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Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,

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99 POEMS

ALSO BY DANA GIOIA

POETRY

Daily Horoscope

The Gods of Winter

Interrogations at Noon

Pity the Beautiful

CRITICAL COLLECTIONS

Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

The Barrier of a Common Language: Essays on

Contemporary British Poetry

Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture

TRANSLATIONS

Mottetti: Poems of Love by Eugenio Montale

The Madness of Hercules by Seneca

OPERA LIBRETTI

Nosferatu

Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast

The Three Feathers

99 POEMS

New & Selected

BY

Dana Gioia

Graywolf Press

Copyright

Copyright © 2016 by Dana Gioia

The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-732-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-925-6

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2016

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953592

Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

Dedication

For My Sons

MIKE AND TED

Beloved Sons and Fellow Writers

99 POEMS

• I •

MYSTERY

THE BURNING LADDER

Jacob

never climbed the ladder

burning in his dream. Sleep

pressed him like a stone

in the dust,

and when

he should have risen

like a flame to join

that choir, he was sick

of traveling,

and closed

his eyes to the Seraphim

ascending, unconscious

of the impossible distances

between their steps,

missed

them mount the brilliant

ladder, slowly disappearing

into the scattered light

between the stars,

slept

through it all, a stone

upon a stone pillow,

shivering. Gravity

always greater than desire.

INSOMNIA

Now you hear what the house has to say.

Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,

the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,

and voices mounting in an endless drone

of small complaints like the sounds of a family

that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,

all that you’ve worked for these past years,

the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,

the moving parts about to come undone,

and twisting in the sheets remember all

the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

How many voices have escaped you until now,

the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,

the steady accusations of the clock

numbering the minutes no one will mark.

The terrible clarity this moment brings,

the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

THE STARS NOW REARRANGE THEMSELVES

The stars now rearrange themselves above you

but to no effect. Tonight,

only for tonight, their powers lapse,

and you must look toward earth. There will be

no comets now, no pointing star

to lead where you know you must go.

Look for smaller signs instead, the fine

disturbances of ordered things when suddenly

the rhythms of your expectation break

and in a moment’s pause another world

reveals itself behind the ordinary.

And one small detail out of place will be

enough to let you know: a missing ring,

a breath, a footfall or a sudden breeze,

a crack of light beneath a darkened door.

NOTHING IS LOST

Nothing is lost. Nothing is so small

that it does not return.

Imagine

that as a child on a day like this

you held a newly minted coin and had

the choice of spending it in any way

you wished.

Today the coin comes back to you,

the date rubbed out, the ancient mottoes vague,

the portrait covered with the dull shellac

of anything used up, passed on, disposed of

with something else in view, and always worth

a little less each time.

Now it returns,

and you will think it unimportant, lose

it in your pocket change as one more thing

that’s not worth counting, not worth singling out.

That is the mistake you must avoid today.

You sent it on a journey to yourself.

Now hold it in your hand. Accept it as

the little you have earned today.

And realize

that you must choose again but over less.

DO NOT EXPECT

Do not expect that if your book falls open

to a certain page, that any phrase

you read will make a difference today,

or that the voices you might overhear

when the wind moves through the yellow-green

and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the

dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon

your shadow walks beside you on the wall,

and the days stay long and heavy underneath

the distant rumor of the harvest. One

more summer gone,

and one way or another you survive,

dull or regretful, never learning that

nothing is hidden in the obvious

changes of the world, that even the dim

reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass

is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then

you touch, you see, you press against

the surface of impenetrable things.

BEWARE OF THINGS IN DUPLICATE

Beware of things in duplicate:

a set of knives, the cufflinks in a drawer,

the dice, the pair of Queens, the eyes

of someone sitting next to you.

Attend that empty minute in the evening

when looking at the clock, you see

its hands are fixed on the same hour

you noticed at your morning coffee.

These are the moments to beware

when there is nothing so familiar

or so close that it cannot betray you:

a twin, an extra key, an echo,

your own reflection in the glass.

ALL SOULS’

Suppose there is no heaven and no hell,

And that the dead can never leave the earth,

That, as the body rots, the soul breaks free,

Weak and disabled in its second birth.

And then invisible, rising to the light,

Each finds a world it cannot touch or hear,

Where colors fade and, if the soul cries out,

The silence stays unbroken in the air.

How flat the ocean seems without its roar,

Without the sting of salt, the bracing gust.

The sunset blurs into a grayish haze.

The morning snowfall is a cloud of dust.

The pines that they revisit have no scent.

They cannot feel the needled forest floor.

Crossing the stream, they watch the current flow

Unbroken as they step down from the shore.

They want their voices to become the wind—

Intangible like them—to match its cry,

Howling in treetops, covering the moon,

Tumbling the storm clouds in a rain-swept sky.

But they are silent as a rising mist,

A smudge of smoke dissolving in the air.

They watch the shadows lengthen on the grass.

The pallor of the rose is their despair.

ON APPROACHING FORTY

The thought pursues me through this dreary town

where the wind sweeps down from the high plateau

and where a diving chimney swift can cut

the slender thread of mountains far away.

So soon come forty years of restlessness,

of tedium, of unexpected joy,

quick as a gust of wind in March is quick

to scatter light and rain. Soon come delays,

snatched from the straining hands of those I love,

torn from my haunts, the customs of my years

suddenly crushed to make me understand.

The tree of sorrow shakes its branches…

The years rise like a swarm around my shoulders.

Nothing has been in vain. This is the work

which all complete together and alone,

the living and the dead, to penetrate

the impenetrable world, down open roads,

down mineshafts of discovery and loss,

and learned from many loves or only one,

from father down to son—till all is clear.

And having said this, I can start out now,

easy in the eternal company

of all things living, of all things dead,

to disappear in either dust or fire

if any fire endures beyond its flame.

(From the Italian of Mario Luzi)

MAZE WITHOUT A MINOTAUR

If we could only push these walls

apart, unfold the room the way

a child might take apart a box

and lay it flat upon the floor—

so many corners cleared at last!

Or else could rip away the roof

and stare down at the dirty rooms,

the hallways turning on themselves,

and understand at last their plan—

dark maze without a minotaur,

no monsters but ourselves.

Yet who

could bear to see it all? The slow

descending spirals of the dust

against the spotted windowpane,

the sunlight on the yellow lace,

the hoarded wine turned dark and sour,

the photographs, the letters—all

the crowded closets of the heart.

One wants to turn away—and cry

for fire to break out on the stairs

and raze each suffocating room.

But the walls stay, the roof remains

strong and immovable, and we

can only pray that if these rooms

have memories, they are not ours.

WORDS

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,

painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving

each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—

greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

INTERROGATIONS AT NOON

Just before noon I often hear a voice,

Cool and insistent, whispering in my head.

It is the better man I might have been,

Who chronicles the life I’ve never led.

He cannot understand what grim mistake

Granted me life but left him still unborn.

He views his wayward brother with regret

And hardly bothers to disguise his scorn.

“Who is the person you pretend to be?”

He asks, “The failed saint, the simpering bore,

The pale connoisseur of spent desire,

The half-hearted hermit eyeing the door?

“You cultivate confusion like a rose

In watery lies too weak to be untrue,

And play the minor figures in the pageant,

Extravagant and empty, that is you.”

ENTRANCE

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,

Out of the room that lets you feel secure.

Infinity is open to your sight.

Whoever you are.

With eyes that have forgotten how to see

From viewing things already too well-known,

Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree

And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.

And you have made the world and all you see.

It ripens like the words still in your mouth.

And when at last you comprehend its truth,

Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

(From the German of Rainer Maria Rilke)

NEW YEAR’S

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.

Eternity has festivals enough.

This is the feast of our mortality,

The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,

Pretending that we live the present moment.

But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,

This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now

Be our true habitat? The present is

The leaky palm of water that we skim

From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want

Simply by bringing us along—to see

A calendar with every day uncrossed,

A field of snow without a single footprint.

THE ANGEL WITH THE BROKEN WING

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,

The one large statue in this quiet room.

The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut

Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design

Above the chatter of the gallery.

Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—

The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.

(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)

I stood beside a gilded altar where

The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—

Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.

Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,

And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution

(Even a saint can savor irony)

When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.

They hit me once—almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,

A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?

A trembling unaccounted by their laws,

An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!

The howling of the damned can’t reach so high.

But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,

A crippled saint against a painted sky.

PROPHECY

Sometimes a child will stare out of a window

for a moment or an hour—deciphering

the future from a dusky summer sky.

Does he imagine that some wisp of cloud

reveals the signature of things to come?

Or that the world’s a book we learn to translate?

And sometimes a girl stands naked by a mirror

imagining beauty in a stranger’s eyes

finding a place where fear leads to desire.

For what is prophecy but the first inkling

of what we ourselves must call into being?

The call need not be large. No voice in thunder.

It’s not so much what’s spoken as what’s heard—

and recognized, of course. The gift is listening

and hearing what is only meant for you.

Life has its mysteries, annunciations,

and some must wear a crown of thorns. I found

my Via Dolorosa in your love.

And sometimes we proceed by prophecy,

or not at all—even if only to know

what destiny requires us to renounce.

O Lord of indirection and ellipses,

ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction.

Slow our heartbeat to a cricket’s call.

In the green torpor of the afternoon,

bless us with ennui and quietude.

And grant us only what we fear, so that

Underneath the murmur of the wasp

we hear the dry grass bending in the wind

and the spider’s silken whisper from its web.

THE ROAD

He sometimes felt that he had missed his life

By being far too busy looking for it.

Searching the distance, he often turned to find

That he had passed some milestone unaware,

And someone else was walking next to him,

First friends, then lovers, now children and a wife.

They were good company—generous, kind,

But equally bewildered to be there.

He noticed then that no one chose the way—

All seemed to drift by some collective will.

The path grew easier with each passing day,

Since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill.

The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom.

Where was it he had meant to go, and with whom?

PRAYER AT WINTER SOLSTICE

Blessed is the road that keeps us homeless.

Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way.

Blessed are hunger and thirst, loneliness and all forms of desire.

Blessed is the labor that exhausts us without end.

Blessed are the night and the darkness that blind us.

Blessed is the cold that teaches us to feel.

Blessed are the cat, the child, the cricket, and the crow.

Blessed is the hawk devouring the hare.

Blessed are the sinner and the saint who redeem each other.

Blessed are the dead, calm in their perfection.

Blessed is the pain that humbles us.

Blessed is the distance that bars our joy.

Blessed is this shortest day that makes us long for light.

Blessed is the love that in losing we discover.

MONSTER

Night-born, malformed, maleficent,

pale as a pulled root,

a monster prowls the woods.

What other explanation is there

for the gutted deer, the naked

footprint by the bedroom window?

Now the neighbor’s dog

has disappeared. The back gate’s broken.

I keep the shotgun loaded.

How often now the birds

suddenly go silent in the trees.

What do they hear?

This thing of darkness I

acknowledge mine. I made it.

I let it escape. Now it returns.

Go on, you ragged underling.

Stalk me with your pitiful strategies.

Starve and shiver in the darkness.

Cry to me from the thorny ravine.

I’m safe behind locked doors.

I will not answer or embrace

the thing I have created.

HOMAGE TO SOREN KIERKEGAARD

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

—ST. PAUL

I was already an old man when I was born.

Small with a curved back, he dragged his leg when walking

the streets of Copenhagen. “Little Kierkegaard,”

they called him. Some meant it kindly. The more one suffers

the more one acquires a sense of the comic.

His hair rose in waves six inches above his head.

Save me, O God, from ever becoming sure.

What good is faith if it is not irrational?

Christianity requires a conviction of sin.

As a boy tending sheep on the frozen heath,

his starving father cursed God for his cruelty.

His fortunes changed. He grew rich and married well.

His father knew these blessings were God’s punishment.

All would be stripped away. His beautiful wife died,

then five of his children. Crippled Soren survived.

The self-consuming sickness unto death is despair.

What the age needs is not a genius but a martyr.

Soren fell in love, proposed, then broke the engagement.

No one, he thought, could bear his presence daily.

My sorrow is my castle. His books were read

but ridiculed. Cartoons mocked his deformities.

His private journals fill seven thousand pages.

You could read them all, he claimed, and still not know him.

He who explains this riddle explains my life.

When everyone is Christian, Christianity

does not exist. The crowd is untruth. Remember

we stand alone before God in fear and trembling.

At forty-two he collapsed on his daily walk.

Dying he seemed radiant. His skin had become

almost transparent. He refused communion

from the established church. His grave has no headstone.

Now with God’s help I shall at last become myself.

• II •

PLACE

CALIFORNIA HILLS IN AUGUST

I can imagine someone who found

these fields unbearable, who climbed

the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,

cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,

wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn

the meagerness of summer, the dry

twisted shapes of black elm,

scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape

August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging

thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,

knowing everything was just a weed,

unable to conceive that these trees

and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon

without wind, without motion,

the only other living thing

a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended

in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone

raised in a landscape short of rain—

the skyline of a hill broken by no more

trees than one can count, the grass,

the empty sky, the wish for water.

CRUISING WITH THE BEACH BOYS

So strange to hear that song again tonight

Traveling on business in a rented car

Miles from anywhere I’ve been before.

And now a tune I haven’t heard for years

Probably not since it last left the charts

Back in L.A. in 1969.

I can’t believe I know the words by heart

And can’t think of a girl to blame them on.

Every lovesick summer has its song,

And this one I pretended to despise,

But if I was alone when it came on,

I turned it up full-blast to sing along—

A primal scream in croaky baritone,

The notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred.

No wonder I spent so much time alone

Making the rounds in Dad’s old Thunderbird.

Some nights I drove down to the beach to park

And walk along the railings of the pier.

The water down below was cold and dark,

The waves monotonous against the shore.

The darkness and the mist, the midnight sea,

The flickering lights reflected from the city—

A perfect setting for a boy like me,

The Cecil B. DeMille of my self-pity.

I thought by now I’d left those nights behind,

Lost like the girls that I could never get,

Gone with the years, junked with the old T-Bird.

But one old song, a stretch of empty road,

Can open up a door and let them fall

Tumbling like boxes from a dusty shelf,

Tightening my throat for no reason at all,

Bringing on tears shed only for myself.

IN CHANDLER COUNTRY

California night. The Devil’s wind,

the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,

raging through the canyon like a drunk

screaming in a bar.

The air tastes like

a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?

The weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe.

Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,

lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,

and count your blessings.

Another sleepless night,

when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches

like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,

when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,

and quiet women in the kitchen run

their fingers on the edges of a knife

and eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck.

Tonight it seems that if I took the coins

out of my pocket and tossed them in the air

they’d stay a moment glistening like a net

slowly falling through dark water.

I remember

the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,

the narrow beams dissolving on the dark

surface of the lake, voices arguing

about the forms, the crackling radio,

the sheeted body lying on the sand,

the trawling net still damp beside it. No,

she wasn’t beautiful—but at that age

when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty—

“Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?”

Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door

catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.

Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,

packs of coyotes come down from the hills

where there is nothing left to hunt.

IN CHEEVER COUNTRY

Half an hour north of Grand Central

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