as if forced to pay taxes.
If there are dream houses,
are there undreamed houses
full of the things we desire,
or only those we deserve?
Perhaps they are the homes
of strange gods with some
incomprehensible, whimsical
way of looking at things.
You said we waded through the mysteries to get here.
Midges in Material Form
A cloud blurs the wicker fence,
a stain where thistles starve the summer air,
the lilac shavings dropping as if burnt
onto the stone. That is the cost of refusal.
The speared wisteria, stiff, Japanese,
holds off the light, uneven in this season—
blunted, familiar, valedictory.
The early artists of wash, of body color,
stole the cold secrets of transparency.
They licked the brush and there, they stuck a tree,
a smudge the eye refused to call a birch.
Painting is still the material form of desire.
Unshaven sixty stares me in the face.
I cannot look at paint and not see death.
The Retention Pond
Thanksgiving’s blanched happiness
come round again, the wood storks
hunch like Troy’s elders along the wall,
uttering not a word of complaint.
In stoic progress they soldier on,
clerkishly planting one foot in the mud,
then another, opening a sheltering wing
as if by noblesse oblige. They eye each other
with respect—or is that suspicion?
The gray waters slick with light,
like a slate countertop, each spindly reed
grazing its mirror-double. And there,
through the breaks, a black boar
snuffles in shadow, like a gorged piggy bank.
All lower nature aspires to the Catholic—
large families and no birth control.
On a rotting post, our local Tiresias,
the lone anhinga, dries outspread wings,
just an advertisement for Barclays.
The old Hohenzollerns, they’d seen it all before.
Venice in Rough Light
Tooth-powder— Magnesia— Macassar Oil— Some Gunpowder from Manton’s
—Lord Byron’s shopping list, 1819
The brute city, perpendicular in cold,
welcomed us back like an old enemy.
The purples slouched behind the terra-cotta,
a thin light stalking limestone parapets,
glinting off capstones, worming the old scars.
Snow pelted down like specks of Styrofoam,
the gutters filling with torn envelopes
or sugar dumped on ruined documents.
Emptiness shivered along the palazzo
shuttered or abandoned, dried lemon flaking the walls.
Upright, as if from Darwin’s illustrations,
the model ghosts walked backward to the sea.
You turned to me then, turned for the first time.
II
In the Dedication Lay the Index
June.
The silent heats,
and those not silent: bird-
cry, the bloated moan of cattle,
the lonely, repetitive wail of the car alarm.
Long Island. Summer. 1968.
after Thomas Jones, Rooftops in Naples
Beneath that chalk-blue sky with iron
stirred through it, the whitewashed windows
burned in faint phosphorescence. That long forgotten
summer, amid the ghostly Long Island yachts,
we entered the waters on that narrow neck
beneath a moon of cracked porcelain.
Our blank lives had almost begun.
War rose behind the shuttered summer, that summer.
We whispered beneath low masses
of anchored boats, stirring through that coldness,
the phosphor radiant along bodies
naked in their nakedness. There in the iced waters,
our glowing outlines almost made us whole.
Mug Shot
Los Angeles
lips parted in the sorrow of seduction,
she has arrowed on thin eyebrows.
Her name, according to the mug shot,
is Ernesteen, though beneath it
someone has penciled Delores.
She might not have chosen to wear this,
her department-store blouse, ruched at the neck,
showing off the sculptural lines of a face
that must have drawn attention
even from strangers.
Perhaps that was the problem.
She looks like a woman caught
somewhere she shouldn’t have been.
It was 1950, after all, and a narcotics bust
was something to think about,
even if you were white, and pretty,
and thought you knew your way around.
Must I mention that she is beautiful,
this Renaissance face caught with a look of surprise
by the flash of the police photographer?
On the Consolations of Faith
The day a steam bath, all life mildewed in incident.
Ahead lay the raw-gated city, at ease
as a retired banker in a chaise longue,
or the murderer who dies unrepentant.
The train took its time, the rural out of date.
Time raked the worm from the soil,
eased the nighthawk from the civic trees.
The reach of yellow field, just out of reach,
promised an abundance that falls from faith,
where hedges break a communion of berry
and dry channels stir the wounded stream
waiting for Advent to come round again.
The Kiss
When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my pistol.
—Stephen Hawking
Moody, jet-haired, she was a whole philosophy—
just another girl, perhaps, but not to me.
When she kissed me roughly on the lips,
as if I’d been staggered by two battleships,
I lay on the cooling sand,
my old life a conjunction—and,
or or, perhaps, or yet. Or but.
I touched my mouth, bleeding from an invisible cut.
And that was all. One kiss by the glaring bay—
sometimes love happens that way.
A few nights later, this local goddess turned
and said carelessly, in a way that burned,
“I’ve never thought of you that way, I guess.”
She touched me then with the ghost of a caress.
Now, when we happen to meet,
a wall of glass rises on the street
or in the bar where we’ve gone for a drink,
she grabbing in her purse, the night again like ink.
Some know who they are by what is missing.
Perhaps there’s a world where we kept kissing,
where we married, had three kids,
and did what decency now forbids.
Nothing terrible happened, no one was swept away,
and our lives continued almost the same way.
The Harbor
The tiresome creak of the harbor—
fishing sloops at anchor, trying their lines,
and the c
restfallen wharf building, clapboards
scoured of their last drip of paint.
The tin sinks, bigger than horse tubs,
groaned with senatorial lobsters
and rude spitting steamers.
Perhaps just the bridge on its last legs,
or piers, rather, shifting over the tidal river
that never changed its mood for the better.
Of a Sunday, when sailboats tilted
toward the river mouth—Cuttyhunk
and Martha’s Vineyard beyond—
someone unseen cranked open the bridge,
using a complicated system of gears
that required an hour of fuss.
The Packards and Fords backed up
along the approach strewn with oyster-shells,
the cars filled with quarrelsome children,
mothers fanning themselves with a sandy catalogue,
and fathers thumbing the cellophane
from a new pack of Lucky Strikes or Camels,
wheeling the smoke out cranked-down windows
as if they had all the time in the world.
“One day, we’ll sail there,” my father said.
Sincerity
All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
—Coleridge, The Table Talk and Omniana
That word again, haunting Coleridge
like a hellhound, rolling like a dislodged boulder.
I mean, crushing all.
There was perhaps sincerity in the kingfisher
perched on the concrete edge
of the artificial pond, the reedy stalks
gray with frost, and distantly the pluck-pluck
of the local woodpecker. There was our furniture,
the sublime that remained slime,
the fluff-headed mergansers cruising still waters,
ever on the make. I saw everything,
I thought. Not the hours longing
for the blunt knife of her gaze. Not the haze
of philosophy, or millefiori, for that. Ah, ah.
Once the “silent majority” meant the dead.
The Storm
“What do you talk your hog-latin to me for?” cried the cripple.
—Melville, The Confidence-Man
Rags of cloud east, in ordinary time,
brought down the chimney and burst the ancient window,
as if an elbow had gone through it.
The orchid sky feathered the gables,
and a last yellow leaf flagged on the evening
breezes. The lateen angle cut the dead housetops,
the shadow fierce and particular, like a wandering Jew.
It was a world of almost nothing, or almost of nothing.
A single star hung on the backdrop like an ornament.
Melville in the Straits
For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then?
—Melville, Moby-Dick
Dawn blazed the snuff-inked cloud, whose solemn glints
hinted at unseen gilt interiors
crackling across the bias of horizon,
the line of bearing the Pequod hammered home.
Home where the garden was blown with oak-shelled snails,
the morbid lilac flushed on pea-black stone,
the shadow world made justice for itself.
A man can lose his faith and still cheat God,
wetting the dried-up brush upon his tongue.
He scans the dead like a physiognomist,
a man-o’-war bird boiled in philosophy—
no hero promised, no chapter ever right
in which brute fate had happened, had to happen.
The ocean was his organized religion.
The Midwife Toad
“You know the old man’s ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it.”
—Melville, Moby-Dick
The maples blush in afterlight
under cold stars that boil the gables and slates.
The midwife toad tries out its telegraph.
Sing to me now, Old Wart, as if you owned
the disconnected alleys of your domain.
Newfangled exile without a proper visa,
who would be king but the discontented soul?
To a Former Beauty
You flared across Boston
like a meteor, blond mane and lowered brow
in every coffeehouse off the Charles.
I could tell your conquests
by their cancerous looks.
You were a Cato among novelists,
breaking a man because you could.
The glazes of the river stood in warning.
Now the wrinkles gather like suitors
along your lips, and there’s a mothy flutter
beneath your left eye. Ah,
and that pressed-dough face, which once,
once, might have launched a thousand
slips of the tongue.
Venice in the Ordinary
“You English intellectuals will be the death of us all.”
—The Man Who Knew Too Much
Off Leg-Break Alley, the white-aproned boy
applied gold leaf to a damaged angel,
wild-haired, staked down
for its beauty treatment. Tourists once more,
we were seeking the workshops of the fallen.
Even our conversations foundered
on the déjà vu of repetition. The spare trees
on the piazza, riffled by hot wind,
loosed the skirts of the Aegean. Wavelets
breached the staccato strokes of Canaletto,
dapper gray mustaches on pea-green swells,
marking the come-and-go of light. Habit
becomes the mother-monster of art.
I felt chilled, as if for a moment
I had seen my own gravestone. It was just
the boy, and the boyish angel carved
a century or two before, needing that renewal
of the skin, the fallen desire.
The Locked Closet
Being clothed we shall not be found naked.
—2 Corinthians
In shadowed ranks, the suitcases huddled,
dozens of them—rusty leather satchels, alligator grips,
Gladstone bags with worn labels of European hotels.
Some of the cases had burst open, exhausted by the wait.
Others had been forced to yield their secrets, disgorging
flowered tea-dresses of some long-forgotten fashion,
collarless shirts in fading antique stripes.
A dozen hats slumped half naked in blown carrying-cases.
And shoes! There lay a rat’s nest of brogues and oxfords,
even a hobnail Abraham Lincoln might have worn!
The abandoned clothes suffered like good servants,
still patient for their masters. It was only an obscure
New England town, but once the Magi
had left their luggage behind, intending to return.
After Eden
Before us lay mud-bestrewn banks,
the flats rutted and torn,
as if cast from molds already broken.
The Lazarus ridges were picked out in pine,
the sun, those silent hours, barely rising
above the eastern mountains.
I had imagined something different,
those days I thought about the future.
You looked older,
the hard lines scoured into your face.
Long afternoons upon the piazza,
we sipped some Venetian variant of coffee,
the richer for being thick with the sediment
of Byzantium. The Arsenale stood empty of keels,
the mazy canals mossy with trash.
We were young then. So there we waited,
having made a small mistake involving the fruit,
or the fruit salad, condemned to the view,
if it could be called a view, of hills bare
as a scalp, nothing upon their nakedness
but some Platonic idea of vacancy.
This is heaven, you said.
Someday you should get a look at hell.
A Garret in Paris
If you leaned over
the peeling window ledge,
one tower of Notre Dame
rose over a rusty bridge.
The puckered Seine labored
down to the storm-tossed coast
while you sat smiling
above the burnt toast.
Each morning your new face
stood modeled in the light,
holding back the feeling
never allowed to ignite.
Darkly underground,
the Métro rumbled on.
You lifted a black eyebrow.
Something there was gone,
and in the air grew
the feathery sound of wings,
like an Annunciation,
among other things.
Moth
Green of old jade, trim as a Tiffany brooch
against the breech of clapboard
in the hard light of noon, the dust moth
was a leftover of the other world—
lost, abandoned, perhaps mislaid,
or found at some inconvenient hour,
like an umbrella after a spring shower.
III
Little Compton
Young Doctor von Trapp
of the singing von Trapps
aimed at my knee with the reflex hammer,
its rubber head a pink triangle of gum.