Collected Poems (22 page)

The blue river is gray at morning

and evening. There is twilight

at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark

wondering if this quiet in me now

is a beginning or an end.

Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this

long life, along with the few others.

And the four I may have loved, or stopped short

of loving. I wander through these woods

making songs of you. Some of regret, some

of longing, and a terrible one of death.

I carry the privacy of your bodies

and hearts in me. The shameful ardor

and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds

of happiness and the walled‑up childhoods.

I carol loudly of you among trees emptied

of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.

A score of women if you count love both large

and small, real ones that were brief

and those that lasted. Gentle love and some

almost like an animal with its prey.

What is left is what’s alive in me. The failing

of your beauty and its remaining.

You are like countries in which my love

took place. Like a bell in the trees

that makes your music in each wind that moves.

A music composed of what you have forgotten.

That will end with my ending.

Not for rhyme or reason, but for the heart’s

sweet seasons and her perfect back sleeping

in the morning dark.

The train’s stopping wakes me.

Weeds in the gully are white

with the year’s first snow.

A lighted train goes

slowly past absolutely empty.

Also going to Fukuoka.

I feel around in myself

to see if I mind. Maybe

I am lonely. It is hard

to know. It could be

hidden in familiarity.

The body is the herb,

the mind is the honey.

The heart, the heart is

the undifferentiated.

The mind touches the body

and is the sun.

The mind touches the heart

and is music.

When body touches heart

they together are the moon

in the silently falling snow

over there. Which is truth

exceeding, is the residence,

the sanctified, is the secret

closet and passes into glory.

Night rises up from the fields

as the stars gather. Under the earth

are the stones and holding the stones

together is the silence. His heart

smelling of the cypress tree.

The whole valley at dawn sweet

with its emptiness. There is a door

in the wind, lima bean soup on the stove.

Tomorrow begins in the dark.

Today is the mountain of what we have

become. Surprised to be alive

in the abundance of time. Two thousand

six hundred and twenty days,

four thousand nights another time.

The red on the large woodpecker

four times in the pine trees.

The hoopoe in the chinaberry tree

only once. Wang Wei in his loneliness

noticing the first raindrops

in the light dust.

The silence around the old villa

was magnified by the shrilling

cicadas. Her soft voice redoubled

that stillness. At night the two

kinds of owls did not consider

each other but together made

something. The small owl mewed

and the other said
dark . . . dark.

How fine it was up there on

the mountain. How happy Michiko

was. She was perishing but did

not know it. I took care of her

body in ways that crossed over

the boundaries of politeness.

The white ship that crossed slowly

to the next island every noon

doubled the blue of the Aegean.

Her absence makes this New England

town completely visible and less.

I call it exile, or being relegated.

I call it the provinces.

And all the time it is my heart.

My imperfect heart which prefers

this distance from people. Prefers

the half-meetings which cannot lead

to intimacy. Provisional friendships

that are interrupted near the beginning.

A pleasure in not communicating.

And inside, no despair or longing.

A taste for solitude. The knowledge

that love preserves freedom in always

failing. An exile by nature. Where,

indeed, would I ever be a citizen?

There was a small butcher shop in the North End

of Boston whose specialty was inferior foods.

Chicken feet and chicken heads. Gizzards, tripe

and beef hearts. Salty fatback and wet brains.

Prosperous people came from the suburbs to pay

too much for the food they ate in hard times.

The man living with difficulty in the winter woods

remembers as he looks at the fresh raccoon tracks

in the snow and wonders if they will tug at him

in the Mediterranean light, if he will write

about the classical bareness of cold and truth

while eating the suckling pig and fried bananas

of Indonesia. Will he miss the Mill River

with its slags of ice and the sound of crows

in the silence. Some years ago, a child was asked

whether he liked radio or television best. The boy

said radio, because the pictures were better.

Pride, pride, pride, pride, pride,

pride and happiness. Winter

and empty fields and beyond the trees

the Aegean. The night sky

bright in the puddles of this lane.

Such dear loneliness. Going along

to no man’s clock. No one who knows

my middle name for a thousand miles.

My youth gone and death unable to find me.

Thinking back to childhood. Astonished

that I could find the way here.

Mother says,

Take two baby steps.

The eyes and inside the mouth,

nipples and naked feet.

Dreams lived and lost

as the great secret.

Mother may I, he says

and she lets him.

Cold rooms in Manhattan

and San Francisco.

First love for the second time.

All night every night

in coffeehouse and bar.

Poetry and painting,

hunger and movies,

disappointment and lies.

Happy and alone.

Take two baby steps,

Mother says. Spring and forest,

music and trains and owls.

Denise and Doris, Marie

and Moira, Anna and Valerie.

Ah, Mother, may I?

and she says You may.

A little success. Dinners

and famous names.

Then giant steps away

from all that.

From the simplicity.

Mother says, Take your heart

in both hands and squeeze

out darkness. You must take

scissor steps down

into longing and forgetting,

loneliness and fear.

Mother must I?

You must.

People’s agony and the injustice.

Your aging and listening.

Sickness and death.

The imperfecting.

Mother, he says, there is arriving

down here. Enjoyment

more than excitement.

Having been and being.

Happiness and ripeness

for all the time there is.

Italy and Greece when they are

spoiled and splendid.

Their daughter makes a noise like a giant fly.

The family brought her today for the threshing.

She grew up here until they moved to the village.

She takes me around to see the geranium sprigs

she tried to plant while I did the laundry.

With a circle of stones to make a house for each.

Grins when I dribble water on them obediently

where she points. She is twenty and misshapen

and cannot speak. Sits on the wall wearing pink,

rocking in the quiet sound of grain being sifted.

Shadows of my doves fly across the bright stones

as she looks down the valley singing and happy

in the late afternoon. A very big happiness I think.

The last year of my being young the way young people

mean young, I was living with a friend in Perugia,

one of those Italian towns made of towers and arches

and Etruscan walls. Down below was gentle Umbria

and summer was coming. Both of us were unhappy.

His love was in Austria and mine was in Berkeley,

and neither of them wanted us now. Every night

we sat in the kitchen at a marble table writing fine

hopeless letters to get them back. His wife cooked

and comforted us and went to bed about one when

we began decorating the envelopes. I would finish first

and take mine to the post office through the sleeping

ancient city. Usually about three in the morning.

Then I would go to the dark palazzo and stand looking

up at Gianna’s bedroom window. When I got home,

his pretty letter would be leaning on the sugar bowl.

I would go quietly across their bedroom to my door.

She would be sitting up holding him in her arms,

watching me as I passed through the first light of dawn.

I was lying on the deck with my eyes closed.

Somewhere to the left the women’s voices began

to change, the voice of one pushing the others.

She idly sang bits of old songs, laughing

as though not noticing. And began to clap,

accentuating the rhythm, crying out.

Her laughing became a gypsy laugh, though I could

hear a shyness underneath. I could hear how

she was as a girl when the men would have urged her on

until she danced, dazzling the whole village.

But these women fell silent. The men nearby

went on playing cards and she gradually stopped.

Later, when I went for tea, I returned that way

to see her spirit in its full-breasted body.

But there was only a group of old ladies

dressed in black, each like the others.

The Greek gods don’t come in winter,

and seldom in person. They speak through

others. Even in summer. Their voices seem

far off and very fast. It’s difficult also

because we can’t trust the people who say

they are translating. When the gods come

in the dawn, there is soon the odor

of roses and warm linen. They sit in their

high-backed chairs and mostly watch

the children. Especially when they are

running and laughing. They applaud

by humming when we read our poems.

They hum differently when the poems

are about lights and parallel geologies

of the sea. But they hum most of all

when the poems are about distance and desire.

A man lies warm under the blankets in a house still

frozen by the night, trying to remember the dream.

A lovely Japanese lady with bare breasts in a palanquin.

It changed and he was crowded against a fat man while

talking with a young woman from California at a party

who was beginning to tell him what she believed.

“Honor rather than bravery for instance,” she said.

(He can hear the slow freight passing through

the ruined cornfields down by the river.) Dreams are

mostly things that we let go. What memory really keeps

is the cargo, the equity we have in our life.

He remembers an almost full moon white in the pale

afternoon sky yesterday and the snow gleaming

in the silence of gray winter light. He thinks

of a bright New England window last week where

a young mother was singing with her children.

And the lighted window near Hampstead Heath years ago

where a naked adolescent girl was laughing sweetly

with a man who was probably her father, holding up

her pretty dress, getting ready to go dancing with

the boy she loved. Any of that heartbreaking abundance.

Someone had left a door unlocked in the Stockton

Tunnel and I went through almost without thinking.

Inside was a vast construction of Byzantium.

It must fill all of San Francisco down there,

shining with beautiful stone light. The watchman

was drunk, and annoyed by something they’d done.

He began telling secrets about the Leader and the order

and imminent takeovers. Most of which I couldn’t follow

because of the whispering and looking away.

He changed after we’d crawled out on the scaffolding.

Wanted to attach electrical things to my earlobes.

It mattered a lot to him. When I still refused,

he started yelling and kicking the towers.

Harder and harder until a dim moaning began below

and timid voices floating up the mighty names

of the Paleologi, frail and lovely on the damp, spoiled air.

The funeral service was people getting up

in the church and saying wonderful things

about my friend. The next night, the family

and some others gathered in the West Village

condominium and told flattering stories.

His daughter said Dad was always fun to be with.

I knew him well for thirty years and he had

never been fun, unless you counted those times

he struggled stubbornly to get the hang of charm.