picnic in ten years’ time — 2004
~ ~ ~
composed of: BESTIARY nos. 1–17 and LATER MANUAL
If, in a crowd of thousands there is preserved one who knows me, then I go free.
1 — Bestiary nos. 1–17
~ ~ ~
The first dream in which I had the sensation of my true situation while asleep occurs in the 207th night; the second in the 214th.
Hervey de Saint-Denys, 1867
It Was a Later Century
I woke in the midst of a deep sleep,
some sleep such as comes over
the entirety of the world, that lasts
an infinite and indefinite period;
that, when finished, is scarcely marked
by those who slept. Out in the world
things were quiet. I went to the house
of the girl I love. She was asleep.
I dressed her, and took her with me
over my shoulder. By the river I picked
cornflowers. It was a glorious day.
From a great distance I saw a picnic,
a party of revelers, a dog. But so far,
would we ever reach them?
My girl did not answer, but looked
lovely I may tell you, in blue cotton.
I began to cross the plain.
If the day stays still we may
yet reach the other side,
to picnic there in ten years’ time.
Arravelli’s “View of Loum,” 1542
There are three walking by the small river,
dividing the world’s belongings
into three. A hatted man in a road-stained cloak.
To the left, a miller bent upon a stick, who seems,
though crippled, to ask no help of his daughter,
she who wanders there
in the composition, the daylight rolled up
like a map against her scarlet hair.
They have been talking some time it seems
without passing beyond that row of hills
the young traveler would have crossed to come
to this crisis, to this dwelling place.
And yes, there is a mill, some four brushstrokes
delicately upon a distant withered lawn. Economy
constitutes this life: the daughter has but one
dress, that she wears; she has but one suitor,
soon to pass away; but one father, hateful,
gathering the plurals of sadness to himself;
one sadness, shared like bread; one world, beyond,
evoked once by the single traveler who has seen her
stark against foreshortened youth. For they grow old,
these wild daughters, bound to fathers
in grim lands. In them grief is a yellow tree, encircled
by a fence of bird-like angels. No shout will cause
this flock to rise to air. And here the light
is never strong enough for the face upon waking,
though it pools where the animals sleep,
and comes radiant at night through unreachable
fields, through windows which, seen with closed eyes,
confirm all dread — elsewhere there is a dance
that many have joined. She winces, and her one hand
is joined by the other, as if it were the painter himself, who,
painting an arm to hold the arm which looked
so hard to bear, had given himself away.
He was this traveler, Arravelli, who lied and yet did not lie,
a young man who said he would return.
The Privileged Girl Speaks
Whatever you do by the margin,
don’t touch the tree line. It’s poisonous.
Grandfather planted it sixty years ago
to keep things out. He’s the only one
it cares for. You should see
the old man take a walk. He goes along
the forest edge, whistling, “St. Pierre is Home”
and it opens like a door
into some other wooden room.
Bestiary 1
It was a gray sun that stood at the door that day
and asked me for some water. Deny the sun
a cup of water? I could not.
And let me tell you something else. If it had asked
for a bed I’d have given it a bed. If it had asked
for a roasted calf, I’d have given it a roasted calf.
Soon after it left, I felt empty. I went
back to my needlepoint — three yellow bees
trying to escape from the Archangel Gabriel.
They’d stung him rather badly
on his hands and on the loose and careless
portions of his wings.
A Set Piece
to be told at gatherings
The resignation of the sheriff left nothing to be done. The populace of that tiny hamlet poured out into the cramped streets, half-dressed and quarrelsome. Shops were broken into. Women were vigorously affronted. Men too were affronted, with equal vigor and panache. Many living near the municipal zoo were beaten by a crowd of contrary children. I taught everyone a hymn I had written, complete with musical accompaniment. It went:
Kill us if you like,
but you won’t like Hell
when you do (when you do)
come to (come to)
in the heat (in the hot)
in the hot (in the heat)
in the goddamn fire of the Lord.
I pretend now to have made it up, but actually an old woman sang it to me when I menaced her husband with my little knife. I wanted their clothing, particularly her aubergine housecoat.
But don’t be concerned for me. This sort of thing is what everyone does when everyone does it. And everyone who doesn’t does play along, or at least watches from the wings as those who do do what they do, whether well or wantonly.
In another hour, we shall burn the town to bits. I’ve always wanted to, and now we’re in cahoots. It’s a wonderful thing, being in cahoots. One can’t help but prefer it. We’ll all sit on the hill outside of town and laugh and hold hands with pretty girls and boys while pretty girls and boys laugh and hold hands with us.
And the sky will stream fitfully across the sky, its sails filled by the same wind that prompted us this morning when we rose, rosy cheeked and hamhanded from our all-too-narrow beds, filled with the same rippling restless pleasure that even now sits like a lantern in my youthful throat.
Bestiary 2
A ninety-five-year-old pilgrim is at the door.
She’s knocked three times. Each time
she knocks, a knuckle in her hand breaks.
She wants a cup of water.
The desert here is wide.
In fact, this is the widest point.
Sometimes I like to go up to the roof
and ring our huge bell.
The sound floats in the air
like some hundred ships
all tossed on a single wave.
It moves out across the sand,
and nothing stops it. I think it can
go forever. I think of places the sound
goes. Cottages, little green
hedgerows, gardeners looking up.
“Oh, it’s time for lunch,” they must say,
“there’s the bell.”
A Turn
So many people had come by asking for water that day
that I took the last one with me to the well.
We both climbed in. It is, you know, one of my favorite places.
At the bottom, I have set up a fine little room
with soft cushions and a phonograph.
“What would you like to hear,” I ask her.
She says, “Mozart, I guess,” and darts
her little tongue at me, coyly disengages a dress strap.
“Oh you deipnosophists are all alike!” I shout,
and put on Brahms to spite her.
In response, she wags her tail. It is long and soft,
most alluring. Alluring, one might say,
if one lived in a house in the desert.
Who knew, I ask you, who knew when I was a child
that I would one day be made a present
of such a lovely girl as this?
That Season
That season there were comedies in every playhouse.
One drought had followed another until certain countries
relied solely upon humor to survive their harsh winters.
At the time I had just begun an illustrious career
as a trainer of soldiers. I didn’t further the war — it was
against my interest. But I taught one skill to the troops:
how to stand immediately behind their opponents.
A fight would start. The enemy would lunge,
and there I would be, standing behind him,
from where I might do what I liked to help or hinder
his passage through the war. The trick, of course,
was in a particular grin and a twisting of the limbs
which accompanies the sudden shift right or left.
The whole thing was rather funny, or so I thought,
as the enemy was employing experts to accomplish
precisely the same gain. The upshot? A battle
in which two armies twirled around like dancers
in some avant-garde ballet. Everyone came out
to the countryside to watch. It was the start
of a short but bloodless epoch in world history.
Bestiary 3
And then one day the pilgrimage route changed. No one wanted to see the pillar in the desert, and so I had no more visitors. It was sad really, or so I thought at first. But then I went back to the history book I was writing.
Such a book. .
It doesn’t even use our verbs. They’re too
pointed. Only causeless words
can please, a record without
a point of view. History proper,
for the first time.
Every physical change
in the world listed, along with its place.
I can work only at night, while I’m asleep.
Dreaming, one has time for such things.
Nonetheless, I fall behind. If only I had
an assistant, a really clever one. .
All hermits begin by pretending to be hermits.
And by liking birds.
First Verse
In the house of my sleeping eye the veins of wood
run from the furniture down into the floor.
When I lay my hands upon the table’s surface
the entire feathered expanse
shifts in flight.
Parades
And when you are finally caught and questioned,
it is discovered, sadly, that you know
nothing of use. Your captors exchange glances, nod.
You are released in the freedom of some afternoon,
some autumn of the year, your coat, hat, returned
as if to continue your life. Now it is you
in the world again. In yellowing rooms, life
becomes no more than the places where it occurs.
At the pier in darkness, parades will cross the water,
visible but once. Or I could say
I saw the wind coming hard along the river touching all it passed.
How are things consequent? When they catch you
again, what will you say? That all things
may be weighed, may be raised and weighed
by two human hands?
A Calico Ascription
I stand by the pump with a deaf girl.
She is on the verge of a breakthrough.
I am very earnest and sedulous.
I am possibly the best teacher
who has ever lived. I lever the pump’s
arm, and water begins to flow.
Meanwhile, in my days as a
snake-charmer, a great painter
is sketching me. He’s on holiday
and has inserted a slight grin
onto this quiet face.
I wasn’t grinning. You mustn’t
suppose I was grinning.
I’ve always known day by day
my real work approaches.
Not for anything would I grin,
not even once.
The work means too much.
Our Plots, Our Comfort
By an old mill my father is waiting
with hundreds of other fathers.
I would like for them to keep
each other company,
but from here it is plain—
none of them is speaking.
What’s that in his hand?
An old leather wallet.
He’s taking something out of it,
a picture, I wonder of whom.
Who next will go to join him,
walking long there
in the early places of my life?
Report from Our Lands
Nevertheless the war continued
trembling the cupboards
where we slept, cracking the long
stone walkways of the village, as
if there were no other way to act
successfully in this foolish place,
as if were we in its place, this war,
we had no light but brute gleaming.
Bestiary 4
A race of men who can turn themselves into not animals
but inanimate objects. Europeans reach this tribe
by boat. What a grand city, they say. What fine broad
avenues, such as you might see in Paris. How lovely
the women in their long satin dresses, with their
fans and shuddering hair. Much feasting goes on.
Days later, the discovery is made. Orders are sent back
across the sea to be confirmed by the Queen.
Orders are confirmed. The populace is brought out
into a series of aesthetically ideal city squares
and forced at gunpoint to change directly
into gold. They object at first, then the King
changes himself into a large gold vase. His sons
become a pair of gold grates (for a confessional). Their
children become lockets. The royal servants
take the form of forks and spoons. This is general
throughout the population, and the objects
become a sort of faux-history, where each object
fails in its attempt to mimic the life lived.
Historians today wonder if this was intentional.
Bestiary 5
These pregnant methods, cheerful
and fat, leaning from filthy casements
in the side of June may yield
ink-eyed marionettes so lovely
that their gestures,
pointedly describing strings,
mean little even to the adept.
Mary. Isa. Joan. Celeste.
Roaming the grounds
of this quartered preserve.
Mary lays a lacquered hand
upon your cheek. Joan’s plain head
inclines — she is speaking
but the voice is from above.
Isa crouches in the near future;
she will scream at a painted boar
that bursts from a stand of trees.
Celeste is absent. Or is Joan
speaking of her when she says,
“I knew a matchstick once
that burned like the hands of a clock.”
From the scenery then, a wooden creaking
as of someone’s descent. Applause.
Applause. And in the front row
a man’s heart bursts in his chest.
EAST RIDING
ONE
The forest was much larger than anyone had previously thought.
So large that one couldn’t find one’s way back.
Luckily there were many lovely clearings and crisp glorious mornings.
It was therefore possible to live.
Also there were rose bushes everywhere, each larger than the one before
(and how we loved to discover the roses, naming them after ourselves).
And biplanes would pass overhead.
TWO
In the period before I entered the forest, I thought
that there was the world, one small corner of which
was the forest. Now it has become clear to me—
there is the forest, and the world is but
one small corner of it, exceedingly small, humble even.
For I have seen them meet in the street, and I can tell you
it is the world that makes the deeper bow, the world
that goes away, hat in hand, making furtive glances back
to see if the forest has turned also to look. Which never happens.
And furthermore, one can’t find one’s way back.
Luckily there are many lovely clearings and crisp glori ous mornings.
THREE
On one such morning I went out looking
for the clearest of seven streams. Seven there were,
running through the forest, and all of them clear.
Which was the clearest?
I put my hand in the first stream.
My hand turned the color of the night sky, which is mottled.
This distressed me, so I put my hand in my pocket.
On to the next stream.
I put my other hand in the second stream.
It soon began to move of its own accord.
This distressed me further. With a stern act of will
I put it too in my pocket.
On again.
At the third stream, a man was standing.
Both of his hands were stuck in his pockets also.
“What do you suppose we do next?” he asked.
FOUR
The forest is different than was supposed.
It is darker in the trees, lighter between them.
Passing between them is its own skill,
separate from the skill of being in clearings.
This is how it goes: you wander for years
in the world, then you find the edge of the forest.
You enter, and wander for days in the forest.
You try to find your way back.
Instead you find a clearing. Also you find out
whether or not you can live alone in the forest.
Many can’t. Others come after, and bury them.
Hungry little roses grow then from the ground.
FIVE
We of the forest wonder often about the biplanes.
From where do they take off?
Where do they land?
It should be easy to answer this question,
as there are so many of us asking it and spending time
wondering and musing.
The trouble is, only one person ever saw the biplanes.
He mentioned it in passing. Afterwards,
he refused to speak of it. Otherwise, he was silent.
If you happen to see a biplane, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?
one of my friends asked me.
Of course I would, I say. But I’m not sure of it.
I’m not sure I wouldn’t follow the plane alone to the land- ing field
(which must be a clearing deeper in the forest)
there to make friends with the aviators, and beg them to take me in.
Such a life it would be to fly in the air above the forest!
Distinctly I feel above the forest, luckily it is always gloriously morning.
And in a plane, one can easily find one’s way,
though not, of course, back to the world. One could,
I mean, find one’s way deeper into the forest.
SIX
What can I tell you about the forest
that you can’t read in books? Well,
our lives here are bared like the trunks of trees.
We believe fundamentally in things that are
quite obviously not true. On such things
our happiness is often based.
For instance, the allegiance of friends.
We of the forest are known cowards.
We make free with each other’s possession,
make love to each other’s husbands and wives.
At first it is odd, I know.
Pierre for instance, has a gorgeous wife.
She wears a little dress of leaves. People are forever
pulling at it as she curtsies by on her girlish legs.
One day she asked me if I would like
to go and find the Monumental Rose.
Where is it? I asked.
Deeper in, she said. We really must be going.
And so we went. I took Pierre’s name.
He took mine. We shook hands.
Have a fine time, he said. Be good.
The forest is much larger than you think.
THEN — a rustling of leaves. Cora had gone.
I’d better go, I said, following into the rustling
through the glorious light.
SEVEN
The philosophers who end up in the forest
stop writing books and begin instead
trying to grow herb-gardens. Every time
it happens the same way. It’s so funny.
There’s Spinoza. What’s he doing? Pruning oregano.
There’s William James.
What are you doing, William James? I inquire.
But he doesn’t answer, so absorbed is he
in laying string for vines. I watch for a minute,
standing fast by his elbow, intent on his progress.
Before you go, he says absently,
be sure to take a sprig of parsley for your buttonhole.
This I do. Need I say it twice?
We of the forest are terribly dashing.
EIGHT
Everyone in the forest has the same dream every night.
We sleep and are immediately awake again
in a tiny one-room house. There is a storm
in the out-of-doors. It is clear to everyone
that it is the biggest storm there’s ever been.
The forest, in fact, has been flattened.
All of a sudden, the storm halts.
We rush out of the cottage door
and are standing in the middle of a clearing
that stretches infinitely in every direction.
It’s then we realize that the forest
has not been flattened. Nor was there
a storm. Merely that
this is a deeper clearing, one we may
someday find. We wake then, invigorated,
and without so much as a by-your-leave,
rush off into the dew-strewn underbrush.
NINE
East Riding. It is the name that the world has
for the forest. I recall I was a child when I
heard it first. Still, I felt drawn.
I would go sometimes to the highest part
of the farm country and gaze eastward to the sea
of treetops drowsing in the distance,
hazy day, the sun’s rays mingling with the dust
and hanging in the air like the passing of hands.
I believe, I told the village priest, in East Riding.
Dismayed, he spoke with my parents,
counseling them to send me to the part of the world
farthest from East Riding.
But my father laughed. I recall this vividly.
He laughed at the priest, and raised me up
eye level into the air. He said,
“I believe you are going to East Riding.
Already you’ve left us.”
He took my mother’s hand and stood in the doorway
looking off into the distance as though watching
the progress of some traveler on a distant road.
But I was still in the house. My things weren’t even packed.
The priest stuck his sharp elbow in my ribs.
See? he said. So I slipped between my parent’s legs
and walked and walked and walked.
When I reached the distant road, I could see
that they were watching. I waved. They waved back.
And I followed the road where it went
beneath a canopy of trees.
TEN
On the deeper paths, one can’t know
for sure if one is welcome, save by clearings.
If one encounters lovely clearings
and crisp glorious mornings, then one has
cannily chosen the right path.
At other times it’s as dark as the inside
of a leaded window on an old cloudy block.
No one visits anymore, and the oldest man
is older by far than the histories he tells.
This is his defense, and it’s a keen one.
So I know to turn back, sometimes.
Always, it’s then one is given a small but kind
clearing to sleep in, and a tiny rose in greeting.
Be thou pleased by the day, and by waking
to light. From the bottom of a well
comes the vaguest song, but it is, I think,
known to you, muttered in your aging heart.
For if we all do not know a thing,
then no one can know it. It is not given us
to have that which is not instinctively
present in the world. On the softest grass
imaginable, I lay my head. It is quiet
and the path has been lost.
The path, I say, has been lost.
It is lovely to say things in a human voice
and hear in your mind or in the air,
and hear in the forest a human reply.
Grimoir or the hole beside the millstream
Little Teag was sleeping on a bed of moss. Just then up crept a satyr, the cruelest, most straying, canceling satyr of them all. He stripped poor Teag down to the bone with his sharp teeth and left the little skeleton for someone else to find. Such a delicate skeleton. I came upon it while walking. I pointed to it with my hand, and went to it with my feet. John Spence, who was along, did not come closer. He said it wasn’t a proper burial. I said we should give it one. And so we had my little sister out with us next day dressed up in ribbons and lace, and I wore my high collar and Spence had a good cap. We wrapped the little fellow in a clean sheet of linen and brought him down to a hole we’d dug by the millstream. I said a few words then, like a deacon, I said, “IF it was a satyr that did this, or a lamb, neither will I worship. Braver than the soil is the flesh that lends it breadth.” And through the woods then the satyr came, galloping on its hind legs. We hid in the grave ’til it had gone, and only then emerged to lay upon the ground in the groggy afternoon, listening to the brook. Before we left I filled the hole, spreading the earth flat enough for any boy to walk upon. John Spence marked it with a stone, in case we should ever again need a hiding place in that part of the forest.
Casuist’s Aside
And being wrong about the colors light takes in the eyes of my animals,
I wonder now what many failures
of difference I have made,
trying to map the catchments of other lives
with brown scenes from this single self.
Missive in an Icelandic Room
RITA KEPT LAZARUS IN A CHINESE BOX & FED HIM PEPPERMINTS UNTIL HE NO LONGER KNEW WHO OR WHAT HE WAS. THEN SHE GAVE HIM A PAPER CROWN AND A JAR WITH A TADPOLE AND BADE HIM SIT BESIDE HER.
And If They Should Tell You
That I have debauched the youth of this town. That further, I,
a youth of this town, have been
debauched, have helped in the debauching of others. Have helped
myself in and to the debauching
of the others, well. . I would not be overly troubled at the news.
For you see, I have a new
project in mind. Imagine a house, a shack rather, in some flyspeck
town. Within the house, a trap door.
And beneath the door, an entire realm of wickedness!
He who first spoke of it
has promised we will meet there, and I must confess, I look now
often at the map he left,
look often upon those impressions his thin and supple fingers
made in oily remark.
Missive in an Icelandic Room 2
Harangued
by the ring
master, the
paper circus
fell to
muttering.
Johan wrung
his hand
and stroked
the elephant’s
thick skin.
“How will
we fathom
the mind of
the audience,
if we cannot
name it truly
our oldest
and deepest
foe?”
The First Mime
A young king is unhappy. He takes
to going out with a false beard,
sackcloth robes, a long knife, a leather bag.
He soon becomes known about town in this capacity,
and liked. He takes a mistress. He spends time
in common taverns, in playhouses.
No one knows his secret, save a palace guard
his own age, who lets him out of the castle each night.
One night the disguised king
returns to the castle, only to find the guard,
now also disguised, ruling from his throne.
Before the King can speak, the new King orders him seized
by palace guards who cut out his tongue
and cart him away to a nearby asylum.
He is heard from no more.
The new King despises his children
and has them strangled. On the other hand,
he takes great pleasure in his association with the Queen,
who has guessed nothing.
One day it is announced before the court
that a madman is at the gates, claiming to be the King.
The King grants him an audience, at which time
the madman tells the court the story
that you have just been told, this time
through a series of hand gestures. Naturally,
no one is convinced. The King, however,
takes pity on the man, and allows him
to take up service as his jester, in which capacity,
I may happily relate, the man excels.
Word of the mute jester spreads,
and soon the court of this King is spoken of
throughout many lands
as a place of enlightenment and culture.
Version
She wanted desperately to know
what was in the green box.
A green box on a coarse black cloth
in a burnished-gold room.
She leaned in close,
her soft hair falling across
both our faces.
If only, she breathed,
I could dream my way
into that citadel
and wake, the green box
clutched in my hands.
Antonym of My Name
It was a dull play about a boy whose pet calf was being slaughtered.
Apparently no one could stop this thing from happening.
The butcher was played by a florid man with a huge beard.
Somehow having a beard made him likely to kill a calf.
I felt sorry for the calf, which was an actual calf,
and must have been on sedatives. It let everyone drag it around
on a little tether of worn rope. I wanted to write a review
for a major newspaper saying, “the little sedated calf
stole the show in Sunday’s performance of Johan’s Gift.”
Instead, two hours into the performance, the boy has his feeble
arms wrapped around the calf which isn’t breathing.
Someone is singing a lullaby, trying to make him fall asleep
so they can take the animal to the block. The butcher
has a surprisingly sweet voice. Nine tawdry little urchins
dressed in sparkly tutus do a dance around the boy. This is his dream
beginning. Each boy has a sedated calf in his arms.
The butcher sneaks in the window and is reaching for the calf
when the dream-urchins draw swords and stab him to death.
They were just pretending to be dream-urchins. HA!
Missive in an Icelandic Room 3
Clever remarks were no good,
Elizabeth realized. A sparrow was a sparrow,
and would never be a proper friend,
nor make up for the legions
of her childhood who’d abandoned her,
and left her to drift in this half-haze,
this country holiday without end.
And that there is
at the core of all the great artists, all the great thinkers, some severe misunderstanding, arrived at in childhood and never disclosed, never brought to light. Such a generative force propels imagination, skews thought, forces realization. And since it is, at heart, a mistaken conception, buried deep in the artist’s past, one cannot hope to emulate that mind’s growth, nor even to find out what it was about which that child was wrong.
In a Glass Coffin Beneath Alexandria, in Alexander’s Dusty Skull, One Image Still Trembling
Darius, in a beggar’s filthy robe, passing
in the street below, a guard of six
beggars about him.
A faint frustration
like a candle’s negligible smoke:
Alexander’s many thousand troops seized
all the beggars of Issus.
But none was Darius.
Bestiary 8
I am watching a girl draw in her notebook.
She draws a little broad-shouldered fellow
with big eyes. Beneath it she writes,
“A WORM BORES INTO FYODOR’s BRAIN.”
Then she draws the worm. As she says,
it is indeed boring into his brain.
In no time the little chap will be insensible.
While there’s still a moment left, I intercede
on Fyodor’s behalf. “At least put a doctor
on the scene. At least that.”
She draws a doctor on a corner of the paper.
He is wearing pajamas.
“I had to get him out of bed,” she says. “He hates that.”
In the cafe, men are playing at cards,
smoking and drinking. A large moon has risen
over the cantina wall. In every direction,
the world is rising out of itself, stretching
like a healed animal. And I too am part of this.
Rising, I say to the girl, “Let’s go to the lake.”
Bestiary 9
Up she gets. Her things go into a cloth bag.
No one notices us leave except a yellow cur that follows us
for miles across the filthy blackened landscape.
Not This But The Truth
A YOUNG WOMAN IS AT THE DOOR. SHE ENTERS,
CROSSES THE ROOM AND OPENS A LOCKED BOX.
INSIDE IS THE POET, JESSE BALL, CURLED UP ASLEEP.
SHE RUNS HER HAND THROUGH HIS HAIR SLOWLY,
CAREFUL NOT TO WAKE HIM, FOR IF HE SHOULD WAKE,
SHE MURMURS SOFTLY, THEN WHAT WOULD
BECOME OF ALL OUR SECRET AND IMPLAUSIBLE HOPES?
Bestiary 10
The sadness of colored glass bottles stands in rows in the disused pharmacy.
I went there once
thinking to play a trick. Oh what a trick.
Two Dogs
As if these true books were given up
in guttural jest,
in flawed and flawing laughter—
And how, upon the road this day
at a line of shadowed yards two dogs
turned their heads and beheld me.
Could I but have called to them by name
we might have gone on, saying,
Evening crouches like a banister,
our famed poverty the steps beneath.
A Bargain
A trail of clothespins held my dress on
as I wandered in the wilderness.
I wandered for seven years
and each year I grew immeasurably
more beautiful.
How many, I ask you, how many
lives can there be that pass
without a glance to right or left?
I made a bargain with a mill-stone.
I said, “Be my lover.”
And it replied,
“Better you had died.”
And in the Hollow Tree There Was a Note That Said:
Not Satan, but some other
more shrewd impresario
created Music with a cunning
beyond good, beyond evil.
Therefore Music, like certain
other human tongues,
is not a source but a mutiny.
Bestiary 13
My mother lives by the smallest road
you could possibly imagine. She walks up it
each day, and down. I think sometimes
that such a road changes our possibilities.
By this I mean, you will never see this road
because I will never tell you
where to find my mother.
Forty-Year Soliloquy
Was there a way we were taught
to talk in doorways? Occasions,
I have always felt, should be the guide
to best propriety: a form for speech
while walking; a way to converse
surprised; a method for
engaging someone whom
you have embarrassed. These
and others would be part
of that manual I wish I had created
forty years back. Forty years
might be time enough, if the work
had been addressed by all,
for those now living to know
how to speak not just their minds
but also what they hope.
A Setting
At the Ambassador’s house the women took up
precisely half the space they ought to have
in order to be pleasing to the eye,
and everyone said savage things to each other,
in hopes they would be overheard.
But I was not amused. Consider this:
My cat had passed away just hours before
on a little plot of grass in the front yard.
In fact, I was carrying it over my shoulder
in a sagging gray canvas bag. And there I was,
there, there, there, as if anything could be solved
by foolish scripted action or the eyes that follow it.
Bestiary 14
Before he left, he passed me the knife
and I used it to cut my bonds.
It was a very dull knife
and the cutting took years.
Guards would wager on my progress.
“Sooner or later,” they’d say,
while washing the changing fashions
out of their thin and cunningly braided hair.
Bestiary 15
Her picture came to when I threw the water
over. Its eyes began to follow me.
No notion I had then, such as is in me now—
what it can mean to wake a thing that’s past.
Bestiary 16
Cardinal Piccate, famed priest-turned-skeptic of the 15th century:
we are somehow present at his denunciation. The pope
declares the excommunication to a crowd of hundreds
who have gathered in the papal gardens. A peculiar hand gesture
accompanies the statement. This gesture is much imitated
later that day and in the days to follow. Would that I could say
it was just the opening of a hand, or a gathering
of fingertips this way. No, you must observe it for yourself,
or read Cartoccio’s treatise on the matter. Later popes
resigned themselves to its loss as a tool of governance, so difficult
was it to master. But even now the sentence is being repeated.
Piccate, with his braided beard, his sun-scalded brow, is led off in chains.
Unbeknownst to the guards, you and I follow to his estate
on the hills outside Rome. He is put inside the main building,
with all his household and all its attendant creatures.
Hoisted above this building on scaffolding huge caul- drons tip
inevitably sealing the house in four-foot-thick
impenetrable hot wax. This was apparently
common practice. Skeptical thought must be dealt with
entirely or not at all, so says the Manual of Kings
and we who would rule must learn their fluid lessons.
To that end there is preserved, in a vault beneath the Vatican,
the house-entire of Cardinal Piccate, still sealed, hermetically,
poised in its last obdurate skepticism, caught beneath a lens
broad as a careful century.
The view from outside is stunning,
Cartoccio wrote, though it can in no way be compared
to that view achieved from the inaccessible interior.
Bestiary 17
A boundary. Laughter in the spanning rooms
I am forced to attend, one by one.
How attached they are, these unlikely places
one to another, street to gateway,
gateway to stair, stair to corridor
and from there — hidden rooms
and cluttered portals.
They say, I sang a song and you were in it
but you left just as I began. How I believe them.
It is a terribly hot summer
and from beneath this shading tree
there is a song just faintly, prompted
by my heel, each factored place singing out
when I have crossed some bordering veil.
But now I have my hearing,
and a group of men come into view,
walking with the theater, livelihood and jest.
Theirs was the tune I heard. Never to belong
to me, save in swayed refrain, or in the manner
of a berth laid by, as it was spoken to me
by the grand ship incidence, that said,
This is the tunnel through which the water flows
and I will bear you as water is borne: in a bucket, in a pan,
or loose throughout the drowning sea.
~ ~ ~
The first dream in which I had the sensation of my true situation while asleep occurs in the 207th night; the second in the 214th.
Hervey de Saint-Denys, 1867
It Was a Later Century
I woke in the midst of a deep sleep,
some sleep such as comes over
the entirety of the world, that lasts
an infinite and indefinite period;
that, when finished, is scarcely marked
by those who slept. Out in the world
things were quiet. I went to the house
of the girl I love. She was asleep.
I dressed her, and took her with me
over my shoulder. By the river I picked
cornflowers. It was a glorious day.
From a great distance I saw a picnic,
a party of revelers, a dog. But so far,
would we ever reach them?
My girl did not answer, but looked
lovely I may tell you, in blue cotton.
I began to cross the plain.
If the day stays still we may
yet reach the other side,
to picnic there in ten years’ time.
Arravelli’s “View of Loum,” 1542
There are three walking by the small river,
dividing the world’s belongings
into three. A hatted man in a road-stained cloak.
To the left, a miller bent upon a stick, who seems,
though crippled, to ask no help of his daughter,
she who wanders there
in the composition, the daylight rolled up
like a map against her scarlet hair.
They have been talking some time it seems
without passing beyond that row of hills
the young traveler would have crossed to come
to this crisis, to this dwelling place.
And yes, there is a mill, some four brushstrokes
delicately upon a distant withered lawn. Economy
constitutes this life: the daughter has but one
dress, that she wears; she has but one suitor,
soon to pass away; but one father, hateful,
gathering the plurals of sadness to himself;
one sadness, shared like bread; one world, beyond,
evoked once by the single traveler who has seen her
stark against foreshortened youth. For they grow old,
these wild daughters, bound to fathers
in grim lands. In them grief is a yellow tree, encircled
by a fence of bird-like angels. No shout will cause
this flock to rise to air. And here the light
is never strong enough for the face upon waking,
though it pools where the animals sleep,
and comes radiant at night through unreachable
fields, through windows which, seen with closed eyes,
confirm all dread — elsewhere there is a dance
that many have joined. She winces, and her one hand
is joined by the other, as if it were the painter himself, who,
painting an arm to hold the arm which looked
so hard to bear, had given himself away.
He was this traveler, Arravelli, who lied and yet did not lie,
a young man who said he would return.
The Privileged Girl Speaks
Whatever you do by the margin,
don’t touch the tree line. It’s poisonous.
Grandfather planted it sixty years ago
to keep things out. He’s the only one
it cares for. You should see
the old man take a walk. He goes along
the forest edge, whistling, “St. Pierre is Home”
and it opens like a door
into some other wooden room.
Bestiary 1
It was a gray sun that stood at the door that day
and asked me for some water. Deny the sun
a cup of water? I could not.
And let me tell you something else. If it had asked
for a bed I’d have given it a bed. If it had asked
for a roasted calf, I’d have given it a roasted calf.
Soon after it left, I felt empty. I went
back to my needlepoint — three yellow bees
trying to escape from the Archangel Gabriel.
They’d stung him rather badly
on his hands and on the loose and careless
portions of his wings.
A Set Piece
to be told at gatherings
The resignation of the sheriff left nothing to be done. The populace of that tiny hamlet poured out into the cramped streets, half-dressed and quarrelsome. Shops were broken into. Women were vigorously affronted. Men too were affronted, with equal vigor and panache. Many living near the municipal zoo were beaten by a crowd of contrary children. I taught everyone a hymn I had written, complete with musical accompaniment. It went:
Kill us if you like,
but you won’t like Hell
when you do (when you do)
come to (come to)
in the heat (in the hot)
in the hot (in the heat)
in the goddamn fire of the Lord.
I pretend now to have made it up, but actually an old woman sang it to me when I menaced her husband with my little knife. I wanted their clothing, particularly her aubergine housecoat.
But don’t be concerned for me. This sort of thing is what everyone does when everyone does it. And everyone who doesn’t does play along, or at least watches from the wings as those who do do what they do, whether well or wantonly.
In another hour, we shall burn the town to bits. I’ve always wanted to, and now we’re in cahoots. It’s a wonderful thing, being in cahoots. One can’t help but prefer it. We’ll all sit on the hill outside of town and laugh and hold hands with pretty girls and boys while pretty girls and boys laugh and hold hands with us.
And the sky will stream fitfully across the sky, its sails filled by the same wind that prompted us this morning when we rose, rosy cheeked and hamhanded from our all-too-narrow beds, filled with the same rippling restless pleasure that even now sits like a lantern in my youthful throat.
Bestiary 2
A ninety-five-year-old pilgrim is at the door.
She’s knocked three times. Each time
she knocks, a knuckle in her hand breaks.
She wants a cup of water.
The desert here is wide.
In fact, this is the widest point.
Sometimes I like to go up to the roof
and ring our huge bell.
The sound floats in the air
like some hundred ships
all tossed on a single wave.
It moves out across the sand,
and nothing stops it. I think it can
go forever. I think of places the sound
goes. Cottages, little green
hedgerows, gardeners looking up.
“Oh, it’s time for lunch,” they must say,
“there’s the bell.”
A Turn
So many people had come by asking for water that day
that I took the last one with me to the well.
We both climbed in. It is, you know, one of my favorite places.
At the bottom, I have set up a fine little room
with soft cushions and a phonograph.
“What would you like to hear,” I ask her.
She says, “Mozart, I guess,” and darts
her little tongue at me, coyly disengages a dress strap.
“Oh you deipnosophists are all alike!” I shout,
and put on Brahms to spite her.
In response, she wags her tail. It is long and soft,
most alluring. Alluring, one might say,
if one lived in a house in the desert.
Who knew, I ask you, who knew when I was a child
that I would one day be made a present
of such a lovely girl as this?
That Season
That season there were comedies in every playhouse.
One drought had followed another until certain countries
relied solely upon humor to survive their harsh winters.
At the time I had just begun an illustrious career
as a trainer of soldiers. I didn’t further the war — it was
against my interest. But I taught one skill to the troops:
how to stand immediately behind their opponents.
A fight would start. The enemy would lunge,
and there I would be, standing behind him,
from where I might do what I liked to help or hinder
his passage through the war. The trick, of course,
was in a particular grin and a twisting of the limbs
which accompanies the sudden shift right or left.
The whole thing was rather funny, or so I thought,
as the enemy was employing experts to accomplish
precisely the same gain. The upshot? A battle
in which two armies twirled around like dancers
in some avant-garde ballet. Everyone came out
to the countryside to watch. It was the start
of a short but bloodless epoch in world history.
Bestiary 3
And then one day the pilgrimage route changed. No one wanted to see the pillar in the desert, and so I had no more visitors. It was sad really, or so I thought at first. But then I went back to the history book I was writing.
Such a book. .
It doesn’t even use our verbs. They’re too
pointed. Only causeless words
can please, a record without
a point of view. History proper,
for the first time.
Every physical change
in the world listed, along with its place.
I can work only at night, while I’m asleep.
Dreaming, one has time for such things.
Nonetheless, I fall behind. If only I had
an assistant, a really clever one. .
All hermits begin by pretending to be hermits.
And by liking birds.
First Verse
In the house of my sleeping eye the veins of wood
run from the furniture down into the floor.
When I lay my hands upon the table’s surface
the entire feathered expanse
shifts in flight.
Parades
And when you are finally caught and questioned,
it is discovered, sadly, that you know
nothing of use. Your captors exchange glances, nod.
You are released in the freedom of some afternoon,
some autumn of the year, your coat, hat, returned
as if to continue your life. Now it is you
in the world again. In yellowing rooms, life
becomes no more than the places where it occurs.
At the pier in darkness, parades will cross the water,
visible but once. Or I could say
I saw the wind coming hard along the river touching all it passed.
How are things consequent? When they catch you
again, what will you say? That all things
may be weighed, may be raised and weighed
by two human hands?
A Calico Ascription
I stand by the pump with a deaf girl.
She is on the verge of a breakthrough.
I am very earnest and sedulous.
I am possibly the best teacher
who has ever lived. I lever the pump’s
arm, and water begins to flow.
Meanwhile, in my days as a
snake-charmer, a great painter
is sketching me. He’s on holiday
and has inserted a slight grin
onto this quiet face.
I wasn’t grinning. You mustn’t
suppose I was grinning.
I’ve always known day by day
my real work approaches.
Not for anything would I grin,
not even once.
The work means too much.
Our Plots, Our Comfort
By an old mill my father is waiting
with hundreds of other fathers.
I would like for them to keep
each other company,
but from here it is plain—
none of them is speaking.
What’s that in his hand?
An old leather wallet.
He’s taking something out of it,
a picture, I wonder of whom.
Who next will go to join him,
walking long there
in the early places of my life?
Report from Our Lands
Nevertheless the war continued
trembling the cupboards
where we slept, cracking the long
stone walkways of the village, as
if there were no other way to act
successfully in this foolish place,
as if were we in its place, this war,
we had no light but brute gleaming.
Bestiary 4
A race of men who can turn themselves into not animals
but inanimate objects. Europeans reach this tribe
by boat. What a grand city, they say. What fine broad
avenues, such as you might see in Paris. How lovely
the women in their long satin dresses, with their
fans and shuddering hair. Much feasting goes on.
Days later, the discovery is made. Orders are sent back
across the sea to be confirmed by the Queen.
Orders are confirmed. The populace is brought out
into a series of aesthetically ideal city squares
and forced at gunpoint to change directly
into gold. They object at first, then the King
changes himself into a large gold vase. His sons
become a pair of gold grates (for a confessional). Their
children become lockets. The royal servants
take the form of forks and spoons. This is general
throughout the population, and the objects
become a sort of faux-history, where each object
fails in its attempt to mimic the life lived.
Historians today wonder if this was intentional.
Bestiary 5
These pregnant methods, cheerful
and fat, leaning from filthy casements
in the side of June may yield
ink-eyed marionettes so lovely
that their gestures,
pointedly describing strings,
mean little even to the adept.
Mary. Isa. Joan. Celeste.
Roaming the grounds
of this quartered preserve.
Mary lays a lacquered hand
upon your cheek. Joan’s plain head
inclines — she is speaking
but the voice is from above.
Isa crouches in the near future;
she will scream at a painted boar
that bursts from a stand of trees.
Celeste is absent. Or is Joan
speaking of her when she says,
“I knew a matchstick once
that burned like the hands of a clock.”
From the scenery then, a wooden creaking
as of someone’s descent. Applause.
Applause. And in the front row
a man’s heart bursts in his chest.
EAST RIDING
ONE
The forest was much larger than anyone had previously thought.
So large that one couldn’t find one’s way back.
Luckily there were many lovely clearings and crisp glorious mornings.
It was therefore possible to live.
Also there were rose bushes everywhere, each larger than the one before
(and how we loved to discover the roses, naming them after ourselves).
And biplanes would pass overhead.
TWO
In the period before I entered the forest, I thought
that there was the world, one small corner of which
was the forest. Now it has become clear to me—
there is the forest, and the world is but
one small corner of it, exceedingly small, humble even.
For I have seen them meet in the street, and I can tell you
it is the world that makes the deeper bow, the world
that goes away, hat in hand, making furtive glances back
to see if the forest has turned also to look. Which never happens.
And furthermore, one can’t find one’s way back.
Luckily there are many lovely clearings and crisp glori ous mornings.
THREE
On one such morning I went out looking
for the clearest of seven streams. Seven there were,
running through the forest, and all of them clear.
Which was the clearest?
I put my hand in the first stream.
My hand turned the color of the night sky, which is mottled.
This distressed me, so I put my hand in my pocket.
On to the next stream.
I put my other hand in the second stream.
It soon began to move of its own accord.
This distressed me further. With a stern act of will
I put it too in my pocket.
On again.
At the third stream, a man was standing.
Both of his hands were stuck in his pockets also.
“What do you suppose we do next?” he asked.
FOUR
The forest is different than was supposed.
It is darker in the trees, lighter between them.
Passing between them is its own skill,
separate from the skill of being in clearings.
This is how it goes: you wander for years
in the world, then you find the edge of the forest.
You enter, and wander for days in the forest.
You try to find your way back.
Instead you find a clearing. Also you find out
whether or not you can live alone in the forest.
Many can’t. Others come after, and bury them.
Hungry little roses grow then from the ground.
FIVE
We of the forest wonder often about the biplanes.
From where do they take off?
Where do they land?
It should be easy to answer this question,
as there are so many of us asking it and spending time
wondering and musing.
The trouble is, only one person ever saw the biplanes.
He mentioned it in passing. Afterwards,
he refused to speak of it. Otherwise, he was silent.
If you happen to see a biplane, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?
one of my friends asked me.
Of course I would, I say. But I’m not sure of it.
I’m not sure I wouldn’t follow the plane alone to the land- ing field
(which must be a clearing deeper in the forest)
there to make friends with the aviators, and beg them to take me in.
Such a life it would be to fly in the air above the forest!
Distinctly I feel above the forest, luckily it is always gloriously morning.
And in a plane, one can easily find one’s way,
though not, of course, back to the world. One could,
I mean, find one’s way deeper into the forest.
SIX
What can I tell you about the forest
that you can’t read in books? Well,
our lives here are bared like the trunks of trees.
We believe fundamentally in things that are
quite obviously not true. On such things
our happiness is often based.
For instance, the allegiance of friends.
We of the forest are known cowards.
We make free with each other’s possession,
make love to each other’s husbands and wives.
At first it is odd, I know.
Pierre for instance, has a gorgeous wife.
She wears a little dress of leaves. People are forever
pulling at it as she curtsies by on her girlish legs.
One day she asked me if I would like
to go and find the Monumental Rose.
Where is it? I asked.
Deeper in, she said. We really must be going.
And so we went. I took Pierre’s name.
He took mine. We shook hands.
Have a fine time, he said. Be good.
The forest is much larger than you think.
THEN — a rustling of leaves. Cora had gone.
I’d better go, I said, following into the rustling
through the glorious light.
SEVEN
The philosophers who end up in the forest
stop writing books and begin instead
trying to grow herb-gardens. Every time
it happens the same way. It’s so funny.
There’s Spinoza. What’s he doing? Pruning oregano.
There’s William James.
What are you doing, William James? I inquire.
But he doesn’t answer, so absorbed is he
in laying string for vines. I watch for a minute,
standing fast by his elbow, intent on his progress.
Before you go, he says absently,
be sure to take a sprig of parsley for your buttonhole.
This I do. Need I say it twice?
We of the forest are terribly dashing.
EIGHT
Everyone in the forest has the same dream every night.
We sleep and are immediately awake again
in a tiny one-room house. There is a storm
in the out-of-doors. It is clear to everyone
that it is the biggest storm there’s ever been.
The forest, in fact, has been flattened.
All of a sudden, the storm halts.
We rush out of the cottage door
and are standing in the middle of a clearing
that stretches infinitely in every direction.
It’s then we realize that the forest
has not been flattened. Nor was there
a storm. Merely that
this is a deeper clearing, one we may
someday find. We wake then, invigorated,
and without so much as a by-your-leave,
rush off into the dew-strewn underbrush.
NINE
East Riding. It is the name that the world has
for the forest. I recall I was a child when I
heard it first. Still, I felt drawn.
I would go sometimes to the highest part
of the farm country and gaze eastward to the sea
of treetops drowsing in the distance,
hazy day, the sun’s rays mingling with the dust
and hanging in the air like the passing of hands.
I believe, I told the village priest, in East Riding.
Dismayed, he spoke with my parents,
counseling them to send me to the part of the world
farthest from East Riding.
But my father laughed. I recall this vividly.
He laughed at the priest, and raised me up
eye level into the air. He said,
“I believe you are going to East Riding.
Already you’ve left us.”
He took my mother’s hand and stood in the doorway
looking off into the distance as though watching
the progress of some traveler on a distant road.
But I was still in the house. My things weren’t even packed.
The priest stuck his sharp elbow in my ribs.
See? he said. So I slipped between my parent’s legs
and walked and walked and walked.
When I reached the distant road, I could see
that they were watching. I waved. They waved back.
And I followed the road where it went
beneath a canopy of trees.
TEN
On the deeper paths, one can’t know
for sure if one is welcome, save by clearings.
If one encounters lovely clearings
and crisp glorious mornings, then one has
cannily chosen the right path.
At other times it’s as dark as the inside
of a leaded window on an old cloudy block.
No one visits anymore, and the oldest man
is older by far than the histories he tells.
This is his defense, and it’s a keen one.
So I know to turn back, sometimes.
Always, it’s then one is given a small but kind
clearing to sleep in, and a tiny rose in greeting.
Be thou pleased by the day, and by waking
to light. From the bottom of a well
comes the vaguest song, but it is, I think,
known to you, muttered in your aging heart.
For if we all do not know a thing,
then no one can know it. It is not given us
to have that which is not instinctively
present in the world. On the softest grass
imaginable, I lay my head. It is quiet
and the path has been lost.
The path, I say, has been lost.
It is lovely to say things in a human voice
and hear in your mind or in the air,
and hear in the forest a human reply.
Grimoir or the hole beside the millstream
Little Teag was sleeping on a bed of moss. Just then up crept a satyr, the cruelest, most straying, canceling satyr of them all. He stripped poor Teag down to the bone with his sharp teeth and left the little skeleton for someone else to find. Such a delicate skeleton. I came upon it while walking. I pointed to it with my hand, and went to it with my feet. John Spence, who was along, did not come closer. He said it wasn’t a proper burial. I said we should give it one. And so we had my little sister out with us next day dressed up in ribbons and lace, and I wore my high collar and Spence had a good cap. We wrapped the little fellow in a clean sheet of linen and brought him down to a hole we’d dug by the millstream. I said a few words then, like a deacon, I said, “IF it was a satyr that did this, or a lamb, neither will I worship. Braver than the soil is the flesh that lends it breadth.” And through the woods then the satyr came, galloping on its hind legs. We hid in the grave ’til it had gone, and only then emerged to lay upon the ground in the groggy afternoon, listening to the brook. Before we left I filled the hole, spreading the earth flat enough for any boy to walk upon. John Spence marked it with a stone, in case we should ever again need a hiding place in that part of the forest.
Casuist’s Aside
And being wrong about the colors light takes in the eyes of my animals,
I wonder now what many failures
of difference I have made,
trying to map the catchments of other lives
with brown scenes from this single self.
Missive in an Icelandic Room
RITA KEPT LAZARUS IN A CHINESE BOX & FED HIM PEPPERMINTS UNTIL HE NO LONGER KNEW WHO OR WHAT HE WAS. THEN SHE GAVE HIM A PAPER CROWN AND A JAR WITH A TADPOLE AND BADE HIM SIT BESIDE HER.
And If They Should Tell You
That I have debauched the youth of this town. That further, I,
a youth of this town, have been
debauched, have helped in the debauching of others. Have helped
myself in and to the debauching
of the others, well. . I would not be overly troubled at the news.
For you see, I have a new
project in mind. Imagine a house, a shack rather, in some flyspeck
town. Within the house, a trap door.
And beneath the door, an entire realm of wickedness!
He who first spoke of it
has promised we will meet there, and I must confess, I look now
often at the map he left,
look often upon those impressions his thin and supple fingers
made in oily remark.
Missive in an Icelandic Room 2
Harangued
by the ring
master, the
paper circus
fell to
muttering.
Johan wrung
his hand
and stroked
the elephant’s
thick skin.
“How will
we fathom
the mind of
the audience,
if we cannot
name it truly
our oldest
and deepest
foe?”
The First Mime
A young king is unhappy. He takes
to going out with a false beard,
sackcloth robes, a long knife, a leather bag.
He soon becomes known about town in this capacity,
and liked. He takes a mistress. He spends time
in common taverns, in playhouses.
No one knows his secret, save a palace guard
his own age, who lets him out of the castle each night.
One night the disguised king
returns to the castle, only to find the guard,
now also disguised, ruling from his throne.
Before the King can speak, the new King orders him seized
by palace guards who cut out his tongue
and cart him away to a nearby asylum.
He is heard from no more.
The new King despises his children
and has them strangled. On the other hand,
he takes great pleasure in his association with the Queen,
who has guessed nothing.
One day it is announced before the court
that a madman is at the gates, claiming to be the King.
The King grants him an audience, at which time
the madman tells the court the story
that you have just been told, this time
through a series of hand gestures. Naturally,
no one is convinced. The King, however,
takes pity on the man, and allows him
to take up service as his jester, in which capacity,
I may happily relate, the man excels.
Word of the mute jester spreads,
and soon the court of this King is spoken of
throughout many lands
as a place of enlightenment and culture.
Version
She wanted desperately to know
what was in the green box.
A green box on a coarse black cloth
in a burnished-gold room.
She leaned in close,
her soft hair falling across
both our faces.
If only, she breathed,
I could dream my way
into that citadel
and wake, the green box
clutched in my hands.
Antonym of My Name
It was a dull play about a boy whose pet calf was being slaughtered.
Apparently no one could stop this thing from happening.
The butcher was played by a florid man with a huge beard.
Somehow having a beard made him likely to kill a calf.
I felt sorry for the calf, which was an actual calf,
and must have been on sedatives. It let everyone drag it around
on a little tether of worn rope. I wanted to write a review
for a major newspaper saying, “the little sedated calf
stole the show in Sunday’s performance of Johan’s Gift.”
Instead, two hours into the performance, the boy has his feeble
arms wrapped around the calf which isn’t breathing.
Someone is singing a lullaby, trying to make him fall asleep
so they can take the animal to the block. The butcher
has a surprisingly sweet voice. Nine tawdry little urchins
dressed in sparkly tutus do a dance around the boy. This is his dream
beginning. Each boy has a sedated calf in his arms.
The butcher sneaks in the window and is reaching for the calf
when the dream-urchins draw swords and stab him to death.
They were just pretending to be dream-urchins. HA!
Missive in an Icelandic Room 3
Clever remarks were no good,
Elizabeth realized. A sparrow was a sparrow,
and would never be a proper friend,
nor make up for the legions
of her childhood who’d abandoned her,
and left her to drift in this half-haze,
this country holiday without end.
And that there is
at the core of all the great artists, all the great thinkers, some severe misunderstanding, arrived at in childhood and never disclosed, never brought to light. Such a generative force propels imagination, skews thought, forces realization. And since it is, at heart, a mistaken conception, buried deep in the artist’s past, one cannot hope to emulate that mind’s growth, nor even to find out what it was about which that child was wrong.
In a Glass Coffin Beneath Alexandria, in Alexander’s Dusty Skull, One Image Still Trembling
Darius, in a beggar’s filthy robe, passing
in the street below, a guard of six
beggars about him.
A faint frustration
like a candle’s negligible smoke:
Alexander’s many thousand troops seized
all the beggars of Issus.
But none was Darius.
Bestiary 8
I am watching a girl draw in her notebook.
She draws a little broad-shouldered fellow
with big eyes. Beneath it she writes,
“A WORM BORES INTO FYODOR’s BRAIN.”
Then she draws the worm. As she says,
it is indeed boring into his brain.
In no time the little chap will be insensible.
While there’s still a moment left, I intercede
on Fyodor’s behalf. “At least put a doctor
on the scene. At least that.”
She draws a doctor on a corner of the paper.
He is wearing pajamas.
“I had to get him out of bed,” she says. “He hates that.”
In the cafe, men are playing at cards,
smoking and drinking. A large moon has risen
over the cantina wall. In every direction,
the world is rising out of itself, stretching
like a healed animal. And I too am part of this.
Rising, I say to the girl, “Let’s go to the lake.”
Bestiary 9
Up she gets. Her things go into a cloth bag.
No one notices us leave except a yellow cur that follows us
for miles across the filthy blackened landscape.
Not This But The Truth
A YOUNG WOMAN IS AT THE DOOR. SHE ENTERS,
CROSSES THE ROOM AND OPENS A LOCKED BOX.
INSIDE IS THE POET, JESSE BALL, CURLED UP ASLEEP.
SHE RUNS HER HAND THROUGH HIS HAIR SLOWLY,
CAREFUL NOT TO WAKE HIM, FOR IF HE SHOULD WAKE,
SHE MURMURS SOFTLY, THEN WHAT WOULD
BECOME OF ALL OUR SECRET AND IMPLAUSIBLE HOPES?
Bestiary 10
The sadness of colored glass bottles stands in rows in the disused pharmacy.
I went there once
thinking to play a trick. Oh what a trick.
Two Dogs
As if these true books were given up
in guttural jest,
in flawed and flawing laughter—
And how, upon the road this day
at a line of shadowed yards two dogs
turned their heads and beheld me.
Could I but have called to them by name
we might have gone on, saying,
Evening crouches like a banister,
our famed poverty the steps beneath.
A Bargain
A trail of clothespins held my dress on
as I wandered in the wilderness.
I wandered for seven years
and each year I grew immeasurably
more beautiful.
How many, I ask you, how many
lives can there be that pass
without a glance to right or left?
I made a bargain with a mill-stone.
I said, “Be my lover.”
And it replied,
“Better you had died.”
And in the Hollow Tree There Was a Note That Said:
Not Satan, but some other
more shrewd impresario
created Music with a cunning
beyond good, beyond evil.
Therefore Music, like certain
other human tongues,
is not a source but a mutiny.
Bestiary 13
My mother lives by the smallest road
you could possibly imagine. She walks up it
each day, and down. I think sometimes
that such a road changes our possibilities.
By this I mean, you will never see this road
because I will never tell you
where to find my mother.
Forty-Year Soliloquy
Was there a way we were taught
to talk in doorways? Occasions,
I have always felt, should be the guide
to best propriety: a form for speech
while walking; a way to converse
surprised; a method for
engaging someone whom
you have embarrassed. These
and others would be part
of that manual I wish I had created
forty years back. Forty years
might be time enough, if the work
had been addressed by all,
for those now living to know
how to speak not just their minds
but also what they hope.
A Setting
At the Ambassador’s house the women took up
precisely half the space they ought to have
in order to be pleasing to the eye,
and everyone said savage things to each other,
in hopes they would be overheard.
But I was not amused. Consider this:
My cat had passed away just hours before
on a little plot of grass in the front yard.
In fact, I was carrying it over my shoulder
in a sagging gray canvas bag. And there I was,
there, there, there, as if anything could be solved
by foolish scripted action or the eyes that follow it.
Bestiary 14
Before he left, he passed me the knife
and I used it to cut my bonds.
It was a very dull knife
and the cutting took years.
Guards would wager on my progress.
“Sooner or later,” they’d say,
while washing the changing fashions
out of their thin and cunningly braided hair.
Bestiary 15
Her picture came to when I threw the water
over. Its eyes began to follow me.
No notion I had then, such as is in me now—
what it can mean to wake a thing that’s past.
Bestiary 16
Cardinal Piccate, famed priest-turned-skeptic of the 15th century:
we are somehow present at his denunciation. The pope
declares the excommunication to a crowd of hundreds
who have gathered in the papal gardens. A peculiar hand gesture
accompanies the statement. This gesture is much imitated
later that day and in the days to follow. Would that I could say
it was just the opening of a hand, or a gathering
of fingertips this way. No, you must observe it for yourself,
or read Cartoccio’s treatise on the matter. Later popes
resigned themselves to its loss as a tool of governance, so difficult
was it to master. But even now the sentence is being repeated.
Piccate, with his braided beard, his sun-scalded brow, is led off in chains.
Unbeknownst to the guards, you and I follow to his estate
on the hills outside Rome. He is put inside the main building,
with all his household and all its attendant creatures.
Hoisted above this building on scaffolding huge caul- drons tip
inevitably sealing the house in four-foot-thick
impenetrable hot wax. This was apparently
common practice. Skeptical thought must be dealt with
entirely or not at all, so says the Manual of Kings
and we who would rule must learn their fluid lessons.
To that end there is preserved, in a vault beneath the Vatican,
the house-entire of Cardinal Piccate, still sealed, hermetically,
poised in its last obdurate skepticism, caught beneath a lens
broad as a careful century.
The view from outside is stunning,
Cartoccio wrote, though it can in no way be compared
to that view achieved from the inaccessible interior.
Bestiary 17
A boundary. Laughter in the spanning rooms
I am forced to attend, one by one.
How attached they are, these unlikely places
one to another, street to gateway,
gateway to stair, stair to corridor
and from there — hidden rooms
and cluttered portals.
They say, I sang a song and you were in it
but you left just as I began. How I believe them.
It is a terribly hot summer
and from beneath this shading tree
there is a song just faintly, prompted
by my heel, each factored place singing out
when I have crossed some bordering veil.
But now I have my hearing,
and a group of men come into view,
walking with the theater, livelihood and jest.
Theirs was the tune I heard. Never to belong
to me, save in swayed refrain, or in the manner
of a berth laid by, as it was spoken to me
by the grand ship incidence, that said,
This is the tunnel through which the water flows
and I will bear you as water is borne: in a bucket, in a pan,
or loose throughout the drowning sea.
2 — Later Manual
Missive From a Room in Pau
A slightly pale tinge to the day,
as if even now it were being remembered.
Asking Advice of the Scissors, in their Small Drawer
By way of introduction, I use a soft white handkerchief
to polish the lens of my spyglass.
Afterwards we spy on your enemies.
Shall we attack them one by one
in the supposed safety of their beds?
Missive In a Room in Pau
A child on an invisible donkey demands your attention,
but you go right past him during an autumn day
one hundred years from now.
I appear at times
I appear at times to children when they go alone too long,
saying — sister, brother, how has it been with you? Dim forests,
balked women, these have sown signposts, not children
upon the broad aisles. For it is in belief that our progress
has long been halted. Tell me, what momentum stirs us
but truth and avoidance. Oh, long night’s approach
upon a warning. Long day, day all through afternoon
and the men who watch beneath the wooden shelters! I say
go to them, speak there, speak your fill. But then — how little
there is to say. I demand of you, the things you thought last night.
Tell us, you must tell us. You must tell us and grow old.
Missive In a Room in Pau
I saw you on that windy day when you were
as yet of no account, roaming the streets in a borrowed coat,
practicing the deft touch, the brief smile, and the slight collision
that are THE PICKPOCKET’s FEW FRIENDS.
Missive From a Room in Pau
The town was so small you could only glance at it out
the window of a moving train.
Here is some information about turtles:
The Corinthian Ambulant Turtle is named for its tripartite crown, a growth of horn to which scientists are troubled to ascribe utility. The Corinthian is the largest of the box turtles, being an incredible five feet in length, from tip of rear claw to sharp forebeak. It is noted for its dissimilarity to much of placid turtlekind. In nature it is perhaps closest to the brutal snapping turtles of North America, which are quite capable of snapping a small branch in two, particularly if that branch is being poked at them by an unctuous child. The Corinthian subsists upon a diet of Vruvkii nuts from the Vruvkii tree. These grow on the slopes of the Limbok Mountains east of the Urals. It is difficult to say whether it is the fault of the Vruvkii tree or the Corinthian Ambulant that neither have spread across foreign geographies. Certainly should one do so, the other would follow. The tree cannot spread, for its seed is carried within the nigh impenetrable Vruvkii nuts. And the turtle cannot spread, for on what would it subsist, were it to pass beyond its precious orchards of Vruvkii? In scientific tests, Russian researchers have managed to break the nuts, but it required the persistent use of a steam drill. Only the irresistible jaws of the Corinthian Ambulant Turtle can break the nut clean as by a whim and, digesting the tender nut, release the Vruvkii seed into the soil along with its own fecal matter. In terms of literary and historical significance, the Corinthian Ambulant has known both. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is menaced by one of these beasts while out picnicking as a child. And none other than the famous Rasputin was known to keep one at his side at all times. That turtle, nicknamed Levkar Klevar, meaning, Head Lost in the Clouds, can be seen in pictures from the period. Canning’s Momentary History of the Occident’s Orient includes a passage devoted purely to this marvelous beast:
It was with trepidation, then, that I stretched out my gloved hand to pet the thing. For had it not that same day snapped the Countess M.’s arm off at the elbow? The priest assured me there would be no repetition of such untowardity. I can report that its crown is quite hard. Were I not gloved I might have scratched the skin of my fingers on one of the many jagged edges that press forth. Though I cannot agree with Rasputin that it, rather than the lion, is king of beasts, I can say with some authority, it is certainly a king, though of what, I know not.
Inventions
Some having posited a lion, others must posit the lion having victims.
These victims in turn must posit things, things that are lost within the lion’s grim and enfolding city, that belly-land of growth and indolence.
100th verse
For though I think that what we are
we are not long or sour: grosvenor,
selah, or a game of chance; it is
soon said: lay me at your feet as if
to bid the world with its own name.
What name could that be? Who,
tearer of the dog sinew that contracts
vowels, could force a stated name
as mantle to the world? Enforce a name?
It would be easier to bear a prophet
from between pale legs. There are not
many prophets, nor many right names.
And in the air a sky is forming.
A Scolding
And so you see, my little jars of marmalade, there’s trouble enough in the district,
and trouble enough in your heads without you going rambling about the shantytown,
nickels clattering, on your way to gamble with that pie- bald rascal, old Head-of-a-Mule!
Verse
Do I subscribe to that living which may be had
from faith in events? One may
persuade the ground to house vegetables,
pages to house unforgivable solutions. Really,
there are none, only names and this listening.
Hours conclude what birth begins,
not death but sympathy. Men agree
on seven things only, and six will go
undiscovered. We know vaguely
what the earth is, ourselves shapeless in a fog.
The secret signal of the greatest landed
invasion was a verse by Verlaine. Now
I sit, wondering what movements
of men may take my words to herald
deeds to which they’re sent.
One may sit alone, housing hours in a cupboard
with which only this may be done,
to suppose that one may smile, and in smiling
find a damning fact — things may seem true.
Then, the sound of a key in the door—
people enter the room,
your name unspoken in the air about
their heads. What can you say
to such people? Not you, not you—
only life can force them away.
The Distressing Effect of Rumors
I reached into the jar, and sought out their little heads with the palm of my hand.
I could hear them talking and scuffling about.
One said:
Because of the present circumstances, we will soon be forced to sell our children.
To that another replied:
But what of we who have no children?
Missive In a Room in Pau
— What can you do to be of use? asked the Inspector.
— I can make a noise like a bee and I can run fast around corners, said Jana politely.
Balloon Diary, week of the pastoral revolt:
Miles of hedge, farms, fields. Beneath my hand, the tiller is like the soft neck of a soft necked girl when girls come to you for the first time, not knowing who or what they are. You tell them, and they rise like the pasture lands as we float and flourish. I feel sometimes that I am like a god-cloud, harboring useless intents that cannot possibly apply to the things upon the ground. Yet sometimes we descend, Balloon and I, to sample the wares in a market, or touch the aged faces of the orphanages on southward tending prairies. As we passed in evening above an esplanade on which satin girls cavorted, touching hands and lips to satin boys, a man came whistling along and hid in a barrel, hid his body first and then his face. Oh my I said, I wonder. . and wondering, I paused the balloon as you, my friend, might pause your finger above an item in the evening paper. Another came soon along the narrow cliff-walk, a bright-eyed lad in a fresh suit, with a tiny bottle of medicine balanced upon his outstretched hand. It was the serum meant to cure his village, afflicted to the east. This fact came later, in the guise of further suffering, when it seemed that all the suffering had been meted out. Or perhaps I lie! Perhaps it never came at all! In any case — a fine looking lad with a glass bottle, a fine looking barrel wherein waits the curiosity of the modern age. Yes, the barrel burst as past the waistcoat walked. The serum was snatched and no explanation given, but for a sliding from shadow to shadow like imagined monkeys that are not real monkeys, but seem so for a moment. The lad grasped at the barrel shards as if some intelligence might be had from them. In the bottom of the barrel he found a deck of cards, all the cards blank, save the seven of clubs. To it he gave a name: Pistol that I Forfeit. And vowing to forget his plague-ridden village, he traveled into the distant lands of Avecture and Intiman where he made a name for himself as a slayer of false doctors.
Of course, I followed the interloper in my balloon for leagues. He was a loper, a real long-walker of the old variety. But faced with a balloonist, well the outcome is obvious; he could not escape. With my long hooked pole I caught him up.
And if the pollywog doesn’t keep her date with the pastrychef, then the silly little waxwork owl won’t hoot and wake the milk-maid and I promise, I really promise, we’ll be visited by hellions in the simpering night.
The Well
A small boy lived with his grandfather in a little house on a large property. On the far back hill of the farthest corner was an old cemetery. The gravestones had been brushed by the wind and rain until they were small white markers without word or direction. The boy loved to go there, for the grass was deep and soft. And in between the gravestones it was always very quiet. And there was a well. The grandfather said it was the deepest well in the world.
When they dropped stones down, there never was a sound, no matter how long they waited. And in a place like that, you can wait a long time. Not even the sun could reach the bottom, not even at noon on a clear day.
The boy began to spend all of his time there, looking down the well. His grandfather began to worry about him. He told the boy that he was no longer allowed to go there. And one day his grandfather locked the cemetery gate with a long iron key.
For a week, the boy stayed away. But it seemed to him that the rest of the property, his grandfather’s house, even the world of the town, was gray and shrunken. He wanted only to lie in the quiet of the cemetery and gaze down the well.
Days passed in the drudgery of dust caught in household sunlight. Finally it was too much for him. He stole into his grandfather’s room and found the long iron key on a hook high up on the wall. He pushed a chair underneath. Climbing onto the chair, he took the key.
Away he went through the tall grass to the high hill and the cemetery gate. He slid the key into the lock; the gate swung open. Beyond it, the path was a clean rut through the green. In the field and by the road the world’s bustling had been loud in his ears. Now in the shade of the cemetery the boy felt soothed. He lay down on a bed of moss and fell into a deep sleep.
In his sleep he dreamed of climbing into the well and dropping through the loose air to land softly on the bottom. A man was there. He seemed familiar. Beside him was a woman. They took the boy in their arms and their warmth was a long warmth. There was a staircase leading downwards. Its stone steps were smooth marble. He took their hands and descended the stair.
He woke. It was afternoon and quiet. The sun was cradling his mossy bed with a hazy slow light. He went to the well and looked down it. Old smells seemed to rise and greet his nose. He remembered the faces; he remembered what was at the bottom of the well. He felt then that he had come round to the beginning of a world that was gone.
Away across the landscape, the boy’s grandfather ran on skinny legs, waving his arms. But the boy did not hear him. The boy was standing on the side of the well. The grandfather yelled and redoubled his pace, struggling to run through the bracken. But it was no good. Into the well the boy went. Into the well he went for good. And he fell for a very long time.
Missive from a Room in Pau
And now we have come to that last country of THURSDAYS and JULY.
Autoptic: 1
At five, I relented and began to speak.
For much of my life I forgot
that this might even be regretted.
Autoptic: 2
I began with the anger of friends
and gathered it beneath my coat.
It kept me warm through first
one winter, then another; I
became grateful, and so the anger went away.
I sought it again, with thin hands,
a hypnotist’s assurance.
I was told do not provoke it, and I,
I listened well. I took my fists
to the glassworks where the lovers
I once became with a trumpet call
were arrayed in fine rows, two by two.
They were astonished,
they who had gone apart so long.
Come back to us, they cried, their voices
thin like old glass. Come back, you fool.
SO I TOOK THEM TOO beneath my coat
and called it precaution.
Autoptic: 3
I loved a man who was a scholar of war,
and I hated war, and loved it
even as I hated it. For there are places
where the dust is entertaining like a clavier
each mote abrupt like a struck and filigreed note,
there and then gone, where horsemen,
mercenary, intent on the several work of death,
gallop through books upon the table,
laying siege to centuries of imaginings,
as men in armored lines advance,
their spears like spun cloth.
Autoptic 4: House Up-Hill
I stand, gray and wan, by the stove, boiling tea, and trees climb down
through the winter hills to bring me news.
They whisper through the tiny window kept for just this reason
in long syllables that reach to my long ears.
A woman is living in a hole, they say, a hole buried in the ground,
and birds are fools who talk of nothing,
or little, not both. The wind is vain, and furthermore blind, wanting only to be thought
of in kind ways. In this
it is often gratified. Yet still, the fury. And too a boy wandered upon
a deep part of the wilderness. He can’t come out.
He is unharmed but very sad, and you would, they say, you would
take pity if you saw him, such a small boy,
so sad, and hungry. He won’t last more than a day. He’ll die of
exposure, as children do in books.
He’s just that way, through the trees. That way.
I smile at such ruses; steam rises from the kettle. Not for nothing
did I go once to the forest’s heart, there to learn my ample secrets.
Belie, Belie
Belie the page upon which this pen sits
like a craven monarch whose kingdom
is as utter and as useless as his fool.
Belie the doldrums that assail
the wizened faces I once bore
in sickness as a raging child.
Belie the becoming and the knowing
of what little I might become, when set
beside that lathe, the sea, and all it does.
Belie the dastard clock, the vagrant
calendar, the leash of seasons, the stunted
grace of graveyards.
Belie the waltzes, the saddened mazurkas that infect
even the joyous as they dance.
Austromancy
And so, in the afternoon I am often
caught feeling as though I’ve gone missing
from the life I was to lead.
This is the chief pleasure, I tell myself,
of young poets.
I followed a Ribbon
I followed a ribbon that trailed from a hand
and it led through the grazing of crowds upon pavement,
through laities and simpering voices in evening,
past lives that might be given me in confidence
and confidences that cannot be given in life,
through the drawers of perished infants, where the bed
linens still keep the traces of tiny bodies,
and beside ladders upon which men stand
as on a willful pride that harms all those beneath,
all down, all down at last, to the harbor
where such ribbons trail the water in a hundred places.
I cannot find my own amidst so many,
but I pretend to, and taking up an oar I leap
foolhardy into a passing boat.
“Do you need an oarsman?” I call out needlessly.
As if there were anything left to do but row.
Autoptic: 7
Prussian blue, the coat
I thought to wear, but cannot,
down into the morning town.
I am a great anticipator, building
my empire with such things as
coats and colors, unexpected visits,
dogs that take their leashes in their
mouths, and gentle-eyed rascals
who follow each other
up through the limbs of trees.
Auturgy Refrain
Brown cotton, and how we have all forgotten
so much that we had promised.
Aching then where light
plays upon long floors
in the cleverest rooms of the skull,
I proceed to become
that which I have admired in
those many I admire.
Is it enough that this ambition holds
one moment? Two would be
miraculous, and three, as good as true.
I count the blemishes
that stain my good name.
But who can count so long?
A good name — what use is it
but for causing jealousy in idle hearts?
No, I was not made to bear a tool like that.
I was Awake a very long Time
Not a carnival but loud
unexplainable noise. The sound
of someone being chased.
Dogs waiting silently beneath hedges.
A man sifting flour on a park bench
no reason given.
Autoptic: 8
Grief, do me no favors. I have grown my hair long,
as you bid me. I have learned to roll
a coin below my knuckles. I have written down now
years of dreams; much of my life has passed in writing
down these books of sleep. And so you see that I can
no longer turn only to what’s true
when I speak of my experience. Sainted men
wander in forests that have been set to rows.
And here, today, already I have found a stone
shaped like a day I passed in a life I can’t claim as my own.
The wind calls water what it wants to call it and passes
overhead. But water names wind from within,
as storms proceed in hinges, all through the captive
captive, captivated light. Therefore, I show my face boldly
in a portrait of my great-great-grandfather. In reply
a deep breath in my lungs, and the room about me
actual as nothing can be actual. My hand is badly cut,
and I cannot say how long it has been bleeding.
And yes, I’m sorry, but that hardly matters now.
Speech in a Meadow
Leopold and his benefactor pause beside a hill on the benefactor’s estate. In the hill
there is a door. The day is cold, and bright.
IT WAS this door, years ago, you understand,
that prompted me to begin a wayward life.
Behind it I imagined a tidy room, a hearth,
some bespectacled, bewhiskered creature, conversant
with the courtesies of our times. Strange, but with
things to tell me. You understand.
Later I thought it to be a long and lamplit hall.
And lately I’ve imagined my portrait hanging there,
quietly, as the lamps are covered,
one by one. The angriest man I ever saw
broke his own teeth with a hammer. For as he said,
It’s dark as night inside the sun,
and that is where we’re told to wait. But this
was years ago. I imagine things are different now.
Yet still no answer from the Captain,
not yet, young Leopold. We awkwards
must go wandering, and tend in our lives
most happily to
doorways set in hillsides upon which we made
human departures and human trade.
Speech in a Chamber
In this book birds are taught their flying
by that which would make them fall
were they not to fly as had been taught.
The book is roughly bound, and left
open on a couch. The page is illustrated
and, lifted to the light displays
a moralizing scene: two children have tied
a third to the wheel of an enormous carriage.
A group of elderly women look on with pride.
It is a scent of such astonishing strength,
why, Leopold, there are flowers hidden
throughout the room. There must be for I
cannot sleep without the noise of a bouquet,
and gently, gently, sir, you know
I sleep most gently in this small room.
Speech Confided
A sheaf of worthy papers, set in a wheel and made to spin
may be enough to give
shape to a hundred ill-set lives.
I declined the first, as it was not freely given.
I declined the second, as it was scarcely a ribbon
bound about a child’s throat.
And that I do not care to lead.
The third was charity.
The fourth came with my fame.
Yet sadly I relate, I could not deny the fifth.
For she spoke so clearly of things I have desired.
And so she sits, even now in the rooms above
plotting when she weeps and weeping when she plots.
A thought came yesterday that pleased me, my young friend.
When I die I shall send her a note, inviting her to join me
where I’ve gone. I’m told the dead can leave notes,
on the backs of leaves, in the brims of hats, on the inside of a lady’s glove.
Oh Leopold, the notes this shade will send. .
Speech by a Window
For the sightless, shapeless hope is vision,
cast back by the long thrower like a discus,
heavy like a discus, ridged, impacted.
No vision is given once, nor given
only to one man, one woman, though legends
would have it so. Most dreams come
a hundred times in a given city before
waking the one who will raise it like some new
roof that men may live beneath.
Picture it, dawn in this far place.
The populace beginning to rise. Heads poking
out windows. Doors opening. Horses
standing in their stalls, their heavy breath
expectant. In the street, women with baskets
pass by house after house. In one
I myself wake. To me it seems
that what was true in the night
is far truer at daybreak. And bearing
this ribbon, I go out with a heavy coat,
with burned eyes, trembling hands.
There is a meeting on the riverbed
conducted with the utmost grace.
— these circumstances like a holstered gun,
that surprises by turn gunman and fool.
Through such waters others go
in boots sewn for the purpose.
Such boots, have I longed for anything more?
I will wear them in the open air
while elsewhere I am buried. And you
will read from Tuolti, who says,
The greatest hunter can hunt his prey and nothing else.
Others decide later
what was his prey, what was not.
Missive From a Room in Pau
A slightly pale tinge to the day,
as if even now it were being remembered.
Asking Advice of the Scissors, in their Small Drawer
By way of introduction, I use a soft white handkerchief
to polish the lens of my spyglass.
Afterwards we spy on your enemies.
Shall we attack them one by one
in the supposed safety of their beds?
Missive In a Room in Pau
A child on an invisible donkey demands your attention,
but you go right past him during an autumn day
one hundred years from now.
I appear at times
I appear at times to children when they go alone too long,
saying — sister, brother, how has it been with you? Dim forests,
balked women, these have sown signposts, not children
upon the broad aisles. For it is in belief that our progress
has long been halted. Tell me, what momentum stirs us
but truth and avoidance. Oh, long night’s approach
upon a warning. Long day, day all through afternoon
and the men who watch beneath the wooden shelters! I say
go to them, speak there, speak your fill. But then — how little
there is to say. I demand of you, the things you thought last night.
Tell us, you must tell us. You must tell us and grow old.
Missive In a Room in Pau
I saw you on that windy day when you were
as yet of no account, roaming the streets in a borrowed coat,
practicing the deft touch, the brief smile, and the slight collision
that are THE PICKPOCKET’s FEW FRIENDS.
Missive From a Room in Pau
The town was so small you could only glance at it out
the window of a moving train.
Here is some information about turtles:
The Corinthian Ambulant Turtle is named for its tripartite crown, a growth of horn to which scientists are troubled to ascribe utility. The Corinthian is the largest of the box turtles, being an incredible five feet in length, from tip of rear claw to sharp forebeak. It is noted for its dissimilarity to much of placid turtlekind. In nature it is perhaps closest to the brutal snapping turtles of North America, which are quite capable of snapping a small branch in two, particularly if that branch is being poked at them by an unctuous child. The Corinthian subsists upon a diet of Vruvkii nuts from the Vruvkii tree. These grow on the slopes of the Limbok Mountains east of the Urals. It is difficult to say whether it is the fault of the Vruvkii tree or the Corinthian Ambulant that neither have spread across foreign geographies. Certainly should one do so, the other would follow. The tree cannot spread, for its seed is carried within the nigh impenetrable Vruvkii nuts. And the turtle cannot spread, for on what would it subsist, were it to pass beyond its precious orchards of Vruvkii? In scientific tests, Russian researchers have managed to break the nuts, but it required the persistent use of a steam drill. Only the irresistible jaws of the Corinthian Ambulant Turtle can break the nut clean as by a whim and, digesting the tender nut, release the Vruvkii seed into the soil along with its own fecal matter. In terms of literary and historical significance, the Corinthian Ambulant has known both. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is menaced by one of these beasts while out picnicking as a child. And none other than the famous Rasputin was known to keep one at his side at all times. That turtle, nicknamed Levkar Klevar, meaning, Head Lost in the Clouds, can be seen in pictures from the period. Canning’s Momentary History of the Occident’s Orient includes a passage devoted purely to this marvelous beast:
It was with trepidation, then, that I stretched out my gloved hand to pet the thing. For had it not that same day snapped the Countess M.’s arm off at the elbow? The priest assured me there would be no repetition of such untowardity. I can report that its crown is quite hard. Were I not gloved I might have scratched the skin of my fingers on one of the many jagged edges that press forth. Though I cannot agree with Rasputin that it, rather than the lion, is king of beasts, I can say with some authority, it is certainly a king, though of what, I know not.
Inventions
Some having posited a lion, others must posit the lion having victims.
These victims in turn must posit things, things that are lost within the lion’s grim and enfolding city, that belly-land of growth and indolence.
100th verse
For though I think that what we are
we are not long or sour: grosvenor,
selah, or a game of chance; it is
soon said: lay me at your feet as if
to bid the world with its own name.
What name could that be? Who,
tearer of the dog sinew that contracts
vowels, could force a stated name
as mantle to the world? Enforce a name?
It would be easier to bear a prophet
from between pale legs. There are not
many prophets, nor many right names.
And in the air a sky is forming.
A Scolding
And so you see, my little jars of marmalade, there’s trouble enough in the district,
and trouble enough in your heads without you going rambling about the shantytown,
nickels clattering, on your way to gamble with that pie- bald rascal, old Head-of-a-Mule!
Verse
Do I subscribe to that living which may be had
from faith in events? One may
persuade the ground to house vegetables,
pages to house unforgivable solutions. Really,
there are none, only names and this listening.
Hours conclude what birth begins,
not death but sympathy. Men agree
on seven things only, and six will go
undiscovered. We know vaguely
what the earth is, ourselves shapeless in a fog.
The secret signal of the greatest landed
invasion was a verse by Verlaine. Now
I sit, wondering what movements
of men may take my words to herald
deeds to which they’re sent.
One may sit alone, housing hours in a cupboard
with which only this may be done,
to suppose that one may smile, and in smiling
find a damning fact — things may seem true.
Then, the sound of a key in the door—
people enter the room,
your name unspoken in the air about
their heads. What can you say
to such people? Not you, not you—
only life can force them away.
The Distressing Effect of Rumors
I reached into the jar, and sought out their little heads with the palm of my hand.
I could hear them talking and scuffling about.
One said:
Because of the present circumstances, we will soon be forced to sell our children.
To that another replied:
But what of we who have no children?
Missive In a Room in Pau
— What can you do to be of use? asked the Inspector.
— I can make a noise like a bee and I can run fast around corners, said Jana politely.
Balloon Diary, week of the pastoral revolt:
Miles of hedge, farms, fields. Beneath my hand, the tiller is like the soft neck of a soft necked girl when girls come to you for the first time, not knowing who or what they are. You tell them, and they rise like the pasture lands as we float and flourish. I feel sometimes that I am like a god-cloud, harboring useless intents that cannot possibly apply to the things upon the ground. Yet sometimes we descend, Balloon and I, to sample the wares in a market, or touch the aged faces of the orphanages on southward tending prairies. As we passed in evening above an esplanade on which satin girls cavorted, touching hands and lips to satin boys, a man came whistling along and hid in a barrel, hid his body first and then his face. Oh my I said, I wonder. . and wondering, I paused the balloon as you, my friend, might pause your finger above an item in the evening paper. Another came soon along the narrow cliff-walk, a bright-eyed lad in a fresh suit, with a tiny bottle of medicine balanced upon his outstretched hand. It was the serum meant to cure his village, afflicted to the east. This fact came later, in the guise of further suffering, when it seemed that all the suffering had been meted out. Or perhaps I lie! Perhaps it never came at all! In any case — a fine looking lad with a glass bottle, a fine looking barrel wherein waits the curiosity of the modern age. Yes, the barrel burst as past the waistcoat walked. The serum was snatched and no explanation given, but for a sliding from shadow to shadow like imagined monkeys that are not real monkeys, but seem so for a moment. The lad grasped at the barrel shards as if some intelligence might be had from them. In the bottom of the barrel he found a deck of cards, all the cards blank, save the seven of clubs. To it he gave a name: Pistol that I Forfeit. And vowing to forget his plague-ridden village, he traveled into the distant lands of Avecture and Intiman where he made a name for himself as a slayer of false doctors.
Of course, I followed the interloper in my balloon for leagues. He was a loper, a real long-walker of the old variety. But faced with a balloonist, well the outcome is obvious; he could not escape. With my long hooked pole I caught him up.
And if the pollywog doesn’t keep her date with the pastrychef, then the silly little waxwork owl won’t hoot and wake the milk-maid and I promise, I really promise, we’ll be visited by hellions in the simpering night.
The Well
A small boy lived with his grandfather in a little house on a large property. On the far back hill of the farthest corner was an old cemetery. The gravestones had been brushed by the wind and rain until they were small white markers without word or direction. The boy loved to go there, for the grass was deep and soft. And in between the gravestones it was always very quiet. And there was a well. The grandfather said it was the deepest well in the world.
When they dropped stones down, there never was a sound, no matter how long they waited. And in a place like that, you can wait a long time. Not even the sun could reach the bottom, not even at noon on a clear day.
The boy began to spend all of his time there, looking down the well. His grandfather began to worry about him. He told the boy that he was no longer allowed to go there. And one day his grandfather locked the cemetery gate with a long iron key.
For a week, the boy stayed away. But it seemed to him that the rest of the property, his grandfather’s house, even the world of the town, was gray and shrunken. He wanted only to lie in the quiet of the cemetery and gaze down the well.
Days passed in the drudgery of dust caught in household sunlight. Finally it was too much for him. He stole into his grandfather’s room and found the long iron key on a hook high up on the wall. He pushed a chair underneath. Climbing onto the chair, he took the key.
Away he went through the tall grass to the high hill and the cemetery gate. He slid the key into the lock; the gate swung open. Beyond it, the path was a clean rut through the green. In the field and by the road the world’s bustling had been loud in his ears. Now in the shade of the cemetery the boy felt soothed. He lay down on a bed of moss and fell into a deep sleep.
In his sleep he dreamed of climbing into the well and dropping through the loose air to land softly on the bottom. A man was there. He seemed familiar. Beside him was a woman. They took the boy in their arms and their warmth was a long warmth. There was a staircase leading downwards. Its stone steps were smooth marble. He took their hands and descended the stair.
He woke. It was afternoon and quiet. The sun was cradling his mossy bed with a hazy slow light. He went to the well and looked down it. Old smells seemed to rise and greet his nose. He remembered the faces; he remembered what was at the bottom of the well. He felt then that he had come round to the beginning of a world that was gone.
Away across the landscape, the boy’s grandfather ran on skinny legs, waving his arms. But the boy did not hear him. The boy was standing on the side of the well. The grandfather yelled and redoubled his pace, struggling to run through the bracken. But it was no good. Into the well the boy went. Into the well he went for good. And he fell for a very long time.
Missive from a Room in Pau
And now we have come to that last country of THURSDAYS and JULY.
Autoptic: 1
At five, I relented and began to speak.
For much of my life I forgot
that this might even be regretted.
Autoptic: 2
I began with the anger of friends
and gathered it beneath my coat.
It kept me warm through first
one winter, then another; I
became grateful, and so the anger went away.
I sought it again, with thin hands,
a hypnotist’s assurance.
I was told do not provoke it, and I,
I listened well. I took my fists
to the glassworks where the lovers
I once became with a trumpet call
were arrayed in fine rows, two by two.
They were astonished,
they who had gone apart so long.
Come back to us, they cried, their voices
thin like old glass. Come back, you fool.
SO I TOOK THEM TOO beneath my coat
and called it precaution.
Autoptic: 3
I loved a man who was a scholar of war,
and I hated war, and loved it
even as I hated it. For there are places
where the dust is entertaining like a clavier
each mote abrupt like a struck and filigreed note,
there and then gone, where horsemen,
mercenary, intent on the several work of death,
gallop through books upon the table,
laying siege to centuries of imaginings,
as men in armored lines advance,
their spears like spun cloth.
Autoptic 4: House Up-Hill
I stand, gray and wan, by the stove, boiling tea, and trees climb down
through the winter hills to bring me news.
They whisper through the tiny window kept for just this reason
in long syllables that reach to my long ears.
A woman is living in a hole, they say, a hole buried in the ground,
and birds are fools who talk of nothing,
or little, not both. The wind is vain, and furthermore blind, wanting only to be thought
of in kind ways. In this
it is often gratified. Yet still, the fury. And too a boy wandered upon
a deep part of the wilderness. He can’t come out.
He is unharmed but very sad, and you would, they say, you would
take pity if you saw him, such a small boy,
so sad, and hungry. He won’t last more than a day. He’ll die of
exposure, as children do in books.
He’s just that way, through the trees. That way.
I smile at such ruses; steam rises from the kettle. Not for nothing
did I go once to the forest’s heart, there to learn my ample secrets.
Belie, Belie
Belie the page upon which this pen sits
like a craven monarch whose kingdom
is as utter and as useless as his fool.
Belie the doldrums that assail
the wizened faces I once bore
in sickness as a raging child.
Belie the becoming and the knowing
of what little I might become, when set
beside that lathe, the sea, and all it does.
Belie the dastard clock, the vagrant
calendar, the leash of seasons, the stunted
grace of graveyards.
Belie the waltzes, the saddened mazurkas that infect
even the joyous as they dance.
Austromancy
And so, in the afternoon I am often
caught feeling as though I’ve gone missing
from the life I was to lead.
This is the chief pleasure, I tell myself,
of young poets.
I followed a Ribbon
I followed a ribbon that trailed from a hand
and it led through the grazing of crowds upon pavement,
through laities and simpering voices in evening,
past lives that might be given me in confidence
and confidences that cannot be given in life,
through the drawers of perished infants, where the bed
linens still keep the traces of tiny bodies,
and beside ladders upon which men stand
as on a willful pride that harms all those beneath,
all down, all down at last, to the harbor
where such ribbons trail the water in a hundred places.
I cannot find my own amidst so many,
but I pretend to, and taking up an oar I leap
foolhardy into a passing boat.
“Do you need an oarsman?” I call out needlessly.
As if there were anything left to do but row.
Autoptic: 7
Prussian blue, the coat
I thought to wear, but cannot,
down into the morning town.
I am a great anticipator, building
my empire with such things as
coats and colors, unexpected visits,
dogs that take their leashes in their
mouths, and gentle-eyed rascals
who follow each other
up through the limbs of trees.
Auturgy Refrain
Brown cotton, and how we have all forgotten
so much that we had promised.
Aching then where light
plays upon long floors
in the cleverest rooms of the skull,
I proceed to become
that which I have admired in
those many I admire.
Is it enough that this ambition holds
one moment? Two would be
miraculous, and three, as good as true.
I count the blemishes
that stain my good name.
But who can count so long?
A good name — what use is it
but for causing jealousy in idle hearts?
No, I was not made to bear a tool like that.
I was Awake a very long Time
Not a carnival but loud
unexplainable noise. The sound
of someone being chased.
Dogs waiting silently beneath hedges.
A man sifting flour on a park bench
no reason given.
Autoptic: 8
Grief, do me no favors. I have grown my hair long,
as you bid me. I have learned to roll
a coin below my knuckles. I have written down now
years of dreams; much of my life has passed in writing
down these books of sleep. And so you see that I can
no longer turn only to what’s true
when I speak of my experience. Sainted men
wander in forests that have been set to rows.
And here, today, already I have found a stone
shaped like a day I passed in a life I can’t claim as my own.
The wind calls water what it wants to call it and passes
overhead. But water names wind from within,
as storms proceed in hinges, all through the captive
captive, captivated light. Therefore, I show my face boldly
in a portrait of my great-great-grandfather. In reply
a deep breath in my lungs, and the room about me
actual as nothing can be actual. My hand is badly cut,
and I cannot say how long it has been bleeding.
And yes, I’m sorry, but that hardly matters now.
Speech in a Meadow
Leopold and his benefactor pause beside a hill on the benefactor’s estate. In the hill
there is a door. The day is cold, and bright.
IT WAS this door, years ago, you understand,
that prompted me to begin a wayward life.
Behind it I imagined a tidy room, a hearth,
some bespectacled, bewhiskered creature, conversant
with the courtesies of our times. Strange, but with
things to tell me. You understand.
Later I thought it to be a long and lamplit hall.
And lately I’ve imagined my portrait hanging there,
quietly, as the lamps are covered,
one by one. The angriest man I ever saw
broke his own teeth with a hammer. For as he said,
It’s dark as night inside the sun,
and that is where we’re told to wait. But this
was years ago. I imagine things are different now.
Yet still no answer from the Captain,
not yet, young Leopold. We awkwards
must go wandering, and tend in our lives
most happily to
doorways set in hillsides upon which we made
human departures and human trade.
Speech in a Chamber
In this book birds are taught their flying
by that which would make them fall
were they not to fly as had been taught.
The book is roughly bound, and left
open on a couch. The page is illustrated
and, lifted to the light displays
a moralizing scene: two children have tied
a third to the wheel of an enormous carriage.
A group of elderly women look on with pride.
It is a scent of such astonishing strength,
why, Leopold, there are flowers hidden
throughout the room. There must be for I
cannot sleep without the noise of a bouquet,
and gently, gently, sir, you know
I sleep most gently in this small room.
Speech Confided
A sheaf of worthy papers, set in a wheel and made to spin
may be enough to give
shape to a hundred ill-set lives.
I declined the first, as it was not freely given.
I declined the second, as it was scarcely a ribbon
bound about a child’s throat.
And that I do not care to lead.
The third was charity.
The fourth came with my fame.
Yet sadly I relate, I could not deny the fifth.
For she spoke so clearly of things I have desired.
And so she sits, even now in the rooms above
plotting when she weeps and weeping when she plots.
A thought came yesterday that pleased me, my young friend.
When I die I shall send her a note, inviting her to join me
where I’ve gone. I’m told the dead can leave notes,
on the backs of leaves, in the brims of hats, on the inside of a lady’s glove.
Oh Leopold, the notes this shade will send. .
Speech by a Window
For the sightless, shapeless hope is vision,
cast back by the long thrower like a discus,
heavy like a discus, ridged, impacted.
No vision is given once, nor given
only to one man, one woman, though legends
would have it so. Most dreams come
a hundred times in a given city before
waking the one who will raise it like some new
roof that men may live beneath.
Picture it, dawn in this far place.
The populace beginning to rise. Heads poking
out windows. Doors opening. Horses
standing in their stalls, their heavy breath
expectant. In the street, women with baskets
pass by house after house. In one
I myself wake. To me it seems
that what was true in the night
is far truer at daybreak. And bearing
this ribbon, I go out with a heavy coat,
with burned eyes, trembling hands.
There is a meeting on the riverbed
conducted with the utmost grace.
— these circumstances like a holstered gun,
that surprises by turn gunman and fool.
Through such waters others go
in boots sewn for the purpose.
Such boots, have I longed for anything more?
I will wear them in the open air
while elsewhere I am buried. And you
will read from Tuolti, who says,
The greatest hunter can hunt his prey and nothing else.
Others decide later
what was his prey, what was not.
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