Aimless Love (14 page)

And if I were that student

holding a broken piece of chalk

ready to begin filling the panels of the board,

I would first stand by one of the tall windows

to watch the other students running in the yard

shouting each other’s names,

the large autumn trees sheltering their play,

everything so obvious now, thanks to the genius of Sōshi.

From this dock by a lake

where I walked down after a late dinner—

some clouds blown like gauze across the stars,

and every so often an airplane

crossing the view from left to right,

its green starboard wing light

descending against this soft wind into the city airport.

The permanent stars,

I think on the walk back to the house,

and the momentary clouds in their vaporous shapes,

I go on, my hands clasped behind my back

like a professor of nothing in particular.

Then I am near enough to the house—

warm, amber windows,

cold dots of lights from the Christmas tree,

glad to have seen those clouds, now blown away,

happy to be under the stars,

constant and swirling in the firmament,

and here on the threshold of this house

with all its work and hope,

and steady enough under a fixed and shifting sky.

He who eats alone chokes alone.

—Arab saying

I would rather eat at the bar,

but such behavior is regarded

by professionals as a form of denial,

so here I am seated alone

at a table with a white tablecloth

attended by an elderly waiter with no name—

ideal conditions for dining alone

according to the connoisseurs of this minor talent.

I have brought neither book nor newspaper

since reading material is considered cheating.

Eating alone, they say, means eating alone,

not in the company of Montaigne

or the ever-engaging Nancy Mitford.

Nor do I keep glancing up as if waiting

for someone who inevitably fails to appear—

a sign of moral weakness

to those who take this practice seriously.

And the rewards?

I am thinking of an obvious one right now

as I take the time to contemplate

on my lifted fork a piece of trout with almond slices.

And I can enjoy swirling the wine in my glass

until it resembles a whirlpool

in a 19th-century painting of a ship foundering in a storm.

Then there are the looks of envy

from that fellow on the blind date

and the long-married couple facing each other in silence.

I pierced a buttered spear of asparagus

and wondered if the moon would be visible tonight,

but uncapping my pen was out of the question

for writing, too, is frowned upon

by the true champions of solitude.

All that would have to wait

until after I have walked home,

collar up, under the streetlights.

Not until I would hear the echo of the front door

closing behind me could I record

in a marbled notebook—

like the ones I had as a schoolboy—

my observations about the art

of dining alone in the company of strangers.

From the deck of the swimming pool

you could see the planes taking off from LAX

and whenever my father visited his friend there,

the two of them would sit in the sun with their drinks

and kill the time between golf and dinner

by betting on whether the next plane would bank

left or right, and if you picked the long shot—

one continuing straight over the ocean—you got double.

The time I was there with them, I watched

the singles and fives changing hands

as they laughed “You lucky bastard!”

and I learned again the linkage between friendship and money

and the sweet primacy of one over the other,

which is not to say that Sandburg’s six-volume

biography of Lincoln or the writings of Lao Tzu

are not also excellent teachers, each in its own way.

Early on, I noticed that you always say it

to each of your children

as you are getting off the phone with them

just as you never fail to say it

to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.

It’s all new to this only child.

I never heard my parents say it,

at least not on such a regular basis,

nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.

To say I love you pretty much every day

would have seemed strangely obvious,

like saying I’m looking at you

when you are standing there looking at someone.

If my parents had started saying it

a lot, I would have started to worry about them.

Of course, I always like hearing it from you.

That is never a cause for concern.

The problem is I now find myself saying it back

if only because just saying good-bye

then hanging up would make me seem discourteous.

But like Bartleby, I would prefer not to

say it so often, would prefer instead to save it

for special occasions, like shouting it out as I leaped

into the red mouth of a volcano

with you standing helplessly on the smoking rim,

or while we are desperately clasping hands

before our plane plunges into the Gulf of Mexico,

which are only two of the examples I had in mind,

but enough, as it turns out, to make me

want to say it to you right now,

and what better place than in the final couplet

of a poem where, as every student knows, it really counts.

Death, one thing you can be proud of

is all the room you manage to take up

in this
Concordance to the Poems of John Donne
,

edited by Homer Carroll Combs and published in 1945.

Mighty and dreadful are your tall columns here,

(though
soul
and
love
put you in deep shade)

for you outnumber
man
and outscore even
life
itself,

and you are roughly tied with
God
and, strangely,
eyes
.

But no one likes the way you swell,

not even in these scholarly rows,

where from the complex fields of his poems

each word has returned to the alphabet with a sigh.

And lovelier than you are the ones that only once he tried:

syllable
and
porcelain
, but also
beach, cup, snail, lamp
, and
pie
.

When you wake up with nothing,

but you are nonetheless drawn to your sunny chair

near the French doors, it may be necessary

to turn to some of the others to get you going.

So I opened a book of Gerald Stern

but I didn’t want to face my age

by writing about my childhood in the 1940s.

Then I read two little Merwins

which made me feel I should apply

for a position in a corner sandwich shop.

And it only took one Simic,

which ended with a couple on a rooftop

watching a child on fire leap from a window,

to get me to replace the cap on my pen,

put on some sweatpants and go for a walk

around the lake to think of a new career,

but not before I told you all about it

in well, look at this, five quatrains—

better than nothing for a weekday,

I thought, as I headed merrily out the door.

Signs and countersigns should be established
to determine your friends in the dark
.

—Robert Rogers,
Rules for Ranging

Such a ripe opportunity is presented here

to expand what Rogers meant,

making those friends our own friends and the dark, The Dark.

But is there not enough in this early manual

on guerrilla warfare written in 1758

in the midst of the French and Indian War

and still in use to this day

by those who must cross on foot

the unfriendly fields and woods of combat?

Yes, given the common guile of the world, we might

send one or two men forward to scout

the area and avoid traps before breaking camp
.

And as far as being attacked from the rear goes,

sure,
immediately reverse order
,

and the same goes if attacked from the flank

as we often are, blindsided by a friend

in the dark or right in the face

outside a motel in the glow of a drink machine.

But why not honor the literal for a change,

let the rules speak for themselves,

and not get all periwinkle with allegory?

In the light of rule #20—

avoid passing lakes too close to the edge

as the enemy could trap you against the water’s edge—

could we not stop to absorb

the plight of these hungry rangers

lost in the wilds up and down the Canadian border,

wind rustling the maples, the scent of rain

and danger, and no one having a clue

that their fighting would one day be written down?

Avoid regular river fords

as these are often watched by the enemy
,

may make us think of the times we have been wounded

by an arrow while wading through life,

but tonight let’s just heed the rules of Rogers

and look for a better place to cross a river.

No, not the river of life,

a real river, the one we cannot see

there is so much to hack through to get to its bank.

Oh, little town far below

with a ruler line of a road running through you,

you anonymous cluster of houses and barns,

miniaturized by this altitude

in a land as parched as Bethlehem

might have been somewhere around the year zero—

a beautiful song should be written about you

which choirs could sing in their lofts

and carolers standing in a semicircle

could carol in front of houses topped with snow.

For surely some admirable person was born

within the waffle-iron grid of your streets,

who then went on to perform some small miracles,

placing a hand on the head of a child

or shaking a cigarette out of the pack for a stranger.

But maybe it is best not to compose a hymn

or chisel into tablets the code of his behavior

or convene a tribunal of men in robes to explain his words.

Let us not press the gold leaf of his name

onto a page of vellum or hang his image from a nail.

Better to fly over this little town with nothing

but the hope that someone visits his grave

once a year, pushing open the low iron gate

then making her way toward him

through the rows of the others

before bending to prop up some flowers before the stone.

The waiter was dressed in black

and wore a hood,

and when we pleaded for a little more time,

he raised his pencil over his order pad.

And later when he came back

to ask if we were finished,

we shook our heads no,

our forks trembling over our empty plates.

Moreover
is not a good way to begin a poem

though many start somewhere in the middle.

Secondly
should not be placed

at the opening of your second stanza.

Furthermore
should be regarded

as a word to avoid,

Aforementioned
is rarely found

in poems at all and for good reason.

Most steer clear of
notwithstanding

and the same goes for

nevertheless, however
,

as a consequence, in any event
,

subsequently
,

and
as we have seen in the previous chapters
.

Finally
’s appearance at the top

of the final stanza is not going to help.

All of which suggests
(another no-no)

that poems don’t need to tell us where we are

or what is soon to come.

For example, the
white bowl of lemons

on a table by a window

is fine all by itself

and,
in conclusion
, so are

seven elephants standing in the rain.

(for the victims of September 11th
and their survivors)

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.

A fine rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,

And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,

I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,

Then Baxter and Calabro,

Davis and Eberling, names falling into place

As droplets fell through the dark.

Names printed on the ceiling of the night.

Names slipping around a watery bend.

Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.