on the southeast corner of Woodward and Euclid
will know what it meant for John Clare
to walk eighty miles across pocked and jutted
roads to Northborough, hungry, shy of strangers,
“foot foundered and broken down” after escaping
from the High Beech Asylum near Epping Forest.
And whoever has followed the bag lady
on her studious round of littered stairwells
and dead-end alleys, and watched her combing
the blue and white city garbage cans for empties,
and admired the way that she can always pick out
the single plate earring and one Canadian dime
from a million splinters of glass in a phone booth
will know how John Clare must have looked
as he tried to follow the route that a gypsy
had pointed out for him, scaling the high
palings that stood in his way, bruising
his feet on the small stones, stooping to
admire the pileworts and cowslips, scorning
the self-centered cuckoos but knowing the sweet
kinship of a landrail hiding in the hedgerows.
I began this morning by standing
in front of the New World Church’s ruined storefront;
I was listening to the bag lady and a pimply-
faced old drunk trading secrets with the vent man,
and remembering how a gentleman on horseback
had mistaken John Clare for a broken-down haymaker
and tossed him a penny for a half-pint of beer.
I remembered how grateful he was to stand
elbow to elbow in the Old Plough Public House
happily sheltered from a sudden rainfall.
But later when I saw the bag lady
sprawled out on a steaming vent for warmth
I remembered how Clare had moved on, crippled
by tiny bits of gravel lodged in his shoes,
and how he tried to escape from the harsh wind
by lying down in an open dike bottom
but was soaked through clear to his bones;
how he came to the heavy wooden doors
of the Wild Ram Public House hours later,
and gazed longingly at the brightly lit windows,
and had no money, and passed on. Whoever
has stood alone in the night’s deep shadows
listening to laughter coming from a well-lit house
will know that John Clare’s loneliness was unbending.
And whoever has felt that same unbending loneliness
will also know what an old woman felt today
as she followed an obedient path between the huge
green garbage cans behind Kroger’s Super-Market
and the small silver ones behind Clarence’s grocery.
I began this day by following a bag lady
in honor of John Clare but suddenly, tonight,
I was reading “The Journey Out of Essex, 1841,”
in honor of the unknown bag lady.
I had witnessed a single day in her life
and was trying hard not to judge myself
and judging myself anyway.
I remember how she stooped to rub her foot;
how she smiled a small toothful grin
when she discovered a half-eaten apple;
how she talked on endlessly to herself
and fell asleep leaning against a broken wall
in an abandoned wooden shed on Second Avenue.
Tonight when I lie down in the dark
in my own bed, I want to remember
that John Clare was so desperately hungry
after three days and nights without food
that he finally knelt down, as if in prayer,
and ate the soft grass of the earth,
and thought it tasted like fresh bread,
and judged no one, not even himself,
and slept peacefully again, like a child.
Excuses
If only I could begin to sift through the smoke
rising from the wet streets leading to your small room
above the warehouse. If only I didn’t have to walk
to one side of myself, sideways, like a shadow
growing out of the side of a building, painfully.
If only the yellow light across the street
wasn’t so ashamed
of the three iron stairs and the empty doorway
that no one crosses in the sullen rainfall,
or afterwards. It’s the way the wind rearranges
the puddles after a storm, the trees hang
upside down in the water, and no starlings call.
Or it’s the way the past revises itself
to mark the place, to find my way back
to the small room that is no longer
your room
above a warehouse that is no longer a warehouse
but the memory of an enormous wooden space
hollowed out of the night. If only I could
find us sleeping there, suspended
over the unrevised space, tangled or spoonlike,
then I wouldn’t have to spend this night
walking to one side of myself,
standing beside myself,
paralyzed by the memory of you
in the middle of a vacant city block.
If only I could stop standing here, sideways,
like a shadow growing out of the fleshy side
of an abandoned building, painfully,
like a shadow on fire.
Unhappy Love Poem
I wanted to lie. I wanted to say
it was the rain falling through a fine mist
and shattering the lake into tiny fragments
that suddenly brought it home to me today
in warm shocks, in a blazing purple gust
as I walked by the water in the early morning.
I wanted to invent the wildest statements
about what happened to us, to feel brilliant
and wronged, like an angry young widow mowing
the front yard in a strapless evening gown,
or a born-again Christian suddenly jumping
into a fountain to wash away his sins.
I never wanted it to be like this: hopeless
and ordinary, dull as a toothache at lunchtime,
as watching t.v. in the afternoon in summer.
I never wanted it to happen inside the house
where I am still undressed at 2 p.m., at 4 p.m.,
where it seems so precisely like failure.
The White Blackbird
“Imagine for a moment that the white blackbird has gone blind....” —JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
The morning after Sartre’s death
I thought of a hundred blackbirds rising
Out of a brilliant white lake sheeted with mist,
Covering the sky with their feathery bodies
And blotting the sun with their dark cries.
I was sitting alone on the twisted wooden
Stairs of a rented house in the country,
Reading about Sartre’s long blindness
And watching the crows in a neighbor’s yard
Descending on the body of a twisted sycamore.
Those birds were a mistake, a dozen black
Errors scrawled across an empty page
In the sudden stark blankness of morning.
It was for Sartre that I remembered a blaze
Of dark scavengers emerging out of a cold lake
In the torturous outer calm of springtime.
And it was for Sartre
That I remembered a single white blackbird
Drifting over the metallic water at noon, lost
And severed from the other birds, blinded
By the clarity and madness of sunlight.
In Spite of Everything, the Stars
Like a stunned piano, like a bucket
of fresh milk flung into the air
or a dozen fists of confetti
thrown hard at a bride
stepping down from the altar,
the stars surprise the sky.
Think of dazed stones
floating overhead, or an ocean
of starfish hung up to dry. Yes,
like a conductor’s expectant arm
about to lift toward the chorus,
or a juggler’s plates defying gravity,
or a hundred fastballs fired at once
and freezing in midair, the stars
startle the sky over the city.
And that’s why drunks leaning up
against abandoned buildings, women
hurrying home on deserted side streets,
policemen turning blind corners, and
even thieves stepping from alleys
all stare up at once. Why else do
sleepwalkers move toward the windows,
or old men drag flimsy lawn chairs
onto fire escapes, or hardened criminals
press sad foreheads to steel bars?
Because the night is alive with lamps!
That’s why in dark houses all over the city
dreams stir in the pillows, a million
plumes of breath rise into the sky.
A Dark Hillside
Out here in the last moments before dusk,
It is strange to see the way that shadows
Steep in the tall grass and sunlight falls,
Like a woman’s naked arm, across the porch
And the dim shoulders of the house.
And it is strange to be standing here
Instead of there, with my hands darkening
Inside my pockets, staring for so long
At a single blue fir spiraling
Out of the forehead of a nearby hill
That it begins to resemble the golden
Horn of a mythical beast, a stray animal
That men have been seeking for centuries.
Every child knows what a unicorn is
Though no one has ever seen anything
But a tapestry, or a well-executed
Illustration, or a faulty copy of one;
And yet this never seemed mysterious
To me before now, until today. I don’t
Know if it is curious or not
To seek the trembling blues and yellows
Of dusk as often as I have, or to feel
Strangeness seeping through the air
Until nothing seems like what it is,
Nothing is what it seems. I don’t know
If children believe in tapestries anymore,
Or in cobblestone streets in old engravings,
Or in blue horses moving across the sky....
But sometimes when I drift through
The afternoon’s deep shadows, the silence
Of the country at dusk can still
Seem like a kind of promise, a pact
Between the red elms and the dusky clouds
Reaching down to engulf them—and somehow,
The hills can still take on the dreamy,
Faraway look of a man standing at the window
High in the crown of his house,
Knowing that no one—not his wife
Descending the stairs, not his children
Running through the yard—can see him.
Standing there at the level of the trees
He could believe in the stars again,
Slowly being released into the sky,
One by one, like long yellow plumes
Of breath, calm and precise above us;
He could believe in the light again
Flying toward him through the clouds....
I have no idea who he is,
Or why he is here now, alone
In my mind’s eye, absent-mindedly
Staring at a purple blend of shadows
Weaving through the long hair of the elms.
And suddenly I have no idea why
I am telling all of this to you,
You who are so unknown to me,
As if there could be something like
Intimacy between us, as if I could ever
Communicate anything so mysterious,
Anything so austere and familiar
As even this simple story, written down:
Once, in the slow shadings of dusk,
In the middle of his life,
A man moved toward a blue unicorn.
He was a stranger
Crossing a deserted road, alone.
He was a late-afternoon shadow
Lengthening across the tall grass,
Darkening on a dark hillside.
The Secret
Soon we will give our speechless bodies
Back to the garden at night, like the scores
Of old songs we can no longer quite remember,
Or the embroidered shirts we outgrew as children.
Once, their colorful new skins clung tightly
To our skins, molding to our elastic human
Shapes, but now they hang limply in thrift shops
Next to coverless issues of Newsweek and Time
And sullen piano music that no longer wants
To remember the slow torture of being played
On endless rainy afternoons in mid-October.
Sometimes I think that inside one of those faded
Musical sheets I am still practicing scales,
Still trying to avoid the musty gray smell
Of an interminable Sunday at home (and sometimes
I think the dullest afternoons of adulthood are
A memory of childhood relived in a tedium of autumn).
I used to press my forehead against the window
And imagine the sun moving behind the buildings
Like an exhausted old woman tramping home
Through a field after a long day in the city
With her hands buried deep in the pockets
Of a flowering red dress. I liked to pretend
That she would leave a smoky lantern flaming
In the elms for luck while she hummed a lullaby
To herself, a song from some other world,
The secret of light. I’d strain to listen,
But all I could hear was the voicelessness
Of the wind blowing its emptiness across the sad
Rooftops, leafing through the empty pages of trees.
All I could see was my own childish, blue boredom.
I am thirty-five now, but sometimes when I look out
At the garden at dusk, I can still feel myself
Becoming that child again, reliving that boredom,
And suddenly I am afraid only that the garden is
Changing even as we are changing, even as the sun
Goes back to being a sun toiling behind purple bars
On the horizon, and our bodies start to wear out
Like our favorite suits and hats. It’s the way
That even the fat crabapple tree swelling up
By the fence will someday retire from giving fruit
To every poor scavenger that comes along, every
Obese squirrel and thin starling, every lost crow.
Soon the sour green tree will quit storing up
Food for the moles—soon, but not yet.
Because look how the garden survives the dusk,
How quietly it waits for us, how lovingly
It welcomes us back. Maybe it already knows
That we always return to its soil like husbands
Who never quite leave their faithless wives,
Or sons who grow into their own fathers.
So, too, we will touch our bodies to the soil
And know the ground by its damp and bitter taste.
But until then, I will stand
by the window at dusk
Remembering the sullen blue notes of a forgotten
Childhood, the tedious hours practicing, the rainy
Afternoons that seem eternal in an adult’s memory.
I will remember a slow dream of leaving the house
And then walk through the garden on cool nights
Listening for a single redbreasted cardinal
That sometimes returns to our dark elms. I
Like to think it is a little explosion of dye
Erupting in secret in its own time, a minor
Echo of the sun toiling on the bruised horizon.
I like to believe it is a smoky red lantern
That an old woman leaves in the branches
To fend off the darkness while she sleeps,
To keep a red flame burning through the night.
Dawn Walk
Some nights when you’re asleep
Deep under the covers, far away,
Slowly curling yourself back
Into a childhood no one
Living will ever remember
Now that your parents touch hands
Under the ground
As they always did upstairs
In the master bedroom, only more
Distant now, deaf to the nightmares,
The small cries that no longer
Startle you awake but still
Terrify me so that
I do get up, some nights, restless
And anxious to walk through
The first trembling blue light
Of dawn in a calm snowfall.
It’s soothing to see the houses
Asleep in their own large bodies,
The dreamless fences, the courtyards
Unscarred by human footprints,
The huge clock folding its hands
In the forehead of the skyscraper
Looming downtown. In the park
The benches are layered in
White, the statue out of history