Second Childhood (5 page)

empathy was our only hope.

Some old people want to leave this earth and

experience another.

They don’t want to commit suicide. They want to

wander out of sight

without comrades or luggage.

Once I was given such an opportunity, and what did

I find?

Mist between mountains, the monotonous buzz of

farm machinery,

cornstalks brown and flowers then furrows

preparing to receive seeds for next year’s harvest.

A castle, half-ruined by a recent earthquake still

highly functional.

Computers, copying machines and cars.

It was once a monastery and home for a family

continually at war.

Cypress trees and chestnut and walnut trees. A swing

hanging long from a high bough,

where paths circle down, impeding quick escapes by

armies or thieves.

I was assigned the monastic wing that later became

a granary.

Brick-red flagstones, small windows with hinged

casements

and twelve squares of glass inside worn frames.

From the moment I entered the long strange space,

I foresaw an otherworldly light taking shape.

Scorpions lived in the cracks.

I came without a plan, empty-handed except for my

notebooks from preceding days.

This lack was a deliberate choice: to see what would

be revealed to me by circumstances.

I took long walks that multiplied my body into

companionable parts.

Down dusty roads and alongside meadows,

and pausing to look at the mountains and clouds,

I talked to myself.

Mysticism “provides a path for those who ask the way

to get lost.

It teaches how not to return,” wrote Michel de Certeau.

One day I had the sense that there were two boys

accompanying me everywhere I went.

I could not identify the boy on the left,

but the one on the right was overwhelmingly himself.

Someone I knew and loved.

The other one was very powerful in his personality,

an enigma and a delight.

His spirit seemed to spread into the roads and

weather.

Silver olive trees and prim vineyards.

Now a rain has whitened the morning sky but every

single leaf holds a little water and glitter.

Mirror neurons experience the suffering that they see.

A forest thick with rust and gold that doesn’t rust.

I saw a painting where the infant Jesus was lying on

his back

on the floor at the feet of Mary

and his halo was still attached to his head.

And another painting where there were about forty

baby cherubs

all wearing golden halos. Gold represents the sun as

the sun represents God.

Outside wild boars were still roaming the hills.

Maize, sunflowers, honey, thyme, beans, stones,

olives and tomatoes.

Rush hour in the two-lane highway.

Oak tree leaves curled into caramel balls.

A Franciscan monk sat on a floor reciting the rosary, a concept borrowed from Islamic prayer beads centuries before.

Figs, bread, pasta, wine and cheese.

These are not the subconscious, but necessities.

People want to be poets for reasons that have little to

do with language.

It is the life of the poet that they want, I think.

Even the glow of loneliness and humiliation.

To walk in the gutter with a bottle of wine.

Some people’s lives are more poetic than a poem

and Francis is certainly one of these.

I know, because he walked beside me for that

short time

whether you believe it or not. He was thirteen.

That night I drank walnut liqueur, just a sip, it tasted

like Kahlua.

The inner wing of a bird is the color of a doe.

And the turned-over earth is the color of a nut, and a bird,

but soon it will be watered for the green wheat of spring.

Flying up the hill on the back of the motorbike in the warm Roman air was like drinking from the fountain of youth.

Umbrella trees along the Tiber.

I walked on the rooftops across Rome, including a grassy one, and one where a palm grew out of a crack in the rocks.

I was carrying an assortment of envelopes containing paintings and notes for my Mass but they could not be managed easily because their shapes were irregular.

Some had juttings, some were swollen, the color red was prominent. They depicted divided cities, divided into layers, not all in a line. A layer cake sagging under the weight of accumulated dust, dirt and now grass.

Each layer had been purchased at the cost of decades, even centuries of hand-hurting, back-breaking slave labor.
Caveat emptor!

Broken columns, mashed marble friezes and faces. The triumph of greed

was written across my storyboard. The city was a

mighty and devouring creation,

a creature with a crusted skin.

Even in the city you look for a place that welcomes you. You actually want to be found!

Being found is the polar opposite of making a vow.

You are a pot of gold and not the arc of the rainbow.

When you sit down on a stone, face up to the sun, you can’t help but think,
Mine, mine.

And you don’t have to promise anything to anyone in time.

You may be called to a place of banality or genius,

but as long as it is your own happiness that responds to it,

you are available to something inhuman.

Mozart sat at the piano for the better part of every day.

All over the world monks have lived in desert hovels as scribes, prophets, mendicants.

They are the extreme realization of one aspect of human personality

that tends towards lack of possession and solitude.

There was a hole in the roof of the Pantheon where

we were told

that the snow fell through onto the relics of Catherine of Siena

the mystic and onto the porphyry.

A man in Rome told me that a monkey climbed down a wall

holding an infant in his arms and in remembrance

there is a statue of the Madonna

on the very rooftop where he began his descent.

For you, what is happiness?

Black tiles and slant

of ribbed clouds.

A child’s rainbow

with a house under it.

Clothes in the washer

clapping all night.

Thanks as ever to the editors of Graywolf Press and to the staff and atmosphere of the Vermont Studio Center and to the kind people of Civitella Ranieri. For help along the way, my thanks to Rae Armantrout, Christian Wiman, William Corbett, Carolyn Forché, Isaac Slater, Richard Kearney, Elizabeth Robinson, Linda Norton, Carmine Cerone, Xandra Bingley, Lynn Christoffers, and to the exemplary life of Joeritta de Almeida.

I would like to thank the editors of the following publications that published my poems and the poems of so many others:

American Poet, The Baffler, Consequence, The Economy, Epiphany, Fact-Simile, Fire
(UK),
Golden Handcuffs, The Harvard Review, The Lamb
(Song Cave chapbook),
New Orleans Review, Pataphysics, Paul Revere, Plume, Poetry, The Straddler, Talisman, The Volta
, and
Water~Stone Review.

Fanny Howe
is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including most recently
Come and See, The Lyrics
, and
The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
She received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement, and she has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. She lives in New England.

The text of
Second Childhood
is set in Minion Pro, an original typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.