Poems 1962-2012 (11 page)

shape of the predator—

Then they disappeared. And I thought:

one shadow. Like the one we made,

you holding me.

FROM THE JAPANESE

1.

A cat stirs in the material world.

And suddenly sunlight pours into the room

as though somewhere a blind had been opened.

And on the floor, the white bars of a ladder appear.

2.

Gwen is sobbing in the front yard; she is three.

The Spanish maid strokes her hair—Gwen

is bilingual; she dries her eyes,

a few petals falling from the jacaranda tree.

Now the door opens: here is Jack, the athlete, in his combat boots.

For the next hour he runs

first away from, then toward his family.

And here is Trixie, roaming the driveway,

huge in comparison

to the rigid bird. Boring bird,

that will not chirp and fight anymore.

She flicks it once or twice,

under the grapefruit, under the lemon tree.

Early summer: fog covers the mountains.

Under each tree, a doily of shade.

3.

At first, I saw you everywhere.

Now only in certain things,

at longer intervals.

4.

We were walking in the Japanese gardens

among the bare cherry trees,

a path you chose

deliberately in desolate November

as though I myself had ordered down

the petals, the black

nuggets of the fruit—

Nearby, a boy sailed his wooden boat,

home and away, home and away.

Then the thread snapped; the boat

was carried toward the waterfall.

“From this moment I will never know

ease,” you said, “since you have lied to me,

nor joy.” The boy

covered his face with his hands.

There is another world,

neither air nor water

but an emptiness which now

a symbol has entered.

5.

The cat

misses her master.

She climbs the brick wall,

a feat

Gwen determines

to copy: loud

objections from the Spanish maid.

Tears, shuffling. At the water's edge,

the boy finally

lowered his hands.

He had a new toy, a thread

tied to a lost thing—

Twilight: in her blue sombrero,

Gwen reconstructs the summer garden.

6.

Alone, watching the moon rise:

tonight, a full circle,

like a woman's eye passing over abundance.

This is the most it will ever be.

Above the blank street, the imperfections

solved by night—

Like our hearts: darkness

showed us their capacity.

Our full hearts—at the time, they seemed so impressive.

Cries, moans, our important suffering.

A hand at the small of the back

or on the breast—

And now across the wall

someone is clearing the table,

wrapping the dark bread and the white ceramic pot of butter.

What did we think?

What did we talk about?

Upstairs, a light goes on.

It must be

Gwen's, it burns

the span of a story—

7.

Why love what you will lose?

There is nothing else to love.

8.

Last night in bed your

hand fell heavily upon

my shoulder. I thought

you slept. Yet we are

parted. Perhaps the sheet moved,

given your hand's weight by

the dampness of

my body. Morning: I have

written to thank you.

9.

The cat sleeps on the sidewalk,

black against the white cement.

The brave are patient.

They are the priests of sunrise,

lions on the ramparts, the promontory.

LEGEND

My father's father came

to New York from Dhlua:

one misfortune followed another.

In Hungary, a scholar, a man of property.

Then failure: an immigrant

rolling cigars in a cold basement.

He was like Joseph in Egypt.

At night, he walked the city;

spray of the harbor

turned to tears on his face.

Tears of grief for Dhlua—forty houses,

a few cows grazing the rich meadows—

Though the great soul is said to be

a star, a beacon,

what it resembles better is a diamond:

in the whole world there is nothing

hard enough to change it.

Unfortunate being, have you ceased to feel

the grandeur of the world

that, like a heavy weight, shaped

the soul of my grandfather?

From the factory, like sad birds his dreams

flew to Dhlua, grasping in their beaks

as from moist earth in which a man could see

the shape of his own footprint,

scattered images, loose bits of the village;

and as he packed the leaves, so within his soul

this weight compressed scraps of Dhlua

into principles, abstractions

worthy of the challenge of bondage:

in such a world, to scorn

privilege, to love

reason and justice, always

to speak the truth—

which has been

the salvation of our people

since to speak the truth gives

the illusion of freedom.

MORNING

The virtuous girl wakes in the arms of her husband,

the same arms in which, all summer, she moved

restlessly, under the pear trees:

it is pleasant to wake like this,

with the sun rising, to see the wedding dress

draped over the back of a chair,

and on the heavy bureau, a man's shirt, neatly folded;

to be restored by these

to a thousand images, to the church itself, the autumn sunlight

streaming through the colored windows, through

the figure of the Blessed Virgin, and underneath,

Amelia holding the fiery bridal flowers—

As for her mother's tears: ridiculous, and yet

mothers weep at their daughters' weddings,

everyone knows that, though

for whose youth one cannot say.

At the great feast there is always the outsider, the stranger to joy,

and the point is how different they are, she and her mother.

Never has she been further from sadness

than she is now. She feels no call to weep,

but neither does she know

the meaning of that word, youth.

HORSE

What does the horse give you

that I cannot give you?

I watch you when you are alone,

when you ride into the field behind the dairy,

your hands buried in the mare's

dark mane.

Then I know what lies behind your silence:

scorn, hatred of me, of marriage. Still,

you want me to touch you; you cry out

as brides cry, but when I look at you I see

there are no children in your body.

Then what is there?

Nothing, I think. Only haste

to die before I die.

In a dream, I watched you ride the horse

over the dry fields and then

dismount: you two walked together;

in the dark, you had no shadows.

But I felt them coming toward me

since at night they go anywhere,

they are their own masters.

Look at me. You think I don't understand?

What is the animal

if not passage out of this life?

ARARAT (1990)

“… human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”

—
PLATO

PARODOS

Long ago, I was wounded.

I learned

to exist, in reaction,

out of touch

with the world: I'll tell you

what I meant to be—

a device that listened.

Not inert: still.

A piece of wood. A stone.

Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?

Those people breathing in the other beds

could hardly follow, being

uncontrollable

like any dream—

Through the blinds, I watched

the moon in the night sky, shrinking and swelling—

I was born to a vocation:

to bear witness

to the great mysteries.

Now that I've seen both

birth and death, I know

to the dark nature these

are proofs, not

mysteries—

A FANTASY

I'll tell you something: every day

people are dying. And that's just the beginning.

Every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born,

new orphans. They sit with their hands folded,

trying to decide about this new life.

Then they're in the cemetery, some of them

for the first time. They're frightened of crying,

sometimes of not crying. Someone leans over,

tells them what to do next, which might mean

saying a few words, sometimes

throwing dirt in the open grave.

And after that, everyone goes back to the house,

which is suddenly full of visitors.

The widow sits on the couch, very stately,

so people line up to approach her,

sometimes take her hand, sometimes embrace her.

She finds something to say to everybody,

thanks them, thanks them for coming.

In her heart, she wants them to go away.

She wants to be back in the cemetery,

back in the sickroom, the hospital. She knows

it isn't possible. But it's her only hope,

the wish to move backward. And just a little,

not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.

A NOVEL

No one could write a novel about this family:

too many similar characters. Besides, they're all women;

there was only one hero.

Now the hero's dead. Like echoes, the women last longer;

they're all too tough for their own good.

From this point on, nothing changes:

there's no plot without a hero.

In this house, when you say
plot
what you mean is
love story.

The women can't get moving.

Oh, they get dressed, they eat, they keep up appearances.

But there's no action, no development of character.

They're all determined to suppress

criticism of the hero. The problem is

he's weak; his scenes specify

his function but not his nature.

Maybe that explains why his death wasn't moving.

First he's sitting at the head of the table,

where the figurehead is most needed.

Then he's dying, a few feet away, his wife holding a mirror under his mouth.

Amazing, how they keep busy, these women, the wife and two daughters.

Setting the table, clearing the dishes away.

Each heart pierced through with a sword.

LABOR DAY

It's a year exactly since my father died.

Last year was hot. At the funeral, people talked about the weather.

How hot it was for September. How unseasonable.

This year, it's cold.

There's just us now, the immediate family.

In the flower beds,

shreds of bronze, of copper.

Out front, my sister's daughter rides her bicycle

the way she did last year,

up and down the sidewalk. What she wants is

to make time pass.

While to the rest of us

a whole lifetime is nothing.

One day, you're a blond boy with a tooth missing;

the next, an old man gasping for air.

It comes to nothing, really, hardly

a moment on earth.

Not a sentence, but a breath, a caesura.

LOVER OF FLOWERS

In our family, everyone loves flowers.

That's why the graves are so odd:

no flowers, just padlocks of grass,

and in the center, plaques of granite,

the inscriptions terse, the shallow letters

sometimes filling with dirt.

To clean them out, you use your handkerchief.

With my sister, it's different,

it's an obsession. Weekends, she sits on my mother's porch,

reading catalogues. Every autumn, she plants bulbs by the brick stoop;

every spring, waits for flowers.

No one discusses cost. It's understood

my mother pays; after all,

it's her garden, every flower

planted for my father. They both see

the house as his true grave.

Not everything thrives on Long Island.

Sometimes the summer gets too hot;

sometimes a heavy rain beats down the flowers.

That's how the poppies died, after one day,

because they're very fragile.

My mother's tense, upset about my sister:

now she'll never know how beautiful they were,

pure pink, with no dark spots. That means

she's going to feel deprived again.

But for my sister, that's the condition of love.

She was my father's daughter:

the face of love, to her,

is the face turning away.

WIDOWS

My mother's playing cards with my aunt,

Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game

my grandmother taught all her daughters.

Midsummer: too hot to go out.

Today, my aunt's ahead; she's getting the good cards.

My mother's dragging, having trouble with her concentration.

She can't get used to her own bed this summer.

She had no trouble last summer,

getting used to the floor. She learned to sleep there

to be near my father.

He was dying; he got a special bed.

My aunt doesn't give an inch, doesn't make

allowance for my mother's weariness.

It's how they were raised: you show respect by fighting.