Collected Poems (28 page)

though that doesn’t mean I’m ready yet to let you go … what it does mean I don’t think I know,

nor why I’m so ill prepared for this insistence, this diligence with which consciousness afflicts us.

5.

I imagine you rising to something like heaven: my friend who died last year is there to welcome you.

He would know the place by now, he would guide you past the ledges and the thorns and terror.

Like a child I am, thinking of you rising in the rosy clouds and being up there with him,

being with your guru Baba, too, the three of you, all strong men, all partly wild children,

wandering through my comforting child’s heaven, doing what you’re supposed to do up there forever.

I tell myself it’s silly, all of this, absurd, what we sacrifice in attaining rational mind,

but there you are again, glowing, grinning down at me from somewhere in the heart of being,

ablaze with wonder and a child’s relief that this after all is how astonishingly it finishes.

6.

In my adult mind, I’m reeling, lost — I can’t grasp anymore what I even think of death.

I don’t know even what we hope for: ecstasy? bliss? or just release from being, not to suffer anymore.

At the grave, the boring rabbi said that you were going to eternal rest: rest? why rest?

Better say we’ll be absorbed into the “Thou,” better be consumed in light, in Pascal’s “Fire”!

Or be taken to the Godhead, to be given meaning now, at last, the meaning we knew eluded us.

God, though, Godhead, Thou, even fire: all that is gone now, gone the dark night arguments,

gone the partial answers, the very formulations fail; I grapple for the questions as
they
fail.

Are we to be redeemed? When? How? After so much disbelief, will something be beyond us to receive us?

7.

Redemption is in life, “beyond” unnecessary: it is radically demeaning to any possible divinity

to demand that life be solved by yet another life: we’re compressed into this single span of opportunity

for which our gratitude should categorically be presumed; this is what eternity for us consists of,

praise projected from the soul, as love first floods outwards to the other then back into the self …

Yes, yes, I try to bring you to this, too; yes, what is over now is over; yes, we offer thanks,

for what you had, for what we all have: this portion of eternity is no different from eternity,

they both contract, expand, cast up illusion and delusion and all the comfort that we have is love,

praise, the grace not to ask for other than we have … yes and yes, but this without conviction, too.

8.

What if after, though, there is something else, will there be judgment then, will it be retributive,

and if it is, if there is sin, will you have to suffer some hellish match with what your wrongs were?

So much good you did, your work, your many kindnesses, the befriendings and easy generosities.

What sort of evil do we dare imagine we’d have to take into those awful rectifications?

We hurt one another, all of us are helpless in that, with so much vulnerable and mortal to defend.

But that vulnerability, those defenses, our belittling jealousies, resentments, thrusts and spites

are the very image of our frailty: shouldn’t our forgiveness for them and our absolution be assumed?

Why would our ultimate identities be burdened with absolutes, imperatives, lost discordant hymns?

9.

How ambiguous the triumphs of our time, the releasing of the intellect from myth and magic.

We’ve gained much, we think, from having torn away corrupted modes of aggrandizement and giantism,

those infected and infecting errors that so long held sway and so bloated our complacencies

that we would willingly inflict even on our own flesh the crippling implications of our metaphysic.

How much we’ve had to pay, though, and how dearly had to suffer for our liberating dialectics.

The only field still left to us to situate our anguish and uncertainty is in the single heart,

and how it swells, the heart, to bear the cries with which we troubled the startled heavens.

Now we have the air, transparent, and the lucid psyche, and gazing inward, always inward, to the wound.

10.

The best evidence I have of you isn’t my memory of you, or your work, although I treasure both,

and not my love for you which has too much of me in it as subject, but the love others bore you,

bear you, especially Vikki, who lived out those last hard years with you, the despairs and fears,

the ambivalences and withdrawals, until that final week of fever that soaked both your pillows.

Such a moving irony that your last days finally should have seared the doubt from both of you.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly whom I cry for — you, that last night as we left you there,

the way you touched her with such solicitude, or her, the desolation she keeps coming to:

“I’ve been facing death, touched death, and now I have a ghost I love and who loves me.”

11.

Genevieve, your precious Gen, doesn’t quite know when to cry, or how much she’s supposed to cry,

or how to understand those moments when it passes, when she’s distracted into play and laughter

by the other kids or by the adults who themselves don’t seem to grasp this terrible non-game.

At the cemetery, I’m asked to speak to her, comfort her: never more impossible to move beyond cliché.

We both know we’re helplessly embedded in ritual: you wanted her, I tell her, to be happy,

that’s all, all her life, which she knows, of course, but nods to, as she knows what I don’t say,

the simplest self-revealing truths, your most awful fear, the brutal fact of your mortality:

how horribly it hurt to go from her, how rending not being here to help bear this very pain.

12.

Nothing better in the world than those days each year with you, your wife, my wife, the children,

at your old stone house in the Dordogne, looking over valleys one way, chestnut woods the other,

walks, long talks, visits to Lascaux or Les Eyzies, reading, listening to each other read.

Our last night, though, I strolled into the moonless fields, it might have been a thousand centuries ago,

and something suddenly was with me: just beyond the boundaries of my senses presences were threatening,

something out of childhood, mine or humankind’s; I felt my fear, familiar, unfamiliar, fierce,

might freeze me to the dark, but I looked back — I wasn’t here alone, your house was there,

the zone of warmth it made was there, you yourself were there, circled in the waiting light.

13.

I seem to have to make you dead, dead again, to hold you in my mind so I can clearly have you,

because unless I do, you aren’t dead, you’re only living somewhere out of sight, I’ll find you,

soon enough, no need to hurry, and my mind slips into this other tense, other grammar of condition,

in which you’re welded to banalities of fact and time, the reality of what is done eluding me.

If you’re accessible to me, how can you be dead? You are accessible to me, therefore … something else.

So what I end with is the death of death, but not as it would have been elaborated once,

in urgencies of indignation, resignation, faith: I have you neither here, nor there, but not not-anywhere:

the soul keeps saying that you might be here, or there — the incessant passions of the possible.

14.

Here’s where we are: out behind the house in canvas chairs, you’re reading new poems to me,

as you have so often, in your apartment, a park in Paris — anywhere: sidewalk, restaurant, museum.

You read musically, intensely, with flourishes, conviction: I might be the audience in a hall,

and you are unimaginably insecure, you so want me to admire every poem, every stanza, every line,

just as I want, need, you, too, to certify, approve, legitimize, all without a doubt or reservation,

and which neither of us does, improving everything instead, suggesting and correcting and revising,

as we knew, however difficult it was, we had to, in our barely overcome but overcome competitiveness.

How I’ll miss it, that so tellingly accurate envy sublimated into warmth and brothership.

15.

Here’s where we are: clearing clumps of shrub and homely brush from the corner of your yard,

sawing down a storm-split plum tree, then hacking at the dozens of malevolently armored maguey:

their roots are frail as flesh and cut as easily, but in the August heat the work is draining.

Now you’re resting, you’re already weak although neither of us will admit it to the other.

Two weeks later, you’ll be dead, three weeks later, three months, a year, I’ll be doing this,

writing this, bound into this other labor that you loved so much and that we also shared,

still share, somehow always will share now as we shared that sunny late-summer afternoon,

children’s voices, light; you, pale, leaning on the wall, me tearing at the vines and nettles.

16.

“A man’s life cannot be silent; living is speaking, dying, too, is speaking,” so you wrote,

so we would believe, but still, how understand what the finished life could have meant to say

about the dying and the death that never end, about potential gone, inspiration unaccomplished,

love left to narrow in the fallacies of recall, eroding down to partial gesture, partial act?

And we are lessened with it, amazed at how much our self-worth and joy were bound into the other.

There are no consolations, no illuminations, nothing of that long-awaited flowing toward transcendence.

There is, though, compensation, the simple certainty of having touched and having been touched.

The silence and the speaking come together, grief and gladness come together, the disparates fuse.

17.

Where are we now? Nowhere, anywhere, the two of us, the four of us, fifty of us at a
fête.

Islands of relationship, friends and friends, the sweet, normal, stolid matrix of the merely human,

the circles of community that intersect within us, hold us, touch us always with their presence,

even as, today, mourning, grief, themselves becoming memory, there still is that within us which endures,

not in possession of the single soul in solitude, but in the covenants of affection we embody,

the way an empty house embodies elemental presences, and the way, attentive, we can sense them.

Breath held, heart held, body stilled, we attend, and they are there, covenant, elemental presence,

and the voice, in the lightest footfall, the eternal wind, leaf and earth, the constant voice.

18.

“The immortalities of the moment spin and expand; they seem to have no limits, yet time passes.

These last days here are bizarrely compressed, busy, and yet full of suppressed farewells…”

The hilly land you loved, lucerne and willow, the fields of butterfly and wasp and flower.

Farewell the crumbling house, barely held together by your ministrations, the shed, the pond.

Farewell your dumb French farmer’s hat, your pads of yellow paper, your joyful, headlong scrawl.

The coolness of the woods, the swallow’s swoop and whistle, the confident call of the owl at night.

Scents of dawn, the softening all-night fire, char, ash, warm embers in the early morning chill.

The moment holds, you move across the path and go, the light lifts, breaks: goodbye, my friend, farewell.

A DREAM OF MIND

[1992]

I

When

As soon as the old man knew he was actually dying, even before anyone else would admit it,

he wanted out of the business, out of the miserable game, and he told whoever would listen,

whenever they’d listen, wife, family, friends, that he’d do it himself but how could he,

without someone to help, unable to walk as he was, get out of bed or up from the toilet himself?

At first he’d almost been funny: “Somebody comes, somebody goes,” he’d said on the birth of a niece,

and one day at lunch, “Please pass the cream cheese,” then, deadpan, “That’s all I’ll miss.”

But now he’s obsessed: “Why won’t you help me?” he says to his children, ten times a day,

a hundred and ten, but what if such meddling’s wrong, and aren’t these last days anyway precious?

Still, he was wearing them down: “This is no fun,” he said to a son helping him hobble downstairs,

and the son, knowing full well what he meant, dreading to hear what he meant, had to ask “What?”

so the old man, the biopsy incision still lumping the stubble of hair on the side of his skull,

could look in his eyes and say, if not as an accusation then nearly, “Death, dying: you know.”

By then they knew, too, that sooner or later they’d have to give in, then sooner was over,

only later was looming, aphasiac, raving too late, so they held council and argued it out,

and though his daughter, holding on to lost hopes, was afraid, they decided to help him,

and told the old man, who said, “Finally, at last,” and then to his daughter, “Don’t be afraid.”

On the day it would happen, the old man would be funny again: wolfing down handfuls of pills,

“I know this’ll upset my stomach,” he’d say, but for now he only asks how it will happen.

“You’ll just sleep,” he’s told, and “That’s great” is his answer: “I haven’t slept for weeks.”

Then “Great” again, then, serious, dry-eyed, to his weeping family: “Just don’t tell me when.”

The Vessel

I’m trying to pray; one of the voices of my mind says, “God, please help me do this,”

but another voice intervenes: “How conceive God’s interest would be to help you believe?”

Is this prayer? Might this exercise be a sign, however impure, that such an act’s under way,