Sailing Alone Around the Room Read online

and the sound of my wife’s laughter

  on the telephone in the next room,

  the woman who cooked the savory osso buco,

  who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted.

  She who talks to her faraway friend

  while I linger here at the table

  with a hot, companionable cup of tea,

  feeling like one of the friendly natives,

  a reliable guide, maybe even the chief’s favorite son.

  Somewhere, a man is crawling up a rocky hillside

  on bleeding knees and palms, an Irish penitent

  carrying the stone of the world in his stomach;

  and elsewhere people of all nations stare

  at one another across a long, empty table.

  But here, the candles give off their warm glow,

  the same light that Shakespeare and Izaak Walton wrote by,

  the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history.

  Only now it plays on the blue plates,

  the crumpled napkins, the crossed knife and fork.

  In a while, one of us will go up to bed

  and the other one will follow.

  Then we will slip below the surface of the night

  into miles of water, drifting down and down

  to the dark, soundless bottom

  until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,

  below the shale and layered rock,

  beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,

  into the broken bones of the earth itself,

  into the marrow of the only place we know.

  Directions

  You know the brick path in back of the house,

  the one you see from the kitchen window,

  the one that bends around the far end of the garden

  where all the yellow primroses are?

  And you know how if you leave the path

  and walk up into the woods you come

  to a heap of rocks, probably pushed

  down during the horrors of the Ice Age,

  and a grove of tall hemlocks, dark green now

  against the light-brown fallen leaves?

  And farther on, you know

  the small footbridge with the broken railing

  and if you go beyond that you arrive

  at the bottom of that sheep’s head hill?

  Well, if you start climbing, and you

  might have to grab hold of a sapling

  when the going gets steep,

  you will eventually come to a long stone

  ridge with a border of pine trees

  which is as high as you can go

  and a good enough place to stop.

  The best time is late afternoon

  when the sun strobes through

  the columns of trees as you are hiking up,

  and when you find an agreeable rock

  to sit on, you will be able to see

  the light pouring down into the woods

  and breaking into the shapes and tones

  of things and you will hear nothing

  but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy

  falling of a cone or nut through the trees,

  and if this is your day you might even

  spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese

  driving overhead toward some destination.

  But it is hard to speak of these things

  how the voices of light enter the body

  and begin to recite their stories

  how the earth holds us painfully against

  its breast made of humus and brambles

  how we who will soon be gone regard

  the entities that continue to return

  greener than ever, spring water flowing

  through a meadow and the shadows of clouds

  passing over the hills and the ground

  where we stand in the tremble of thought

  taking the vast outside into ourselves.

  Still, let me know before you set out.

  Come knock on my door

  and I will walk with you as far as the garden

  with one hand on your shoulder.

  I will even watch after you and not turn back

  to the house until you disappear

  into the crowd of maple and ash,

  heading up toward the hill,

  piercing the ground with your stick.

  Sunday Morning with the

  Sensational Nightingales

  It was not the Five Mississippi Blind Boys

  who lifted me off the ground

  that Sunday morning

  as I drove down for the paper, some oranges, and bread.

  Nor was it the Dixie Hummingbirds

  or the Soul Stirrers, despite their quickening name,

  or even the Swan Silvertones

  who inspired me to look over the commotion of trees

  into the open vault of the sky.

  No, it was the Sensational Nightingales

  who happened to be singing on the gospel

  station early that Sunday morning

  and must be credited with the bumping up

  of my spirit, the arousal of the mice within.

  I have always loved this harmony,

  like four, sometimes five trains running

  side by side over a contoured landscape—

  make that a shimmering, red-dirt landscape,

  wildflowers growing along the silver tracks,

  lace tablecloths covering the hills,

  the men and women in white shirts and dresses

  walking in the direction of a tall steeple.

  Sunday morning in a perfect Georgia.

  But I am not here to describe the sound

  of the falsetto whine, sepulchral bass,

  alto and tenor fitted snugly in between;

  only to witness my own minor ascension

  that morning as they sang, so parallel,

  about the usual themes,

  the garden of suffering,

  the beads of blood on the forehead,

  the stone before the hillside tomb,

  and the ancient rolling waters

  we would all have to cross some day.

  God bless the Sensational Nightingales,

  I thought as I turned up the volume,

  God bless their families and their powder blue suits.

  They are a far cry from the quiet kneeling

  I was raised with,

  a far, hand-clapping cry from the candles

  that glowed in the alcoves

  and the fixed eyes of saints staring down

  from their corners.

  Oh, my cap was on straight that Sunday morning

  and I was fine keeping the car on the road.

  No one would ever have guessed

  I was being lifted into the air by nightingales,

  hoisted by their beaks like a long banner

  that curls across an empty blue sky,

  caught up in the annunciation

  of these high, most encouraging tidings.

  The Best Cigarette

  There are many that I miss,

  having sent my last one out a car window

  sparking along the road one night, years ago.

  The heralded ones, of course:

  after sex, the two glowing tips

  now the lights of a single ship;

  at the end of a long dinner

  with more wine to come

  and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;

  or on a white beach,

  holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

  How bittersweet these punctuations

  of flame and gesture;

  but the best were on those mornings

  when I would have a little something going

  in the typewriter,

  the sun bright in the windows,

  maybe some Berlioz on in the background.

  I would go into the kitchen for coffee
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  and on the way back to the page,

  curled in its roller,

  I would light one up and feel

  its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

  Then I would be my own locomotive,

  trailing behind me as I returned to work

  little puffs of smoke,

  indicators of progress,

  signs of industry and thought,

  the signal that told the nineteenth century

  it was moving forward.

  That was the best cigarette,

  when I would steam into the study

  full of vaporous hope

  and stand there,

  the big headlamp of my face

  pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

  Days

  Each one is a gift, no doubt,

  mysteriously placed in your waking hand

  or set upon your forehead

  moments before you open your eyes.

  Today begins cold and bright,

  the ground heavy with snow

  and the thick masonry of ice,

  the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

  Through the calm eye of the window

  everything is in its place

  but so precariously

  this day might be resting somehow

  on the one before it,

  all the days of the past stacked high

  like the impossible tower of dishes

  entertainers used to build on stage.

  No wonder you find yourself

  perched on the top of a tall ladder

  hoping to add one more.

  Just another Wednesday,

  you whisper,

  then holding your breath,

  place this cup on yesterday’s saucer

  without the slightest clink.

  Tuesday, June 4, 1991

  By the time I get myself out of bed, my wife has left

  the house to take her botany final and the painter

  has arrived in his van and is already painting

  the columns of the front porch white and the decking gray.

  It is early June, a breezy and sun-riddled Tuesday

  that would quickly be forgotten were it not for my

  writing these few things down as I sit here empty-headed

  at the typewriter with a cup of coffee, light and sweet.

  I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only

  responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation

  until it’s time to go to lunch with the other girls,

  all of us ordering the cottage cheese with half a pear.

  This is what stenographers do in courtrooms, too,

  alert at their miniature machines taking down every word.

  When there is a silence they sit still as I do, waiting

  and listening, fingers resting lightly on the keys.

  This is also what Samuel Pepys did, jotting down in

  private ciphers minor events that would have otherwise

  slipped into the dark amnesiac waters of the Thames.

  His vigilance finally paid off when London caught fire

  as mine does when the painter comes in for coffee

  and says how much he likes this slow vocal rendition

  of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and I figure I will

  make him a tape when he goes back to his brushes and pails.

  Under the music I can hear the rush of cars and trucks

  on the highway and every so often the new kitten, Felix,

  hops into my lap and watches my fingers drumming out

  a running record of this particular June Tuesday

  as it unrolls before my eyes, a long intricate carpet

  that I am walking on slowly with my head bowed

  knowing that it is leading me to the quiet shrine

  of the afternoon and the melancholy candles of evening.

  If I look up, I see out the window the white stars

  of clematis climbing a ladder of strings, a woodpile,

  a stack of faded bricks, a small green garden of herbs,

  things you would expect to find outside a window,

  all written down now and placed in the setting

  of a stanza as unalterably as they are seated

  in their chairs in the ontological rooms of the world.

  Yes, this is the kind of job I could succeed in,

  an unpaid but contented amanuensis whose hands

  are two birds fluttering on the lettered keys,

  whose eyes see sunlight splashing through the leaves,

  and the bright pink asterisks of honeysuckle

  and the piano at the other end of this room with

  its small vase of faded flowers and its empty bench.

  So convinced am I that I have found my vocation,

  tomorrow I will begin my chronicling earlier, at dawn,

  a time when hangmen and farmers are up and doing,

  when men holding pistols stand in a field back to back.

  It is the time the ancients imagined in robes, as Eos

  or Aurora, who would leave her sleeping husband in bed,

  not to take her botany final, but to pull the sun,

  her brother, over the horizon’s brilliant rim,

  her four-horse chariot aimed at the zenith of the sky.

  But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,

  barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window

  in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.

  She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,

  offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

  Canada

  I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark

  that I cut from a tree with a penknife.

  There is no other way to express adequately

  the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms

  and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility

  that hands you the horizon on a platter.

  I am also writing this in a wooden canoe,

  a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,

  resting the birch bark against my knees.

  I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back,

  but I am thinking of winter,

  snow piled up in all the provinces

  and the solemnity of the long grain-ships

  that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound.

  O Canada, as the anthem goes,

  scene of my boyhood summers,

  you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,

  you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night,

  you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock.

  You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage:

  Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,

  A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,

  Ann of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,

  So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin,

  and Peril Over the Airport, one

  of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series

  by Helen Wills whom some will remember

  as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories.

  What has become of the languorous girls

  who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading

  Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,

  Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, and Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse?

  Where are they now, the ones who shared her adventures

  as a veterans’ nurse, private duty nurse, visiting nurse,

  cruise nurse, night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,

  dude ranch nurse (there is little she has not done),

  rest home nurse, department store nurse,

  boarding school nurse, and country doctor’s nurse?

  O Canada, I have not forgotten you,

  and as I kneel in
my canoe, beholding this vision

  of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast,

  polar, North American memory.

  You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.

  You are Jean de Brébeuf with his martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.

  You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall.

  You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.

  You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.

  But not only that.

  You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,

  and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

  On Turning Ten

  The whole idea of it makes me feel

  like I’m coming down with something,

  something worse than any stomach ache

  or the headaches I get from reading in bad light—

  a kind of measles of the spirit,

  a mumps of the psyche,

  a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

  You tell me it is too early to be looking back,

  but that is because you have forgotten

  the perfect simplicity of being one

  and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.

  But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.

  At four I was an Arabian wizard.

  I could make myself invisible

  by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.

  At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

  But now I am mostly at the window

  watching the late afternoon light.

  Back then it never fell so solemnly

  against the side of my tree house,

  and my bicycle never leaned against the garage

  as it does today,

  all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

  This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,

  as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.

  It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,

  time to turn the first big number.

  It seems only yesterday I used to believe

  there was nothing under my skin but light.

  If you cut me I would shine.

  But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,

  I skin my knees. I bleed.

  Workshop

  I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.

  It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now

  so immediately the poem has my attention,

  like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.