Picnic, Lightning Read online

  And find another shore to darken with my pain.

  And find another shore to darken with my pain.

  Another pain for me to darken the mountain.

  And find the time, cross my shore, to with it is to.

  The weather warm, the handwriting familiar.

  The weather warm, the handwriting familiar.

  Your letter flies from my hand into the waters below.

  Your letter flies from my hand into the waters below.

  The familiar waters below my warm hand.

  Into handwriting your weather flies you letter the from the.

  I always cross the highest letter, the thinnest bird.

  Below the waters of my warm familiar pain,

  Another hand to remember your handwriting.

  The weather perched for me on the shore.

  Quick, your nervous branch flew from love.

  Darken the mountain, time and find was my into it was with to to.

  NOTE: The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only those words.

  Duck/Rabbit

  The lamb may lie down with the lion,

  But they will never be as close as this pair

  Who share the very lines

  Of their existence, whose overlapping is their raison d'être.

  How strange and symbiotic the binds

  That make one disappear

  Whenever the other is spied.

  Throw the duck a stare,

  And the rabbit hops down his hole.

  Give the rabbit the eye,

  And the duck waddles off the folio.

  Say, these could be our mascots, you and I—

  I could look at you forever

  And never see the two of us together.

  Egypt

  Alone under the bright swords of sunlight,

  alone under the stars,

  and nothing to do but circle the pyramids

  or walk under the nose of the Sphinx

  stopping to listen sometimes

  to the sound of stone pressing down on stone.

  I put on my boatlike hat in the morning

  and enter the marketplace,

  but by noon I am home again, lying down on a slab

  reading some hieroglyphics

  or practicing frontality in front of a mirror,

  aiming my hands backwards and forwards.

  Whenever a cat appears in a doorway—

  her little bell announcing the death of us all—

  I bow my head like the others

  knowing that there is an asp

  for every softly rising breast,

  a vial of poison for every swirling ear.

  Never mind that in the streets

  no woman bothers to look at me

  with her enormous, painted fish-eye.

  When I cross my arms on my chest

  for the final time

  and point my toes up at the sky,

  I will lie at the bottom of the desert

  for a thousand years.

  I will wait there until a young archaeologist

  comes to dig for me,

  unwraps the leathery ball of my head

  and sweeps the sand from my face with her delicate brush.

  Home Again

  The black porcelain lamp

  painted with boughs of cherry blossoms

  still stands on its end table,

  unlit, the little chain untouched,

  just the way I left it,

  just the way it remained while I was off

  leaning into the prow of a boat,

  doused with spray, heading for a limestone island,

  or sitting at the base of a high Celtic cross

  eating a green apple.

  While I balanced a pan of hot water on a stone wall

  and shaved outside a cottage

  overlooking the Irish Sea,

  this stack of books, this chair, and paperweight

  were utterly still, as they are now.

  And you, red box of matches on the floor,

  you waited here too, faithful as Penelope,

  while I saw the tiny fields

  disappear under the wing of my plane,

  or swam up and down the flowing Corrib River.

  As I lay in a meadow near Ballyvaughan,

  ankles crossed, arms behind my head,

  watching clouds as they rolled in—

  billowing, massive, Atlantic-fresh—

  you all held your places in these rooms,

  stuck to your knitting,

  waited for me to stand here again,

  bags at my feet, house key still in hand,

  admiring your constancy,

  your silent fealty, your steadfast repose.

  Lines Lost Among Trees

  These are not the lines that came to me

  while walking in the woods

  with no pen

  and nothing to write on anyway.

  They are gone forever,

  a handful of coins

  dropped through the grate of memory,

  along with the ingenious mnemonic

  I devised to hold them in place—

  all gone and forgotten

  before I had returned to the clearing of lawn

  in back of our quiet house

  with its jars jammed with pens,

  its notebooks and reams of blank paper,

  its desk and soft lamp,

  its table and the light from its windows.

  So this is my elegy for them,

  those six or eight exhalations,

  the braided rope of the syntax,

  the jazz of the timing,

  and the little insight at the end

  wagging like the short tail

  of a perfectly obedient spaniel

  sitting by the door.

  This is my envoy to nothing

  where I say Go, little poem—

  not out into the world of strangers' eyes,

  but off to some airy limbo,

  home to lost epics,

  unremembered names,

  and fugitive dreams

  such as the one I had last night,

  which, like a fantastic city in pencil,

  erased itself

  in the bright morning air

  just as I was waking up.

  The Many Faces of Jazz

  There's the one where you scrunch up

  your features into a look of pained concentration,

  every riff a new source of agony,

  and there's the look of existential bemusement,

  eyebrows lifted, chin upheld by a thumb,

  maybe a swizzle stick oscillating in the free hand.

  And, of course, for ballads,

  you have the languorous droop,

  her eyes half-closed, lips slightly parted,

  the head lolling back, flower on a stem,

  exposing plenty of turtleneck.

  There's the everything-but-the-instrument look

  on the fellow at the front table,

  the one poised to mount the bandstand,

  and the classic crazy-man-crazy face,

  where the fixed grin joins the menacing stare,

  especially suitable for long drum solos.

  And let us not overlook the empathetic

  grimace of the listener

  who has somehow located the body

  of cold rage dammed up behind the playing

  and immersed himself deeply in it.

  As far as my own jazz face goes—

  and don't tell me you
don't have one—

  it hasn't changed that much

  since its debut in 1957.

  It's nothing special, easy enough to spot

  in a corner of any club on any given night.

  You know it—the reptilian squint,

  lips pursed, jaw clenched tight,

  and, most essential, the whole

  head furiously, yet almost imperceptibly

  nodding

  in total and absolute agreement.

  Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

  First, her tippet made of tulle,

  easily lifted off her shoulders and laid

  on the back of a wooden chair.

  And her bonnet,

  the bow undone with a light forward pull.

  Then the long white dress, a more

  complicated matter with mother-of-pearl

  buttons down the back,

  so tiny and numerous that it takes forever

  before my hands can part the fabric,

  like a swimmer's dividing water,

  and slip inside.

  You will want to know

  that she was standing

  by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,

  motionless, a little wide-eyed,

  looking out at the orchard below,

  the white dress puddled at her feet

  on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

  The complexity of women's undergarments

  in nineteenth-century America

  is not to be waved off,

  and I proceeded like a polar explorer

  through clips, clasps, and moorings,

  catches, straps, and whalebone stays,

  sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

  Later, I wrote in a notebook

  it was like riding a swan into the night,

  but, of course, I cannot tell you everything—

  the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,

  how her hair tumbled free of its pins,

  how there were sudden dashes

  whenever we spoke.

  What I can tell you is

  it was terribly quiet in Amherst

  that Sabbath afternoon,

  nothing but a carriage passing the house,

  a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

  So I could plainly hear her inhale

  when I undid the very top

  hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

  and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,

  the way some readers sigh when they realize

  that Hope has feathers,

  that reason is a plank,

  that life is a loaded gun

  that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

  IV

  The Night House

  Every day the body works in the fields of the world

  mending a stone wall

  or swinging a sickle through the tall grass—

  the grass of civics, the grass of money—

  and every night the body curls around itself

  and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

  But the heart is restless and rises

  from the body in the middle of the night,

  leaves the trapezoidal bedroom

  with its thick, pictureless walls

  to sit by herself at the kitchen table

  and heat some milk in a pan.

  And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe

  and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,

  and opens a book on engineering.

  Even the conscience awakens

  and roams from room to room in the dark,

  darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

  And the soul is up on the roof

  in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,

  singing a song about the wildness of the sea

  until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.

  Then, they all will return to the sleeping body

  the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

  resuming their daily colloquy,

  talking to each other or themselves

  even through the heat of the long afternoons.

  Which is why the body—that house of voices—

  sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen

  to stare into the distance,

  to listen to all its names being called

  before bending again to its labor.

  The Death of the Hat

  Once every man wore a hat.

  In the ashen newsreels,

  the avenues of cities

  are broad rivers flowing with hats.

  The ballparks swelled

  with thousands of strawhats,

  brims and bands,

  rows of men smoking

  and cheering in shirtsleeves.

  Hats were the law.

  They went without saying.

  You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.

  You bought them from Adams or Dobbs

  who branded your initials in gold

  on the inside band.

  Trolleys crisscrossed the city.

  Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.

  Men with hats gathered on the docks.

  There was a person to block your hat

  and a hatcheck girl to mind it

  while you had a drink

  or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.

  In your office stood a hat rack.

  The day war was declared

  everyone in the street was wearing a hat.

  And they were wearing hats

  when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.

  My father wore one to work every day

  and returned home

  carrying the evening paper,

  the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.

  But today we go bareheaded

  into the winter streets,

  stand hatless on frozen platforms.

  Today the mailboxes on the roadside

  and the spruce trees behind the house

  wear cold white hats of snow.

  Mice scurry from the stone walls at night

  in their thin fur hats

  to eat the birdseed that has spilled.

  And now my father, after a life of work,

  wears a hat of earth,

  and on top of that,

  a lighter one of cloud and sky—a hat of wind.

  The List of Ancient Pastimes

  First must have come listening

  to the wind or regarding

  the movements of animals,

  then monitoring the stars

  and sometime after that

  scrutinizing fire;

  but somewhere in there belongs

  watching the progress of a river

  from an elevated bank,

  studying the pooling near the edges,

  the way the smooth or rippled

  current divulges the secret

  contours of the unseen bottom,

  and the effects of sky-light

  on the surface,

  all the elongated colors of the flow.

  Today it is my turn on the shore.

  I flatten the tall grass with my pacing.

  I lock my elbows and lean back

  listening to the liquid rush.

  I scribble in a notebook,

  drink from a bottle of water.

  I find a perfect stone

  and fling it out into the middle.

  And sometimes I see something

  being carried down,

  a cracked-off branch, a bucket on its side

  in the late afternoon,

  or as the dusk gets heavy,

  the head of Orpheus bobbing along,

  singing softly

  to the overhanging trees,

  or the body of Ophelia

  held up by her voluminous,

  outspread clothes—

  the light so
faint now

  it is difficult to tell

  if the red and yellow petals

  are embroidered into her gown

  or real, floating on the darkness of the water.

  Passengers

  At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats

  with the possible company of my death,

  this sprawling miscellany of people—

  carry-on bags and paperbacks—

  that could be gathered in a flash

  into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.

  Not that I think

  if our plane crumpled into a mountain

  we would all ascend together,

  holding hands like a ring of skydivers,

  into a sudden gasp of brightness,

  or that there would be some common place

  for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,

  some spaceless, pillarless Greece

  where we could, at the count of three,

  toss our ashes into the sunny air.

  It's just that the way that man has his briefcase

  so carefully arranged,

  the way that girl is cooling her tea,

  and the flow of the comb that woman

  passes through her daughter's hair…

  and when you consider the altitude,

  the secret parts of the engines,

  and all the hard water and the deep canyons below…

  well, I just think it would be good if one of us

  maybe stood up and said a few words,

  or, so as not to involve the police,

  at least quietly wrote something down.

  Serpentine

  This morning I saw suddenly

  on the road ahead of me

  the moving question mark of a snake,

  black thumb of a head lifted,

  some ancient node within the dark hood

  urging the long thin body forward,

  sensing its way

  through its slippery existence

  as it had been doing since birth,

  slithering toward our moment of intersection,

  its swishing passage no longer hidden by grass

  or the wet cover of leaves,

  but its entire length visible now

  in the pure daylight of this dilated second,

  just as I had been moving toward it, too,

  all my life,

  in my own upright, warm-blooded way,

  walking the long sidewalks, riding trains,

  leaning on the railing of a ferry,

  or, as today, driving a country road,

  which from the air would look like a snake itself

  curling through the dense green woods.