and the way my apron always got stained
but I wouldn’t wash it, proud of the mess
for once, making mistakes, sloshing and dripping.
Yes, soup was what I wanted: not news
but the slow courage of the lentil
as it softened, its heart splitting into wings;
not good cop bad cop but the swift metallic smack
of too much thyme administered hastily,
the kind of mistake you never make again.
Bread, too; I wanted the whole thick crusty hump of it
laid out for vivisection (here is my body eat)
and lots of red wine that always feels like it’s greasing my bones
with lava (here is my blood) . . .
and then the bad news came (who ever listens to the good?)
and before I answered, before the questions
and the arched eyebrow of my husband
standing in the doorway could fall into
pity and helplessness, I thought Yes
I’ll make soup tonight, a soup fit for the gods.
Pearl on Wednesdays
“Write a poem about why people die.”
Sunlight streams down on the TV Guide crossword
I fill in, even though I don’t watch much TV,
so don’t know Matlock’s first name or
the number of seasons Studio One has aired.
My feet have chilled in their slipper socks;
I like the not yet thrill of completing small tasks
for a reward, as in: Finish the puzzle before reheating
your coffee, soak your cup before going upstairs.
You call me to the front room to show off the couch:
spray-foamed and scrubbed, it’s white again after years
of lolling heads and popcorn, the bit-by-bit grime
of a family relaxing from . . . well, just living, just life.
We made these environments we cling to—
unlike the lion who accepts the zebra as meat,
or the zebra who understands he’s meat
just as much or as little as he understands
the grasses he hides in or the sky’s sickening lurch
when death comes. Does he fear it? You betcha.
Maybe he thinks about death all the time, too,
but I doubt it. We’re the species wired for that,
and our only comfort’s the world we’ve built
to fuss over, the props and affections
we mourn all the time we have them, practicing.
Biology is the why, Pearl. That’s the easy one.
The Terror and the Pity
as in: cold pain, shitty pain,
a shock, a shirring, a ripple.
sharp, of course. more variously:
crisp or piercing, clean or fuzzy.
a whisper. a tickle cresting, then
settling down. (good.) the reliable dull roar.
sheered through. a cold punch followed
by radiating calm . . .
can it be sour? yes. salty?
perhaps; bitter, definitely;
and sweet, sweet is the worst,
a deep pure blue of an ache,
a throb caught in its own throat
trying to explain—
as in: numbing, searing, penetrating, sudden.
as in blotto. lord-have-mercy. why. please.
No Color
No dream of the ancients.
No gray, even; it’s all
black or white, absence or presence
of pigment, of light . . . no matter:
They’re not here, what or whoever
“they” are—the horizon’s blank,
the sky a vacuum opaque
as only a vacuum can be,
decanting its endless suction.
Five p.m. I never thought
I’d find relief
in the old joke that it’s always darkest
before it goes pitch black,
but at least then
it will be dark and then
thank god, black.
Blues, Straight
I ache. I ache. It’s not so odd,
no rarity to find a body
going through the daily give
and take, the clarity of
blues. No reason for it:
I just find myself on pause—
paused for longer than is
proper. If I were more
seasoned, I’d ignore it.
The laws of coexistence
call for movement—through
a week, a day, a rescued instant.
One minute I’m up and running,
and then I’m not.
I smile. I nod. I practically beam.
The cup of plenty runneth
over, ruins my hands—
I’ve scrubbed them, but
they won’t come clean.
Strange, I know, to wish
for nothing. A day
to live through. A scream.
Borderline Mambo
As if the lid stayed put on the marmalade.
As if you could get the last sip of champagne
out of the bottom of the fluted glass.
As if we weren’t all dying, as if we all weren’t
going to die some time, as if we knew for certain
when, or how. As if the baseball scores made sense
to the toddler. As if the dance steps mattered, or there’s a point
where they don’t. For instance wheelchair. Heart flutter.
Oxygen bottle mounted on the octogenarian’s back
at the state ballroom competition—that’s Manny,
still pumping the mambo with his delicious slip
of an instructor, hip hip hooray. Mambo, for instance,
if done right, gives you a chance to rest: one beat in four.
One chance in four, one chance in ten, a hundred, as if
we could understand what that means. Hooray. Keep
pumping. As if you could keep the lid on a secret
once the symptoms start to make sense. A second
instance, a respite. A third. Always that hope.
If we could just scrape that last little bit
out, if only it wouldn’t bottom out
before they can decode the message
sent to the cells. Of course it matters when, even though
(because?) we live in mystery. For instance
Beauty. Love. Honor. As if we didn’t like
secrets. Point where it hurts. Of course we’ll tell.
Voiceover
Impossible to keep a landscape in your head.
Try it: All you’ll get is pieces—the sun
emerging from behind the mountain ridge,
smoke coming off the ice on a thawing lake.
It’s as if our heads can’t contain
anything that vast: It just leaks out.
You can be inside a house and still feel
the rooms you’re not in—kitchen below
and attic above, bedroom down the hall—
but you can’t hold onto the sensation
of being both inside the walls
and outside looking at them
at the same time.
Where do we go with that?
Where does that lead us?
There are spaces for living
and spaces for forgetting.
Sometimes they’re the same.
We walk back and forth without a twitch,
popping a beer, gabbing on the phone,
with only the occasional stubbed toe.
The keyhole sees nothing.
Has it always been blind?
It’s like a dream where a voice whispers
Open your mouth and you do,
but it’s not your mouth anymore
because now you’re all throat,
a tunnel skewered by air.
So you rewind; and this time
when you open wide, you’re standing
outside your skin, looking down
at the damage, leaning in close . . .
about to dive back into your body—
and then you wake up.
Someone once said: There are no answers,
just interesting questions.
(Which way down? asked the dove,
dropping the olive branch.)
If you think about it,
everything’s inside something else;
everything’s an envelope
inside a package in a case—
and pain knows a way into every crevice.
Rosary
I.
1 tablet 1 drop
1 tablet 1 drop
1 g 1 ml
Apply Inject
0.5 tablet 1 tablet
1.5 tablets
1 tablet 1 drop
1 tablet 1 drop
Use as directed
II.
Take Use Place Inject
Place Place Take Take
Apply Place Apply Take
Place Place Take Take
III.
By mouth. Into both eyes. As directed.
Into the skin. On light spots.
Vaginally. Topically.
Both eyes
By mouth
By mouth
IV.
2 times a day. 3 times. Every 6 hours.
On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Daily.
Nightly.
With breakfast.
Daily for six weeks, take weekends off.
2 times daily for 3 days. For 10 days.
2 times daily. Every day.
As needed.
Green Koan
That the mind can go
wherever it wishes
is a kindness
we’ve come to rely on;
that it returns
unbidden to the soul
it could not banish
and learns to thrive there
is life’s stubborn mercy—given
to soften or harden us,
as we choose.
Last Words
I don’t want to die in a poem
the words burning in eulogy
the sun howling why
the moon sighing why not
I don’t want to die in bed
which is a poem gone wrong
a world turned in on itself
a floating navel of dreams
I won’t meet death in a field
like a dot punctuating a page
it’s too vast yet too tiny
everyone will say it’s a bit cinematic
I don’t want to pass away in your arms
those gentle parentheses
nor expire outside of their swoon
self propelled determined shouting
let the end come
as the best parts of living have come
unsought & undeserved
inconvenient
now that’s a good death
what nonsense you say
that’s not even worth
writing down
This Is the Poem I Did Not Write
while sorting mail, responding to posts.
Chasing a dream I can’t quite remember,
remembering things I never dreamed
could happen. Putting on rice, the laundry,
all the times it was time for pills or injections,
mounting the elliptical: stairs up, stairs down.
One martini late in the day. Writing other poems—
less impatient ones, better behaved.
Rive d’Urale
Cedar Waxwing
I am not a poem, not
a song, unsuspecting.
I am not a river, exactly.
I am not a stunned head on the wall . . .
Pleasure arrives on wings of glass
and I pay with my red bead.
The Study
in the luminous wood the gay sparrow
in the middle of the afternoon a white room
too much paradise
I do not want to go out
I do not wish to stay in
shining grove
green sparrow
the face a dream before it reaches the mirror
One in the Palm
The bird?
The bird was
brown, not golden,
smoothed feathers in no wind.
Stilled, not still.
Stilled at the end of the seeing.
A brown ordinariness.
A cup of coffee.
Dying occurs
elsewhere, more quickly
than we in a lifetime
No angels.
A cup of coffee
and a bead of red:
perfect coherence.
The March of Progress
The wall went up sleekly,
no hillside.
The wall went up like a bullet,
magnificent.
The wall was recognized officially
for its achievement, the wall
slithered towards heaven on a glycerin pulley,
efficient silicone.
The wall would be so kind as to let in
Light.
Fingertip Thoughts
Sehr geehrte Zuschauer, do not believe
what you see before you: The very eyeball can deceive.
Somewhere in the picture
there is a bird, but not where
you’d have it. Also
a banner, presupposing a breeze.
Red-tipped birds from wet branches
singing, skimming the available light
into a cup. Snatch up for an instant
the dark shawl . . .
What is the spirit?
The age’s slow exhalation.
What bird is that singing
beyond my window,
small skull grinning through the leaves?
Assassinated Storylines
It begins with a bird who has something
to offer—a plump one, maligned,
whose plumage has grown sooty
along the beggar’s path to the city.
Talon-clutch, blue bone ring:
a scrap of color—go on,
take it, pluck it away! There.
Patience: The song is rising.
Rive d’Urale
that which is cut out
that which is ravaged
that which has opened itself before the rippling blade
that which loiters
that which roves town to town
abundant
loosening
that which burrows
that which unlocks stone
waters rising
birds circling
too many cracks to think about along this spine
each step
a bead
Mercy
An absolute sound,
this soughing above
the tops of trees.
For the longest while
I couldn’t look up, so much
did I long to see ocean,
rough and whitened.
Such soft ululations,
such a drumroll of feathers!
Yet it was no other weather
than Wind. I looked up; the sky
lay blue as always, Biblical
and terrifying, just where
it was supposed to be.
Wayfarer’s Night Song
Above the mountaintops
all is still.
Among the treetops
you can feel
barely a breath—
birds in the forest, stripped of song.
Just wait: before long
you, too, shall rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1776
Notes
Time’s Arrow
“Bellrin
ger”: Henry Martin was born into slavery at Monticello outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, on the day Thomas Jefferson died—July 4, 1826. He rang the Rotunda bell at Jefferson’s University (the University of Virginia) for over fifty years.
“From the Sidelines”: A Golden Shovel inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood” [11: my own sweet good]. The end words are taken from the line “You kiss all the great-lipped girls that you can.”
“Found Sonnet: The Wig”: All terms were taken from catalog and display descriptions of actual wigs.
“A·wing´”: The epigraph is from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier.
After Egypt
In 1516, the Jews of Venice had to move to a section of the principality known as the Ghetto—the first use of this word for segregated, and subpar, living quarters. In preparation for the 500th anniversary of this event, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Beit Venezia invited a number of artists, writers and intellectuals to reflect on the evolution of the word “ghetto” and its connotations and symbolism. Thanks to this project, called “Reimagining the Ghetto of Venice,” and its director Shaul Bassi, I spent a month in La Serenissima, overlooking the Canale Grande from a magnificent apartment in the Palazzo Malipiero, the very building where a young Giacomo Casanova began solidifying his scandalous reputation.
“Foundry”: Ghetto is a derivation of ghet, Venetian dialect for foundry, and refers to the island where foundry slag was dumped before the Jews were forced to move there.
Although just fourteen of her poems have survived (plus two letters and a manifesto), we know that Sarra Copia Sullam (1592–1641) played a pivotal role in the intellectual and cultural life of Jewish Venice. As a patron of the arts, she ran a literary salon and maintained lively correspondences with writers beyond her enclave, Jewish and Christian alike.
“Sarra’s Answer”: In response to Gabriele Zinano’s sonnet “To a Jewess Called Signora Sarra Copia Who Loved the Virtues of Signor Anselmo Ceba Though He Is Dead”—in which Zinano praises her Christian mentor and exhorts her to convert to Christianity—Sarra composed her own sonnet, using his end words. I have attempted the same in English.