Collected Poems (49 page)

Only appalling now to comprehend that reality could be constructed of expediency, falsehood, self-lies;

only worth lamenting now when at last you might but hopelessly won’t, for so much else demands rectification.

Even our notions of beauty, even our modes of adornment; whence suspicion of one’s own sensual yearnings,

whence dejection, whence rage, all with such labor to be surmounted, while love waited, life waited; whence woe.

Whence woe,
and the voice far distant within crying out still of what was lost or despoiled.

And the cellular flares incessantly flashing, evil and good, yes, no; whence desolation, what never would be.

Sully: Sixteen Months

One more thing to keep:

my second grandson, just

pre-speech, tripping on a toy,

skidding, bump and yowl,

and tears, real tears,

coursing down his cheeks,

until Jessie, cooing, lifts

and holds him to her,

so it’s over, but as

they’re leaving for home,

he and I alone a moment

in the room where he fell,

he flops down again,

to show me, look,

how it came to pass,

this terrible thing, trilling

syllables for me, no

words yet, but notes,

with hurt in them, and cries,

and that greater cry

that lurks just behind:

right here, he’s saying,

on this spot precisely,

here
it happened, and yes,

I answer, yes, and so

have the chance to lift him

too, to hold him, light

and lithe, against me, too.

The World

Splendid that I’d revel even more in the butterflies harvesting pollen

from the lavender in my father-in-law’s garden in Normandy

when I bring to mind Francis Ponge’s poem where he transfigures them

to levitating matches, and the flowers they dip into to unwashed cups;

it doesn’t work with lavender, but still, so lovely, matches, cups,

and lovely, too, to be here in the fragrant summer sunlight reading.

Just now an essay in
Le Monde,
on Fragonard, his oval oil sketch

of a mother opening the bodice of her rosily blushing daughter

to demonstrate to a young artist that the girl would be suitable as a “model”;

the snide quotation marks insinuate she might be other than she seems,

but to me she seems entirely enchanting, even without her top

and with the painter’s cane casually lifting her skirt from her ankle.

Fragonard needs so little for his plot; the girl’s disarranged underslips

a few quick swirls, the mother’s compliant mouth a blur, her eyes

two dots of black, yet you can see how crucial this transaction is to her,

how accommodating she’d be in working through potential complications.

In the shadows behind, a smear of fabric spills from a drawer,

a symbol surely, though when one starts thinking symbol, what isn’t?

Each sprig of lavender lifting jauntily as its sated butterfly departs,

Catherine beneath the beech tree with her father and sisters, me watching,

everything and everyone might stand for something else,
be
something else.

Though in truth I can’t imagine what; reality has put itself so solidly before me

there’s little need for mystery … Except for us, for how we take the world

to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.

II

Of Childhood the Dark

Here

Uncanny to realize one was
here,
so much

came before the awareness of being here.

Then to suspect your place here was yours only

because no one else wanted or would have it.

A site, a setting, and you the matter to fill it,

though you guessed it could never be filled.

Therefore, as much as a presence, you were a problem,

a task; insoluble, so optional, so illicit.

Then the first understanding: that you

yourself were the difficult thing to be done.

Outsets

Even then, though surely I was a “child,”

which implied sense and intent, but no power,

I wasn’t what I’d learned a child should be:

I was never naïve, never without guile.

Hardly begun, I was no longer new,

already beset with quandaries and cries.

Was I a molten to harden and anneal, the core

of what I was destined to become, or was I

what I seemed, inconsequential, but free?

But if free, why quandaries, why cries?

Danger

Watch out, you might fall, as that one fell,

or fall
ill,
as he or she did, or die,

or worse, not die, be insufficient,

less than what should be your worth.

Be cautious of your body, which isn’t you,

though neither are you its precise other;

you’re what it feels, and the knowing

what’s felt, yet no longer quite either.

Your life is first of all what may be lost,

its ultimate end to not end.

And Fear

Not lurk, not rancor, not rage, nor,

please, trapping and tearing, yet they were
there,

from the start, impalpable but prodigious,

ever implicit. Even before anything happens,

(how know that this is what happens?)

there was the terror, the wrench and flex,

the being devoured, ingested by terror,

and the hideous inference, that from now

every absence of light would be terror,

every unheard whisper more terror.

The Lesson

One must be
right,
one’s truths must

be
true,
most importantly they,

and you, must be irrefutable, otherwise

they’ll lead to humiliation and sin.

Your truths will seek you, though you still

must construct and comprehend them,

then unflinchingly give yourself to them.

More than you, implying more even

than themselves, they are the single matter

for which you must be ready to lie.

The Ban

Always my awful eyes, and always

the alluring forbidden, always what I’d see

and the delirious behind or beneath; always

taboo twinned with intrigue, prohibition,

and the secret slits, which my gaze, with my assent

or without it, would slip skittering through.

Though nothing was ever as enchanting

as the anticipation of it, always my eyes

would be seeking again all they imagined,

lewd and low, might be hidden from them.

Pandora

It was clear, now that the story I’d waited

so long for had finally found me,

it was I who englobed the secrets, and the evil,

and the ruined splendor before evil,

for I guessed I’d once been in splendor.

Terrible to have coffered in myself these forebodings,

these atrocious closeds which must never

be opened, but are, ever will be.

Revealed now, though, ratified and released,

at least they were no longer just mine.

Games

The others play at violence, then so do I,

though I’d never have imagined

I’d enact this thing of attack,

of betraying, besting, rearing above,

of hand become fist, become bludgeon,

these similes of cruelty, conquest, extinction.

They, we, play at doing away with,

but also at being annulled, falling dead,

as though it were our choice, this learning

to be done away with, to fall dead.

Devout

I knew this couldn’t be me, knew this holy

double of me would be taken from me,

would go out to the ravenous rocks to be dust

beneath rock, glint ashudder in dust,

but I knew I’d miss him, my swimmer in the vast;

without him was only mind-gristle and void.

Disbelief didn’t drive him from me, nor the thrash

of austerities I gave him to think might be prayer.

Scorn, rather, for me, for my needing reasons to pray,

for the selves I tried to pray into being to pray.

Self-Love

No sooner had I heard of it, than I knew

I was despicably, inextricably guilty of it.

It wasn’t as I’d hoped that kingdom I’d found

in myself where you whispered to yourself

and heard whispers back: that was iniquity too,

but was nothing to this; from this, I could tell,

my inept repentances would never redeem me,

so I must never trust myself again,

not the artifice I showed others, still less

that seething, sinful boil within.

First Love Lost

The gash I inflict on myself in a sludge-slow

brook in a dip in field of hornets and thorns,

I hardly remark, nor the blood spooled out behind

like a carnivore’s track; it brings satisfaction,

as though I’d been tested, and prevailed. And the talon

of pain in my palm? I already know pain,

love’s pain, which I know is all pain, just as I know

the river will dry, my filthy wound heal

and the wolf be driven to earth, before love,

love everlasting, will relent or release me.

Sensitive

Sensitive on a hillside, sensitive in a dusk,

summer dusk of mown clover exhaling

its opulent languor; sensitive in a gush

of ambient intimation, then inspiration, these forms

not forms bewilderingly weaving towards,

then through me, calling me forth from myself,

from the imperatives which already so drove me:

fused to sense and sensation, to a logic

other than attainment’s, unknowns beckoned,

from beyond even the clover and dusk.

My Sadness

Not grounded in suffering, nor even

in death, mine or anyone else’s,

it was sufficient unto itself, death and pain

were only portions of its inescapable sway.

Nor in being alone, though loneliness contained

much of the world, and infected the rest.

Sadness was the rest; engrossed in it, rapt,

I thought it must be what was called soul.

Don’t souls, rapt in themselves, ravish themselves?

Wasn’t I rapt? Wasn’t I ravaged?

Tenses

Then seemingly all at once there was a
past,

of which you were more than incidentally composed.

Opaque, dense, delectable as oil paint,

fauceted from a source it itself generated in you,

you were magnified by it, but it could intrude,

and weigh, like an unfathomable obligation.

Everything ending waited there, which meant

much would never be done with, even yourself,

the memory of the thought of yourself you were now,

that thought seemingly always hardly begun.

III

Elegy for an Artist

for Bruce McGrew

Wichita, Kansas, 1937–Rancho Linda Vista, Arizona, 1999

1.
THE REHEARSAL

(
Months before
)

Vivaldi’s
Stabat

Mater,
an amateur

ensemble in a church,

the conductor casual

but competent enough,

the strings adequately

earnest so if they thump

a little or go sour,

that igniting passion’s

still there. The singer,

waiting, hugs herself,

as though the music

chilled her, then with a fierce

attack, a pure, precise

ecstatic lift above

the weavings of the rest,

she soars, and as I

often do these days,

I think of you, old friend

so far away, so ill,

of how I’d love to have

you listening with me,

though with every

passage you are with

me, always with me,

as music we cherish

is always with us, only

waiting to be ascended

to again, to confirm

again there’ll always

be these counterpoints

of memory and love,

unflawed by absence

or sorrow; this music

we hear, this other,

richer still, we are.

2.
WEPT

(
The day after
)

Never so
much
absence,

though, and not just absence,

never such a sense

of violated presence,

so much desolation,

so many desperate

last hopes refuted,

never such pure despair.

Surely I know by now

that each death demands

its own procedures

of mourning, but I can’t

find those I need even

to begin mourning you:

so much affectionate

accord there was with you,

that to imagine

being without you

is impossibly

diminishing; I relied

on you to ratify

me, to reflect

and sanction with your life

who I might be in mine.

So restorative you were,

so much a response:

untenable that

the part of me you shared

with me shouldn’t have you

actively a part of it.

Never so much absence,

so many longings ash,

as you are ash. Never

so cruel the cry within,

Will I never again

be with you?
Ash. Ash.

3.
WITH YOU

(
Months after
)

One more morning I want

with you, one last dawn

together on your porch,