The quiet of the porcelain
cup in the cupboard.
The one with the chipped lip
that never speaks.
The blue-green stillness
of the robin’s egg
discarded from the nest.
The silence
of the loaded gun.
The silence of stone
differing, quietly, from the silence of iron.
The cello groaning
into the tuned calm
that precedes the song.
Beneath the pines
a single needle falls. It
ticks into the duff.
What about the slender
nothing between the next
two words.
Or the endless inhalation
before the piercing air-horn
scream of the wounded child?
Then there is the silence
of truth unspoken. The muteness
of rust on barbed wire. Or the general quiet
of you
reading this: the silence of the birdbath
waiting for rain.
Unspoken
Given the unspeakable nature of their differences,
they decided to settle their divorce in mime court.
It was a pale imitation of justice, but all in all
we agreed the testimony rang true. Outside,
the shadows of the houses swallowed
the shadows of the pigeons without flinching.
Some things are easier to absorb than others,
said the judge, using white gloves and what
we finally understood to be an invisible rope.
Before that he’d been trapped in a glass box
which most likely represented the transparent
vows they’d first spoken on that rainy June day,
back when we were so concerned with our finery
we missed the nerves wired under the words.
From Chaos
I.
Listen and tinsel wrestled,
and silent inlets were born.
Still water opened before us,
there, off the coast of Bologna.
The hourglass held falling snow
and gentle was the root of genital.
This Latin mispronunciation
stemmed from the ancient decree:
Tenderly touch what is tender,
and often you will feel better.
A fork of geese dragged the sky
with hoarse and rasping wings.
The sound was a lone thing
in the blank and open air.
II.
And suddenly it seemed you wanted to be a part from my collection
and apart from me. I could not tell if you meant this
in an underhanded way, and thus became utterly whelmed.
Calm down, you said. Render seizures unto Caesar.
If only such things were aloud, said the mime offhandedly.
He’d wandered in searching for conclusions,
and his gesture was little more than a white-gloved shiver.
How lovely, you motioned back, with a nearly silent
murmur. Listen. It ends as it begins.
What Might
It all begins with might, the word
and its power, which might make
right unless it’s the muscular sort
and then we’re talking otherwise.
We might begin again, I think,
without losing one another,
given these current arrangements,
given that we’re talking
about possibilities, about mights,
about one poem with two beginnings
and the many dozen doorways
that we don’t walk through each day
opening up a permanent and shadowy
can spend his entire life beside himself,
inhabiting two houses on the same street,
happily eating an orange in one room,
weeping softly to himself in another,
breathing soundly in both places at once,
and of course it is the weeping man
who might be happy, pushed toward it
by Casals coaxing something eternal
from the emptiness of his cello,
while the man eating the orange might
be ticking toward some sort of pain,
carefully separating peel from fruit,
one sweet section after another,
oblivious to what could be happening
to a wife and daughter elsewhere:
a small indignity perhaps, a rudeness,
or maybe something darker. But as it is,
his pleasure multiplies with each
bursting bite, Oranges are miracles,
he thinks, envisioning himself
a contented monk in a sunlit cell
which in the way of cells soon divides
again and again, until he’s imagined
an entire monastery of robed brethren
chanting vespers and stooping in the fields
each one of them wearing a rough garment
and wondering how it came to be
that he found himself so far from home
filling his basket with tender lavender
in the mind of a man he’s never met.
September Picnic
Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
—JOHN LYDON
It was a September picnic
and in the splintered basket
purchased cheap
as trucks and tents were being loaded and packed
the fruit spotty, ready for wasps
but wonderfully fragrant
were pears.
Pears from the open-air market
overripe in a damp brown bag.
The fragile leather of their skin
spiraled from the horn-handled
knife in grandfather’s hands
knotted and working
with the thoughtless
efficiency of six decades
twirling out damp garlands
to drape our fingers.
We were on the train, crossing the St. Lawrence,
heading into the sunburnt fields beyond Montreal.
We were eating pears. Slices lifted wetly from the blade.
The train clacking and the picnic not yet begun and this
is nonetheless all that I can recall. I remember only the pears.
We could draw conclusions about anticipation, or about joy.
Or that possibly only sweetness persists
but this would trouble me all the more because
this memory is not mine. It belongs to Moses Herzog
who in turn owes it to Saul Bellow who wrote him
into life and placed him in a book that I read and never forgot
and now, yes, I remember the pears. I can taste them,
even, after all these years that never passed
between me and that honeyed moment.
Interrogation
What utensil would you use to eat a bowl of rain?
How many policemen does it take to make a candle?
Where is the pelvic bone of a centaur located?
How many policemen does it take in general? Nine?
Doesn’t that strike you as more than enough? What if
one of them is named Wick and the other Tallow?
Could their marriage be called a candle? Does that
complicate the uniform? If one were the front
of the centaur would the hind end dream of goats?
When I mentioned a bowl of rain earlier was it clear
that I meant a bowl constructed solely out of raindrops
and not a conventional bowl holding collected rainwater?
Now when I mention a bowl of rain is it perfectly clear?
Clear as the fallen rain? Rain settled in a puddle th
at holds
pale drowned earthworms because for one fatal moment
they mistook that clear panel of water for a long deep drink
and did not recognize it as the vessel of their demise?
there yet? Will we ever be there? How can we truly know?
What would the earthworm tell us with its pale tiny mouth?
Lions
If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.
—WITTGENSTEIN
the problem would not be those beautiful
teeth or the dark purse
of his mouth muffling consonants
or the complete absence of adjectives
but rather how his tense
always slides through time
loose as a brushstroke
shading every action into now
and there would be the arrival of one word
for blood riding the wind
and another for the shuddering
twitch of the hindquarters that presages the burst
before sudden fangs make meat go slack
also that volatile purr
coughing and guttering
like candle flame in the breeze
as well as the unnerving jokes ending in splinters
of marrow and cracked bone
and the confusion of sixty-two
different words for hunger
each one opening
into the same fearful roar
but only the one
telling silence
for sleep
A Woman Stands in a Field
The scene is so clear it might be a memory.
But no. It is too clear for that. This is something happening right now.
A woman stands in a field near the only stand of trees for a long way
round. She is looking down, scanning the ground. Perhaps she is
searching for acorns.
But she is beyond the tree-shadow, and she has no basket in which to
gather, and besides, upon closer inspection, it turns out the trees are
not even oaks. She parts the grass with her hands, gently, as a mother
might push the hair from her child’s forehead. She steps gingerly
over the rooms and tunnels filled with tiny animals. A wind comes. It
shakes the tree and runs its hand across the field, flattening the grass.
This evening, she will still be here. It will be hard to see the lesser
darkness of her dress bobbing above the greater darkness of the field.
Days from now, when she finds it, we will no longer be watching.
She will draw it gently from the thatch, glinting like a baby snake, a
thin gold chain.
There you are, she will say matter-of-factly. She will examine the
clasp carefully and then refasten the chain around her neck and begin
walking through the fields toward home. It is just as well that we will
no longer be observing the scene. Her faith in the clasp seems almost
perverse, and it would be all you could do not to cry out.
The Crisis
The financier walked into a roomful of women, scantily clad in lacy
underthings. They were all quite heavyset, and their amplitude ap-
pealed to him. He became aroused.
“What is it that you want from us?” they murmured, as he walked
among them. “It seems we were summoned here specifically for you.”
“How do you know this to be the case?” he asked, gently brushing
the hair from one woman’s shoulder.
“Because none of us remember anything other than this room.”
He paused and looked around him. Many of the women appeared to
be just coming awake, blinking lazily on their velvet couches. One
smiled at him and arched her back, stretching. “So you remember
nothing at all?”
“Nothing. It’s as if we were born five minutes ago. Or five hours.
There are no clocks here. All we know is this room, and waiting.”
“For me,” he said.
There was no reply. The women exchanged glances. There was not
one among them that could tell him they had no navels, no scars.
Their bodies were like those of dolls, a smooth pink flatness round-
ing down the belly and around, unbroken.
Elpenor
There was a man, Elpenor, the youngest in our ranks, none too brave in battle, none too sound in mind.
—BOOK 10, THE ODYSSEY
There he is, standing on the granite shingle, watching
a sail recede across the bright water, no larger than a swan.
The shouts that laced his dreams were preparations for departure.
He nuzzled into sleep, forgotten. Useless to raise his voice now,
yet the cries of the gulls cut sharply. He feels the morning breeze
blow through him like a ladder. He does not yet know that he is
dead, having run so hurriedly out of his broken-necked body.
But when he wanders back and sees the spine angled like a
snapped twig, the earth around soaked dark, he turns and runs
toward the glinting water and across the heaving waves, leaving
no tracks on their rolling hills, crying, Wait! I’m here. I’m still here!
Look, Overlook
The wing
of a moth: fine ridges, dusty translucence, powdery
crumbling as it feathers between two
fingers: you
are made of such soft stuff, crumbling
beneath breath;
the dust on your things, your bookshelves and shoes, was once
skin, and your day of long walking is
done, not done
through wet grass, shadows, and
sight: the starling-spangled elm, the hinges of your hand, clouds
sledding on the wind.
III
The Dark Thing
It used to come into the light,
so deeply creased it seemed to be scarred,
bristling with hairs like a baby elephant.
Its hunger was slow and stolid but also
always there, tusks clicking above its steady
jaws as it moved among the trees.
Seeing the limit of its skin lessened it—
the way it lightened into pinkness near the lips
unnerved us. We hurled rocks and broken
concrete, even poked it with sticks
we’d blackened in the fire. When the first blade
cut and drew a startling thread of blood,
it moaned so quietly we backed away.
It sounds like my grandmother in her sleep,
someone whispered. We looked
at one another. The thing was barely
moving. Then the boy who’d spoken
unstrapped the knife from the stick, wiped it
clean on the grass and folded it
shut with a sharp click. That’s enough,
he said. It had been so much
easier than we’d imagined.
This is what we would have said,
if we had spoken of it again.
The Book of _______________
First, there is the consideration of my appearance which even those
who care for me say is troublesome. It is not simply the coarseness
of hair coming from where one does not anticipate hair, but also
things beneath the surface that stretch the skin and hinges that work
differently, so I am both more and less mobile than your kind and though
I’ve learned to walk upright as a man, when I’m alone I scuttle sideways.
I am quite fast. I hope I can say this without boasting. I am told
I appear more liquid than solid when I wend acr
oss a room, feathering
over couches, tables and other obstructions rather than walking round.
Uneven surfaces disturb me no more than trees disturb the wind.
People do not tell me these things in admiration but as explanation
for the fear that glitters in their eyes. I try to speak softly but my voice
breaks like glass. When they found me, I was feeding on venison. A doe,
toppled on the roadside and risen in the afternoon sun. I kept my vigil
until dusk, then scissored slowly up the bank and started in. I was young.
Headlights astonished me. I was docile, easily taken. The whole escapade
leaves me with a feeling of vague shame and chagrin, especially now
that I’ve learned to read and can place the incident on the shelf of context.
I have a window in my room overlooking the garden from which I see
the crowns of trees, and in the evening the sunset gilds the rooftops then
stretches a blanket of shadow across them until darkness eats the world.
They were kind enough to tint the window for me so that I can see
out but no one can see in which might sound like a lonely thing to say
but I understand. I have foresworn using my pincers to sever the cordage
of my meals though knife and fork feel dull as cold toes. Yet the fear
remains in others’ eyes and is there always, so much so that I wonder
if it is not unfounded. I have dreams. Some I am not inclined to share,
but there is one that continues to return and seems innocent enough.
It seems to spring from your world more than mine and I wonder if you
might be willing to interpret its signs. I cannot tell it with words but must
write the dream upon the world with my body. I have been waiting
to do this for a long time. My joints ache to unfurl. You were kind
to listen. Let me offer my dream in return. Open the door. Let me out.
Nuns
Have you heard the one about the nun and the penguin
in the bathtub and the nun drops the soap
and says to the penguin, Do you think you could
fish that out? And the penguin says, What do you think I am,