The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems Read online

  lighting the same bed-space where I lie

  having nothing to farm, and no son,

  the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,

  feeling better and worse by turns.

  In the Moment

  It was a day in June, all lawn and sky,

  the kind that gives you no choice

  but to unbutton your shirt

  and sit outside in a rough wooden chair.

  And if a glass of ice tea and a volume

  of seventeenth-century poetry

  with a dark blue cover are available,

  then the picture can hardly be improved.

  I remember a fly kept landing on my wrist,

  and two black butterflies

  with white and red wing-dots

  bobbed around my head in the bright air.

  I could feel the day offering itself to me,

  and I wanted nothing more

  than to be in the moment—but which moment?

  Not that one, or that one, or that one,

  or any of those that were scuttling by

  seemed perfectly right for me.

  Plus, I was too knotted up with questions

  about the past and his tall, evasive sister, the future.

  What churchyard held the bones of George Herbert?

  Why did John Donne’s wife die so young?

  And more pressingly,

  what could we serve the vegetarian twins

  who were coming to dinner that evening?

  Who knew that they would bring their own grapes?

  And why was the driver of that pickup

  flying down the road toward the lone railroad track?

  And so the priceless moments of the day

  were squandered one by one—

  or more likely a thousand at a time—

  with quandary and pointless interrogation.

  All I wanted was to be a pea of being

  inside the green pod of time,

  but that was not going to happen today,

  I had to admit to myself

  as I closed the book on the face

  of Thomas Traherne and returned to the house

  where I lit a flame under a pot

  full of floating brown eggs,

  and, while they cooked in their bubbles,

  I stared into a small oval mirror near the sink

  to see if that crazy glass

  had anything special to tell me today.

  The Peasants’ Revolt

  Soon enough it will all be over—

  the shirt hanging from the doorknob,

  trees beyond the windows,

  and the kettle of water bubbling on a burner.

  Soon enough, soon enough,

  the many will be overwhelmed by the one.

  Instead of the shaded road to the house,

  the blue wheelbarrow upended,

  and a picture book across my hips in bed,

  just an expanse of white ink,

  or a dark tunnel coiling away and down.

  No sunflowers, no notebook,

  no sand-colored denim jacket

  and a piece of straw in the teeth,

  just a hole inside a larger hole

  and the starless maw of space.

  But we are still here,

  with all the world before us,

  a beaded glass of water on the night table,

  and the rest of this summer afternoon ahead.

  So undo the buttons on your white blouse

  and toss it over a chair back.

  Let us lie down side by side

  on these crisp sheets like two effigies on a tomb,

  supine in a shadowy corner of a cathedral.

  Let us be as still and serene

  as Richard II and Anne of Bohemia—

  he who ended the Peasants’ Revolt so ruthlessly

  and she to whom he was so devoted,

  now entombed together, hand in stone hand.

  Let us close our eyes to the white room

  and let the fan blades on the ceiling cool us

  as they turn like the hands of a speeding clock.

  Theme

  It’s a sunny weekday in early May

  and after a ham sandwich

  and a cold bottle of beer on the brick terrace,

  I am consumed by the wish

  to add something

  to one of the ancient themes—

  youth dancing with his eyes closed,

  for example,

  in the shadows of corruption and death,

  or the rise and fall of illustrious men

  strapped to the turning

  wheel of mischance and disaster.

  There is a slight breeze,

  just enough to bend

  the yellow tulips on their stems,

  but that hardly helps me

  echo the longing for immortality

  despite the roaring juggernaut of time,

  or the painful motif

  of Nature’s cyclical return

  versus man’s blind rush to the grave.

  I could loosen my shirt

  and lie down in the soft grass,

  sweet now after its first cutting,

  but that would not produce

  a record of the pursuit

  of the moth of eternal beauty

  or the despondency that attends

  the eventual dribble

  of the once gurgling fountain of creativity.

  So, as far as the great topics go,

  that seems to leave only

  the fall from exuberant maturity

  into sudden, headlong decline—

  a subject that fills me with silence

  and leaves me with no choice

  but to spend the rest of the day

  sniffing the jasmine vine

  and surrendering to the ivory governance

  of the piano by picking out

  with my index finger

  the melody notes of “Easy to Love,”

  a song in which Cole Porter expresses,

  with put-on nonchalance,

  the hopelessness of a love

  brimming with desire

  and a hunger for affection,

  but met only and always with frosty disregard.

  Eastern Standard Time

  Poetry speaks to all people, it is said,

  but here I would like to address

  only those in my own time zone,

  this proper slice of longitude

  that runs from pole to snowy pole

  down the globe through Montreal to Bogotá.

  Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band,

  sitting up in your many beds this morning—

  the sun falling through the windows

  and casting a shadow on the sundial—

  consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words.

  They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are,

  or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion.

  Rather, they are at work already,

  leaning on copy machines,

  hammering nails into a house-frame.

  They are not swallowing a vitamin like us;

  rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half moon,

  even jumping around on a dance floor,

  or just now sliding under the covers,

  pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps.

  But we are not like these others,

  for at this very moment on the face of the earth,

  we are standing under a hot shower,

  or we are eating our breakfast,

  considered by people of all zones

  to be the most important meal of the day.

  Later, when the time is right,

  we might sit down with the boss,

  wash the car, or linger at a candle-lit table,

  but now is the hour for pouring the juice

  and flipping the eggs with one eye o
n the toaster.

  So let us slice a banana and uncap the jam,

  lift our brimming spoons of milk,

  and leave it to the others to lower a flag

  or spin absurdly in a barber’s chair—

  those antipodal oddballs, always early or late.

  Let us praise Sir Stanford Fleming,

  the Canadian genius who first scored

  with these lines the length of the spinning earth.

  Let us move together through the rest of this day

  passing in unison from light to shadow,

  coasting over the crest of noon

  into the valley of the evening

  and then, holding hands, slip into the deeper valley of night.

  The Long Day

  In the morning I ate a banana

  like a young ape

  and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”

  In the afternoon I opened the mail

  with a short kitchen knife,

  and when dusk began to fall

  I took off my clothes,

  put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”

  and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.

  I closed my eyes and thought

  about the alphabet,

  the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten

  to become literature.

  If the British call z zed,

  I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead?

  And why does z, which looks like

  the fastest letter, come at the very end?

  unless they are all moving east

  when we are facing north in our chairs.

  It was then that I heard

  a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark,

  and the claw-footed bathtub

  took one step forward,

  or was it backward

  I had to ask

  as I turned

  to reach for a faraway towel.

  TWO

  I Ask You

  What scene would I rather be enveloped in

  than this one,

  an ordinary night at the kitchen table,

  at ease in a box of floral wallpaper,

  white cabinets full of glass,

  the telephone silent,

  a pen tilted back in my hand?

  It gives me time to think

  about the leaves gathering in corners,

  lichen greening the high gray rocks,

  and the world sailing on beyond the dunes—

  huge, oceangoing, history bubbling in its wake.

  Outside of this room

  there is nothing that I need,

  not a job that would allow me to row to work,

  or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4

  with cracked green leather seats.

  No, it is all right here,

  the clear ovals of a glass of water,

  a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,

  an odd snarling fish in a frame on the wall,

  and these three candles,

  each a different height, singing in perfect harmony.

  So forgive me

  if I lower my head and listen

  to the short bass candle as he takes a solo

  while my heart

  thrums under my shirt—

  frog at the edge of a pond—

  and my thoughts fly off to a province

  composed of one enormous sky

  and about a million empty branches.

  Breathless

  Some like the mountains, some like the seashore,

  Jean-Paul Belmondo says

  to the camera in the opening scene.

  Some like to sleep face up,

  some like to sleep on their stomachs,

  I am thinking here in bed—

  some take the shape of murder victims

  flat on their backs all night,

  others float face down on the dark waters.

  Then there are those like me

  who prefer to sleep on their sides,

  knees brought up to the chest,

  head resting on a crooked arm

  and a soft fist touching the chin,

  which is the way I would like to be buried,

  curled up in a coffin

  in a fresh pair of cotton pajamas,

  a down pillow under my weighty head.

  After a lifetime of watchfulness

  and nervous vigilance,

  I will be more than ready for sleep,

  so never mind the dark suit,

  the ridiculous tie

  and the pale limp hands crossed on the chest.

  Lower me down in my slumber,

  tucked into myself

  like the oldest fetus on earth,

  and while cows look over the stone wall

  of the cemetery, let me rest here

  in my earthy little bedroom,

  my lashes glazed with ice,

  the roots of trees inching nearer,

  and no dreams to frighten me anymore.

  In the Evening

  The heads of roses begin to droop.

  The bee who has been hauling his gold

  all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

  In the sky, traces of clouds,

  the last few darting birds,

  watercolors on the horizon.

  The white cat sits facing a wall.

  The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

  I light a candle on the wood table.

  I take another sip of wine.

  I pick up an onion and a knife.

  And the past and the future?

  Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

  Bereft

  I liked listening to you today at lunch

  as you talked about the dead,

  the lucky dead you called them,

  citing their freedom from rent and furniture,

  no need for doorknobs, snow shovels,

  or windows and a field beyond,

  no more railway ticket in an inside pocket,

  no more railway, no more tickets, no more pockets.

  No more bee chasing you around the garden,

  no more you chasing your hat around a corner,

  no bright moon on the glimmering water,

  no cool breast felt beneath an open robe.

  More like an empty zone that souls traverse,

  a vaporous place

  at the end of a dark tunnel,

  a region of silence except for

  the occasional beating of wings—

  and, I wanted to add

  as the sun dazzled your lifted wineglass,

  the sound of the newcomers weeping.

  Flock

  It has been calculated that each copy of the

  Gutenburg Bible … required the skins of 300 sheep.

  —from an article on printing

  I can see them squeezed into the holding pen

  behind the stone building

  where the printing press is housed,

  all of them squirming around

  to find a little room

  and looking so much alike

  it would be nearly impossible

  to count them,

  and there is no telling

  which one will carry the news

  that the Lord is a shepherd,

  one of the few things they already know.

  Boyhood

  Alone in the basement,

  I would sometimes lower one eye

  to the level of the narrow train track

  to watch the puffing locomotive

  pull the cars around a curve

  then bear down on me with its dazzling eye.

  What was in those moments

  before I lifted my head and let the train

  go rocking by under my nose?

  I remember not caring much

  about the fake grass or the buildings

  that made up the miniature town.

  The same went for
the station and its master,

  the crossing gates and flashing lights,

  the milk car, the pencil-size logs,

  the metallic men and women,

  the dangling water tower,

  and the round mirror for a pond.

  All I wanted was to be blinded

  over and over by this shaking light

  as the train stuck fast to its oval course.

  Or better still, to close my eyes,

  to stay there on the cold narrow rails

  and let the train tunnel through me

  the way it tunneled through the mountain

  painted the color of rock,

  and then there would be nothing