Plundered Hearts (17 page)

•

In Plato’s
Republic,
there is an explanation of this.

Twelve days after his death in battle, the body of Er—

Son of Armenius, a hero of legend in far Pamphylia—

As torches were readied, came to life again on his funeral pyre,

And told what he had seen of the other world,

That his soul in a crush of companions had journeyed

To a mysterious place, two openings, it seemed, in the earth

And two others above, between them the seats of judges

Who bound men to their sentences, that they should climb

Or descend, the symbols of their deeds fastened to their backs.

But Er was told only to watch and bear the message back to men.

He saw the dead arrive, dusty with travel, and the souls

Of those already saved step down into a meadow to meet them.

Those who knew one another embraced and wept at tales

Of what they had endured and seen, while those above

Told of delights to come, of injustices reversed, of tyrants

Cast into terrors worse than they had themselves inflicted.

Er then looked up at a column of light to which the chains

Of heaven were attached that held the spindle of Necessity,

Its eight hollowed whorls broadening into spangled ranks

Of wheeling planetary orbits moving as they must,

Each sounding a note in harmony with the rest, and the Fates

Adding their overtones, their hands touching, turning,

Guiding the spindle through its past, its present, its future.

As Er looked on, each mortal soul was asked to choose its genius.

The first were told not to be careless, the last not to despair—

Each would have the lot of his desire, the length of a new life.

Er stood in astonishment as, one after another, men and women,

Because the memory of their previous lives was still so strong,

Asked to be animals in the next, no matter bird or beast,

A blameless, unknowing being not in love with death.

The soul that had once been Orpheus chose the life of a swan,

Not wanting to be born of a woman, hating

The race of women who had murdered him.

Others chose sparrow or horse or, remembering their pain,

An eagle that could circle the slain in their bloody armor,

Slowly circle, high over what men do to themselves.

Then each was given a cup of Unmindfulness

From which some carelessly drank too much

And some too little, so that the past would haunt them.

Er himself was kept from drinking, and how

His body was returned he could never say,

But as the others were driven, like stars shooting,

Up to their births in the world, torches were lit

And Er suddenly woke and found himself

Lying on a pyre, his old parents in tears.

•

In the end, because I took too long to decide,

The bird-lives on the ground there to choose from

Meant I would have to live far from home.

I chose the farthest, the common tufted warbler,

Native to the Maghreb, a small bird,

The size of a fist, the color of wet sand,

My tail brushed with berrystain, my crest

Opening to the sides its fan of mandarin

Barbules gemmed with black incipient beads,

My call a calling,
er-rand,
er-rand,
er-rand.

I can fly to find direction out and sing

Only to attract the echoing air,

But my task, an hour before dawn, is to help

Summon the halfhearted day from its sleep

As the dark begins to tip reluctantly.

My limping chirr, its admonition falling

Into place, glides through the oasis citrus grove,

Switches of scrub beginning to stir and stretch,

To remind who hears it there is work to be done,

Word to be sent ahead of happiness,

Of noon on an iridescent scarab wing,

Of the dank leaf mold and warted rind,

Of the peace in our hours now, for all but them,

Those humans who shout and slash and smell of flesh.

One of them stands alone, every morning, looking

Into water, silently moving his lips. I stay

To keep watch, and something comes back, a sense

From some other life, that because he has never been hurt,

He is impossible to love. For now, he is my errand.

for Edmund White

When as a boy I lay with no clothes, no cover,

The window open to winter, I would watch for the sun

To appear, as today its sharp edge has finally

Sliced through the months of waiting with companions

I loathe because I cannot do this alone.

So the adventure, too long dreamt of and precisely

Planned, will start tomorrow, the calculation

To be mounted against chance. My eye is on the timepiece

Of days, on how we measure the setting out

Of depots to support our coming back to tell

The story to the king whom we allowed to send us.

The sledges are loaded, the dogs—half of them

To be killed to feed the other half—impatient.

Come “night” we will stop, and by “day” move forward

Across the waste of pack ice without a horizon

Before us. No living thing can be replaced.

On a cloud, a compass error, a tangled bootlace

The action may depend, the last secret lost.

The metallic light, the fear of rival black specks

Miles off but hour by hour coming closer,

These are thought by others unscalable barriers.

I have always known that I would be the one

Not just who found but wanted to find the abstract,

Meaningless point on which the planet turns.

Fussily ornate and merely decorative,

Wreaths of fruited branchlets and fluttering ribbons

               Echoing the scrolled plasterwork

               On moldings around the mirrored

                         Parlors where a patron

                         Could straighten his collar,

               Reliefs embellished with glass beads

               To mimic his beloved’s brooch,

Rosettes cast in pairs and affixed with foil and wax,

Then coated with gesso and gilded to seem carved,

Or cross-hatched textures scratched onto the surfaces

Of curling leaves and hammered for the fine matting

               Of metal with tiny pocked points,

               The crinkled foil of gold pressed down

                         Onto the moistened bole

                         For a burnished veneer

               That aligns the soft candlelight

               On the apostle’s face with what

Shines more severely from the Savior’s fingertip,

Is not the sort of frame I prefer to enclose

What I should figure on as an allegory

Of someone’s sense of what he puts between himself

               And the world. I prefer the frame

               Whose entablature seems to shield

                         What it displays, withhold

                         What has been given it

               To help explain the mysteries

               Of the child sent to redeem us.

From architrave to plinth, balusters upholding

What the crested lunette oversees, the rigid

Vocabulary of antiquity admits

No distractions, nothing to lead the eye away

               From the perfected cityscape

               And room, where a sad pale woman

                         Under a stone cherub

                         The color of the clouds

               Holds something that she knows will die.

               A friend sits beside her, peeling

An apple. In the distance, three men on horseback

Look up at her window, the darkness in a frame.

I like trees because they seem more resigned
to the way they have to live than other things do.

—
WILLA CATHER

Here the oak and silver-breasted birches

Stand in their sweet familiarity

While underground, as in a black mirror,

They have concealed their tangled grievances,

Identical to the branching calm above

But there ensnared, each with the others’ hold

On what gives life to which is brutal enough.

Still, in the air, none tries to keep company

Or change its fortune. They seem to lean

On the light, unconcerned with what the world

Makes of their decencies, and will not show

A jealous purchase on their length of days.

To never having been loved as they wanted

Or deserved, to anyone’s sudden infatuation

Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced

To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.

The name in the register was
Pinkerton, Frank,

The plate on his Ford parked next to Cabin Eight

The dented oil-and-orange of the Golden State.

The Pinewoods Motor Court, on the riverbank

A mile south of the Heart Mountain camp,

Seemed more welcoming each visit—not a home

But a familiar port of call where, cold and alone,

He can walk the wards of desire with a signal lamp.

His father’s Navy ties had kept him free—

No bedding, kettle, and hot plate on E-Day.

Milton Eisenhower’s signature

Was clearance enough, but only for him, not her.

The years in Wyoming, she said, have been “okay.”

He stared at her mittens, love’s own internee.

They’d met at a blood drive, winter of ’42,

Her father a clerk, her mother a picture bride.

Pearl Harbor meant they were on the same side.

His father was dead, his mother said she knew

“About the things my husband had done abroad,

About the suicide … mistakes of the past …

A love that made no sense and could not last.

Under his uniform, what man isn’t flawed?”

He filled out a form. She glanced at it and then

Looked up. She saw a future, he the face

Among the fallen blossoms. They agreed to meet.

It was already hard to cross a street

Without an angry stare, or find a place

To share a pot of tea, again and again.

Her name is Tanabata, after the queen

Who wove the Milky Way’s gauzy grisaille,

Her loom but three weak stars in the eastern sky.

Her herdsman-lover can cross the Celestial Stream

On the seventh day of the seventh month, a span

Of birds his passageway, and, as he nears,

The sallow river-mist begins to clear,

The floodtide loses ground where once it ran.

She has waited there for him on the other shore,

A year at a time. She has waited through her tears,

Through all the promises made and broken before.

But there he is! The familiar shape appears.

               At the water’s edge,

               Her robe of rushes and cranes

               Slowly getting wet,

               She can hardly remember

               In which lifetime they had met.

The weeks in the assembly center’s horse stalls—

The stench, the straw, the lack of privacy—

Had made the boxcar and the barracks seem

A privilege. Actual beds and tarpaper walls,

Canned Vienna sausages and kumquats,

The Rockies beyond a barbed-wire fence.

The guards were tight-lipped and indifferent,

Like their old neighbors, who waved and forgot.

The world beyond the camp was a weekly newsreel.

She pretended not to mind the soot and the noise,

Or notice the boys who sat near her at meals—

Those swoony, moon-bit pepper-shaker boys.

She sewed, and gave a day at the clothing bank,

Chewed her pencil, and sometimes wrote to Frank.

Only once had he ever heard her name.

Sitting in the chair of his hospital room

Toward the end, his father suddenly assumed

He knew the story but never whom to blame.

“So long ago.… What was I thinking of?

They said she called you Sorrow. I don’t know why.

We give the silliest names to the things we love.

I killed her, I guess. I called her Butterfly.”

After the funeral, his mother told him more.

She hated what she couldn’t understand.

He watched her twist her handkerchief and cry.

She told him of the blindfold, the knife on the floor …

Already items in memory’s contraband.

The sun sank quickly.
He called her Butterfly
.

He has driven twice a month, for two years now,

Through endless miles of broccoli and sugar beets,

Then east across the mountains to a road that meets

Another, despite the map, and leads somehow

To the Pinewoods’ nondescript, unfastened door.

Only the slant-eyes down the way have a past.

A “salesman” is what he’s called himself if asked,

But no one seems to care much anymore.

Each night at nine he’s at the prison gate.

A pack of Chesterfields, and a familiar face

Is furtively waved in. He’s allowed an hour.

He and Tanny sit and complicate

Their lives, while rival gangs of schoolboys chase

A barking mongrel toward the security tower.