fixing the middle distance.
5.
From which the village climbs again,
receding from
the valley in switchbacks
(we can tell because
of that minuscule vehicle
ducking in and out of trees)
to scale the face of the first
cloud-haloed
mountain in a series
of mountains, each slipped
neatly behind the last:
ever-flatter and -duller
file folders of color,
emerald to jade to a faded
wafer of blue so watery
it comes out of sumi-e.
A Japanese- or Chinese-
Italian scroll, a vertiginous
landscape hung
in the empty niche
between the open French windows.
6.
When did the puddle
of rain on the balcony
chair disappear?
I thought I was looking.
Did it drip through the slats?
Evaporate? What?
7.
Sun picks out
the young olive trees
positioned widely in a field
with their new shadows,
as if gawkily waiting
to be tagged in a game.
And on the lake, finally,
all agitations, tremblings
longed-for are visible:
slubbed yellows, prismatic
pinks like the costly
shantungs of Como
smoothed out on a counter,
cupped again, crumpled,
marveled at, lifted
to light; set aside.
8.
Behind the brooding,
regrouping humidity,
lightning
is assembling all our
slate-blue, shifting
late afternoons into one simple,
zigzagged, single-minded line:
not here yet, but
coming on schedule
like the ferry pushing
off from Varenna,
appointed to veer this way.
CONSTELLATIONS
His parents want him to play less.
Well then, they should have thought ahead—
they knew the type of mind he had;
Dad never should have taught him chess.
But face it, Dad’s still limited
at seeing long-term consequences.
Dumb strategies, those lame defenses—
it makes him sad, alone in bed
on a Saturday night, beneath a quilt
his mother calls a floral chessboard;
at only five years old, he’d floored
them both by beating him. (It’s guilt,
not sadness, that he’s really feeling:
he gets the picture faster than
they’ll ever fathom.) Tonight again
he looks up at his stickered ceiling
for the vision of the infinite
Grand Master. There, instead of glue-on,
glow-in-the-dark stars, the view
some guys make do with, he has eight
squares by eight: a constellation
of white on black, a sixty-four-
tile universe, a dizzy dance floor
on which his moves, some combination
he thought of, might not have been seen
once in the game’s unending annals.
King-usurping gambits, channels
around the wide skirts of the queen.
He should be “thinking about dating,”
his mother says. As if he isn’t!
She seems to think he’s self-imprisoned
here, that some brave girl is waiting
to rescue him, like Rapunzel, from
the castle. Of course he’s desperate
to kiss them, to plunge into that sweet
wet something: but thinking hard can summon
even that sensation. It’s long
since he has bothered clasping, lifting
a piece: admittedly, the shifting
of objects on a plane isn’t wrong,
if you need that, but he’s in a space
markers above him to know he’s there,
sliding a checkmate into place.
How not resolve it, knight after knight,
side-sneaking bishop, stalwart pawn?
He’ll probably be up till dawn
with this endgame—genius, if he’s right—
but even when sleep’s stubborn law
overtakes him, some new dream position
may break the surface: if not a win,
he thinks, at least a draw.
CARDINAL NUMBERS
Our heads down, two of a
kind, we’re reading at either end
of the red sofa.
Is it a one in a million
chance? Not that such
a thing would happen—
that each of us
would look up to catch
on the wing that moment—
but that we speak in unison
when (framed in a mullion
of double windows)
two cardinals descend
to a fiery perch
on a barren pear tree.
Perfectly twinned,
they’re content to stand
for pure ornament,
to be bright but dumb:
“like red bows
tied to the boughs.”
That’s what we both said.
Attachment is in
the air, evidently.
So we note, in tandem,
another twosome
mirroring them:
the marvelous,
upright, waxen ear-
trumpets of amaryllis
propped on the sill,
their double-bloomed red
deaf to the blaring
echo outside;
blind to the cardinals
that are blind to our staring.
Off the pair flies
to amaze somewhere else.
Our two pairs of eyes,
back and forth like birds,
flit from the plant
to twice-read words.
OUR FRIENDS THE ENEMY
Christmas 1914
Were they mad?
They kicked the severed head
of the football across the frozen mud
like Ajax running wild in the field:
it was sheep he killed
when he’d thought he’d been slaughtering
Odysseus and Agamemnon.
Now it was either the war to end
all wars, or Armageddon,
but surely they’d been out of their wits
picking their way across No Man’s Land
unarmed but for brandy and cigarettes
and pictures of girls they liked.
In no time the chaps with cameras
were snapping photographs—
Tommy swapping his cap for the spiked
pickelhaube on Fritz.
It started, Colonel, the night before.
Sir, I can explain…
The Jerrys who wanted them dead so close
all along the front
they could hear them clear
as the stars, singing “Stille Nacht.”
Some of the boys sang back:
“O Come All Ye Faithful.”
A friendly taunt:
“Engländer! Engländer!”
And all ablaze,
the candles in rows
on the Germans’ Christmas trees.
How did they dare walk across?
They’d trod their way through worse before—
lads underfoot in the muck;
now the day was cold enough those poor
contorted stiffs
were coated in merciful rime.
As for them, whose time
hadn’t come, you could say that squalor
was the better part of valor.
You could call it a sort of luck
not standing in standing slime in the trench.
Not fraternizing with the rats
but clambering over the parapets
with a few of your rations in hand.
Sergeant Bernard Joseph Brookes
of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles
wrote in his diary:
In the afternoon I went out
and had a chat
with our friends the Enemy.
And the football game?
It was a sort of courtship
before the first, last, passionate fusion.
Or it felt like the smiling sorrow
after you and your girl have split up.
But nothing forgiven, furious, tomorrow.
The Germans won, 3 to 2.
On Boxing Day
the mercury rose, and the mud.
It was agreed—
let the dead bury their dead—
and side by side, they dug.
They laid them in who hadn’t played
but had already lost:
each a tidy Christmas package
tied with a cross.
II
THE AFTERLIFE
NORA
Even in death your radiance follows me.
Or leads me. You’re ahead of me on the sidewalk,
pushing your baby’s pram as I push mine,
and you swing your head to greet someone driving by,
your sheet of black hair the shiniest anyone
has ever seen; you don’t even understand
that nobody in her thirties shines that much,
nobody laughs so musically at jokes
that are not that funny. Whatever it was I said
twenty years ago, whatever anyone said
no longer is heard, or can be, the way you took it
because you’re not here to beam it back, to turn it
funny or beautiful—even the saddest things
you somehow made useful to us who were sad
with those infinite eyes of yours, looking right at us,
that Oh that was all acceptance. Even in death
that swept down upon you, death that locked you shut
and the No that is locked inside your name now, Nora,
I see the Ra for sun god, too, which is silly,
but you’d understand; I take it for your radiance
that even now in the darkness follows me.
THE AFTERLIFE
Oh shabti allotted to me, if I be summoned or if I be detailed to do any work which has to be done in the realm of the dead … you shall detail yourself for me on every occasion of making arable the fields, of flooding the banks or conveying sand from east to west; “Here am I,” you shall say.
—BOOK OF THE DEAD
1.
They’re looking a little parched
after millennia standing side
by side in the crypt, but the limestone
Egyptian couple, inseparable
on their slab, emerge from it as noble
and grand as you could ask of people
thirteen inches tall.
The pleasant, droopy-breasted wife
smiles hospitably in her gown
(the V-necked sheath “a style popular
for the entire 3,000-year
Pharaonic period”).
Her skin is painted paler than his:
a lady kept out of the sun.
Bare-chested in his A-line kilt,
her husband puts his spatulate
best foot forward, so as to stride
into a new life.
Not mummies; more like dummies.
Not idols, yet not merely dolls.
Stocky synecdoches
of the ruling class, they survey
an entourage of figurines
at work providing necessaries
for long days under the reigns
of dynasties still unborn.
To serenade them, here’s a harpist.
A dwarf even in life—
a mascot to amuse the court
whose music must not be cut short.
A potter modeling vessels that seem,
like him, already fired in a kiln.
Six silos of wheat,
imaginary granaries.
A woman of stone grinding grain,
as she would have, on a quern of stone.
A woman winnowing grain in a pan.
Another on her knees, kneading.
A brewer mashing a vat of beer,
a butcher slitting the throat
of a heifer for the hereafter.
2.
What had it felt like, that credence
in the afterlife of art?
To die, as the departed did,
comforted by the guaranteed
incarnation of a statuette;
to feed then on that slaughtered meat?
To take a leap from the stock-still
tyranny of the literal?
To see the miniature, the fiction
as a grow-in-the-dark depiction
of the soon-to-be actual?
3.
Aboveground, thought was evolving.
So many lords and ladies died;
not everyone could be supplied
with a finely sculpted retinue
of laborers to keep them living.
And how were the high ones to keep
so many minions at their task?
The overseer with his whip
became a smiling, bland convention:
one foreman for every ten or so
farmers with a hoe.
It wasn’t only math.
Something unforeseen
was undermining transfiguration—
a canny, efficient faith
that less detail might well stand in
for the stand-in;
a simplicity of encryption.
Hundreds and hundreds of years passed.
Alabaster, faience, wood,
the scale of the factotum totems
dwindled as numbers multiplied;
jostled in the mass graves
of toy-box coffins, they were transported
by a procession of living slaves
a little distance, and slipped
into their niches in the crypt
for the shelf life of eternity.
Thumb-sized effigies wrapped
in bandages of holy script,
the hieroglyphed Book of the Dead.
Words. The nominal vow to work,
not the enactment of work.
The shabti held one stylized tool,
barely identifiable—
and were serene as Christian saints
with their hatchets and wheels, the instruments
of a recurring martyrdom.
In time they grew more mummiform,
cross-armed at the chest
or armless. Finally, curiously, at rest—
like zeros who were something
in being nothing,
place markers of their own
as much as of the master’s soul.
4.
And on the wall of a vault,
an artist has drawn himself—
or a cunning substitute—
at work, shaping a life-sized shabti
designed to be his twin:
a goateed dandy that our mute,
vainglorious ventriloquist
settles on one knee.
Profile to profile, they stare
into the mannered mirror
of one another.
In whatever kingdom this was
(by now, the blink
of one kohl-lined, almond eye),
what did people think was the life span
of the stunt man who betokens man?
The shabti sent to make shabti?
But the question too has shrunk,
eroded to vocabulary—
one fine old potsherd of a word
to be carried from the museum
like any other item
in the museum shop:
a replica necklace, a postcard.
The visitor is illiterate.
What did that stone scroll say,
meant to convert someday
to the thing it represents, papyrus?
Even the scribes couldn’t read.
Something about the god Osiris
who came back from the dead.
She must be going.
Feels for the gloves in her pockets,
empty hands for her hands.
Opens a door to Chicago,
where a fine dust is ticking
coldly onto everything;
where she is still alive, and it’s snowing.
IT’S HARD TO SAY
That’s what you say a hundred times a day.
Yet we keep asking.
(“How was your morning? Did you like the nurse?”)
The worse you get, the louder we keep asking—
as though, if you heard better, you could say.
Two adjectives bob up sometimes, depending.
Good things you call “amazing.”
(“How was the garden? Did you like the birds?”)
Things are either “terrible” or “amazing.”
Nothing is in the middle. It’s the ending,
the drawn-out ending, of your verbal life.
“It’s hard to say,”
you say, as though by thinking you’d remember
your sentence: word by word, still less to say.
This man here is your son. I am his wife,