New and Selected Poems (11 page)

 

Frame houses like grim exhibits
Lining the empty street
Where a little girl sat on the steps
In a flowered nightgown, talking to it.

 

It looked like a serious matter,
Even the rain wanted to hear about it,
So it fell on her eyelashes,
And made them glisten.

We played war during the war,
Margaret. Toy soldiers were in big demand,
The kind made from clay.
The lead ones they melted into bullets, I suppose.

 

You never saw anything as beautiful
As those clay regiments! I used to lie on the floor
For hours staring them in the eye.
I remember them staring back at me in wonder.

 

How strange they must have felt
Standing stiffly at attention
Before a large, uncomprehending creature
With a mustache made of milk.

 

In time they broke, or I broke them on purpose.
There was wire inside their limbs,
Inside their chests, but nothing in the heads!
Margaret, I made sure.

 

Nothing at all in the heads . . .
Just an arm, now and then, an officer's arm,
Wielding a saber from a crack
In my deaf grandmother's kitchen floor.

He gives excellent advice by example.
“See!” he says. “See that?”
And he doesn't have to open his mouth
To tell you what.
You can trust his vast experience.
Still, there's no huff in him.
Once he had a most unfortunate passion.
It came to an end.
He loved the way the summer dusk fell.
He wanted to have it falling forever.
It was not possible.

That was the big secret.
It's dreadful when things get as bad as that—
But then they don't!
He got the point, and so, one day,
Miraculously lucid, you, too, came to ask
About the strangeness of it all.
Charles, you said,
How strange you should be here at all!

 

To find a bit of thread
But twisted
In a peculiar way
And fallen
In an unlikely place

 

A black thread
Before the mystery
Of a closed door
The greater mystery
Of the four bare walls

 

And catch oneself thinking
Do I know anyone
Who wears such dark garments
Worn to threads
First thing in the morning?

The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.

 

They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me,
And then didn't.

 

Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild

 

Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
More and more dark houses
Hushed and abandoned.

 

There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The thought of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.

 

The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn't leave her room much.

 

The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact.
The simplest things,

 

Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People described as “perfect.”

 

Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins, a hand mirror,
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn't it.

 

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light—
And the trees waiting for the night.

Such skies came to worry men
On the eve of great battles
With clouds soaked in blood
Fleeing the armies of the night,

 

An old woman was summoned
Who could predict the future,
But she kept her mouth shut
Even when shown the naked sword.

 

In what remained of the light,
The white village church
Clutched its bird-shaped weathervane
Above the low rooftops.

 

A small child, who had been
Nursing at his mother's breast,
Hid his face from her
To see the horses rear in the sky.

So, hurry up!
The evening's coming.
The grownups are on the way.
There'll be hell to pay.

 

You forgot about time
While you sought its secret
In the slippery wheels,
Some of which had teeth.

 

You meant to enthrall
The girl across the hall.
She drew so near,
Her breast brushed your ear.

 

She ought to have gone home,
But you kept telling her
You'll have it together again
And ticking in no time.

 

Instead, you're under the table
Together, searching the floor.
Your hands are trembling,
And there's a key in the door.

You're shivering, O my memory.
You went out early and without a coat
To visit your old schoolmasters,
The cruel schoolmasters and their pet monkeys.
You took a wrong turn somewhere.
You met an army of gray days,
A ghost army of years on the march.
It was the bread they fed you,
The kind it takes a lifetime to chew.

 

You found yourself again on that street
Inside that small, rented room
With its single dusty window.
Outside it was snowing quietly,
Snowing and snowing for days on end.
You were ill and in bed.
Everyone else had gone to work.
The blind old woman next door,
Whose sighs and heavy steps you'd welcome now,
Had died mysteriously in the summer.

 

You had your own heartbeat to attend to.
You were perfectly alone and anonymous.
It would have taken months for anyone
To begin to miss you. The chill
Made you pull the covers up to your chin.

 

You remembered the lost arctic voyagers,
The evening snow erasing their footprints.
You had no money and no job.
Both of your lungs were hurting; still,
You had no intention of lifting a finger
To help yourself. You were immortal!

 

Outside, the same dark snowflake
Seemed to be falling over and over again.
You studied the cracked walls,
The maplike water stain on the ceiling,
Trying to fix in your mind its cities and rivers.

 

Time had stopped at dusk.
You were shivering at the thought
Of such great happiness.

The fat sisters
Kept a candy store
Dim and narrow
With dusty jars
Of jawbreaking candy.

 

We stayed thin, stayed
Glum, chewing gum
While staring at the floor,
The shoes of many strangers
Rushing in and out,

 

Making the papers outside
Flutter audibly
Under the lead weights,
Their headlines
Screaming in and out of view.

She was about to chop the head
In half,
But I made her reconsider
By telling her:
“Cabbage symbolizes mysterious love.”

 

Or so said one Charles Fourier,
Who said many other strange and wonderful things,
So that people called him mad behind his back,

 

Whereupon I kissed the back of her neck
Ever so gently,

 

Whereupon she cut the cabbage in two
With a single stroke of her knife.

St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses
When he passed me on the street.
St. Therese of Ávila, beautiful and grave,
Came at me spreading her wings like a seagull.

 

“Lost soul,” they both cried out,
“Where is your home?”

 

I was one of death's juggling balls.
The city was a mystic circus
With all of its lights dimmed,
The night's performance already started.

 

On a wide, poorly lit avenue,
Store windows waited for me,
Watched for me coming,
Knew what thoughts were on my mind.

 

In a church, where the child killer,
So the papers said,
Hid himself one night from the cold,
I sat in a pew blowing on my hands.

 

Like a thought forgotten till called forth—
The new snow on the sidewalk
Bore fresh footprints—some unknown master
Offering to guide my steps from now on.

 

In truth, I had no idea what was happening to me.
Four young hoods blocked my way,
Three dead serious,
One smiling crazily as he laid his hand on me.

 

I let them have my raincoat,
And went off telling myself
It was important to remain calm,
And to continue to observe oneself
As if one was a complete stranger.

 

At the address I'd been given,
There were white X's painted on each window.
I knocked, but no one came to open.
By and by a girl joined me on the steps.
Her name was Alma, a propitious sign.

 

She knew a housewife
Who solved life's riddles
In a voice of a Sumerian queen.
We had a long chat about that
While shivering and stamping our feet.

 

In the sixteenth century, she told me,
Dabblers in occult sciences
Were roasted in iron cages,
Or else they were clothed in rags
And hanged on gibbets painted gold.

 

Once in a hotel room in Chicago, I confessed,
I caught sight of someone in the mirror
Who had my face,
But whose eyes I did not recognize—
Two hard, all-knowing eyes.

 

The hunger, the cold and the lack of sleep
Brought on a kind of ecstasy.
I walked the streets as if pursued by demons,
Trying to warm myself.

 

There was the East River,
There was the Hudson.
Their waters shone at midnight
Like oil in sanctuary lamps.

 

Something was about to happen to me
For which there would never be any words afterward.
I stood as if transfixed,
Watching the sky clear.

 

It was so quiet where I was,
You could hear a pin drop.
I thought I heard a pin drop
And went looking for it
In the dark, deserted city.

               
1986–2011

In a neighborhood once called Hell's Kitchen
Where a beggar claimed to be playing Nero's fiddle
While the city burned in midsummer heat;
Where a lady barber who called herself Cleopatra
Wielded the scissors of fate over my head
Threatening to cut off my ears and nose;
Where a man and a woman went walking naked
In one of the dark side streets at dawn.

 

I must be dreaming, I told myself.
It was like meeting a couple of sphinxes.
I expected them to have wings, bodies of lions:
Him with his wildly tattooed chest;
Her with her huge, dangling breasts.

 

It happened so quickly, and so long ago!

 

You know that time just before the day breaks
When one yearns to lie down on cool sheets

In a room with shades drawn?
The hour when the beautiful suicides
Lying side by side in the morgue
Get up and walk out into the first light.

 

The curtains of cheap hotels flying out of windows
Like seagulls, but everything else quiet . . .
Steam rising out of the subway gratings . . .
Bodies glistening with sweat . . .
Madness, and you might even say, paradise!

for Octavio

 

There's a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

 

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

 

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.

The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

 

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

As if there were nothing to live for . . .
As if there were . . . nothing.
In the fading light, our mother
Sat sewing with her head bowed.