Aimless Love (4 page)

This—

according to the voice on the radio,

the host of a classical music program no less—

this is the birthday of Vivaldi.

He would be 325 years old today—

quite bent over, I would imagine,

and not able to see much through his watery eyes.

Surely, he would be deaf by now,

the clothes flaking off him,

hair pitiably sparse.

But we would throw a party for him anyway,

a surprise party where everyone

would hide behind the furniture to listen

for the tap of his cane on the pavement

and the sound of that dry, persistent cough.

Call it a field where the animals

who were forgotten by the Ark

come to graze under the evening clouds.

Or a cistern where the rain that fell

before history trickles over a concrete lip.

However you see it,

this is no place to set up

the three-legged easel of realism

or make a reader climb

over the many fences of a plot.

Let the portly novelist

with his noisy typewriter

describe the city where Francine was born,

how Albert read the paper on the train,

how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

Let the playwright with her torn cardigan

and a dog curled on the rug

move the characters

from the wings to the stage

to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

Poetry is no place for that.

We have enough to do

complaining about the price of tobacco,

passing the dripping ladle,

and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

We are busy doing nothing—

and all we need for that is an afternoon,

a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,

or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

The birds are in their trees,

the toast is in the toaster,

and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows

in every section of the tangerine of earth—

the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,

the American poets gazing out

at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,

the miners are down in their mines,

and the poets are looking out their windows

maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,

and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong

game of proofreading,

glancing back and forth from page to page,

the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,

and the poets are at their windows

because it is their job for which

they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

What window it hardly seems to matter

though many have a favorite,

for there is always something to see—

a bird grasping a thin branch,

the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,

those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,

the linemen climb their round poles,

the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,

and the poets continue to stare

at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying

that what the oven is to the baker

and the berry-stained blouse to the drycleaner,

so the window is to the poet.

Just think—

before the invention of the window,

the poets would have had to put on a jacket

and a winter hat to go outside

or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,

I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper

and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of field stones,

the wall of the medieval sonnet,

the original woman’s heart of stone,

the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

I thought of you today

when I stopped before an equestrian statue

in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me

in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,

you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,

the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,

as they were in this case—

bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—

it meant that the man on the horse,

this one staring intently

over the closed movie theatre across the street,

had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,

I wondered about the others

who had simply walked through life

without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

pedestrians who could no longer

place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly

recumbent on their cold stone beds,

the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,

the murdered covering their wounds,

the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,

up on a rosy-gray block of granite

near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,

my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,

praying to the passing clouds,

forever begging in vain for just one more day.

I lie in a bedroom of a house

that was built in 1862, we were told—

the two windows still facing east

into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

The early birds are chirping,

and I think of those who have slept here before,

the family we bought the house from—

the five Critchlows—

and the engineer they told us about

who lived here alone before them,

the one who built onto the back

of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

I have an old photograph of the house

in black and white, a few small trees,

and a curved dirt driveway,

but I do not know who lived here then.

So I go back to the Civil War

and to the farmer who built the house

and the rough stone walls

that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

he who mounted his thin wife in this room,

while the war raged to the south,

with the strength of a dairyman

or with the tenderness of a dairyman

or with both, alternating back and forth

so as to give his wife much pleasure

and to call down a son to earth

to take over the cows and the farm

when he no longer had the strength

after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—

the sun breaking over the same horizon

into these same windows,

lighting the same bed-space where I lie

having nothing to farm, and no son,

only the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,

feeling better and worse by turns.

In the morning I ate a banana

like a young ape

and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”

In the afternoon I opened the mail

with a short kitchen knife,

and when dusk began to fall

I took off my clothes,

put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”

and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.

I closed my eyes and thought

about the alphabet,

the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten

to become literature.

If the British call
z
zed,

I wondered, why not call
b
bed and
d
dead.

And why does
z
, which looks like

the fastest letter, come at the very end?

unless they are all moving east

when we are facing north in our chairs.

It was then that I heard

a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark,

and the claw-footed bathtub

took one step forward,

or was it backward

I had to ask

as I turned

to reach for a far-away towel.

The heads of roses begin to droop.

The bee who has been hauling her gold

all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,

the last few darting birds,

watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.

The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.

I take another sip of wine.

I pick up an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?

Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

It has been calculated that each copy of
the Gutenburg Bible … required the
skins of 300 sheep.

—from an article on printing

I can see them squeezed into the holding pen

behind the stone building

where the printing press is housed,

all of them squirming around

to find a little room

and looking so much alike

it would be nearly impossible

to count them,

and there is no telling

which one will carry the news

that the Lord is a shepherd,

one of the few things they already know.

How suddenly the private

is revealed in a bombed out city,

how the blue and white striped wallpaper

of a second story bedroom is now

exposed to the lightly falling snow

as if the room had answered the explosion

wearing only its striped pajamas.

Some neighbors and soldiers

poke around in the rubble below

and stare up at the hanging staircase,

the portrait of a grandfather,

a door dangling from a single hinge.

And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed

by its uncovered ochre walls,

the twisted mess of its plumbing,

the sink sinking to its knees,

the ripped shower curtain,

the torn goldfish trailing bubbles.

It’s like a dollhouse view

as if a child on its knees could reach in

and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture.

Or it might be a room on a stage

in a play with no characters,

no dialogue or audience,

no beginning, middle and end—

just the broken furniture in the street,

a shoe among the cinder blocks,

a light snow still falling

on a distant steeple, and people

crossing a bridge that still stands.

And beyond that—crows in a tree,

the statue of a leader on a horse,

and clouds that could be smoke,

and even farther on, in another country

on a blanket under a shade tree,

a man pouring wine into two glasses

and a woman sliding out

the wooden pegs of a wicker hamper

filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly

off the pale blue walls of this room,

bouncing from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word
lanyard
.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one more suddenly into the past—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,

set cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth