Aimless Love (9 page)

I am better off closing the newspaper,

putting on the same clothes I wore yesterday

(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)

then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle

and pedaling along the shore road by the bay.

And you stay just as you are,

lying there in your beautiful blue suit,

your hands crossed on your chest

like the wings of a bird who has flown

in its strange migration not north or south

but straight up from earth

and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.

I have a feeling that it is much worse

than shopping for a mattress at a mall,

of greater duration without question,

and there is no random pitchforking here,

no licking flames to fear,

only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.

Yet wandering past the jovial kings,

the more sensible queens,

and the cheerless singles

no satin sheet will ever cover,

I am thinking of a passage from the
Inferno
,

which I could fully bring to mind

and recite in English or even Italian

if the salesman who has been following us—

a crumpled pack of Newports

visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt—

would stop insisting for a moment

that we test this one, then this softer one,

which we do by lying down side by side,

arms rigid, figures on a tomb,

powerless to imagine what it would be like

to sleep or love this way

under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights,

which Dante would have surely included

had he lain on his back between us here today.

I am going to sit on a rock near some water

or on a slope of grass

under a high ceiling of white clouds,

and I am going to stop talking

so I can wander around in that spot

the way John Audubon might have wandered

through a forest of speckled sunlight,

stopping now and then to lean

against an elm, mop his brow,

and listen to the songs of birds.

Did he wonder, as I often do,

how they regard the songs of other species?

Would it be like listening to the Chinese

merchants at an outdoor market?

Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?

Or is that nervous chittering

I often hear from the upper branches

the sound of some tireless little translator?

The sky began to tilt,

a shift of light toward the higher clouds,

so I seized my brush

and dipped my little cup in the stream,

but once I streaked the paper gray

with a hint of green,

water began to slide down the page,

rivulets looking for a river.

And again, I was too late—

then the sky made another turn,

this time as if to face a mirror

held in the outstretched arm of a god.

When a man asked me to look back three hundred years

Over the hilly landscape of America,

I must have picked up the wrong pen,

The one that had no poem lurking in its vein of ink.

So I walked in circles for days like a blind horse

Harnessed to an oaken pole that turns a millstone,

A sight we might have seen so many years ago—

Barley being ground near a swift and silent millrace—

Which led to other sights of smoky battlefields,

The frames of houses, then a tall steeple by a thoroughfare,

Which I climbed and then could see even more,

A nation being built of logs and words, ideas, and wooden nails.

The greatest of my grandfathers was not visible,

And the house I live in was not a pasture yet,

Only a wooded hillside strewn with glacial rock,

Yet I could see Dutch men and women on an island without bridges.

And I saw winding through the scene a line of people,

Students it would seem from their satchels and jackets,

Three hundred of them, one for every school year

Walking single-file over the decades into the present.

I thought of the pages they had filled

With letters and numbers, the lifted bits of chalk,

The changing flag limp in the corner, the hand raised,

The learning eye brightening to a spark in the iris.

And then I heard their singing, all those voices

Joined in a fluid chorus, and all those years

Synchronized by the harmony of their anthem,

History now a single chord, and time its key and measure.

You see them on porches and on lawns

down by the lakeside,

usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out

at the water or the big shade trees.

The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs

though at one time it must have seemed

a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table

between the chairs where no one

is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It may not be any of my business,

but let us suppose one day

that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them

if only for the sake of remembering

what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,

side by side with a table in between.

The clouds are high and massive on that day.

The woman looks up from her book.

The man takes a sip of his drink.

Then there is only the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird

then another, cries of joy or warning—

it passes the time to wonder which.

Every reader loves the way he tells off

the sun, shouting busy old fool

into the English skies even though they

were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.

And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day

pacing the carpet and repeating the words,

feeling the syllables lock into rows

until I can stand and declare,

the book held closed by my side,

that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.

But after a few steps into stanza number two,

wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes,

I can feel the first one begin to fade

like the puffs of sky-written letters on a windy day.

And by the time I have taken in the third,

the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now,

a wavering line of acrid smoke.

So it’s not until I leave the house

and walk three times around this hidden lake

that the poem begins to show

any interest in walking by my side.

Then, after my circling,

better than the courteous dominion

of her being all states and him all princes,

better than love’s power to shrink

the wide world to the size of a bedchamber,

and better even than the compression

of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas

is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,

testing the plank of every line,

it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

…of all your children,
only those who were born.

—Wislawa Szymborska

I have so many of them I sometimes lose track,

several hundred last time I counted

but that was years ago.

I remember one was made of marble

and another looked like a goose

some days and on other days a white flower.

Many of them appeared only in dreams

or while I was writing a poem

with freezing fingers in the house of a miser.

Others were more like me,

looking out the window in a worn shirt

then later staring into the dark.

None of them ever made the lacrosse team,

but they all made me as proud

as I was on the day they failed to be born.

There is no telling—

maybe tonight or later in the week

another one of my children will not be born.

I see this next one as a baby

lying naked below a ceiling pasted with stars

but only for a little while,

then I see him as a monk in a gray robe

walking back and forth

in the gravel yard of an imaginary monastery,

his head bowed, wondering where I am.

If I were crowned emperor this morning,

every child who is playing Marco Polo

in the swimming pool of this motel,

shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth

Marco        Polo        Marco        Polo

would be required to read a biography

of Marco Polo—a long one with fine print—

as well as a history of China and of Venice,

the birthplace of the venerated explorer

Marco        Polo        Marco        Polo

after which each child would be quizzed

by me then executed by drowning

regardless how much they managed

to retain about the glorious life and times of

Marco        Polo        Marco        Polo

Not long after we had sat down to dinner

at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago

and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,

one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie—

asked if anyone had ever considered

applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

The differences between these two figures

were much more striking than the differences

between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine

I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.

If, the man with the tie continued,

an object moving through space

will never reach its destination because it is always

limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,

then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die

from the wounds inflicted by the arrows:

the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach.

Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.

I think I’ll have the trout, I told the waiter

for it was now my turn to order,

but all through the elegant dinner

I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing

the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian

a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances

to his body, tied to post with rope,

even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.

And I thought of the bullet never reaching

the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,

the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,

and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.

The theories of Zeno floated above the table

like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ,

yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth

delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,

and after we ate and lifted our glasses,

we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street

then walked our separate ways in the world where things do arrive,

where people usually get where they are going—

where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,

where geese land with a splash on the surface of a pond,

and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your arms—

and, yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,

splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint,

that popular subject of European religious painting.

One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills.

Moon in the upper window,

shadow of my crooked pen on the page,

and I find myself wishing that the news of my death

might be delivered not by a dark truck

but by a child’s attempt to draw that truck—

the long rectangular box of the trailer,

some lettering on the side,

then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,

maybe the inscrutable profile of a driver,

and puffs of white smoke

issuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowers

and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky, only smaller.

When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,

I was like give me a break.

I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.

I was just similar to give me a break.

As I said, I was like give me a break.

I would love to tell you

how I was able to resemble give me a break

without actually being identical to give me a break,