The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life from The Grave: A Poem by Robert Blair, London, 1808; engraving by Luigi Schiavonetti (1765–1810) after Blake
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2013 by Mary Jo Salter
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salter, Mary Jo.
[Poems. Selections]
Nothing by design : poems / by Mary Jo Salter.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-34979-6
I. Title.
PS3569.A46224N68 2013
811.54—dc23 2013001009
Jacket images: (female northern cardinal) by John James Audubon, from Birds of America. The Granger Collection, New York; (daisy and leaves) by J. J. Rousseau from La Botanique
Jacket design by Jason Booher
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-34980-2
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-34979-6
v3.1
TO MY DAUGHTERS
Heavy in the womb,
at birth light as a feather—
not even your own mother
can understand that riddle,
or how you’d fill the room
although you were so little,
or how, once you had grown,
you weren’t there to measure
yet stubbornly would loom
larger than anyone.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I THE NUMBERS
Morning Mirror
Pair of Bells
Common Room, 1970
Fractal
The Gods
A Toast for Richard Wilbur
From a Balcony, Lake Como
Constellations
Cardinal Numbers
Our Friends the Enemy
II THE AFTERLIFE
Nora
The Afterlife
It’s Hard to Say
Cities in the Sky
Over and Out
III UNBROKEN MUSIC
Unbroken Music
IV LIGHTWEIGHTS
T. S. Lightweight and Ezra Profound
Out of the Woods
Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.
Urban Haiku
Dr. Syntax and Prosody
Kitti’s Hog-Nosed Bat
French Haiku
Our Ping-Pong Table
Instrumental Riddles
No Second Try
V BED OF LETTERS
String of Pearls
The Gazebo
Drinking Song
Complaint for Absolute Divorce
Bed of Letters
VI THE SEAFARER
The Seafarer
VII LOST ORIGINALS
Voice of America
English Country Dollhouse
Crusoe’s Footprint
Lost Originals
Acknowledgments
A Note about the Author
Other Books by This Author
I
THE NUMBERS
MORNING MIRROR
He doesn’t see me, whoever he is, who steps
through high grass in his khakis and bow tie
at six in the morning. I’m looking through the glass
of my cottage at the inn, hours before
coffee and buns begin at the conference.
He looks as if he knows things, and will speak
at his appointed time on experiments
successfully conducted, with a coda
on unforeseen, exciting implications,
and a call for further research. The wordless calm
of kayaks moored and mirrored, the yachts far off,
the silver-pink lake’s lapping seem to please him.
He may be in a blessed state of non-thinking.
He runs a hand through thinning, tousled hair.
A witness at the window: somehow a deer
has sidled up, and is staring at me drinking
plaintive and yet neutral gaze, as if
she knew once and is trying to recall my name.
I’m trying to unthink the expectations
of my given kind, to adopt another mode, a
curious but disinterested sense
of otherness. (Why is it for a week
all the deer have been either does or fawns?
Somebody knows the answer.) She wants more
from me, or maybe nothing; sniffs the grass,
nibbles a bit, then twitches: her profile high,
she bounds to the shore with leisurely, sure leaps.
PAIR OF BELLS
Joanna and Valerio
went up to the campanile
of the stone-deaf castle.
From across the courtyard, one
dented little bell with a skew
clapper could be seen.
I hadn’t noticed the bellpulls.
But when Joanna yanked on hers,
and Valerio took his turn,
I heard a pair of louder bells,
deeper, surely bigger—though
these and both my friends remained
entirely invisible.
And the little bell, off-key
and out of sync, hung on and swung—
a third wheel like myself, moved
to celebrate a pair of bells.
Things happen but are parables.
COMMON ROOM, 1970
And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me; and I will make you to become fishers of men.
—MARK 1:17
It was the age of sit-ins
and in any case, there weren’t enough chairs.
The guys loped heavy-footed down the stairs
or raced each other to the bottom, laughing,
pushing their luck. But here they all crammed in,
sophomores, born like him in ’51,
to huddle on the floor of the Common Room.
In a corner, a grandfather clock
startled the hour; hammered it home again.
He would remember that. The old New England
rickety dignity of the furniture.
The eminent, stern faces looking down
from time-discolored portraits. Or maybe some
of this was embellishment, added later on.
The flickering, thick fishbowl
of a TV screen, a Magnavox console,
silenced them all. There, in black and white,
gray-haired men in gray suits now began
to pull blue capsules from an actual fishbowl.
(At least the announcer said they were bright blue.)
It was the age of drugs. These looked like giant
Quaaludes handed out
by a mad pharmacist, whose grimly poised
assistant—female, sexless—then unscrewed
from each a poisonous slip of sticky paper.
A man affixed that date to a massive chart.
It was filling up already. (Some poor dude
named Bert was 7; he punched a sofa cushion.)
As for himself, he thought
of penny candy in a jar a million
years ago, picked out with his brother
most days after school. Or times he’d draw
tin soldiers from the bottom of a stocking.
(Born two days pa
st Christmas, he’d always seen
that as good karma: the whole world free to play.)
A congressman was rifling
loudly through capsules, seized some in his fist,
dropped all but one. Not Jeremy? Good friend,
socked with 15. Two strangers, 38.
Ben got 120. Would that be good enough?
Curses, bluster, unfunny humor, crossed
fingers for blessed numbers that remained.
Somewhere, sometime in
that ammunition pile awaited his:
239. He heard the number whiz,
then lodge safe as a bullet in his brain.
Like a bullet in a dream: you’re dead, you’re fine.
No need to wish for C.O. or 4-F.
Oh thank you, Jesus God. No Nam for him.
Yet he was well brought up.
In decency, rather than dance for joy
or call up Mom right then from the hallway phone,
he stayed until the last guy knew his fate.
Typical Roy, who’d showed up late, freaked out
when, it appeared, his birthday got no mention.
He hadn’t heard: they’d hosed him. Number 2.
Before the war was lost
some four years later, a handful in that room
would battle inside fishbowls, most in color—
and little men, toy soldiers in a jungle,
bled behind the glass while those excused,
life-sized, would sit before it eating dinner.
He’d lived to be a watcher. And number 2
in the Common Room that day?
Clearly not stupid. Roy became a major
in Independent Projects. Something about
landscapes in oil, angles of northern sun.
By the time he graduated, he had won
(so his proposal went) the light was different.
FRACTAL
A fish-shaped school of
fish, each individual
shaped like a single
scale on the larger
fish: some truths are all
a matter of scale,
in the manner that shale
will flake into thin layers
of and like itself,
or a roof is made
of shingle upon shingle
of roofish monad.
Scale, fish, school of fish…
“That’s a fractal, isn’t it?”
was your feedback when
you ate what I said.
“A form that’s iterated:
output is input
ad infinitum.”
Must I now mull it over?
I mulled it over.
This aquarium,
I thought, was a sort of think
tank for non-thinkers
in their open-mouthed
safety-in-numbers forage,
needing no courage.
Yet so beautiful:
mathematically serving
one end while swerving
in a fraction of
a second into action:
how do they sense when
to advance or back-
track, tail that guy, or swallow
the law to follow?
Somewhat in the line
of Leibniz, Mandelbrot coined
the term fractal: it’s
the hall-of-mirrors
parthenogenesis of
a recursive, nonce,
anonymously
irregular form: i.e.,
copies no other
formula can make.
(I learned that when I got home.)
An eye on either
side of a flat head
is useful, I read; herring
have a keen sense of hearing,
but it’s not that that
gives them their unerring
“high polarity,”
pooling together
just close enough to discern
skin on a neighbor,
far enough to skirt
collision. That’s a vision
scaled for fish—but what
human can marshal
acceptance, much less a wish,
for sight so partial?
“Stand back from the glass,
make room for the universe,”
I thought then; “at least
for whatever we
can compass: iteration
on iteration,
until fish fill the ocean.”
THE GODS
I always seem to have tickets
in the third or fourth balcony
(a perch for irony;
a circle of hell the Brits
tend to call “the gods”),
and peer down from a tier
of that empyrean
at some tuxedoed insect
scrabbling on a piano.
Some nights there’s a concerto,
and ranks of sound amass
until it’s raining upward
(violin bows for lightning)
from a black thundercloud.
A railing has been installed
precisely at eye level—
which leads the gaze, frustrated,
still higher to the vault
of the gilt-encrusted ceiling,
where a vaguely understood
fresco that must be good
shows nymphs or angels wrapped
in windswept drapery.
Inscribed like the gray curls
around the distant bald spot
of the eminent conductor,
great names—DA VINCI PLATO
WHITTIER DEBUSSY—
form one long signature,
fascinatingly random,
at the marble base of the dome.
It’s more the well-fed gods
of philanthropy who seem
enshrined in all their funny,
decent, noble, wrong
postulates, and who haunt
these pillared concert halls,
the tinkling foyers strung
with chandeliered ideals,
having selected which
dated virtues—COURAGE
HONOR BROTHERHOOD—rated
chiseling into stone;
having been quite sure
that virtue was a thing
all men sought, the sublime
a mode subliminally
fostered by mentioning
monumentally.
All men. Never a woman’s
name, of course, although
off-shoulder pulchritude
gets featured overhead—
and abstractions you might go
to women for, like BEAUTY
JUSTICE LIBERTY.
Yet at the intermission,
I generally descend
the spiral stairs unjustly
for a costly, vacant seat
I haven’t paid for. Tonight
I’ve slipped into D9.
The lights dim. Warm applause
and, after a thrilling pause,
some stiff-necked vanities
for a moment float away—
all the gorgeous, nameless,
shifting discordances
of the world cry aloud; allowed
at last, I close my eyes.
A TOAST FOR RICHARD WILBUR
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his first book,
The Beautiful Changes
Poems like yours are, frankly, hard to beat—
snapping and flapping from each line
like a deceptively blank sheet
that turns into an angel—but
of course the image isn’t mine;
your poems inspire the rest of us to cheat.
So, while I’m out borrowing, let me steal
another angel from your brain.
I’m thinking of Bruna Sandova
l
in your “Plain Song for Comadre,”
who mopped the church floor seventeen
years, and daily saw her tinted pail
of scrubwater take the sheen of heavenly wings.
For fifty years the beautiful change
you’ve wrought upon the plainest things
of this world has been like that—
a private labor to estrange
the eye from yesterday, so that it brings
forward the clean habit of surprise.
To become a “giver of due regard”
you prayed to Saint Lucy once. I rise
before you, glass raised, to insist
that regarding you was never hard,
you for whom seeing is the keenest praise.
FROM A BALCONY, LAKE COMO
1.
Up close, last night’s beads of rain
cling to the underside of the railing
like berries to a vine.
2.
Is it still raining? How to be sure
this morning, if not for the tall
columnar cypress
so many plummeting
meters down, a solemn
sentry standing at attention
to everything that can’t be seen
by the human eye? Only
against such opacity
can we discern the soundless
drizzle, a mild
disturbance like midges.
3.
A blur of terra cotta
and ochre here and there:
while I describe it,
4.
the village is clearing a little.
Just below, a gardener’s
broom of snapped branches
scratches a surface,
sidelines another heap of debris.
On a rooftop (so far from us
it’s a floor), a roofer
plants his boots on the tiles,