Collected Poems (50 page)

our families still

sleeping, the night’s breezes

barely waned, the foliage

already motionless

in the heat-scorched scrub

across the desert hills,

the wary cactus wrens

and cardinals just

gathering at the feeder;

and one last long walk

out across the ranch,

your paint and brushes

in their beat-up case,

the sheet of
Arches

paper tacked to its board;

out past your studio,

the wash, the cottonwoods

I helped you plant it seems

months not decades ago,

the sagging barbed-wire fence,

the cow and deer trails

worn through the brush; past

mesquite, paloverde,

saguaro, out to

the boulder-strewn canyon

where I loved to watch

as in that harsh, nearly

mineral glare

you’d labor to transfigure

the world before you

to the luminous

distillations of

yourself your paintings were.

*   *   *

Then past there, too, past

world and light and art,

past this sadness from which

I speak now, past speech

and the desire to speak,

into that clear place

of effortlessly

welcoming ardor

that being with you

always was, for me

and all who loved you —

(so many loved you);

past everything except

this single moment

of your presence. Not

that anything’s missing

from our time together —

we had much together —

and not because I need

anything you haven’t

already given me,

or believe the sum

of your life might want

or lack in any way,

nor because I can’t bring

myself to let you go,

can’t bring myself to offer

a definitive farewell,

but because my sadness

still feels incomplete,

and it’s come to me

I need you to help

me grieve for you, as I

needed you to share

all the good and ill

my life has brought me.

*   *   *

But isn’t this just what

grief always makes us think?

Isn’t this what grief
is,

this feeling of a final

salutation that might

link a past that’s finished

with an affection

and a spiritual

companionship ever

in effect, though no

longer generating

matter for remembrance?

But knowing doesn’t

help: so much of

who we are is memory,

and anticipation

of memories to come.

How really believe

there’ll be no more strolls

through cities, no museum

afternoons with you

explaining to me

what the painters meant

to do, and what they did,

no stoppings in cafés,

like that evening in

a barrio in Spain

when an old singer

keened an older song

that almost made us cry

with the awful rawness

of its lamentation:

beyond conception then,

to imagine either

of us ever grieving

that way for the other.

4.
STILL

(
A year
)

But I do grieve, grieve still;

a continent, an

ocean and a year

removed from you, I still

find it impossible

to think of you as
past,

and I know too well

by now there’ll never

be anything like

a persuasive

reconciliation

for your having gone.

What there is instead

is knowing that at least

we had you for a time,

and that we still have

evidence of you, in

your work and in the love

which eternally

informs the work, that

one love which never ends.

And to be able

to tell oneself that once

one knew a man wholly

unsusceptible

to triviality,

bitterness or rancor,

who’d fashioned himself

with such dedication

and integrity

that he’d been released

from those resentments

and envies that can make

the fullest life seem mean:

your life was never mean,

never not inspiring.

*   *   *

A year, summer again,

warm, my window open

on the courtyard where

for a good half hour

an oboe has been

practicing scales. Above

the tangle of voices,

clanging pans, a plumber’s

compressor hectically

intensifying,

it goes on and on,

single-minded, patient

and implacable,

its tempo never

faltering, always

resolutely focused

on the turn above,

the turn below,

goes on as the world

goes on, and beauty,

and the passion for it.

Much of knowing you

was knowing that, knowing

that our consolations,

if there are such things,

dwell in our conviction

that always somewhere

painters will concoct

their colors, poets sing,

and a single oboe

dutifully repeat

its lesson, then repeat

it again, serenely

mounting and descending

the stairway it itself

unfurls before itself.

IV

War

September–October 2001

1.

I keep rereading an article I found recently about how Mayan scribes,

who also were historians, polemicists and probably poets as well,

when their side lost a war, not a rare occurrence apparently,

there having been a number of belligerent kingdoms

struggling for supremacy, would be disgraced and tortured,

their fingers broken and the nails torn out, and then be sacrificed.

Poor things — the reproduction from a mural shows three:

one sprawls in slack despair, gingerly cradling his left hand with his right,

another gazes at his injuries with furious incomprehension,

while the last lifts his mutilated fingers to the conquering warriors

as though to elicit compassion for what’s been done to him: they,

elaborately armored, glowering at one another, don’t bother to look.

2.

Like bomber pilots in our day, one might think, with their radar

and their infallible infrared, who soar, unheard, unseen, over generalized,

digital targets that mystically ignite, billowing out from vaporized cores.

Or like the Greek and Trojan gods, when they’d tire of their creatures,

“flesh ripped by the ruthless bronze,” and wander off, or like the god

we think of as ours, who found mouths to speak for him, then left.

They fought until nothing remained but rock and dust and shattered bone,

Troy’s walls a waste, the stupendous Mesoamerican cities abandoned

to devouring jungle, tumbling on themselves like children’s blocks.

And we, alone again under an oblivious sky, were quick to learn

how our best construals of divinity, our
Do unto, Love, Don’t kill,

could easily be garbled to canticles of vengeance and battle-prayers.

3.

Fall’s first freshness, strange; the seasons’ ceaseless wheel,

starlings starting south, the annealed leaves ready to release,

yet still those columns of nothingness rise from their own ruins,

their twisted carcasses of steel and ash still fume, and still,

one by one, tacked up by hopeful lovers, husbands, wives,

the absent faces wait, already tattering, fading, going out.

These things that happen in the particle of time we have to be alive,

these violations which almost more than any ark or altar

embody sanctity by enacting so precisely sanctity’s desecration.

These broken voices of bereavement asking of us what isn’t to be given.

These suddenly smudged images of consonance and peace.

These fearful burdens to be borne, complicity, contrition, grief.

Fear

September 2001–August 2002

1.

At almost the very moment an exterminator’s panel truck,

the blowup of a cockroach airbrushed on its side,

pulls up at a house across from our neighborhood park,

a battalion of transient grackles invades the picnic ground,

and the odd thought comes to me how much in their rich sheen,

their sheer abundance, their hunger without end, if I let them

they can seem akin to roaches; even their curt, coarse cry:

mightn’t those subversive voices beneath us sound like that?

Roaches, though … Last year, our apartment house was overrun,

insecticides didn’t work, there’d be roaches on our toothbrushes and combs.

The widower downstairs — this is awful — who’d gone through deportation

and the camps and was close to dying now and would sometimes faint,

was found one morning lying wedged between his toilet and a wall,

naked, barely breathing, the entire surface of his skin alive

with the insolent, impervious brutes, who were no longer daunted

by the light, or us — the Samaritan neighbor had to scrape them off.

2.

Vermin, poison, atrocious death: what different resonance they have

in our age of suicide as armament, anthrax, resurrected pox.

Every other week brings new warnings, new false alarms;

it’s hard to know how much to be afraid, or even how.

Once I knew, too well; I was of the generation of the bomb —

Hiroshima, the broiling bubble at Bikini, ICBMs.

The second world war was barely over, in annihilated cities

children just my age still foraged for scraps of bread,

and we were being taught that our war would be nuclear,

that if we weren’t incinerated, the flesh would rot from our bones.

By the time Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off over Cuba,

rockets primed and aimed, we were sick with it, insane.

And now these bewildering times, when those whose interest is

to consternate us hardly bother to conceal their purposes.

Yes, we have antagonists, and some of their grievances are just,

but is no one blameless, are we all to be combatants, prey?

3.

We have offended very grievously, and been most tyrannous,

wrote Coleridge, invasion imminent from radical France;

the wretched plead against us
 … Then,
Father and God,

spare us,
he begged, as I suppose one day I will as well.

I still want to believe we’ll cure the human heart, heal it

of its anxieties, and the mistrust and barbarousness they spawn,

but hasn’t that metaphorical heart been slashed, dissected,

cauterized and slashed again, and has the carnage relented, ever?

Night nearly, the exterminator’s gone, the park deserted,

the swings and slides my grandsons play on forsaken.

In the windows all around, the flicker of the television news:

more politics of terror; war, threats of war, war without end.

A half-chorus of grackles still ransacks the trash;

in their intricate iridescence they seem eerily otherworldly,

negative celestials, risen from some counter-realm to rescue us.

But now, scattering towards the deepening shadows, they go, too.

Chaos

I saw a spider on a library cornice snatch a plump,

brightly lacquered as-a-yellow-pepper beetle

and dash — that was the word — across its system of webs

until it came to a dark lair where it let itself fall,

settle, and avidly, methodically, with evident delectation,

devour its still so sadly brilliantly hued prey.

All this took place in a dream, but even when I woke,

my revulsion wouldn’t abate, nor my dread,

because when I followed the associative tracks

that had brought me to engender such harshness in myself,

I kept being driven further than I wanted to go,

arriving at conclusions I’d never usually entertain.

The beetle, I thought, was the generalized human person,

gullible, malleable, impotent, self-destructive —

gullible, above all, is what kept coming to me;

how the prospect of living without anxiety renders us

ever more anxious, more ready to accede

to interests which clearly contradict ours.

The spider was power, plus limitless greed,

plus an abstraction, not God, but something like God,

which perpetrates something like Babel on us,

within us, though, in our genes; that twist of something

which keeps us with only this many words, and no more,

leaving us all but incoherent to ourselves, thus easily misled.

But why, even in dreams, must I dwell on the dark,

the dire, the
drek?
A foal in a dappling field,

I might have dreamed, a child trailing after with a rope,

but no, the sense, the scent nearly, the dream-scent,

was wild frustration; not pity but some insane collision

with greed, and power, and credulity, above all.

Perhaps I slept then, perhaps I dreamed my muse,

to whom when she appears I too often say,

“You’re not as seemly as I believed, nor as pure,”

and my muse forsakes me. But perhaps the spider is muse,

or the beetle, or Babel; no wonder she’d betray me,

no wonder, bending her languorous note, she’d forsake me.

The Future

That was the future I came back from

vomiting the taste of the sulfur of my lowest