The Rain in Portugal Read online

  from dawn until noon

  then devoting the rest of the day

  to whittling pencils that stopped writing long ago.

  All of which makes me wonder

  how Donald Hall is doing tonight

  when so many things are so different—

  the bladed cars, a colored cube for lunch—

  yet the stars look the same,

  still holding their places in the sky,

  except for the one that once indicated

  the raised elbow of The Archer,

  now gone missing in outer space.

  Bags of Time

  When the keeper of the inn

  where we stayed in the Outer Hebrides

  said we had bags of time to catch the ferry,

  which we would reach by traversing the causeway

  between this island and the one to the north,

  I started wondering what a bag of time

  might look like and how much one could hold.

  Apparently, more than enough time for me

  to wonder about such things,

  I heard someone shouting from the back of my head.

  Then the ferry arrived, silent across the water,

  at the Lochmaddy Ferry Terminal,

  and I was still thinking about the bags of time

  as I inched the car clanging onto the slipway

  then down into the hold for the vehicles.

  Yet it wasn’t until I stood at the railing

  of the upper deck with a view of the harbor

  that I decided that a bag of time

  should be the same color as the pale blue

  hull of the lone sailboat anchored there.

  And then we were in motion, drawing back

  from the pier and turning toward the sea

  as ferries had done for many bags of time,

  I gathered from talking to an old deckhand,

  who was decked out in a neon yellow safety vest,

  and usually on schedule, he added,

  unless the weather has something to say about it.

  One Leg of the Journey

  From the back seat of an old Toyota

  on a breakneck rush to the Mexico City airport

  out of the city of Puebla to the southeast,

  I could see in the rear-view mirror

  the clenched face of the driver

  as he pushed the car to 90 then 95 miles an hour.

  The sun had yet to show its face

  but already thin clouds were turning yellow,

  and I was tired of thinking about death

  in a country with its own day of the dead

  featuring skeletons on horseback,

  skeletons playing the trombone,

  even bride and groom skeletons,

  so I closed my eyes instead and pictured

  a turtle climbing onto a log to sun herself there,

  motionless and nearly invisible,

  while the river flowed bubbling

  around her on its journey to the east.

  I was tempted to add some baby turtles

  to form a kind of family,

  but I decided to leave well enough alone.

  Before too long, we ran into

  the evacuation-scale traffic of the city

  and inched along through the vendors

  with their bottles of water and pink toys

  and pinwheels that twirled in the wind,

  until we pulled up to a curb at the airport

  where we all parted company—

  the driver heading back to Puebla,

  me looking for the number of my gate,

  and the turtle poking out her head

  then sliding off the log and disappearing

  into the less troubled waters by the shore.

  A Restaurant in Moscow

  Even here among the overwhelming millions

  and the audible tremble of history,

  a solemn trout stared up at me

  as it lay on its side on a heavy white plate

  next to some broccoli and shards of broken bread.

  I could tell from its expression,

  or lack of expression, that it was pretending

  not to listen to my silent questions about its previous life—

  its cold-water adventures, its capable mother—

  and that its winking at me was a trick of candlelight.

  But soon, all that was left

  was the spine and a filigree of bones,

  so I sat back to finish off the wine

  and survey this place that had comforted me

  with its chests of ice where fish were bedded,

  drawings of fish in frames on the white walls,

  and the low music. Backed by a hint

  of guitar sang a broken-hearted woman

  I imagined to be my waitress

  who had no English, nor I any Russian,

  and who never once smiled, yet she had waited

  for me to close my notebook

  and put away my pen before clearing my plate

  as if she understood the provocative nature of this trout.

  And how sweet to realize this only later

  after I had put on my raincoat

  and was back in the drizzle of the wide boulevard

  among pedestrians on their private missions,

  heading downhill to my hotel,

  the onion domes of St. Basil’s lit up in the distance.

  Tanager

  If only I had not listened to the piece

  on the morning radio about the former asylum

  whose inmates were kept busy

  at wooden benches in a workshop

  making leather collars and wristbands

  that would later be used to restrain them.

  And if only that had not reminded me,

  as I stood facing the bathroom mirror,

  of the new state prison whose bricks had been set

  by prisoners trucked in from the old prison,

  how sweet and free of static my walk

  would have been along the upland trail.

  Nothing to spoil the purity of the ascent—

  the early sun, wafer-white,

  breaking over the jagged crest of that ridge,

  a bird with a bright-orange chest

  flitting from branch to branch with its mate,

  and a solitary coyote that stopped in its tracks

  to regard me, then moved on.

  Plus the cottonwood fluff snowing sideways

  and after I stood still for a while,

  the coyote appearing again in the distance

  before vanishing in the scrub for good.

  That’s the kind of walk it might have been.

  Santorini

  Turn any corner in this village,

  the owner of the eccentric bookstore assured me,

  and you are likely to run into

  the history of Greek poetry,

  and sure enough there was a woman

  picking out lemons from a pile of lemons

  and a barber leaning in his doorway with folded arms.

  I even thought I saw Yannis Ritsos

  whispering something to George Seferis

  as they sat under a white awning

  while the others pulled down their hat brims

  and pretended not to be listening in.

  And Cavafy might have risen

  in a room like the one where I woke up

  to chalk-washed walls, two wicker chairs,

  and on a battered table, coffee

  and a single peach, newly sliced.

  But let us not go overboard.

  When I peered out the small window

  at the foot of the bed

  that offered the immensity of the Aegean,

  I did not see the sail of Odysseus at dawn

  rounding the island’s volcanic corner

  and coming slowing but plainly into view.

  Rather, I h
eard the hornet whine

  of a motorbike flying up the street,

  a metal grill being unlocked and lifted open,

  then some mourning doves on the roof,

  a clatter of dishes in a kitchen,

  and other siren songs of an ordinary day.

  Bravura

  It wasn’t until I took a class in oil painting,

  which met on Saturday afternoons

  in the painter’s apartment on Central Park West,

  that I realized that painters of still lifes

  as much as they are displaying an affection

  for the material objects of the world,

  are also busy showing off their stuff.

  Why else would anyone leave the ease

  of a tableau of violin, curl of parchment,

  a silvery knife and a pear, all backed by a velvet cloth,

  and take on a glass bowl full of light bulbs

  or a crystal chandelier reflected in a mirror

  except to inflame the confraternity

  of one’s fellow artists with jealous furor?

  I will never forget the stunner

  modestly titled “Still Life with Roses,”

  which featured so many decanters and mirrors

  the result was a corridor of echoing replications.

  For when I leaned in to examine

  one of the softly textured red petals,

  I could see suspended there a drop of moisture

  and on its surface a tiny window catching the light

  and next to that a solitary, delineated ant

  who had paused in his travels

  before the globular liquid mirror

  just to see how he looked on that overcast weekday morning.

  Muybridge’s Lobsters

  At first sight

  the photographs in the series

  appear to be the same—

  all black and white,

  a single lobster

  at the center of each,

  underwater, probably in a tank.

  But look more closely

  along the rows

  and you will see the motion

  of a single antenna, waving

  as if to ask a question,

  something you had missed.

  Of course, this was late

  in the old man’s life,

  well after the gymnasts

  and the airborne racehorses,

  after the leap-frogging boys

  and that woman

  hopping over a footstool,

  even after the photographs of himself

  swinging a coal-pick in the nude.

  And then the lobster studies—

  a reminder perhaps

  of the falling off to come for us all,

  a focus on the smaller parts

  like a settlement of crumbs

  beside a cup and saucer

  or the bars of light on a painted wall.

  That day at the exhibition

  a small boy asked his mother

  why the pictures were not in color,

  too young to know that a lobster

  wagging its claws at the bottom of the sea

  is either black or a very dark green

  and that it must be coaxed, by boiling, into being red.

  Portrait

  After she swiveled on a heel

  and headed with a flip

  of the ponytail

  toward Grand Central Station

  I watched her

  disappear into the crowd

  the way a forest

  may disappear into its trees.

  And then I too began

  to disappear, a scrivener’s

  eraser rubbing out

  the pencil lines of my being.

  Now neither of us

  was either here nor there

  and would fail to make our mark

  on the history of civilization.

  And that reminded me of the day

  I stood in a museum

  before a somber painting

  then bent close to read

  the little printed card

  that told me it was a portrait

  of an anonymous Dutch family

  by an anonymous Dutch artist.

  Early Morning

  I don’t know which cat is responsible

  for destroying my Voter Registration Card

  so I decide to lecture the two of them

  on the sanctity of private property,

  the rules of nighttime comportment in general,

  and while I’m at it, the importance

  of voting to an enlightened citizenship.

  This is the way it was in school.

  No one would admit to winging a piece of chalk

  past the ear of Sister Mary Alice,

  so the whole class would have to stay after.

  And likewise in the army, or at least

  in movies involving the army. All weekend

  privileges were revoked until the man

  who snuck the women and the keg of beer

  into the barracks last night stepped forward.

  Of course, it’s hard to get them to stay

  in one place let alone hold their attention

  for more than two seconds. The black one

  turns tail and pads into the other room,

  and the kitten is kneading a soft throw

  like crazy, pathetically searching for a nipple.

  Meanwhile, it’s overcast, not pewter

  or anything like that, just overcast period,

  and I haven’t had a sip of coffee yet.

  You know, when I told that interviewer

  early morning was my favorite time to write,

  I was not thinking of this particular morning.

  I must have had another kind of morning in mind,

  one featuring a peignoir, some oranges, and sunlight.

  But now there’s nothing else to do

  but open the back door a crack for the black one,

  who enjoys hunting and killing lizards,

  while blocking the kitten with one foot,

  the little cottontail fucker who’s still too young to go out.

  Child Lost at the Beach

  This time, a boy had gone missing

  for so many hours a television crew had been sent

  to cover the story, which is how I heard

  one lifeguard explain to the camera

  that a lost child will often start walking

  along the shoreline, in the direction of the sun.

  I took this as a hopeful sign,

  not because it was a safer choice

  than toddling into the pounding surf

  or inland into the parking lot and the traffic beyond—

  but something about the power of the sun and the bravery of children.

  That’s when I began to picture

  a long single-file parade of lost children

  walking through the sand toward the lowering sun

  before that moment when their parents

  turned to each other with the shock of the absence,

  each boy or girl traveling toward

  the light burning in the distance,

  hundreds of little explorers striking out

  into uncharted territory with nothing but a sunhat,

  a useless pail and shovel—

  Lewis without Clark, Clark with no Lewis.

  The evening news showed the boy being swept up

  into the glad arms of his parents,

  you will be pleased to know,

  but I continued to follow the rest of the children

  as they disappeared over the horizon

  continuing their journey into the days ahead

  and in the process blazing a new path

  across the upper reaches of the continent,

  thus establishing a solid American presence in the early West.

  In Praise of Ignorance


  On a bench one afternoon

  in a grassy park in Minneapolis,

  I realized that what I liked best

  about the dogs of Minneapolis

  is they have no idea they’re in Minneapolis.

  The same could be said

  of the dogs of Houston or Philadelphia,

  it occurred to me on the slow walk

  back to my hotel, but I was

  in no mood to be distracted.

  I’m sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,

  I resolved as the elevator

  rose to my floor, just as they stick

  with their owners, the natives of Minneapolis,

  most of whom know exactly where they are.

  Alone in my room on the 17th floor,

  I surveyed the vast prospect below me—

  the slithery river and hills beyond

  and the bluish hills beyond those hills—

  in the manner of those English poets

  who loved to regard the world from a height.

  One of them even had a witty epitaph

  inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.

  Microscopic Pants

  Among the more remarkable features of the calendar,

  right up there with the meandering date of Easter

  and the regular appearance of Flag Day,

  is how the end of May slips unnoticed into the beginning of June.

  It’s a transition so subtle

  (usually one day of sunshine and birdsong

  passing into another day of sunshine and birdsong)

  that it feels like being switched as an infant

  from one of your mother’s breasts to the other,

  which is how the Bengali poet Tagore described

  the smooth transition from this life into the next.

  A truly striking way of putting it,

  like saying the ants in your pants have ants

  in their pants when you are more nervous than usual

  because it’s fun to think of ants wearing pants,

  and it rhymes. Plus, it suggests an infinite

  series of tinier and tinier ants

  pulling on smaller and smaller pairs of pants,

  like the facing barbershop mirrors

  of my childhood when my newly shorn head

  would repeat itself down a hallway of reflections.

  I hadn’t heard of Tagore back then,

  nor had I given much thought to the calendar,