Questions About Angels Read online

  you have to wait for every half note to fall into place

  like pieces dropping from heaven into a puzzle.

  Even if you were a saint, how could you travel back

  to the Renaissance and find someone to paint you

  with the putti floating over your halo, your sandals,

  your coarse brown robe and wild, uplifted eyes?

  And would you say that your loving deserves such sweet

  levitation, such a feathery, ethereal regard?

  Better to turn up the music loud enough to hear

  outside, better to take a walk on the darkened lawn

  and trade all this in for a new swarm of thoughts.

  The rain is lighter now, atomized and soft upon your face.

  It makes you stop and listen to Bud Powell pounding

  in the silence and feel the old embrace of earth and sky.

  The Man in the Moon

  He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood,

  the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft.

  I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness.

  But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads

  I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees

  and rising again to show his familiar face.

  And when he comes into full view over open fields

  he looks like a young man who has fallen in love

  with the dark earth,

  a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy,

  his round mouth open

  as if he had just broken into song.

  Horseman, Pass By!

  When I show you the photograph of me

  leaning on the tombstone of Yeats,

  you are surprised that I never noticed

  the photograph of you leaning on it,

  in a metal frame above your desk.

  So many caravans of tour buses stop

  at Drumcliff's little churchyard these days

  there must be enough color photographs

  of people leaning against that limestone slab,

  casting a cold eye at the camera,

  to fill an archive rivaling the archives

  of people leaning on the Eiffel Tower or a sphinx,

  cartons of these glossy shards of travel

  stacked along the walls as the night watchman

  works his crossword under a lamp etc., etc.

  But still, when forced to backtrack down

  that road I remember feeling myself touch

  the brake, lift the directional stick and pull

  like gravity into the muddy carpark.

  Little point in standing again by his grave

  where the picture was taken just three days before,

  so I stayed in the car, low music on the radio,

  holding a map, and letting the distance increase

  between me and that phantom self

  who could just drive by and now was miles away.

  Memento Mori

  There is no need for me to keep a skull on my desk,

  to stand with one foot up on the ruins of Rome,

  or wear a locket with the sliver of a saint's bone.

  It is enough to realize that every common object

  in this sunny little room will outlive me—

  the carpet, radio, bookstand and rocker.

  Not one of these things will attend my burial,

  not even this dented goosenecked lamp

  with its steady benediction of light,

  though I could put worse things in my mind

  than the image of it waddling across the cemetery

  like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord,

  the small circle of mourners parting to make room.

  The Last Man on Earth

  Once there was a time when the moon swept

  over the hemlocks, lawns and white mountaintops

  of the earth, but now it only hides its face against my chest.

  It used to pull sleepers from the lagoons of dreams

  where they floated facedown,

  but now it only lures me to an open window, curtains

  billowing around my head like useless, delicate sails.

  Weather used to ride high over the world

  like an announcement nailed to the sky,

  but now the cold wind has become my favorite song,

  and I sing along in the only house with lights.

  Clouds that once toured the air in the style

  of dirigibles now gather helplessly in the kitchen

  and stare at me across the long wooden table.

  This morning when I put on my shoes they seemed

  important, like the north and south poles,

  and when I walked out and heard the noise of geese

  I looked up as if they were calling my name.

  Come Running

  I spot the neighbor's dog scampering across the lawn

  with my name in its mouth,

  leaving me to wander through the house anonymously

  and scour the telephone directory for an alias.

  When I say my name out loud it sounds like

  someone else's, a character in a play who cheats

  the hero and comes to a bad end, or an obscure

  athlete lost in the deep encyclopedia of baseball.

  When I try writing it down on paper

  I find I have also lost my signature. My hand

  feels retarded, unable to perform its inky trick,

  that unmistakable, eerie, Arabic flourish.

  Perhaps the dog was never given a name

  and is now eating mine with pleasure

  under a porch in the cool, lattice-shadowed dirt.

  Perhaps late tonight I will hear the voice

  of my neighbor as she stands at her back door,

  hands cupped around her mouth, calling my name,

  and I will leap the hedge and come running.

  Modern Peasant

  This morning is the same as all other mornings.

  I part the window curtain and the familiar play begins.

  Sunlight keeps repeating itself as if I were blind.

  The same black car waits in the driveway for my key,

  my manipulations and the sound of its radio.

  It is the same old song, blue exit signs enlarging

  and disappearing behind the stream of my travel

  as I think about the past, that rope I drag along,

  and the future which is the rope that pulls me forward.

  Ah, but tonight I will drink red wine at dinner.

  I will continue to drink red wine after dinner.

  Then I will lie down in the dark greens of the lawn

  and think of something entirely new.

  I will feel the rotation of the earth

  as electrically as the sudden touch of a stranger.

  I will wonder how many thousands of days

  it would take the two of us to walk to the moon.

  Instructions to the Artist

  I wish my head to appear perfectly round

  and since the canvas should be of epic dimensions,

  please trace the circle with a dinner plate

  rather than a button or a dime.

  My face should be painted with

  an ant-like sense of detail;

  pretend you are executing a street map

  of Rome and that all the citizens

  can lift thirty times their own weight.

  The result should be a strained

  but self-satisfied expression,

  as if I am lifting a Volkswagen with one foot.

  The body is no great matter;

  just draw some straight lines

  with a pencil and ruler.

  I will not be around to hear the voice

  of posterity calling me Stickman.

  The background I leave up to you

  but if there is to be a house,

  lines of smok
e rising from the chimney

  should be mandatory.

  Never be ashamed of kindergarten—

  it is the alphabet's only temple.

  Also, have several kangaroos grazing

  and hopping around in the distance,

  an allusion to my world travels.

  Some final recommendations:

  I should like to appear hatless.

  Kindly limit your palette to a single

  primary color, any one but red or blue.

  Sign the painting on my upper lip

  so your name will always be my mustache.

  Weighing the Dog

  It is awkward for me and bewildering for him

  as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom,

  balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale,

  but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier

  than training him to sit obediently on one spot

  with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.

  With pencil and paper I subtract my weight

  from our total to find out the remainder that is his,

  and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here.

  It could not have to do with my leaving you

  though I never figured out what you amounted to

  until I subtracted myself from our combination.

  You held me in your arms more than I held you

  through all those awkward and bewildering months

  and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods.

  One Life to Live

  This is the only life I have, this one in my head,

  the one that travels along the surface of my body

  singing the low voltage song of the ego,

  the one that feels like a ball between my ears

  sometimes, and other times feels absolutely galactic,

  the life that my feet carry around like two blind

  scholars working together on a troublesome manuscript.

  This is the only life I have, and I am standing

  dead in the center of it like a man doing a rope trick

  in a rodeo, passing the lasso over his body,

  smiling inside a twirling of ovals and ellipses.

  This is the only life I have and I never step out of it

  except to follow a character down the alleys of a novel

  or when love makes me want to remove my clothes

  and sail classical records off a cliff.

  Otherwise you can always find me within this hoop of myself,

  the rope flying around me, moving up to encircle my head

  like an equator or a halo or a zero.

  The Wires of the Night

  I thought about his death for so many hours,

  tangled there in the wires of the night,

  that it came to have a body and dimensions,

  more than a voice shaking over the telephone

  or the black obituary boldface of name and dates.

  His death now had an entrance and an exit, doors and stairs,

  windows and shutters which are the motionless wings

  of windows. His death had a head and clothes,

  the white shirt and baggy trousers of death.

  His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index,

  and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read.

  His death had hinges and bolts which were oiled and locked,

  had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna which listened

  to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past.

  His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams.

  It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor

  you could not lie down on in the middle of the night.

  In the freakish pink and grey of dawn I took

  his death to bed with me and his death was my bed

  and in every corner of the room it hid from the light,

  and then it was the light of day and the next day

  and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future

  like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.

  Axiom

  “Life is beautiful. Life is sad.”

  —NABOKOV

  And the two are braided together

  like the long hair of a woman

  who is about to die suddenly.

  She arranges a vase of flowers,

  takes a coat from the closet.

  She regards herself in a mirror.

  She is leaving the house,

  closing the door behind her.

  There is no stopping her.

  The sadness is the bread

  and the beauty is the wine

  or the other way around.

  I have been visited by a thought

  contoured like an automobile:

  beautiful.

  Then again, I am lying under

  all the clothes of the dead,

  feeling every ton

  as they add more to the pile.

  Vade Mecum

  I want the scissors to be sharp

  and the table to be perfectly level

  when you cut me out of my life

  and paste me in that book you always carry.

  Not Touching

  The valentine of desire is pasted over my heart

  and still we are not touching, like things

  in a poorly done still life

  where the knife appears to be floating over the plate

  which is itself hovering above the table somehow,

  the entire arrangement of apple, pear and wineglass

  having forgotten the law of gravity,

  refusing to be still,

  as if the painter had caught them all

  in a rare moment of slow flight

  just before they drifted out of the room

  through a window of perfectly realistic sunlight.

  Night Sand

  When you injure me, as you must one day,

  I will move off like the slow armadillo over night sand,

  ambulating secretly inside his armor,

  ready to burrow deep or curl himself into a ball

  which will shelter his soft head, soft feet

  and tail from the heavy, rhythmic blows.

  Now can you see the silhouettes of ranchers' hats

  and sticks raised against the pink desert sky?

  Love in the Sahara

  The small camel leaves his common place

  on the front of the pack of cigarettes

  and sways across the floorboards in search of water.

  His absence leaves a vacuum as eerie

  as the one you left in our rented house,

  empty as a desert without its furniture.

  I never thought I would find myself smoking here

  on this flat stretch of uncountable sand,

  a forlorn illustration of figure and ground,

  my only company the tiny pyramids and palms

  planted in the distance, and the man

  whose shirt pocket I ride in all afternoon.

  Invective

  Turn away from me, you, and get lost in the past.

  Back to ancient Rome you go, with its parallel columns and syllogisms.

  Stuff yourself with berries, eat lying on your side.

  Suck balls of snow carried down from the Alps for dessert.

  I don't care. I am leaving too, but for the margins of history,

  to a western corner of ninth century Ireland I go,

  to a vanishing, grey country far beyond your call.

  There I will dwell with badgers, fish and deer,

  birds piercing the air and the sound of little bells.

  I will stand in pastures of watercress by the salmon-lashing sea.

  I will stare into the cold, unblinking eyes of cows.

  4

  The Life of Riley: A Definitive Biography

  He was born one sunny Florida morning

  a
nd napped through most of his childhood.

  He spent his adult life relaxing in beach chairs,

  always a tropical drink in his hand.

  He never had a job, a family or a sore throat.

  He never mowed a lawn.

  Passersby would always stop to remind him

  whose life it was he was living.

  He died in a hammock weighing a cloud.

  Jack

  Just when I am about to telephone her

  so she can hear me swallowing my pride,

  a thing the size of a watermelon,

  a giant barges out of a fairy tale,

  picks up the house by the chimney

  and carries it off laughing like thunder.

  She will never believe this I tell myself.

  From the windowsill where I hang on

  I can see geysers of plumbing,

  the exposed basement embarrassed by its junk,

  snapped telephone wires on the lawn,

  and the neighbors looking up with little

  apocalypse expressions on their faces.

  I realize on the way up the beanstalk

  apologizing over the phone was a bad idea.

  A letter provides a more reflective means

  of saying hard things, expressing true feelings.

  If there is pen and paper in his kingdom,

  I plan to write her a long vivid one

  communicating my ardor, but also describing

  the castle floating in high clouds,

  the goose, the talking musical instruments,

  and the echo of his enormous shoes.

  In fact, to convince her of my unwavering love,

  I will compose it while pacing back and forth

  in his palm.

  Metamorphosis

  If Kafka could turn a man into an insect in one sentence

  perhaps he could transform me into something new,

  a slow willful river running through a forest,

  or simply the German word for river, a handful of letters

  hidden in the dark alphabetical order of a dictionary.

  Not that I am so miserable, but I could use a change

  of scenery and substance, plus the weather reminds me of him.