Aimless Love (12 page)

I considered all the people

who would be grateful to have this apple,

and others who might find it in their hearts

to kill me before slipping it into a pocket.

And I considered another slice

of the world’s population, too,

those who are shielded from anything

as offensive as a slightly imperfect apple.

Then I took a second bite, a big one,

and pitched what was left

over the tall hedges hoping to hit on the head

a murderer or one of the filthy rich out for a stroll.

As I was wandering the city this morning

working on my impression of Michael Caine,

I began to think about her again—

which makes it sound as if she were far away

or lost in the past or possibly both.

But I was with her only an hour ago,

and later I will sit in the kitchen

and watch her hair hiding her face

as she stirs some onions and butter in a skillet

and I pour us a glass of frosty white wine.

Still, she has been known to vanish

as if in a mist as we walk past

a row of store windows, or she will disappear

behind a hedge or into a side room at a party.

And often no aisle of the supermarket reveals her.

Like the fox, she is nowhere and everywhere,

a tail of fire out of the corner of my eye,

one of the corners she likes to turn

just as the streetlights are coming on

when I am searching for her in the evening crowd.

Would she and Michael Caine hit it off,

I wondered as I emerged from an alley

only to see her staring at me from a spot on a public bench.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

John Whalen.

It seems whenever I dig in the woods

on the slope behind this house

I unearth some object from the past—

a shard of crockery or a bottle with its stopper missing,

sometimes a piece of metal, maybe handled

by the dairy farmer who built this house

over a century and a half ago

as civil war waged unabated to the south.

So it’s never a surprise

when the shovel-tip hits a rusted bolt,

or a glass knob from a drawer—

little hands waving from the past.

And today, it’s a buried toy,

a little car with a dent in the roof

and enough flecks of paint to tell it was blue.

Shrouded in a towel, the body of our cat

lies nearby on the ground where I settled her

in the mottled light of the summer trees,

and I still have to widen the hole

and deepen it for her by at least another foot,

but not before I stop for a moment

with the once-blue car idling in my palm,

to imagine the boy who grew up here

and to see that two of the crusted wheels still spin.

It’s hard to describe how that day in the park

was altered when I stopped to read

an official sign I came across near the great carousel,

my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Ambrose.

As the carousel turned in the background,

all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses

rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope,

I was learning how the huge thing

was first designed to be powered

by a blind mule, as it turned out,

strapped to the oar of a wheel in an earthen

room directly below the merry turning of the carousel.

The sky did not darken with this news

nor did a general silence fall on the strollers

or the ball players on the green fields.

No one even paused to look my way,

though I must have looked terrible

as I stood there filling with sympathy

not so much for the harnessed beast

tediously making its rounds,

but instead for the blind mule within me

always circling in the dark—

the mule who makes me turn when my name is called

or causes me to nod with a wooden gaze

or sit doing nothing on a bench in the shape of a swan.

Somewhere, there must still be a door

to that underground room,

the lock rusted shut, the iron key misplaced,

last year’s leaves piled up against the sill,

and inside, a trace of straw on the floor,

a whiff of manure, and maybe a forgotten bit

or a bridle hanging from a hook in the dark.

Poor blind beast
, I sang softly as I left the park,

poor blind me, poor blind earth turning blindly on its side
.

Oh, large brown, thickly feathered creature

with a distinctive white head,

you, perched on the top branch

of a tree near the lake shore,

as soon as I guide this boat back to the dock

and walk up the grassy path to the house,

before I unzip my windbreaker

and lift the binoculars from around my neck,

before I wash the gasoline from my hands,

before I tell anyone I’m back,

and before I hang the ignition key on its nail,

or pour myself a drink—

I’m thinking a vodka soda with lemon—

I will look you up in my

illustrated guide to North American birds

and I promise I will learn what you are called.

I feel nothing this morning

except the low hum of the ego,

a constant, shameless sound behind the rib cage.

I even keep forgetting my friend in surgery

at this very hour.

In other words, a perfect time to write

about clouds rolling in after a week of sun

and a woman beating laundry on a rock

in front of her house overlooking the sea—

all of which I am making up—

the clouds, the house, the woman, even the laundry.

Or take the lights strung in a harbor

that I once saw from the bow of a sailboat,

which seemed unreal at the time and more unreal now.

Even if I were there again at the ship’s railing

as I am sitting here in a lawn chair, who would believe it?

Vast maple tree above me, are you really there?

and you, open cellar door,

and you, vast sky with sun and a fading contrail—

no more real than the pretend city

where she lies now under the investigating lights,

an imaginary surgeon busy

breaking into the vault of her phantom skull.

The first line will not go away

though the middle ones will disappear,

and the third, like the first, is bound to get more play.

Examples of this type are written every day,

and whether uplifting or drear,

that first line will just not go away.

It seems some lines have the right of way.

It’s their job to reappear,

for example, the third, designed to get more play.

Whether you squawk like an African Grey

or sing sweetly to the inner ear,

the line you wrote first will just not go away.

You may compose all night and day

under a bare lightbulb or a crystal chandelier,

but line number three must get more play.

How can a poet hope to go wildly astray

or sing out like a romantic gondolier

when the first line will not go away

and the third always has the final say?

or at least in the general vicinity

of Flying Point Beach,

certainly closer than I normally am

to that beach where the ocean

crests the dunes at high tide

spilling tons of new salt water into Mecox Bay,

and probably closer to Flying Point Beach

than you are right now

or I happen to be as you read this.

But how close do I really need to be

to Flying Point Beach

or to any beach in order to write these lines?

Oh, Flying Point Beach,

I love all three words in your name,

not to mention the deep, white sand

and the shorebirds on their thin legs

facing into the wind

along that low stretch between the ocean and the bay.

How satisfying it is to be

even within bicycling distance of you,

though it’s dangerous to ride at the edge of these roads.

Thoreau had his cabin near a pond.

Virginia Woolf stood on the shore of the River Ouse,

and here I am writing all this down

not very far at all—maybe twenty minutes by taxi

if the driver ever manages to find this place—

from the many natural wonders of Flying Point Beach.

No, this time I’m not kidding around.

There’s some half-shattered outdoor furniture,

then crowds of dianthus and pink hydrangeas,

honeysuckle going wild over the bright blue door,

and zinc buckets and coal carriers overflowing

with pansies, lavender, and some kind of soft fern—

just the right combination of growth and neglect.

And you don’t have to wish for a brick wall,

a gravel path or a leaning disused shed

to complete the picture because they’re all right here

as well as a concrete statue of a maiden

holding a jug, one breast exposed, overgrown with ivy.

The only thing you might not think of,

being in another place so far away,

is this one bee who just refused to wait

for all the morning glories to unfurl in the early sun,

and instead, pushed her way into the white flute

of a blossom, disappearing for a moment

before she flew off in her distinctive gold

and black uniform like a player on a team,

heading over the hedge toward a core of honey.

Pardon my benevolence,

but given the illusion that my fellow passengers and I

are now on our way to glory,

rising over this kingdom of clouds

(airy citadels! unnamable goings-on within!)

and at well over 500 miles per hour,

which would get you to work in under one second,

I wish to forgive the man next to me

who so annoyed me before the wine started arriving

by turning each page of his newspaper

with a kind of crisp, military snap,

and the same goes for that howling infant,

and for the child in the row behind me

who persisted in hitting that F above high C

that all of her kind know perfectly how to hit

while rhythmically kicking the back of my seat.

Yes, I have softened and been rendered

even grateful by the ministrations of Eva,

uniformed wine bearer in the sky,

and if we are not exactly being conveyed to Paradise,

at least we are vectoring across the continent

to Los Angeles—orange tree in the backyard,

girl on a motorcycle roaring down Venice Boulevard.

And eventually we will begin our final descent

(
final descent!
I want to shout to Eva)

into the city of a million angels,

where the world might terminate or begin afresh again,

which is how I tend to feel almost every day—

life’s end just around another corner or two,

yet out the morning window

the thrust of a new blossom from that bush

whose colorful name I can never remember.

I remember the first time I realized

how lacking I was in Negative Capability.

It was on a long slope of lawn

next to a turreted stone building

that housed the shenanigans

of the department of English.

Some brown birds were pecking in the grass,

and yet here I was, a nineteen year old

too concerned with my clothes

and the nervous mystery of girls

to identify with this group of common sparrows

another student was pointing to,

let alone the nightingale we had read about,

invisible in the woods of England.

I was so short on empathy in those days

the only Negative Capability I could have possessed

would be negative Negative Capability,

which I could have turned into a positive

had Keats not so firmly determined

that regular Negative Capability was already a positive thing.

All those birds are surely dead by now,

no more hopping around

in the grass of Massachusetts for them,

but I’m still here this afternoon

looking at a dog asleep half under the porch,

an old brown mongrel with a hoary muzzle,

his paws twitching so frantically

I can even see what he is dreaming

as the sun helps itself down the sky.

Yes, I am watching him jump a stone wall

in pursuit of a darting rabbit—

I’m way up on a high branch

of a tree that is swaying in the wind of his dream.