To settle briefly on this or that heart-
Stopping beauty, or flutters vainly around
The flame of its own image, light of its life.
Better the friend to whom we’re drawn by choice
And not instinct or the glass threads of passion.
Better the friend with whom we fall in step
Behind our proper god, or sit beside
At the riverbend, idly running a finger
Along his forearm when the conversation turns
To whether everything craves its opposite,
As cold its warmth and bitter its honeydrop,
Or whether like desires like—agreed?—
Its object akin to the good, recognizing
In another what is necessary for the self,
As one may be a friend without knowing how
To define friendship, which itself so often slips
Through our hands because … but he’s asleep
On your shoulder by now and probably dreaming
Of a face he’d glimpsed on the street yesterday,
The stranger he has no idea will grow irreplaceable
And with whom he hasn’t yet exchanged a word.
VII.
Late one night, alone in bed, the book
Having slipped from my hands while I stared at the phrase
The lover’s plaintive “Can’t we just be friends?”
I must have dreamt you’d come back, and sat down
Beside my pillow. (I could also see myself
Asleep but in a different room by now—
A motel room to judge by the landscape I’d become,
Framed on the cinder-block wall behind.)
To start over, you were saying, requires too much,
And friendship in the aftermath is a dull
Affair, a rendezvous with second guesses,
Dining out on memories you can’t send back
Because they’ve spoiled. And from where I sat,
Slumped like a cloud over the moon’s tabletop,
Its wrinkled linen trailing across a lake,
I was worried. Another storm was brewing.
I ran a willowy hand over the lake to calm
The moonlight—or your feelings. Then woke
On the bed’s empty side, the sheets as cool
As silence to my touch. The speechlessness
Of sex, or the fumble afterwards for something
To say about love, amount to the same. Words
Are what friends, not lovers, have between them,
Old saws and eloquent squawkings. We deceive
Our lovers by falling for someone we cannot love,
Then murmur sweet nothings we do not mean,
Half-fearing they’ll turn out true. But to go back—
Come dawn, exhausted by the quiet dark,
I longed for the paper boy’s shuffle on the stair,
The traffic report, the voices out there, out there.
VIII.
Friends are fables of our loneliness.
If love would live for hope, friendship thrives
On memory, the friends we “make” made up
Of old desires for surprise without danger,
For support without a parent’s smarting ruler,
For a brother’s sweaty hand and a trail of crumbs.
Disguised in a borrowed cloak and hood, Christine
Has escaped with Octave the muddle of romance.
It is midnight. They are in the greenhouse, alone
But spied upon by jealousies that mistake
Anxiety for love, the crime that requires
An accomplice. Then, for no reason, they mistake
Themselves, and suddenly confess—the twin
Armed guards, Wish and Censor, having fallen
Asleep—to a buried passion for each other.
The friendship shudders. In the end, as if he’s pushed
Christine toward a propeller blade for the pleasure
Of saving her, he sends the proper hero
In his place to meet her. His head still in the clouds,
The aviator races to his death, shot down
Like a pheasant the beaters had scared up for the hunt.
Christine, when she discovers the body, faints.
Her husband, the mooncalf cuckold, so that the game
Might continue, acts the gentleman, and thereby
Turns out the truest friend. He understands,
Is shaken but shrugs, and gracefully explains
“There’s been the most deplorable accident …”
One guest begins to snigger in disbelief.
The old general defends his host: “The man has class.
A rare thing, that. His kind are dying out.”
IX.
And when at last the lights come up, the echo
Of small arms fire on the soundtrack nextdoor
Ricochets into our multiplex cubicle.
Retreating up the empty aisle—the toss
Is heads for home, tails for ethnic out—
We settle on the corner sushi bar,
Scene of so many other films rehashed,
Scores retouched, minor roles recast,
Original endings restored or, better, rewritten,
So the stars up there will know what the two of us,
Seated in the dark, have come to learn
After all these years. How many is it now?
Twenty? Two hundred? Was it in high school or college
We met? The Film Society’s aficionados-
Only, one-time, late-night Rules of the Game,
Wasn’t it? By now even the classics
(Try that tuna epaulet) show their age,
Their breakneck rhythms gone off, their plots creaky.
But reflections our own first feathery daydreams
Cast on them still shimmer, and who looks back,
Airily, is a younger self, heedless
Of the cost to come, of love’s fatal laws
Whose permanent suffering his joy postpones.
He’s a friend too. But not so close as you.
He hasn’t the taste for flaws that you and I
Share, and wants to believe in vice and genius,
The sort of steam that vanishes now above one
Last cup of tea—though I could sit here forever
Passing the life and times back and forth
Across the table with you, my ideal friend.
THE WINDOW
Even during the war, I used to get up at noon. The weariness—a damp, musky, still warm mold of myself—stayed in bed while I made coffee. If an idea disturbed this first surface of the day—like one of those tiny whirlpools that form the closer you come to the falls—it was easily ignored. I’d stand at the window in my underwear and blow on my cup and watch them drink in the café across the square. Afternoons, I’d sit in the back of the cinema, smoking, as sad and useless as a god. Long, crumpled nylons of cigarette smoke would drift up toward the projectionist’s opening, then wrap around that single beam of romance from which, in those days, everything that counted came—the orphan on the train, the machine guns and lipstick, the water ballet, the ambush in the hotel corridor. When did it start? The moment you raised your arm to wave to someone across the street? The day you didn’t answer the telephone and showed up later with your hair mussed? It wasn’t until the war ended and the men came home that they too realized what had happened. By then they had lived so long in the hills and cellars and hardened themselves against regret that they hadn’t the energy to retrieve any delicacy of feeling. Some bought that cheap religion, love, until they had no more belief to spend. Others tried the commonplace left out of their dreams: they made their beds in the morning and washed with plenty of soap, or stood round after round of drinks at the café, or counted on their children like the new government. Myself, I had my old habits, the letters to write to M., my diary, the dog. My train back—was it as long as a yea
r ago now?—followed the shoreline by night. I could see little fires in the distance, and the moon laid like a compress on what beach the tide was giving up. By dawn the steam was settling on the fields. The tree-curtains parted to show a house on the crest of the hill, a lemon grove metallic against the blue sky, and then, closer, bullet-pocked, the red brick wall of a farm stable. The woman beside me had awakened by then, and asked me to help her with the window. It is easy to be good when you’re not in love. You do someone a favor, and how soon you come to hate her grateful, radiant face.
after Pavese
KILIM
I.
The force of habit takes order to its heart,
As when a nurse, her basket filled with the dead
Child’s toys, has put it by the head
Of her tomb, unwittingly on an acanthus root.
Kallimachos, they say, made his capital
Of it, when around that basket the thorny leaf
Sprang up, nature pressed down by grief
Into shapes that made the loss a parable,
His idea to change the shallow bead and reel
For an imprint of afterlife apparent to all,
Bringing down to earth an extravagance.
So skill gives way to art, or a headstone
To history—the body by now left alone,
As if bodies were the soul’s ornaments.
II.
As if bodies were the soul’s ornaments,
A mullah turned the Koran’s carpet page.
Old Babur made a couplet instead—of Age
And Youth, his “throneless days,” their violence.
The opium pearl, to ease him out of life,
Made a garden of pain. The rugs, the tent
Dissolved. A flower stall appeared. He went
On rearranging the couplet and devised,
To keep death at bay, five hundred and four
Versions. His first poem had been to a boy
From the bazaar whom for a day he had adored,
Whose glances he could still see in the dark
That lined the geometric border’s void,
Reproduced in glistening egg-and-dart.
III.
Reproduction’s glistening egg-and-dart,
Column or carpet, whatever cultures may rest
Upon, and couples do, like Prussian drill …
Nietzsche said the poem is a dance
In chains. Molecular life enchained by chance?
The bonds of atoms formulas distill
Are strains that resonate, the elements
Held both far together and close apart.
The rose window, its creation story speechless,
Its pattern telling all, duplicates
The cross-sectioned axial view each strand
Of genetic coil reveals. Each grain of sand
Takes an eternity to articulate
History’s figure of speech for randomness.
IV.
History’s figures of speech for randomness—
Car-bomb, rape, skyjack, carcinogens,
Dragon’s teeth sown in the morning headlines,
Blips on a monitor, all this summer’s kinds
Of long-festering terrorist violence
A final demand, its victims slumped, helpless—
How muffled they seem in my own bloodstream,
And here in Vermont, whose coldhearted self
Has long gone underground. The daydream
Of a hooded finch on the thistle’s globe. The stealth
Of mallow colonizing clapboard. The beard
And turban on one last old iris. Who knows
If the image also frees what it’s commandeered.
Meaning’s subversive, being superimposed.
V.
Meaning, subversive because superimposed,
Signs on a dotted line of brushwood its truce,
Its terms with mountains out beyond my window’s
Squaring off with cloudspray, a crest of spruce,
The green, landlocked swell and trough this state
Navigates, a chaos first unloosed
In the crown glass whose own wavering is bated
Breath upon the waters, then onto the wide
Pine floor of my study and the kilim—ornate
But frayed—that has designs on it. As if I’d
Come ashore and a moon been brought to light
The new world’s passageways, its thread inside
The carpet’s magic, I hear something like
So strangely silent this still desert night …
VI.
so strangely silent this still desert night
you kneel on me to pray lanternlight
rows of petalled guls to guard the borders
his knot garden opposite the women’s quarters
nomad bands a running dog four split
leaf lobed medallions concentric
threats dollar signs God is everywhere
a janissary comet the mihrab’s stair
and doorway the prophet’s place in his house
a sura the flame flickers on as if in doubt
the strain on paradise in its descent
hollowed out the moon jangles the tent
pole sways look the heart slows
a wind that frames and fills the scene O rose
VII.
The wind that frames and fills the scene arose
Between the mountains and the nomad camp,
Grazing the flocks, their pile of wool that combs
Had plied for spinning like stories still damp
With last night’s storm of raw material,
Tightening for the warp, but nearly all
The weft yarn as loosely spun as thought.
Saffron, indigo, and cochineal,
The pots of dye have simmered through the night.
The loom is ready. Dawn sits by the fields
To stir. All color is an effect of light.
The woman dreams of patterns the sky might yield,
Of love’s unchanging aspect in starlight.
VIII.
And love’s unchanging aspect—by starlight
Whose cressets are blurred
In the brazier’s perfumed smoke,
A bride enters her husband’s tent, her birthright
And dowry now spread or stowed
As he sees fit, and later a child whose first
Toy is a shuttle—watches over her work.
She weaves the carpet from memory, a talent
Her hands recollect,
Though bound to a narrow loom
As to the tribe’s own wayworn valley,
Its tripod stakes festooned
With skeins of past and future their lives connect
When seen and heard in the fabric’s page of text.
IX.
When seen and heard as one, a page of text
And an urgent voice make up a history—
Matter, pattern, sources a poem selects.
The carpet, too, is a complicity.
When grown at ten, the child may sit beside
The other women and in time betray
Her mother’s hand, the seed pods multiplied
On a blank expanse, in favor of her father’s way
With zigzag diagonals (he had seen
The electric plant at Shiraz) and a few of her own
Imaginings. By twenty she’ll have learned
To read. Hafiz says love is never free
Of choice. The rose’s tongues, or its thorn alone.
A palm-read pool, or its vacillating pattern.
X.
A palm. A red pool. The vacillating pattern
Of television lights on the bloodslick.
The diplomat still seated. The powder burn
On his neck like a new neighborhood picked
Out by rocket fire from the Shuf. A note,
A warning from Hezbollah, pinned to his shirt.
The day before, ten children had almost
Escaped a mortar. How much death will serve?
The assassin’s mother and her mother’s mother
Wove carpets. Now the time for art is past.
There is no god but God. To be a martyr
Is both thread and legend. The pistol gives her wrist
The graveside ache that, as her father’s mourner,
The first stone she tossed created. And the next.
XI.
The touchstone I toss first creates but next
(Because the poem always has a shadow
Under its reliefs, unlike a carpet’s
Flat entanglements, its straight and narrow
Life without illusions, turned inward
Like a dream, or like that disinterred
Necropolis Beirut’s become of late—
The savagery of the abstract, form or faith—
And because that shadow is the natural world
The poem’s grounded in and the figures branching
Up from it, like an oasis to the approaching
Caravan lost and found in a blinding swirl
Of sand, the mirage they drink in before they turn)
Disrupts. The way things go we come to learn.
XII.