Forbidden City 9780226349732

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Forbidden City

Gail Mazur

Forbidden City

The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London

Gail Mazur is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry series and the author of six previous books of poems, including They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­34956-­5 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­34973-­2 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226349732.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mazur, Gail, author. Forbidden city / Gail Mazur. pages cm — (Phoenix poets) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-226-34956-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-34973-2 (e-book) I. Title. II. Series: Phoenix poets. ps3563.a987f67 2016 811'.54—dc23 2015026529  ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992

(Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii One Forbidden City  3 Mount Fuji  5 Late at Night  7 My Studio  8 Believe That Even in My Deliberateness I Was Not Deliberate  10 Sintra  11 Inventory  13 At Dusk, in the Yard  16 We Swam to an Island of Bees  18 Ou Sont Les Neiges d’Antan  20 Two Philip Guston  23 On Jane Cooper’s “The Green Notebook”  24 Shade  27 Three Instance of Me  33 Doorknobs  34 Things  35 Genealogy  37 Art History  39 The 70s  40 Age  41 Living Treasure  43 Unveiling  45 Family Crucible  46 Perennial  48

Four Night  51 Minnesota  53 Ur-­Dream  56 Elephant Memory  58 To the Charles River  60 Amarin  62 July Saturday Night  64 The Self in Search of the Sublime  65 The Bay  66 Morning Letter  67 Grief  68 Notes 71

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the following publications in which these poems have ­appeared, some in earlier versions: Agni: “Ou Sont Les Neiges d’Antan,” “To the Charles River,” and “Philip Guston” The Atlantic: “Grief ” Cincinnati Review: “Amarin” and “Geneaology” The Harvard Review: “Family Crucible” The Hudson Review: “Mount Fuji,” “Night,” and “Morning Letter” Locomotive: “We Swam to an Island of Bees” Memorious: “My Studio,” “Inventory,” “The 70s,” “Art History,” and “Perennial” New Ohio Review: “Sintra” and “Believe That Even in My Deliberateness” The New Republic: “Instance of Me” Ploughshares: “The Bay” (as “Late Summer”) Plume: “Age,” “Elephant Memory,” “July Saturday Night,” “Shade,” and “Minnesota” Poem-a-Day: “Unveiling” (as “Unveiling, Wakefield”) Poetry Porch: “Living Treasure” and “The Self in Search of the Sublime” Provincetown Arts: “At Dusk, in the Yard” Salamander: “Ur-­Dream” and “On Jane Cooper’s ‘The Green Notebook’” Slate (online): “Forbidden City” and “Late at Night” Tuesday: “Doorknobs”

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One

Forbidden City

Asleep until noon, I’m dreaming we’ve been granted another year. You’re here with me, healthy. Then, half-­awake, the half-­truth—­ this is our last day. Life’s leaking away again, and this time, we know it. Dear body, I hold you, pleading, Don’t leave! but I understand you can’t say anything. Who are we? Are we fictional? We don’t look like our pictures, don’t look like anyone I know. Daylight flickers through a bamboo grove, we approach the Forbidden City, looking together for the Hall of Fulfilling Original Wishes. Time is the treasure, you tell me, and the past is its hiding place. I instruct our fictional children, The past is the treasure, time 3

is its hiding place. If we told him how much we love him, how much we miss him, he could stay. But now you’ve taken me back to Luoyang, to the Garden of Solitary Joy, over a thousand years old—­ I wake, I hold your hand, you let me go.

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Mount Fuji

Hokusai and Hiroshige, my first presents to you, two linen-­bound books that closed with looped ribbons and faux-­ivory clasps. Decades later we gaped at Fuji from a window of Japan Air and gasped together in Narita, a park so immaculate white rocks gleamed graphic in a river of gravel. Later still you’d move between the floating worlds of ukiyo-­e woodcuts and Chinese landscapes, whose surfaces entered you as if it had been fated. A draughtsman’s draughtsman, Hokusai at 70 thought he’d begun to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way plants grow, hoped that by 90 he’d have penetrated to their essential nature. And more, by 100, I will have reached the stage where every dot, every mark I make will be alive. You always loved that resolve, you’d repeat joyfully—­Hokusai’s utterance of faith in work’s possibilities, its reward, that, at 130, he’d perhaps have learned to draw.

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In Edo then, his beloved Fuji was seen as the true source of immortality (as for him it was to be). Will you always give me such spectacular gifts? you asked me that day—­that day when we were 20.

6

Late at Night after reading Su Dongpo’s “Reading Meng Chao”’

Reading awful poems late at night, each word scratchy as a hog’s bristles, my eyes ache and blur in the dimming light. I don’t find one good line, one image, one single flower piercing the mud—­ only ponderous “ideas,” heavy as boulders clogging a clear stream. Or worse, it’s like eating bony little fish—­ or boiled crabs and breaking out in hives! Nothing I hear or see tonight is comfort or anodyne, nothing to lose myself in for part of an hour. . . . Our lives passed like a morning mist, or a night flame whose candle’s burned away. Why strain listening for beautiful music in the witless peeps of an insect, when I can just put the book aside and gaze into your last woodcut’s blue night, rain pelting the riddling moonlight on a blue-­black bay—­more wondrous than words on a page. Better for me.

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My Studio

A garage we called garaggio, ten-­by-­twenty-­two, with a peaked roof. You painted the plywood floor sky blue with a long-­handled roller from Land’s End True Value. With the ceiling fan, a mild breeze always blew, though when the tide was in, the wind would do. My desks—­two flush doors you painted white, on wrought-­iron stands, solid and true. Homasote walls you painted white, too, and seven small windows all new that opened and closed. I hung bamboo shades to block the bay view (distracting for me as it was for you—­its marine clichés, its colorful hullabaloos). Then I push-­ pinned my old poster of Van Gogh’s room at Arles, butter yellow, poppy red, cool blues, and a photo of Elvis the Jew—­ not really a Jew but a shabbos goy who, Saturdays, as a nice Memphis boy, lit gas pilots for his frum neighbors and opened their flues. (When he died the rebbitzen broke down and wept—­ it’s true!) Three flea market lamps; one bookcase from Staples, brand new, Assembly Required asked too much first of me, then of you. When we stood it up, its sides were firmly askew. Without much to-­do I wrote three books. If we had regrets,

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they were very few. Now I know we were the paper, we were the glue. I’m still at my desks, it’s all I can do here by our little dream house at dusk when the bay turns lavender, without you.

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Believe That Even in My Deliberateness I Was Not Deliberate

We’d be calm, we’d be serene, as long as we could believe in the blue dragonflies and balletic monarchs that hovered near us in a kind of peaceable kingdom even while my love’s illness menaced the peace in the summer yard, in the fragile house, in the air I breathed in my deliberateness. My only stratagem, deliberateness: to accept our lot in that pathless time. I thought I’d know what he’d want; what I’d want was-­ n’t any different. Wouldn’t it be, wouldn’t it finally be, not to consider how finite our August? Not to deliberate?

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Sintra 2003

In your office, you, mastering the art of Photoshop, scanning a crumpled snapshot, three inches square, of your father, poolside, jaunty in a blue swimsuit, his straw fedora at a rakish angle, carrying two splashing cups of bica toward your mother. Beaming, gallant, tanned, grinning for her camera. That was in Portugal, in Sintra—­ the village Byron called “most beautiful in the world.” In the old cracked photo, part of his naked chest had flaked away: under the glossy surface an ashen patch. Forty years later at your desk, filial, in a fantasy of surgery, you worked your laptop to repair the wound, dragging pixels of skin tone, of mortal coloration, from his right side to his left. A new skill mastered, new language, new tools that restored but couldn’t save. I watched you transplant a blush of skin—­ a tender ministry, your digital touch 11

lighter than a kiss—­not unlike a kiss—­ exactly where his heart four decades earlier began to falter. As yours, invisibly, did now. —­One of those days we both still thought that somehow, with the proper tools, there was nothing you couldn’t fix.

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Inventory

Clarice, the Swiss appraiser, paces our rooms, listing furnishings on her yellow legal pad with a Waterman pen, a microcamera. Although I’ve asked why we have to do this, I forget the answer. The answer to why is because, inscrutable, outside of logic, helpless, useless because. Wing chairs, a deco lamp, my mother’s cherry dining table—­nothing we both loved using looks tragic. Most nights now I sit in the den reading the colorful spines of your art books, Fra Angelico to Zurburan, volume after volume of Balthus, Botticelli, Cezanne, Degas, Michelangelo, Monet, Titian, Velasquez. Friends. An art school’s asked for them—­ after all, they have no “real” value now, except to me. . . . Upstairs, Cerise—­is that her name?—­gasps at the bentwood chaise, the blonde moderne bedroom “set” my parents bought on their two-­day Depression honeymoon in Manhattan. I know this has something to do with paying taxes. Last night, a real icy February zero, I went out to start the engine of the car you gave me on my birthday, to keep it going, then came in and forgot it till this morning. I woke to the city’s recycling truck grinding my papers and plastic bottles and my motor running. And still, I wasn’t out of gas. Our neighbor, his head in a red bandana, yelled,

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“We didn’t want to bother you at one in the morning!” and I thought, How did you know I wasn’t in there, suiciding? Cerise means “cherry,” Clarice means “light” or “famous”—­ is her name Clarissa? What is she saying? She’s blurring, she looks like a Candice, she looks nice enough, but I’ll defer judgment until she’s finished this business. If I let on I felt sad, remember my mother’s advice? “Everyone should collect something!” That was her path to the purpose-­driven life, along rows of a flea market, then alone in her house jammed with the nicked, the chipped, ceramics with dings, the inscribed wedding bands of strangers—­ damaged things that always needed gluing or polishing. I tried not to teach our children the world’s a dangerous place, but there we were, four of us, plunked into history, listening to Dylan. Then, two of us. Our son and daughter out in it, unafraid, purposeful. . . . Somehow, life veered from the script. I should get a new cell phone, but eighteen of your messages are in/on my old one and can’t be transferred. How can Verizon say your voice isn’t really in there at all, calling home to me?—­Then where is it? Why should it disappear from somewhere it unapparently isn’t? Why should my living here be so metaphysical? Callista enters our bedroom, the room sacrosanct to me, off-­limits, but no matter. She scans our night tables, our TV, our pills and lotions and clippers. Oh, mornings here

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you’d perform what you’d call your “ablutions” while I read the paper in bed. Pearl slinks from her place on my pillow, Bogey’s hunched in the clothes closet on your shearling slippers, Hosni Mubarak’s been deposed, Benghazi’s a riot of freedom until the Khadaffis say it isn’t. The day you died, I knew what people meant by saying the earth stopped spinning on its axis. No choice but to write myself, to keep going. Today’s Science Times says we’re not in the Garden of Eden anymore—­ well, that shouldn’t give evolutionary biologists pause. Life, say the geologists, is a natural consequence of geology. Geology? I know there’s got to be more to be written. Clarissa, Clarinda, Career, whatever your name is, pack up your digital camera, your officious watery pen, your scrutineer’s notepad, you’re in the wrong biosphere, your data will never add up—­Clarity, I think we’re done here.

15

At Dusk, in the Yard

At dusk, in the yard of people—­people you never knew—­ a night-­blooming cereus was about to open, and eleven of us gathered to observe the opening. In a desert, so ordinary no one would remark on it, yet in Medford this couple move dozens of cacti and exotic orchids out of their house each spring then back in before the first frost, recognizing signs we didn’t know—­ all year it had looked a dry stick—­ that one morning the shrivelly pod would begin its move toward a single night’s attenuated blossoming, and they called people to share their night watch, night so hot, so steamy, we all took turns going out to the yard to check and report back in—­ I say we though I felt I, and they—­ to stream back in, the air being cooler, the beer cold, and the table laden. Finally, alone on the front steps I saw the spiky white petals lifting slowly from their homely bud, so slowly 16

I might have been imagining a flowering, dreamy as time-­lapse photography. Minute to minute, the changes infinitesimal. Nocturnal quiet, great starry sky, and through the lit windows, tinkling of glasses, laughter. Had I been thirsty, no drink would quench my thirst. At midnight, the luscious bud half-­open, its interior glowing, I left for home. Had I waited until morning, I’d have seen the golden starburst’s withered casing, pale ghostly vessel of the night’s spectacular. Nocturnal queen, cactus flower, or like a water lily, or—­ I can’t convey to you its visceral, ethereal glory. Morning: a ghostly husk, wizened remainder of a night’s story. One night! One night! To believe that living thing will return again, renewed again, next year.

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We Swam to an Island of Bees

We swam to an island of bees and poison ivy, catbrier and low-­ hanging blueberry bushes, of coarse sand we could lie on to dry ourselves in the July sun. The only sounds the bees buzzing, the cacophonous calls of herons. Inhospitable tangle of an island we liked, forbidding little island I’d heard the Wampanoag call Get Off It. There were two others in the lake, one they’d named Stay On It—­ it had a battered duck-­hunters’ shed—­ and Come To It, a grassy glade hidden inside a grove of black walnut trees that had once covered all Cape Cod, perfect for boat building, perfect for houses in a deforested Eden. Some days we’d stay on Come To It, lying peacefully in its soft grasses, resting for the swim home, telling ourselves things we wanted to do, tickling each other’s arms and throats with tender blades of grass, while across the unblemished lake, a red-­ dening cranberry bog I knew honey bees would soon be working over. That was before a kind of libertarian

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rage fueled the lake’s motorized boaters, before they firebombed the Quietists’ floats. That day, from our island of thorns and poisonous leaves, the swim back seemed long, we were drowsy, the dusty little blueberries delicious, manna. The bees hummed and investigated our sun-­warmed skin as we lay not moving, just resting, nothing to harm us there, nothing in that first chapter of our life that stung.

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Ou Sont Les Neiges D’A ntan

At my table, Mark and Jill and Lloyd and David. And large soft snowflakes falling gentle as mercy on the yard, on the bare trees outside my window, and we’re eating sweet and succulent things, and some with capers, and laughing at our old foibles born of hopes, of shyness and clumsy ambitions, and chortling at the faux pas of long-­gone friends, the snow accumulating in gentle accumulations, and we gleefully talking this Sunday morning away, together again after a long time apart and now the black lyrical tree limbs are outlined in snow, pristine and marvelous, nature’s graphic art, black and white, limbs you loved to draw and you still not here, though yes, today the snow is a marvel, falling so peacefully—­this snow that isn’t, will never be the snow of yesteryear.

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Two

Philip Guston

Everything, he said, has a form, even doubt has a form, he said, walking away from class, the painting students all puzzlement at their easels, left there, with a week to wonder. Class over, but he, still teaching. On Comm Ave a blue parked truck with bright red lettering—­ Look at that, he said, Look at that.

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On Jane Cooper’s “The Green Notebook” There are 64 panes in each window of the Harrisville church where we sit listening to a late Haydn quartet. Near the ceiling clouds build up, slowly brightening, then disperse, till the evening sky glistens like the pink inside of a shell over uncropped grass, over a few slant graves. . . .

Reading Jane’s midsummer poem, I’m in the New England church, listening to late music of Haydn. Light, pouring through 64-­paned windows (was she 64?), suffuses the chapel. The poem at once celebratory (nature, and art) and valedictory (late, evening, hollows, scurry of leaves, etc.). In here, it is early evening, sunset. Indoors and outdoors fused by light, ceiling and sky one and the same. Exterior, interior, painted by the same hand. Jane’s eye moves from acknowledgment of evening, its pearlescent glow, to the few, askew graves and the untended grass in the churchyard. The ceiling, of “brightening” clouds, nature itself as chapel, chapel as nature, and late Haydn—­probing, inventive, a little dark—­ now a kind of hymn to nature. The mind’s eye takes it in, the ear and heart. Outside, a late July landscape, a pond’s arena of density, attrition, its growth decomposing, its watery depths a deep brown. Water lilies, early June blossomers, now at their peak, bronze and muscular. Etheriality

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not part of the green notebook’s natural world. Jane’s point of view shifts, from the peace of the church interior, out to the life she can only, in this moment, imagine. Youthful figures on a float yet also floating, the heat of summer an atmosphere so natural to them that it breathes them. Sensuality, dense, heated, suspended, floating toward fate. The midsummer of youth. Is there wistfulness in her voice? I don’t think so, although a wise friend says to me it’s really about death. I feel, rather, an appetite for, an awareness, and appreciation of, bodily and aesthetic pleasures—­and for the temporality—­ of the season. And more, a kind of praise song for the world she’s taking in, and being taken in by, that reminds me of Lorca’s “Green, I Love You Green” and Marvell’s “Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade . . .” Greenness is all. But is it all? No. Light and darkness. Joy and grief. Life, and attrition. And unfashionably, beauty—­a beauty about to be ravished I find ravishing. Nameless. Slowly gathering. . . . It seems I am on the edge of discovering the green notebook containing all the poems of my life, I mean the ones I never wrote. . . .

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Here, the anonymity and therefore, maybe, the universality of the floating figures, what the poet sees and what she imagines. And namelessness moves her to her work of naming, work she has spent her life shaping, deepening, perfecting; to the sense of work yet to be written. That line break (my life, / I mean) first implying the notebook is the collection of her life’s work—­ then undoing the achievement: everything in the green notebook, her life’s work, is unwritten. So all this time of the poem, has the poet been reading the world, experiencing the greenness of it as the notebook containing all the poems she never wrote? Rueful, a melancholy idea. Annihilating. The notebook is under my fingers. I read. My companions read. Has she not captured its greenness? No—­but she’s on the verge of it, of transcribing what her fingers, her senses have discovered. As if it were braille and she could, suddenly, read braille, the notebook under her fingers. She reads, companioned and yet solitary. The life of the artist, the life of making, surely is ongoing. Beginnings are a gift! She’s in it now, and in the poem. Time is unhurried, no, urgent, hurrying, music is in the air: Now thunder joins in, scurry of leaves. . . .

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Shade Alan Dugan, 1923–­2003

A cold April day, five black ducks huddled, shivering, on the bay, and coming to life, gardens on Commercial Street we were all indifferent to. Eight writers in a sort of circle arguing, ardent—­ a committee living on argument, fierce, dismissive—­ overeager youthful manuscripts, on fire with the possibilities for poetry, as if we knew the stakes, as if we could determine the future of American literature in that sunny room. Those meetings gripping, intoxicating, then—­heaven—­ all of us with passionate positions, and adamant or uncertain, arguing the world. And there sat our grumbly Dugan (but was he ours, or anyone’s?) in a chair apart, the least voluble among us, hunkered down, muttering, decades past posturing, if he’d ever postured, insistent, contrary—­yet the least excitable among us—­as we all wrangled for something we were sure was ours to shape. Gone for good the Gauloises, gone for good the six-­packs. In his lap, page after page of illegible notations on the yellow legal pad he’d scribbled on all winter

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and kept to himself. Kept to himself, but he was there. He’d told me once he’d always lost those battles—­ I never actually saw him fight them, he’d read his notes and sit, enclosed and silent, except to growl, deadpan, Everyone’s writing poems about Georgia O’Keefe. Or, They all think they know Coltrane. Or, Frieda Kahlo. Again. The implication: no one but Dugan understood those three, and, dead, they’d become drained, conventions, degraded by callow enthusiasms. I don’t know if he’s a poseur, he said of one poem, or if he just doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. No exclamation points in Dugan, only judgments thudding, resounding in the fierce room from the old poet who in his distant Brooklyn boyhood was by his parents nicknamed Spud—­Spud: that boy impossible now for us to imagine—­“How—­I didn’t know any word for it—­ how ‘unlikely’ . . .” But today, more than a decade after his death, taking a stab at sorting my papers, I find in a box some of Dugan’s notes, written on the back of a beat-­up manila folder, lines that stop me—­that long-­ago ephemeral Provincetown day brought back tellingly in words I struggle to decipher and transcribe, his handwriting illegible chicken—­or rooster—­ ballpoint scratches incongruously similar to Bishop’s hand on early drafts of “One Art”:

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Only 85—­a long way to 100, he writes, and The darkness grew closer and darker and he tried to see thru it to the other side, fearless and undefeated he died On his deathbed—­fought his sins to a draw (I’m sure that’s what this says.) Then, a space, then one more word above a list I’ve written of sandwiches for the committee’s take-­out lunch, Shade and in my tidy Palmer method, our choices: 2 lobster roll, 1 Greek salad, 4 fried sole sandwich squid stew 3 lemonades, coleslaw, fries, coke, etc. etc. Thinking of his bitter poems we so relish, I hear the same unashamed intransigent voice in these oddly triumphant lines, musical, destined for the wastebasket, scrawled when he was nearly 80, half-­lame, half-­blind. . . . What makes me think, copying them here, There is no music in hell—­ Who believes in hell? Who believes in heaven?

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Three

Instance of Me

Hot hot hot, you are hot, Sun, Glaring all over my east window Burning, beaming, yellowing The room. Uninterested in me Because I’m not Mayakovsky Although I feel you insisting I wake, that I produce right now Or perish as my uncle used to say. Brave Mayakovsky, doomed Mayakovsky, He could sass you, and later O’Hara (Before they turned forty, both gone) Sassed you and sassed Mayakovsky, too—­ But when I try I know it’s just another Instance of me whistling in the dark, Me not blazing, me not burning out.

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Doorknobs

My brother, planning his memoir, interviews his old friend who says, “You know what I loved about you? You knew so much—­you even knew about antique doorknobs!” When he lived in Paris, Mother commissioned him to go to the flea market and buy “at least two boxes” of porcelain doorknobs and bring them back to Boston for her. What he remembers now, after this conversation with Hal, is how heavy those doorknobs were.

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Things

Mementos, knickknacks, treasured junk, set pieces. Some call them soulless, yet I heard Robert Lowell admonish his child, a toddler stomping a book, “Oh no, dear, you mustn’t—­ books are immortal souls.” Things we might say we “love,” flea market tables are piled with them—­hand-­painted trays, chipped deco pottery; LIFE magazines saved in drawers for their covers—­they’re little museums themselves: American photography of our troops at Normandy, dead soldiers, flotsam, washed ashore; the Dionne Quints, five little girls in white dresses, caged in Quintland, their Ontario yard, for tourists and their cameras; LIFE , declaring without shame: there is a case for interplanetary saucers

(Marilyn’s on that cover). Prowling the daytime drive-­in’s aisles at the flea, in the summer sun, I go into a classic hunter’s crouch, walk on the balls of my feet, my arms outstretched, my fingertips metal detectors for Sunday’s hidden coin. Dusty broken useless. My closets full of things, my shelves overflow with LPs, snapshots, Bakelite boxes that held monogrammed playing cards—­someone else’s monogram—­ or unfiltered cigarettes; my grandmother’s stereopticons, scenes of the vast Grand Canyon with tiny human figures for perspective; my grandfather’s tefillin in a blue velvet drawstring bag. Old piles of books, papers, drafts, catalogues, magazines—­what’s a bedside floor for?—­ notebooks, science articles torn jagged from the Times, and also book reviews, passionate or sardonic dicta about what? by whom? Handle bags from long-­closed bookstores, mugs with jokes or slogans holding inkless pens, wood rulers, random screws and nails. Grandfather’s pencil stub marked 35

Aid to the Jewish Blind, his arthritic hand held it to dial the phone, its eraser petrified. Mother preached collecting was the only cure for depression—­she couldn’t think it was a symptom, didn’t believe anyway in depression. Earmuffs, bell-­bottoms, campaign buttons. Matchbooks from vanished restaurants, cool restaurants with ashtrays, with smokers. An embossed plumber’s card from Pasadena touts Miranda the Plumber—­ You Don’t Have to Live with a Drip! A small bamboo rat carved so delicately it’s hard to imagine the tool, the carver’s hand; two blackened Senufo masks, displaced, implacable on the wall. Things, things—­Uncle Harold’s tragedy of the Chinese revolution, No Peace for Asia; the last biography of Harry S. Truman, and Harry Blackmun’s; the scathing pleasure of Philip Roth, of stirring unsentimental Willa Cather’s America; a battered Amphigorey; my childhood copy of Struwwelpeter, Johnny Head-­in-­Air, who finally walked right off a pier and drowned, the point being it served him right, translated from the German. And all this, all this poetry, my friends’, the challenging dead, unalphabetized life’s blood, positioned to be rediscovered. An inventory of them alone would take a thousand pages. But who on this green earth would type it? And why? And when? (So many things in your poems, one friend said to me, disdainfully, I thought. . . .) Your steel tool-­case with molded grooves to fit each mystifying tool. Drill bits, Phillips heads, brushes, tubes of color, drying . . . Art—­the walls, the closets, the flat files—­ humming its demanding song. Or not just demanding, generous. Secretly, in the dark companioning me. Things aren’t company, I know that, or ideas, or moral currencies, although they feel like company when I hold them, I look at them, I know they’re here except in dreams, except in dreams. Loving them, touching them, keeping them, I’d like to think they love me back. Here are your shirts, and your hand-­sharpened pencils—­this blue-­gray one impressed with a haiku by Basho, With dewdrops dripping / I somehow wish I could wash / this perishing world. 36

Genealogy

Of my ancestors I know little, and to try tracing them now would be absurd, their surnames reinvented, mangled at every gate. Was there, among their number, a hero? Were there heliographs, a silhouette, daguerreotypes, lost in the wolverine dark as they fled where they were unwanted for where they were unwanted? To me, it doesn’t matter—­like William James, they believed in free will. Summer nights, I stroll Broadway or Pennsylvania or Massachusetts Avenue, haloed in the night lamps’ sodium vapors, and they are my marveling entourage, small, bent, dogged, homely, though I turned out tall—­oh, generations of nutrition—­and when I sleep,

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they toss beside me, blacksmiths, dentists, deliverers of ice, of knives, of artificial flowers, of a posterity bred heartlessly to lose them.

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Art History

Your great-­aunt Sydney went to Europe twice—­once to Paris where the food was lousy and the Louvre depressing; and London where they wouldn’t let her, or Abie, touch the Elgin Marbles which were, you know, carved by a British Lord. Later, they’d try Rome—­ You know what you can do with their spaghetti!—­ and Florence. At I Tatti, Bernard Berenson didn’t bother to come out to meet them. She didn’t think much of BB anyway: Big deal—­ a dirty old man in a dirty old house, who got buried by the Pope! she swore. When you graduated from art school, she yanked me aside, pinching my arm hard, demanding, How the hell’s he supposed to make a living?

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The 70 s 901 Broadway, for Juan Downey

Even the miniature dachshunds were stoned when they sank their teeth into our ankles, and we were stoned, too, just from riding up two floors from our illegal loft to Juan’s, where he was growing corn and raising bees for his museum show. His bees flew from Broadway to Gramercy Park for pollen—­or that was the plan. Roaches loved the rice and beans Juan’s table offered, so he mail-­ordered mantis eggs—­he’d read that mantids were formidable predators, but when their cases opened and the babies hatched, the immortal roaches ate them before they’d even had a chance to prey. The bees? They were delivered in glass vitrines to Buffalo for Juan’s retrospective and installed, the gallery for the opening gala at the Albright-­Knox brightly lit. Too bright, too hot—­next morning, the curator switched the spotlights on, and every bee had fried. —­Oh, and John and Yoko visited one night.

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Age

I’d study an old man in a dune garden, his gnarly feet planted in a swath of blue salvia, pruning a low-­growing red rose he called Europeana. Each summer a new project, dear labor, digging, replanting, weeding, terracing, taming the sandy slope—­still, always beneath it the lively indomitable dune. Mornings, afternoons, dusk, the shrill cries of seagulls. Moonlight, prehistoric. I watched as if to osmose, to take in the flame of concentration, as if I’d learn how it was to be lost myself in a saving task. But you can’t choose who or what claims you. Though sometimes it seemed he’d live forever—­each tier of seedlings a stanza he’d go on and on revising—­it was only that one century, ten little decades. Ten decades, ten worlds of change, of fabrication and horror, ten worlds he never tired of. The garden’s gone now, the lilies, the anemones, the gardener a tiny body in a cemetery’s fidgeting sand by the white eroded markers of Yankee sea captains and Azorean fishermen. I’d always thought there was no

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weight to him, no guilt or sorrow, he was an ethereal spirit, that ambition had finally cast him off, stranded him, as if he lacked the heft of a neutrino and was moving faster than the speed of light—­ all worldliness subsumed—­ but that wasn’t really him I’d been studying, not him, just an idea trying to form itself, an idealization of age, a bearable fiction, a world of tenderness and nurturing where I’d enjoy my books and papers, my gardens, where what I’d tend would know to blossom and each death be followed by renewal. Those were the days I had almost everything I loved, until it happened the world shook, and my life whispered to me, Come closer, Gail, look! I won’t hurt you, and I had to look—­and it did.

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Living Treasure

Because she’s 84 and living, the Elder Learning Center proclaims her a Living Treasure. In the hall her photograph, drained of personality, of spirit. Her hair’s not gray yet she’s posed here, an exhausted relic. Never comfortable with leisure, she teaches a special course this winter in Ephemera, the fever of her late decades. Today the class goes well, the seminar table strewn with postcards and stereopticons—­ the Headquarters of General Grant; a Settler’s sod house in the Dakotas; the Great Mark Twain (in bed) and his Peculiar Manner of Work; Flowers and Frost. Goes well, yet still to her it feels a failure: the least she longs for as an elder volunteer is to ignite her “students,” to feel loved, feel treasured. But she’s tough, she was always tough, living history, a terror to me, even in this picture, the backdrop a bulletin board of Gentle Yoga, Grief Support, counseling, lectures. Tiny, dignified, her “porcelain beauty” hardly a memory, hardly anyone living’s memory—­a bleak defiance in the pale blue eyes, in the tight-­lipped smile that spelled calamity when we were young. Work is the measure of a being, she’d say. I remember her weeding the Mashpee woods, a mad perfectionism fueled by anger;

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her, climbing a trembling extension ladder rung over rung, a towel on her head, to exterminate a nest of spiders. Today this condescension, Living Treasure. Not tribute—­ rather, the crowning insult of her life, otherwise still unsung.

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Unveiling

I say to the named granite stone, to the brown grass, to the dead chrysanthemums, Mother, I still have a body, what else could receive my mind’s transmissions, its dots and dashes of pain? I expect and get no answer, no loamy scent of her coral geraniums. She who is now immaterial, for better or worse, no longer needs to speak for me to hear, as in a continuous loop, classic messages of wisdom, love and fury. MAKE! DO! a note on our fridge commanded. Here I am making, unmaking, doing, undoing.

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Family Crucible

For seven years, my sister has refused to speak to me. It’s biblical—­ but are these the lean years, or the fat? The one time we had Christmas at her house, she seated me in a corner away from the rest of the family, at a little triangular telephone table. —­Who would I call? I brought the bagels! I made a pie! So I rebelled and moved my plate and cup near to my nephew; we sat by the burning Yule log video—­ a mirage of coziness, without warmth. He wanted to talk with me about Walt Whitman; I was thinking, If you want me look for me under your boot soles! That’s when my sister decided to make shunning me official—­ she announced it with magisterial authority to the flummoxed gathering. One side of my family always had a penchant for hostilities.

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But when I think about one of us dying, I’m uneasy about my sister. I worry there’s a gesture I ought to make, something that calls for largeness of heart or, failing that, something harder, a willingness to “engage”? Should I rue my puzzling role in this estrangement? A voice tells me, Just let it go, the voice of one no longer here, the one who thought I could do no wrong. I think she hates me—­and longs for me to love her. Would it be wrong to rob her of the pleasure of shunning me—­ me, her nemesis—­and blaming me for the shun?

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Perennial

Here it is winter again The great heavy coat The brown woolen coat With the frayed lining Over me. I wear it Into the comfortless Morning weight of The coming year Mother coat

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Four

Night

Sleep is a narrator telling a mystery I don’t hear in a language I don’t understand it’s not only the vocabulary there’s no perceptible order (Sleep seems not to have declarative sentences) I think sometimes I want to learn yet dread learning Sleep’s language Guessing at meaning, I find it contradictory, pyrotechnical its images phantasms swirling an instant, then grabbing me missing, gravity like lead, then evanescing—­ Has my arsonned house been rebuilt on a cliff and with a kidney-­shaped pool? I’m in the attic, the old attic with its unfinished floor, its board games and broken dolls, its cracked scrapbooks of grandparents and report cards . . . Is the President really smitten with me? Is that why he’s holding my hand? 51

Where does the windowless door lead? What is this dark cave? Who, the other mammals in it with me? Dark, yes, but not dull—­clearly dangerous, that kind of clarity In it, in it, listening intensely, intensely focusing, would I recognize, as Emerson put it, my own rejected thoughts? Yes, no, I don’t know—­ a relief when I wake, the teller gone and the ghost of the tale Waking here in the familiar double-­speak of my mother tongue—­ that’s the whole other story

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Minnesota

Here we are, a small gathering, and before us a figure at a podium analyzing her dreams, a melodramatic exhibition of self-­discovery. . . . Maybe because we’re not psychoanalysts, her performance is less than riveting. Yet though the others slip away I stay, as if I’m waiting for an insight (that would surely prove—­as so many insights have—­useless, irrelevant). In the tiny low-­ceilinged room, I’m now the entire audience. My chair too small, tight, its arms binding my arms. Was it one of the three bears that found one of the chairs too small? The momma bear, trying the baby chair? There are so many meanings, aren’t there, of bear? Child-­sized, like the deco chairs on the Hindenburg. The Hindenburg whose pink nose cone I passed daily in a filigreed yard. Houston decades ago, where I’d be out walking, the only pedestrian in Texas. It could have been illegal. The filigreed pink fence, and the filigreed reliquary that held the cone also painted a pale pink. . . . The Hindenburg crashing and burning. From Germany.

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The grand avenue in Houston shaded by live oaks, the silly frilly “nose cone.” But its nose would have been much too big for a lawn reliquary—­ I suddenly realize that, an insight into my gullibility. After all, I’d seen the movie. Deco chairs—­ Am I thinking of the burning deck the boy stood on when all but he had fled? The chairs being rearranged on the Titanic? My house that burned in the night when I was 7? My father, clinging to the breaking ladder? The neighbors watching, titillated by nudity and calamity. Heartless. The speaker’s fingers brush her tendrilly hair away from her cheekbones, enacting a parodic drama of self-­love, of trauma, of glamour. And now she no longer wants to walk alone in the woods—­ too ugly, dark and deep. No longer wants to recognize Indian Pipe or Monk’s Hood. To go barefoot on warm pine needles. Will I never want that again either? All the places we won’t go, heedless, where are they exactly? Looking for Lady Slippers in the hills of the Cotswolds?

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Never to see Gloucestershire, never to have scones with clotted cream among the English eccentrics? The Lady Slipper, with its beautiful scrotum, the state flower of Minnesota. I am very tired of the dreamer sharing her bad tidings. Her browns, her siennas, her slithering snakes, her drowned palomino. . . . This analysis could go several lifetimes while I sit in the burning dirigible, my wrecking ball of a chair, my deco chair, listening. Monk’s Hood. Indian Pipes. Lady Slipper. Minnesota. The significance of each figure may be clarified, fleetingly, questionably, in time. But the significance of our dream—­never.

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Ur-­Dream

Why was Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 my favorite piece to play when I was ten and always dreading practicing the piano? Was it the melody—­his melancholy lines, like verse, had such clarity, their notes like syllables I didn’t need to try to understand. Yet tonight, when the auditorium’s bustling and whispering, now when it’s my turn to play the Conservatory’s Steinway, its keys seem alien undifferentiated rows, un-­dotted looming dominoes, so I ask you please to place my fingers on Satie’s first notes when I sit down. Maybe then—­I hope—­Satie will rescue me. If not, here’s my cockamamie plan: to look “professional” as the house lights dim and wait out the expectant welcoming applause, then take a deep breath—­ and then, pretend to faint! I think you agree this passes for a course of action. In my ur-­dream, the ultimate shirk’s refined, I practice it as diligently, as desperately as work itself. I’m at the keyboard now, my gooseneck hands, 56

their long fingers my old teacher praised—­Octave plus one!—­are hovering. The hall’s gone silent but you’ve disappeared! Where are you? I tell myself, Satie said to play gravely. I watch these hands faking over the unintelligible keys. I look for you, it’s dawn, my feet aren’t pedaling, you’re not here, or anywhere—­there’s only our room, its cool air noiseless, hushed as an audience holding its breath.

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Elephant Memory 1994

Pragmatical realists, my friend and I are out strolling along Mass Ave one reasonable seasonable November morning, and all of a sudden a colossal elephant ambles slowly in our direction, padding north, on its own. Past the modernist Law School dorms, past the Montrose Spa and the package store, past the blinking traffic light and the credit union. Past us. A peaceable giant a prodigiously long way from its exotic home trodding our mundane macadam. Dolorous, like elephants I’ve read about who don’t forget their dreadful griefs and losses, the slaughter of their kin. Maybe it’s myth they bury their dead then travel back many miles together to mourn on anniversaries. Mystics, melancholy mystics. Tears of the elephants, tears at the gravesites, trumpeting lamentations, the somber grandeur of their jungle yahrzeits. Foundations of the natural history museum begin to shake, the ingenious delicate glass irises tremble, a gorilla’s threadbare stitching splits—­kapok’s afloat in the airless Hall of Grand Mammals! A stuffed ibis wakes and grunts to a dead egret in ancient Greek. What algorithm leads a descendant of mammoths to journey—­where? unhurriedly through Harvard Square? What on earth can we make of this sudden elephantine apparition, this unlikely hallucination Lloyd and I are sharing? Well, as Saramago said, it’s not every day an elephant appears in our lives. Grounded in our concrete terrain, 58

we stand there, humbled, as it sways deliberately, toward Arlington, leaving the two of us behind. —­(No one with any sense wants to be put in a poem. But that elephant’s been asking for it for twenty years.)

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To the Charles River

Because you flowed through my childhood; because summers I swam freely in your currents; because you froze every winter, metamorphosed to a glazed floor for skating; because I believed you were the first landing place for Leif Erikson, although the World Book claimed otherwise (Leif named his new discovery Wood-­land, and Land of Flat Stones); because you had trees and many flat stones, gray skipping stones; Leif ’s men found wild grapes and salmon there, and my father fished from your shore, catching perch and pickerel and found them delicious to fry in spite of their little bones. Because on the Day of Atonement my grandfather walked from Dorchester to empty his pockets into you, casting off lint and crumbs for the year’s sins, his good shoes steeped in your waters; because your dark green trees promised to protect us, because twice I nearly drowned in you, and a neighbor child did drown, small body washed up on your snarled bank. Because my love and I canoed through your toxic years, when you’d become reeking and filthy, only mutant fish and water rats swam in you. He’d say there’s no great city without a river, and because a Governor determined you were worth saving, and cleaned you up and made you swimmable again and lively with mallards, grackles, American coots—­ 60

in our warming world, nearly paradisial; because an ocean says Eternity and a river says Home; because, dear Familiar, I believe I haven’t stepped into the same river twice, for other waters always flow into you, and I am always a different person; because this chilly October I find Devil Pods tangled among your river grasses, tough grotesque little seed pods that look like bats or demons that will always live and thrive in you, and in me.

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Amarin

Bitter melon. Kaffir lime. Holy basil. An evening out after nights muddling alone. The hubbub and mixed pleasures of “a plan.” The night cold, the Thai menu a minefield. . . . We hadn’t met in years, my friend confided a dream—­you and I were climbing a dune with her, our old friendship restored. What could I say? With you gone, I couldn’t join her there, no easing together into sorrow for past time or lost intimacy—­ no answer that would deliver us to her Eden, the phantasm of a peopled life, the sun-­warmed sand, the surf. This reunion was only a dinner, a Tuesday in November, month of your birthday, and mine. Down on the Cape beaches, the biting north wind, blackened logs from the season’s last illegal fires. What was required of me? She’d shared her story, her figment, three figures, three dancers in a pastoral scene. What could I say, 62

I, who have lost my heart’s answer? Later, the bill divided and paid, we walked to our cars from dinner at Amarin. I could see a campfire, the vibrations of its heat—­and a shorebird with burning feathers, blinded, whose heart, poor stupid muscle, still endured its beat.

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July Saturday Night

Now I’m going to walk downtown to Cape Tip Sportswear And buy a swimsuit. Downtown, noisy and busy—­tonight Long trucks still delivering breads and cokes and not-­so-­ Fresh produce to Bubala’s and the Stormy Harbour. The daytrippers back-­packed up and gone on the ferry, Have tossed their empties into yards, and the Saturday-­to-­ Saturdays gone, their vans packed, the town bike racks empty, Gone last night’s illegal firecrackers. Tomorrow the beginning—­ Another week, peach ice cream cones, foot-­long hot dogs, saltwater Taffy. Cosmopolitans. Still, mornings when I walk downtown, everyone Passing with dogs, without dogs, with containers of coffee, everyone Smiles and says Good Morning! though some without this Punctuation, their mouths determined simulacra of small-­town Friendliness. I like it, starting the day with a “Beautiful dog!” Or even just Good morning, good morning, good morning. Some conversation. Tomorrow, I’m sure of it, I’ll be swimming In the silvery bay in my new Speedo, but tonight, something here Has closed, something else opened in the passing faces, In the ones who don’t smile, in the ones that do smile. You sense another day of shame, another day of disappoint-­ Ment with themselves, with the place they’ve come to, The couples and the uncoupled, another day ending with grief, Mouths not tight now, really, but tired or wistful, the smiles Tired, or trying too hard, or very drunk, you feel it, you know it, And the little town knows it, too, but to survive ignores it. Also the dogs, the high-­strung cats, the skunks and coyotes.

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The Self in Search of the Sublime

I could have just closed the windows when the tidal breeze flapped the shades, I could have gone on working, but those blue shades were so lively, I could have, but I was hoarding up something, my mind a small storage bin of torpor. If I’d even clapped, my keyboard’s untapped wordage might have erupted into a thesaural something I could have played at, but my hands weren’t ready, they fidgeted by my sides, nervish and ligamenty, their opposable thumbs too twiddly to come to nothing. It’s summer, delicious fruition in the air, the screen door open to a seemly ripeness. I could have stretched my spine a little, shimmied some, twirled a hand in a nice flourish Musty Chiffon showed me at Vixen last night, witty Musty trilling, Honey, why let it hang there doin’ nothing when it could be doin’ something pretty?

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The Bay

Dragonflies mating in the greeny shade of the tamarisk, their brief lives unfettered. On the bleached bay, becalmed, white sails adrift under a blanched overheated sky. Sand-­washed, sun-­warmed fragments—­“sea glass”: wines tossed—­when?—­from a party ship; antique nostrums, a patent bottle’s eroded story. On the shore tiny green-­black mites, terns—­ and the calligraphic beach grasses yearning with the breeze like a printmaker’s lines. Pale world, green world, aromatic, moving, still, life we knew together—­ in everything I see your hand. . . . Wild mint at our door, honeysuckle, fragrant August wind shifting, dying—­nectar, salt, all one breath.

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Morning Letter

Cuando pasen los años, cuando pasen Los años . . . —­Nicanor Parra

When all the years have passed, when all the years have passed, and time hasn’t time hasn’t closed a door between your soul and mine, when years have passed, and I’m still the creature who breathed with your breaths creature in the garden that so many sweet flowers bore—­when those years have passed, where outside my dreams will you be, where can we find one another again? Not in the garden, no, and not gathering stones and shells on the shore will I find you, husband of my quirks, my body, my love, my tears.

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Grief

Don’t speak to me of heartbreak, I have an argument with habits of metaphor—­it’s not the heart In April I brought tulips white pale green and orange in from the garden you mean but the ineffable—­character soul locus of feeling—­don’t tell me that muscle and with his fine pen he drew page after page of delicate ravishing tulips is made whole by breaking—­the thready beat made stronger if ravaged, then repaired In June plush peonies named for Paean the physician to ancient gods Could we salvage joy from each day loosening Then July I brought the overabundance of the Asiatic lily’s perfume our ravenous hold on the world—­ his hand transfigured the rich ivory paper Where could it be written to a garden-­room various edenic alive why would anyone say, why would 68

a rabbi teach, the heart survives by breaking? August now and great maples tall oaks darken and cool the garden so flowers know not to thrive that in black ink my love may still shine bright

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Notes

p. 10: The words at the end of the lines “Believe That Even in My Deliberateness I Was Not Deliberate” form a line of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “the mother.” The form, introduced by Terrance Hayes, is called “The Golden Shovel.” pp. 13, 35: Wisława Szymborska’s statement “You can find the entire cosmos in the least remarkable objects” would be, I’d hope, redundant as an epigraph to “Inventory” and “Things.” p. 40: Juan Downey (1940–­1993) was a prominent Chilean-­born conceptual artist living above us in the years from 1970 to 1972 at 901 Broadway in Manhattan, a post–­Civil War wrought-­iron building, Lord and Taylor. p. 67: The two opening lines of “Morning Letter” are a translation of the ­beginning of Nicanor Parra’s poem, “Letter.”

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