Husbandry

So it’s come to this: short years ago,
(I don’t know, 30 or 40 perhaps)
We wanted to go play outside,
And scratched ourselves, squirming, bored,
As the grown-ups palavered on and on
About tomatoes, cup-o’-golds, the lawn.
We’d eye the blank screen: what was on?
What were we missing? Afternoons were long.
How could they stand it? We’d never be old.
Yes, it’s come to this: hoisting the bag
From where you crouch now on the grass,
Stuffing sweet mown clumps away,
You notice the fog’s beginning to thin—
Best wait, and water at the end of the day.
High August now. The Better Boys
Come thick and fast. You’re giving them away,
A lightly-noted guilty pleasure.
Perspective rounds the edges of all:
There was a time when Hesiod seemed
The dullest character imaginable.
Poetry was all about flash and passion,
What was this old guy going on about
With his oxen, plows, the nagging Pleiades?
Now you rub your chin when he speaks.
Here on the coast, cranes don’t fly,
But subtle seasons manage to go by,
And it’s come time to pause and confess
You have absorbed their rhythm, long since.
Hoisting the bag, walking toward the fence,
You console yourself with the memory
Of a photograph on a dust jacket:
If this adds up to noon long past,
You’re in good company. You recall
The goddess’ man himself, caught in the act
Of hauling potted plants down the steps
Outside his house, in the sun of Mallorca.
So it goes. There’s no beating back
The flood, nor stepping out of the frame
Despite the dull ache of old advertising.
Almost game time. You empty the bag,
Park green-stained gloves on the toolshed floor,
Glance at your watch, check the fridge for beer,
Remember to leave your shoes by the door.

August 2004

Rocking Chair

The creak when it receives
My weight—maple’s just
Music, after all—recalls
What might have been
The motion and the sound
In Grandfather’s time,
Not here, but a thousand
Miles at sea: soundless
But for this, the creak
And the undulating,
Borne on a southeast wind,
The rhythm of seafaring then.
Each is an inheritance,
And equally mysterious:
I don’t know where or when
The maple was cut, nor
What was passing through
His head when he posed,
Stiff, uniformed and stern,
For the framed photograph
Fading atop the glass-fronted
Bookcase that houses
Encyclopedias 40 years old.
It wasn’t his. It came
From Massachusetts, I think,
Somehow reached the west coast,
And sat unoccupied,
Occasionally dusted,
Under the front-room mirror,
Eventually migrating
To the back of the house.
Day’s getting underway,
High summer in California:
This gray rhythm mocks
Another, as the coffee
Steams, the fan blows
Ocean air from the window,
And the brief tomatoes
Ripen behind the toolshed.
Legs crossed, I watch the toe
Of my moccasin pulse.
A sip, a creak. I’ll be
50 next year, and down
The street, where in an hour
Or so, the day’s first hip-hop
Car will come boom-booming
along, Jean is still asleep,
Jean, who, pushing 90,
Still keeps that corner
As neat and flower-tended
As when Grandmother’s rose,
Visible from the window,
Was planted some lost summer.
The pattern in the maple
Shapes a symmetry. So
Mirror-images tend to
Run, like music, from
The first note to the working-
Out, logical, one would hope,
Ultimately, making some kind
Of sense. Three or four more
Creaks, more rocks, a pause.
The pendulum doesn’t give you
That kind of break. And it’s
An illusion of course:
The marine layer brightens
And the tomatoes ripen
Despite this fermata,
And what the rhythm
Of the wood implies,
Creaks more quietly,
For that reason’s more
Insistent, as the fog starts
To lift, a weed-whacker
Guns across the street,
And blocks away, the wailing
Of Saturday’s first ambulance
Fades in, forcing me to close
The book on my lap
Until the noise subsides.

August, 2004

8:45 and Elsewhere

Note: Begun in the fall of 2001, and completed almost three years later, 8:45 and Elsewhere is a sequence commemorating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and the season that followed.



I

These twilit evenings, the twilight’s intense:
Looking out over the parking lot’s frown,
You feel beyond the trees a humming of sky
Not like bees, but like a whisper of intent
In a language that you can’t quite place.
Where is the morning when that certainty of sky,
So blue that its blueness could not be imagined,
Glimpsed before a flutter of pigeons flew off,
Defined Tuesday morning, a somnolent clock?
All of those Tuesdays have been defaced:
Long shadows gap-tooth the grass near the fence.

II

The sun was what I expected
During that long, nervous childhood
When the radio antennas
Cranked, clawing at the sky;
The songs that dreaded the sun
Never dreamed a dread mundane
Could ignite a billion fears.

Late in the afternoon,
As the talking heads buzzed on,
My thumb spoke up for silence.
A drive down to the reservoir
Seemed like the thing to do.
Ducks moved in rippling water,
Small fishes swam in synchro,
The quiet itself spoke eloquently
Of smoke on three horizons:
The lake fire-danced with sun.

Then bright night, humming loud:
White noise drowned out the stars;
Sense came down with the cities.
Monday’s clear-text: Tuesday’s garble.
In half a million tons there smoked
Remnants of a collective reach,
100-plus channels of helplessness
Adding speechlessness to speech.
Groping for words from long ago,
I think of the belly of a cloud.

The view from the Narrows:
Yellow fog drifts over the battery,
Then, on the streets of Brooklyn
A noisome odor leers.
Our job now is to reclaim daylight;
Never mind night: that remains
The mystery it will always be.
But in the afternoon on Canal Street,
I tuned in America speaking,
Subdued as never heard before.

Since Time’s murderous birth,
Whose echo we can still make out,
It’s been obvious to a handful
Just what our inheritance is,
And now it’s come to consciousness,
Not like the sun, but like nonsense
Amplified a billion times.
This is the search for keys in a downpour,
Thought hindered by hammering rain,
One more questioning of the earth.

III

A full moon on Halloween.
Won’t be another for 19 years.
But it shows up this year,
A stage-prop seeking a stage.
Yes, there’s some movement
On the streets: little shadows,
Clutching bags, shepherded
As usual by chatting adults
With flashlights, And I hurry
Home through the dark,
As the wind obligingly
Scrapes the street with the dry leaves
It shepherds along,
Then break out the candy,
Pour it in a bowl, and set it
By the door to wait.
8:15. Everyone’s gone now;
My doorbell’s only rung once—
The boy next door: his parents
trust me—so the candy’s poured
Back into the bag, and tomorrow
The crowd at the office
Will dispose of it, I’m sure.
Now, channel-surfing takes me past
The World Series, The Munsters
And chattering of anthrax.
A full moon on Halloween.
Won’t be another for 19 years.

IV

The gyroscope spinning in the radio tried to right itself
As you drove along through traffic this afternoon:
The lead story, when the news came on at two,
Was the government’s done deal with Microsoft.
Ah, for a moment there it was old times again:
Judges sternly judging, lawyers prevaricating, the prating press.
But then the voice moved on to other business:
The FBI picked up some telephone calls,
And the National Guard was patrolling bridges in California.
About that time, the left-turn signal said it was all right to go,
And as you pulled back into the office parking lot,
You remembered a long-ago collision on the Oakland Bay bridge.
The Maverick was totaled; beyond that it was no big deal.

V
The Nostradamus industry
Has set up shop again.
He comes and goes in grocery stores:
You see him now and then.
But now he’s on the world circuit
Where you can’t see his eyes,
And someone’s claiming he foresaw
Fire, raining from the skies.
Fire’s the perfect metaphor
For what we encounter next:
Before someone corroborates
The words of the old text,
Doom brushfires its way around
The corridors of space
As quickly as the Internet
Can make a rumor race.
And by the time that common sense
Finally regains the floor,
Someone claims Old Scratch himself
Appeared amidst the roar.
It’s true that when things fall apart
And the center doesn’t hold,
We often go seek order in
The awesome and the old.
But must we, even though we must
Desperately search for clues,
So lose our heads we start to trust
In the Weekly World News?

VI

One more time,
As so often before,
Autumn can’t seem
To make up its mind.
One morning the glass
Has to be scraped
Before you can move,
Then you find yourself
Impatiently peeling
An unneeded parka
As you step outside.

I once wrote of
Indian summer,
That it seemed as if
Time’s teeth were on edge.
How much truer
Does that seem now.
Less irony around
These days (so they say),
But I’m not so sure.
These Indian summer mornings
Are too much the one
There’s no escaping,
That when the crackle
Of strange blue-sky
Thunder tore a jagged hole
In the face of every clock,
And everything froze
Into frames that burn
With each rewinding,
And don’t fade, but grow
Sharper with recall,
Like the heartbreak
That a lover keeps
Re-playing, and re-playing.

One wishes the fall
Would get on with it,
Turn that last key,
Clear irony from the air,
And bring on the certainties
Of winter, whose shades
Are a more fitting mirror
Of this collective moment.
The poets who love
Autumn leaves, yes,
They’ll be here again,
And we’ll be glad,
But the time isn’t now.
I feel, walking along
In the blue afternoon
With the trees their annual
Shout of orange, yellow
And red, that this isn’t
The time for bright autumn:
The thrush music,
The dusk outside,
Oddly enough,
Are holding us back
From burying our dead.

VII

Architecture is an act of optimism.
--The New York Times

One Sunday evening in Paris June,
Sprawling on a stone bench, half-drunk,
(Beer and jet-lag working in tandem)
I ogled the west font of Notre Dame
And thought...nothing. Sometimes it’s best
Just to take a sublime moment for granted,
And I was too tired to think in any case.
This I once heard said about a great cathedral:
That it was conceived as a smile.
If it faced the sunset, seeking its own end,
Well, that was only part of the scheme of things,
And just one more reason to be glad.
These also were begun and finished
With a smile, though of a different kind:
Not arrogance, no, but a confidence
That was not common in that era.
They arose against a racket so intense
That some wondered if it would ever subside.
But it did, and on we went, safe in the knowledge
Of who our friends and enemies were.
And now Notre Dame and that cloudy sunset
Lie across a space that in all likelihood
Will never again be crossed: the beer-haze
Of that summer night gave way in turn
To the morning no amount of caffeine
Could make sense of, or liquor dull the edge,
And in fact, as I watched the split-screen (live)
The moment the west font awaited came to mind,
And wasn’t quite so easily dismissed
As one might normally have expected.
It was that kind of morning,
As it had been that kind of night.

VIII

In every film
I’ve ever seen
That was worth seeing
More than once,
There comes a defining
Moment: Bogey catches
Bergman’s tear as it falls;
Henry Fonda heaves
The captain’s palm tree
Over the side;
Gable, eyes cocked
Like pistols, freezeframed
Forever, resolutely
Doesn’t give a damn;
Newman and Redford,
Plunging 100 feet
Into swirling water
To the cry of “Ah, shiiiiiiit!”
But the movie moment
That keeps playing back
These dew-wet mornings
Is that flock of pigeons.
Yes, those pigeons,
Those black-and-white
Fail-Safe pigeons,
(Fonda again, ’64)
Fluttering en masse
Into New York
Morning sky,
Like the clattering,
Rippling-down timetables
In the older airports,
Those venetian blinds of
Arrival and departure.
The pigeons
Last a second or two,
And then a fusillade
Of frozen city sights
Leaves you on your own
With the blow-back in the mind
That you know comes next.
Clearer than the implied
Soviet missile following
Is this: in full
Color, (reality doesn’t
Usually bother with
The touch of
Black-and-white)
At 8:44:52, somewhere
In lower Manhattan,
A flock of pigeons
Scrambled for the sky,
And kept on going,
But didn’t fade to black.



IX

An Airbus went down in Rockaway last week.
Horror was called for and duly received,
But also a collective breath-holding:
The stock market nose-dived, and once again
We took up our spots to watch CNN
And wait for the verdict. Hours went by
And as Dominican families wept,
(The doomed jet was Santo Domingo-bound)
A more general dread filled the quiet.
The two flight recorders were quickly found,
And the NTSB sent out the word:
“Mechanical failure most likely cause.”
So. 62 days proved to be too soon.
The Dow-Jones took off, screaming for the moon.



X

The turkey carcass is a skeletal wreck,
(“My fowl was soupbones,” the poet wrote,
Conjuring a nightmare of another sort)
And Macy’s parade having echoed away,
--Uneventful, thank God, as we secretly say—
Cable TV has wasted no time
In trotting out the classics it no doubt hopes
Will put everyone in a shopping mood.
So, as the soap-bubbles tick in the sink,
We settle down, sated, not full, as we say,
And TNT dishes up Home Alone,
The Christmas number about the little boy
Left behind by his family, besieged by burglars,
Who outwits the bad guys and makes them pay.
Outside, traffic is sparse on the road:
A taxi lurches past, and an SUV
Whose blackened windows flash, anonymous
Under the glance of a gas-station awning
As inside, a Pakistani immigrant counts change,
And two kids, one with a ring in his nose,
Skulk to the counter to buy frozen burritos,
Skin slightly green in commercial light.
The turkey is ravaged. It’s Thanksgiving night.
The paper still lies on the lawn from this morning,
An ignored intruder from ordinary time
Bound to re-assert itself come tomorrow.
But for now, plastic-bagged, it patiently waits,
With everything it promises to contain,
For when someone stoops, dew soaking their shoes,
On the way to the car, in a ritual
As automatic, if not quite as dread-free
On this blue-sky morning as it was on that.
Meanwhile, we lean back, not full as we say,
And laugh in a circle one more time
At the little boy, besieged by burglars,
Who outwits the bad guys and makes them pay.




XI

The armchair in the corner keeps its back to the window.
Outside, Indian summer presses on, and on.
Lately, it might have been the storied place
Where one looking quietly toward the tall bookcase
Contemplated those big events that were none of his doing
Or concern; the undusted TV screen,
And the spiderweb up near the ceiling
Were artifacts of an afternoon long and bemused.
The impression still visible could have been any back,
Someone watching, barely moving, outrage beyond thought,
Wondering as the carping and shouting went on
Not so much about them, but of things closer to home,
And then, with a stretch and a yawn perhaps,
A reminder to remember to take a glance
At how the 401(k) might be performing,
And to drop off the car on the way in next morning.
But now the TV screen, dusted off, has hummed to life,
And an old man in a peaked cap is quietly recalling
A horribly unquiet moment, 60 years ago,
When all eyes were suddenly and cruelly forced outward,
And as he’s interviewed, under blue morning sky,
The editing cuts to that all-too-familiar piece of film:
The teetering tower, black smoke, Arizona listing,
Outrage ripping the skin off a long and troubled sleep.
(I had a neighbor who was on one of those ships;
He dove into the harbor, swam as fast as he could,
Eventually came to a sewer pipe, and swam on ahead:
“I wasn’t going to stop until I came to an asshole,” he said.)
The old man in the peaked cap is magnanimous:
“There’s no comparison. It was our job to be in harm’s way.”
This is traditionally the time of year when demons come visit,
And it might be argued once again that our grandparents
Weren’t quite the fools we liked to think they were:
Suddenly, the gathering and the pressure to be “excessive”
Seems to make a kind of sense: weeks ago we were told
Of a sudden surge in “hooking up” and dessert consumption,
And now, huddling again in the early and abrupt dark,
The only thing differentiating this December from last
Is a general nervous pulse-checking, an extra glance
Where one glance would have been plenty before.
The armchair, its back to the window, faces the door.
The spider web near the ceiling has been cleared away.
Someone may have just left, and may be returning soon,
But whoever was here a year ago has left for good.

XII

Jogging under the aegis of a murder of crows,
You recall the courier who survived two plane crashes
Back when we took it for granted that such things were
Accidents. The white envelope atop the dresser
Has been looming there for weeks; louring, one might say,
Like the ceiling, or this December sky.
You know what’s inside, having examined it repeatedly.
Banal as winter daylight, computer-spat, number-riddled,
Perforated along one edge, subject to conditions of contract,
The sort of threat you would never perceive as such
In other times. You who were never superstititous a day
In your life, are now amazed to notice things
You never would have bothered to notice before:
“Baltimore/Washington” is harmless enough a POD,
But did the plane-change have to be “Houston George Bush?”
(And is this the sort of thing, you ask in quiet alarm,
That such as they would notice in plotting their next move?)
The obligatory annual homing forces a crisis:
Will you, when the chips are down, actually find the courage
To go ahead with rituals as you’re being urged to do,
And heed the pressure from your family to fly to the coast,
Just as you did last year without thinking twice?
Out there, the table is set and the kitchen warmly illuminated,
Like the tree that confronts the dining room window,
Smiling at the street, as it has every year since Vietnam.
But you wish, in ordinary time like you never did before,
That the tesseract which you remember from great childhood
Could become real long enough to swoosh you through this.
A dozen time-zones and two satellite-skips away,
They’re clearing out caves, chasing shadows across borders,
While closer to home, the old music makes a game attempt
To play again, and the most risible of the doomsayers
Seem for now to be those discussing WalMart’s bottom line.
Still, you clamp down the hatchback over your carry-on
With a bit more queasiness than when air was more benign.
Even now, the red sign proclaims no satellite parking.
The Gold Lot’s where you go, stacked out in the weeds.
Then the packed bus, lurching every foot or two, inching,
And in the tension that accompanies the tightness
Of clamping your carry-on between your knees,
You want to reach over and smack the old lady, three down
Yammering into a cellular phone for all to hear.
Once you’ve run the bottlenecked gauntlet out of hell,
Bossy six-dollar-an-hour help shouting this way and that,
(“A little authority is a wonderful thing,” grumbles one victim)
You slip into the gateside men’s room for a slug of resolve,
Edgy enough to curse when the stall latch resists closing,
Then, facing the bowl standing up, self-conscious, afraid,
You see where someone’s pencilled a message in the grouting:
“There is life after September 11—move on.”
One more swallow and it’s there: the backbone to face
Jet-blast mobilizing the stroll of the tarmac crows.

XIII

Gathering around and among lights
Scattering, doomed:
What better return of that familiar
Nesting, solsticial light
Could possibly be imagined for now?
But there it is: only days after
We’ve done it all one more time,
The glistening ham taken
Crackling from the oven,
The family showing up
Just late enough to be annoying,
Astaire and Crosby dancing across
The flickering screen in black-and-white,
Bing putting down his pipe to sing
White Christmas, his hands
Fluttering over the keyboard as if
Trying to shake drops of water
From his fingernails,
The menfolk sharing a shot of Glenfiddich
Before the table, (always reminiscent
Of that awful scene in Joyce)
The circling of chairs, then the clearing-away
Of all that multicolored, crinkling
Paper and ribbon, stuffed efficiently
Into a Glad green trash bag
For the intrusion of Wednesday morning,
Comes this. It breaks, at six O’clock,
Upon a string of open-ended triumphs
That may or may not (no one seems sure)
Lead to anything like
An unqualified conclusion,
That the universe may indeed be eternal,
But it’s beginning to look like we’re not.
The number-crunchers, re-writing
The playbook of endgame one more time,
Now say the expansion may
Go on forever, picking up speed,
Not slowing down, (their last good guess)
Until, at some time, ten
To the string-your-zeroes-here moment
From now,
There’ll be nothing but a darkness,
Sublime or not, it makes no difference,
As there will be no eyes, evolved or not
To look upon it and find it sublime.
The object of our mammoth quest
Has skedaddled into the hills;
Reassuring voices say
The future and the answer will be found,
But the heavens as always
Have nothing to add,
As they had nothing to add
All those other times either,
And what kind of maniac
Would be fool enough
To think they had?
This dead-in-four-billion-years
Chunk of ground
My fraying Nikes press against
As I haul the Glad sack down the driveway,
The spiked eggnog still swimming,
Fatty and comforting in my blood,
Is going with its progenitor,
Which just dropped down redly
Behind the eucalyptus trees,
As symmetrical shenanigans
At the galaxy’s core,
Patiently, unhurriedly
And without purpose,
Go about mapping their final score,
A new alphabet
For all the holy books ever written.





XIV

A quarter past nine: the mirror sheen
Shimmers where the candle gutters.
New Year’s Eve, and I settle back
Unpacked, swirl the cubes (they clink)
And as cable TV once again utters
Those commonplaces we hear each year,
I join in progress an old favorite:
Rod Taylor in The Time Machine.

I saw it first when I was a boy:
A Saturday afternoon in ‘62:
Kids crowded into the school
Cafeteria to sit on wooden benches,
And marvel, as daylight poked the corners,
And the old projector rattled, threatening,
At the rickety screen, flanked by the flags
Of states none would ever destroy.

Science fiction with its cautionary eye:
Oh, he learns a lesson all right,
Fast-forwards to high-tech horror,
Then dogs on to another kind,
Careening through a night of night
Toward Weena, and those gargoyles
Gnawing on the bones of the innocent
Who never bothered asking why.

That world, we know, was where they believed.
That’s the joke we’re supposed to get tonight.
Complacent in their overstuffed chairs,
They ask friendly questions of the poor soul;
Of course we feel it’s proper and right
For the smugness to be blown off their clocks.
Okay, he oversteps himself like Phaeton,
But in the end, gets time’s reprieve.

There will be no snowfall tonight.
Winter’s staying away with a will
When it’s most called-for. Socking over
The kitchen tiles to fix another drink,
Rounding out a season well-defiled
And crying to be buried in something,
I finger-spread the slats and look up:
Quietly insolent, Orion’s bright.

Wheels are turning, you’d like to think.
(Or would that really be such a good thing?)
Two years ago, at 1000 mph,
What passed for the millennium came in.
Around that world a knife-edge flew:
Towers exploded and rivers burned,
But the real catastrophe stayed its hand.
No round-number tonight, just this drink.

There are no firecrackers to be heard
As AMC cuts to a commercial break:
Some pitchman or woman for Dell
Around the corner is selling speed.
But it seems we have too much already,
As my cheap Lorus hums the chapters on,
And I, befuddled under Orion’s sword,
Stand swirling cubes, waiting for a word.

2001-2004

Selected Poems, 1974-2000

Indian Summer

Grief, sir, is a species of idleness.
The parked car ticks in its painted slip,
No breath of air stirs the
Hundred-million stained-glass windows
Illuminated in the noontime silence.
Drought killed the buds of summer early;
The lingering wasps are getting desperate.
Sit down to lunch beneath the still tree,
And they launch airstrikes on your sandwich.
What is it about this time of year?
Time’s teeth are on edge, the very afternoon
A seemingly-endless con game:
The Washington Post lies face-up
On the table, masthead and date
Magnified through a glass of water,
By sunlight too certain to be real.
But their implied threat is as loud
As the wasp-hum is quiet. Somehow,
Unlikely as it may seem, things
Are going to get moving again,
Their natural round only slowed
By these impertinences, these piled-up
Still-life snapshots which will forestall
No frozen locks, no iced-over windows,
No future species of idleness.
This is when you remember things:
The first day of trout season on the cold lake,
The floodtide of epiphany in a first kiss,
The onrushing of early buds in a
Whirlwind that seemed to contain all
Potential in itself. It’s at the first equinox,
And the first only, when all the great
Romances of the world get written;
From here it’s all recollection
And dread. On the wall, a woman,
Beautiful and nearly nude, steps down
Toward the sea, her back to view,
Everylastingly mysterious,
Graceful as the rocking, moon-drugged
Metronome that waits to embrace her,
A fugitive from memory, returning home.





To Nadya, During Mahler’s Third

The eloquent smugness of April trees:
Outside, the immensity of returning green,
As certain as the symphony’s opening phrase,
Whispers that carousel of the will
Which sweeps everything along the street.
Rebirth is a treachery:
By rights the dead should be left alone.
The evening sun is a mockery,
Grist for the ridicule of nightingales.
Once we walked along a path of birches,
Ears tuned to hear their peculiar song;
Above and around us, spring went along
Mindlessly with its annual outrage,
While another awaited, just ahead.
Seasons away now, your bright portrait
Somehow resists the sun of time—
Somnolent in my steps, I watch
It hover, sometimes changing shape,
Sometimes light or depth of color,
Floating above the open window,
As snowflakes swirl or pink bud-showers
Fall to be squashed by passing cars.
I found you in a bright November,
(Give me the honesty of autumn leaves!)
And now recall colors among this riot
Altogether different from what I see,
A karma of night, your eyes’ geometry.







Beginnings

They gave my nephew Joey a Joey-sized guitar,
(That is to say, a six-stringed ukulele)
He left it on the sofa, where it lay
Face-down till his little sister grabbed it
And started playing it with her teeth.
Then he snatched it back. His mother loves
The song “Jalisco,” and hopes he’ll learn
To play it some day. There’s music in his blood,
Going back a long way. His grandma plays
The organ in church, the piano at home,
And his grandpa remembers New England nights
When the kitchen circle of moonshine drunks
Would stomp their feet and begin to chant
“Ou-est Beloo?” And then my father,
Hauled in from the adjoining room, would blow
His harp, stamp in time, and the drunks would
Lurch upright, clog the jugs to shaking
On the shelves as the kerosene lamp flickered,
And you thought the house might just fall down.






Listening to Wagner and Looking at Kansas

Some farmer, scratching his butt
27,000 feet below mine,
Would never guess what’s going on
Up here.
The fields slide by, criss-crossed,
Checkerboarded,
Shades of green fading
To shades of brown.
Somewhere down there,
Someone, no doubt,
Is worried sick about
Paying off a loan.
Up here, the sun makes
Silver dollars of the
Irrigation ponds,
And a whole world is falling apart
In continuous melody.
The plane shakes,
But the painted-on smiles
Of the flight attendants
Don’t crack as they pass out
Fruit and wine coolers.
Meanwhile,
Brunnhilde launches into
Her final act filibuster,
Preparing to take her flying leap
On to Siegfried’s pyre.
The land’s a mottled pool-table
As far as you can see.
No wonder tornadoes
Get loose down there and don’t stop
Until they’ve plunked someone down
In the Land of Oz.
Accepting a drink
And a few strawberries,
I settle back, wondering
If I’ll know when it’s no longer
Kansas we’re over.
Landscapes, myths and troubles
Have boundaries all their own.
The cymbals clash,
The trumpets blare,
And it’s curtains for the gods
Once more. The plane lurches.
I grab my seat,
Panicky at turbulence,
But it’s OK in a moment,
The air is smooth again.
And up ahead, beyond the
Horizon even from this height,
I know the Mississippi
Flows, a river whose own sagas
Are no doubt lost beyond retrieving,
Somewhere in the depths
Below commercial traffic,
Where the water’s just
A bit polluted,
And no maidens sing.






Ocean Logic
(Sunset Beach, San Francisco)

Descartes envisioned a universe
That ran on wheels: it’s easy to believe,
Watching the surf crash in.
I sit on the sand, unabashedly
Reading out loud—who gives a damn?
The ocean drowns me out,
And besides,
On a beach as seedy as this one,
What’s one more nut?
The ocean beats time
In rhythm with my reading.
It makes more sense somehow
Than the words on the page,
Its logic as unperturbed
As the merry-go-round of the polar stars.
The tugging moon plays on its heart,
As a smaller, darker,
Interior moon plays on mine,
Infecting its rhetoric a bit perhaps,
But the message flows on.
I put my book down and try to tune in,
Scoping for that music
Keats thought so divine,
But it is there?—I can’t tell.
There’s a freighter going out now,
A wet-suited surfer just walked by
On his way to brave the undertow,
And I’ve got a jingle for Coca-Cola
Stuck in my head.
Fugues and discourses
Of god-knows what kind
Are lapping the continent’s edge
One hundred yards in front
Of my face, and yet
Their language is as lost on me
As this poem is on you.






Sextet for the Dusk
(Benicia, California)


Secretive, gulls in figure-eight swirls
Make halos around St Dominic’s domes.
Arcane in the breath of their holy
Indifference, as dusk comes down they
Head for the delta, like the fire-breathing
Bombers that razed Dresden, and no less one.
A runner, meanwhile, whose rhythms of blood
And heart tick-tock him past the Spanish
Portico, is ambushed there by gnats
In a cloud, orbiting the nucleus of their
Common cause. Three stray dogs, hot for
A fourth, dance braids of lust
In the tall grass of a vacant lot.

The Chinese box of our gravities,
Sun on sun, in layers of night,
From house to city to planet to brain,
Wraps universes in quiet submission,
The whispered non-language of assent.
The downward-speaking ricorso rain,
Lullaby and word, rinses the street,
But blurs the sharp-edged, defining light.
“Sleep,” it says, then its work goes on:
It soaks the cemetery at the city limits,
Gently erasing the names from the stones.





The Whipcrack

I

A tree seemed a natural place for Dylan back then;
Just in from Minnesota and not yet a superstar,
He looks down in those old photographs with just
A hint of the sardonic grimace young America would
Ape when it clutched him as a banner. And he looks so
Right, bearing that bullwhip down the long
Country road, ready for all comers, an Indiana Jones
Of the ideal, poised to battle hypocrisy and greed
Back to the caves of the unconscious. Crack,
Went time’s echo-judgement as the stroke of that
Whip reverberated for miles and miles
Over the not-yet famous Woodstock hills.


II

The portentious whistle was faintly in the air
As Strauss lit his candles while the empire faltered,
Determined to give overwaltzed Vienna what it didn’t
Want: a magnum opus. They whirled to his tunes,
But he could hear a more malevolent kind of
Acceleration waltz picking up speed above his
Aging head as they danced and danced. He prayed
For rain, the only kind of weather
That could give him peace, keep the dancers from
The door. And so he sat down, pen in hand,
But time was running out: already the whipcrack
Heralding the non-tonal storm was in the backswing,
Gathering momentum in that rainy night.



III

Children on the frozen pond, hand-in-hand
In winter, string out, the wind on their faces and
Their heads full of Christmas, inscribing joyous
Nonsense symbols on a frozen slate.
Arcs, circles and pirouettes scar the surface
Of what was just a few months ago
The undisturbed mirror of a summer sky. Their lives
Are still andante; a year to them goes on for
Miles. Look: they swerve, they swing,
They crack the whip--scattering like a covey
Of birds flushed from a thicket, they fly off
In all directions. No sound but their inarticulate
Laughter pierces the deadened December sky.





Prologue in March

Hushed sunlight—and you remember it again,
(Here, in places you had nearly forgotten)
In air that smells of something besides
Stopped watches. It wafts through the room.
The impulse is not to jump up and sing, not quite,
But to go and seek the echoes in the stairwell
Of what seemed the cries of demons not long ago.
Now you’ve bought, with no other currency than
The accumulated dust on the windowsill,
One more glimpse through the prism that’s always turning,
Each facet presenting the same scene
A thousand miles from the last.
Neither hope nor despair make any sense now;
There is in this breath only a colossal never-to-be-defined.
The drone of an airplane passing overhead
Recalls the drone of the electric fan that hummed on the table
So many midsummers, blowing in from the window
Those superheated liquors of honeysuckle and jasmine,
A breeze that made the blood want to throw off its rhythm,
Demand the next day, leap into the river
And drift downstream, an echo of afternoon thunder.





Up The Street and Through the Cemetery
(Ann Arbor, Michigan)

for Jesus R. Araiza

The frat-houses, hugged
By not-quite eastern ivy,
Are old-money smug.

We mock their pretense:
“Gaudeamus igitur,”
As we pass the fence.

The graveyard, you say
Is an interesting spot.
Why not? Lead the way.

A water-pipe drips,
Phallic at the graveyard gate.
I miss it, and trip.

You grin, then pause. “See?
The city disappears here.”
I look, and agree.

The rooftops at bay
Are only half the story.
Time has backed away.

Granite names preside,
Some recent enough, some aged
To the death of pride.

You whisper a word
Appropriately humble;
The reply of birds

Stirs up the trees,
Echoing your sentiment
In a sudden breeze.

Empty cans of beer
Rattle in the brown dumpster.
“Frat boys party here,”

You say. “It’s a great
Place for Friday-night bashes.”
Meanwhile, quite sedate,

Anonymous dust
Pays no perceptible heed
To frat boys or us.

“So what do we do?”
I ask as a family tomb
Blocks the sky’s pale blue.

“Nothing,” you reply.
“What’s the difference, anyway?”
So what if you lie

Beneath beer-drinking
Gamma Phi Alphans some night?
A similar sinking

Awaits them all too.
No use brooding about it.
I’ve heard, in Peru,

People come with food
And picnic among the headstones,
Enjoying the mood.

Multilingual stones
Of early Michiganders
Stand above their bones:

Here’s one in Chinese--
There, a Spanish influence
Molds beneath the trees.

Dates to when the land
Was yanked from the Indians
Fade from where we stand.

Whole families past
Under common granite names
Sleep where union lasts:

No discordant word
To question what they lived for
Is here to be heard.

One stone reads “BABY”
For a nameless turnstile life
Cut short at “maybe.”

No pair of dates here:
Entry and exit took place
The same day and year.

The clock tower chimes.
We’ve circled to the main gate
My watch says it’s time

To go home and cook.
Bored, you smack the fence-rails with
A paperback book.

Buildings reappear
Above the whispering trees,
Smiling at the fear

That whispers all around
The corners of calm habit.
Glad, I greet the town

Silently, as two
Possible frat-boys come in,
Tossing, as they do,

A frisbee back and forth,
(they have two) and then the wind
picks up from the north.




Wine-Tasting
(St. Helena, California)

First, the chardonnay:
A man dressed like a funeral director
Waves around glasses
Three at a time.
“It’s very drinkable,” he says,
Then mumbles something
About how long it stood on its head
At sixty-eight degrees.
A sip, a sidelong glance at you,
rolling it around on your tongue.
Next, the riesling:
Another character
(This one looks Levantine)
Doles out drops
Of the precious stuff
While those who didn’t care
For the chardonnay dump their dregs
Into a huge pickle jar.
As you cross-examine him
About sugar content
And the time the grapes spent
Soaking in their skins,
I give my eye to the muscat,
(The end of the line)
Thinking inappropriate thoughts
Of brown-paper bags on skid row.
Then comes the cabernet:
You don’t care for reds, especially,
And tell me so. Something to do
With the acid, you said.
But I sniff the blood-colored marvel
And let something slip
About a well-done steak with mushrooms.
This spoils your appraisal
As you swallow and giggle.
The room’s suddenly friendlier
Now, the Sunday tourists
From 400 miles around
Just a big befuddled family...
And now, finally, we reach
That muscat…
O, it’s sweet,
It’s a song,
It’s the color of your eyes.
It cries out for a big, roaring
Fireplace somewhere, a sheepdog
And other stage props.
(Did I mention that
It’s the color of your eyes?)

Then we squint in the daylight,
Preparing to drive
Another quarter of a mile
Down the road,
And do all this again.
(Champagne’s been promised.)
All around,
The valley sings your praises
As the Sunday sun
Gently kisses the vineyards,
Working up that sugar content.
The newspaper on my lap
Says something about Dan White,
Just sprung from jail.
Would he dare, they ask,
Return to San Francisco,
The killer of Moscone and Milk?
Who cares? I’m in love!

March, 1985



Weightlessness

Some of the seagulls circling that about-to-explode idol
Will be dead within the hour from the noise.
But some will survive, and would pass the story on,
If there were any way they could, of their enormous
Counterpart, which tore the curtain of the morning
And then disappeared into the sun. With the window open,
I could smell the dawn, and I turned to watch and hear
The sparrows on the telephone line, their notes the right hand,
Your breathing the ground bass of the left,
As the cat jumped down from the lump that had to be
Your feet: this morning- counterpoint was reveille for her,
And she went off looking for her breakfast.
What were you dreaming of when the firecracker
That would piggy-back the shuttle into orbit
Exploded three thousand miles away? I wasn’t aware of it
Myself—I heard about it later, over coffee,
With the radio on and the cat chasing invisible demons
Up and down the stairs. God, what must it be like,
The g-forces mounting, The astronauts suddenly finding
Themselves upside-down and staring, as they ride away
From earth aboard an earthquake, at a sky deepening
From blue to black, and then the release, the sudden
Absence, the drifting harness-ends?
You stood at the sink in your robe, dishing out cat food.
When I stood behind you and kissed your neck,
You purred just like the cat. Sunday: we had hours to fill,
And no need to hurry the morning along. The heavens
Were doing quite well by themselves, or maybe
Assisted just a little by the human presences:
Those singing in churches and those loosed from the earth,
Chasing broken satellites.
I followed you back upstairs, reaching out to run my hand
Along your spine as I counted the steps of your bare feet
On the carpet. The news was over with, the radio
Indifferently offering Strauss, and we lay down again and
Overcame its indifference, your eyes coming to light as
Your robe slipped to the floor, the door closed so that the cat,
Still jousting with demons, wouldn’t bring her battle
Into the room. No battle here, just rising g-forces,
And the sky I envisioned turning from blue to black,
And the universe warming from the three degrees Kelvin of its
Birthing moments, to a warmth wherein our births could be
Re-enacted. Listen—was that a knocking I heard just now
On the door downstairs? No, my mistake…It was the sound
(I like to think) of my own knocking on the door of some
Creation, the hammer-blows of longing for a reunion
With the one whose messenger you are, warming the clouds
As we ride a quieter earthquake to our own escape velocity.
And there it is—a sudden hush, like the coasting after the burn,
A silence like the space between galaxies when the echo
Of that great birthing faded to form the microwave whisper
Whose message has repeated all these billions of years
With no one listening until just now. Then suddenly
I’m floating. No dangling harness straps, no crackling
Radio traffic, no need to do battle with the ticking sky
Or anything else. This is being weightless,
The purest kind to be found between the other two,
The floating in the womb and the drifting toward death,
But more like the first I think—the sparrows have left,
But dawn noises reverberate in my head as your arms
Draw me in, encircling me in a boundary not unlike
Beginnings themselves, just as the layers of whispering forever
Encircle the shuttle, drifting 200 miles above.




The Minimal Muse

To stretch a point,
Newton’s Third Law
Would have us believe
That for every Turangalila,
There must be a 4’ 33”
Or the other way around.
Meanwhile, the poor sap in the middle
Shakes his head
And switches on the Muzak.
“It’s lovely silence,
But who can dance to it?”



Voices

for Lucia


Some follow them to their doom,
Like the maid, born to burn in
That more credulous age, who
Heard in the wind an exhortation
To drive the invaders out.
But that was back when the doves
Came down to take the eyes of the blind
To heaven, restoring sight
When they returned to earth.
Things like that don’t happen anymore.

If I were to hear voices—
I can see it now: the woman behind
The counter down at County Mental Health
Would reach for her pink form,
Pencilling in “stress” at line 17b.
“Take this down the hall,” she’d say.
“Otro loco mas,” she’d think.
What happens, then, when you hear
My voice? Are forms filled out?
Do the doves return?
Rest assured that though
The ever-widening sky
May take no notice,
while my love burns, you never will.




The Sniper

I

Someone or something always did
Your sacred job. Uncaring sky
And primitive paranoia
Were your eldest antecedents.
From the Assyrian hell-wheels
Whirling fear to the marrow
Of subjugated bones, to SALT’s
Nervous pulse-checking, you were always there.

II

Passenger planes over the wheatfield
Of infinity wait for you
As you watch from near the window,
And your various shapes invade
The flaming tree-tops and the hills.
Everything hinges on your choice
For those who fall within the range
Of your sight, and are within you.

III

Einstein’s face stares from the textbook,
Seeming burdened with all he knew.
A picture that seems meant for walls
Where teachers drone and students yawn.
But in another picture, where,
Mugging for the camera, tongue stuck out,
He takes the smug ones quite off-guard,
I’d like to think he just dodged you.



IV

Paramedics playing poker
At midnight on a Saturday,
Breathing between catastrophes,
Inhale that heavy air for life.
Not too interested, they look out
From the back of the van at one.
A night’s work is just a night’s work:
The shifts they stand are two nights long.

V

So who can ever go between
Your dark intent and our mistakes?
Distinguishing malevolence
From rainfall is not for our kind.
The paramedics’ van pulls up,
Lights flicker over Einstein’s face,
An airplane crashes in a field,
Another leaves an hour late.

July, 1978



Gumball Universe

Eleven dimensions now, they say.
The knobby surface of reality runs
Beneath my fingertips, mercurial, unseen.
We were just getting a grip on the ones
We had, still trying to fine-tune our
fears to the ins and outs of matter and
Energy either sunflowering in that burst
Of horror that’s haunted our most recent
Long sleep, or smoldering, a mean dog
Unaware, but growling as you pass from habit.
And then this came along. What next?
Will they fashion some new malevolence out of it,
Or will it remain the sole property of the
Priesthood, they with the unpronounceable names,
Who tend to address themselves in integers?
Every day they reshape the unshapeable,
While, at the galaxy’s core, something unnameable
Is already ordering something unspeakable:
A wholly new alphabet, a rewriting and reordering
Of all the holy books ever written.





Whiteout
(Vacaville, California)

It’s the deadest Sunday of the year,
and the year’s just getting started—
Consider that.
Not quite time for the Super Bowl:
How will we survive?
You can feel it, time,
oozing from a million living rooms,
Feel it as you walk to the laundromat,
Or watch your breath
Materialize.
Even the church crowd is hiding out
Somewhere.
What there is,
of course,
is fog.
It drifts and drips
and runs along the windowpanes,
the icing on silence.
You can get lost in it, and somehow
Today, I think, everyone would like to.
Even “60 Minutes” is miles away;
For the moment there’s only basketball
and Jimmy Swaggart.
The fog gives the percolator’s bubbling an urgency,
makes the pine needles on the patio,
(from where the Christmas tree was dragged away)
So mutely elegaic, and urges such a
General anonymity…
What it whispers as it
streams down the windows
Is clearer than the streaming windows themselves.
The only thing we really need now
Is one good snowfall
to wake us all up within view
of the Emerald City’s gates.

January 5, 1985




To Marina on her Birthday

There was a time when you wouldn't
Have thought twice about them,
The second looks and double-takes
Attending each venture
You made along the street.
But in these days of the phone
Off the hook at sunset,
And the solitary walks around
The old neighborhood, I hear
Sometimes you catch yourself
In the long fluorescent glance
And think "No, I don't look
So very much different--still, how
Could they?" They do. Take my
Word for it: I've watched, myself,
(Trying not to get caught)
As you made your way down some
Yawn of a corridor,
A splash of delight, bright in
Our general sleep-walk, rousing
That never-aging catch of breath
That so often becomes song.
For all the summers you've been
Part of, all you've seen and heard,
Smelled, touched and tasted,
And in the shadow of every word,
Foreign to me, familiar to you,
That spells out your other-
Looking-glass life, still I envy
Those chimerical, bright-as-you-are
Mid-Atlantic birds that attend
Your May morning walks to
Safeway or CVS...Having seen both
Them and you, there's no doubt
I think, that grace and beauty
Have rules of their own, and where
And when they choose to speak
Or put in an appearance,
The rest of us can only smile,
Scratch our heads, and try to be
Worthy of the moment.

1998



During Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”

The most longed-for moment is never the furthest away:
Imagine the ultimate 2 a.m. under fog,
The night as silent and bright as remembrance,
The universe illuminated in the orange glow of that
Artificial moon, sleeping city light rising,
The cloud-ceiling phosphorescent.
Move from the corner room, where the dim sky
Illuminates nothing, over the profile of the highrise
And down to the street itself. Here there are no
Declarations. The clock on the Security Pacific Bank
Building chimes an everlasting frozen hour;
The police car standing on the corner might be
Unoccupied, it engine silent and its headlights all its own.
No answers are heard, but the questioner is celebrated
With a mute tenderness: footsteps out of the moon and fog;
They carry you down to the street where, loud as midday,
The rustle of an irrelevant newspaper affronts the stars.

1990



Six Love Songs



I

A falling leaf
Reaches the ground
Without a word:
It makes no sound
As it flutters
Down to death
To disappear
In a falling breath.

In my time
I hope I may
Be like the leaf:
You’ll turn away,
Your words unsaid,
Your eyes gone dry.
I’ll say nothing
As you pass by.


II

Faces follow your footsteps as they come.
Your fast-approaching cadence fills the air
With image-blizzards, pictures of yourself
Torn up and windblown, flying everywhere.
The cadence stops. You’re opening the door.
A flood of pictures comes in on the click,
A hidden rain of ancient melodies:
The fevered music of the deathly sick.
Yet when you speak, your voice upon my ear
Is sweet, but not the music that it seems
When you’re far off. The sunlight on your face
Is not, perhaps, as lovely as in dreams.
The crisis comes: I reach to take your hand,
And though I shake, the walls stubbornly stand.


III

I dreamed my love were dead,
And I smiled as she lay
Naked at my feet,
A vanquished enemy.

But morning took a hand
And pulled me back to earth,
The jacket on the chair,
The day and day’s preserve.

Later, when I saw you
Sitting at your desk,
A lion passed the window,
But then lay down to rest.


IV

Morning got in here
Without being frisked.
No one asked the day
Its business or intent.
March flows into April
Naturally as night;
Who would ever want to
Demand its credentials?
Entropy envelopes
The entire sleeping earth
In one-way fluid faith.
And the elemental you,
As of the earth as stone,
But above it as Polaris,
(Unflinchingly that way)
Must surely wake to day’s
Unfrisked arrogance
Equal at all times
To whatever it demands,
Chosen and in time,
Subject to a law
Binding you alone.
Your little finger’s ring
Glimmers with your intent:
A crack in the sky considers
Each impaling hour.
It holds at your discretion,
And at your will explodes.


V

Ocean, clock and sky conspire
In their dark complicity,
Pulling you from my embrace.

Ocean, large as night itself,
Comes in, goes out, its rhythm still
Pulsing like the blood’s demand.

Clock, a spinning manmade will,
Blindly speaks its own intent,
Ticking fast when we would wait.

Sky sweeps toward a breaking dawn,
Hushed around its polar way,
Threshing through the dark we share.

But you and I grab stolen gems:
The seconds that we steal away
Are ours alone when darkness ends.


VI

Now throw aside
All pettiness
And come with me
Into this light.
Our bodies fit
Like dovetailed dreams;
Together we
Invade the night.


Sadness, defiance,
Joy between
The canyon of us,
The valley of you,
Paint the rocks
Of cold desire.
Now climb the cliffs
And see the view:

A galaxy’s heart.
Naked, you are
The center of all,
The beginning sun.
I lie in your core
As skies explode,
Hidden in you,
The completing one.

1979-81





Es ist Genueg

In Alban Berg’s great Violin Concerto,
After a series of tutti hammer-blows,
And after a quirky glance back at Vienna,
The woodwinds talk some older talk
Still: that alter Duft aus Maerschenzeit
--scent of other times—appears and grows,
A scent Schoenberg would have recognized,
And Mahler (had he lived) might have brought home.
It hints at you, among the rattling
Dishes and the ringing telephones;
The lotus of tranquillity in you
And the chorale are much the same.
They speak a common language at the bottom
Of the mind, echoing in the mists of
Tonal instinct, seeping from the crazy-
Quilt of time. Yes, you and the music
Are of a common kind: two echoes
Of vintage sweetness in the toneless street
Where the noises rising from the workshops
Make that harmony more precious still,
In the way you have, and do—the way you will.



Blake

Challenged to sketch
The soul of a flea,
He jumped at the chance,
“That’s it! Can’t you see?”—

Then glanced with reluctance
At London’s gray streets.
“Reality’s nothing
But a chain of defeats.”

January, 1996





Near Antalya


Tongues, faces and weather meet
Here to argue in harness with
Dead generations, trucks and Fiats
Belaboring the road like rhinos or
Camels criss-crossing the touristy sand.

You'd think we'd be wiser now. This
Old "Mare Nostrum" unfailingly
Listens, has heard so much, but still
Never shuts up; it talks on and on
Despite the speedboats and jet-skis...

Just a hundred feet north, and not
Quite listening, we play out the
Old script once more, and then once again:
The heart's pile-up, mirror-drunk mysteries...
If we can't locate ourselves, even here,

What chance that we'll ever find each other?
The sea either won't say or won't stop
Repeating, while the wind, aimed
At Africa, babbles its mimicry, their
Common code, unbreakable as speech.

Belek, Turkey
September, 1997


M51

Old Messier made himself a list
Of things that could be lightly missed:
Numbered, toss-out points of light,
Distractions to his busy night.
He was on the comets' trail,
And never thought beyond the pale
Of Newton's clockwork universe--
These light-puffs were a nightly curse.
Now, spinning in a photograph,
This whorl, (which Messier thought chaff)
Some thirty million years away
Appears much like the Milky Way.
Old Messier would never know
He'd forced the universe to grow;
These "sands upon the Red Sea shore"
Were not what he was looking for.

July, 1997






Joshua Blues

In memory of Richard M. Bettez, 1957-1980

Running deeper than remembrance in these bones, Richard,
Are the fading pictures—remnants—of what we once were.
Look, though: the desert you loved to paint stays
Essentially the same—the land, the 40-mile horizon,
And of course the joshua, that enormous tree
Whose portrait you once painted, then brought
Around to my house. We talked as I brewed tea.

Now you’ve joined Picasso, whose vision you once
Panned, all those years ago, sketching in Bic pen
A crosseyed Cubist man, which you then
Showed around for laughs in the high-school halls.
Proof yourself that an artist could out-dance
An athlete, you went out for sports nonetheless,
Chased after girls, loved life—a painter one minute,
A rocker the next, then again something neither could name.

Fat chance you had, once you decided to choose
The mire of that suburb which nurtured us both
Like feedlot steers, as a place to come back to.
Drifting death, that jellyfish, floating
White on the water of our recalcitrant years,
Marked your return, watched over the road,
Then gently let down his tentacles to brush you
As late one night, you drove too fast in the dark.

Once we talked of travelling, partners to Paris,
That summer I was pumping gas and mopping bay floors
While you copied Constable’s The Hay Wain.
We never went, but you, loving landscapes, looked
closer to home for what you could secure
As your private domain. The desert? You could have it.
And now I’m living there, watching desolation bear
Down--the perimeter of mountains saw-tooths hot sky.

But the joshua tree is out there somewhere,
Clinging to its is-ness, stark silhouette of patience,
Like the land all around. If I should come across it
While driving in circles, finding nothing else
Worthy of note, I may not be sweetly mugged
By the muse of your release, but you never know.
You went before the rest of us, first to flower,
And then to embrace death’s dirty logic,

And now it’s the joshua as well as Picasso
Whom you’re privileged to join in its petrified peace,
Whose secret is the mastery of that elusive art,
Homing in on the landscapes of the desert and the heart.

March, 1981




Dirty Birds

Would you say
That there’s a little of the seagull in all of us?
That putting aside all the
Romantic hogwash
About complete freedom,
And all the freudian nonsense
Imbedded in the desire
To fly,

Would you say
That there’s a deep-seated yearning
In some forgotten corner of the best of us
To be tick-ridden,
filthy,
Despised by sunbathers who don’t like
White deposits
plunked in their navels,
And forced to live on floating garbage?

Buddhists might say
That your karma’s kicking up,
And that maybe, just maybe
The next time around,
You’d do well to set your sights
A little bit higher.



Page One

It’s not the sound of bursting bombs,
But the low whispers of l’infame
That shake this card-house in the night,
Which rose in artificial light
In that unspeakable grinning face.
Not the whine of planes in strings
As the terrified quartet sings,
Remembering the fevered hours
Of air-assaults and horror’s flowers
Blooming above the roofs in flames,
But rather, those who have no names
Under a collective hood:
They mouth a common, choral good
And follow one who sniffs the breeze
And maybe marvel at the ease
With which they let themselves be led.
O tell me, is the hero dead,
And that which killed him in the street?
He lies beneath the led ones’ feet
As the bewildered mumble psalms
And piped-in music calms and calms.



Karma Bum

Sticky night air
Hammers at his wakefulness,
And in the darkness he listens hard…
For what?
Some blank, redeeming sound
In the promise of morning?
No—his ears are tuned
To the sound of
His own heart,
Wrapped in envelopes
Of accumulated jet-noise,
Radio static
And curses long ago spat out
And remembered.
He strains to hear
The bird’s wing on the night air,
Frozen in the act of its homing.
“The angels mark
Your every step,” he’s told.
“The tightrope may snap
At any moment,” he hears.
Where in the ticking sky
Is the mirror he seeks?
Those who went before,
(How he struggles
To imagine their faces!)
Far outnumbering
Those who stand around,
Line up behind him,
Shaking the core of his
Fibrous interior galaxy
With a universal sigh
Of what he hopes is peace.

Ann Arbor, Michigan
May, 1982




Going Back To Ithaca

They tell me that Shelley was disappointed
The day he ran down to the docks and saw
The curly-haired Greeks who reeked of garlic
And sweated in the sun as they unloaded
Some cargo or other. They were not the Greeks
He knew, only having met marble Greeks
Himself. Poor Percy—before his startled eyes,
Under a cherished and well-fostered notion
The columns crumbled.

What was he out looking for in that harbor?
Perhaps only a link with the source of us,
Some reminder of beginnings: a dreaming
Descendant, his eyes deceived by his training,
Marble-conditioned, looked for a marble forebear.
(And I am told that even now, young Greeks,
When those glorious books are put in their hands,
Puzzle over them like a high-school kid
Required to swallow “Beowulf.”)

So what did it matter to my friend’s sister Debra,
That the ghosts of great men moved all around her
When she went down to the docked destroyer,
Sons-in-tow in some hellenic port,
To greet the man she was to marry?
There was no sad surprise in her eyes
When that soulless gray bucket (bought from America)
Yielded him up. If there were any old statues there,
I imagine she stood with her back to them
And smiled.

October 27, 1974

Terminalia

“Did Rome become ruins,
Or do ruins become Rome?”
Ruins do seem to fit the script:
“Rome,” it reads. “Crumbling marble.”
And now, when people think of ruins,
They think of Rome.
Irony: when the theater
Of all the Aegean’s past glory,
And the eastern half of “Mare Nostrum”
Were only a corner of what was
Rome’s, no patrician in his right mind
Would dream that stage-setting,
Not even on a morning after,
When thoughts of further conquest
Could only aggravate his
Aristocratic headache.

This occurred to me when,
Late one night, yawning every
Fifteen seconds, I thought about
The roses I’d sent to your door.
There were twelve, in a glass vase.
They were left on the step,
And I was angry when I found out,
Thinking that they could have been
Stolen before you returned.
But there they were, on the table,
And you came to me, (your hair was wet)
And threw your arms around
My neck. I glanced over at
The yellow roses, and wished
They had been open then.
They were embryonic, like your thoughts.
They were thoughtless, like your eyes.
They bloomed while I was gone,
And were opened up
The next time I dropped by.
Within a week, they had
Turned brown, and you regretted
Not having pressed one in a book.

Then they went the way
Of all garbage, and I felt sadness,
Not for eighteen bucks out the door,
But for having given you
Something that would die.
Tonight, however, I don’t think anything
More permanent could have been so right.
Disease demands the price
It will, and time has moved
Only slightly, but slightly
Was enough. Lent now:
A week ago last Wednesday,
The reader smeared some ashes
On my forehead, and told me
I was going back to dust.
A thousand years from now,
(If they have Ash Wednesday then)
I’d like to think the reader,
Smearing ashes borne of me
On someone else’s forehead,
Might think of Rome and roses
As well as Lentan things;
For you, if for no one else,
They were love’s best-chosen gift.

February, 1977




Good Night, Good Night


The bass drum pounding in the kitchen sink
Goes unnoticed as the moonlight moves
A little further westward. Do you think
You’re equal in heart to what the moonlight proves?

You’re not alone: the moonlight on your face
Silently complements the distant siren-sound
As, across the city, two police cars race
To where some drunk lies bleeding on the ground,

Having been rolled. You do not hear:
Your contentment’s unchallenged as the dawn comes on:
You dream the right dreams, have nothing to fear
As sailors stumble home when the moonlight’s gone.

May 5, 1977



Apricot Brandy

Proust was right: there are moments when time
Turns back on itself and, transparent,
Pulls back your eyes from the persistent crime
Of one-way motion and blindness.

And then the illusion of travelling power
Reveals what may be or may not,
(In a grain of sand on the beach of an hour)
An independent reality.

Four years flew back in his startled face
When he uncorked the bottle,
And what hurried past was too complex to trace
In the odor of apricot brandy.

A midnight, a high wind, a batch of caresses,
A moment when a friend now dead
Still walked the streets, girls in short dresses:
It all raced by, inhaled in an instant,

And was gone. O was it, I wonder, that quick breath
Like the moment of life’s unreeling
We’ve all heard about at the moment of death,
And the culprit was apricot brandy?

1977



Faithful Physics

A dissonance of voices, both strange and familiar, echoes
From every corner: a standing-in-the-middle of things becoming,
In combination with things imagined, or as we hoped they were.
Pick your corner: on which does the marketplace go mad,
On which does the guitar player easily pluck his strings?
Are they where we put them yesterday, or did they move
While we slept? Harmonies themselves ring strange,
A standing-in-the-middle of colors that shift and skate
On the surface of what world? Do the poplars bend as the exile
Imagines, or in a wholly new direction, obedient to
The whisperings of possibly-hostile winds?
Compassion holds his hand back as he raises it to strike
The spider crawling up the bookcase—or is it compassion?
The uncertainties of the whirlpool come yawning,
And in them is imbedded the possibility that he may be
Forced to see the world sometime the way a spider sees it.
Achor yourself on a chain of the expected:
The bubbles in the glass rise for a reason.
Then again, what if those molecules were to go into open revolt?
The window might become an angry eye staring inward,
The world-globe on top of the shelf a fist
Looking for something to smash—or is there too much sense
Even in that, a hope that the whirlpool can be trusted
To go along with the logic of our nightmares?
Looks once readable take on a catlike strangeness,
A standing-in-the-middle of a most peculiar entropy.
Do the sunlight shafts, striking your face this morning,
Incline as they did the first day we awoke together,
When the doves who had escaped the hunters’ shotgun blasts
Rang like bells in the field outside, and the mountains
Rimming the desert hummed like buddhas? Was it even,
I wonder, the same sun? It hasn’t blinked once, but the light
Has changed: books unread multiply on the shelf where the
Spider crawls, the furniture has gotten more worn,
And there’s a resonance, a dimly-hollow bell-echo,
Not fading, but building to an almighty shriek
That could only make us run for cover.
The boomeranging forces of the whirlpool, growing
Like acre-feet of nuclear waste, leave us with the ever-more
Desperate search for a place where they can be safely stored,
Until their half-lives have run full circle,
and their enlightened molecules lie down
To hum their own mysterious peace.


Snowflakes

to a small child glimpsed at Safeway

When I was young and you were unimagined,
A compass in a circle, I looked out
At a landscape only as wide as I dreamed,
And peopled and colored it with what seemed
The very best the kaleidescope (my gift at birth)
Could whirl into being. And you were looking
At me like that—you had the same secret
Strength, a god unaware,
Riding along in that shopping cart,
Leaving it to your mother to worry about
More earthbound, less-important things.
I waved, you stared. What background place
In the lonely circle you’re building yourself
Will I occupy? The sun, the sky, the circumference
As it looks to you are yours alone,
As mine were, before that circle widened,
And everything shrank to its appointed place.
Worlds like snowflakes: within the space
You occupy, (as I once did) where trees
Could be monsters, sunrises gifts,
And holidays lurked beyond the horizon
Like joyous constellations waiting to rise,
Everything you see, singular crystals,
Was there to be arranged as I saw fit,
And now it’s your turn. So build away,
And live as long as you’re allowed
In the magic circle of that divine neurosis,
Doomed to grow until you awake one day
To find the process of its destruction
Suddenly complete, the boundaries you laid out
Nowhere to be seen, the colors dulled,
The constellations set,
The mysterious noises just distracting sound,
The snowflakes melting as they hit the ground.

1983



Any Two Things

for Holly


At Chartres cathedral (they tell me) you can see God
the Geometer, holding a huge compass,
and some of the more mystically-minded still regard
Pythagoras as being on the right track.
Probabilities themselves, they say, prove that there is
an Alpha and Omega behind the veil.
Imagine, for instance, the odds against two flies in
that very cathedral, buzzing past God’s nose,
and somehow managing to bump into each other.
Now multiply that a few quadrillion times,
And you’ve got the odds against two random electrons
finding each other in a blank endlessness.
Then there’s the one we’ve all heard, the “typing monkey” scene:
Statisticians say if the little buggers
Jumped up and down long enough, they’d manage to write not
only “War & Peace,” but all of Shakespeare’s plays,
and even the grocery list I tossed out this morning.
That makes us a cosmology in ourselves,
I think. We were born on opposite sides of the world,
six years apart, and the credulous would say
that our meeting, when it happened, was no accident.
Then again, what if it were dictated from
nowhere, then taken down by a zillion cosmic monkeys?
How pretty a world does that augur for us?
You asked me how I write, and this is how I do it:
(or how it happens, anyway) I’m a void
Where any two things will meet and spark, and a third is born.
I speak, we touch: the word and the touch are things
in themselves, their existence outside my volition,
yet they spark, giving birth to angels and suns.
Islam teaches that everything began with a sneeze.
I think of that, when I think of how you laughed the time
I told you how I sneeze when I get horny.
But when you come right down to it, it’s a lovely thought
that each time I desire you, I make a universe.

Frankfurt-am-Main,
March, 1986



Broadway Melody for Henry Miller


What kind of night is darker than big-city night?
(Big-city night under a billion watts of light,
That’s the hell of it.)
How in the world did you endure that world
Of love in smoke-filled rooms,
Where the men didn’t take their hats off,
And the women didn’t smile?
A dance floor in hell: all those
Nickels in all those
Slots in all those
Machines in all those
Automats—ugh, no wonder
You wanted to sing five thousand year-old songs,
Get drunk on water,
Speak any language that never heard a Brooklyn accent,
Wag your hard-on at the sun.
The time of the assassins has come and gone.
Welcome to the hour of the wet ankles,
The time-bomb ticking in the blood,
The air-conditioned nightmare gone condo.
But you carried bigger bombs inside yourself,
And I can see you, flinging them left and right,
From a bicycle all the better for being imagined,
Pedalling along streets whose shrieks of protest
To you and you alone
Sounded like Scriabin,
Faster than the speed of bullshit,
More powerful than a loaded motive.

December, 1988

CELLO

They said: “The sense of this music is like the patterns of the grain in wood.”
You stand in the corner. The pattern of the grain in wood harbors secrets,
And no less the demand of your presence, insistent, by dint of the very eloquence
Of mute potentiality, and the unspeakable tautness that you imply into the air:
Somehow, someone is compelled to make music here.
To make music, the original demand, not the flick of a switch
That frees you up to let your thoughts wander as something called “music”
Fills the room. Sorting what you demand…it isn’t easy, nor necessarily enjoyable:
Participating in mysteries not very often is. The sublime implies catastrophe.
The tightrope-walker may smile, afterward, watching the videotape,
But not when he’s picking his way slowly forward, under lights and over eyes.
This morning I tucked my pocket watch into the change-pocket of my jeans.
I take it out now, pop it open, see that it’s early afternoon, the sky outside gray,
The upright coffin over there summoning without a sound, bringing to mind
The story of the Russian beauty who told the poor smitten clod to bring her
The tsarina’s shoes, and then, maybe, he might get what he wanted.
Now, in all your elegance, you rest—but not rest at all—against my shoulder,
Between my knees, poised, your strings making that most impossible
And at the same time most promising demand against slightly-calloused fingers:
Then slowly, in motions repeated that they might be as automatic as breathing,
I try to bring out of you (watch ticking, small sweat starting up on my forehead)
A Bach prelude, but not just a Bach prelude, no, that wouldn’t be enough--
It has be a singularity, a once-in-a-universe, never-to-be-repeated event,
Or it has somehow failed to honor the music in that way we all agree
It must, only no two of us can agree on just what defines that quality.
Something disturbs the air. It’s not for me to say if the mysteries have been
Well-served; in this ritual I’m the communicant who waits to see whether
The goddess is pleased or not with the offering tossed on the fire.
She—you—remain mute as the afternoon light when the bow is laid down.
Nothing left now but the instant replay in the mind, and the question
That cannot, in this silence, find a definitive answer: mystery
Remains mystery, despite the point of order poked in the veil by these
Tremulous notes that reverberate even now, in fingers that can remember.
When I was a child I used to imagine shapes in a dish of strawberry jello:
Red was a threatening color, implying adventure, danger, the unknown.
To the woman in the story of the tsarina’s shoes it implies the beautiful,
But not to me at five: “There’s a lion in there, there’s a lion in there, “ I whispered.
Now, in the heavy, questioning silence of after, in which the watch
And the light might constitute either a mockery or a reply,
I find a lion lurking as well in these wood-grain patterns of mystery,
Waiting, indisputable, promising only that she’ll pounce in her own good time.

1996


Bach in the Pantanal


Randy guns the Fiat south
Toward hills that don’t want
Visitors. Unremembered hills
Rise up, through steam unseen,
But seeming still
An echo of hills inside
Yourself,
Resonating silences
From this noisy earth.
The rain streams down: past
Faded signs, locals plod
Along the road,
Oblivious and wet. The hills
Are too far away to walk.
I clamp on my Walkman, talk
Flagging in the heat,
And sound, strangely confident
With joy invades this
Pre-flood scenery. The
Second Brandenburg,
That miracle which rose
From Europe’s own soul-
Dampening drizzle, defies
The jungle thunderheads, until
We park the car beside the road
To snap away at wildlife. There
I get into a stare-down
with a jacare, immobile as
Those thunderheads. The agate
Of his eye encapsulates
The jungle afternoon; his perch
On the swamp-bank brooks
No back-talk from me.
Suddenly, mosquitoes
Are the roar inside
My head. That, at least,
I manage to subdue with Bach.
That’s not for him, though:
He’s old as thunder,
And doesn’t blink.

Pixaim, Brazil
February, 1989



International Hotel


Heavy-metal at breakfast: the waiters don’t mind,
But I do, and block it as well as I’m able,
As I bury myself in my free New York Times
And strain to hear whether, at the next table,

Portuguese, English or Hindi is spoken.
Now it’s the lobby, the bar or the street:
I can’t go upstairs yet—the maids will have broken
Into my room for the towels and sheets.

The bellhops, the desk clerks, they’re all deferential;
Their English is good, though they don’t know your name.
Here you’re well cared-for, with all the essentials,
And each night your room looks exactly the same.

Sao Paulo, Brazil
March, 1990




The Traffic in Sao Paulo

Two blocks, four blocks, six—
Going to work is like watching
Hamburger defrost, and in a din like a video gallery,
Where the stakes are much higher
Than fake planets or quarters.
To miss by inches
Goes unnoticed here,
And timetables should be posted
On every street sign:
Padre Joao Manuel to the Avenida Paulista,
ETA 45 minutes,
Give or take the eternity between
Two shock-enjambed heartbeats,
And the mopping-away of sweat.
No one but cabbies should invade this
whacked-out pinball game,
A slow-motion stampede under a
Swamp-miasma of gasohol,
Breath of a thousand year-old wino
At the most neon hour of the night,
And not even a cabbie, until
He’s racked up enough confirmed kills
To command the respect of his peers.
Honking high noon: the luncheon crowd
Sipping espresso at the Café Almanara
Is treated to a wedding’s worth
Of racket when someone stalls
A derelict VW at the corner.
O dear God no—not a cloudburst,
Not now…
But it lets up in minutes,
And the streets become
A steaming ice-rink in the
Late-November sun.
Now poise at the curb’s edge,
Urban cliff-diver; don’t slip—
You’re not at home here;
You won’t understand those
Last-second curses,
And the bus driver?
He won’t even look back.

1989


The Island Around the Corner

From the island around the corner,
Where dawn is an act of willing,
The vicissitudes of midnight
Puncture the sailor’s dreams.
His unlikely dreams of landfall
Satellite-photo that coastline,
As time takes the face of icebergs,
And the snapshot-clocks are stupid,
And the vestals of morning stoke
Beach fires that burn without light
On the island around the corner.

On the island around the corner,
Where the coiled springs all lie broken
And the keys to the locks are misplaced
Beyond cobweb-ripping light,
No codebreaker holds bright vigil,
Or boasts of the blueprints to sorrow,
And the sailor who hears the waves breaking
Wakes up to find only calm sea.
No bells ring, nor are heard rising
The appoggiaturas of a dawn breeze
On the island around the corner.

On the island around the corner,
Where the cliff-walls all face westward,
And absorb the cries of sea-birds
With their backs to the threat of day,
The seed of the earthquake that threatens
In the tossings of the dreamer
Who calls up both island and sailor
Shakes no tree, nor this earth’s resolve.
The rules have been set down in sorrow,
And the treetops will brook no consoling
On the island around the corner.

March, 2000



Closing the Consulate

Sometimes what’s been forgotten can speak
More eloquently than what’s been remembered.
Four old, crumbling books, swiped from a box--
I can’t imagine how they’ll ever be missed--
Paint pictures of a past no one thinks about now,
One that might never have been there at all,
Through glass tinted during an age and a time
When things were built to last, though nowadays
We have trouble even grasping such an idea.

The closed-circuit camera facing the back door
Makes you pause for a split second, but then
You smile at yourself--it’s as dead as the rest
Of this building; no longer does a glassed-in
Marine eyeball a monitor at the other end.
Among a pile of trash in the hallway lies a transcript
Of the speech the secretary made here last month,
With German newspapers respectfully covering
The last-time reeling-down of the American flag.

It’s everywhere, that official talk, but more articulate
Are the things now speaking that you know
Will be forgotten: this afternoon light on the
CASHIER sign, and on the hours posted for
Passport business, the empty basement lockers,
The now-meaningless “security check sheet”
On the propped-open-with-a-brick bulletproof door,
Which invites the world (which ignores the invitation)
To watch as we haul an old refrigerator away.

Stuttgart, Germany
September 1996



Extremism In The Defense of Music
Is No Vice

In memory of Leonard Bernstein


That which unifies also separates:
“Universal language” my ass—you should
Have been there the night they booed
Messaien. Then again, you probably were,
And whatever you thought or said that night,
We should have heard. I’ve read the clippings,
Seen the video, sensed the question
Behind the glance and the well-turned phrase.

Your polytonality was dark—you played
The useful idiot when it suited your key,
But if anyone had bothered stopping to ask,
You could have sorted out the sense for them
Of Messaien’s bird-logic, Stockhausen’s way
Of juggling time, Or the hide-in-plain-sight
Wood-grain patterns of Carter. Beethoven
Chords leave no room for argument; Mahler’s
Appoggiaturas leave nothing but, and beyond
Lies a shifting landscape: mountains, glens
And valleys you knew intimately enough
To keep us arguing amongst ourselves for years.

“What’s this?” They say you said at the end.
I only hope it was worth your attention,
And not another variant of the Stupid Question,
Questioning the ends: the ends are music,
You said it yourself, with as much finality
As it could be said. The means, they’re fodder
For Newsweek, a noisome racket that dies
On the first tremor of a downbeat’s stroke.


October, 1993



Late Winter Sketches

Taxi Ride

Spinning wheels on the ice,
and waving around whoever’s behind,
the cabbie mutters. He’s one of those
who’s made a living room of the front seat:
beads, sacred heart, pictures of the kids…
while a cop watches from the corner,
(his partner slipping into the 7-11)
shadows in an SUV, rocking past over the
deep snow ruts, just barely restrain
(you can feel it) the bird.
The door swings open,
and as his breath turns to steam,
the cabbie lurches out into the street-lamp light,
Stumbles around back, throws open the trunk,
hauls out a sack of kitty litter and voila—
instant traction.
Now we’re underway again,
beneath the eye of the cop who hasn’t moved,
and my watch, which I shake.
It’s stopped.

Messy Divorce

Shuttle diplomacy,
lawyers on the line,
the child a sleepy lateral pass
between icy sunset at Grandma’s
and chilly dawn at the airport…
The telephone burbles in mid-anecdote,
and suddenly her distracted eyes,
like Superman’s,
shoot past him,
miles beyond the glass door
beside the potted palm—
Interrupted, he has no choice
but to make common cause
with that cheerful door,
whispering, smiling, nodding himself out.
Ding-dong, happy as morning itself,
it ushers him back
to where the sign says “5th floor.”

Gospel Remote

Whale-backs of winter,
Bus-and-dog insulted,
Die in the gutter
While the music blares.
(The season in its seed
Changes hands, rising
Against a dusk for weeks
Pushing limits.)
Salvation blasts
Faces of brownstones,
Ears of worn asphalt—
The four-lettered van,
Ferryslipped at the curb
Leaves no doubt
Of what it’s all about.
(Someone inside is
Dial-twiddling probably,
While two shadowy figures
On the railed stoop,
Sway, talk-or-sing;
It’s hard to tell which
From here.) The high-
Ceilinged harmony of
These city hallelujahs
Hums the window screens
Beneath risen panes,
Up for the first time,
Most likely, since these
Mud-spattered patrol cars,
Oozing around the corner,
Sullenly endured their threats
Under solsticial light.

2000


Etude

The sky is friendly because it doesn’t care.
If the late, first-of-November wind
Rips loose the screen from my front door,
It’s not bad weather; I tighten the screws
And turn back to what I was doing before.
The branches whip like women’s hair.
And yes, it might be that the wind wants an answer,
And yes, there are poets who talk to the wind,
But I think that I’m out of my depth in the air.


November, 1999