Plundered Hearts, Page 4

  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

  Canvas yanked aside from plaster-frame ambition,

  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.