Rock Harbor (3 page)

so terrible. Why

is it? What so satisfied,

before, about distortion

that, now, I miss it?

There should be birds,

sky-strung, and

following, isn't that what

happens in the wake,

at first, of a sea

departure? To have

ever heard such or—once

heard—to have

trusted in it—

Which is worse,

the incidental, or the more

deliberate? How

much of what seems

deliberate isn't, is

instead unavoidably

inherent, a fact

of character, of the self

no one chooses—

incidental, therefore. The blame

that lies always

somewhere matters

here—seems to—no

more than whether I wave or don't

at the nothing, almost, left

to wave at. I am

farther, even, than I imagined,

or hoped for, or

against— Which?

There should be custom,

conduct, some

compass fashioned out of

rules by which to fix

not on failure's

occurrence—what needs

no marker—but on,

of that occurrence, what degree

exactly. Surely even a

precision concerning

the difficult-to-admit-to will have

had its pleasures? The air,

for example, heavy,

less with blooming than with

the thought of. A collapse

of vision; the rise,

accordingly, of craft—

here,

between the two, where neither

one, to the other, gives

ever itself up

entirely, the narrowest space,

opening:

it shuts behind me.

THREE

BLUE SHOULDER

Come here.

See how the boughs pass

idly over, across

one another, return

after, as a hand

can do

with what never will be

possessed—only

wanted, touched only—

and then to its original position come

less unpunished than

untempted toward what is punishable

back slowly.

                     This is the way

a house shakes

in a wind—the way, in the throat,

song does. Hear it? This is

the kind of rain that

so much looks like not

stopping, we get used to it,

an end to falling becomes

the last thing we expected,

and—there, an ending. I think

pleasure is like that, or

can be, I think

you are.

              The snow,

what remains of it, slides

melted, free from an earlier

stranding-place among

storm-stunted rhododendrons—

the leaves in turn find

again the pose of here-no-there

remembering,

or asking,

what did a snowlessness

once resemble? To ask as much

maybe should not

be to open, however

narrow, a door

on suffering—I think it can be. If you

will not stay, go now.

SPOKEN PART, FOR COUNTERTENOR VOICE

I. Carolina Window

Through the glass, spillage—

no longer half-explaining

the story—becomes the story:

limb tree thicket

until, further, the wooded miles.

A field of view, which is to say

finite. Making what is

continuous and whole

seem discrete, divisible, as

if to the material world and our

vision of it could be assigned

the same properties, which

is impossible—a variety, at

best, of hoping. Not hope itself.

II. Window, Graham Chapel

Against the figured pane

the hours lean, almost—

time a ghost, granted only

part of its wish: substance, but

without visibility. —Color, or

the light, angling shine,

something gives to the face

of Christ the look of one who

understands, like never before,

damage as the song with which

the sleeve of God comes lined.

Necessity to shadow, as any

wind to the branch inside it.

There's a flaw in the glass.

ROCK HARBOR

The wind was high—it gave to your

hair a lift in equal parts gradual,

steep, disarming—

                                  I love a storm,

and said so; by
I have always

loved better the wreckage after,

I did not mean instead of, but

a preference.

                       To the air, an edge

anyone would call arctic—isn't

that why we left it nameless? To

your face, a look I'd admired before

in the bodies of those who seem

not so much indifferent as made

ignorant, or stunned as if by

sudden luck, or else repentant and

in payment, somehow, for what

all price falls like an irrelevance,

a stole, an expensive sail in a

calm away from. Sex

as a space available where neither

loss nor regret figures—imagine

that.

         Or not having, finally, to take

anything away—in the form of

photographs of the mostly ice

that the harbor's water, the shore

past that, the street after had

become; or as words like those

that came to me:
green, kind of,

lit almost, but as if from within

in places, a spill but

an arrested one, less force than

the idea of it, block and edge like

the chance for pattern, but

spent now or only, from the very

start, false

                  
—false and singing.

The wind was high; it exaggerated

what you were already, a man

returning toward shelter he can't

see yet, but believes just ahead

exists, the sort of man for whom

to doubt at all is treason. By

not unfaithful,
I understood I

could mean both things: I'd do

nothing I'd promised not to—

Also, there is nothing I'll forget.

FOUR

TRADE

Bending—as no

flower bends—

casting the difficult rule

of his attention upon an elsewhere

that accordingly broke open

into a splendor that, too,

would pass,

I am resigned,

mostly,

said the emperor,

to a history between us less of loss than,

more protractedly, of losing—

and, having said as much, said

nothing else to the man to

whom he'd said it;

whom, for years now, he'd called

variously paramour,

consort,

sir; who, for

himself, said nothing;

who from where he was seated could

see, and easily,

each at its labeled and color-coded slip

moored slackly,

the bows of the ships of the Fleet

Imperial, about which

what he found, just

then, most worth admiring it

is impossible, anymore, to

say exactly:

the trim of them,

flawless, sleek—reminiscent, in

that way, of almost any line from Ovid; or

when there was wind,

how the bows tipped,

idly,

in it;

or the stillness, afterwards,

that they found; or the way they seemed to.

TO THE TUNE OF A SMALL, REPEATABLE, AND PASSING KINDNESS

In the cove of hours-like-a-dream this

is, it isn't so much

that we don't enjoy watching

a view alter rather little, and each time

in the same shift-of-a-cloud

fashion. It's the

swiftness with which we

find it easier, as our cast

lines catch more and more at nothing,

to lose heart—

                          All afternoon, it's

been with the fish as with

lovers we'd come to think of as

mostly forgotten, how

anymore they less often themselves

surface than sometimes

will the thought of them—less

often, even, than that, their names …

But now the fish bring to mind

—of those lovers—

the ones in particular

who were knowable

only in the way a letter written

in code that resists

being broken fully can be

properly called a letter we

understand:
If

you   a minute   could you   when

said I might   however

what if   haven't I loved

—who?

             As I remember it, I'd lie

in general alone, after, neither in

want nor—at first—sorry inside

the almost-dark I'd

wake to. The only stirring

the one of last light getting

scattered, as if for

my consideration. All over the room.

CAVALRY

The best views—the ones

from horseback—will be

no longer: surely no one can

fail to see how

the horses, perishing, are

all but done for. Already, though,

the idea of infantry

rears before us—a prospect

we find not without its

portion, more than fair, of

invitation. So much

as well, meanwhile, will go

unchanged: the peculiar,

undistracted

sorrow attached to

bugle call, at sunset, a sorrow

finally that of inquiry

itself, whose modes are two:

to branch,

to cluster,

manifesting itself in

panicles, as of lilacs, the still

remembered stoop we called

bluebells, if blue—if white,

snowdrops, wasn't

that it,

when we knew no better than

to name the light at dusk

flirtation,

for how it seemed

each night like—

first—going,

then gone forever, and then

came back. It seems less to have

been flirtation—more,

a career spent saying,

perpetually,

farewell, until

who believes it? Even now,

we have only to lift

long enough our

faces, the light

again gives what it

always has to flesh,

a color that makes

briefly forgettable how

the art of casting bronze

is a mostly

lost one.

There seems nothing that is

impossible. Soon, darkness;

we'll put the horses down,

a mercy. We'll salvage, find

rest beside their still

good-for-trade

saddles: cool, and

wet, by morning.

TO SPEAK OF IT NOW

Leaving, he conducted his

body as if it were that of a child

Pharaoh, who

understands to a sometimes

dimming,

brightening other times,

degree the possibilities for

great power,

has been told it somewhere

rests finally inside

himself.

How he will use it,

whether he will or won't

live to do so, neither

the hand, ring-heavy, nor

the head beneath its abbreviated

tower of crown

quite answers.

North of here, in a country he

won't ever know of,

snow falls like the part

of argument where

all room for argument now

diminishes,

is gone, becomes like

dream that

—did it happen?

Made small

by distance,

through a window,

the people he does not easily yet

call his own

seem the pinchings-off

of clay,

what gets forgiven that it is dirty

by the ease with which it can be

shaped into something beautiful that

also serves.

That
he
thinks of them, though,

that way, is

less than believable, it is

unlikely still he considers them much

at all.

He is quiet mostly. This

does not mean that if asked to

name, among the world's most

lovely things,

the second—or if third,

a close one—he

would not know.

The Nile by moonlight.

The Nile with the stars upon it.

THOSE PARTS THAT RESCUE LOOKED LIKE

The usual, pulled, expansive

afternoon—the flattish

light of it less

disclosure, more a stripping from

the field its

small details—

I had almost forgotten that definition

requires shadow. I had

been distracted, had found

myself among the ones who would be

persuaded, singing as if

of song were made the ship called Self-

Persuasion:
we shall not

want what we do not

miss, we cannot

miss what we don't

remember …

                      But if persuasion is

not a ship? if

no persuasion? —I

did not ask. I'd forgotten, almost,

that to want to know a life

entirely is not

the worst thing: obliteration,

for example, is worse—