Plundered Hearts

  Lying on a pyre, his old parents in tears.

  •

  In the end, because I took too long to decide,

  The bird-lives on the ground there to choose from

  Meant I would have to live far from home.

  I chose the farthest, the common tufted warbler,

  Native to the Maghreb, a small bird,

  The size of a fist, the color of wet sand,

  My tail brushed with berrystain, my crest

  Opening to the sides its fan of mandarin

  Barbules gemmed with black incipient beads,

  My call a calling, er-rand, er-rand, er-rand.

  I can fly to find direction out and sing

  Only to attract the echoing air,

  But my task, an hour before dawn, is to help

  Summon the halfhearted day from its sleep

  As the dark begins to tip reluctantly.

  My limping chirr, its admonition falling

  Into place, glides through the oasis citrus grove,

  Switches of scrub beginning to stir and stretch,

  To remind who hears it there is work to be done,

  Word to be sent ahead of happiness,

  Of noon on an iridescent scarab wing,

  Of the dank leaf mold and warted rind,

  Of the peace in our hours now, for all but them,

  Those humans who shout and slash and smell of flesh.

  One of them stands alone, every morning, looking

  Into water, silently moving his lips. I stay

  To keep watch, and something comes back, a sense

  From some other life, that because he has never been hurt,

  He is impossible to love. For now, he is my errand.

  for Edmund White

  SELF-PORTRAIT AS AMUNDSEN

  When as a boy I lay with no clothes, no cover,

  The window open to winter, I would watch for the sun

  To appear, as today its sharp edge has finally

  Sliced through the months of waiting with companions

  I loathe because I cannot do this alone.

  So the adventure, too long dreamt of and precisely

  Planned, will start tomorrow, the calculation

  To be mounted against chance. My eye is on the timepiece

  Of days, on how we measure the setting out

  Of depots to support our coming back to tell

  The story to the king whom we allowed to send us.

  The sledges are loaded, the dogs—half of them

  To be killed to feed the other half—impatient.

  Come “night” we will stop, and by “day” move forward

  Across the waste of pack ice without a horizon

  Before us. No living thing can be replaced.

  On a cloud, a compass error, a tangled bootlace

  The action may depend, the last secret lost.

  The metallic light, the fear of rival black specks

  Miles off but hour by hour coming closer,

  These are thought by others unscalable barriers.

  I have always known that I would be the one

  Not just who found but wanted to find the abstract,

  Meaningless point on which the planet turns.

  THE FRAME

  Fussily ornate and merely decorative,

  Wreaths of fruited branchlets and fluttering ribbons

  Echoing the scrolled plasterwork

  On moldings around the mirrored

  Parlors where a patron

  Could straighten his collar,

  Reliefs embellished with glass beads

  To mimic his beloved’s brooch,

  Rosettes cast in pairs and affixed with foil and wax,

  Then coated with gesso and gilded to seem carved,

  Or cross-hatched textures scratched onto the surfaces

  Of curling leaves and hammered for the fine matting

  Of metal with tiny pocked points,

  The crinkled foil of gold pressed down

  Onto the moistened bole

  For a burnished veneer

  That aligns the soft candlelight

  On the apostle’s face with what

  Shines more severely from the Savior’s fingertip,

  Is not the sort of frame I prefer to enclose

  What I should figure on as an allegory

  Of someone’s sense of what he puts between himself

  And the world. I prefer the frame

  Whose entablature seems to shield

  What it displays, withhold

  What has been given it

  To help explain the mysteries

  Of the child sent to redeem us.

  From architrave to plinth, balusters upholding

  What the crested lunette oversees, the rigid

  Vocabulary of antiquity admits

  No distractions, nothing to lead the eye away

  From the perfected cityscape

  And room, where a sad pale woman

  Under a stone cherub

  The color of the clouds

  Holds something that she knows will die.

  A friend sits beside her, peeling

  An apple. In the distance, three men on horseback

  Look up at her window, the darkness in a frame.

  RESIGNATION

  I like trees because they seem more resigned

  to the way they have to live than other things do.

  —WILLA CATHER

  Here the oak and silver-breasted birches

  Stand in their sweet familiarity

  While underground, as in a black mirror,

  They have concealed their tangled grievances,

  Identical to the branching calm above

  But there ensnared, each with the others’ hold

  On what gives life to which is brutal enough.

  Still, in the air, none tries to keep company

  Or change its fortune. They seem to lean

  On the light, unconcerned with what the world

  Makes of their decencies, and will not show

  A jealous purchase on their length of days.

  To never having been loved as they wanted

  Or deserved, to anyone’s sudden infatuation

  Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced

  To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.

  SORROW IN 1944

  1.

  The name in the register was Pinkerton, Frank,

  The plate on his Ford parked next to Cabin Eight

  The dented oil-and-orange of the Golden State.

  The Pinewoods Motor Court, on the riverbank

  A mile south of the Heart Mountain camp,

  Seemed more welcoming each visit—not a home

  But a familiar port of call where, cold and alone,

  He can walk the wards of desire with a signal lamp.

  His father’s Navy ties had kept him free—

  No bedding, kettle, and hot plate on E-Day.

  Milton Eisenhower’s signature

  Was clearance enough, but only for him, not her.

  The years in Wyoming, she said, have been “okay.”

  He stared at her mittens, love’s own internee.

  2.

  They’d met at a blood drive, winter of ’42,

  Her father a clerk, her mother a picture bride.

  Pearl Harbor meant they were on the same side.

  His father was dead, his mother said she knew

  “About the things my husband had done abroad,

  About the suicide … mistakes of the past …

  A love that made no sense and could not last.

  Under his uniform, what man isn’t flawed?”

  He filled out a form. She glanced at it and then

  Looked up. She saw a future, he the face

  Among the fallen blossoms. They agreed to meet.

  It was already hard to cross a street

  Without an angry stare, or find a place

  To share a pot of tea,
again and again.

  3.

  Her name is Tanabata, after the queen

  Who wove the Milky Way’s gauzy grisaille,

  Her loom but three weak stars in the eastern sky.

  Her herdsman-lover can cross the Celestial Stream

  On the seventh day of the seventh month, a span

  Of birds his passageway, and, as he nears,

  The sallow river-mist begins to clear,

  The floodtide loses ground where once it ran.

  She has waited there for him on the other shore,

  A year at a time. She has waited through her tears,

  Through all the promises made and broken before.

  But there he is! The familiar shape appears.

  At the water’s edge,

  Her robe of rushes and cranes

  Slowly getting wet,

  She can hardly remember

  In which lifetime they had met.

  4.

  The weeks in the assembly center’s horse stalls—

  The stench, the straw, the lack of privacy—

  Had made the boxcar and the barracks seem

  A privilege. Actual beds and tarpaper walls,

  Canned Vienna sausages and kumquats,

  The Rockies beyond a barbed-wire fence.

  The guards were tight-lipped and indifferent,

  Like their old neighbors, who waved and forgot.

  The world beyond the camp was a weekly newsreel.

  She pretended not to mind the soot and the noise,

  Or notice the boys who sat near her at meals—

  Those swoony, moon-bit pepper-shaker boys.

  She sewed, and gave a day at the clothing bank,

  Chewed her pencil, and sometimes wrote to Frank.

  5.

  Only once had he ever heard her name.

  Sitting in the chair of his hospital room

  Toward the end, his father suddenly assumed

  He knew the story but never whom to blame.

  “So long ago.… What was I thinking of?

  They said she called you Sorrow. I don’t know why.

  We give the silliest names to the things we love.

  I killed her, I guess. I called her Butterfly.”

  After the funeral, his mother told him more.

  She hated what she couldn’t understand.

  He watched her twist her handkerchief and cry.

  She told him of the blindfold, the knife on the floor …

  Already items in memory’s contraband.

  The sun sank quickly. He called her Butterfly.

  6.

  He has driven twice a month, for two years now,

  Through endless miles of broccoli and sugar beets,

  Then east across the mountains to a road that meets

  Another, despite the map, and leads somehow

  To the Pinewoods’ nondescript, unfastened door.

  Only the slant-eyes down the way have a past.

  A “salesman” is what he’s called himself if asked,

  But no one seems to care much anymore.

  Each night at nine he’s at the prison gate.

  A pack of Chesterfields, and a familiar face

  Is furtively waved in. He’s allowed an hour.

  He and Tanny sit and complicate

  Their lives, while rival gangs of schoolboys chase

  A barking mongrel toward the security tower.

  7.

  Just sitting there, at the table for BLOOD TYPE B,

  She seemed to Frank at first too young, all wrong,

  The sweater and saddle shoes, the hair too long.

  But the longer he spoke to her, the more he could see

  That time and chance had converged on this one girl.

  His duty now was clear. What might it mean—

  All the years between them merely a screen

  He could slide to reveal the cherry trees aswirl—

  To love her who long ago had this same face?

  He waited until he was sure she’d seen through

  His social calls more than she’d admit.

  He hesitated, then in an awkward embrace

  Vowed to be constant and compassionate.

  (Oh, how not tell the truth and still be true?)

  8.

  She and her parents sent away for good …

  The world at war … the papers filled with hate …

  She was twenty, he was forty-eight …

  Everything conspired as it could

  To keep them apart. Even the words they spoke

  Fell short of what they felt. Sometimes silence

  Seemed more to them than mere convenience.

  Tanny would fidget or hum. Frank would smoke.

  Her father asked him to smuggle letters or take

  A message to the general, but he refused,

  Not from fear but apathy, or heartbreak.

  He wanted only what she might suddenly choose,

  Though for herself she asked nothing, like love

  Or like stars, those wounds in the tender flesh above.

  9.

  Each night—on those nights he visited the camp—

  He’d turn the corner by Block Thirteen and stop,

  Expecting to find a badly painted backdrop,

  A pale body on a bloodsoaked, floodlit ramp,

  And the tearful applause that echoed in his dreams.

  Instead, she was sitting there on the mess hall steps

  And shyly smiled. Again, his promise was kept.

  Again, she helped him past the years between.

  She let him hold her hand while she described

  A basketball game. He looked down at the ground

  And smiled to hear just how the girls would shriek,

  How they ran across the muddy court and found

  An opening in the air. She’d nearly died!

  By then he wasn’t listening, but he let her speak.

  10.

  When all the wells in the holy city had failed

  And only Matsumura’s, as if fed by a spring,

  Remained, he allowed the afflicted people to bring

  Their buckets, until one day—or so the tale

  Unfolds—a servant drowned and the old priest

  Went to the well, where he saw in the water there

  The image of a woman combing her hair,

  A ghost from his past or a spirit unreleased.

  A week later, during a violent storm,

  The woman visited his room and revealed

  She was a dragon’s mirror in a woman’s form.

  No harm would come so long as he kept her concealed.

  The well, drained and raked,

  Yielded a blazoned hairpin

  And a mirror rim.

  When he searched its emptiness

  He saw what had haunted him.

  LINGERING DOUBTS

  1.

  The honeybees dance and are understood,

  But their point is always and only nectar.

  Achilles spoke with the gods, and all

  They wanted was his spear through Hector.

  2.

  By the Senate’s decree, in the heart of Rome

  No ominous soldiers were allowed

  Except in hollow triumphs where,

  More than the general, plated and proud,

  The whispering slave amused the crowd.

  3.

  From pre-hab to re-tox in under a year,

  The cynic had run his terror to ground.

  The man in the mirror was merely glass.

  The world was just “Another round.”

  4.

  The woman giving birth

  Was standing near a bed,

  The child apparently worth

  The risk that lay ahead.

  “Don’t be stubborn. Here,

  Lie down,” he crossly said.

  She winced and shook her head.

  “Spoken just like a man.

  Lie
down? A bed? That’s where

  The trouble first began.”

  5.

  The day he left, he said I knew the reason.

  Look at the trees. Love only lasts a season.

  For years since then, I’ve stared at them and seen

  Only their blackened branches beneath the green.

  THREE OVERTURES

  I. Consecration of the House

  How many did I live in before I had my own?

  During the war, my father in the Pacific,

  There was my widowed grandmother’s

  With its collection of French clocks

  And closet doors, mostly the must

  Of a turn-of-the-century wardrobe.

  Next, the newly demobbed’s semidetached

  And its neighborhood’s first television set,

  A cherrywood box on legs with its ten-inch

  World Series that played to a crowd

  White-knuckling old-fashioneds.

  Finally, the tile-roofed white stucco

  Suburban, memory’s first homestead

  Because living there—my own room at last!—

  Coincided with a fogbound sexual dawning

  That rose, flushed, in a corner of its attic

  But had less to do with my body than the books

  Stolen from Wanamaker’s that touched

  On Reproduction, accompanied by

  Photographs of one toad atop another.

  I would hold my own tiny reptile

  And imagine a milky pudding of incipient

  Tadpoles until a translucent drop

  Of something surfaced with less pleasure

  Than, in the basement, a sheet on a clothesline

  Came up on Act I in which, having collected

  Tickets and delivered the Prologue, who starred

  As the Frog Prince, accompanied by his sisters

  As cellophaned water beetles, insisted

  He eat from the plate and sleep in the bed