In the self. And like the girl, I found myself
Looking at the boy, your voice suddenly
Thrown into him, as he echoed the woman’s
Final rendering, a voice that drove upward
Onto the lampblack twigs just beyond her view
To look back on her body there, on its page
Of monologue. The words, as they came—
Came from you, from the woman, from the voice
In the trees—were his then, the poem come
From someone else’s lips, as it can.
THE CUP
The figures on this morning’s second cup
Slowly wake to a touch whose method
Varies. My finger’s circling outside the fire-
Charged sunrise saucer and the cloud
Chip on its rim, while the sugary anthem
Of dregs inside, struck up to call a halt
To dreaming, turns strangely bitter. Halting,
Blind, it’s they who finger the lip of the cup.
Hoplite or sharecropper, can I speak for them?
A grown-up love asks a relentless method.
They swarm like ghosts to the bloody cloud
Of thought: what of my life, where’s my fire?
One of them bends now to spit in the fire.
The only hesitation is of flame, its halt
Or stutter, as when the heart bolts out of a cloud
Long enough to light what’s fallen to the cup’s
Dark side to show, illustration’s methodical
Storm of types. Two chances. Which of them
Is mine? The horse and rider’s winded anthem?
Or the thumbprint ash, arms akimbo, blackfired
Against the light? Oh, love’s our method
To let blood put on the skyspan halter,
That bit of thinking, then ride, then cup
The dawn in a cold hand. The cloud
Parts again. Moon mouth half shut on cloud.
Star crumbs. A woman rising to leave them
To themselves. She’s overturned their cup
Of responsibilities, spilling it into the fire’s
Airglow. And when she asked whose fault
It was, I had to choose between old methods
Of excess. You’ll hear I chose that myth odd
To some, even to her, and know how it would cloud
Any fear of hers to make time pass or halt
On that one moment. The myth holds one of them—
I mean now one of us—up to the fire
Already gone out from the body, as into a cup,
Its thirsts poured into another cup, a method
To balance the fire’s given set of words, a cloud
That drifts over them before it halts at sorrow.
ANTHEM
All things began in separation: the day’s
Young god, puffed, fireshod, first dispatched
On a mirrored globe: the negress, locked up
In a star chamber, her lamp at the lone window:
Dry land parted from sea, its bulbous fruit
Spilt from river urns, the spring’s leaking
Pitcher drawn up from the airy stream: wave’s
Spume breaks on a caudal fin, shells soften
To paws: then the clouds too will take shape
As stag and hen, infant owl who repeats—who?
Made of something missing, the couple comes:
His city in flames, a stitch in his side
From having run this far away from home,
He dreams his heart’s a book, open to her
Taper’s hovering wing: call him again:
He had not meant so much he could not see
The worst that love can do: to wake and leave
Loving, indifferent to practice this one way:
But who will believe me if I say he fell
Into some deeper sleep: in the end was a word.
THE PALACE DWARF
The Ladder of Paradise would lead, this time,
To the Apartment of the Dwarfs, the steps
So short the rise was gradual as an afterlife.
The French looked at pictures in their guidebooks
As it was described. The Germans whispered
Loudly to each other. I watched the dwarf
Climb the stairs. I had spotted him the day before,
Flat on a wall by the Mincio, reading Emma.
That was put aside, some scenes too clogged
With allusion, like the river with its frisbees,
Detergent jugs, weeds in cellophane barrettes.
But here he was again. No gainsaying the insistent,
Good and evil alike. Which did he seem, in sunglasses,
A studded motorcycle jacket, smudge of sideburns,
Tattooed crown of thorns? His baby-head
Bulged with its one secret, how to turn anyone’s
Gold back into straw, this whole palace—
Ticket-booth, fresco, tourist group, the long galleries
Overthrown with history—into a dropcloth, a slatting
The heart made small with scorn of littleness.
Did he feel at home here, where only he could
Fit? But who ever does? Head bowed now
In self-defense, I followed him up the tilting
Scale, from the chapel, its breadbox altar and gnarled
Crucified savior, in death near lifesized for him,
Back to the bedrooms and the favorite’s gilded
Manger. Not a word, not a wink. He took it all in,
Or all but what was missing, any window view
That gave out on “the former owner’s” contradictions,
A garden’s logic of originality, the box-hedged
Bets, the raging winged cypresses, the royal
Children playing with their head-on-a-stick,
The jester’s marotte, over whose cap they’d look
Back, up at the Apartment, that skewed cortex
Through which I wormed behind him. How close
It had suddenly become, when as if into the daylight
That jabs a shut eye from between the curtains
Of his dream, we were led into the next room,
Where guardian archers had once been posted,
Their crossbows ready for the unseen nod,
Their forty horses stabled in paint above.
Each niche turned a knotted tail impatiently.
Instinct looks up. But where one expected
Allegory, the simple bearings that tell us
Where and how tall we ought to stand—some titan
Routing the pygmy appetites, some child
Humbling kings to their senses—the ceiling’s frame
Of reference was empty—the missing window at last?—
Clouds bearing nothing. And nothing was what
We were certain of. We looked around
For the dwarf, the moral of these events.
He was waddling out of a far door, as if
He knew where next we all would want to be.
A COLD IN VENICE
Montaigne—for him the body of knowledge
Was his own, to be suffered or studied
Like a local custom—had one too, I read
In bed, his diary more alert and all-gathering
The more I lose touch with it, or everything.
Even the gardenia on the neighbor’s sill
That for three nights running a nightingale
Has tended with streamsprung song—
The senses competing with a giddy vulgarity—
Draws a blank. The San Vio vesper bells
Close in, fade, close in, then fade
To the congestion of voices from the street.
Why “clear as a bell”? Even as the time-release
Capsule I’m waiting on is stuffed with pellets
The bell must first be chok
ed with the changes
To be rung, all there at once, little explosions
Of feeling, the passages out of this world.
These pills clear a space, as if for assignment
Undercover. Last week’s liver seared in oil
And sage, the mulberry gelato on the Zattere …
Neither smell nor taste make it back.
And what of the taste for time itself,
Its ravelled daybook and stiff nightcap,
What it clears from each revisited city,
Depths the same, no inch of surface unchanged?
I can see to that. The gouged pearl pattern
Of light on the canals, the grimy medallioned
Cavities of the facings, or goldleaf phlegm
Around a saint’s head. It’s always something
About the body. For Montaigne the cure
Was “Venetian turpentine”—grappa, no doubt—
Done up in a wafer on a silver spoon.
The next morning he noticed the smell
Of March violets in his urine.
How dependent
One becomes on remedies, their effects familiar
As a flower’s perfumed throat, or a bird’s
Thrilled questioning, like the trace
Of a fingertip along that throat, or now
Between the lines of a book by someone well
I’d taken up to read myself asleep with.
THE LESSON IN PREPOSITIONS
de
The night watchman, Mr. Day,
having let us in, the elevator’s
pneumatic breath is held,
counting now again to ten.
It’s we who wonder what’s up.
Arriving there follows after
a loss—is it of that push-
button Panic, or Power’s pulley?—
over any grounds for leaving.
The rule is, if you try to hurt
by silence, you’ll find the words
to accuse yourself of speech.
Time to talk back. Say here, out.
The fingertipped light’s gone out.
ex
Because the door automatically slid
closed against a pointless kiss—
an ashen sulphur-bulb still smoking—
and by reason of a walk refused
out of a mood since despaired of
for effects … no, wait for me!
If you’ll apologize, I’ll go.
sine
The way the dead live in dreams
as ageless ego’s poor relation,
the milksop or wattled Muscovy duck,
every feature, under a merciful eye,
concentrated on “Did you ever love me?”
—so there you are, without an answer.
sub
My friend the screenwriter,
the moth in Armani fatigues
under cover of flickering credits,
is in from the coast and down
on his luck. “You’ve no idea
what it’s like to loll
in the hold. The whisperjet
full of studio spies could talk
of nothing else.” At the foot of having
been left to myself, I could
only think of our old days out back,
Vantages lit, the stock company
of headmasters left to the dishes.
We were playing the Landscape Game.
House. Key. Body of water. Beast.
A bowl stood in for art. Yours
had legs that ran all the way home.
It was a backdoor in summer,
your mother calling through
the half-patched screen. The fireflies
in your jar brightened when you shook.
ad
The new stars are coming out.
To ward off another influence
is one priority, but only one.
The other is to catch their light
as a design on us, then call it
hardship up among the heroes.
I go back to what falls
out as advance. Call their bluff
a cloud that blurs the dark
retreating densities. Or call it
hardship, then call to it again
and hear answer: come up here
and see for yourself. Even then
I went ahead and answered back.
Who has the last word wins
his forced smile, but only one.
cum
With what? The too familiar
self that ducks behind depressions,
a cigarette and shot on the stoop?
The estranged hubbub of dressing?
How often can one ask, how
do I look? I look alone,
perched in this mare’s nest
of cross-hatched fume and twig.
The newel-post could be a trunk
(packed with, oh, rings of age)
to climb back down on.
This once there’s a footstep,
an echo, a step, then a step.
pro
As good as guilt in front
of his floor-length plea
for the short view of sincerity,
even the blackest has side.
When he’s right, I’m left
donned in flawless arraignment.
post
What’s over takes the accusative,
shears to the podded scape, shovel
down on the woodchuck’s skull,
the humbling touch, or misfingered
bagatelle that bears down not on
but as the moment. The point’s
to add dependence whether or not
you have the means to support it,
a pedal weight that sticks,
like blood, like brooding,
to make a fool of motive,
love’s long held embarrassment.
BEES
First to bloom at last
this late spring
the crabapple’s a wain
of white the ox
sun is hauling homeward.
Humbles brawl on top,
goaded by syrups,
the rut of work so far
from the wing-lit
hive of their making.
A bent toward folly argues
for intelligence.
They’ll break with the past
as with an enemy.
The flowers cry to them!
•
Left behind, in clover’s
common sense,
a solitary honeybee
plies her trade.
Circumspect, all twelve
thousand eyes are trained
on her needlework:
genetic cross-stitch
and pollen purl.
Her pattern is the field’s.
HUMMINGBIRD
There is no hum, of course, nor is the bird
That shiver of stained glass iridescence
Through which the garden appears—itself
In flight not from but toward an intensity
Of outline, color, scent, each flower
An imperium—as in a paragraph of Proust.
Mine is a shade of that branch it rests on
Between rounds: bark-wing, lichen-breast,
The butternut’s furthest, hollow twig.
How to make from sow thistle to purslane?
So, into this airy vault of jewelweed,
Slipped past the drowsing bee watch,
Deep into the half-inch, bloodgold
Petal curve, tongue of the still untold.
Deaf to tones so low, the bees never mind
The dull grinding, these rusted gears
Pushed to the limit of extracting
From so many its little myth of rarity.
OVID’S FAREWELL
What was my fault? A book, and something I saw.
The one he never read, th
e other
He was author of.
Not his daughter—her adulteries
Were with boys from other men’s beds, mine
Merely with women from other men’s poems—
But his empire. He had long since made his Peace
And thereby the fear that would keep it,
The commerce of praise
And the short sword, a vomit that cleanses
The palate. The same horses that tear
The flesh at night by day drive over the tribes.
The quarry falls into his toils. We all have
Our methods of conquest. Even me.
Mine was the dove-drawn
Chariot named Illusion, cockeyed
Laurel crown, and whispers on the way.
I could have chosen another theme—the sons
Who kill their fathers, the brothers who salt each
Other’s cities, or the empire’s spawn,
Glistered avenues
To sacrifice, bloody baths and nets.
But mine was love-in-idleness scratched
On an apple. In that sweet anatomy
Of desire he smells a treason. Woodland
Shrines and pillow-books, the subversive
Mirror, its fragrant
Incestuous tear beneath the bark—
These conspire against the down-turned
Thumb, policy for sale with chalk on its feet
And locks around its heels. When gods make themselves
Into men, they become less than men,
A human desire.
When men would be gods, they pass new laws
And strengthen the Family. Like gods,
Then, they breed contempt and their own betrayal.
Though whatever work I tried turned under me
Into verse, the spells and bullroarers
Of family life
Resisted all but a low satire,
The cold late supper of everyday.
I had chosen and loved a life in the shade,
A cough, certain oils, her blue lips from under.