Aimless Love (13 page)

The woman on the radio

who was lodging the old complaint

that her husband never listens to her

reminded me of the music of the spheres,

that chord of seven notes,

one for each of the visible planets,

which has been sounding

since the beginning of the universe,

and which we can never hear,

according to Pythagoras

because we hear it all the time

so it sounds the same as silence.

But let’s say the needle were lifted

from the spinning grooves

of those celestial orbs—

then people would stop

on the streets and look up,

and others would stop in the fields

and hikers would stop in the woods

and look this way and that

as if they were hearing something

for the first time,

and that husband would lower

the newspaper from his face

look at his wife

who has been standing in the doorway

and ask
Did you just say something, dear?

You are turning me

like someone turning a globe in her hand,

and yes, I have another side

like a China no one,

not even me, has ever seen.

So describe to me what’s there,

say what you are looking at

and I will close my eyes

so I can see it too,

the oxcarts and all the lively flags.

I love the sound of your voice

like a little saxophone

telling me what I could never know

unless I dug a hole all the way down

through the core of my self.

It is possible to stick your foot

into the same swimming pool twice,

dive, or even cannonball

into the deep or shallow end

as many times as you like

depending on how much you had to drink.

Oh faithful light, under which I have written

and read for all these decades,

flying saucer with your underbelly softly aglow,

rising on a stem from a heavy metal base,

lamp I rescued from my old girlfriend’s mother,

who was about to toss you

from her condo on a bluff

overlooking the ruffled Pacific.

Has anyone been with me longer?

me without siblings or children,

you with your kindly 60 watt frosted bulb,

you who have not died like others I knew,

you nestled in a bath towel

on the floorboards of the car

as I backed it down the driveway of my marriage

and steered east then south down the two-then four-lane roads.

So may nights like this one,

me sleepless, you gazing down on the page

and now on a crystal rock, a tiny figure of a pig,

and an orchid dying in its blue China pot.

But that is more than enough

of the sad drapery of the past as I hold the present

between two fingers and the thumb

and a blue train whistles in the distance.

It’s time to saddle up, partner,

once I unplug your tail from the socket,

time to ride out west,

far from the gaucheries of men,

the inconstancy of women,

and the rowdy mortality of them all,

until we find a grove of trees near a river—

just you and me with our bedrolls under a scattering of stars.

That morning under a pale hood of sky

I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling

against the side of our wickered, penitential house.

The day mirled and clabbered

in the thick, stony light,

and the rooks’ feathered narling

astounded the salt waves, the plush arm of coast.

I carried my bucket past the forked

coercion of a tree, up toward

the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school,

hunkered there in its gully of learning.

But only later, as I stood before a wash-stand

and gaunt, phosphorescent heifers

swam purposefully beyond these windows

did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite

manage to whorl me into knowledge.

Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle

on the rough threshold

and understood the meadow-bells

that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort—

the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.

When you told me you needed a
drink
-drink

and not just a drink like a drink of water,

I steered you by the elbow into a corner bar,

which turned out to be a real bar-bar,

dim and nearly empty with little tables in the back

where we drank and agreed that the funeral

was a real
funeral
-funeral complete with a Mass,

incense, and tons of eulogies.

You know, I always considered Tom a real

friend
-friend, you said, lifting your
drink
-drink

to your lips, and I agreed that Tom

was much more than just an ordinary friend.

We also concurred that Angela’s black dress

was elegant but not like
elegant
-elegant,

just elegant enough. And a few hours later

when the bartender brought yet another round

of whiskeys to our table in the corner

we recognized by his apron and his mighty girth

that he was more than just a bartender.

A true
bartender
-bartender was what he was

we decided, with a respectful
clink-clink

of our
drink
-drinks, amber in a chink of afternoon light.

was what we called a game we played

which had nothing to do

with a favorite autumn,

somebody else’s gorgeous reds and yellows.

no, eleven years old

all we wanted was to be shot

as we charged sacrificially into the fire

of the shooter lying prone behind a hedge

or even better, to be that shooter

and pick off the others

as they charged the gun

each one stopping in his young tracks

to writhe and twist

aping the contortions of death

from the movies,

clutching our bleeding hearts

holding ourselves

as we lifted—a moment of ballet—

into the air then tumbled

into the grass behind our houses.

and whoever invented that game

made sure it would have

no ending,

for the one who was awarded

best fall by the shooter

got to be the next shooter

and so it went, shooting and being shot,

tearing at our cowboy shirts

trying our best

to make death look good

until it got almost dark

and our mothers called us in.

You and your frozen banana,

you and your crème brûlée.

Can’t we just skip dessert

and go back to the Hotel d’Orsay?

You and your apple tart

and your plates of profiteroles.

Can’t we just ask for the check?

Can’t you hear Time’s mortal call?

Why linger here at the table

stuffing ourselves with sweets

when all the true pleasures await us

in room trois cent quarante-huit?

Just because I’m dead now doesn’t mean

I don’t exist anymore.

All those eulogies and the obituary

in the corner of the newspaper

have made me feel more vibrant than ever.

I’m here in some fashion,

maybe like a gust of wind

that disturbs the upper leaves,

or blows a hat around a corner,

or disperses a little cloud of mayflies over a stream.

What I like best about this

is you realizing you can no longer

get away with things the way you used to

when it would be ten o’clock at night

and I wouldn’t know where you were.

I’m all ears
, you liked to say

whenever you couldn’t bother listening.

And now you know that I’m all eyes,

looking in every direction,

and a special eye is always trained on you.

There was a lot to notice that morning

in the Church of Saint Dorothy, virgin martyr—

a statue of Mary with a halo of electric lights,

a faded painting of a saint in flight,

Joseph of Copertino, as it turned out,

and an illustration above a side altar

bearing the title “The Musical Ecstasy of St. Francis.”

But what struck me in a special way

like a pebble striking the forehead

was the realization that the simple design

running up the interior of the church’s dome

was identical to the design on the ceiling

of the room by the Spanish Steps

where Keats had died and where I

had stood with lifted eyes just the day before.

It was nothing more than a row

of squares, each with the carved head

of a white flower on a background of blue,

but all during the priest’s sermon

(which was either about the Wedding at Cana

or the miracle of the loaves and fishes

as far as my Italian could tell)

I was staring at the same image

that the author of
Hyperion
had stared at

from his death bed as he was being devoured by tuberculosis.

It was worth coming to Rome

if only to see what supine Keats was beholding

just before there would be no more Keats,

only Shelley, not yet swallowed by a wave,

and Byron before his Greek fever,

and Wordsworth who outlived Romanticism itself.

And it pays to lift the eyes, I thought outside the church

where a man on a bench was reading a newspaper,

a woman was scolding her child,

and the heavy sky, visible above the narrow streets

of Trastevere, was in the process

of breaking up, showing segments of blue

and the occasional flash of Roman sunlight.

Here on this map of the oceans everything is reversed—

the land all black except for the names of the continents

whereas the watery parts, colored blue,

have topographical features and even place names

like the Bermuda Rise, which sounds harmless enough

as does the Cocos Ridge, but how about exploring

The Guafo Fracture Zone when you’re all alone?

And from the many plateaus and seamounts—

the Falkland, the Manning, the Azores—

all you could see is water and if you’re lucky

a big fish swallowing a school of smaller ones

through the bars of your deep-sea diver’s helmet.

And talk about depth: at 4,000 feet below the surface,

where you love to float on your back all summer,

we enter the Midnight Zone where the monkfish

quietly says his prayers in order to attract fresh prey,

and drop another couple of miles and you

have reached The Abyss where the sea cucumber

is said to undulate minding its own business

unless it’s deceiving an attacker with its luminescence

before disappearing into the blackness.

What attacker, I can hear you asking,

could be down there messing with the sea cucumber?

and that is exactly why I crumpled the map into a ball

and stuffed it in a metal wastebasket

before heading out for a long walk along a sunny trail

in the thin, high-desert air, accompanied

by juniper trees, wildflowers, and that gorgeous hawk.

Walking the dog,
you meet
lots of dogs.

—Soshi

One was a seventeenth-century doctor

arrested for trading with Dutch merchants.

One loved
sake
then disappeared

through the doors of a monastery in his final years.

Another was a freight agent

who became a nun after her husband died.

Quite a few lived the samurai life

excelling in the lance, sword, and horseback riding

as well as poetry, painting, and calligraphy.

This one started writing poems at eight,

and that one was a rice merchant of some repute.

One was a farmer, another ran a pharmacy.

But next to the name of my favorite, Soshi,

there is no information at all,

not even a guess at his years and a question mark,

which left me looking vacantly at the wall

after I had read his perfect little poem.

Whether you poke your nose into Plato

or get serious with St. John of the Cross,

you will not find a more unassailable truth

than walking the dog, you meet lots of dogs

or a sweeter one, I would add.

If I were a teacher with a student

who deserved punishment, I would make him write

Walking the dog, you meet lots of dogs

on the blackboard a hundred thousand times

or until the boy discovered

that this was no punishment at all, but a treat.