Cover

Dedication

For Carl

AFTER LONG SILENCE

Politeness fades,

a small anchovy gleam
leaving the upturned pot in the dish rack
after the moon has wandered out of the window.

One of the late freedoms, there in the dark.
The leftover soup put away as well.

Distinctions matter. Whether a goat’s
quiet face should be called noble
or indifferent. The difference between a right rigor and pride.

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

PYRACANTHA AND PLUM

Last autumn’s chastened berries still on one tree,

spring blossoms tender, hopeful, on another.

The view from this window

much as it was ten years ago, fifteen.

Yet it seems this morning

a self-portrait both clearer and darker,

as if while I slept some Rembrandt or Brueghel

had walked through the garden, looking hard.

FLOWERING VETCH

Each of the tragedies can be read

as the tale of a single ripening self,

every character part of one soul.

The comedies can be included in this as well.

Often the flaw is a flaw of self-knowledge;

sometimes greed. For this reason

the comic glint of a school of herring leads to no plot line,

we cannot imagine a tragedy of donkeys or bees.

Before the ordinary realities, ordinary failures:

hunger, coldness, anger, longing, heat.

Yet one day, a thought as small as a vetch flower opens.

After, no longer minding the minor and almost wordless role,

playing the messenger given the letter

everyone knows will arrive too late or ruined by water.

To have stopped by the fig and eaten was not an error, then,

but the reason for going.

THEOLOGY

If the flies did not hurry themselves to the window

they’d still die somewhere.

Other creatures choose the other dimension:

to slip

into a thicket, swim into the shaded, undercut

part of the stream.

My dog would make her tennis ball

disappear into just such a hollow,

pushing it under the water with both paws.

Then dig for it furiously, wildly, until it popped up again.

A game or a theology, I couldn’t tell.

The flies might well prefer the dawn-ribboned mouth of a trout,

its crisp and speed,

if they could get there,

though they are not in truth that kind of fly

and preference is not given often in these matters.

A border collie’s preference is to do anything entirely,

with the whole attention. This Simone Weil called prayer.

And almost always, her prayers were successful—

the tennis ball

could be summoned again to the surface.

When a friend’s new pound dog, diagnosed distempered,

doctored for weeks, crawled under the porch to die, my friend crawled after,

pulled her out, said, “No!”,

as if to live were just a simple matter of training.

The coy-dog, startled, obeyed.

Now trots out to greet my car when I come to visit.

Only a firefly’s evening blinking outside the window,

this miraculous story, but everyone hurries to believe it.

HOPE: AN ASSAY

At 79 my friend says, “I feel differently now.

I thought we could change, now I am not so sure.

We are chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees fighting. I begin to lose my old hope.”

How hard he still fights, I think,

still struggling with the nature of human nature, his own and others’.

And I, who have always despaired of change,

see him change and grow hopeful.

TO JUDGMENT: AN ASSAY

You change a life

as eating an artichoke changes the taste

of whatever is eaten after.

Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat—

not objectively present at all—

and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:

to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.

The piano, that good servant,

has none of you in her at all, she lends herself

to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.

Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot

whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.

Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow,

coldly delicious.

For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind,

not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes.

Judgment decrees what remains—

the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment

of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says,

and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner

of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle

fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children.

The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments—

judged beetles especially loved by God,

“because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender:

I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever

carries the quail. Yet however much

I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you:
you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth.

When I have erased you from me entirely,

disrobed of your measuring adjectives,

stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns,

when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter—

not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter—

then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not.

As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk,

find it sweet.

THOSE WHO CANNOT ACT

“Those who act will suffer,

suffer into truth”—

What Aeschylus omitted:

those who cannot act will suffer too.

The sister banished into exile.

The unnamed dog

soon killed.

Even the bystanders vanish,

one by one,

peripheral, in pain unnoticed while

SHEEP’S CHEESE

In the cellar, sheep’s milk cheeses

soak in cold brine.

Once a week, a man comes to turn them.

Sixty pounds lifted like child after child,

lain back re-wrapped

in their cloths on the wooden shelves.

The shelves are nameless, without opinion or varnish.

The wheels are only sheep’s milk, not ripening souls.

He sings no lullabye to them. But his arms know the weight.

BENEATH THE SNOW, THE BADGER’S STEADY BREATHING

Beneath the snow,

the badger’s steady breathing.

He does not count the cold as cold.

He does not call his hunger fate.

His sett is neither large nor small. Not dark.

Closer to tree root than human.

Closer to the wilderness

than to its saints

who sought to learn from where they’d moved.

A life uninterrupting,

without want or aspiration.

A persistence.

And yet not meager. Not unfeeling.

—Sharp starlight coming all the way down to the snow.

SKY: AN ASSAY

A hawk flies through it, carrying

a still-twisting snake twice the length of its body.

Radiation, smoke, mosquitoes, the music of Mahler fly through it.

The sky makes room, adjusting its airy shoulders.

Sky doesn’t age or remember,

carries neither grudges nor hope.

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased

as the not quite imaginable first.

From the fate of thunderstorms, hailstorms, fog,

sky learns no lesson,

leaping through any window as soon as it’s raised.

In speech, furious or tender,

it’s still of passing sky the words are formed.

Whatever sky proposes is out in the open.

Clear even when not,

sky offers no model, no mirror—cloudy or bright—

to the ordinary heart: which is secretive,

rackety, domestic, harboring a wild uninterest in sky’s disinterest.

And so we look right past sky, by it,

through it, to what also is moody and alters—

erosive mountains, eclipsable moons, stars distant but death-bound.

POCKET OF FOG

In the yard next door,

a pocket of fog like a small herd of bison

swallows azaleas, koi pond, the red-and-gold koi.

To be undivided must mean not knowing you are.

The fog grazes here, then there,

all morning browsing the shallows,

leaving no footprint between my fate and the mountain’s.

ARTICULATION: AN ASSAY

A good argument, etymology instructs,

is many-jointed.

By this measure,

the most expressive of beings must be the giraffe.

Yet the speaking tongue is supple,

untroubled by bone.

What would it be

to take up no position,

to lie on this earth at rest, relieved of proof or change?

Scent of thyme or grass

amid the scent of many herbs and grasses.

Grief unresisted as granite darkened by rain.

Continuous praises most glad, placed against nothing.

But thought is hinge and swerve, is winch,

is folding.

“Reflection,”

we call the mountain in the lake,

whose existence resides in neither stone nor water.

TRANSLUCENCE: AN ASSAY

A dog implausibly large,

with fur the color of rose-quartz, slipped through my sleep.

I have never seen roses that color,

or a vein of quartz move through its fissure on soft-padded feet.

This was sure, though: what she wanted was for me to follow.

She did not look back.

A shadow opened then folded behind her.

I followed as if past a gate latch

sliding closed on its own silent weight.

It was not so very different, really.

More as if the narrator had turned and departed,

abandoned the story,

and each tree, each stone, stood clear in its own full fate.

The dream, like the dog, went on, travelled elsewhere.

Passed by the moment when everything might have been changed.

Passed by the moment of knowing I wanted everything changed.

WHAT IS USUAL IS NOT WHAT IS ALWAYS

What is usual is not what is always.

As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back.

Footsteps resume their clipped edges,

birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear.

Where were they? By what route did they return?

A woman mute for years

forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

The bitter young man tires;

the aged one sitting now in his body is tender,

his face carries no regret for his choices.

What is usual is not what is always, the day says again.

It is all it can offer.

Not ungraspable hope, not the consolation of stories.

Only the reminder that there is exception.

THE MOUNTAIN

One moment, the mountain is clear

in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog.

I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again

from my reading and find in the window moonlight—

but when I do, the fog is still there,

and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray

while a single wild goose passed him, silently climbing.

TEARS: AN ASSAY

A great philosopher is born, walks his lifetime’s allotment of footsteps, and dies, but while he is living he has the demeanor and body and voice of a great clown. Each of his propositions is heard, but met with snorts, guffaws, and the wiping of tears of laughter from the eyes. Or perhaps it is the reverse: A great comic is born, walks the earth, and dies. But her demeanor and body and voice are such that people listen gravely, they nod in silence at her words, are moved to weeping by the feelings her thoughts cause to rise. The composition of tears of laughter and tears of grief is not, it seems, the same, though the tongue cannot tell this. Different still the tears of outrage, or the tears that come from a misplaced dust mote, errant eyelash, or flake of soot. Each brought to the earth a great if different pleasure. Each died unsatisfied and angry, though this too is not perceived. And where does the mistake lie, if a mistake is granted at all? In the person who refuses an inescapable fate, or in those who shed at his words their tears of subtly erroneous composition?

POE: AN ASSAY

In “The Gold-Bug,” the overt finding of the treasure

is tossed out mid-tale like a bone to a waiting dog.

His stories were not intended for the canine heart that howls inside us,

though he fed it the tidbits it needed to stay near.

What could simply be seen, named, described was not his interest.

Half-close your eyes, he advised, to double the world.

The process of a discovery accomplished was his interest,

its after-savoring his appetite and his pleasure.

While he wrote, the peppered moths

of industrial London were growing darker with an internalized protective soot.

While he wrote, the last illegal slave ships were still coming in.

In his 150-year-old prose there is only one word you might recognize as archaic.

Omission his characteristic gesture;

stepping into the thought that thought cannot enter

his characteristic desire.

While he wrote, the ongoing, quiet famine of laborers paid below costs of housing and food.

While he wrote, the ongoing, unquiet emptying of the Plains.

These things happened under the culture’s floorboards and behind its walls.

These things happened beneath the lids of half-closed eyes.

It is not precisely true that they are absent, though it is true they do not appear.

Whether they were for him

embraced or subsumed in his offered terrors cannot be known.

While he wrote, Turgenev, Goethe,

and this lithe-legged haiku of Issa from the other side of the world:

Spider,

do not worry.

I keep house casually.

In Poe the worry is like the long-cooled lead in Baltimore house-glass, settled and clear.

THE REFUSAL

The usual stories are of foxes and thick-pelted wolves,

but even a house rat will gnaw off a leg if it must.

Some travel on three legs as swiftly as four.

Swimming is harder,

though my friend’s three-legged wolfhound can still catch a rabbit.

Easy to wish the rat well, now it is gone,

I who have stared at the trap for years,

refusing the clear necessity, the dream-command.

DOG AND BEAR

The air this morning,

blowing between fog and drizzle,

is like a white dog in the snow

who scents a white bear in the snow

who is not there.

Deeper than seeing,

deeper than hearing,

they stand and glare, one at the other.

So many listen lost, in every weather.

The mind has mountains,

Hopkins wrote, against his sadness.

The dog held the bear at bay, that day.

DOWNED BRANCH

I wanted to be intimate to my own life.

What came were

the many eating their way through the tree.

Night of no wind, the grass littered with unripe apples.

The limb fell hard.

It was not

the weight of the apples but the many eating,

even on the ground still eating,

anonymous and steady.

Someone else could name them, genus, species.

Someone else could feel for them affection.

I wanted the intimate knowledge

they had of the tree.

Wanted their simple and ruinous hunger,

made without distinction of the lived-in tree.

VILNIUS

For a long time

I keep the guidebooks out on the table.

In the morning, drinking coffee, I see the spines:

St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Vienna.

Choices pondered but not finally taken.

Behind them—sometimes behind thick fog—the mountain.

If you lived higher up on the mountain,

I find myself thinking, what you would see is

more of everything else, but not the mountain.

“OF”: AN ASSAY

Its chain link can be delicate or massive. In the human realm, directional: though one thing also connects to another through “and,” this is not the same. Consider: “Science and elephants.” “The science of elephants.” “The elephants of science.” In nature, however, the preposition is bidirectional and equal. The tree that possesses the roots is not different from the root-possessed tree. The flashing red of the hummingbird’s crest is the bird; the crust of a bread loaf, the loaf. The interior nonexistent without the external, each part coequal. And so grief too becomes meaningless in that fortunate world.

“TO”: AN ASSAY

If drawn as a cartoon figure,

you would be leaning always forward, feet blurred

with the multiple lines that convey both momentum and hurry.

Your god is surely Hermes:

messenger, inventor,

who likes to watch the traveller passing the crossroads

in any direction.

Your nemesis? The calm existence of things as they are.

When I speak as here,

in the second person, you are quietly present.

You are present in presents as well, which are given to.

Being means and not end, you are mostly modest,

obedient as railroad track to what comes or does not.

Yet your work requires

both transience and transformation:

night changes to day, snow to rain, the shoulder of the living pig to meat.

When attached to verbs, you sometimes change them

to adjectives, adverbs, nouns,

a trick I imagine

would bring enormous pleasure,
were you capable of pleasure. You are not.

You live below the ground of humor, hubris, grievance, grief.

Whatever has been given you,

you carry, indifferent as a planet to your own fate.

Yet it is you,

polite retainer of time and place, who bring us to ours,

who do not leave the house of the body

from the moment of birth until your low-voiced murmur, “dust to dust.”

And so we say, “today,” “tomorrow.”

But from yesterday, like us, you have vanished.

“AND”: AN ASSAY

The strange wind pressed on everything at once—

A door blew open in one room, a vase fell in another.

In this not unlike the word “and”: omnipresent even unseen.

Before disappears.

After transforms into others.

“And”—that strong rock—stays standing.

Undevourable thus of connection. Even death spits it back.

STUDY OF MELON & INSECT

A small misshapen gourd rests on the whiteness.

Near it a beetle, one wing lifted slightly above the other.

No reason why these.

The painter could have practiced a twisted pine branch housing a heron.

He could have brushed the ten thousand fish as arhats at play.

The two have travelled the centuries together

like the two halves

of a long and unlikely marriage met on a park bench—

Six decades, and still I sometimes find him a stranger,

the old woman pretends to complain.

A MAN WALKS THROUGH HIS LIFE

A man walks through his life

as he did when he was a boy,

taking a pear here, an apple there,

three peaches.

It is easy. They are there, by the roadside.

I want to say to him, stop.

I want to say to him, where is the plum tree you planted?

But how can I say this?

I suck on the pit of my question,

I who also eat daily the labor of others.

A DAY COMES

A day comes

when the mouth grows tired

of saying “I.”

Yet it is occupied

still by a self which must speak.

Which still desires,

is curious.

Which believes it has also a right.

What to do?

The tongue consults with the teeth

it knows will survive

both mouth and self,

which grin—it is their natural pose—

and say nothing.

THE DOUBLE

More and more I have come to wonder

about this stranger—

woman whose sweaters and coats resemble my own,

whose taste in breads and coffee

resembles my own,

who sleeps when I sleep, wakens when I awaken.

For her,

whose verb form takes the felicitous s at its close,

what happens is simply what happens.

I fret the most slender of errors—

the name forgotten, the borrowed book unreturned—

but never have found her holding a teacup

or coin between her fingers

as if its substance and purpose were something she did not comprehend.

How self-assured she seems,

who decides nothing,

whose insomnia is to my own what the shadow of a leaf is to a leaf.

I am tired, but she is not tired.

I am wordless;

she, who has never spoken a word of her own,

is full of thoughts as precise and impassioned

as the yellow and black exchanges of a wasp’s striped body.

For a long time I thought her impostor.

Then realized:

her jokes, even her puns, are only too subtle for me to follow.

And so we go on, mostly ignoring each other,

though what I cook, she eats with seeming gusto,

and letters intended for her alone I open with a curious ease,

as if I, not she, were the long-accomplished thief.

NOT ONLY PARALLEL LINES EXTEND TO THE INFINITE

For a few days, any pattern lingers—

Just now, for instance,

though here it is California and late afternoon,

the urge to be drinking bad coffee and eating good butter

on rolls for breakfast at the Hotel Fortuna in Kraków.

Then putting some slices

of brown bread and cheese in a heavy napkin for later.

Flavors vanish first, and then the sounds.

Unphilosophical as a yet unsharpened pencil, the senses;

as without purpose.

A horse’s muzzle struck deep in the oats and his eyes half closed.

At each X, the three worlds meet, then part forever.

Of this the horse knows nothing, living outside of time.

And if I, like Chekhov’s sleepless coachman,

were to go now and whisper “Kraków” into his ears,

he would greet the sound as only another mystery he cannot obey—

a command neither canter nor carrot,

though almost familiar, almost a thing he can taste.

I IMAGINE MYSELF IN TIME

I imagine myself in time looking back on myself—

this self, this morning,

drinking her coffee on the first day of a new year

and once again almost unable to move her pen through the iron air.

Perplexed by my life as Midas was in his world of sudden metal,

surprised that it was not as he’d expected, what he had asked.

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,

what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,

I whose choices made her what she will be?

THE MEETING

The rat was fat and healthy and equally surprised,

almost insulted. Leaving only because I was larger

but renouncing no claim.

As I, at times, have looked my fate in the face

and acknowledged nothing.

Continued as if I could, as if this life were mine to choose,

and I the unquestioned lord of my basement kingdom

with its single, high, and unwashed corner window.

WANTING MORE AND MORE TO LIVE UNOBSERVED, UNOBSERVING

Wanting more and more to live unobserved,

unobserving,

like a dog who takes the bone and goes to another room

where it just fits under the low-legged table or couch.

In the farthest depths, no sunlight reaches.

Yet certain fish, now eyeless, streak with luminescence

when excited;

a lowered bathysphere turns on a floodlight

and is mobbed, the strange-formed bodies drawing in for miles.

No one was ever meant to see this.

Certainly not the fish, who see nothing, whose

tentacles travel the cold light, and no one knows how or why.

Like human beings to a mystery

they imagine feels some passion for their fate.

And the dog? Fallen into the marrow-pleasure completely.

THE DESTINATION

I wanted something, I wanted. I could not have it.

Irremediable rock of refusal, this world thick with bird song,

tender with starfish and apples.

How calming to say, “Turn right at the second corner,”

and be understood,

and see things arrive as they should at their own destination.

Yet we speak in riddles—

“Turn back at the silence.” “Pass me the mountain.”

To the end we each nod, pretending to understand.

LATE SELF-PORTRAIT BY REMBRANDT

The dog, dead for years, keeps coming back in the dream.

We look at each other there with the old joy.

It was always her gift to bring me into the present—

Which sleeps, changes, awakens, dresses, leaves.

Happiness and unhappiness

differ as a bucket hammered from gold differs from one of pressed tin,

this painting proposes.

Each carries the same water, it says.

RYOANJI: AN ASSAY

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