Chattanooga? That was hours ago.
Martinsburg, Harrisburg—
You’ve never seen the ocean, you could see the ocean—
First stop: the Vermeers
At the Metropolitan, gallery 899.
Second, Maria Callas, seats in the parterre.
Mark
Eyebrows raised as you uncorked the cognac, dishes cleared,
The children screaming in the living room—
Grow old along with me.
Eight years later resting on a bench
In the Piazza Santo Spirito—
Getting old is not for sissies.
You by the window overlooking the park at Ninety-First Street,
Unable to walk
There, looking to read.
Wendy
Addio, per sempre addio, per sempre,
Sings Elisabetta to Don Carlo at the end of act five;
Per sempre, sings the don. Inevitably
This story ends, we had a train to make.
Feet dangling beneath you,
One of us hoisting you by your left arm, another by your right,
You flew down the Via Venti Settembre
While the rest of us ran.
Your beaming face.
Bianca
Although we’re standing on the icy wing of an airplane
In the middle of the Hudson River,
Nobody dies today.
Although the ruins of Palmyra have been ruined again,
Ruins I saw first in Life magazine,
I was a boy, summer of ’66,
Nobody dies today. All we did
Was leave the door open.
And you disappeared.
Sandy
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces,
The lectures and the arguments,
The students listening politely in rows—
You with a bottle of chardonnay and a package of Ritz crackers
Pinched from the reception.
Meet you in my room!
And a thousand years before that: you
At the Academy, letting me sit
In Edith Wharton’s chair.
Maureen
I’m wearing the cardigan you sent me, the blue one;
I saved the box in which it came.
I’m walking across the park, I’m sitting
In brilliant sunshine on the steps of the museum, a taxi pulls up—
Everybody’s alive.
Where is he exactly,
You asked, unable to imagine
A life alone.
Where are you now?
Russ
A singer in the moment before he opens his mouth,
Said Charles Anthony, who stood on the Met stage 2,928 times,
Is the loneliest person in the world.
Love of words, mouths shaping words, your taste, equally exquisite,
For the vulgar—I dreamt
About a department meeting: there, primly
At a little desk, you were waiting.
What are you doing here?
Where else, you answered, would I be?
IN THE VILLAGE
1.
Shortly before I died,
Or possibly after,
I moved to a small village by the sea.
You’ll recognize it, as did I, because I’ve written
About this village before.
The rocky sliver of land, the little houses where the fishermen once lived—
We had everything we needed: a couple of rooms
Overlooking the harbor,
A small collection of books,
Paperbacks, the pages
Brittle with age.
How, if I’d never seen
The village, had I pictured it so accurately?
How did I know we’d be happy there,
Happier than ever before?
The books reminded me of what,
In our youth,
We called literature.
2.
Took it out of me.
I searched for the words,
And I resisted them as soon as I put them down.
Now, listening to them again, what I hear
Is not so much nostalgia
As a love of beginning. A wish
Not to be removed
From time but
Always to be immersed in it.
The boats come in, the boats go out—
3.
After a routine ultrasound revealed a fifteen-centimeter mass, my left kidney was removed robotically on February 12. Fifteen months later, nodules were discovered in my lungs and peritoneum. Two subsequent rounds of therapy failed to impede their growth, so I enrolled in a trial, a treatment not yet FDA approved.
I walked down High Street to the harbor, though when I say walked I mean imagined; I hadn’t been there yet.
4.
Of ghosts pursued, forgotten, sought anew—
Everywhere I go
The trees are full of them.
From trees come books, that, when they open,
Lead you to expect a person
On the other side:
One hand having pulled
The doorknob
Toward him, the other
Held out, open,
Beckoning
You forward—
5.
The Branch Will Not Break.
A Cold Spring.
Leaflets.
The Lost World.
The Moving Target.
Nightmare Begins Responsibility.
Rivers and Mountains.
The Story of Our Lives.
Untitled Subjects.
Water Street.
6.
Ash-blond, tall, a sweater
Knotted by its sleeves around his neck,
A boy is leaning on a bicycle. Deftly when she reaches him
A girl slips to the grass, one hand straightening her skirt,
The other tugging at the boy,
Who remains standing, to sit beside her.
Their heads are close
Enough to be touching;
Their lips are still—
A book is the future.
You dream
Of reading it, and once you’ve finished, it’s a miracle, you know the past.
The sky fills with stars. The sun
Climbs every morning
Over Watch Hill, dropping behind the harbor at dusk.
Water Street runs past
Church and Wall,
Harmony and School,
Until it crosses Omega, by the sea.
VENICE
Before the pedestrian bridges had railings, before most people knew how to swim, the water entrance would have been the Hotel Daniele’s fulcrum, the hub of its staff’s solicitations. The beginning of everything was in seeing the gondola-beak come actually inside the door at the Daniele: for centuries it’s been impossible to see Venice except through the images of Canaletto and Turner, the sentences of Shakespeare and Byron, but the teen-aged John Ruskin nonetheless experienced the beginning of everything—not just a discovery of a lifelong passion for Venice but the discovery of eros itself.
•
Nobody has been there before. Every time you walk from a typically mid-century train station onto the water—the vaporetti unloading their cargo of tourists, the dome of San Simeone Piccolo hovering on the other side, improbably larger than the portico beneath it—you do so for the first time. Even when you know the city well enough to navigate alone, getting lost is easy, but so is being found—look where I am! Walk out to the Ognissanti at nine o’clock at night, the water black and still, look down toward San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, founded in the seventh century, built over the next millennium, and you might be anyone living in the year 2020 or 1520.
•
I grew up in New Jersey, not far from New York, not far from the Jersey shore. Though New Jerse
y has more coastline per square mile than Alaska or Hawaii, water seemed to me exotic. Cranford, the town next door, where my father taught art at the high school, is bisected by the meandering Rahway River, and after Hurricane Alma in the summer of ’66, the river’s twists and turns were obliterated, the houses along its banks submerged in a vast sheet of shimmering water.
•
Venice, as everyone knows, is sinking. Its buildings settle a little deeper, year after year, into the layer of silt on which they were made. At the same time, the water is rising, transgressing the layers of impervious Istrian stone laid on a foundation of innumerable tree trunks. The lagoon is the crux of Venetian hegemony: in what other medieval city does the center of government, the home of its ruler, stand completely unprotected, meters from the sea, flaunting its delicate opulence? But as the level of the lagoon rises, salt water wicks into the courses of brick laid above the stone. The MOSE project, an expensive plan to install mobile barriers at the mouths of the lagoon, has been debated for decades, and meanwhile the atrium of San Marco floods over half the days of the year.
•
Like anyone, I could slip in the bathtub. Looking at myself in the mirror, I was forced to rethink everything: returning to Venice bolstered my relationship to contingency, though I can’t evade the suspicion that New Jersey might have suited me just as well.
•
Start in the northwest corner of the Campo San Giacomo, behind the garden with its stand of sycamores. Take a right on the first bridge crossing the canal, turn sharply to the left, as quickly you must, then take another right on the Calle del Tentor. If you keep walking straight, or as straight as you can, you’ll come to the Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini, unremarkable except for the row of elegant Gothic windows gracing the dilapidated fourteenth-century Palazzetto Viaro on its west side. Beneath the central window is a low relief of the Venetian lion, symbol of the Republic, that was half scratched out by Napoleon’s soldiers in 1797, when after a thousand years of independence the Republic welcomed an outsider.
VIA SACRA
Imagine the most beautiful girl in the world is walking in front of you.
She’s entering the ruins of western civilization,
The wind is swirling her skirt
Around her thighs.
You want to follow. But you know
She wants to be alone
With western civilization; she’s holding a map.
Little boy, one day your hand will hover above the spinning record
As you drop
The stylus on the Berg quartet.
You will retain this memory, return to it,
Because she’ll write it down.
III
BARCAROLLE
Empedocles on Etna is a poem
By the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold.
Readily I’ll concede that poetry is a criticism of life (his phrase)
About as much as red-hot iron
Is a criticism of fire,
•
But we’re in Sicily.
The gods are still with us.
The sun has warmed the rocks
On which we’re lounging, eating goat cheese, drinking new wine.
You’re hardly wearing any clothes.
•
Nobody’s wearing clothes!
Neither is anyone
Worried about sunlight.
This is before Jesus, before Socrates,
Before the double onslaught of guilt and rationality
•
Doomed us (I’m paraphrasing Nietzsche) to believe
In the rectification of the world
Through knowledge—to live
Within the limited circle of soluble problems,
Where we may cheerfully say to life
•
I want you! You’re worth knowing!
Empedocles is having a bad day.
Once, he was a god;
Smart, good-looking, too.
You understand how anyone might feel that way
•
Just being where we are, tasting things, just breathing the air.
Above us, Etna’s cone
Emits its languorous white plume.
Miracles? Mistrust them, says Empedocles.
Mind is a spell that governs
•
Heaven and earth.
Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived lightly in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done?
•
Obvious as the answer to this question may be, convincing, too,
Empedocles climbs beyond the ashen trees,
The potholes red as an open wound,
And steps into a cloud.
A poem of passive suffering, said Arnold,
•
Could have no place in his collected poems.
No place. His greatest poem! Whose suffering
Isn’t passive? What else
Could suffering be?
One night in Venice
•
I couldn’t sleep; I heard the bells
Of San Giacomo ring four times, then five.
I heard the mutter of a boat, two voices, a woman’s and a man’s,
Then somehow rising
Between them, as from the water itself,
•
The Chopin Barcarolle.
Who could they have been?
Why were they playing
Chopin in their little boat,
Playing it softly, just for me? Remember
•
When we lived like forest creatures,
You and I, when all
We left behind were footsteps
Crushed in the wet grass?
When I opened my eyes
•
Sun-stirred water played
Across the ceiling;
You were asleep.
It felt like being
In the present, being alive.
SCHOOL STREET
The person I once was found himself
In the present, which was the only place he could be.
The dog that yesterday had barked
At his empty dish barked again.
The stars were still shining,
Though the brilliance of the sun obscured them so completely
You’d believe they’d disappeared.
Time to walk to the paddock.
Will the roses be blooming? Will Penny be there, too?
Selfishly we planted cornflowers, delphiniums,
A different bed for every shade.
From behind the wisteria came children, then grandchildren—
The girls wore smocked dresses, dresses my mother
Had made, the boys had floppy hair.
The things we made
Ourselves seemed permanent,
But like the stars invisible, even the things
We made from words. Downstairs
The kitchen, the living room, everything in place:
The bed could fold up in the wall.
But upstairs a ladder where each evening, one by one,
We’d climb into the crow’s nest
To rehearse the stars. Hold the railing! Don’t fall!
How did we afford this house?
Why, if it exists
In the present,
Am I speaking in the past?
SONG OF THE SUN
1.
Two children side by side
In the cathedral at twilight, knowing
They’d missed the train.
And once, just
Before dawn, they stumbled
Down an alley, it was Christmas,
To a courtyard strung with tiny yellow lights.
They learned to read,
To make love. The fields
Grew taller than their foreheads,
And the trees sent taproots
Deep into the ground.
2.
What happened next
Had never happened before
Though it would happen again.
From her body came forth another body not
More beautiful but beautiful
In a different way.
Immediately
There were people who helped them care for this body,
Feed it, clothe it,
But when this happened
Again, it had never
Happened before.
3.
Song of the First First Child
In the middle of a steep staircase
I fell asleep I didn’t know
Whether to look forward
Or back each step
Looked dangerous to me
You called this being born I call it
Making a sandwich
Taking the bus if
You could understand me
I would tell you
Everything I’d show you
Sunlight on my golden hair
4.
Song of the Second First Child
Before I could walk I
Walked through snow a forest
Shagged with ice who’s there
Said the bird I could not
Say I could say
Only what I’d heard before I said
It differently there was
A little girl she could not
Speak she spoke
The pine trees
Shagged with ice she said
You’re beautiful
5.
To imagine you’ve changed is to preserve
The person you once were.
Alternatively, to recognize you’ve
Never changed, that now you
See yourself as then you
Didn’t, couldn’t,
Even if you’d tried,
Is to feel
Viscerally a part
Of time, to collaborate
In the project of becoming, always
To have begun.