Poems 1962-2012 (21 page)

A small window, filled with the patterns light makes.

In its emptiness the world

was whole always, not

a chip of something, with

the self at the center.

And at the center of the self,

grief I thought I couldn't survive.

A room with a bed, a table. Flashes

of light on the naked surfaces.

I had two desires: desire

to be safe and desire to feel. As though

the world were making

a decision against white

because it disdained potential

and wanted in its place substance:

panels

of gold where the light struck.

In the window, reddish

leaves of the copper beech tree.

Out of the stasis, facts, objects

blurred or knitted together: somewhere

time stirring, time

crying to be touched, to be

palpable,

the polished wood

shimmering with distinctions—

and then I was once more

a child in the presence of riches

and I didn't know what the riches were made of.

THE QUEEN OF CARTHAGE

Brutal to love,

more brutal to die.

And brutal beyond the reaches of justice

to die of love.

In the end, Dido

summoned her ladies in waiting

that they might see

the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the Fates.

She said, “Aeneas

came to me over the shimmering water;

I asked the Fates

to permit him to return my passion,

even for a short time. What difference

between that and a lifetime: in truth, in such moments,

they are the same, they are both eternity.

I was given a great gift

which I attempted to increase, to prolong.

Aeneas came to me over the water: the beginning

blinded me.

Now the Queen of Carthage

will accept suffering as she accepted favor:

to be noticed by the Fates

is some distinction after all.

Or should one say, to have honored hunger,

since the Fates go by that name also.”

THE OPEN GRAVE

My mother made my need,

my father my conscience.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Therefore it will cost me

bitterly to lie,

to prostrate myself

at the edge of a grave.

I say to the earth

be kind to my mother,

now and later.

Save, with your coldness,

the beauty we all envied.

I became an old woman.

I welcomed the dark

I used so to fear.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

UNWRITTEN LAW

Interesting how we fall in love:

in my case, absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often—

so it was in my youth.

And always with rather boyish men—

unformed, sullen, or shyly kicking the dead leaves:

in the manner of Balanchine.

Nor did I see them as versions of the same thing.

I, with my inflexible Platonism,

my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time:

I ruled against the indefinite article.

And yet, the mistakes of my youth

made me hopeless, because they repeated themselves,

as is commonly true.

But in you I felt something beyond the archetype—

a true expansiveness, a buoyance and love of the earth

utterly alien to my nature. To my credit,

I blessed my good fortune in you.

Blessed it absolutely, in the manner of those years.

And you in your wisdom and cruelty

gradually taught me the meaninglessness of that term.

THE BURNING HEART

“… No sadness

is greater than in misery to rehearse

memories of joy…”

 

Ask her if she regrets anything.

I was

promised to another—

I lived with someone.

You forget these things when you're touched.

Ask her how he touched her.

His gaze touched me

before his hands touched me.

Ask her how he touched her.

I didn't ask for anything;

everything was given.

Ask her what she remembers.

We were hauled into the underworld.

I thought

we were not responsible

any more than we were responsible

for being alive. I was

a young girl, rarely subject to censure:

then a pariah. Did I change that much

from one day to the next?

If I didn't change, wasn't my action

in the character of that young girl?

Ask her what she remembers.

I noticed nothing. I noticed

I was trembling.

Ask her if the fire hurts.

I remember

we were together.

And gradually I understood

that though neither of us ever moved

we were not together but profoundly separate.

Ask her if the fire hurts.

You expect to live forever with your husband

in fire more durable than the world.

I suppose this wish was granted,

where we are now being both

fire and eternity.

Do you regret your life?

Even before I was touched, I belonged to you;

you had only to look at me.

ROMAN STUDY

He felt at first

he should have been born

to Aphrodite, not Venus,

that too little was left to do,

to accomplish, after the Greeks.

And he resented light,

to which Greece has

the greatest claim.

He cursed his mother

(privately, discreetly),

she who could have arranged all of this.

And then it occurred to him

to examine these responses

in which, finally, he recognized

a new species of thought entirely,

more worldly, more ambitious

and politic, in what we now call

human terms.

And the longer he thought

the more he experienced

faint contempt for the Greeks,

for their austerity, the eerie

balance of even the great tragedies—

thrilling at first, then

faintly predictable, routine.

And the longer he thought

the more plain to him how much

still remained to be experienced,

and written down, a material world heretofore

hardly dignified.

And he recognized in exactly this reasoning

the scope and trajectory of his own

watchful nature.

THE NEW LIFE

I slept the sleep of the just,

later the sleep of the unborn

who come into the world

guilty of many crimes.

And what these crimes are

nobody knows at the beginning.

Only after many years does one know.

Only after long life is one prepared

to read the equation.

I begin now to perceive

the nature of my soul, the soul

I inhabit as punishment.

Inflexible, even in hunger.

I have been in my other lives

too hasty, too eager,

my haste a source of pain in the world.

Swaggering as a tyrant swaggers;

for all my amorousness,

cold at heart, in the manner of the superficial.

I slept the sleep of the just;

I lived the life of a criminal

slowly repaying an impossible debt.

And I died having answered for

one species of ruthlessness.

FORMAGGIO

The world

was whole because

it shattered. When it shattered,

then we knew what it was.

It never healed itself.

But in the deep fissures, smaller worlds appeared:

it was a good thing that human beings made them;

human beings know what they need,

better than any god.

On Huron Avenue they became

a block of stores; they became

Fishmonger, Formaggio. Whatever

they were or sold, they were

alike in their function: they were

visions of safety. Like

a resting place. The salespeople

were like parents; they appeared

to live there. On the whole,

kinder than parents.

Tributaries

feeding into a large river: I had

many lives. In the provisional world,

I stood where the fruit was,

flats of cherries, clementines,

under Hallie's flowers.

I had many lives. Feeding

into a river, the river

feeding into a great ocean. If the self

becomes invisible has it disappeared?

I thrived. I lived

not completely alone, alone

but not completely, strangers

surging around me.

That's what the sea is:

we exist in secret.

I had lives before this, stems

of a spray of flowers: they became

one thing, held by a ribbon at the center, a ribbon

visible under the hand. Above the hand,

the branching future, stems

ending in flowers. And the gripped fist—

that would be the self in the present.

TIMOR MORTIS

Why are you afraid?

A man in a top hat passed under the bedroom window.

I couldn't have been

more than four at the time.

It was a dream: I saw him

when I was high up, where I should have been

safe from him.

Do you remember your childhood?

When the dream ended

terror remained. I lay in my bed—

my crib maybe.

I dreamed I was kidnapped. That means

I knew what love was,

how it places the soul in jeopardy.

I knew. I substituted my body.

But you were hostage?

I was afraid of love, of being taken away.

Everyone afraid of love is afraid of death.

I pretended indifference

even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger.

And the more deeply I felt

the less able I was to respond.

Do you remember your childhood?

I understood that the magnitude of these gifts

was balanced by the scope of my rejection.

Do you remember your childhood?

I lay in the forest.

Still, more still than any living creature.

Watching the sun rise.

And I remember once my mother turning away from me

in great anger. Or perhaps it was grief.

Because for all she had given me,

for all her love, I failed to show gratitude.

And I made no sign of understanding.

For which I was never forgiven.

LUTE SONG

No one wants to be the muse;

in the end, everyone wants to be Orpheus.

Valiantly reconstructed

(out of terror and pain)

and then overwhelmingly beautiful;

restoring, ultimately,

not Eurydice, the lamented one,

but the ardent

spirit of Orpheus, made present

not as a human being, rather

as pure soul rendered

detached, immortal,

through deflected narcissism.

I made a harp of disaster

to perpetuate the beauty of my last love.

Yet my anguish, such as it is,

remains the struggle for form

and my dreams, if I speak openly,

less the wish to be remembered

than the wish to survive,

which is, I believe, the deepest human wish.

ORFEO

“J'ai perdu mon Eurydice…”

I have lost my Eurydice,

I have lost my lover,

and suddenly I am speaking French

and it seems to me I have never been in better voice;

it seems these songs

are songs of a high order.

And it seems one is somehow expected to apologize

for being an artist,

as though it were not entirely human to notice these fine points.

And who knows, perhaps the gods never spoke to me in Dis,

never singled me out,

perhaps it was all illusion.

O Eurydice, you who married me for my singing,

why do you turn on me, wanting human comfort?

Who knows what you'll tell the furies

when you see them again.

Tell them I have lost my beloved;

I am completely alone now.

Tell them there is no music like this

without real grief.

In Dis, I sang to them; they will remember me.

DESCENT TO THE VALLEY

I found the years of the climb upward

difficult, filled with anxiety.

I didn't doubt my capacities:

rather, as I moved toward it,

I feared the future, the shape of which

I perceived. I saw

the shape of a human life:

on the one side, always upward and forward

into the light; on the other side,

downward into the mists of uncertainty.

All eagerness undermined by knowledge.

I have found it otherwise.

The light of the pinnacle, the light that was,

theoretically, the goal of the climb,

proves to have been poignantly abstract:

my mind, in its ascent,

was entirely given over to detail, never

perception of form; my eyes

nervously attending to footing.

How sweet my life now

in its descent to the valley,

the valley itself not mist-covered

but fertile and tranquil.

So that for the first time I find myself

able to look ahead, able to look at the world,

even to move toward it.

THE GARMENT

My soul dried up.

Like a soul cast into fire, but not completely,

not to annihilation. Parched,

it continued. Brittle,

not from solitude but from mistrust,

the aftermath of violence.