This Blue : Poems (9781466875074) (2 page)

looking sidelong

as you sidelong

smile I do not think

he's a god

or frankly that great

but it's true he's glowing

under your eyes &

obliterating

the sun that moments ago

was shining on this bench

where we sit across

from him now

flaring terrible

as I think of your

many rendezvous

I desire death &

I almost shove back

in my throat the call

to the Perseids calling them

down now to shower

him dead in their shower

EVEN THOSE

Even the places

the sun doesn't reach

in the deepest woods

are hot. Even the places

that never dry—the mosses

creeping everywhere

a damp carpet underfoot—

are dry. Even the quietest

places you've never been

are disquieted by your cry.

Even those places.

LUNCH WITH MOUNTAIN

The moss I ate

revised my esophagus

into a symbiotic system

any lichen could live in.

I ate too much

you sd last night

I could drown

from this beer

I can't finish.

Give me that stick

to shove down

my throat.

Give me your bow

your arrow

of burning burning

throated green.

THEY WERE NOT KIDDING IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

They were not kidding

when they said they were blinded

by a vision of love.

It was not just a manner

of speaking or feeling

though it's hard to say

how the dead

really felt harder

even than knowing the living.

You are so opaque

to me your brief moments

of apparent transparency

seem fraudulent windows

in a Brutalist structure

everyone admires.

The effort your life

requires exhausts me.

I am not kidding.

MORNING VANITAS

Weeding

the moss

a local

boy tends

the folly

the new gardener

created on the patio—

a loose

quilt of greens

the weeds' greens

are seen

to violate.

Every day

something

to exclude

to survive.

I cut

you out

of this

my life.

MORNING WITH ADIRONDACK CHAIR

The woods are winds.

The rush of your mind

plays against a rustle

you could almost pitch.

Clouds a moment's

monument disperse

into an ever whiter sky.

Today you could be

anyone. A dragonfly

soars high above the grass

infested with annoying

flying beetles, bee-like

things made to sting.

You live your whole life

backward the green

chair always placed

there on the lawn

you long to flee.

Here it is—

another lawn

become a field

become a meadow

hedged with trees.

Why not sit forever

in a weathered chair named

for Indians you'll never

meet? Why the stand

of poplars marking the edge

of the town you arrive

at in dreams surprising

you back to the drugstore

the traintracks the road

out of town and also

back to its nuclear

bicycled streets?

Memory is boring

but as measure.

Everything is boring

unless it replaces time.

Music was making

me crazy

for a permanent

song nothing ever

unshaped I come

when you touch me

like that or like

that when you

move me into

an unforeseen

chair in your

exploding heart

GLACIAL ERRATIC

Boulders flung everywhere

signs of the glacier god

marking the path you can't take.

“I am in Brooklyn

but not of Brooklyn.”

“Do you have an avidity

for the new?”

Some violence

is very slow

until it makes itself felt.

Makes you feel it.

“I need to write

good fast music.

All my good music

is slow.”

How should a person be?

“I am happy

to be contemporary.”

“I am glad I will die

before all this prevails.”

In child pose

you breathe through the back.

Then there's the rest,

all those positions

you flow or stumble through

until that rock. That specific rock.

ROAD / HERE NOW

I think of you here

because I thought of you here

before. Otherwise

I never think of you

except on a summer drive

that echoes the drive

I took the day after

I heard you died

except when I see

the red skirt

I wore that day

the day you finally

kissed me

a red skirt

I now see

only in pictures

from a long-ago trip

to the Pyrenees

the skirt I wore

to your party

In the middle of the party

here's death

is what I thought

when we saw our friend

lying on the bare road

by her smashed bike

She's alive

in the Berkshires.

So many are alive!

More are dead.

Strange thing

to survive to discover

you will live

till one day it's over

no more to discover

no more rounding back

to this ongoing living

avoiding till you don't

that specific rock

III

TODAY'S COMEDY

Why Dante in summer?

Why not? The doctrine

of purgatory's no more strange

than nanotubes or Tang.

I used to know

its ins and outs.

What we've abandoned grows

higher than trashheaps

in Naples. My love

canal's clean and my heart

in my breast

is right dressed.

No guide led me here

but Virgil and everyone

I ever met, in woods

books dreams in suburbs

the city the farm.

Marcus Aurelius

took a page

from the town mouse

and his country cousin.

The lesson of fables

is mutable, their structure

not. Something

must change. A hero

must range in a land

he also unwittingly

charts. If many die

not everyone can.

Odysseus must reach

if not Ithaca

a farther shore

and the little zygotic blip

you once were

must enter the world

& its pure gore.

MEZZO

To choose

not to translate

heaven

paradiso

not so heavy

so let it be

& let there be

a Golfo Paradiso

sailed slowly through

the day you arrived

at the place the names

made their way to your ears

*   *   *

did all this fall

into the lap of the world

protozoa pulsing

upward from the slime

complicating themselves

into a sentience

you'd recognize

*   *   *

the quilted greens

an eye ascends

the terraced steep

attests the hands

and feet of men

who raised the sail

& crushed the grape

*   *   *

Apennines scraped

but for a few pines—

man or sheep or time

the denuder,

stripper of scrub,

flayer of rock—

*   *   *

that stone over there

whitestreaked outcrop clawed

by perpetual waves

it too thinks

a stone's stoniness

*   *   *

here it is ever

mild and the faces

show it gently

lined different

from the way

a less temperate clime

will incise you

*   *   *

below my neck

a faint network

the mirror reveals

in the morning

*   *   *

nel mezzo del cammin

I was caught

in a glass net

what did the glass weave

GENOA

The merchant republics are done

as is the nun

who forbade us aged five to say

we were done.

The oven door opened

in her mime

the door to the oven

where we were thoroughly roasted

and done.

If you are done

that means I can stick

a fork in you. You

she corrected

are finished.

Finished

with all that some days

it seems a dream

the long boredom

in the schoolroom

workbook assignments

rushed through straining

toward what weird

consummation?

Sister Lucretia—

she was another one

terrifying the children who braved

the zenana of nuns

pledged to Christ and torture

of the wayward souls who ventured

into the sanctum sanctorum

the private apartment of six nuns

for a weekly piano lesson.

Bach had twenty children

she declared. Her heart was given

to a Texan—Van Cliburn.

A wimpled nun

one of the last

thus to dress among the remaining Franciscan

sisters. Excess

daughters in immigrant families

ready to give some

aid and comfort to the Lord

or the local monsignor—

a special vocation—

were they rotting away

in their habits, were they

the transfigured ones?

I wanted once

to become one.

Those days are done

and I am almost done

almost historical as a usuried ship

heading west and more west

to find treasures

for kings. Look in thy heart

it is a treasury

it was said

Mary said.

She was another one.

Even now at the Brignole station

we see flocks of nuns

rope-belted, a crucifix flying in wind.

A veiled woman

might become another woman

under a different sun.

Even here the sisters

have become Indian, Ethiopian,

no extra Italian

daughters to pay the godly sum

of glorious renunciation.

The Turks are threatening Christendom

in old chronicles

and today's European bulletin.

Beware of falling under the thumb

of Islam.

It will never be finished

said the Caliph

to the Sultan.

It is almost done

this meal where I stick

a fork in tomatoed squid stew

called
burrida
its Arabic origins

brining my tongue.

I stick a fork in an animal

fork in a soul

and I eat and I eat

until kingdom come.

SAN FRUTTUOSO GLOBAL

The merchant republics are done.

The Cristo degli Abissi beseeches the sea

from seventeen meters below.

He will never again see the sun.

They sank him in 1954.

The Strada Nuova was old.

Genoa devoured the world, Braudel said.

Columbus killed Taínos for gold.

It's good not to be dead

—a thing one wouldn't have said

those days the islanders fled

to the hills escaping Spaniards

their helmeted heads

and fists clasped round handles

of pikes and swords for striking

off every savage hand

empty of glinting metal—

they knew they knew

where gold could be found

and they knew their lord

a forgiving lord

who watched indifferent

as they ran them to ground

DRINK WITH MOUNTAIN, REMEMBERED, ANDALUCÍAN

The rosé from Spain

followed us west

as if hot on the scent

of tomato—

O brave New World

your fruits have gone incognito!

A rosé's a rosé's a rosé

with love apples.

You are moving west

beyond the Chinese coast

to the interior

of Inner Mongolia. A threatened

horse rides again

the steppes unburdening

themselves below revived hooves.

The time of the emperor

is nigh. No inquisition

will be able to check

the future. Your local

grapes are delicious

picked off the vine

or bottled, thus.

This is the interval

between eras of fathers,

dictators fallen, the marble

fists crushed and not crushing.

But the future, its empress,

who can say what beast

she'll ride to meet us?

Raise a glass, comrades—

all you who refuse

to forget the civil war.

INSCRIPTION

Not far

from the Chandrabar

and the Nervi Belvedere

I drink this beer

under an awning

on the Passeggiata

Anita Garibaldi

a kayak flotilla

choreographed quintet

heading east and easter

the French Alps outlined

in a faint blue to our west

My t-shirt's plain