Florida Fauna
1.
Silently, the green
long-tailed lizard glides across
our floor like a queen.
2.
Who was first to spear
toothpicks through melon balls and
diced alligator?
3.
Ice cubes in a glass:
outside, the chilling shake of
rattlesnake through grass.
Discovery
6:48 a.m., and leaden
little jokes about what heroes
we are for getting up at this hour.
Quiet. The surf and sandpipers running.
T minus ten and counting, the sun
mounting over Canaveral
a swollen coral, a color
bright as camera lights. We’re blind-
sided by a flash:
shot from the unseen
launching pad, and so from nowhere,
a flame-tipped arrow—no, an airborne
pen on fire, its ink a plume
of smoke which, even while zooming
upward, stays as oddly solid
as the braided tail of a tornado,
and lingers there as lightning would
if it could steal its own thunder.
—Which, when it rumbles in, leaves
under or within it a million
firecrackers going off, a thrill
of distant pops and rips in delayed
reaction, hitting the beach in fading
waves as the last glint of shuttle
receives our hands’ eye-shade salute:
the giant point of all the fuss soon
smaller than a star.
Only now does a steady, low
sputter above us, a lawn mower
cutting a corner of the sky,
grow audible. Look, it’s a biplane!—
some pilot’s long-planned, funny tribute
to wonder’s always-dated orbit
and the itch of afterthought. I swat
my ankle, bitten by a sand gnat:
what the locals call no-see-’ums.
Double Takes
THE DEBUTANTE
Heads turn: in the taffeta rustle
of leaves, clutching a dance-card
acorn under her chin,
a high-society squirrel
curls her tail like a bustle.
NORWOTTUCK
The leftward-peaking curve
of the mountain just behind
our house puts me in mind
of a huge, arrested wave
engraved upon the sky’s
absorbent paper … wait,
that thought
was Hokusai’s.
Shadow
The name of my neighbors’ black Lab is Shadow.
He stands on the deck in back of their house
like a figurehead fixed on the wrong direction.
The house—across the street, at the corner—
I view from one side, as I do the dog.
Shadow faces astern while the prow
leans into the morning sun.
Whenever I wake, my first sight is Shadow
already at military attention.
His profile’s imperial, nearly Egyptian.
Turning in bed, I stare out the window,
unaware of my room, as if the glass
were my eyes, and what I see out of it
is freighted as a dream.
But no, this is the day’s first emblem
of the real, because it is real: a black
dog that doesn’t know I’m looking
as he looks out over the back yard thinking
at whatever level he’s thinking,
while I lie in silence, starting to grasp
whatever it is I feel.
There’s something cheering about him, something
comic in his erect, respectful
salute to the day; and a call to sadness—
though I resist this, not wishing to greet
my own life with less gratitude
than a dog chained to a post. What is it
that lends the whole neighborhood the flat,
deluded air of a stage set—like
a backdrop whose painted simplicity
of House and Tree only seals the fate
of the characters in the tragedy?
Besides, what’s the tragedy? I’m all right,
and so, I think, is Nancy,
who now steps out to the deck in her robe,
unhooks Shadow’s leash. He follows her in.
I know what will happen next: she’ll emerge
briskly in work clothes, and back the car out
past the woodpile, the trash cans, the basketball hoop,
her late summer garden; I’ll watch her turn up
the street to disappear
on the hilltop, seeming to tumble off it.
No tragedy. She’ll be back at three.
Yet the thought was there just a moment ago,
barely within the range of my senses:
an equal consciousness
of how little I understand that the life
one has is one’s only life
and how well I understand it; and how
most of the time one functions better
forgetting. Do I want to function?
It’s humbling to think that human ears
are duller than dogs’. I rise and dress,
and for better or worse the darkness curls
behind me, like a tail.
Peonies
Heart-transplants my friend handed me:
four of her own peony bushes
in their fall disguise, the arteries
of truncated, dead wood protruding
from clumps of soil fine-veined with worms.
“Better get them in before the frost.”
And so I did, forgetting them
until their June explosion when
it seemed at once they’d fallen in love,
had grown two dozen pink hearts each.
Extravagance, exaggeration,
each one a girl on her first date,
excess perfume, her dress too ruffled,
the words he spoke to her too sweet—
but he was young; he meant it all.
And when they could not bear the pretty
weight of so much heart, I snipped
their dew-sopped blooms; stuffed them in vases
in every room like tissue-boxes
already teary with self-pity.
On the Wing
You fly to my table with unbuttoned sleeves.
You look like an angel with unbuttoned sleeves.
Where have you been? Did you run from a fire?
Here, share my meal with unbuttoned sleeves.
Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff’s in my coffee.
You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.
Don’t say it yet. That’s not what you mean.
I know you too well with unbuttoned sleeves.
How many years since I first loved your face?
You could have set sail with unbuttoned sleeves.
Clothes make the man. Our bed’s still unmade.
Please pay the bill with unbuttoned sleeves.
Unbutton me back to our first nakedness:
I have no name at all with unbuttoned sleeves.
Crystal Ball
“Here’s a story for you,” he said. He slid the paper
off his chopsticks and snapped them, making two from one.
Then folded a red accordion from the wrapper,
pressed it between his fingers, let it spring
and slide across the table like a snake.
There were red snakes on our placemats too, and dragons,
monkeys and rats. “This story that I see
before me”—and he studied the zodiac’s
combination plate of animals—
“occurs, how perfect, in the Year of the Horse.
In ’54. Did you know the Japanese,
maybe the Chinese too, think it’s unlucky
to be born in one of them if you’re a girl?”
“I was born in ’54.”
“Right, I forgot!
But that’s perfect too. Everything fits today.
I just took Val for her final sonogram.
Next comes the birth. I’d never seen her move—
my daughter. Today I saw my daughter swim
inside Val, fuzzily, for the first time.
We’re used to seeing anything on TV,
so for a second that seemed almost normal.”
“1999. Is this a Year of the Horse?
Is that what you’re trying to say? I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Of course she is.” He studied the mat again.
“We ride to the millennium on the back
of the Rabbit—see? Fertility!—and then
the Dragon’s waiting for us at the gates
of the year 2000. That number sounded
impossible, didn’t it, when we were kids?
Amazing that it’s matched up with the only
chimera for any year, the Dragon …”
“So come on. What’s the story, anyway?”
He sighed, took a gulp of tea; then sat up straight.
“I don’t—I can’t describe it. Last night, Val
and my father and I watched a video
from 1954. Or just a clip
from a home movie, made by a family friend
who’d had it saved on video. A surprise
for my mother’s younger child, age 46.
It was the only record of my mother,
moving and breathing, that I’ve ever seen.
My mother who died when I was two, whose death
has haunted me more than anything—”
“I know—”
“because I can’t remember her. There she was.
Sick, on her last vacation, in Venezuela—
you like the exotic touch? It was as if
she was destined always to be worlds away—
and standing at the counter of some store,
trying out perfumes. You can see her lift
a bottle up, to study it like a doctor
checking an IV. No, she was happy.
She lifts the bottle, you can see her smile,
laugh, even, and say to Dad, It’s beautiful—
I mean you can read her lips. Of course, no sound.”
He raised his chopsticks, like a magic wand.
“What I would give to hear her! I must have played
those few seconds back a dozen times, as if
the next time, anytime, I’d hear her voice.
As if, I swear to God, I’d learn to crawl
inside that crystal bottle of perfume
like a little genie. As if in the end
I’d smell what my mother smelled.
“Imagine,” he went on,
“your mother says just one thing in your life,
and what she says is, It’s beautiful. You see?
But there was more. This morning I understood
how lucky I was. First I saw my mother move,
half a century after it couldn’t happen.
And then my daughter. I got to see her move—
the child you know I feared I’d never have
because I married late—and in a way
I saw her outside her lifespan, like my mother.
And all within the space of twenty-four hours.
On two TV screens! Nothing more banal.
I’d looked in my past and future crystal ball.”
Our soup had come. Meanwhile, unwatched, the screen-
saver of the laptop I’d left on
at home was open, a window onto icons
of windows flying forward endlessly
like long-dead stars still seeking by their light
and at the speed of light a match in words.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Is it too neat
to write about? Would anyone believe it?”
“Probably not,” I said, dipping a spoon
into the cosmos of my egg-drop soup,
and inhaling, as I leaned down, the aroma
of the moment’s vapor. “Still. It’s beautiful.”
After September
Evening, four weeks later.
The next jet from the nearby Air Force base
repeats its shuddering exercise
closer and closer overhead.
A full moon lifts again in the fragile sky,
with every minute taking on
more light from the grounded sun, until
it’s bright enough to read the reported
facts of this morning’s paper by—
finally, a moon that glows
so brilliantly it might persuade us
that out there somebody knows.
A comfort once—the omniscience
of Mother, Father, TV, moon.
Later, in the long afternoon
of adolescence, I lay on the grass
and philosophized with a friend:
would we choose to learn our death date
(some eighty years from now, of course)?
Did it exist yet? And if so,
did we believe in fate?
(What we thought: to the growing
narcissist, that was the thing to know.)
Above our heads, the clouds kept drifting,
uncountable, unrecountable,
like a dreamer’s game of chess
in which, it seemed, one hand alone
moved all the pieces, all of them white,
and in the hand they changed
liquidly and at once into
shapes we almost—no,
we couldn’t name.
But if there were one force
greater than we, had I ever really
doubted that he or she
or it would be literate?
Would see into the world’s own heart?
To know all is to forgive all—
(now, where had I read that?).
Evil would be the opposite, yes?—
scattershot and obtuse:
what hates you, what you hate
hidden in cockpits, caves, motel rooms;
too many of them to love
or, anyway, too late.
By now I’ve raided thousands
of stories in the paper for
thinkable categories:
unlettered schoolboys with one Book
learned by heresy and hearsay;
girls never sent to school;
men’s eyes fixed on the cause;
living women draped in shrouds,
eyes behind prison-grilles of gauze.
Mine, behind reading glasses
(updated yearly, to lend no greater
clarity than the illusion
that one can stay in place),
look up and guess what the moon
means by its blurred expression.
Something to do with grief
that grief now seems old-fashioned—
a gesture that the past
gave the past for being lost—
and that the future is newly lost
to an unfocused dread
of what may never happen
and nobody can stop.
Not tired yet, wound-up, almost
too glad to be alive—as if
this too were dangerous—
I imagine the synchronized operations
across the neighborhood:
putting the children to bed;
laying out clean clothes;
checking that the clock radio
is set for six o’clock tomorrow,
to alarm ourselves with news.
An Open B
ook
for Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001)
I saw your father make a book,
instinctively, from upturned palms;
as prayers began
in a language I don’t understand,
I saw he didn’t need to look.
Your brother, sisters, others read
from lines in their own empty hands
that you were dead,
or so it seemed to one who had
nothing by heart yet but the snow.
For days now, I’ve kept seeing how
the volume of your coffin sank
into the sole
dark place in all that whiteness—like
your newest book of poems, blank
to you in your last weeks because
a tumor in your brain had blurred
more than your eyes;
prompting your memory, a friend
had helped you tape it word by word.
After, at your brother’s house,
I asked your father: “What does it mean
when you pray with open
hands? Are they a kind of Koran?”
He smiled, and said I was mistaken:
he’d cupped hands to receive God’s blessings.
Nothing about the Book at all;
but since I’d asked,
here was the finest English version
(plucked up from the coffee table—
tattered cover, thick but small
as a deck of cards), translated by
an unbeliever,
a scholar who’d found consolation
in it when he lost his son.
That was the closest the old man
would come to telling me how he feels.
I think of him
when in my head a tape unreels
again your coffin’s agonized
slow-motion lowering upon
four straps, incongruously green;
and then that snap—
like Allah’s blessings falling through