intently, and almost perfectly,
deep down in the gorge.
SO FAR
All we can say so far
is that we suffer
for nothing.
Not for the self, or
for people at home.
Not for the wisdom.
Not for the love.
Not for the looking
out to the future,
or into the nothing
that goes back so far.
We suffer because
suffering’s there.
We hadn’t been warned
it got here first,
that it drank all the water
before we were born.
Soon enough we’ll join
all the people behind us
who died of thirst
and can tell us nothing
so far.
OLD SAW
The cat is out of the bag,
the horse has left the barn,
the train pulled out of the station,
no bridge is left to burn,
the genie can’t be put
back in the bottle, and
in short, it’s long been time
to take our medicine.
They threw us under the bus.
It feels as if we’re to blame.
Maybe we are: we wonder,
when did we turn obtuse?
How did we lose our charm?
Why do our old saws,
our hats, our radio shows,
so harmless, make them squirm?
And do they think we love
their swearwords and tattoos?
If we could, we’d take a walk.
It’s years since we could drive.
They roll their eyes when we talk.
They’re glad when we go to bed.
Why did we wake today
on the wrong side of the dead?
DRAPERY FOR GOD THE FATHER
for Mark Leithauser
Wherever I turn, he’s already there—
Dürer’s determined follower
who has come, like me, to the museum
to study the masterpieces.
I study him: an old Hells Angel
in damp, unlaundered undershirt
from which pale tufts of armpit hair
sprout, and make him smell
much as Dürer must have smelled.
He’s spellbound by A Tuft of Cowslips
(1526, gouache
on vellum); the blue-gray wash
of Praying Hands; the darkening series
of engraver’s proofs for Adam and Eve.
Thick as the rhinoceros
in that woodcut, he stays put—
I skip a room or I backtrack
and yet he blocks me, having swung
into my lane again, a Wild One
weaving against the traffic.
When he and I were young, I suppose
I could have been the girl behind him
on the Harley, arms around his waist,
not gaping in distaste
at the rear view of his clothes:
armored as one of Dürer’s knights,
his belt is spiked, he’s trailing chains
from the pockets of his jeans,
and sleeving his bare arms, tattoos
by a contemporary artist
were needle-pricked in reds and blues
that blend now on his skin.
When (a miracle) at last
he steps aside, he leaves me standing
alone before a floating study
for an altar triptych, lost
in a palace fire two centuries later.
Disembodied twice, then—since
this is Drapery for God
the Father: a priceless heap
of heavy cloth fit for the shape
that moves within it, though unseen.
White hatching, done not with a pen
but the thinnest paintbrush, brings
forth the weave of light itself.
Dazzling. I look away. And there
he is once more, my heaven-sent
blind date, my odd opponent
in this afternoon’s long scrimmage:
we make eye contact, and agree
wordlessly to share the creator
who made us in his image.
MOON-BREATH
Dark mornings staying dark
longer, another autumn
come, and the body one
day poorer yet,
from restless sleep I wake
early now to note
how the pale disk of moon
caves to its own defeat,
cold as yesterday’s fish
left over in the pan,
or miserly as a sliver
of dried soap in a dish.
Oh for a sparkling froth
of cloud, a little heat
from the sun! I shiver
at the window where I plant
one perfect moon-round breath,
as I liked to do as a girl
against the filthy glass
of the yellow school bus
laboring up the hill,
not thinking what I meant
but passionate, as if
I were kissing my own life.
THE BUTTONHOOK
President Roosevelt, touring Ellis Island
in 1906, watched the people from steerage
line up for their six-second physical.
Might not, he wondered aloud, the ungloved handling
of aliens who were ill infect the healthy?
Yet for years more it was done. I imagine
my grandmother, a girl in that Great Hall’s
polyglot, reverberating vault
more terrible than church, dazed by the stars
and stripes in the vast banner up in front
where the blessed ones had passed through. Then she did too,
to a room like a little chapel, where her mother
might take Communion. A man in a blue cap
and a blue uniform—a doctor? a policeman?
(Papa would have known, but he had sailed
all alone before them and was waiting
now in New York; yet wasn’t this New York?)—
a man in a blue cap reached for her mother.
Without a word (didn’t he speak Italian?)
he stuck one finger into her mother’s eye,
then turned its lid up with a buttonhook,
the long, curved thing for doing up your boots
when buttons were too many or too small.
You couldn’t be American if you were blind
or going to be blind. That much she understood.
She’d go to school, she’d learn to read and write
and teach her parents. The eye man reached to touch
her own face next; she figured she was ready.
She felt big, like that woman in the sea
holding up not a buttonhook but a torch.
LITTLE STAR, 2015
But soon, I’m told, I’ll lose my epaulets altogether
and dwindle into a little star.
—JOSEPH BRODSKY, 1940–1996
Joseph, how is your sense of irony
holding up in Heaven?
Did you know, by chance, that the United States
released in 2011
a postage stamp in which your youthful visage
is price-tagged at Forever?
When did you think they’d do that for you in Russia?
How about Never?
Yet here you are, their little star, depicted
in the city you called Peter;
your troubles have been weighed at seventeen rubles
on the poetry meter.
Pressed like a headstrong schoolboy to the corner
of the envelope,
your image puts me in mind of your doting mother,
who never
lost hope
she’d see you again (although of course she didn’t)
as she stood in line in
the post office, holding a letter to be franked
with the face of Lenin.
A WOMAN’S TALE
In the first scene, I’m eighteen,
with a waist of twenty-four inches.
I’m wearing a sweet blouse
my mother sewed for me.
A businessman in a suit
comes walking down the street,
stops in his tracks, and cries,
“My God, you’re adorable.
I want you to have my babies!”
Then, good-naturedly
shaking his head, not waiting
for any sort of reply—
and what on earth would I say?—
he keeps on ambulating.
A decade later. Another
man has found me winning:
this one impregnates me.
We’d done the romantic thing,
the ring, the honeymoon.
Now, on a scorching day
in July, some guy approaching
on the sidewalk takes me in:
at nine months gone, five-three,
I’m nothing but a belly
waddling along like Falstaff.
He flings his head back to laugh—
a belly laugh, if you will.
That was thirty summers ago,
and it still gives me a chill.
LO SPOSALIZIO
That’s the shorthand for it,
The Marriage of the Virgin
stuffed here in my pocket—
a masterpiece in soft
washable microfiber,
a cloth six inches square
designed to clean the lenses
on fingerprinted glasses
and reproduce the clear
triumph of the rational
(oil on poplar panel)
in the ceremony Raphael
composed for Mary and Joseph.
Their modest heads incline
to harmonize, as if
half-note ovals penned
on a staff made by the patterned
stones in the piazza—
geometries that bend
to a vanishing point beyond
a Romanesque, domed temple
porticoed with arches
along its base, except for
(far off) a rectangular
door that gives on air,
blue hills and air, the future
until it is the past.
Perspective and proportion
are what the bearded priest
is authorized to join
as he guides the husband’s wrist
to place the ring on a destined
finger on her hand.
Yet every head’s its own.
The congregation’s faces
turn against symmetries,
gaze this way or that
or inward, while a number
of background figures whisper
like stands of distant trees.
Even the draperies
(the gold cloak falling from
the bridegroom’s emerald shoulder;
her mantle’s swag of sapphire
wrapping the ruby gown)
assert, for all their mass
and balance, how the fabric
of the moment improvises
and unfolds as it will.
Such, now, is the time in
which you, my new son Simon,
stand in your bow tie;
you, Emily, the child
I swaddled once, are veiled
as only brides may be.
Now may the mystery start.
With nothing to espouse
but hope as old as art,
I clutch the little cloth
in case need should arise
to wipe my naked eyes.
THE HOTEL BELVEDERE
A June day under the Jungfrau.
Near the railway that brought her here,
an old woman sits on a bench.
She isn’t facing the Jungfrau
but the Hotel Belvedere
which has, as its name implies,
a beautiful view of the Jungfrau,
a name for what she had been
when she last saw it, maybe,
on her honeymoon.
She regards the hotel intently,
studies what I assume
were the windows of their room.
Was it hard to come back alone,
hobbling on that cane?
No, not alone: her husband
and daughter (or granddaughter—
surely this couple’s offspring
can’t be very young)
have arrived with ice cream cones,
inverted mountains where snow
is piled on the widest end.
They make the most of that pleasure
before, like a magic trick,
a tripod’s pulled from a backpack.
Steady as you go
is what the granddaughter says
as she pulls the old woman up
and the three of them, like a tripod,
lean to make one shape
that peaks on top, like the Jungfrau.
But the hotel’s the backdrop.
The camera’s timed to snap
at a smile, and another smile;
new pose, and it snaps again.
Even the staring stranger
who has no need to invent
their story is distracted
from the majesty of the Jungfrau,
to yield up little grandeur:
the acts of a granddaughter
who, when she’s old, will tell
of the long journey they took
back to the hotel,
the origin of what mattered
to a few vanished people.
There was ice cream; and a view
of the snowcapped Jungfrau,
which is nowhere pictured.
AN AFGHAN CARPET
Bring me just notice of the numbers dead
On both our parts.
—HENRY V
Centuries of illiterate
women, think of it, making them one by one
on portable looms, knotting the fringes by hand,
delineating along the way
the figured border, the either-or,
between home ground and what’s beyond
the raveled shore;
between us and anonymous
landlocked nomads in their tents.
What is this carpet’s provenance?
Herati pattern. Made in Afghanistan.
Purchased years ago in Bahrain
in a little shop where
the chatty proprietor served tea;
then given to me
by you, my beloved, that scared-as-hell
young man from Indiana, churchy
and virtuous, who got to finish college
before your number was up.
You too would come to sleep in tents;
you dressed and spoke in camouflage,
handpicked for Intelligence.
Clueless, I consult a map
for what hems Afghanistan in.
Turkmenistan, China, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Iran…
the cartographer’s inked
lines in the sand,
named-and-renamed
infringements.
Think of the line
of elephants, as grand as time,
thundering over the Hindu Kush
repeatedly in these octagons
that stand for their giant prints.
Motifs that stomp
the margins like a postmaster’s stamp
over and over, he cannot stop,
on the carpet’s envelope.
Art as target.
Art as grid
where secret combatants are hidden.
Prayer rug whose standard size
is a village square.
What do I know?
Nothing. But I hear it underfoot:
the terrible, low
warble of warplanes.
And sometimes I see five miles high
an enemy, silent, without a face
in uncontested airspace,
dropping ordnance from a leather chair
in (can it be?) Las Vegas.
Move in with me. This is our house.
This will be us:
first, we’ll get to be alive.
And then we’ll have
labor-saving appliances,
megatons of mail-ordered stuff,
an Afghan carpet, a smart TV
larger than good taste might warrant
but face it, our eyes
are no longer what they were.
Let’s sit above this homemade, nomad
carpet woven by women
in black shapes on fields of red.
The spade-shapes look like missiles.
The one-armed shapes like jugs
seem they might put out flames.
Each of us in a leather chair
and primed, with a glass of wine, for tonight’s
mystery set in some English hamlet
where a murder is solved every week,
let’s confess: we can’t
unearth the carpeted names.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors of the journals where these poems appeared, sometimes in slightly different form.
Ambit: “The Surveyors”
The American Scholar: “Aloe,” “Mr. Boyfriend,” “So Far”
The Antioch Review: “Dragnet,” “Tennis in the Snow”
The Common: “Bratislava,” “Here I Am,” “The Hotel Belvedere,” “We’ll Always Have Parents”
The Fiddlehead: “Little Men,” “Moon-Breath,” “A Vanity Table”
The Hopkins Review: “St. Florian with Burning Church”
Little Star: “Little Star, 2015,” “Vierge Ouvrante”
National Archives (www.archives.gov) and poets.org: “The Buttonhook”
Plume: “Advantage Federer,” “A Word from Our Sponsor”
Poetry Northwest: “Lo Sposalizio,” “Old Saw”
Southwest Review: “An Afghan Carpet,” “Today’s Specials”
Women’s Studies Quarterly: “A Woman’s Tale”
The Yale Review: “The Bickers,” “Drapery for God the Father,” “Pastry Level,” “The Profane Piano Tuner,” “Smoking the Dead Sea Scrolls”