The Sound, Page 2

  The cliffs will fall away. The voices die.

  There was another ship, another time,

  but going nowhere. It steamed both day and night.

  It made quite a business of making clouds.

  The sky poured from its stack, its boilers the same,

  and the ship’s hull tugged at cables and lines

  lashed to a gravel bulkhead by the road.

  It tugged like a leashed dog with boundless hope

  but never left the shore, that cloudy ship

  with laborers who strove inside the hull.

  It rained inside. The men were always wet,

  the women too, working wet, and wet

  when they quit work and stepped out to the clouds

  exhaled from cigarettes they cupped in hands,

  talking of food they would like to eat again

  and letters they would like to read, dry-eyed.

  They too felt time rising from the gray stack.

  Time is the kitchen high up in the trees

  and time is the cloudy ship, time is the shore.

  The people hadn’t known the time before.

  Only when it slowed and swayed and clouded out,

  only when the coffee in the hand went cool

  could anyone be sure they’d touched the hours

  or the year of gull cries from an open throat.

  A current stirs the trees like tidal grass.

  Stand in the kitchen looking out to sea

  through stands of waving limbs and feel the wind,

  the leaking vessels of the blood go down.

  No one can make up time. The sea would laugh,

  the crowded rocks whisper among themselves.

  The coffee has gone cold. The names are gone.

  They are another generation gone.

  The room is time, the room is out of time.

  The fissured road will fall into the waves.

  The ruined millionaire will watch his house

  tip like a sandbox toy and slide away.

  A colony of ants will have its say

  remembered by the beetle rolling dung.

  An old man dances, knowing he is young.

  A woman dances in the breaking day.

  GALLINA CANYON

  All night the cattle bellowed,

  cows and calves of the separated herd

  seeking each other under helpless stars,

  never sleeping, even when the dog slept.

  Cows and calves of the separated herd,

  loud as the far-flung buffalo

  never sleeping, even when the dog slept.

  I heard a world of other animals,

  loud as the far-flung buffalo,

  loud as mother bears calling to their young.

  I heard a world of other animals

  filling the canyon with their awful song.

  Loud as mother bears calling to their young,

  a night of wailing from the walls,

  filling the canyon with their awful song

  from open lungs among the cottonwoods.

  A night of wailing from the walls.

  I could not sleep. The night was at a loss.

  From open lungs among the cottonwoods,

  mothers were calling to their young.

  I could not sleep. The night was at a loss.

  All night the cattle bellowed.

  Mothers were calling to their young,

  seeking each other under helpless stars.

  SAYING GRACE

  If every moment is

  and is a wilderness

  to navigate by feel

  whether half or whole,

  the river takes a turn,

  the forest has to burn,

  the broken fern to grow.

  The silence of a night

  of supplicating stars

  may answer us aright:

  our worries and our cares

  are not the same as theirs.

  Give us this day more world

  than we can ever know.

  BRISTLECONE PINE

  If wind were wood it might resemble this

  fragility and strength, old bark bleeding amber.

  Its living parts grow on away from the dead

  as we do in our lesser lives. Endurance,

  yes, but also a scarred and twisted beauty

  we know the way we know our own carved hearts.

  TO THE SEA OF CORTEZ

  for Robert King

  And if I could I would

  fall down, fall all the way

  down to the breathing sea.

  I would pass by the towns

  I would pass by the grass

  banks where the buffalo graze.

  I would fall down, I would

  lie down in the red mud

  of memory, where Spanish

  lances lie with arrowheads.

  I would lie down and roll

  my being to the sea,

  unroll and roll, lap and sing

  my body down, and down

  and turn at the hard cliffs

  and carry the soft soil

  with me. Nothing would impede

  my downward being, my

  desire to lie down like a fawn

  in the new grass, like trout

  in the shallows, like a child

  tired of making letters

  out of chalk, or talk

  of airy nothings caught

  by fingers made of lead.

  I would lie down and go,

  and go until I found

  the sea that rose to meet

  whatever thread of me

  had made it there, out there

  among vaquitas and swift birds,

  there where hardy grasses

  have not been annihilated,

  where the salt tides rise,

  looking for currents they

  have loved, and finding me.

  THE SECRET HEARING

  A life that moves to music cannot fail...

  —A. D. Hope

  Big as a pterodactyl and as old

  it seemed. Damn. The muscled force of air.

  The straight flight

  heedless of gardeners. That was the wild.

  No one stood near to see the heron beat

  above my head, making me dive for cover

  in the autumn flowerbed.

  No one saw me kneeling to watch it pass.

  Even the marriage I went home to later,

  a solitude of children who wouldn’t tell,

  knew banishment

  unspoken, and fiercely tribal distances.

  But I had felt the air pushed from its wings.

  I raked and hauled the cartloads of dead leaves

  behind my tractor,

  singing a made-up tune no person heard,

  half-worshipping the world that made such flight,

  feeling its hidden music in my lungs,

  but safe in the sound

  of the diesel engine drowning out my voice.

  MENDING TIME

  The fence was down. Out among humid smells

  and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks

  moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands.

  Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep

  had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer’s woods

  or coyotes might have got them, or the far road.

  I remember the night, the moon-colored grass

  we waded through to look for them, the oaks

  tangled and dark, like starting a story midway.

  We gazed over seed heads to the barn

  toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw

  the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue

  moving without sound as if charmed

  by the moon beholding them out of bounds.

  Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn.

  The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow

  and the story unravels, the sunli
ght creeping back

  like a song with nobody left to hear it.

  ACROSS THE PYRENEES

  We had to change—Iberian rails

  were a wider gauge. The tricorn hats

  of the Guardia Civil glared in the rain.

  Their submachine guns glared, and that’s

  how we knew Franco was still alive.

  The sleepy passengers packed in,

  leaned on baskets or thigh to thigh

  as steel on steel made a lurching whine

  and we were moving through the night,

  the Spanish night, the civil war

  of books fresh in my memory

  and in the looks these faces bore,

  till a man whose thin, unshaven face

  was wan with sleeplessness pulled down

  a bota full of wine and squeezed

  a long stream into his open mouth

  and smiled, passing the bag to me.

  I grasped the full goatskin of wine.

  He showed me how to tip my head

  and squeeze the skin until a line

  of fruit and sunlight filled my mouth

  with a sweat and leather aftertaste.

  I passed the skin to a young girl

  across from me who wore a chaste

  black sweater, but drank the wine

  in a long, slow, practiced pull

  and shook her pretty head and laughed.

  The old man called it “blood of the bull,”

  slicing slabs of cheese with a knife

  while his plump wife busied herself

  paring apples from a plastic sack

  she’d taken down from the luggage shelf.

  These too were passed among us, bread

  and wine, cheese and fruit, and I

  had nothing to offer my companions

  but a word of thanks they waved away.

  Yes—it happened many years ago

  in the passing dark of northern Spain.

  Some strangers shared their food with me

  in the dim light of the night train.

  SKETCHES IN THE SUN

  Folksong (Anonymous)

  I kissed red lips and my lips too were dyed,

  and the handkerchief I wiped them with turned red,

  and the running stream where I washed that kerchief

  colored the shoreline far out into mid-sea.

  An eagle swooped down for a drink, and its wings

  as it rose stained half the sun, all of the moon.

  The Laurel (Achilles Paraschos)

  Don’t envy me. Don’t envy the laurel tree,

  my roots watered with blood and scalding tears.

  Only those who never look for me

  are lucky, who seek the rose in their careers.

  The sick and disinherited I crown

  singly, weaving my envy-poisoned leaves,

  a life of pain refining their renown.

  Only the poets truly win my wreaths.

  The Cypress Tree (Kostis Palamas)

  I look out the window; the depth

  of sky, all sky and nothing more;

  and within it, utterly sky-swept,

  a slender cypress; nothing more.

  Whether sky is starry or dark,

  in drunken blue or thunder’s roar,

  always the cypress sways, so stark,

  calm, lovely, hopeless; nothing more.

  The Ship (C. P. Cavafy)

  It certainly resembles him,

  this small penciled portrait.

  Hurriedly drawn on the ship’s deck

  one delightful afternoon.

  The Ionian Sea surrounding us.

  It resembles him. Yet I remember a greater beauty.

  He was painfully sensitive

  and this lit up his expression.

  He seems to me more beautiful

  now when my soul recalls him from the years.

  From the years. All of those things are very old—

  the sketch, the ship and the afternoon.

  Lean Girls (Yannis Ritsos)

  Lean girls are gathering salt by the shore,

  bending to bitterness, ignorant of the open sea.

  A sail, a white sail, beckons from the blue,

  and what they do not see in the distance

  darkens with longing.

  September 1971 (Yiorgos Chouliaras)

  Summer incessantly flees from open windows

  light burns

  the room is flooded with butterflies

  at such a time he too

  was looking for the dead king’s face

  in a gold reflection

  the boat was rocking

  in the mind’s furrows

  and the field split in two

  where the armored sun’s bright thorns

  rose up

  the place smelled of basil

  maybe this is the message

  of the one we are looking for

  in the stone, the birds and the ship

  Many names from those days

  remain unchanged

  but we, what do we know

  Aσίνην τε—

  a word in Seferis

  FIRST CHRISTMAS IN THE VILLAGE

  It was unanticipated, the birth,

  and late at that, stormy and close,

  as we were gathered in by the hearth.

  Nothing about it called for words,

  though the widow had no children

  and taught a game with playing cards.

  A fisherman brought an octopus

  that sizzled on a metal grate

  over the pulsing olive coals.

  The widow’s father leaned to the fire

  and with a dark blade sawed off a leg

  and laid it burning on my plate.

  It tasted like a briny steak

  with tentacles like tiny lips

  oozing the savor of the sea,

  my first octopus, its brain afire.

  And the illicit cards—Don’t tell the priest—

  a wink at caution in the game of living.

  That night all human struggle ended,

  or recollection wants it so.

  That night all murders were forgotten

  in the salt abundance and the storm

  and the warm fire in the widow’s house

  when the vast peace was said to be born.

  That night I carried a bucket of coals

  back to my rented dwelling, wind

  trailing the fading sparks behind—

  a small fire, for the warmth it made

  as the stars held steady in the dome,

  and sleep became an open grave.

  GIVEN RAIN

  Late in these latitudes,

  the given rain, hazel and

  evergreen by the small roads

  where few are traveling,

  inwards, indoors, the books

  lie open, read not at random

  but by dreaming whimsy

  like roads in the dusk.

  The child who struggled

  to write a name and struggled

  harder to believe that name

  now moves the pen

  of the one who has come indoors

  and shaken the rain

  and left muddy boots on the mat.

  The world is wet

  and close and the light

  is low, the books

  glow with a darkness of their own,

  the words like rain in the mind.

  It is late in these latitudes.

  Sleep on, says the hill

  of the night and the tunneling road

  bent out of sight.

  THE NIGHTMARE VERSION

  You arrive at a seaside town

  and the wind is blowing a gale,

  soaking your clothes with rain.

  By the quay you cannot fail

  to notice a drowned pig

  in the sea wrack and gravel,

  a man shooing his dog


  away from the pale flesh,

  and you feel your spirits sag.

  The gale-blown rollers crash

  on the black piles of the pier

  and it seems that every sash

  and door you can see from here

  is shut against your face.

  Only a pint of bitter

  in a dim pub solaces

  as you steam in the damp air.

  The barman dips his glasses,

  tells you it isn’t fair

  and you wonder what he means.

  You’ve come to find a lair

  in the kirkyard by the fence,

  a grave without a stone,

  but the barman’s acting dense

  and leaves you there alone

  to nurse the dregs of your pint.

  You know you know this town,

  the pier on the pummeled point,

  because you’ve been here before—

  a face in the mirror’s glint,

  the beer stains on the floor,

  bad weather in your blood,

  a pig dead on the shore.

  DAYTIME

  An empty room, the television on,

  rooms where the baby’s fed and the vacuum’s run,

  then elevators playing CNN,

  a silent baseball game above a bar,

  amoebic pictures from a distant star,

  three models waving hands across a car—

  I see these screens and, feeling pixelated,

  dust in a sunbeam, so disintegrated

  I can’t divine the cases being stated,

  wonder if a particle, afloat,

  can teach itself to pray, or to devote

  its substance to the god of the remote.

  TO HYGEIA

  Goddess, I have watched your motions gratify the world.