Picnic, Lightning Read online

  anonymous faces on the street,

  a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,

  a million forgotten hours.

  Journal

  Ledger of the head's transactions,

  log of the body's voyage,

  it rides all day in a raincoat pocket,

  ready to admit any droplet of thought,

  nut of a maxim,

  narrowest squint of an observation.

  It goes with me

  to a gallery where I open it to record

  a note on red and the birthplace of Corot,

  into the tube of an airplane

  so I can take down the high dictation of clouds,

  or on a hike in the woods where a young hawk

  might suddenly fly between its covers.

  And when my heart is beating

  too rapidly in the dark,

  I will go downstairs in a robe,

  open it up to a blank page,

  and try to settle on the blue lines

  whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

  Net I tow beneath the waves of the day,

  giant ball of string or foil,

  it holds whatever I uncap my pen to save:

  a snippet of Catullus,

  a passage from Camus,

  a tiny eulogy for the evening anodyne of gin,

  a note on what the kingfisher looks like when he swims.

  And there is room in the margins

  for the pencil to go lazy and daydream

  in circles and figure eights,

  or produce some illustrations,

  like Leonardo in his famous codex—

  room for a flying machine,

  the action of a funnel,

  a nest of pulleys,

  and a device that is turned by water,

  room for me to draw

  a few of my own contraptions,

  inventions so original and visionary

  that not even I—genius of the new age—

  have the slightest idea what they are for.

  Some Days

  Some days I put the people in their places at the table,

  bend their legs at the knees,

  if they come with that feature,

  and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

  All afternoon they face one another,

  the man in the brown suit,

  the woman in the blue dress,

  perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

  But other days, I am the one

  who is lifted up by the ribs,

  then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse

  to sit with the others at the long table.

  Very funny,

  but how would you like it

  if you never knew from one day to the next

  if you were going to spend it

  striding around like a vivid god,

  your shoulders in the clouds,

  or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,

  staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

  Silence

  Now it is time to say what you have to say.

  The room is quiet.

  The whirring fan has been unplugged,

  and the girl who was tapping

  a pencil on her desktop has been removed.

  So tell us what is on your mind.

  We want to hear the sound of your foliage,

  the unraveling of your tool kit,

  your songs of loneliness,

  your songs of hurt.

  The trains are motionless on the tracks,

  the ships at rest in the harbor.

  The dogs are cocking their heads

  and the gods are peering down from their balloons.

  The town is hushed,

  and everyone here has a copy.

  So tell us about your parents—

  your father behind the steering wheel,

  your cruel mother at the sink.

  Let's hear about all the clouds you saw, all the trees.

  Read the poem you brought with you tonight.

  The ocean has stopped sloshing around,

  and even Beethoven

  is sitting up in his deathbed,

  his cold hearing-horn inserted in one ear.

  Picnic, Lightning

  “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident

  (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”

  Lolita

  It is possible to be struck by a meteor

  or a single-engine plane

  while reading in a chair at home.

  Safes drop from rooftops

  and flatten the odd pedestrian

  mostly within the panels of the comics,

  but still, we know it is possible,

  as well as the flash of summer lightning,

  the thermos toppling over,

  spilling out on the grass.

  And we know the message

  can be delivered from within.

  The heart, no valentine,

  decides to quit after lunch,

  the power shut off like a switch,

  or a tiny dark ship is unmoored

  into the flow of the body's rivers,

  the brain a monastery,

  defenseless on the shore.

  This is what I think about

  when I shovel compost

  into a wheelbarrow,

  and when I fill the long flower boxes,

  then press into rows

  the limp roots of red impatiens—

  the instant hand of Death

  always ready to burst forth

  from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

  Then the soil is full of marvels,

  bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,

  red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick

  to burrow back under the loam.

  Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,

  the clouds a brighter white,

  and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge

  against a round stone,

  the small plants singing

  with lifted faces, and the click

  of the sundial

  as one hour sweeps into the next.

  II

  In the Room of a Thousand Miles

  I like writing about where I am,

  where I happen to be sitting,

  the humidity or the clouds,

  the scene outside the window—

  a pink tree in bloom,

  a neighbor walking his small, nervous dog.

  And if I am drinking

  a cup of tea at the time

  or a small glass of whiskey,

  I will find a line to put it on.

  My wife hands these poems back to me

  with a sigh.

  She thinks I ought to be opening up

  my aperture to let in

  the wild rhododendrons of Ireland,

  the sun-blanched stadiums of Rome,

  that waterclock in Bruges—

  the world beyond my inkwell.

  I tell her I will try again

  and travel back to my desk

  where the chair is turned to the window.

  I think about the furniture of history.

  I consider the globe, the lights of its cities.

  I visualize a lion rampant on an iron shield,

  a quiet battlefield, a granite monument.

  And then—just between you and me—

  I take a swallow of cold tea

  and in the manner of the ancient Chinese

  pick up my thin pen

  and write down that bird I hear outside,

  the one that sings,

  pauses,

  then sings again.

  Morning

  Why do we bother with the rest of the day,

  the swale of the afternoon,

  the sudden dip into evening,

  then night with his notorious perfumes,

  his many-pointed stars?


  This is the best—

  throwing off the light covers,

  feet on the cold floor,

  and buzzing around the house on espresso—

  maybe a splash of water on the face,

  a palmful of vitamins—

  but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

  dictionary and atlas open on the rug,

  the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,

  a cello on the radio,

  and, if necessary, the windows—

  trees fifty, a hundred years old

  out there,

  heavy clouds on the way

  and the lawn steaming like a horse

  in the early morning.

  Bonsai

  All it takes is one to throw a room

  completely out of whack.

  Over by the window

  it looks hundreds of yards away,

  a lone stark gesture of wood

  on the distant cliff of a table.

  Up close, it draws you in,

  cuts everything down to its size.

  Look at it from the doorway,

  and the world dilates and bloats.

  The button lying next to it

  is now a pearl wheel,

  the book of matches is a raft,

  and the coffee cup a cistern

  to catch the same rain

  that moistens its small plot of dark, mossy earth.

  For it even carries its own weather,

  leaning away from a fierce wind

  that somehow blows

  through the calm tropics of this room.

  The way it bends inland at the elbow

  makes me want to inch my way

  to the very top of its spiky greenery,

  hold onto for dear life

  and watch the sea storm rage,

  hoping for a tiny whale to appear.

  I want to see her plunging forward

  through the troughs,

  tunneling under the foam and spindrift

  on her annual, thousand-mile journey.

  Splitting Wood

  Frost covered this decades ago,

  and frost will cover it again tonight,

  the leafy disarray of this woodland

  now thinned down to half its trees,

  but this morning I stand here

  sweating in a thin shirt

  as I split a stack of ash logs

  into firewood

  with two wedges, an ax, and a blue-headed maul.

  The pleasures here are well known:

  the feet planted wide,

  the silent unstoppable flow of the downswing,

  the coordination that is called hand-eye,

  because the hand achieves

  whatever the concupiscent eye desires

  when it longs for a certain spot,

  which, in this case, is the slightest fissure

  visible at one end of the log

  where the thin, insinuating edge

  of the blade can gain entry,

  where the shape of its will can be done.

  I want to say there is nothing

  like the sudden opening of wood,

  but it is like so many other things—

  the stroke of the ax like lightning,

  the bisection so perfect

  the halves fall away from each other

  as in a mirror,

  and hit the soft ground

  like twins shot through the heart.

  And rarely, if the wood

  accepts the blade without conditions,

  the two pieces keep their balance

  in spite of the blow,

  remain stunned on the block

  as if they cannot believe their division,

  their sudden separateness.

  Still upright, still together,

  they wobble slightly

  as two lovers, once secretly bound,

  might stand revealed,

  more naked than ever,

  the darkness inside the tree they shared

  now instantly exposed to the blunt

  light of this clear November day,

  all the inner twisting of the grain

  that held them blindly

  in their augmentation and contortion

  now rushed into this brightness

  as if by a shutter

  that, once opened, can never be closed.

  Shoveling Snow with Buddha

  In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok

  you would never see him doing such a thing,

  tossing the dry snow over the mountain

  of his bare, round shoulder,

  his hair tied in a knot,

  a model of concentration.

  Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word

  for what he does, or does not do.

  Even the season is wrong for him.

  In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?

  Is this not implied by his serene expression,

  that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

  But here we are, working our way down the driveway,

  one shovelful at a time.

  We toss the light powder into the clear air.

  We feel the cold mist on our faces.

  And with every heave we disappear

  and become lost to each other

  in these sudden clouds of our own making,

  these fountain-bursts of snow.

  This is so much better than a sermon in church,

  I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.

  This is the true religion, the religion of snow,

  and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,

  I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

  He has thrown himself into shoveling snow

  as if it were the purpose of existence,

  as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway

  you could back the car down easily

  and drive off into the vanities of the world

  with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

  All morning long we work side by side,

  me with my commentary

  and he inside the generous pocket of his silence,

  until the hour is nearly noon

  and the snow is piled high all around us;

  then, I hear him speak.

  After this, he asks,

  can we go inside and play cards?

  Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk

  and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table

  while you shuffle the deck,

  and our boots stand dripping by the door.

  Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes

  and leaning for a moment on his shovel

  before he drives the thin blade again

  deep into the glittering white snow.

  I Go Back to the House for a Book

  I turn around on the gravel

  and go back to the house for a book,

  something to read at the doctor's office,

  and while I am inside, running the finger

  of inquisition along a shelf,

  another me that did not bother

  to go back to the house for a book

  heads out on his own,

  rolls down the driveway,

  and swings left toward town,

  a ghost in his ghost car,

  another knot in the string of time,

  a good three minutes ahead of me—

  a spacing that will now continue

  for the rest of my life.

  Sometimes I think I see him

  a few people in front of me on a line

  or getting up from a table

  to leave the restaurant just before I do,

  slipping into his coat on the way out the door.

  But there is no catching him,

  no way to slow him down

  and put us back
in sync,

  unless one day he decides to go back

  to the house for something,

  but I cannot imagine

  for the life of me what that might be.

  He is out there always before me,

  blazing my trail, invisible scout,

  hound that pulls me along,

  shade I am doomed to follow,

  my perfect double,

  only bumped an inch into the future,

  and not nearly as well-versed as I

  in the love poems of Ovid—

  I who went back to the house

  that fateful winter morning and got the book.

  After the Storm

  Soft yellow-gray light of early morning,

  butter and wool,

  the two bedroom windows

  still beaded and streaked with rain.

  The world calm again, routine with traffic,

  after its night of convulsions,

  when storm drains closed at the throat,

  and trees shook in the wind like the hair of dryads.

  In the silent house, its roof still on,

  too early for the heat to come whistling up

  and the guest room doors still closed,

  I am propped up on these pillows,

  a gray, moth-eaten cashmere jersey

  wrapped around my neck

  against the unbroken cold of last night.

  I am thinking about the dinner party,

  the long table, dark bottles of Merlot,

  the odd duck and brussels sprouts,

  and how, after midnight,

  with all of us sprawled on the couch and floor,

  the power suddenly went out

  leaving us to feel our way around

  in the tenth-century darkness

  until we found and lit a stash of candles

  then drew the circle of ourselves a little tighter

  in this softer hula of lights

  that gleamed in mirrors and on rims of glasses

  while the shutters banged and the rain lashed down.

  A sweet nut of a memory—

  but the part that sends me whirring

  in little ovals of wonder,

  as the leftover clouds break apart

  and the sun brightly stripes these walls,

  is the part that came later,

  hours after we had each carried a candle

  up the shadowy staircase and gone to bed.

  It was three, maybe four in the morning

  when the power surged back on,

  and, as if a bookmark

  had been inserted into the party

  when the lamps went dark,

  now all the lights downstairs flared again,

  and from the stereo speakers