Poems 1962-2012 (25 page)

with contempt for the communal, the ordinary; forever

consigned to solitude, the bleak solace of perception, to a future

completely dominated by the tragic, with no use for the immense will

but to fend it off—

That is the problem of silence:

one cannot test one's ideas.

Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

All the defenses, the spiritual rigidity, the insistent

unmasking of the ordinary to reveal the tragic,

were actually innocence of the world.

Meaning the partial, the shifting, the mutable—

all that the absolute excludes. I sat in the dark, in the living room.

The birthday was over. I was thinking, naturally, about time.

I remember how, in almost the same instant,

my heart would leap up exultant and collapse

in desolate anguish. The leaping up—the half I didn't count—

that was happiness; that is what the word meant.

ANCIENT TEXT

How deeply fortunate my life, my every prayer

heard by the angels.

I asked for the earth; I received earth, like so much

mud in the face.

I prayed for relief from suffering; I received suffering.

Who can say my prayers were not heard? They were

translated, edited—and if certain

of the important words were left out or misunderstood, a crucial

article deleted, still they were taken in, studied like ancient texts.

Perhaps they
were
ancient texts, re-created

in the vernacular of a particular period.

And as my life was, in a sense, increasingly given over to prayer,

so the task of the angels was, I believe, to master this language

in which they were not as yet entirely fluent or confident.

And if I felt, in my youth, rejected, abandoned,

I came to feel, in the end, that we were, all of us,

intended as teachers, possibly

teachers of the deaf, kind helpers whose virtuous patience

is sustained by an abiding passion.

I understood at last! We were the aides and helpers,

our masterpieces strangely useful, like primers.

How simple life became then; how clear, in the childish errors,

the perpetual labor: night and day, angels were

discussing my meanings. Night and day, I revised my appeals,

making each sentence better and clearer, as though one might

elude forever all misconstruction. How flawless they became—

impeccable, beautiful, continuously misread. If I was, in a sense,

an obsessive staggering through time, in another sense

I was a winged obsessive, my moonlit

feathers were paper. I lived hardly at all among men and women;

I spoke only to angels. How fortunate my days,

how charged and meaningful the nights' continuous silence and opacity.

FROM A JOURNAL

I had a lover once,

I had a lover twice,

easily three times I loved.

And in between

my heart reconstructed itself perfectly

like a worm.

And my dreams also reconstructed themselves.

After a time, I realized I was living

a completely idiotic life.

Idiotic, wasted—

And sometime later, you and I

began to correspond, inventing

an entirely new form.

Deep intimacy over great distance!

Keats to Fanny Brawne, Dante to Beatrice—

One cannot invent

a new form in

an old character. The letters I sent remained

immaculately ironic, aloof

yet forthright. Meanwhile, I was writing

different letters in my head,

some of which became poems.

So much genuine feeling!

So many fierce declarations

of passionate longing!

I loved once, I loved twice,

and suddenly

the form collapsed: I was

unable to sustain ignorance.

How sad to have lost you, to have lost

any chance of actually knowing you

or remembering you over time

as a real person, as someone I could have grown

deeply attached to, maybe

the brother I never had.

And how sad to think

of dying before finding out

anything. And to realize

how ignorant we all are most of the time,

seeing things

only from the one vantage, like a sniper.

And there were so many things

I never got to tell you about myself,

things which might have swayed you.

And the photo I never sent, taken

the night I looked almost splendid.

I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow

kept hitting the mirror and coming back.

And the letters kept dividing themselves

with neither half totally true.

And sadly, you never figured out

any of this, though you always wrote back

so promptly, always the same elusive letter.

I loved once, I loved twice,

and even though in our case

things never got off the ground

it was a good thing to have tried.

And I still have the letters, of course.

Sometimes I will take a few years' worth

to reread in the garden,

with a glass of iced tea.

And I feel, sometimes, part of something

very great, wholly profound and sweeping.

I loved once, I loved twice,

easily three times I loved.

ISLAND

The curtains parted. Light

coming in. Moonlight, then sunlight.

Not changing because time was passing

but because the one moment had many aspects.

White lisianthus in a chipped vase.

Sound of the wind. Sound

of lapping water. And hours passing, the white sails

luminous, the boat rocking at anchor.

Motion not yet channeled in time.

The curtains shifting or stirring; the moment

shimmering, a hand moving

backward, then forward. Silence. And then

one word, a name. And then another word:

again, again.
And time

salvaged, like a pulse between

stillness and change. Late afternoon. The soon to be lost

becoming memory; the mind closing around it. The room

claimed again, as a possession. Sunlight,

then moonlight. The eyes glazed over with tears.

And then the moon fading, the white sails flexing.

THE DESTINATION

We had only a few days, but they were very long,

the light changed constantly.

A few days, spread out over several years,

over the course of a decade.

And each meeting charged with a sense of exactness,

as though we had traveled, separately,

some great distance; as though there had been,

through all the years of wandering,

a destination, after all.

Not a place, but a body, a voice.

A few days. Intensity

that was never permitted to develop

into tolerance or sluggish affection.

And I believed for many years this was a great marvel;

in my mind, I returned to those days repeatedly,

convinced they were the center of my amorous life.

The days were very long, like the days now.

And the intervals, the separations, exalted,

suffused with a kind of passionate joy that seemed, somehow,

to extend those days, to be inseparable from them.

So that a few hours could take up a lifetime.

A few hours, a world that neither unfolded nor diminished,

that could, at any point, be entered again—

So that long after the end I could return to it without difficulty,

I could live almost completely in imagination.

THE BALCONY

It was a night like this, at the end of summer.

We had rented, I remember, a room with a balcony.

How many days and nights? Five, perhaps—no more.

Even when we weren't touching we were making love.

We stood on our little balcony in the summer night.

And off somewhere, the sounds of human life.

We were the soon to be anointed monarchs,

well disposed to our subjects. Just beneath us,

sounds of a radio playing, an aria we didn't in those years know.

Someone dying of love. Someone from whom time had taken

the only happiness, who was alone now,

impoverished, without beauty.

The rapturous notes of an unendurable grief, of isolation and terror,

the nearly impossible to sustain slow phrases of the ascending figures—

they drifted out over the dark water

like an ecstasy.

Such a small mistake. And many years later,

the only thing left of that night, of the hours in that room.

COPPER BEECH

Why is the earth angry at heaven?

If there's a question, is there an answer?

On Dana Street, a copper beech.

Immense, like the tree of my childhood,

but with a violence I wasn't ready to see then.

I was a child like a pointed finger,

then an explosion of darkness;

my mother could do nothing with me.

Interesting, isn't it,

the language she used.

The copper beech rearing like an animal.

Frustration, rage, the terrible wounded pride

of rebuffed love—I remember

rising from the earth to heaven. I remember

I had two parents,

one harsh, one invisible. Poor

clouded father, who worked

only in gold and silver.

STUDY OF MY SISTER

We respect, here in America,

what is concrete, visible. We ask

What is it for? What does it lead to?

My sister

put her fork down. She felt, she said,

as though she should jump off a cliff.

A crime has been committed

against a human soul

as against the small child

who spends all day entertaining herself

with the colored blocks

so that she looks up

radiant at the end,

presenting herself,

giving herself back to her parents

and they say

What did you build?

and then, because she seems

so blank, so confused,

they repeat the question.

AUGUST

My sister painted her nails fuchsia,

a color named after a fruit.

All the colors were named after foods:

coffee frost, tangerine sherbet.

We sat in the backyard, waiting for our lives to resume

the ascent summer interrupted:

triumphs, victories, for which school

was a kind of practice.

The teachers smiled down at us, pinning on the blue ribbons.

And in our heads, we smiled down at the teachers.

Our lives were stored in our heads.

They hadn't begun; we were both sure

we'd know when they did.

They certainly weren't this.

We sat in the backyard, watching our bodies change:

first bright pink, then tan.

I dribbled baby oil on my legs; my sister

rubbed polish remover on her left hand,

tried another color.

We read, we listened to the portable radio.

Obviously this wasn't life, this sitting around

in colored lawn chairs.

Nothing matched up to the dreams.

My sister kept trying to find a color she liked:

it was summer, they were all frosted.

Fuchsia, orange, mother-of-pearl.

She held her left hand in front of her eyes,

moved it from side to side.

Why was it always like this—

the colors so intense in the glass bottles,

so distinct, and on the hand

almost exactly alike,

a film of weak silver.

My sister shook the bottle. The orange

kept sinking to the bottom; maybe

that was the problem.

She shook it over and over, held it up to the light,

studied the words in the magazine.

The world was a detail, a small thing not yet

exactly right. Or like an afterthought, somehow

still crude or approximate.

What was real was the idea:

My sister added a coat, held her thumb

to the side of the bottle.

We kept thinking we would see

the gap narrow, though in fact it persisted.

The more stubbornly it persisted,

the more fiercely we believed.

SUMMER AT THE BEACH

Before we started camp, we went to the beach.

Long days, before the sun was dangerous.

My sister lay on her stomach, reading mysteries.

I sat in the sand, watching the water.

You could use the sand to cover

parts of your body that you didn't like.

I covered my feet, to make my legs longer;

the sand climbed over my ankles.

I looked down at my body, away from the water.

I was what the magazines told me to be:

coltish. I was a frozen colt.

My sister didn't bother with these adjustments.

When I told her to cover her feet, she tried a few times,

but she got bored; she didn't have enough willpower

to sustain a deception.

I watched the sea; I listened to the other families.

Babies everywhere: what went on in their heads?

I couldn't imagine myself as a baby;

I couldn't picture myself not thinking.

I couldn't imagine myself as an adult either.

They all had terrible bodies: lax, oily, completely

committed to being male and female.

The days were all the same.

When it rained, we stayed home.

When the sun shone, we went to the beach with my mother.

My sister lay on her stomach, reading her mysteries.

I sat with my legs arranged to resemble

what I saw in my head, what I believed was my true self.