Today, sitting down at six to darn the day
with a drink, I glanced across the room
to my desk, where Wystan, my month-old tabby,
lay asleep on an open volume
of the wizard’s unfailing dictionary,
faultless creaturely Instinct atwitch
on a monument. How to sneak out past him
for the sweating martini shaker?
My clumsy tiptoe prompts a faint annoyance—
a single eye unlidded, a yawn,
his right paw, claws outstretched, pointing to soodle.
Weren’t these—the cat and book, or instinct
and idea—the two angels on his shoulder?
Together, they’d made him suspicious
of the holy crusade, the top of the charts,
compulsive hygiene, debt, middlemen,
seaside cottages, crooners, Gallic charm,
public charities, the forgeries
of statecraft, the fantasies of the bedroom,
easy assumptions, and sweeping views.
The kitten’s claws have somehow caught in the page
and puckered it so that, skewed sideways,
it resembles—or rather, for the moment
I can make out in the lines of type—
the too often folded map his face looked like.
Protect me, St. Wiz, protect us all
from this century by your true example.
With what our language has come to know
about us, protect us still from both how much
and how little we can understand
ourselves, from the unutterable blank page
of soul, from the echoing silence
moments after the heavy book is slammed shut.
WHAT THEY LEFT BEHIND
The room with double beds, side by side.
One was the bed of roses, still made up,
The other the bed of nails, all undone.
In the nightstand clamshell, two Marlboro butts.
On the shag, a condom with a tear in its tip
Neither of them noticed—or would even suspect
For two years more. A ballpoint embossed
By a client’s firm: Malpractice Suits.
A wad of gum balled in a page of proverbs
Torn from the complimentary Bible.
His lipstick. Her aftershave.
A dream they found the next day they’d shared:
All the dogs on the island were dying
And the birds had flown up into the lonely air.
PROUST IN BED
Through the peephole he could see a boy
Playing patience on the huge crimson sofa.
There was the carpet, the second-best
Chairs, the old chipped washstand, all his dead parents’
Things donated months ago
“To make an unfortunate
Crowd happy” at the Hôtel
Marigny, Albert’s brothel,
Warehouse of desires
And useless fictions—
For one of which he turned to Albert
And nodded, he’d have that one at cards, the soon-
To-be footman or fancy butcher.
He’d rehearsed his questions in the corridor.
Did you kill an animal
Today? An ox? Did it bleed?
Did you touch the blood? Show me
Your hands, let me see how you …
(Judgment Day angel
Here to separate
The Good from the Bad, to weigh the soul …
Soon enough you’ll fall from grace and be nicknamed
Pamela the Enchantress or Tool
Of the Trade. Silliness is the soul’s sweetmeat.)
One after another now,
Doors closed on men in bed with
The past, it was three flights to
His room, the bedroom at last,
The goal obtained and
So a starting point
For the next forbidden fruit—the taste
Of apricots and ripe gruyère is on the hand
He licks—the next wide-open mouth
To slip his tongue into like a communion
Wafer. The consolation
Of martyrs is that the God
For whom they suffer will see
Their wounds, their wildernesses.
He’s pulled a fresh sheet
Up over himself,
As if waiting for his goodnight kiss
While the naked boy performs what he once did
For himself. It’s only suffering
Can make us all more than brutes, the way that boy
Suffers the silvery thread
To be spun inside himself,
The snail track left on lilac,
Its lustrous mirror-writing,
The mysterious
Laws drawn through our lives
Like a mother’s hand through her son’s hair …
But again nothing comes of it. The signal
Must be given, the small bedside bell.
He needs his parents to engender himself,
To worship his own body
As he watches them adore
Each other’s. The two cages
Are brought in like the holy
Sacrament. Slowly
The boy unveils them.
The votive gaslights seem to flicker.
Her dying words were “What have you done to me?”
In each cage a rat, and each rat starved
For three days, each rat furiously circling
The pain of its own hunger.
Side by side the two cages
Are placed on the bed, the foot
Of the bed, right on the sheet
Where he can see them
Down the length of his
Body, helpless now as it waits there.
The rats’ angry squealing sounds so far away.
He looks up at his mother—touches
Himself—at her photograph on the dresser,
His mother in her choker
And her heavy silver frame.
The tiny wire-mesh trapdoors
Slide open. At once the rats
Leap at each other,
Claws, teeth, the little
Shrieks, the flesh torn, torn desperately,
Blood spurting out everywhere, hair matted, eyes
Blinded with the blood. Whichever stops
To eat is further torn. The half-eaten rat
Left alive in the silver
Cage the boy—he keeps touching
Himself—will stick over and
Over with a long hatpin.
Between his fingers
He holds the pearl drop.
She leans down over the bed, her veil
Half-lifted, the scent of lilac on her glove.
His father hates her coming to him
Like this, hates her kissing him at night like this.
THREE DREAMS ABOUT ELIZABETH BISHOP
I.
It turned out the funeral had been delayed a year.
The casket now stood in the state capitol rotunda,
An open casket. You lay there like Lenin
Under glass, powdered, in powder blue
But crestfallen, if that’s the word
For those sagging muscles that make the dead
Look grumpy. The room smelled of gardenias.
Or no, I was a gardenia, part of a wreath
Sent by the Radcliffe Institute and right behind
You, with a view down the line of mourners.
When Lloyd and Frank arrived, both of them
Weeping and reciting—was it “Thanatopsis”?—
A line from Frank about being the brother
To a sluggish clod was enough to wake you up.
One eye, then the other, slowly opened.
You didn’t say anything, didn’t have to.
You just blinked, or I did, and in another room
A group of us sat around your coffin chatting.
Once in a while you would add a comment—
That, no, hay was stacked with beaverslides,
And, yes, it was a blue, a mimeograph blue
Powder the Indians used, and stuck cedar pegs
Through their breasts in the ghost dance—
All this very slowly. Such an effort for you
To speak, as if underwater and each bubble-
Syllable had to be exhaled, leisurely
Floated up to the surface of our patience.
Still alive, days later, still laid out
In a party dress prinked with sun sparks,
Hands folded demurely across your stomach,
You lay on the back lawn, uncoffined,
Surrounded by beds of freckled foxglove
And fool-the-eye lilies that only last a day.
By then Lowell had arrived, young again
But shaggy even in his seersucker and tie.
He lay down alongside you to talk.
The pleasure of it showed in your eyes,
Widening, then fluttering with the gossip,
Though, of course, you still didn’t move at all,
Just your lips, and Lowell would lean in
To listen, his ear right next to your mouth,
Then look up smiling and roll over to tell me
What you said, that since you’d passed over
You’d heard why women live longer than men—
Because they wear big diamond rings.
II.
She is sitting three pews ahead of me
At the Methodist church on Wilshire Boulevard.
I can make out one maple leaf earring
Through the upswept fog bank of her hair
—Suddenly snapped back, to stay awake.
A minister is lamenting the forgetfulness
Of the laws, and warms to his fable
About the wild oryx, “which the Egyptians
Say stands full against the Dog Star
When it rises, looks wistfully upon it,
And testifies after a sort by sneezing,
A kind of worship but a miserable knowledge.”
He is wearing, now I look, the other earring,
Which catches a bluish light from the window
Behind him, palm trees bent in stained glass
Over a manger scene. The Joseph sports
A three-piece suit, fedora in hand.
Mary, in a leather jacket, is kneeling.
The gnarled lead joinder soldered behind
Gives her a bun, protruding from which
Two shafts of a halo look like chopsticks.
Intent on her task, her mouth full of pins,
She seems to be taking them out, one by one,
To fasten or fit with stars the night sky
Over the child’s crib, which itself resembles
A Studebaker my parents owned after the war,
The model called an Oryx, which once took
The three of us on the flight into California.
I remember, leaving town one Sunday morning,
We passed a dwarfish, gray-haired woman
Sitting cross-legged on an iron porch chair
In red slacks and a white sleeveless blouse,
A cigarette in her hand but in a silver holder,
Watching us leave, angel or executioner,
Not caring which, pursuing her own thoughts.
III.
Dawn through a slider to the redwood deck.
Two mugs on the rail with a trace
Still of last night’s vodka and bitters.
The windchimes’ echo of whatever
Can’t be seen. The bottlebrush
Has given up its hundred ghosts,
Each blossom a pinhead firmament,
Galaxies held in place by bristles
That sweep up the pollinated light
In their path along the season.
A scrub jay’s Big Bang, the swarming
Dharma of gnats, nothing disturbs
The fixed orders but a reluctant question:
Is the world half empty or half full?
Through the leaves, traffic patterns
Bring the interstate to a light
Whose gears a semi seems to shift
With three knife-blade thrusts, angry
To overtake what moves on ahead.
This tree’s broken under the day.
The red drips from stem to stem.
That wasn’t the question. It was,
Why did we forget to talk about love?
We had all the time in the world.
What we forgot, I heard a voice
Behind me say, was everything else.
Love will leave us alone if we let it.
Besides, the world has no time for us,
The tree no questions of the flower,
One more day no help for all this night.
LATE NIGHT ODE
It’s over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,
Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,
The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,
The sour taste of each day’s first lie,
And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling
A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,
Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark
Along a body like my own, but blameless.
What good’s my cut-glass conversation now,
Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad?
You get from life what you can shake from it?
For me, it’s g and t’s all day and CNN.
Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level
At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime,
Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,
And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.
There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer
Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.
His answering machine always has room for one more
Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.
Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears
Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why now?
I long ago gave up pretending to believe
Anyone’s memory will give as good as it gets.
So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream
Almost every night of holding you again,
Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,
Through the bruised unbalanced waves?
Horace iv.i
from HAZMAT
2002
Suppose my heart had broken
Out of its cage of bone,
Its heaving grille of rumors—
My metronome,
My honeycomb and crypt
Of jealousies long since
Preyed on, played out,
My spoiled prince.
Suppose then I could hold it
Out toward you, could feel
Its growling hound of blood
Brought to heel,
Its scarred skin grown taut
With anticipating your touch,
The tentative caress
Or sudden clutch.
Suppose you could watch it burn,
A jagged crown of flames
Above the empty rooms
Where counterclaims
Of air and anger feed
The fire’s quickening flush
And into whose remorse
Excuses rush.
Would you then stretch your hand
To take my scalding gift?
And would you kiss the blackened
Hypocrite?
It’s yours, it’s yours—this gift,
This grievance embedded in each,
Where time will never matter
And words can’t reach.
GLANUM
at the ruins of a provincial Roman
town
So this is the city of love.
I lean on a rail above
Its ruined streets and square
Still wondering how to care
For a studiously unbuilt site
Now walled and roofed with light.
A glider’s wing overhead
Eclipses the Nike treads
On a path once freshly swept
Where trader and merchant kept
A guarded company.
As far as the eye can see
The pampered gods had blessed
The temples, the gates, the harvest,
The baths and sacred spring,
Sistrum, beacon, bowstring.
Each man remembered his visit
To the capital’s exquisite
Libraries or whores.
The women gossiped more
About the one-legged crow
Found in a portico
Of the forum, an omen
That sluggish priests again
Insisted required prayer.
A son’s corpse elsewhere
Was wrapped in a linen shroud.
A distant thundercloud
Mimicked a slumping pine
That tendrils of grape entwined.
Someone kicked a dog.
The orator’s catalogue
Prompted worried nods
Over issues soon forgot.
A cock turned on a spit.
A slave felt homesick.
The underclass of scribes
Was saved from envy by pride.
The always invisible legion
Fought what it would become.
•
We call it ordinary
Life—banal, wary,
Able to withdraw
From chaos or the law,
Intent on the body’s tides
And the mysteries disguised
At the bedside or the hearth,
Where all things come apart.
There must have been a point—
While stone to stone was joined,
All expectation and sweat,
The cautious haste of the outset—
When the city being built,
In its chalky thrust and tilt,
Resembled just for a day
What’s now a labeled display,
These relics of the past,
A history recast
As remarkable rubble,