It was from such shadows that I saw
His daughter come to
Kick against his rule. I ignored her,
Of course, but one of her slaves had seen
Me, and seen a way to pay for his freedom.
Slaves, our living shades, are like readers, always
Eager for a new master. Lovers
Look for somewhere else
To live, and when they find it, they ask
The poet for passage. Now it is
My turn to pay for love. First my poems made me
Friends, now fame has made my enemies. Tomis?
In Greek the word means “amputation”
And so he would have
My tongue cut out. The title is his,
Not mine, called the Master of Changes.
The life to come will be all the past, the world
Before Rome, rough skins and grunts and frenzied wasps
In their rain-ruined tents. I hear they
Have only one god
To worship. How can one god fill up
The sky? Or answer for this wrangle
In the heart? Perhaps the sky there in Tomis—
Where the Kid is drowned under waves, and the Bear
Kept chained to his pole—is small enough.
I am to be changed
Into a character—a woman
Whose lover is at wine and gaming
With knuckle-bones. She smears her eyes with charcoal
So he will not see her—if he should look up—
Looking away. Or, if not that girl,
Then what is the same,
A ghost, skirling inside an urn called
Tomis. Flattery! That is the work
Of a woman and a ghost. Let us play them
Tonight, before I am both, and you neither.
My friends tell me, Fabia, I am
Married to story,
And so to change. But men do not change,
They grow old, and grow afraid. I have
Left wives before, but not one I loved. There, there,
… The very poem of Troy is enacted!
The fires wept on, the hearth gods smashed,
The old queen’s ashes
Passed from hand to hair. They are afraid
For themselves, my friends, and come to offer
Advice like gentlemen. I may as well count
On the critics. Not that I mind to beg them
For it. Their pity is a fool’s gold
And dealt in Caesar-
Struck coin. One will pay my ferry-ride.
But what shall I take from this last night?
A book? A strong leather cloak? A pen to blind
Myself with petitions? We all live someone
Else’s story, so we may know how
It turns out. I have
Taken something before, then … But what?
My brother’s life. Yes. No one knows that,
Nor ever thought it then, thirty years ago.
One day, in an island of wheatspikes,
We were playing our war, his mattock
Up in the noonlight’s
Angry hour, my barrel-siding
Like an elephant on the mountain.
Having leaped into some last ditch of defense,
His angular stillness was itself both call
And surrender. Not meant to win,
I wondered, then saw
The snake, black standard of an army
Marching off under the world. I watched
Its tongue question the distance to the boy.
When it stopped, the tale came to my lips. “Brother,
Show respect to the god, a sea-borne
God, come to favor—”
My own panic made up its mission—
“The purple shells on his cave’s ceiling
Were tongues that told of the Sun’s only daughter
Who kept his light from the dead, their souls the chaff
Winnowed from life. If a snake could slip
Into the mill’s pin.…”
Calmed, I continued, and backed away.
He turned to me, as one who believes
Will turn the page, and as he turned, the snake struck.
The stone in my throat was that one said
To turn black in the hand of a liar.
Dog’s milk was rubbed on
His gums, a wolf’s liver in thin wine
Was forced, and cow dung through a fresh reed.
Superstitions save what’s no longer wanted.
He died. He died as silent as I’ve remained.
Had truly returned
And come to the chamber of the dead.
My brother, pale as a grain fallen
On a cloth, recognized him and stood, head bowed,
Intent on his part. Then the god took him up
To Hercules whose quiver behind
Is a crown of stars.
But the great Serpent coiled in night,
As the boy approached, wound itself round
The hero’s outstretched arm who was to hold
Him fast by his side, a friend to his labors.
So the boy in error was taken
Further up, farther
Away, too far to be seen by men.
But I have, there between the bowstring
And the shaft, whenever I look up for a line.
Exile—a boy into death, the bit of life
Stranded in a song, or its singer—
Is the end of our
Belief. It comes to pass, the last change
As the first, from a stream of star-shot
Wonderment that falls down to our home on earth.
from THE REST OF THE WAY
1990
MEDEA IN TOKYO
Already in place, her tears are chainlink gold,
Her grief a silken streamer of “blood” that friends
Draw slowly from her mouth while she is told
A rival has worked her magic. Who’s the witch?
The unseen girl will have her hour, then ends
Up on fire. And the star’s in fact an old
Man, with clay breasts and trailing robe
Forty pounds of mirror flints enrich,
Who never says a word I comprehend.
What happens when the language is a mask,
And the words we use to hush this up have failed?
The chorus—beekeepers with samisens—ask
That question (I think) over and over again.
Is tragedy finally wrenched from fairy tale
When we ought to understand but can’t pretend?
She doesn’t hear a thing. Her dragon cart—
The bucket of a sleek hydraulic lift—
Sways above us all. By now the part
Has worn out her revenge. We’re made to feel
Even she is beyond the spell of speech, the gift
Of fate she gave the others. But a moral starts
To echo. The children’s screams. And to each wheel
A body’s tied with ribbons, pale and stiff.
The words had made no sense, but the sword was real.
THE RENTED HOUSE
The faintly digital click of the overhead fan
stroking what was left of the dark
had finally given way to a rooster alarm.
Not that we needed one.
We’d been kept awake all night by cats, cats
in the crawlspace, in the yard,
up and down the back lane, until it seemed
they were in your head,
their guttural chittering, then a courting sound—
more like tires spinning on ice—
a sort of erotic simmer that would mount
to a wail in heat, a wailing,
one pair, and soon after another, the same,
sex shrieking all around and under us,
who hadn’t
touched, or barely spoken, for days.
When I leaned over you
to bang on the window, your back was hot on my chest.
I banged louder, longer, less to scare
the cats away than to feel your heat, the flesh
and an inch above the flesh,
while listening to theirs, though theirs hurt less
because the pain thrilled, you could hear it,
the now worried tom helplessly caught in her
until she’d had enough.
And then they set to fighting. Again and again
I’d be getting out of bed to stamp or shout
into the dark, and they would stop for a minute
before turning on each other
with a threatening sigh-long cough. No point, no use
trying to silence it. And the losers,
self-pitying, moved off further under the house,
making a curious new sound,
a wounded coo and some hen-gabble (Christ!
I should have known that rooster was a cat).
By morning we were all exhausted, trying to start
something or stop it,
giving in to another day, angry—but angry at what?
There on the porch, when I opened the screen door,
a black, three-legged, pregnant cat was sitting,
our brooding household god,
last night’s own story staring back at me in the slatted
early palmlight, all the accidents of envy and will
thrown together in one mangled, swollen creature,
mewling, limping, her stump
dangling down beneath her belly. When I took one,
then two hesitant steps toward her, she arched
and hobbled away. Sometimes a life comes to its senses,
or suddenly just speeds up,
as when we first met, whole months it seemed collapsed
to a night, an emptiness years-deep filled
and spilling over by dawn into—but first things first.
Some milk. A shallow bowl.
By the time I’d returned with it, the cat had vanished.
But there beside the door, earlier overlooked,
you’d already set a milkbowl down for her yourself,
someone else’s earthenware,
the glazed, coarse-grained gesture neither of us
can make for each other. Poor, stupid cat,
where are you? All day the bowls have sat there,
side by side, untouched.
THE SHIELD OF HERAKLES
The ocean circles its outer rim,
With dented silver swan-shaped studs
To hold taut the backing, deerskin
Lashed to a frame of olive wood.
Next, as if on shore, a round
Of horsemen, loosening their reins,
Gaining on a prize forever unwon.
The face of each is worked in pain.
(Who once coughed up the Milky Way
And later, maddened, killed his sons
Has guiltily now to undertake
Labors to please a weaker man.)
And then a city with seven gates
Of gold where men are bringing home
A bride in her high-wheeled chariot.
Shrill bridal pipes and their echo
Mingle with the swollen torches,
Women, one foot lifted to the lyre,
And a pack of young men watching
Or laughing in the dance, tired,
Others mounted, galloping past
A field the ploughman’s just turned up.
Sharpened hooks have reaped the last
Bending stalks that children prop
In sheaves. Beside them now a row
Of vines, with ivory tendrils curled
On grapes soon trod upon to draw
Their sweetness for the frightened girl.
(My journal of dreams this month: “One
By one the twelve new monsters yield.”
The doctor says the threat’s begun
To counterattack. Is strength a shield?)
Deeper within stand ranks of men
In warring harness, to hold or sack
The town, while corpses, enemy by friend,
Lie near widows tearing their cheeks—
They could have been alive. The Fates,
Shrouded in black enamel, loom
Behind, clawing a soldier to taste
The blood that drips from an open wound.
And closer still four faces stare—
Panic, Slaughter, Chaos, Dread—
Each knotted to the next one’s hair
By serpents, like the Gorgon’s head.
And here are souls now swept beneath
The world, all made of palest glass,
Their skin and bones long since bequeathed
To earth, where the wandering stars pass.
(The archers squint at a gleaming phalanx,
As if from nowhere moved into place.
Machine-made Armageddons—tanks
Or missile shields in outer space—
Threaten always to turn against
The false-hearted power they excite.
What draws attack is self-defense,
A target for the arrow’s flight.)
And at its very center, a wonder
Held up to see, the figure of Fear
Was hammered fast by fire and thunder.
But only half her face appears.
The other half is turned away,
A quivering lip, one widened eye,
Turned back as if to warn in vain
The armored giant, come to rely
On what protects to terrify,
That while at night his dreams explain
The city and field, the dance, the bride,
A crow is picking at one of the slain.
FOG TROPES
A sheet of water turned over.
Sedge script. River erasure.
The smoke out of the factory
Stacks drifts to the title page—
Words too big to read, too quickly
Gone to say what they are.
The water turbine is stalled
And sighs. There go last night’s
Now forgotten dreams, airborne,
Homebound, on their way to work.
•
Again this morning: five-storey elm spoons
Stirring the wheylight, fur on the knobby
Melon rind left in the sink, the china egg
Under the laying hen, the quilt’s missing
Patch, and now the full moon’s steamed-up
Shaving mirror leaning against the blue.
•
When my daughter died, from the bottom
Of every pleasure something bitter
Rose up, a sour taste of nausea,
The certain sense of having failed
Not to save her but in the end to know
I could not keep her from passing
As through the last, faintest intake
Of breath to somewhere unsure of itself,
The dim landscape that grief supposes.
I remember how, in the hospital,
Without a word she put her glasses on
And stared ahead, just before she died.
I take mine off these days, to see
More of my solitude, its incidental
Humiliations. Nothing satisfies
Its demand that she appear in order
To leave my life over and over again.
If, from my car, I should glimpse her
In a doorway, bright against the dark
Inside, and stop and squint at the glare—
It’s a rag on a barbed-wire fence.
Or I spot her in a sidewalk crowd
But almost at once she disappears
The way one day slips behind the next.
I’ve come to think of her now, in fact,
Or of her
ghost I guess you’d have to say,
As the tear that rides and overrides
My eye, so that the edges of things go
Soft, a girl is there and not there.
•
Even in the dark
The long shadow of the stars
Drifts beneath the pines.
•
Snagged on a stalk: fresh tufts of rabbit down,
Thistle silk, a thumbnail’s lot of spittle spawn.
•
Fidgeting among the goateed professors
And parlor radicals at the Pension Russe,
The girls whispered to themselves
About the tubercular young Reinhard,
Alone at a corner table, smoking,
Who had introduced them to immortality
By burning a cigarette paper
And as the ash plummeted upward
Exclaiming “Die Seele fliegt!”
•
It’s the first breath of the dead
That rises from the firing squad
While the anarchist who squealed
Gets drunk and argues with God.
It’s Shelley’s lung in the lake
And his hand in the ashes on shore.
It’s the finespun shirt he ordered
And the winding sheet he wore.
•
When the two famous novelists discovered
Each the other in the same dress—
A shot-silk “creation” of orris-dust
Laid on blanched silver, like the irony
That is the conscience of style, obscuring
To clarify, bickering to be forgiven—
One retired with her pale young admirers,
Disdain for whom creamed up in her tea,
To a folly by the buckled apple tree.
She sat and pretended to listen to herself
Being praised, picking at grizzled lichen
On the bench, like drops of blistered enamel.