Wild Gratitude (2 page)

               I escaped from the celestial power

of that light and paused beside a young girl

                         sponging her neck, two courtesans

    powdering their shoulders with talc,

                             kimonos gathered at their waists.

               Their lips were the color of plums,

                         their eyes were as shiny as porcelain.

I heard lightning exploding in the distance,

               a branch cracking somewhere in my mind, rain

and sleet washing across the tented willows.

                         The wind gusted through the wet leaves.

    And suddenly I found myself staring

                             at the stark, inky gray profile

               of an emaciated horse:

                         gaunt and bony, half-starved, a shrunken

towering remnant of a once-splendid body,

               that horse was someone I could know, someone

that I had already known for a long time.

                         It was drawn on a faded handscroll

    by Kung K’ai, a familiar of emperors,

                             “a strangely isolated man”

               who had become an
i-min
,

                         a pariah, a late survivor—

like his horse—from an earlier dynasty.

               This was the same artist who had once drawn

large, fearsome creatures racing furiously

                         through the countryside with their nostrils

    smoking and their warlike black eyes

                             blazing in anger, their coarse manes

               flying in the mountain wind—

                         and I kept trying to imagine him

kneeling on the dirt floor of a one-room house

               patiently spreading out a paper scroll

on the back of his eldest son, carefully

                         drawing the slow, torturous outline

    of a starving horse, a dying

                             horse against a vacant background.

               One gray horse and nothing else.

                         I had seen that stark creature before;

I recognized its harsh, inhuman profile.

               And then I was seven years old again.

I was in the city with my grandmother

                         buying Christmas gifts for my parents

    and the emaciated horse—

                             yoked tightly to a gilded carriage

               of wealthy, laughing tourists—

                         was standing next to us on the crowded

street corner, waiting for a traffic light.

               
The city was wearing its brightest colors,

but all I could see was the woeful figure

                         of a horse, a gaunt survivor

    from a previous dynasty,

                             waiting for the light to change,

               for the tourists to dismount,

                         for the taxis to start moving again,

for the intolerable burden of its life to stop.

Out here in the exact middle of the day,

This strange, gawky house has the expression

Of someone being stared at, someone holding

His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed

Of its fantastic mansard rooftop

And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed

Of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.

But the man behind the easel is relentless;

He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes

The house must have done something horrible

To the people who once lived here

Because now it is so desperately empty,

It must have done something to the sky

Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant

And devoid of meaning. There are no

Trees or shrubs anywhere—the house

Must have done something against the earth.

All that is present is a single pair of tracks

Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.

Now the stranger returns to this place daily

Until the house begins to suspect

That the man, too, is desolate, desolate

And even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man. And somehow

The empty white canvas slowly takes on

The expression of someone who is unnerved,

Someone holding his breath underwater.

And then one day the man simply disappears.

He is a last afternoon shadow moving

Across the tracks, making its way

Through the vast, darkening fields.

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,

And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered

Storefronts on the edges of small towns.

Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone

Being stared at, someone American and gawky,

Someone who is about to be left alone

Again, and can no longer stand it.

At this hour the soul floats weightlessly

through the city streets, speechless and invisible,

astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds

seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones

of dusk already filling the cloudy sky

while the body sits listlessly by the window

sullen and heavy, too exhausted to move,

too weary to stand up or to lie down.

At this hour the soul is like a yellow wing

slipping through the treetops, a little ecstatic

cloud hovering over the sidewalks, calling out

to the approaching night, “Amaze me, amaze me,”

while the body sits glumly by the window

listening to the clear summons of the dead

transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal.…

Some nights it is almost ready to join them.

Oh, this is a strained, unlikely tethering,

a furious grafting of the quick and the slow:

when the soul flies up, the body sinks down

and all night—locked in the same cramped room—

they go on quarreling, stubbornly threatening

to leave each other, wordlessly filling the air

with the sound of a low internal burning.

How long can this bewildering marriage last?

At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire

of stars flaming on the other side of the sky,

but the body stares into an empty night sheen,

a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels,

feverish old loves: don’t separate yet.

Let what rises live with what descends.

Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,

And put my fingers into her clean cat’s mouth,

And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,

And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,

And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,

I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,

Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing

In every one of the splintered London streets,

And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke’s

With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,

And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,

And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry.

All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how

Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,

For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience.

This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General

“And all conveyancers of letters” for their warm humanity,

And the gardeners for their private benevolence

And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers,

And the milkmen for their universal human kindness.

This morning I understood that he loved to hear—

As I have heard—the soft clink of milk bottles

On the rickety stairs in the early morning,

And how terrible it must have seemed

When even this small pleasure was denied him.

But it wasn’t until tonight when I knelt down

And slipped my hand into Zooey’s waggling mouth

That I remembered how he’d called Jeoffry “the servant

Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,”

And for the first time understood what it meant.

Because it wasn’t until I saw my own cat

Whine and roll over on her fluffy back

That I realized how gratefully he had watched

Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork

Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently

Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening

His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose

Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or

Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse,

A rodent, “a creature of great personal valour,”

And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped.

And only then did I understand

It is Jeoffry—and every creature like him—

Who can teach us how to praise—purring

In their own language,

Wreathing themselves in the living fire.

It must have been a night like this one,

Cool and transparent and somehow even-tempered,

Sitting on the friendly wooden porch of someone’s

Summer house in mid-October in the country

That my father, home from the Korean War

And still in uniform, wearing a pilot’s bars

And carrying a pilot’s stark memories (still

Fingering a parachute in the back of his mind)

Jumped from the front steps where he’d been sitting

And held a sweating gin and tonic in the air

Like a newly won trophy, and flushed and smiled

Into the eyes of a strangely willing camera.

It must have been winning to see him again

Safely home at the close of a vague war

That was too far away to imagine clearly,

A little guarded and shy, but keenly present,

Tall and solid and actual as ever, and anyway

Smiling past the camera at his high-school sweetheart

(Now his wife, mother of his two small children)

Surrounded by friends on a calm midwestern night.

It must have been so soothing to have him back

That no one studied him closely, no one noticed

That there was something askew, something

Dark and puzzling in his eyes, something deeply

Reluctant staring into the narrow, clear-eyed

Lens of the camera. I’ve imagined it all—

And tonight, so many light years afterwards,

Looking intently at a torn photograph

Of that young soldier, my distant first father,

Home from a war that he never once mentioned,

I can foresee the long winter of arguments

Ahead, the hard seasons of their divorce,

The furious battles in court, and beyond that,

The unexpected fire, the successive bankruptcies,

The flight to California with a crisp new bankroll,

The move to Arizona with a brand-new family.

Tonight the past seems as sharp and inevitable

As the moment in Indian Summer when you glance up

From a photograph album and discover the fireflies

Pulsing in the woods in front of the house

And the stars blackening in a thicket of clouds.…

It must have been a night like this one

When my mother glanced over her husband’s head

Into a cluster of trees emerging behind him

And heard the wind scraping against the branches

Like the
strop strop
of a razor on rawhide,

And saw the full moon rising between the clouds

And shattering into hundreds of glassy fragments.

Twelve years old and lovesick, bumbling

and terrified for the first time in my life,

but strangely hopeful, too, and stunned,

definitely stunned—I wanted to cry,

I almost started to sob when Chris Klein

actually touched me—oh God—below the belt

in the back row of the Skokie Theatre.

Our knees bumped helplessly, our mouths

were glued together like flypaper, our lips

were grinding in a hysterical grimace

while the most handsome man in the world

twitched his hips on the flickering screen

and the girls began to scream in the dark.

I didn’t know one thing about the body yet,

about the deep foam filling my bones,

but I wanted to cry out in desolation

when she touched me again, when the lights

flooded on in the crowded theatre

and the other kids started to file

into the narrow aisles, into a lobby

of faded purple splendor, into the last

Saturday in August before she moved away.

I never wanted to move again, but suddenly

we were being lifted toward the sidewalk

in a crush of bodies, blinking, shy,

unprepared for the ringing familiar voices

and the harsh glare of sunlight, the brightness

of an afternoon that left us gripping

each other’s hands, trembling and changed.

               Now the city deepens in smoke,

now the darkness raises a withered hand

                         and the night begins, like a prelude,

    in real earnest. This is the music