My Noiseless Entourage: Poems (3 page)

The translator is a close reader.
He wears thick glasses
As he peers out the window
At the snowy fields and bushes
That are like a sheet of paper
Covered with quick scribble
In a language he knows well enough,
Without knowing any words in it,

Only what the eyes discern,
And the heart intuits of its idiom.
So quiet now, not even a faint
Rustle of a page being turned
In a white and wordless dictionary
For the translator to avail himself
Before whatever words are there
Grow obscure in the coming darkness.

You were always more real to me than God.
Setting up the props for a tragedy,
Hammering the nails in
With only a few close friends invited to watch.

Just to be neighborly, you made a pretty girl lame,
Ran over a child with a motorcycle.
I can think of a million similar examples.
Ditto: How the two of us keep meeting.

A fortune-telling gumball machine in Chinatown
May have the answer,
An old creaky door opening in a horror film,
A pack of cards I left on a beach.

I can feel you snuggle close to me at night,
With your hot breath, your cold hands—
And me already like an old piano
Dangling out of a window at the end of a rope.

Taking cover in the closet
With my dark suspicions.
Two of her nightgowns brush my cheeks
As I stand trembling.

At the funeral, I thought I had much to say,
When in truth I had nothing.
I was just one more crow
Trailing after the pallbearers.

This house is haunted,
Though I've never seen a ghost.
I don't count myself, of course,
Or their bare feet in bed,

Incubus, spreading his black wings
Over her in the slow afternoon hours
As she lay writhing
Like a snake at the end of a stick.

In one of these old seaside towns,
On soot-stained December afternoons
When it's wise to hurry home
Past the closed-up summer homes,
While he hugs the shadows in pursuit.

I caught a glimpse of him once
Towering in his stovepipe hat
At the top of the stairs to my room
With its view of the sky at sunset
Washing its bloody rags in the sea.

Looking for stowaways under my bed,
Runaway orphans, pot lickers
In wooden clogs, rat and mice catchers
And finding, instead, Melville's book
And a gull moping on the windowsill.

Little candy in death's candy shop,
I gave your sugar a lick
When no one was looking,
Took you for a ride on my tongue
To all the secret places,

Trying to appear above suspicion
As I went about inspecting the confectionary,
Greeting the owner with a nod
With you safely tucked away
And melting to nothing in my mouth.

Talking to themselves, digressing, rambling on—
Or is it a tête-à-tête we are overhearing?
A flutter of self-revelations, a gust of recriminations
With the moon slipping in and out of the clouds.

A half-mad oak tree affronted by nature's conduct,
The vagaries of New England weather.
The foolish adoration of every skimpy ray of sunlight,
Or some other disturbing truth?

A mock-heroic farce being played in whispers.
The tree as the hanging judge, the tree as the accused.
Windy night squabble followed by a long hush
As they wait anxiously for our applause.

Spooked me. They had heard a rumor
We had not yet,
And were collectively
On the verge of panic.

The few of us passing the park
Quickened our steps,
With a wary, sidelong glance
At each other.

Bent under some obscure burden,
We were fleeing,
Crossing the avenue and dispersing
As if we, too, had wings.

The way you sat at the kitchen table
Made you look like you were staring at your feet
Or thinking of the next move
On an invisible chessboard.

Truth to tell, you were doing neither.
It was seven o'clock in the morning.
You were waiting for a ray of sunlight
To warm your cold feet,

Or your wife to amble in drowsily
In her frayed blue bathrobe,
And reach down with hair over her eyes
For the paper that had slid out of your hands
With its headline and large picture,

And remain like that, bent over, reading
Intently, with her robe opening bit by bit,
The dangling breast and dark pubic hair
Still moist with sleep coming into full view,
While she read on in that ghastly whisper.

Because few here recall the old wars,
The burning of Atlanta and Dresden,
The great-uncle who lies in Arlington,
Or that Vietnam vet on crutches
Who tried to bum a dime or a cigarette.

The lake is still in the early morning light.
The road winds; I slow down to let
A small, furry animal cross in a hurry.
The few remaining wisps of fog
Are like smoke rising out of cannons.

In one little town flags fly over dark houses.
Outside a church made of gray stone,
The statue of the Virgin blesses the day.
Her son is inside afraid to light a candle,
Saying,
Forgive one another, clothe the naked.

Niobe and her children may live here.
As for me, I don't know where I am—
And here I'm already leaving in a hurry
Down a stretch with little to see,
Dark woods everywhere closing in on me.

Tyrants never sleep a wink:
An aggrieved and grim
Unblinking eye
Stares back at the night.

The mind is a palace
Walled with mirrors.
The mind is a country church
Overrun with mice.

When dawn breaks,
The saints kneel,
The tyrants feed their hounds
Chunks of bloody meat.

Never-yet-equaled, wide-screen blockbuster
That grew more and more muddled
After a spectacular opening shot.
The pace, even for the most patient
Killingly slow despite the promise
Of a show-stopping, eye-popping ending:
The sudden shriveling of the whole
To its teensy starting point, erasing all—
Including this bag of popcorn we are sharing.

Yes, an intriguing but finally irritating
Puzzle with no answer forthcoming tonight
From the large cast of stars and galaxies
In what may be called a prodigious
Expenditure of time, money and talent.
"Let's get the fuck out of here," I said
Just as her upraised eyes grew moist
And she confided to me, much too loudly,
"I have never seen anything so beautiful."

A memory of a cloudless summer sky,
The elegant boredom of trees
On a slow, windless day.
The quiet of little-traveled country roads
Crisscrossed by shadows.

The house with curtains drawn,
A pair of red slippers on the front steps,
But no one in the barn
Or among the roses, which like being greeted
And admired this early.

Love, that damn fool, who points a flashlight
With a dying battery into the past
Ought to find more than a goat
Tied to a stake ready to butt anyone
Should they dare to step his way.

Surely, he could make it easier
When it comes to inquiries
As to his whereabouts.
Rein in our foolish speculations,
Silence our voices raised in anger,

And not leave us alone
With that curious feeling
We sometimes have
Of there being a higher purpose
To our residing here
Where nothing works
And everything needs fixing.

The least he could do is put up a sign:
AWAY ON BUSINESS
So we could see it,
In the graveyard where he collects the rent
Or in the night sky
Where we address our complaints to him.

Your prayer. The one you offered
On behalf of someone ailing.
Darkness was his world,
So you shut your eyes tight to come into it.

There was no one there.
He may be wearing another disguise,
You were told.
No one can keep track.

The morning light was full of cobwebs,
As if it had brushed against a ghost.
A cow they forgot to milk
Had lowed all night long.

Now it was peaceful again.
Her bed had its sheets stripped off.
One of her red slippers missing—
In fact, nowhere to be found.

These wars that end
Only to start up again
Somewhere else
Like barber's clippers,
Or like these winters
With their bleak days
One can trace back to Cain.

All I've ever done—
It seems—is go poking
In the ruins with a stick
Until I was covered
With soot and ashes
I couldn't wash off,
Even if I wanted to.

Night is coming.
A lone hitchhiker
Holds up a homemade sign.

Masked figures
Around a gambling table?
No, those are scarecrows in a field.

At the neighbors',
Where they adore a black cat,
There's no light yet.

Dear Lord, can you see
The fleas run for cover?
No, he can't see the fleas.

Who hasn't been seen in his yard
Or sitting on his front porch
For what seems like forever,
Whose house stays dark at night,
The garage closed, the great
Hearse of a car parked in the back.

Whom, nevertheless, we suspect
Of spying on us at all hours
From behind drawn curtains,
His absence and our alleged presence
Casting shadows on the street
Of almost identical homes

Where an odd rush of wind in the leaves
Now and then makes us imagine
We are hearing muffled voices
Where in truth there is no one,
Only an upstairs window partly open
Over his surprisingly well-kept lawn.

Extraordinary efforts are being made
To hide things from us, my friend.
Some stay up into the wee hours
To search their souls.
Others undress each other in darkened rooms.

The creaky old elevator
Took us down to the icy cellar first
To show us a mop and a bucket
Before it deigned to ascend again
With a sigh of exasperation.

Under the vast, early-dawn sky
The city lay silent before us.
Everything on hold:
Rooftops and water towers,
Clouds and wisps of white smoke.

We must be patient, we told ourselves,
See if the pigeons will coo now
For the one who comes to her window
To feed them angel cake,
All but invisible, but for her slender arm.

Some of these poems have previously appeared in the following magazines, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made:
The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, TLS, The Iowa Review, Jubilat, The NewEngland Review, Literary Imagination,
and
Tri-Quarterly.