Poems 1962-2012 (28 page)

There was one love, there were many nights

Smell of the mock orange tree

Corridors of jasmine and lilies

Still the wind blew

There were many winters but I closed my eyes

The cold air white with dissolved wings

There was one garden when the snow melted

Azure and white; I couldn't tell

my solitude from love—

There was one love; he had many voices

There was one dawn; sometimes

we watched it together

I was here

I was here

There was one summer returning over and over

there was one dawn

I grew old watching

SCREENED PORCH

The stars were foolish, they were not worth waiting for.

The moon was shrouded, fragmentary.

Twilight like silt covered the hills.

The great drama of human life was nowhere evident—

but for that, you don't go to nature.

The terrible harrowing story of a human life,

the wild triumph of love: they don't belong

to the summer night, panorama of hills and stars.

We sat on our terraces, our screened porches,

as though we expected to gather, even now,

fresh information or sympathy. The stars

glittered a bit above the landscape, the hills

suffused still with a faint retroactive light.

Darkness. Luminous earth. We stared out, starved for knowledge,

and we felt, in its place, a substitute:

indifference that appeared benign.

Solace of the natural world. Panorama

of the eternal. The stars

were foolish, but somehow soothing. The moon

presented itself as a curved line.

And we continued to project onto the glowing hills

qualities we needed: fortitude, the potential

for spiritual advancement.

Immunity to time, to change. Sensation

of perfect safety, the sense of being

protected from what we loved—

And our intense need was absorbed by the night

and returned as sustenance.

SUMMER NIGHT

Orderly, and out of long habit, my heart continues to beat.

I hear it, nights when I wake, over the mild sound of the air conditioner.

As I used to hear it over the beloved's heart, or

variety of hearts, owing to there having been several.

And as it beats, it continues to drum up ridiculous emotion.

So many passionate letters never sent!

So many urgent journeys conceived of on summer nights,

surprise visits to men who were nearly complete strangers.

The tickets never bought, the letters never stamped.

And pride spared. And the life, in a sense, never completely lived.

And the art always in some danger of growing repetitious.

Why not? Why not? Why should my poems not imitate my life?

Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning

is not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie.

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—

surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects

to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.

I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,

imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,

the dreamed as well as the lived—

what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

FABLE

Then I looked down and saw

the world I was entering, that would be my home.

And I turned to my companion, and I said
Where are we?

And he replied
Nirvana.

And I said again
But the light will give us no peace.

AVERNO (2006)

FOR NOAH

Averno. Ancient name Avernus. A small crater lake, ten miles west of Naples, Italy; regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld.

THE NIGHT MIGRATIONS

This is the moment when you see again

the red berries of the mountain ash

and in the dark sky

the birds' night migrations.

It grieves me to think

the dead won't see them—

these things we depend on,

they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?

I tell myself maybe it won't need

these pleasures anymore;

maybe just not being is simply enough,

hard as that is to imagine.

I

OCTOBER

1.

Is it winter again, is it cold again,

didn't Frank just slip on the ice,

didn't he heal, weren't the spring seeds planted

didn't the night end,

didn't the melting ice

flood the narrow gutters

wasn't my body

rescued, wasn't it safe

didn't the scar form, invisible

above the injury

terror and cold,

didn't they just end, wasn't the back garden

harrowed and planted—

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,

in stiff rows, weren't the seeds planted,

didn't vines climb the south wall

I can't hear your voice

for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care

what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem

pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can't change what it is—

didn't the night end, wasn't the earth

safe when it was planted

didn't we plant the seeds,

weren't we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

2.

Summer after summer has ended,

balm after violence:

it does me no good

to be good to me now;

violence has changed me.

Daybreak. The low hills shine

ochre and fire, even the fields shine.

I know what I see; sun that could be

the August sun, returning

everything that was taken away—

You hear this voice? This is my mind's voice;

you can't touch my body now.

It has changed once, it has hardened,

don't ask it to respond again.

A day like a day in summer.

Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples

nearly mauve on the gravel paths.

And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer.

It does me no good; violence has changed me.

My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;

now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,

with the sense it is being tested.

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer;

bounty, balm after violence.

Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields

have been harvested and turned.

Tell me this is the future,

I won't believe you.

Tell me I'm living,

I won't believe you.

3.

Snow had fallen. I remember

music from an open window.

Come to me,
said the world.

This is not to say

it spoke in exact sentences

but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

Sunrise. A film of moisture

on each living thing. Pools of cold light

formed in the gutters.

I stood

at the doorway,

ridiculous as it now seems.

What others found in art,

I found in nature. What others found

in human love, I found in nature.

Very simple. But there was no voice there.

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,

bits of green were showing.

Come to me,
said the world. I was standing

in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—

I can finally say

long ago;
it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty

the healer, the teacher—

death cannot harm me

more than you have harmed me,

my beloved life.

4.

The light has changed;

middle C is tuned darker now.

And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.

The light of autumn:
you will not be spared.

The songs have changed; the unspeakable

has entered them.

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says

I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn:
I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.

This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:

the ideal burns in you like a fever.

Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.

They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.

They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly

in anticipation of silence.

The ear gets used to them.

The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;

it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be still passionately

clinging to what you love;

the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.

Surely it is a privilege to approach the end

still believing in something.

5.

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.

It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.

Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

I am

at work, though I am silent.

The bland

misery of the world

bounds us on either side, an alley

lined with trees; we are

companions here, not speaking,

each with his own thoughts;

behind the trees, iron

gates of the private houses,

the shuttered rooms

somehow deserted, abandoned,

as though it were the artist's

duty to create

hope, but out of what? what?

the word itself

false, a device to refute

perception— At the intersection,

ornamental lights of the season.

I was young here. Riding

the subway with my small book

as though to defend myself against

this same world:

you are not alone,

the poem said,

in the dark tunnel.

6.

The brightness of the day becomes

the brightness of the night;

the fire becomes the mirror.

My friend the earth is bitter; I think

sunlight has failed her.

Bitter or weary, it is hard to say.

Between herself and the sun,

something has ended.

She wants, now, to be left alone;

I think we must give up

turning to her for affirmation.

Above the fields,

above the roofs of the village houses,

the brilliance that made all life possible

becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch:

they give nothing but ask nothing.

From within the earth's

bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness

my friend the moon rises:

she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

PERSEPHONE THE WANDERER

In the first version, Persephone

is taken from her mother

and the goddess of the earth

punishes the earth—this is

consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction

in doing harm, particularly

unconscious harm:

we may call this

negative creation.

Persephone's initial

sojourn in hell continues to be

pawed over by scholars who dispute

the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape,

or was she drugged, violated against her will,

as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved

does not correct

the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home

stained with red juice like

a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will

keep this word: is earth

“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,

in the bed of the god? Is she

at home nowhere? Is she

a born wanderer, in other words

an existential

replica of her own mother, less

hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like

no one, you know. The characters

are not people.

They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,

ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,

a kind of diagram that separates

heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:

where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,

of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.

Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know

what winter is, only that

she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.

What is in her mind?

Is she afraid? Has something

blotted out the idea

of mind?

She does know the earth

is run by mothers, this much

is certain. She also knows

she is not what is called

a girl any longer. Regarding

incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.