benighted chalk-cliffed coasts,
or empty bejeweled lakes.
That steamy summer vision,
bleached in indolence,
admits a single intruder
perched on a wire fence.
Its drenched Tyrrhenian purples,
spit-shined tawny browns,
sharpened glints of silver
trouble the pockmarked downs
that barred the armored legions
breasting the swampy marches
until the border succumbed
to a study of Roman arches.
So civilization was dragged
out of the sunburnt south—
the pin-straight road, lead plumbing,
a bird fit for Caesar’s mouth,
and, after the fall of Rome,
belonging in their way
to a place they had once invaded,
the invaders managed to stay.
Dürer’s Stag Beetle
Pincers erupt from its skull case,
two Damascene blades
sharpened for some Crusader,
its armor plate enameled in black and brown,
an à la mode tailored jacket
just racked by Prada,
though the belly resembles
a computer mouse. Its legs, the spindly legs
of the Paris dancing master,
end in Rorschach blots
or sad India-ink beads,
like broken necklaces of Tahitian pearls.
Ink spot, you are part of your sums,
lowly Ding an sich
in that rude philosophy
available only to creatures that crawl.
Not even the most patient bride
would hold such a pose
for more than five hundred years.
Still, who complains about success in design?
O beetle, ever now the hard-
headed bachelor
of the grass-lot realm, never
to know the comforts and solicitations
of the holy marital state
or the afterlife
promised to those who worship
the trinity of abdomen, thorax, head,
bless our belated nuptials,
delayed past the date
when wisdom could bow to love
or grace in its grave time, then turn back to stone.
Then, in the Trumpetings
How necessary, meanwhile,
the season of sun-spoilt skies, the rinse
of confirming clouds, even when death
awaits, the next day, the next.
Venice in the Old Days
i
Mist rose from nothing, from the spent idea.
Venice—the last Weberian fantasy,
San Marco isolate, a pawned-off jewel
amid the lowering century’s broken lights.
The case was handsome, but the jewel fake.
Women in towering costumes swarmed the noons,
as if our period were an exclamation.
Love is the archive of ordinary time.
Thirty years on, what nags at memory?
Confectioner’s snow spilled on ruined cloisters,
a greasy film of water lagging the flagstones
under the dove-gray skies of Italy.
The Roman holidays were not meant for us—
perhaps, in a way, they were not meant at all.
ii
The sunset scraped the gilt dome like a match.
Nothing had lost the kink of purity.
Scrabbling through the beach sand of Murano,
you hauled up dribbling rubies, amethysts.
We stalked reflections of the Risorgimento
through pea-soup mudflats of the drained canal.
The Catholic idea was genocide:
kill everyone—let God sort out the rest.
The phosphorescence on the churches blazed—
no, just limelights touching the numinous.
Two tourists, we lingered nightward, homeward, past
palazzos peeling from their ocher skins.
The vaporetto rocked in acid fog—
what looked like brass to us might have been gold.
The Venetian Dog
Morning drew a damask curtain
across the lagoon. A sketch
would have offered more of the scene,
those hours in Venice, when the powder
tore off the Dolomites, a whitish haze
blinding the edges of the paper.
Weren’t we, too, drawn as if
with blunt pencil into the empty margins,
soon to be rubbed clean
with bread crumbs? We stood in the museum
off the Piazza San Marco,
corn snow whipping the glass
as you traced the scribble of a dog,
done two or three centuries past
in a moment of inattention
while the artist sat at coffee
and watched the crowd pass
along the piazzetta—the scrawl
no doubt forgotten,
perhaps consigned to household trash
used by a scullery maid to light the kitchen fire.
Perhaps even the artist himself did not think
the ragged beast worth preserving,
though obviously someone had.
Winter Before Winter
At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business.
—Melville, The Confidence-Man
The sky not uniform gray, but a splendor
of chalky washes, some Prussian blue,
smutty or smoky, where stray dots of starlings
whip past like loose punctuation—
the afternoon falters, as afternoons will,
this season of late gestures,
the hardness before true winter.
Botticelli showed the same futility of the beautiful,
caught, held, the merest
stay against the inevitable, the way the first
locust seems a mistake, but soon—
in that way age runs through its petty defeats—
the mobs clatter in the grain bin.
There is that last pleasure, disease.
Winter in Cloud
Canaletto, Old Walton Bridge over the Thames
Bean-shaped clouds steal winter’s laziness,
the sketch of trees, bare rocks, pale ground below
mare’s tails, feathers, the woolen lumps insolvent
and brutish on the swirl of January.
I studied their climbing orders—
only in underpaint could they be stilled.
No wonder I loved the artist’s frozen studies,
hovering air on which the smudged and harnessed sky
took shape like a dream of smoke, or soot
spooled into drains. In Canaletto’s travels,
he found the light of God, the English fire
in cannonading peace dropped
onto a matchstick bridge sawn from ivory.
Beneath the blank sky standing in afterglow,
that heaven would be savior of us all.
On Hair as a Revolutionary Mode of Dress
Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops
But all to a man wore Republican crops.
—English song of 1794
Our very looks are deciphered into disaffection, and we cannot move without treading on some political spring-gun.
—Coleridge
And so the powder was perforce abandoned
for hair au naturel, the gallows look
serving a man as his revealing dress,
the bare neck not necked to the wooden yoke,
though stout informers lingered in doorways,
took ear in every inn, stole a man’s letters,
bribed the dull maid who flowered in his kitchen
or the clown who spaded up his dying crop.
Only the fop, the Crown’s man, the MP
could pay the guinea tax that Pitt required
on powder, become a Guinea Pig, which made
fashion, for once, the badge of loyalty.
A poor man wore his treasons in his hair.
The barber took confession in his shears.
The War
We were the last, the very last, to know.
It was a day like any other day.
Soldiers arrived to take the Jews away.
I saw the neighbor girl with her portmanteau.
What is that thing that people think we owe?
We witnessed scenes more brutal than Doré—
we suffered, too, and sank to our knees to pray.
Someone was first, but we were the last to know.
A Cloudy Sunset in East Anglia
A few glints subtracted the glassine skin
of the crooked pond, like a hand mirror set
on vacant lawns without regret
and so eternally feminine,
the shafts of antique light
not so much the fallen columns of Tyre
but a completeness cast into fire.
We saw that ash could still ignite.
They burned through the plane tree’s dowdy dress,
the ordinary days, lively with nothingness.
Night World
The barbed-wire vines
knot the azaleas
in the DMZ
of the border yard.
Everywhere I find
the sign of signs:
the abandoned wreck
of a cardinal’s nest,
over-mortgaged,
or underwater;
the snout divots
of armadillos,
shy, unregistered aliens.
The world’s another
world at night,
where the dream-scatter
of day lunks about,
preparing, preparing
for nothing at all.
The Troubles
When the householder answered the tentative knock,
he found this scrawny wild-eye of a youth on the step,
ski mask in hand. The boy was dripping—
bangs plastered down, clothes soaked in gasoline,
reeking of the stuff—asking, “Would you be having
a match there, mate? I have need of it.”
When the old man shook his head,
the boy said, “Aye. Ta, then.”
He turned down the walk, a stream pooling in his footsteps.
The teller added, “That boy was a bard, d’you see?
That boy was poetry himself.”
On Reading That the Ozone Is in Danger from Air Conditioning and Amphibious Life from Shampoo
We, in the day when Earth was burning,
The hour the oceans turned blood red,
Ignored the obvious signs of warning
And took our comforts and are dead.
Head and Shoulders held the sky suspended;
To Frigidaire we preferred to pray;
What God abandoned, Walmart defended,
And lost the world the American way.
There Was
Ohanessian’s world-history class,
that grotto of tact
where a millennium of war, disease,
and natural disaster had been shrunk
to the odd fact I could plunder
for exams then murderously forget—
the Tennis Court Oath, Teapot Dome,
Charlemagne, the Diet of Worms,
the Know-Nothings, Aethelred the Unready,
most now by grace forgotten,
until this afternoon’s dust-mote-driven air
recalled the Piranesi figure
of the tenth-grade classroom projector
and that washed-out ratchety clip
filmed on the steppes during the Revolution.
A sepia line of men, raggedly dressed,
only their black fleece hats
identifying them as Cossacks,
scruffy, half-starved, shuffled their feet
and, almost as one, leapt back
into a trench we could not see.
Then a second line, a third,
nothing altered but the faces
of bewildered half-boys smiling shyly,
seemingly almost flattered that this act,
their last, was being recorded.
One waggled his fingers in a modest wave.
The hand-cranked camera, the acrobatic
jumps worthy of Keaton, the crack
of bullets in silence: no wonder the clutch
of fifteen-year-olds, in that AP class
of suburban young starters, burst
into raucous laughter.
Lt. Selkirk on the Weymouth
off the coast of Africa
They were not hard to tame, the feral goats.
I doubt all London is much larger—
and soon the goats and I grew used to our lot.
I had my favorites, or a string of favorites,
because of course the beasts would die,
or break a foreleg, or grow ill-tempered;
and there is nothing like a goat for temper.
But then the kids were so entertaining.
Mary was my darling, dearest Mary.
I would tease her with a parsnip,
or what I named a parsnip—
I’m still not sure what the warty thing was called.
Many was the evening I took her by the fire,
when I had combed for driftwood,
some splinter of spar washed up or, once, two hatches
I used to floor my “house” until the air grew chill.
Mary was my wife those two long years!
She started to cough one afternoon,
and by dawn she was dead.
Oh, how I mourned! I cut my arms
with my dull knife. I cut and cut and let them bleed.
At first I had been neat as a little maid,
for what is a man when he cannot mind himself?
For my business, I squatted behind a mottled dune,
which I called the Dune of Sorrows;
but it’s so hard to keep yourself beyond six months—
to keep yourself, I mean, with no one about
to appreciate the daily despair it takes,
not even my precious Mary, whose habits
were slatternly as some Bridewell wench.
I would find her turds in my bed, like love tokens.
I lamed her so she could not stray,
though I was not her only husband, I knew.
Later I lived with Mary’s daughter for a time.
She was silky and affectionate,
but I felt a brute. Who could have known
that a grieving man who shat where he stood
would have some compunction
about incest with his goats? And yet I did.
I restored my harem after that. I refused
to take a single wife again, for what use
is the Protestant’s marriage when his God
can murder the beloved out of whim?
The goat is a most forgiving Christian—
if you slaughter his mate, if you butcher her
within his sight and roast her over a blazing fire,
why, the next dawn he forgives you!
And yet I felt ashamed. And yet I ate.
I was lord of the cotton tree and palm.
The goats owed fealty to me,
for was I not Alexander the First, Alexander the Good?
Had I not conquered those lands within a week,
and did I not hold the sacred crown,
carved of pimento wood?
A sailor is but a sailor; a king is king forever,
or a little longer, should his subjects be goats.
I clothed myself in my own linens;
but those I owned, those I had drawn from my cabin,
were rags within two seasons.
When my breeches fell away, I dreamed
I was attacked by a native with a spear,
a spear that proved a long iron-nail.
I owned such a nail! And the nail
was soon my needle, and the needle my seamstress,
and my cloth my beloved goats.
When I wanted a new knife, I made the beastly thing
from barrel hoops, for a man may be a blacksmith
if he heats well and hammers hard.
I kept a stolen hammer in my trunk.
What little food I had, I made a banquet—
wild turnips and cabbages decorated
my trencher, seasoned by the pepper berry.
I learned to savor the fish, and fish I caught—
aye, chimney sweepers and old wives,
more fish than the moon could claim.
For meat, there were my dear subjects,
brought to refinement by the salt I dried
from my acres of ocean, my infinite water-fields.
I was a lord of water. Aye, and my realms
bestowed upon me the ten-pound crawfish.
I named each a King William and ate him up.
I never learned to love the taste of rat,
though I knew a mate who believed it
more glorious than English beef
if hung a few days and let grow gamy as mutton.
The bead-eyed beasts used to set upon me
of a night, gnawing at my feet, like cannibals.