Wild Gratitude (6 page)

                         It was as if the sky had imagined a morning

               of indigos and pinks, mauves and reddish-browns.

    The smiling young nurse who helped you into the car

was wearing two colorful ribbons in her auburn hair and

    somehow they looked precisely like ribbons gleaming

               in the hair of a woman helping you into a car.

                         I believe I had never seen ribbons before.

                         And suddenly I was staring at asphalt

               puddled with rainwater. And bluish letters

    purpling on a white sign. And sliding electric

ENTRANCES
&
EXITS
. And statues bristling with color.

    The yellow sunlight filtered through the clouds

               and I believe I had never seen a street lamp

                         shimmer across a wavy puddle before.

                         The road home was slick with lights

               and everything seemed to be crying,
just

    
this, just this, nothing more, nothing else!
—

as if the morning were somehow conscious of itself.

    When you leaned over and touched me on the arm

               it was as if my arm needed to be touched

                         in that way, at exactly that time.

Whoever has followed the bag lady

on her terrible journey past Food Lane’s Super-Market,

and Maze’s Records, and The Little Flowering Barbershop

on the southeast corner of Woodward and Euclid

will know what it meant for John Clare

to walk eighty miles across pocked and jutted

roads to Northborough, hungry, shy of strangers,

“foot foundered and broken down” after escaping

from the High Beech Asylum near Epping Forest.

And whoever has followed the bag lady

on her studious round of littered stairwells

and dead-end alleys, and watched her combing

the blue and white city garbage cans for empties,

and admired the way that she can always pick out

the single plate earring and one Canadian dime

from a million splinters of glass in a phone booth

will know how John Clare must have looked

as he tried to follow the route that a gypsy

had pointed out for him, scaling the high

palings that stood in his way, bruising

his feet on the small stones, stooping to

admire the pileworts and cowslips, scorning

the self-centered cuckoos but knowing the sweet

kinship of a landrail hiding in the hedgerows.

I began this morning by standing

in front of the New World Church’s ruined storefront;

I was listening to the bag lady and a pimply-

faced old drunk trading secrets with the vent man,

and remembering how a gentleman on horseback

had mistaken John Clare for a broken-down haymaker

and tossed him a penny for a half-pint of beer.

I remembered how grateful he was to stand

elbow to elbow in the Old Plough Public House

happily sheltered from a sudden rainfall.

But later when I saw the bag lady

sprawled out on a steaming vent for warmth

I remembered how Clare had moved on, crippled

by tiny bits of gravel lodged in his shoes,

and how he tried to escape from the harsh wind

by lying down in an open dike bottom

but was soaked through clear to his bones;

how he came to the heavy wooden doors

of the Wild Ram Public House hours later,

and gazed longingly at the brightly lit windows,

and had no money, and passed on. Whoever

has stood alone in the night’s deep shadows

listening to laughter coming from a well-lit house

will know that John Clare’s loneliness was unbending.

And whoever has felt that same unbending loneliness

will also know what an old woman felt today

as she followed an obedient path between the huge

green garbage cans behind Kroger’s Super-Market

and the small silver ones behind Clarence’s grocery.

I began this day by following a bag lady

in honor of John Clare but suddenly, tonight,

I was reading “The Journey Out of Essex, 1841,”

in honor of the unknown bag lady.

I had witnessed a single day in her life

and was trying hard not to judge myself

and judging myself anyway.

I remember how she stooped to rub her foot;

how she smiled a small toothful grin

when she discovered a half-eaten apple;

how she talked on endlessly to herself

and fell asleep leaning against a broken wall

in an abandoned wooden shed on Second Avenue.

Tonight when I lie down in the dark

in my own bed, I want to remember

that John Clare was so desperately hungry

after three days and nights without food

that he finally knelt down, as if in prayer,

and ate the soft grass of the earth,

and thought it tasted like fresh bread,

and judged no one, not even himself,

and slept peacefully again, like a child.

If only I could begin to sift through the smoke

rising from the wet streets leading to your small room

above the warehouse. If only I didn’t have to walk

to one side of myself, sideways, like a shadow

growing out of the side of a building, painfully.

If only the yellow light across the street

wasn’t so ashamed

of the three iron stairs and the empty doorway

that no one crosses in the sullen rainfall,

or afterwards. It’s the way the wind rearranges

the puddles after a storm, the trees hang

upside down in the water, and no starlings call.

Or it’s the way the past revises itself

in my mind, searching for a white stone

to mark the place, to find my way back

to the small room that is no longer

your room

above a warehouse that is no longer a warehouse

but the memory of an enormous wooden space

hollowed out of the night. If only I could

find us sleeping there, suspended

over the unrevised space, tangled or spoonlike,

then I wouldn’t have to spend this night

walking to one side of myself,

standing beside myself,

paralyzed by the memory of you

in the middle of a vacant city block.

If only I could stop standing here, sideways,

like a shadow growing out of the fleshy side

of an abandoned building, painfully,

like a shadow on fire.

I wanted to lie. I wanted to say

    it was the rain falling through a fine mist

               and shattering the lake into tiny fragments

that suddenly brought it home to me today

    in warm shocks, in a blazing purple gust

               as I walked by the water in the early morning.

I wanted to invent the wildest statements

    about what happened to us, to feel brilliant

               and wronged, like an angry young widow mowing

the front yard in a strapless evening gown,

    or a born-again Christian suddenly jumping

               into a fountain to wash away his sins.

I never wanted it to be like this: hopeless

    and ordinary, dull as a toothache at lunchtime,

               as watching t.v. in the afternoon in summer.

I never wanted it to happen inside the house

    where I am still undressed at 2 p.m., at 4 p.m.,

               where it seems so precisely like failure.

The morning after Sartre’s death

I thought of a hundred blackbirds rising

Out of a brilliant white lake sheeted with mist,

Covering the sky with their feathery bodies

And blotting the sun with their dark cries.

I was sitting alone on the twisted wooden

Stairs of a rented house in the country,

Reading about Sartre’s long blindness

And watching the crows in a neighbor’s yard

Descending on the body of a twisted sycamore.

Those birds were a mistake, a dozen black

Errors scrawled across an empty page

In the sudden stark blankness of morning.

It was for Sartre that I remembered a blaze

Of dark scavengers emerging out of a cold lake

In the torturous outer calm of springtime.

And it was for Sartre

That I remembered a single white blackbird

Drifting over the metallic water at noon, lost

And severed from the other birds, blinded

By the clarity and madness of sunlight.

Like a stunned piano, like a bucket

of fresh milk flung into the air

or a dozen fists of confetti

thrown hard at a bride

stepping down from the altar,

the stars surprise the sky.

Think of dazed stones

floating overhead, or an ocean

of starfish hung up to dry. Yes,

like a conductor’s expectant arm

about to lift toward the chorus,

or a juggler’s plates defying gravity,

or a hundred fastballs fired at once

and freezing in midair, the stars

startle the sky over the city.

And that’s why drunks leaning up

against abandoned buildings, women

hurrying home on deserted side streets,

policemen turning blind corners, and

even thieves stepping from alleys

all stare up at once. Why else do

sleepwalkers move toward the windows,

or old men drag flimsy lawn chairs

onto fire escapes, or hardened criminals

press sad foreheads to steel bars?

Because the night is alive with lamps!

That’s why in dark houses all over the city

dreams stir in the pillows, a million

plumes of breath rise into the sky.

Out here in the last moments before dusk,

It is strange to see the way that shadows

Steep in the tall grass and sunlight falls,

Like a woman’s naked arm, across the porch

And the dim shoulders of the house.

And it is strange to be standing
here

Instead of
there
, with my hands darkening

Inside my pockets, staring for so long

At a single blue fir spiraling

Out of the forehead of a nearby hill

That it begins to resemble the golden

Horn of a mythical beast, a stray animal

That men have been seeking for centuries.

Every child knows what a unicorn is

Though no one has ever seen anything

But a tapestry, or a well-executed

Illustration, or a faulty copy of one;

And yet this never seemed mysterious

To me before now, until today. I don’t

Know if it is curious or not

To seek the trembling blues and yellows

Of dusk as often as I have, or to feel

Strangeness seeping through the air

Until nothing seems like what it is,

Nothing is what it seems. I don’t know

If children believe in tapestries anymore,

Or in cobblestone streets in old engravings,

Or in blue horses moving across the sky....

But sometimes when I drift through

The afternoon’s deep shadows, the silence

Of the country at dusk can still

Seem like a kind of promise, a pact

Between the red elms and the dusky clouds

Reaching down to engulf them—and somehow,

The hills can still take on the dreamy,

Faraway look of a man standing at the window

High in the crown of his house,

Knowing that no one—not his wife

Descending the stairs, not his children

Running through the yard—can see him.

Standing there at the level of the trees

He could believe in the stars again,

Slowly being released into the sky,

One by one, like long yellow plumes

Of breath, calm and precise above us;

He could believe in the light again

Flying toward him through the clouds....

I have no idea who he is,

Or why he is here now, alone

In my mind’s eye, absent-mindedly

Staring at a purple blend of shadows

Weaving through the long hair of the elms.

And suddenly I have no idea why

I am telling all of this to
you
,

You who are so unknown to me,

As if there could be something like

Intimacy between us, as if I could ever

Communicate anything so mysterious,

Anything so austere and familiar

As even this simple story, written down:

Once, in the slow shadings of dusk
,

In the middle of his life
,

A man moved toward a blue unicorn.

He was a stranger

Crossing a deserted road, alone.

He was a late-afternoon shadow

Lengthening across the tall grass,

Darkening on a dark hillside.