Ballistics Read online

  or bark at my passing in the guise of local dogs.

  Aubade

  If I lived across the street from myself

  and I was sitting in the dark

  on the edge of the bed

  at five o’clock in the morning,

  I might be wondering what the light

  was doing on in my study at this hour,

  yet here I am at my desk

  in the study wondering the very same thing.

  I know I did not have to rise so early

  to cut open with a penknife

  the bundles of papers at a newsstand

  as the man across the street might be thinking.

  Clearly, I am not a farmer or a milkman.

  And I am not the man across the street

  who sits in the dark because sleep

  is his mother and he is one of her many orphans.

  Maybe I am awake just to listen

  to the faint, high-pitched ringing

  of tungsten in the single lightbulb

  which sounds like the rustling of trees.

  Or is it my job simply to sit as still

  as the glass of water on the night table

  of the man across the street,

  as still as the photograph of my wife in a frame?

  But there’s the first bird to deliver his call,

  and there’s the reason I am up—

  to catch the three-note song of that bird

  and now to wait with him for some reply.

  No Things

  This love for the petty things,

  part natural from the slow eye of childhood,

  part a literary affectation,

  this attention to the morning flower

  and later in the day to a fly

  strolling along the rim of a wineglass—

  are we just avoiding the one true destiny,

  when we do that? averting our eyes from

  Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?

  The leafless branches against the sky

  will not save anyone from the infinity of death,

  nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.

  So why bother with the checkerboard lighthouse?

  Why waste time on the sparrow,

  or the wildflowers along the roadside

  when we should all be alone in our rooms

  throwing ourselves against the wall of life

  and the opposite wall of death,

  the door locked behind us

  as we hurl ourselves at the question of meaning,

  and the enigma of our origins?

  What good is the firefly,

  the droplet running along the green leaf,

  or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub

  when ultimately we are meant to be

  banging away on the mystery

  as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?

  banging away on nothingness itself,

  some with their foreheads,

  others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.

  The First Night

  The worst thing about death must be

  the first night.

  —Juan Ramón Jiménez

  Before I opened you, Jiménez,

  it never occurred to me that day and night

  would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

  but now you have me wondering

  if there will also be a sun and a moon

  and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

  then repair, each soul alone,

  to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.

  Or will the first night be the only night,

  a darkness for which we have no other name?

  How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,

  how impossible to write it down.

  This is where language will stop,

  the horse we have ridden all our lives

  rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

  The word that was in the beginning

  and the word that was made flesh—

  those and all the other words will cease.

  Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,

  how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?

  But it is enough to frighten me

  into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,

  to sunlight bright on water

  or fragmented in a grove of trees,

  and to look more closely here at these small leaves,

  these sentinel thorns,

  whose employment it is to guard the rose.

  January in Paris

  Poems are never completed—they are

  only abandoned.

  —Paul Valéry

  That winter I had nothing to do

  but tend the kettle in my shuttered room

  on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,

  but I would sometimes descend the stairs,

  unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets

  often turning from a wide boulevard

  down a narrow side street

  bearing the name of an obscure patriot.

  I followed a few private rules,

  never crossing a bridge without stopping

  mid-point to lean my bike on the railing

  and observe the flow of the river below

  as I tried to better understand the French.

  In my pale coat and my Basque cap

  I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie

  or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,

  and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.

  I would see beggars and street cleaners

  in their bright uniforms, and sometimes

  I would see the poems of Valéry,

  the ones he never finished but abandoned,

  wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.

  Most of them needed only a final line

  or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,

  but whenever I approached,

  they would retreat from their makeshift fires

  into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,

  forsaken for so many long decades

  how could they ever trust another man with a pen?

  I came across the one I wanted to tell you about

  sitting with a glass of rosé at a café table—

  beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,

  cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache

  by Monsieur Paul Valéry himself,

  big fish in the school of Symbolism

  and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters

  of the League of Nations if you please.

  Never mind how I got her out of the café,

  past the concierge and up the flights of stairs—

  remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.

  And never mind the holding and the pressing.

  It is enough to know that I moved my pen

  in such a way as to bring her to completion,

  a simple, final stanza, which ended,

  as this poem will, with the image

  of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,

  her large eyes closed,

  a painting of cows in a valley over her head,

  and off to the side, me in a window seat

  blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

  two

  Ballistics

  When I came across the high-speed photograph

  of a bullet that had just pierced a book—

  the pages exploding with the velocity—

  I forgot all about the marvels of photography

  and began to wonder which book

  the photographer had selected for the shot.

  Many novels sprang to mind

  including those of Raymond Chandler

  where an extra bul
let would hardly be noticed.

  Nonfiction offered too many choices—

  a history of Scottish lighthouses,

  a biography of Joan of Arc and so forth.

  Or it could be an anthology of medieval literature,

  the bullet having just beheaded Sir Gawain

  and scattered the band of assorted pilgrims.

  But later, as I was drifting off to sleep,

  I realized that the executed book

  was a recent collection of poems written

  by someone of whom I was not fond

  and that the bullet must have passed through

  his writing with little resistance

  at twenty-eight hundred feet per second,

  through the poems about his childhood

  and the ones about the dreary state of the world,

  and then through the author’s photograph,

  through the beard, the round glasses,

  and that special poet’s hat he loves to wear.

  Pornography

  In this sentimental painting of rustic life,

  a rosy-cheeked fellow

  in a broad hat and ballooning green pants

  is twirling a peasant girl in a red frock

  while a boy is playing a squeeze-box

  near a turned-over barrel

  upon which rest a knife, a jug, and a small drinking glass.

  Two men in rough jackets

  are playing cards at a wooden table.

  And in the background a woman in a bonnet

  stands behind the half-open Dutch door

  talking to a merchant or a beggar who is leaning on a cane.

  This is all I need to inject me with desire,

  to fill me with the urge to lie down with you,

  or someone very much like you,

  on a cool marble floor or any fairly flat surface

  as clouds go flying by

  and the rustle of tall leafy trees

  mixes with the notes of birdsong—

  so clearly does the work speak of vanishing time,

  obsolete musical instruments,

  passing fancies, and the corpse

  of the largely forgotten painter moldering

  somewhere beneath the surface of present-day France.

  Greek and Roman Statuary

  The tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost,

  then the arms and legs,

  and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured.

  And often an entire head followed the nose

  as it might have done when bread

  was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome.

  No hope for the flute once attached

  to the lips of that satyr with the puffed-out cheeks,

  nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on,

  the sword no longer gripped by the warrior,

  the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy,

  and whatever it was Aphrodite once held in her severed hand.

  But the torso is another story—

  middle man, the last to go, bluntly surviving,

  propped up on a pedestal with a length of pipe,

  and the mighty stone ass endures,

  so smooth and fundamental, no one

  hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare.

  And that is the way it goes here

  in the diffused light from the translucent roof,

  one missing extremity after another—

  digits that got too close to the slicer of time,

  hands snapped off by the clock,

  whole limbs caught in the mortal thresher.

  But outside on the city streets,

  it is raining, and the pavement shines

  with the crisscross traffic of living bodies—

  hundreds of noses still intact,

  arms swinging and hands grasping,

  the skin still warm and foreheads glistening.

  It’s anyone’s guess when the day will come

  when there is nothing left of us

  but the bare, solid plinth we once stood upon

  now exposed to the open air,

  just the wind in the trees and the shadows

  of clouds sweeping over its hard marble surface.

  Quiet

  It occurred to me around dusk

  after I had lit three candles

  and was pouring myself a glass of wine

  that I had not uttered a word to a soul all day.

  Alone in the house,

  I was busy pushing the wheel in a mill of paper

  or staring down a dark well of ink—

  no callers at the door, no ring of the telephone.

  But as the path lights came on,

  I did recall having words with a turtle

  on my morning walk, a sudden greeting

  that sent him off his log splashing into the lake.

  I had also spoken to the goldfish

  as I tossed a handful of pellets into their pond,

  and I had a short chat with the dog,

  who cocked her head this way and that

  as I explained that dinner was hours away

  and that she should lie down by the door.

  I also talked to myself as I was typing

  and later on while I looked around for my boots.

  So I had barely set foot on the path

  that leads to the great villa of silence

  where men and women pace while counting beads.

  In fact, I had only a single afternoon

  of total silence to show for myself,

  a spring day in a cell in Big Sur,

  twenty or so monks also silent in their nearby cells—

  a community of Cameldolites,

  an order so stringent, my guide told me,

  that they make the Benedictines,

  whom they had broken away from in the 11th century,

  look like a bunch of Hells Angels.

  Out of a lifetime of running my mouth

  and leaning on the horn of the ego,

  only a single afternoon of being truly quiet

  on a high cliff with the Pacific spread out below,

  but as I listened to the birdsong

  by the window that day, I could feel my droplet

  of silence swelling on the faucet

  then dropping into the zinc basin of their serenity.

  Yet since then—

  nothing but the racket of self-advertisement,

  the clamor of noisy restaurants,

  the classroom proclamations,

  the little king of the voice having its say,

  and today the pride of writing this down,

  which must be the reason my pen

  has turned its back on me to hide its face in its hands.

  Scenes of Hell

  We did not have the benefit of a guide,

  no crone to lead us off the common path,

  no ancient to point the way with a staff,

  but there were badlands to cross,

  rivers of fire and blackened peaks,

  and eventually we could look down and see

  the jeweler running around a gold ring,

  the boss trapped in an hourglass,

  the baker buried up to his eyes in flour,

  the banker plummeting on a coin,

  the teacher disappearing into a blackboard,

  and the grocer silent under a pyramid of vegetables.

  We saw the pilot nose-diving

  and the whore impaled on a bedpost,

  the pharmacist wandering in a stupor

  and the child with toy wheels for legs.

  You pointed to the soldier

  who was dancing with his empty uniform

  and I remarked on the blind tourist.

  But what truly caught our attention

  was the scene in the long mirror of ice:

  you lighting the wick on your head,

  me blowing on the final spark, />
  and our children trying to crawl away from their eggshells.

  Hippos on Holiday

  is not really the title of a movie

  but if it was I would be sure to see it.

  I love their short legs and big heads,

  the whole hippo look.

  Hundreds of them would frolic

  in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,

  and I would eat my popcorn

  in the dark of a neighborhood theater.

  When they opened their enormous mouths

  lined with big stubby teeth

  I would drink my enormous Coke.

  I would be both in my seat

  and in the water playing with the hippos,

  which is the way it is