The Rain in Portugal Read online

  who were told by Thrift how little she charges.

  Maybe the ermine collar on the robe

  of Excess has come loose

  or a rip in the gown of Abandon

  needs mending, and no questions

  will be asked about how that came to pass.

  A little bell over the door rings

  whenever a customer enters or leaves,

  but Poetry is too busy thinking about her children

  as she replaces a gold button on the blazer of Pride.

  Hendrik Goltzius’s “Icarus” (1588)

  The Icarus Auden favored was two tiny legs

  disappearing with a splash into a green bay

  while everyone else went on with their business,

  fisherman and sailor, shepherd and sheep.

  But in this version, the plight of the boy

  in all his muscular plunging fills the circular canvas

  as if he were falling through a hole in the world,

  passing through the lens of our seeing him.

  It’s hard to read the expression on a pair of legs,

  but here we have the horrified face

  contorted with regret not unlike the beady-eyed

  Wile E. Coyote, who pauses in mid-air

  to share with us his moment of fatal realization

  before beginning his long descent into a canyon.

  It’s as if Auden’s Brueghel had been run

  backwards to produce an amazing sight—

  a wet boy rising into the sky,

  and then a sudden close-up to show the sorrow

  or the stupidity, however we like to picture

  the consequences of not listening to your father,

  of flying too high, too close to the source of heat and light.

  And to enhance the mythic drama, this Icarus

  is presented as one of “The Four Disgracers”

  where he joins Phaeton, who also took the sun lightly,

  Ixion, bound to a fire-spoked wheel,

  and Tantalus, who served up his son for dinner,

  each figure tumbling operatically in a rondo of air.

  To think if they were left in the hands of Brueghel,

  one might have ended up as a tangle of limbs in an oak,

  another as a form face down in a haycock,

  and the last just a hole in the roof of a barn.

  The Money Note

  Every time I listen to a favorite opera,

  I close my eyes at some point

  and wait in the dark for the note to arrive.

  It’s the high note I’m expecting,

  the one that carries the singer

  to the outer limits of his voice

  and holds him there, but only in the way

  that water is held in the hands,

  for even though tenor

  (from the Latin tenere) means to hold,

  there is no lingering here

  at the risky zenith of the possible

  where the singer seems suspended

  in the bright air of the hall,

  stopped at the gate of a city no one

  has ever entered and escaped with their voice.

  It’s the note that awakens with a jolt

  the dozing spouses in the upper boxes,

  who mistake it for a sound of alarm

  as if the heavy, dazzling chandelier

  were now breaking free of its moorings.

  And even the wakeful can misconstrue

  the look on the singer’s florid face

  as a cry for help, as if someone

  could assist him down from such a height.

  Of course, after the note has crested,

  more of the story remains to be told

  of the countess and her suitors,

  some meaning well, others in disguise,

  and soon enough, a soft aria of doomed love

  will return the inattentive to their dreams.

  But lingering still for some

  is that gooseflesh moment

  when the note at the tip of a scale

  threatened to overwhelm the plot,

  put a match to the corner of the libretto,

  plant a rippling flag on a snow-blown summit

  somewhere beyond the margins of music and art.

  Helium

  “The morning is expected to be cool and foggy.”

  —WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA “The Day After—Without Us”

  Imagining what the weather will be like

  on the day following your death

  has a place on that list of things

  that distinguish us from animals

  as if walking around on two legs

  laughing to ourselves were not enough to close the case.

  In these forecasts, it’s usually raining,

  the way it would be in the movies,

  but it could be sparkling clear

  or grey and still with snow expected in the afternoon.

  Much will continue to occur after I die

  seems to be the message here.

  The rose will nod its red or yellow head.

  Sunbeams will break into the gloomy woods.

  And that’s what was on my mind

  as I drove through a gauntlet of signs

  on a road that passed through a small town in Ohio:

  Bob’s Transmissions,

  The Hairport, The Bountiful Buffet,

  Reggie’s Bike Shop, Balloon Designs by Pauline,

  and Majestic China Garden to name a few.

  When I realized that all these places

  could still be in business on the day after I die,

  I vowed to drink more water,

  to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables,

  and to start going to the gym I never go to

  if only to outlive

  Balloon Designs by Pauline

  and maybe even Pauline herself

  though it would be enough if she simply

  lost the business and left town for good.

  Weathervane

  It’s not a rooster, a horse, or a simple arrow,

  nor the ship or whale you might see near a harbor,

  but a cat silhouetted in black metal

  extending a forepaw downward

  in order to reach one of the four metal mice

  perched on the arms that indicate the compass points.

  A mouse for the east, a mouse for the west,

  a mouse for the north, a mouse for the south,

  facing in all directions as the vane turns in the wind

  and the cat reaches down to snatch a wee one in its hooks.

  Like nothing less than the lovers on Keats’ urn

  or the petrified bodies at Pompeii, here is another

  frozen moment in western culture,

  for the cat will never consume one of the mice,

  and no mouse will ever be disjointed by the black cat

  no matter which way the wind is blowing,

  no matter how madly the cat swivels on the roof

  while you and I are at home, safe from a coming storm,

  or far away in another country, as we are now,

  thinking about a weathervane in a café in Istanbul.

  Species

  I have no need for a biscuit,

  a chew toy, or two bowls on a stand.

  No desire to investigate a shrub

  or sleep on an oval mat by the door,

  but sometimes waiting at a light,

  I start to identify with the blond Lab

  with his head out the rear window

  of the station wagon idling next to me.

  And if we speed off together

  and I can see his dark lips flapping

  in the wind and his eyes closed

  then I am sitting in the balcony of envy.

  Look at you, I usually say

  when I see a terrier on a leash

  trotting briskly along as if running

>   his weekday morning errands,

  and I stop to stare at any dog

  who is peering around a corner,

  returning a ball to the thrower,

  or staring back at me from a porch.

  So early this morning

  there was no avoiding a twinge

  of jealousy for the young spaniel,

  tied to a bench in the shade,

  who was now wagging

  not only his tail but the whole of himself

  as a woman in a summer dress

  emerged from the glass doors of the post office

  then crouched down in front of him

  taking his chin in her hand,

  and said in a mock-scolding tone

  “I told you I’d be right back, silly,”

  leaving the dog to sit

  and return her gaze with a look

  of understanding which seemed to say

  “I know. I know. I never doubted that you would.”

  The Bard in Flight

  It occurred to me

  on a flight from London to Barcelona

  that Shakespeare could have written

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

  with more authority had he occupied

  the window seat next to me

  instead of this businessman from Frankfurt.

  Of course, after a couple of drinks

  and me loaning him an ear bud

  he might become too preoccupied

  with Miles Davis at the Blackhawk

  at 36,000 feet above some realm or other to write a word.

  I imagine he’d enjoy playing with my wristwatch,

  the one with the tartan band,

  and when he wasn’t looking out the window

  he would study the ice cubes in his rotating glass.

  And he’d take a keen interest

  in the various announcements from the flight deck

  and the ministrations of the bowing attendants,

  all of which would be sadly lost on me

  having gotten used to rushing above the clouds

  even though 99% of humanity has never been there.

  Yet I am still fond of the snub-nosed engines,

  the straining harmony of the twin jets,

  and even the sensation of turbulence,

  jostled about high above some blessed plot,

  with the sound of crockery shifting in the galley,

  the frenzied eyes of the nervous passengers,

  and the Bard reaching for my hand

  as we roared with trembling wings

  into the towering fortress of a thunderhead.

  Sirens

  Not those women who lure sailors

  onto a reef with their singing and their tresses,

  but the screams of an ambulance

  bearing the sick, the injured, and the dying

  across the rational grid of the city.

  We get so used to the sound

  it’s just another sharp in the city’s tune.

  Yet it’s one thing to stop on a sidewalk

  with other pedestrians to watch one

  flashing and speeding down an avenue

  while a child on a corner covers her ears

  and a shopkeeper appears in a doorway,

  but another thing when one gets stuck

  in traffic and seems to be crying for its mother

  who has fled to another country.

  Everyone keeps walking along then,

  eyes cast down—for after all,

  there’s nothing we can do,

  and today we are not the one peering

  up at the face of an angel dressed in scrubs.

  Some of us are late for appointments

  a few blocks away, while others

  have the day off and take their time

  angling across a broad, leafy avenue

  before being engulfed by the green of a park.

  Predator

  It takes only a minute

  to bury a wren.

  Two trowels full of dirt

  and he’s in.

  The cat at the threshold

  sits longer in doubt

  deciding whether

  to stay in or go out.

  Traffic

  “…watching the next car ahead and in the mirror the car behind.”

  —GRAHAM GREENE

  A child on a silver bicycle,

  a young mother pushing a stroller,

  and a runner who looked like he was running to Patagonia

  have all passed my car, jammed

  into a traffic jam on a summer weekend.

  And now an elderly couple gradually

  overtakes me as does a family of snails—

  me stalled as if in a pit of tar

  far from any beach and its salty air.

  Why even Buddha has risen

  from his habitual sitting

  and is now walking serenely past my car,

  holding his robes to his chest with one hand.

  I watch him from the patch of shade

  I have inched into as he begins to grow smaller

  over my steering wheel then sits down again

  up ahead, unfurling his palms

  as if he were only a tiny figurine affixed to the dash.

  Sixteen Years Old, I Help Bring in the Hay on My Uncle John’s Farm with Two French-Canadian Workers

  None of us expected the massing thunderheads

  to swing open their doors so suddenly

  that we would have to drop our rakes

  and run across the field to a shelter

  and stand there side by side under its tin roof

  looking out through a shiny curtain of rain.

  We had never spent any time together

  except for the haying, raking it into piles

  and pitchforking it up into an old truck,

  but now there was nothing to do

  but watch and listen to the downpour

  and nothing to say either

  after the cigarettes had been offered around

  and lit one by one with the flame of a single match.

  The Present

  Much has been said about being in the present.

  It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,

  like the latest club on the downtown scene,

  but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

  It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible

  to wake up every morning and begin

  leaping from one second into the next

  until you fall exhausted back into bed.

  Plus, there’d be no past

  with so many scenes to savor and regret,

  and no future, the place you will die

  but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

  The trouble with the present is

  that it’s always in a state of vanishing.

  Take the second it takes to end

  this sentence with a period—already gone.

  What about the moment that exists

  between banging your thumb

  with a hammer and realizing

  you are in a whole lot of pain?

  What about the one that occurs

  after you hear the punch line

  but before you get the joke?

  Is that where the wise men want us to live

  in that intervening tick, the tiny slot

  that occurs after you have spent hours

  searching downtown for that new club

  and just before you give up and head back home?

  On Rhyme

  It’s possible that a stitch in time

  might save as many as twelve or as few as three,

  and I have no trouble remembering

  that September has thirty days.

  So do June, November, and April.

  I like a cat wearing a chapeau or a trilby,

  Little Jack Horner sitting on a sofa,


  old men who are not from Nantucket,

  and how life can seem almost unreal

  when you are gently rowing a boat down a stream.

  That’s why instead of recalling today

  that it pours mostly in Spain,

  I am going to picture the rain in Portugal,

  how it falls on the hillside vineyards,

  on the surface of the deep harbors

  where fishing boats are swaying,

  and in the narrow alleys of the cities,

  where three boys in tee shirts

  are kicking a soccer ball in the rain,

  ignoring the window-cries of their mothers.

  The Five Spot, 1964

  There’s always a lesson to be learned

  whether in a hotel bar

  or over tea in a teahouse,

  no matter which way it goes,

  for you or against,

  what you want to hear or what you don’t.

  Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,

  with two then three saxophones

  in his mouth at once

  and a kazoo, no less,

  hanging from his neck at the ready.

  Even in my youth I saw this

  not as a lesson in keeping busy

  with one thing or another,

  but as a joyous impossible lesson

  in how to do it all at once,

  pleasing and displeasing yourself

  with harmony here and discord there.

  But what else did I know

  as the waitress lit the candle

  on my round table in the dark?

  What did I know about anything?

  2128

  It’s the year when everyone is celebrating

  the 200th birthday of Donald Hall,

  but I don’t know what to do with myself.

  No one ever thought to tell me

  that he and I would live

  beyond anyone’s expectations

  and that the challenge would be

  to figure out how to keep ourselves busy.

  Were not Tennyson’s “Tithonus”

  and Swift’s sketch of the Struldbrugs

  eloquent enough warnings

  of the dangers of living too long?

  And here’s a more recent proof:

  me pacing around a dining room table