Sailing Alone Around the Room Read online

  Etched on the head of a pin,

  my own production would leave room for

  The Lord’s Prayer and many dancing angels.

  No matter.

  In my revenge daydream I am the one

  poised on the marble staircase

  high above the crowded ballroom.

  A retainer in livery announces me

  and the Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella

  Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari.

  You are the one below

  fidgeting in your rented tux

  with some local Cindy hanging all over you.

  Insomnia

  After counting all the sheep in the world

  I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,

  camels, skylarks, etc.,

  then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,

  country by country.

  By early light I am asleep

  in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,

  yelling across the rising water

  at preoccupied Noah as his wondrous

  ark sails by and begins to grow smaller.

  Now a silhouette on the horizon,

  the only boat on earth is disappearing.

  As I rise and fall on the rocking waves,

  I concentrate on the giraffe couple,

  their necks craning over the roof,

  to keep my life from flashing before me.

  After all the animals wink out of sight

  I float on my back, eyes closed.

  I picture all the fish in creation

  leaping a fence in a field of water,

  one colorful species after another.

  Earthling

  You have probably come across

  those scales in planetariums

  that tell you how much you

  would weigh on other planets.

  You have noticed the fat ones

  lingering on the Mars scale

  and the emaciated slowing up

  the line for Neptune.

  As a creature of average weight,

  I fail to see the attraction.

  Imagine squatting in the wasteland

  of Pluto, all five tons of you,

  or wandering around Mercury

  wondering what to do next with your ounce.

  How much better to step onto

  the simple bathroom scale,

  a happy earthling feeling

  the familiar ropes of gravity,

  157 pounds standing soaking wet

  a respectful distance from the sun.

  Books

  From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus

  I can hear the library humming in the night,

  a choir of authors murmuring inside their books

  along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,

  Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,

  each one stitched into his own private coat,

  together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

  I picture a figure in the act of reading,

  shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,

  a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie

  as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,

  or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.

  He moves from paragraph to paragraph

  as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

  I hear the voice of my mother reading to me

  from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,

  and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,

  the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,

  a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

  I watch myself building bookshelves in college,

  walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,

  or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

  I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,

  straining in circles of light to find more light

  until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs

  that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

  when evening is shadowing the forest

  and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,

  we have to listen hard to hear the voices

  of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.

  Bar Time

  In keeping with universal saloon practice,

  the clock here is set fifteen minutes ahead

  of all the clocks in the outside world.

  This makes us a rather advanced group,

  doing our drinking in the unknown future,

  immune from the cares of the present,

  safely harbored a quarter of an hour

  beyond the woes of the contemporary scene.

  No wonder such thoughtless pleasure derives

  from tending the small fire of a cigarette,

  from observing this glass of whiskey and ice,

  the cold rust I am sipping,

  or from having an eye on the street outside

  when Ordinary Time slouches past in a topcoat,

  rain running off the brim of his hat,

  the late edition like a flag in his pocket.

  My Number

  Is Death miles away from this house,

  reaching for a widow in Cincinnati

  or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker

  in British Columbia?

  Is he too busy making arrangements,

  tampering with air brakes,

  scattering cancer cells like seeds,

  loosening the wooden beams of roller coasters

  to bother with my hidden cottage

  that visitors find so hard to find?

  Or is he stepping from a black car

  parked at the dark end of the lane,

  shaking open the familiar cloak,

  its hood raised like the head of a crow,

  and removing the scythe from the trunk?

  Did you have any trouble with the directions?

  I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this.

  Introduction to Poetry

  I ask them to take a poem

  and hold it up to the light

  like a color slide

  or press an ear against its hive.

  I say drop a mouse into a poem

  and watch him probe his way out,

  or walk inside the poem’s room

  and feel the walls for a light switch.

  I want them to water-ski

  across the surface of a poem

  waving at the author’s name on the shore.

  But all they want to do

  is tie the poem to a chair with rope

  and torture a confession out of it.

  They begin beating it with a hose

  to find out what it really means.

  The Brooklyn Museum of Art

  I will now step over the soft velvet rope

  and walk directly into this massive Hudson River

  painting and pick my way along the Palisades

  with this stick I snapped off a dead tree.

  I will skirt the smoky, nestled towns

  and seek the path that leads always outward

  until I become lost, without a hope

  of ever finding the way back to the museum.

  I will stand on the bluffs in nineteenth-century clothes,

  a dwarf among rock, hills, and flowing water,

  and I will fish from the banks in a straw hat

  which will feel like a brush stroke on my head.

  And I will hide in the green covers of forests

  so no appreciator of Frederick Edwin Church,

  leaning over the soft velvet rope,

  will spot my tiny figure moving in the stillness

  and cry out, pointing for the others to see,

  and be thought mad and led away to a cell

  where there is no vaulting landscape to explore,

 
; none of this birdsong that halts me in my tracks,

  and no wide curving of this river that draws

  my steps toward the misty vanishing point.

  Schoolsville

  Glancing over my shoulder at the past,

  I realize the number of students I have taught

  is enough to populate a small town.

  I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,

  chalk dust flurrying down in winter,

  nights dark as a blackboard.

  The population ages but never graduates.

  On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park

  and when it’s cold they shiver around stoves

  reading disorganized essays out loud.

  A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags

  into the streets with their books.

  I forgot all their last names first and their

  first names last in alphabetical order.

  But the boy who always had his hand up

  is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.

  The girl who signed her papers in lipstick

  leans against the drugstore, smoking,

  brushing her hair like a machine.

  Their grades are sewn into their clothes

  like references to Hawthorne.

  The A’s stroll along with other A’s.

  The D’s honk whenever they pass another D.

  All the creative-writing students recline

  on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.

  Wherever they go, they form a big circle.

  Needless to say, I am the mayor.

  I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.

  I rarely leave the house. The car deflates

  in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing.

  Once in a while a student knocks on the door

  with a term paper fifteen years late

  or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.

  And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane

  to watch me lecturing the wallpaper,

  quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.

  FROM

  Questions

  About Angels

  (1991)

  American Sonnet

  We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser

  and it is not fourteen lines

  like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field

  but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,

  that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms

  or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.

  We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,

  adding to the view a caption as conventional

  as an Elizabethan woman’s heliocentric eyes.

  We locate an adjective for the weather.

  We announce that we are having a wonderful time.

  We express the wish that you were here

  and hide the wish that we were where you are,

  walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered

  as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.

  A slice of this place, a length of white beach,

  a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral

  will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

  and you will toss on the table this reversible display:

  a few square inches of where we have strayed

  and a compression of what we feel.

  Questions About Angels

  Of all the questions you might want to ask

  about angels, the only one you ever hear

  is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

  No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time

  besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin

  or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth

  or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

  Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?

  Do they swing like children from the hinges

  of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?

  Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

  What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,

  their diet of unfiltered divine light?

  What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall

  these tall presences can look over and see hell?

  If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole

  in a river and would the hole float along endlessly

  filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

  If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive

  in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume

  the appearance of the regular mailman and

  whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

  No, the medieval theologians control the court.

  The only question you ever hear is about

  the little dance floor on the head of a pin

  where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

  It is designed to make us think in millions,

  billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse

  into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:

  one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,

  a small jazz combo working in the background.

  She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful

  eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over

  to glance at his watch because she has been dancing

  forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

  A History of Weather

  It is the kind of spring morning—candid sunlight

  elucidating the air, a flower-ruffling breeze—

  that makes me want to begin a history of weather,

  a ten-volume elegy for the atmospheres of the past,

  the envelopes that have moved around the moving globe.

  It will open by examining the cirrus clouds

  that are now sweeping over this house into the next state,

  and every chapter will step backwards in time

  to illustrate the rain that fell on battlefields

  and the winds that attended beheadings, coronations.

  The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed

  along with the gales that blew off Renaissance caps.

  The tornadoes of the Middle Ages will be explicated

  and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages.

  There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity

  and on the heat that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.

  The study will be hailed as ambitious and definitive,

  for it will cover even the climate before the Flood

  when showers moistened Eden and will conclude

  with the mysteries of the weather before history

  when unseen clouds drifted over an unpeopled world,

  when not a soul lay in any of earth’s meadows gazing up

  at the passing of enormous faces and animal shapes,

  his jacket bunched into a pillow, an open book on his chest.

  The Death of Allegory

  I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions

  that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings

  and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance

  displaying their capital letters like license plates.

  Truth cantering on a powerful horse,

  Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.

  Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,

  Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

  Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,

  Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.

  They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.

  Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

&nbs
p; Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.

  Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,

  and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,

  hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.

  Even if you called them back, there are no places left

  for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.

  The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums

  and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

  Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies

  and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,

  exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,

  objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,

  themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,

  an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.

  As for the others, the great ideas on horseback

  and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,

  it looks as though they have traveled down

  that road you see on the final page of storybooks,

  the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears

  into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

  Forgetfulness

  The name of the author is the first to go

  followed obediently by the title, the plot,

  the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

  which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never

  even heard of,

  as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

  decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

  to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

  Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good-bye

  and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

  and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

  something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

  the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

  Whatever it is you are struggling to remember

  it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

  not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

  It has floated away down a dark mythological river

  whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,