Ballistics (3 page)

is twirling a peasant girl in a red frock

while a boy is playing a squeeze-box

near a turned-over barrel

upon which rest a knife, a jug, and a small drinking glass.

Two men in rough jackets

are playing cards at a wooden table.

And in the background a woman in a bonnet

stands behind the half-open Dutch door

talking to a merchant or a beggar who is leaning on a cane.

This is all I need to inject me with desire,

to fill me with the urge to lie down with you,

or someone very much like you,

on a cool marble floor or any fairly flat surface

as clouds go flying by

and the rustle of tall leafy trees

mixes with the notes of birdsong—

so clearly does the work speak of vanishing time,

obsolete musical instruments,

passing fancies, and the corpse

of the largely forgotten painter moldering

somewhere beneath the surface of present-day France.

The tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost,

then the arms and legs,

and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured.

And often an entire head followed the nose

as it might have done when bread

was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome.

No hope for the flute once attached

to the lips of that satyr with the puffed-out cheeks,

nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on,

the sword no longer gripped by the warrior,

the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy,

and whatever it was Aphrodite once held in her severed hand.

But the torso is another story—

middle man, the last to go, bluntly surviving,

propped up on a pedestal with a length of pipe,

and the mighty stone ass endures,

so smooth and fundamental, no one

hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare.

And that is the way it goes here

in the diffused light from the translucent roof,

one missing extremity after another—

digits that got too close to the slicer of time,

hands snapped off by the clock,

whole limbs caught in the mortal thresher.

But outside on the city streets,

it is raining, and the pavement shines

with the crisscross traffic of living bodies—

hundreds of noses still intact,

arms swinging and hands grasping,

the skin still warm and foreheads glistening.

It’s anyone’s guess when the day will come

when there is nothing left of us

but the bare, solid plinth we once stood upon

now exposed to the open air,

just the wind in the trees and the shadows

of clouds sweeping over its hard marble surface.

It occurred to me around dusk

after I had lit three candles

and was pouring myself a glass of wine

that I had not uttered a word to a soul all day.

Alone in the house,

I was busy pushing the wheel in a mill of paper

or staring down a dark well of ink—

no callers at the door, no ring of the telephone.

But as the path lights came on,

I did recall having words with a turtle

on my morning walk, a sudden greeting

that sent him off his log splashing into the lake.

I had also spoken to the goldfish

as I tossed a handful of pellets into their pond,

and I had a short chat with the dog,

who cocked her head this way and that

as I explained that dinner was hours away

and that she should lie down by the door.

I also talked to myself as I was typing

and later on while I looked around for my boots.

So I had barely set foot on the path

that leads to the great villa of silence

where men and women pace while counting beads.

In fact, I had only a single afternoon

of total silence to show for myself,

a spring day in a cell in Big Sur,

twenty or so monks also silent in their nearby cells—

a community of Cameldolites,

an order so stringent, my guide told me,

that they make the Benedictines,

whom they had broken away from in the 11th century,

look like a bunch of Hells Angels.

Out of a lifetime of running my mouth

and leaning on the horn of the ego,

only a single afternoon of being truly quiet

on a high cliff with the Pacific spread out below,

but as I listened to the birdsong

by the window that day, I could feel my droplet

of silence swelling on the faucet

then dropping into the zinc basin of their serenity.

Yet since then—

nothing but the racket of self-advertisement,

the clamor of noisy restaurants,

the classroom proclamations,

the little king of the voice having its say,

and today the pride of writing this down,

which must be the reason my pen

has turned its back on me to hide its face in its hands.

We did not have the benefit of a guide,

no crone to lead us off the common path,

no ancient to point the way with a staff,

but there were badlands to cross,

rivers of fire and blackened peaks,

and eventually we could look down and see

the jeweler running around a gold ring,

the boss trapped in an hourglass,

the baker buried up to his eyes in flour,

the banker plummeting on a coin,

the teacher disappearing into a blackboard,

and the grocer silent under a pyramid of vegetables.

We saw the pilot nose-diving

and the whore impaled on a bedpost,

the pharmacist wandering in a stupor

and the child with toy wheels for legs.

You pointed to the soldier

who was dancing with his empty uniform

and I remarked on the blind tourist.

But what truly caught our attention

was the scene in the long mirror of ice:

you lighting the wick on your head,

me blowing on the final spark,

and our children trying to crawl away from their eggshells.

is not really the title of a movie

but if it was I would be sure to see it.

I love their short legs and big heads,

the whole hippo look.

Hundreds of them would frolic

in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,

and I would eat my popcorn

in the dark of a neighborhood theater.

When they opened their enormous mouths

lined with big stubby teeth

I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat

and in the water playing with the hippos,

which is the way it is

with a truly great movie.

Only a mean-spirited reviewer

would ask on holiday from what?

Maybe it was the fast-moving clouds

or the spring flowers quivering among the dead leaves,

but I knew this was one day I was born to seize—

not just another card in the deck of the year,

but March 19th itself,

looking as clear and fresh as the ten of diamonds.

Living life to the fullest is the only way,

I thought as I sat by a tall window

and tapped my pencil on the dome of a glass paperweight.

To drain the cup of life to the dregs

was a piece of irresistible advice,

I averred as I checked someone’s dates

in the
Dictionary of National Biography

and later, as I scribbled a few words

on the back of a picture postcard.

Crashing through the iron gates of life

is what it is all about,

I decided as I lay down on the carpet,

locked my hands behind my head,

and considered how unique this day was

and how different I was from the men

of hari-kari for whom it is disgraceful

to end up lying on your back.

Better, they think, to be found facedown

in blood-soaked shirt

than to be discovered with lifeless eyes

fixed on the elegant teak ceiling above you,

and now I can almost hear the silence

of the temple bells and the lighter silence

of the birds hiding in the darkness of a hedge.

There was no art in losing that coin

you gave me for luck, the one with the profile

of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other.

It rode for days in a pocket

of my black pants, the paint-speckled ones,

past storefronts, gas stations and playgrounds,

and then it was gone, as lost as the lost

theorems of Pythagoras, or the
Medea
by Ovid,

which also slipped through the bars of time,

and as ungraspable as the sin that landed him—

forever out of favor with Augustus—

on a cold rock on the coast of the Black Sea,

where eventually he died, but not before

writing a poem about the fish of those waters,

into which, as we know, he was never transformed,

nor into a flower, a tree, or a stream,

nor into a star like Julius Caesar,

not even into a small bird that could wing it back to Rome.

So much to be learned out here in the drizzle

with all the tall busses swinging themselves

so close to me around corners and men

in bunches smoking outside the betting parlors.

And when the rain falls steadily enough

to drive me into a gallery or a city castle,

then the knowledge only comes pouring down

whether I am in the mood for it or not.

Today, it’s the codex of Leonardo on display

in the dim light where you touch a screen

to turn a page, the margins busy with pulleys

and siphons, whirlwinds, tides, and sluices.

And better informed I am to read on a little card

the news that Herbert Hoover translated

into English for the first time the works

of Agricola, the father of modern mineralogy himself.

Out the windows of the gallery,

a jumble of raincoats and black umbrellas,

and so my afternoon education continues

with the discovery in a vitrine of Vegetarius,

who in the 4th century came up

with the idea of underwater warfare,

hand-to-hand combat beneath the lily pads

as if bloodying one another on the ground were not enough.

And if his illustration of an armed soldier

standing on the bottom of a lake

and breathing through a snake-like tube

comes at me tonight and shakes me out of sleep,

I will not coax an oval pill from its bottle

nor put on a robe and stand by the stove

looking at the ads in a magazine

while some milk is heating in a pan.

I only need to slide into place

the image of Leonardo at a table by a window,

his marvelling head resting in his hands,

as he wonders if water could exist on the moon.

Everyone has two birthdays

according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,

the day you were born and New Year’s Day—

a droll observation to mull over

as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen

that is being transformed by the morning light

into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.

“No one ever regarded the First of January

with indifference,” writes Lamb,

for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,

this one marks nothing but the passage of time,

I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell

of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.

I admit to regarding my own birthday

as the joyous anniversary of my existence

probably because I was, and remain

to this day in late December, an only child.

And as an only child—

a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child

in a colorful room this morning—

I would welcome an extra birthday,

one more opportunity to stop what we are doing

for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.

And one more might be a small consolation

to us all for having to face a death-day, too,

an X in a square

on some kitchen calendar of the future,

the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time

by a burly, heartless conductor

as it roars through the months and years,

party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes

billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.

It is 5:40 in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, a Tuesday

a few days before the birthday of Martin Luther, yes

it is 1959 and I need to do my chores

which include milking the ten cows—

did I mention it was 5:40 in the morning?—

and driving them with a stick into the pasture.

After breakfast (I am thinking oatmeal

with brown sugar and some raisins)

I will drive the twelve miles into town

and pick up a few things,