Aimless Love (10 page)

but all I can say is that I sensed

a similarity between me and give me a break.

And that was close enough

at that point in the evening

even if it meant I would fall short

of standing up from the table and screaming

Give me a break,

for God’s sake will you please give me a break?!

No, for that moment

with the rain streaking the restaurant windows

and the waiter approaching,

I felt the most I could be was like

to a certain degree

give me a break.

I seem to have forgotten several features

crucial to the doing of this,

for instance, how your lower lip

meets your upper lip besides just being below it,

and what happens at the end of the nose,

how much does it shade the plane of your cheek,

and would even a bit of nostril be visible from this angle?

Chinese eyes, you call them

which could be the difficulty I have

in showing the flash of light in your iris,

and being so far away from you for so long,

I cannot remember what direction

it flows, the deep river of your hair.

But all of this will come together

the minute I see you again at the station,

my notebook and pens packed away,

your face smiling as I cup it in my hands,

or frowning later when we are home

and you are berating me in the kitchen

waving the pages in my face

demanding to know the name of this latest little whore.

My new copper-colored bicycle

is looking pretty fine under a blue sky

as I pedal along one of the sandy paths

in the Palm Cemetery here in Florida,

wheeling past the headstones of the Lyons,

the Campbells, the Dunlaps, and the Davenports,

Arthur and Ethel, who outlived him by 11 years

I slow down even more to notice,

but not so much as to fall sideways on the ground.

And here’s a guy named Happy Grant

next to his wife Jean in their endless bed.

Annie Sue Simms is right there and sounds

a lot more fun than Theodosia S. Hawley.

And good afternoon, Emily Polasek

and to you too, George and Jane Cooper,

facing each other in profile, two sides of a coin.

I wish I could take you all for a ride

in my wire basket on this glorious April day,

not a thing as simple as your name, Bill Smith,

even trickier then Clarence Augustus Coddington.

Then how about just you, Enid Parker?

Would you like to gather up your voluminous skirts

and ride side-saddle on the crossbar

and tell me what happened between 1863 and 1931?

I’ll even let you ring the silver bell.

But if you’re not ready, I can always ask

Mary Brennan to rise from her long sleep

beneath the swaying grey beards of Spanish moss

and ride with me along these halls of the dead

so I can listen to her strange laughter

as some crows flap overhead in the blue

and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.

As optical illusions go

it was one of the more spectacular,

a cluster of bright stars

appearing to move across the night sky

as if on a secret mission

while, of course, it was the low clouds

that were doing the moving,

scattered over my head by a wind from the east.

And as hard as I looked

I could not get the stars to budge again.

It was like the curious figure

of the duck/rabbit—

why, even paradoxical Wittgenstein

could not find his way back to the rabbit

once he had beheld the bill of the duck.

But which was which?

Were the stars the rabbit

and the blown clouds the duck?

or the other way around?

You’re being ridiculous,

I said to myself,

on the walk back to the house,

but then the correct answer struck me

not like a bolt of lightning,

but more like a heavy bolt of cloth.

Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,

the tortoise has stopped once again

by the roadside,

this time to stick out his neck

and nibble a bit of sweet grass,

unlike the previous time

when he was distracted

by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.

After our final class, when we disbanded

as the cigar rollers here had disbanded decades ago,

getting up from their benches for the last time

as the man who read to them during their shift

closed his book without marking the page where he left off,

I complimented myself on my restraint.

For never in that sunny white building

did I draw an analogy between cigar-making and poetry.

Not even after I had studied the display case

containing the bladed
chaveta
, the ring gauge,

and the hand guillotine with its measuring rule

did I suggest that the cigar might be a model for the poem.

Nor did I ever cite the exemplary industry

of those anonymous rollers and cutters—

the best producing 300 cigars in a day

compared to 3 flawless poems in a lifetime if you’re lucky—

who worked the broad leaves of tobacco

into cylinders ready to be held lightly in the hand.

Not once did I imply that tightly rolling an intuition

into a perfectly shaped, hand-made thing

might encourage a reader to remove the brightly colored

encircling band and slip it over her finger

and take the poet as her spouse in a sudden puff of smoke.

No, I kept all of that to myself, until now.

Everything is fine—

the first bits of sun are on

the yellow flowers behind the low wall,

people in cars are on their way to work,

and I will never have to write again.

Just looking around

will suffice from here on in.

Who said I had to always play

the secretary of the interior?

And I am getting good at being blank,

staring at all the zeroes in the air.

It must have been all the time spent

in the kayak this summer

that brought this out,

the yellow one which went

nicely with the pale blue life jacket—

the sudden, tippy

buoyancy of the launch,

then the exertion, striking

into the wind against the short waves,

but the best was drifting back,

the paddle resting athwart the craft,

and me mindless in the middle of time.

Not even that dark cormorant

perched on the
No Wake
sign,

his narrow head raised

as if he were looking over something,

not even that inquisitive little fellow

could bring me to write another word.

Too bad you weren’t here six months ago,

was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska.

You could have seen the astonishing spectacle

of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them

feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River.

There was no point in pointing out

the impossibility of my being there then

because I happened to be somewhere else,

so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment

if only to be part of the commiseration.

It was the same look I remember wearing

about six months ago in Georgia

when I was told that I had just missed

the spectacular annual outburst of azaleas,

brilliant against the green backdrop of spring

and the same in Vermont six months before that

when I arrived shortly after

the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked,

Mother Nature, as she is called,

having touched the hills with her many-colored brush,

a phenomenon that occurs, like the others,

around the same time every year when I am apparently off

in another state, stuck in a motel lobby

with the local paper and a styrofoam cup of coffee,

busily missing God knows what.

How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,

jotting down little things,

noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,

then wondering what will become of me,

and finally to work alone under a lamp

as if everything depended on this,

groping blindly down a page,

like someone lost in a forest.

And to think it all began one night

on the steps of a nunnery

where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket,

which was doubling for a proper baby carrier,

staring into the turbulent winter sky,

too young to wonder about anything

including my recent abandonment—

but it was there that I committed

my first act of self-expression,

sticking out my infant tongue

and receiving in return (I can see it now)

a large, pristine snowflake much like any other.

There’s a possum who appears here at odd times,

often walking up the path to the house

in the middle of the day like a little ghost

with a long tail and a blank expression on his face.

He likes to slip behind the woodpile,

but sometimes he gets so close to the window

where I am standing with a glass in my hand

that I start to review my sins, systematically

going from one commandment to the next.

What is it about him that causes me

to begin an examination of conscience,

calling to mind my failings in this time of reflection?

It could just be the twitching of the tail

and that white face, but his slow priestly pace

also makes a contribution, as do the tiny paws,

more like hands, really, with opposable thumbs

able to carry a nut or dig a hole in the earth

or lift a chalice above his head

or even deliver a document,

I am thinking as he nears the back door,

not merely a subpoena but an order

of excommunication with my name and a date

written in fine Italian ink

and signed with a flourish of the papal sash.

The Tyrrhenian Sea was bouncing off to the right

as we headed south down the coast,

and to the left rose the Apennine mountains,

some with their faces quarried away,

from where heavy blocks of white marble

had been cut and carried down

and stacked in rows in yards along the highway.

Is anyone hiding within? I wondered,

as we passed a little Fiat

and were passed in turn by a green Lamborghini,

hiding the way Pinocchio hid inside a log—

maybe a David who goes by another name,

or an anonymous girl caught dancing,

or any other figure encased and yet to be revealed.

Are you in there, Dawn with your sunburst halo,

concealed from the freshly sharpened chisel?

How about you, Spirit of Revolution

waving a flag of marble

and crushing the serpent of Tyranny with one foot?

Or is nobody home, no one barely breathing

in the heavy darkness of the pure white stone?

Soon, we were standing on a wide beach

where the body of Shelley had floated ashore,

and where all those questions washed away—

though later I pictured a sculptor wandering

among the blocks, hands clasped behind his back,

then deciding it was time to get to work

on a towering likeness of his favorite English poet.

For one thing, there’s no more snow

to watch from an evening window,

and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house

so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow,

and once inside, no iron stove like an old woman

waiting to devour her early dinner of wood.

No hexagrams of frost to study

on the cold glass pages of the bathroom.

No black sweater to pull over my head

while I wait for the coffee to brew.

Instead, I walk around in children’s clothes—

shorts and a tee shirt with the name of a band

lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody.

The sun never fails to arrive early

and refuses to leave the party

even after I go from room to room,

turning out all the lights, and making a face.

And the birds with those long white necks?

All they do is swivel their heads

keeping an eye on me as I walk along,

as if they all knew my password

and the name of the little town where I was born.