Picnic, Lightning Read online

  up through the heat register

  into our bedroom and our sleep

  blared the sound of Jimmy Reed

  singing “Baby What You Want Me to Do”

  just where he had left off.

  So the party resumed without us,

  the room again aglow with a life of its own,

  the night air charged

  with guitar and harmonica,

  until one of us put on slippers,

  went down to that blazing, festive emptiness,

  and turned everything off.

  Then, without lights or music,

  even the ghosts of ourselves

  had to break up their party,

  snub out their cigarettes,

  carry their wineglasses to the kitchen,

  where they kissed each other good night,

  and with nowhere else to go,

  floated vaguely upstairs

  to lie down beside us in our dark and quiet beds.

  Snow

  I cannot help noticing how this slow Monk solo

  seems to go somehow

  with the snow

  that is coming down this morning,

  how the notes and the spaces accompany

  its easy falling

  on the geometry of the ground,

  on the flagstone path,

  the slanted roof,

  and the angles of the split rail fence

  as if he had imagined a winter scene

  as he sat at the piano

  late one night at the Five Spot

  playing “Ruby My Dear.”

  Then again, it's the kind of song

  that would go easily with rain

  or a tumult of leaves,

  and for that matter it's a snow

  that could attend

  an adagio for strings,

  the best of the Ronettes,

  or George Thorogood and the Destroyers.

  It falls so indifferently

  into the spacious white parlor of the world,

  if I were sitting here reading

  in silence,

  reading the morning paper

  or reading Being and Nothingness,

  not even letting the spoon

  touch the inside of the cup,

  I have a feeling

  the snow would even go perfectly with that.

  Moon

  The moon is full tonight

  an illustration for sheet music,

  an image in Matthew Arnold

  glimmering on the English Channel,

  or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield

  in one of the history plays.

  It's as full as it was

  in that poem by Coleridge

  where he carries his year-old son

  into the orchard behind the cottage

  and turns the baby's face to the sky

  to see for the first time

  the earth's bright companion,

  something amazing to make his crying seem small.

  And if you wanted to follow this example,

  tonight would be the night

  to carry some tiny creature outside

  and introduce him to the moon.

  And if your house has no child,

  you can always gather into your arms

  the sleeping infant of yourself,

  as I have done tonight,

  and carry him outdoors,

  all limp in his tattered blanket,

  making sure to steady his lolling head

  with the palm of your hand.

  And while the wind ruffles the pear trees

  in the corner of the orchard

  and dark roses wave against a stone wall,

  you can turn him on your shoulder

  and walk in circles on the lawn

  drunk with the light.

  You can lift him up into the sky,

  your eyes nearly as wide as his,

  as the moon climbs high into the night.

  Looking West

  Just beyond the flower garden at the end of the lawn

  the curvature of the earth begins,

  sloping down from there

  over the length of the country

  and the smooth surface of the Pacific

  before it continues across the convex rice fields of Asia

  and, rising, inclines over Europe

  and the bulging, boat-dotted waters of the Atlantic,

  finally reaching the other side of the house

  where it comes up behind a yellow grove of forsythia

  near a dilapidated picnic table,

  then passes unerringly under the spot

  where I am standing, hands in my pockets,

  feet planted firmly on the ground.

  This Much I Do Remember

  It was after dinner.

  You were talking to me across the table

  about something or other,

  a greyhound you had seen that day

  or a song you liked,

  and I was looking past you

  over your bare shoulder

  at the three oranges lying

  on the kitchen counter

  next to the small electric bean grinder,

  which was also orange,

  and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.

  All of which converged

  into a random still life,

  so fastened together by the hasp of color,

  and so fixed behind the animated

  foreground of your

  talking and smiling,

  gesturing and pouring wine,

  and the camber of your shoulders

  that I could feel it being painted within me,

  brushed on the wall of my skull,

  while the tone of your voice

  lifted and fell in its flight,

  and the three oranges

  remained fixed on the counter

  the way stars are said

  to be fixed in the universe.

  Then all the moments of the past

  began to line up behind that moment

  and all the moments to come

  assembled in front of it in a long row,

  giving me reason to believe

  that this was a moment I had rescued

  from the millions that rush out of sight

  into a darkness behind the eyes.

  Even after I have forgotten what year it is,

  my middle name,

  and the meaning of money,

  I will still carry in my pocket

  the small coin of that moment,

  minted in the kingdom

  that we pace through every day.

  Japan

  Today I pass the time reading

  a favorite haiku,

  saying the few words over and over.

  It feels like eating

  the same small, perfect grape

  again and again.

  I walk through the house reciting it

  and leave its letters falling

  through the air of every room.

  I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.

  I say it in front of a painting of the sea.

  I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

  I listen to myself saying it,

  then I say it without listening,

  then I hear it without saying it.

  And when the dog looks up at me,

  I kneel down on the floor

  and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

  It's the one about the one-ton

  temple bell

  with the moth sleeping on its surface,

  and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating

  pressure of the moth

  on the surface of the iron bell.

  When I say it at the window,

  the bell is the world

  and I am the moth resting there.

  When I say it into the mirror,

  I am the hea
vy bell

  and the moth is life with its papery wings.

  And later, when I say it to you in the dark,

  you are the bell,

  and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

  and the moth has flown

  from its line

  and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

  III

  Victoria's Secret

  The one in the upper left-hand corner

  is giving me a look

  that says I know you are here

  and I have nothing better to do

  for the remainder of human time

  than return your persistent but engaging stare.

  She is wearing a deeply scalloped

  flame-stitch halter top

  with padded push-up styling

  and easy side-zip tap pants.

  The one on the facing page, however,

  who looks at me over her bare shoulder,

  cannot hide the shadow of annoyance in her brow.

  You have interrupted me,

  she seems to be saying,

  with your coughing and your loud music.

  Now please leave me alone;

  let me finish whatever it was I was doing

  in my organza-trimmed

  whisperweight camisole with

  keyhole closure and a point d'esprit mesh back.

  I wet my thumb and flip the page.

  Here, the one who happens to be reclining

  in a satin and lace merry widow

  with an inset lace-up front,

  decorated underwire cups and bodice

  with lace ruffles along the bottom

  and hook-and-eye closure in the back,

  is wearing a slightly contorted expression,

  her head thrust back, mouth partially open,

  a confusing mixture of pain and surprise

  as if she had stepped on a tack

  just as I was breaking down

  her bedroom door with my shoulder.

  Nor does the one directly beneath her

  look particularly happy to see me.

  She is arching one eyebrow slightly

  as if to say, so what if I am wearing nothing

  but this stretch panne velvet bodysuit

  with a low sweetheart neckline

  featuring molded cups and adjustable straps.

  Do you have a problem with that?!

  The one on the far right is easier to take,

  her eyes half-closed

  as if she were listening to a medley

  of lullabies playing faintly on a music box.

  Soon she will drop off to sleep,

  her head nestled in the soft crook of her arm,

  and later she will wake up in her

  Spandex slip dress with the high side slit,

  deep scoop neckline, elastic shirring,

  and concealed back zip and vent.

  But opposite her,

  stretched out catlike on a couch

  in the warm glow of a paneled library,

  is one who wears a distinctly challenging expression,

  her face tipped up, exposing

  her long neck, her perfectly flared nostrils.

  Go ahead, her expression tells me,

  take off my satin charmeuse gown

  with a sheer, jacquard bodice

  decorated with a touch of shimmering Lurex.

  Go ahead, fling it into the fireplace.

  What do I care, her eyes say, we're all going to hell anyway.

  I have other mail to open,

  but I cannot help noticing her neighbor

  whose eyes are downcast,

  her head ever so demurely bowed to the side

  as if she were the model who sat for Coreggio

  when he painted “The Madonna of St. Jerome,”

  only, it became so ungodly hot in Parma

  that afternoon, she had to remove

  the traditional blue robe

  and pose there in his studio

  in a beautifully shaped satin teddy

  with an embossed V-front,

  princess seaming to mold the bodice,

  and puckered knit detail.

  And occupying the whole facing page

  is one who displays that expression

  we have come to associate with photographic beauty.

  Yes, she is pouting about something,

  all lower lip and cheekbone.

  Perhaps her ice cream has tumbled

  out of its cone onto the parquet floor.

  Perhaps she has been waiting all day

  for a new sofa to be delivered,

  waiting all day in a stretch lace hipster

  with lattice edging, satin frog closures,

  velvet scrollwork, cuffed ankles,

  flare silhouette, and knotted shoulder straps

  available in black, champagne, almond,

  cinnabar, plum, bronze, mocha,

  peach, ivory, caramel, blush, butter, rose, and periwinkle.

  It is, of course, impossible to say,

  impossible to know what she is thinking,

  why her mouth is the shape of petulance.

  But this is already too much.

  Who has the time to linger on these delicate

  lures, these once unmentionable things?

  Life is rushing by like a mad, swollen river.

  One minute roses are opening in the garden

  and the next, snow is flying past my window.

  Plus the phone is ringing.

  The dog is whining at the door.

  Rain is beating on the roof.

  And as always there is a list of things I have to do

  before the night descends, black and silky,

  and the dark hours begin to hurtle by,

  before the little doors of the body swing shut

  and I ride to sleep, my closed eyes

  still burning from all the glossy lights of day.

  Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited

  As far as mental anguish goes,

  the old painters were no fools.

  They understood how the mind,

  the freakiest dungeon in the castle,

  can effortlessly imagine a crab with the face of a priest

  or an end table complete with genitals.

  And they knew that the truly monstrous

  lies not so much in the wildly shocking,

  a skeleton spinning a wheel of fire, say,

  but in the small prosaic touch

  added to a tableau of the hellish,

  the detail at the heart of the horrid.

  In Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony,

  for instance, how it is not so much

  the boar-faced man in the pea-green dress

  that frightens, but the white mandolin he carries,

  not the hooded corpse in a basket,

  but the way the basket is rigged to hang from a bare branch;

  how, what must have driven St. Anthony

  to the mossy brink of despair

  was not the big, angry-looking fish

  in the central panel,

  the one with the two mouselike creatures

  conferring on its tail,

  but rather what the fish is wearing:

  a kind of pale orange officer's cape

  and, over that,

  a metal body-helmet secured by silvery wires,

  a sensible buckled chin strap,

  and, yes, the ultimate test of faith—

  the tiny sword that hangs from the thing,

  that nightmare carp,

  secure in its brown leather scabbard.

  Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey

  I was here before, a long time ago,

  and now I am here again

  is an observation that occurs in poetry

  as frequently as rain occurs in life.

  The fellow may be gazing

  over an English landscape,
/>
  hillsides dotted with sheep,

  a row of tall trees topping the downs,

  or he could be moping through the shadows

  of a dark Bavarian forest,

  a wedge of cheese and a volume of fairy tales

  tucked into his rucksack.

  But the feeling is always the same.

  It was better the first time.

  This time is not nearly as good.

  I'm not feeling as chipper as I did back then.

  Something is always missing—

  swans, a glint on the surface of a lake,

  some minor but essential touch.

  Or the quality of things has diminished.

  The sky was a deeper, more dimensional blue,

  clouds were more cathedral-like,

  and water rushed over rock

  with greater effervescence.

  From our chairs we have watched

  the poor author in his waistcoat

  as he recalls the dizzying icebergs of childhood

  and mills around in a field of weeds.

  We have heard the poets long dead

  declaim their dying

  from a promontory, a riverbank,

  next to a haycock, within a copse.

  We have listened to their dismay,

  the kind that issues from poems

  the way water issues forth from hoses,

  the way the match always gives its little speech on fire.

  And when we put down the book at last,

  lean back, close our eyes,

  stinging with print,

  and slip in the bookmark of sleep,

  we will be schooled enough to know

  that when we wake up

  a little before dinner

  things will not be nearly as good as they once were.

  Something will be missing

  from this long, coffin-shaped room,

  the walls and windows now

  only two different shades of gray,

  the glossy gardenia drooping

  in its chipped terra-cotta pot.

  And on the floor, shoes, socks,

  the browning core of an apple.

  Nothing will be as it was

  a few hours ago, back in the glorious past

  before our naps, back in that Golden Age

  that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.

  Paradelle for Susan

  I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.

  I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.

  Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch.

  Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch.

  Thinnest love, remember the quick branch.

  Always nervous, I perched on your highest bird the.

  It is time for me to cross the mountain.

  It is time for me to cross the mountain.