In My Unknowing : Poems [1 ed.] 9780822987536, 9780822966159

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In My Unknowing

Pitt Poetry Series Ed Ochester, Editor

In My Unknowing

University of Pittsburgh Press

Chard deNiord

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2020, Chard deNiord All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 .

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6615-9 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6615-8 Cover art: Brian Cohen, Lizard, 2019. Cover design: Alex Wolfe

For Liz

What is known I strip away, I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown. � Walt Whitman �

Contents

�I� In My Unknowing    5 Weatherman   6 Night Walk    7 I Wept with Joy above the River    8 Poet   9 Dispatch from Putney   10

� II � The Widow  13 Then There  15 Reception  16 On Encountering a Friend with Little Time at the Walpole Inn   17 To the End   18 Grief Is the River with a Foreign Name   19 The Lake  20 Elegy  22

� III � Dumuzi in Bliss   25 Dumuzi’s Wound  26 Dumuzi in Grief   27 Ghost with Cigarette   28 Wrestler’s Lament  30

� IV � Children of Aleppo   35 Buzz  36 The Day  38 Inquisition in the Kitchen of Dorothy Day   40 Letter to the President from a Citizen, August 19, 2019   41 Checklist  42

�V� At the Sleep Clinic   45

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� VI � Drive-In  53 Sex Is  54 Goddess of Maple   55 Swimming Hole  56 Stag’s Reprieve  57 Layover  58 How It Went, My Heart   61 Shepherd  62 Testimony  63

� VII � Dream of Heaven   67 The Beavers  68 Vesper  70 Sunday Drive  72 Gerald Stern, Sappho, and Anonymous in Provincetown, June 29, 1995   73 Jefferson’s Baths  75

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Where and How Blood Was Made   76 Return as Ticket   77 In the Garden   79 Frog Pond  80 Maraca  81 Acknowledgments  85

In My Unknowing

�I�

IN MY UNK NOW ING Oh taste and see. —Psalm 34:8

I was driving through the fields of Heaven when I realized I was still on Earth, because Earth was all I had ever known of Heaven and no other place would do for living forever. I had grown beyond belief from seeing that everything I felt had sprung from lives I’d already lived, so that I could feel the way I did, which was so much I had no idea where to begin. The crawling? The slithering? The leaping? The flying? The dying? If you had been there with me in the passenger seat and asked me about the newt or flea or pachyderm, I would have told you everything I knew, which was a frightening amount, and not only that, but just how much I loved them all—those Heavenly beings: the serpent, the lion, the mosquito, the hawk, the antelope, the worm; and not only beings, but stones as well. Each particular thing so mysterious in my unknowing, I knew I was living forever. I knew the fields through which I was driving were the fields of Heaven in which I was tasting and seeing, seeing and tasting.

5

WE ATHER M AN

A cloud spelled out a rune I couldn’t read fast enough before it morphed into another form that changed again, so I recited something true enough from an ancient book: “The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes.” The screen went blank and then the slip. No matter, I thought, I’ll drive a truck. “The clouds are codes for reading the blues,” I said beneath my breath as I walked out into the rain with my umbrella and attitude that kept me lean if unemployed. A hermit thrush reported the dusk somewhere in the woods on my way home and I called back like a human bird who’d lost his wings: “Light’s such a fickle thing but I sing for it.”

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NIGHT WALK

I prayed for luck with so little on the animals thought I was one of them and talked to me in their fricative tongues. What could I say when I didn’t believe but wanted to use those words I used to use like “begotten not made” because I loved the sound of them so much I wished they killed like they used to kill when music played in the hills on silent strings and reeds. I put down my gun and gazed at the sky where the clouds spelled out the truth in vapors I couldn’t hope to read, so I plagiarized with a stick in the dirt: “Wisdom is folly and eternity moot inside my heart.” A hermit thrush yodeled in the lingo of dusk: “Light’s in love with darkness, so lie down with it and dream.” What greater thing could I become, I thought, than a translator of a song that has no words but only sounds that say, “This beauty lives inside the woods as consolation for everything that can’t be said.” I watched the sky turn black and then the stars come out like animal eyes so close and far apart.

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I WEPT W ITH JOY ABOVE THE R IVER

I wept with joy above the river. I wept with sorrow above the river. My tears were clear, both sweet and bitter. One leaf cried out to another, “Empty me today of all my color. Fill me tomorrow with a shot of sugar.” This was the still ritual for my feet: To stand on the earth that took of earth earth with ill and sing.

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POET

She’s the host of her own show, singing to the world in her makeshift studio: “My music fades in the light like the moon for failing to say what it means in the dark.” She leans into the microphone with all the cool of a shade from the underworld. She sings in memory of the one she grieves with a smile that fools her fans—a tune she says she learned from the sparrow’s song, but also the clouds and trees and grass— each stunning thing with its guitar that takes both silence and loss to hear.

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DISPATCH FROM PUTNEY

All morning the air whispered things I might forget as I sat listening to the silence beyond the drone of the apple sprayer—a voice for hearing myself as someone else: Put down your pen and pick up a stick. See how clearly it writes in the dirt. What did you think? That you weren’t the farthest point from yourself? That silence runs out of ink?

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� II �

THE W IDOW for Ruth Stone (1915–2011)

“You get what you get when you get it,” she said when I asked her if she believed in heaven, which she didn’t, but found useful to say she did in her poems. “For the sake of the poem,” she claimed. “Not heaven, but the unity of knowing and feeling— the same thing Mandelbrot found in the fractal  property of self-similarity,” she’d say. No different at all than the properties of her poems that just came to her, she swore, from across the universe and entered her heart where they fanned the coal of her grief over the loss of her beloved Walter. “See what you miss by being dead?” she wrote to him in a poem called “Curtains,” as if what she called his change of means could read it still wherever he was— her story, that is, about a “crying jag” she had one day when her landlord, Mr. Tempesta, yelled at her: “No pets! No pets!” upon discovering her cat on the window sill, but then relented to make her stop. She was that sad and impossibly funny at the same time— so large in her voice that sang the difficult song for two voices in one made possible by loss. The bittersweet of her coal’s invisible smoke rose to her eyes and watered them, then put them out. “He never even left a note,” she said “Just hung himself one day on his office door, like a coat. The poems just come to me now from out of the blue while I’m hanging laundry or planting flowers.

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I never know when they’re going to arrive; so, if I don’t run inside just then and write them down exactly as they sound—word for word— they disappear for good. Poof! I’ve lost most of my poems that way, some good ones, too.”

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THEN THER E

This spring we planted again, turned the earth and pushed the seeds into the ground with our thumbs just deep enough, then covered them with the compost loam that we had cooked throughout the winter. Then there, buried in the loam, your auburn hair— strands and clumps of it which you had put in the can when it was falling out in your hands. I threw it on the lawn where it glistened in the grass. “Look!” I said, “the ground has sprouted your hair!” “So poetic, dear,” you said. “The grass can’t have it all,” I said. “We need it, too, as a souvenir. Let’s leave it there but take some, too.” Which we did, only to notice that the hair we left in the grass was gone the following day. “The wind has donned your hair,” I said, at which you laughed and then agreed since I had reached so far beyond the pale and was reaching still. “It needed it for what?” I asked. “The clouds? Sunsets? The air?” But then I saw it again a few weeks later in a spruce at the edge of the yard: those auburn strands entwined around some straw in a nest with four blue eggs and the mother watching from above with small black eyes that burned right through from the other side.

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R ECEPTION

The guests were sitting at their tables on the lawn, when suddenly I saw them rise in a line and approach a door that opened onto a field of clover and rye. I was in awe of them, the way they stood in the shadow of the door and sipped their wine. The way they laughed and cried. I watched a Cessna hum across the sky as something that was there for a while in the form of pure idea, as something that would burn one day like straw. I saw the endless line move along, move along, pulling me in like a cloud, forgetting everything as they passed beneath the high dark beam of the door and were gone.

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ON ENCOUNTER ING A FR IEND W ITH LITTLE TIME AT THE WALPOLE INN for Mark Green

Why act as if I didn’t see him, then disappear like a ghost already? So, I greeted him like a brother in a tight embrace. Noli timere, I almost said like Seamus Heaney to his wife before he died in his Dublin bed, but held my tongue since I had no right, like Mark—that shadow in his head. “Or what . . . ?” I thought, then said just loud enough for him to hear. “Come again?” he said. “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.” But what I thought was this: We die alive behind our shrimp and gin if we look away. So, what to say that was better than nice? Better than a saying or old advice?” Nothing at all but a warm embrace to follow the first, just that—our closeness there at the edge of life without any words to spoil the silence in which we spoke with our arms as tongues.

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TO THE END

So angry in the first light of day as he lay in his hospital bed with the metal guards upraised, stuck on his heath for good, demented but aware of the time and bent on fighting to the end, old marine that he was who’d never been to war, but had in his head, destroying his enemies one by one except this one without any form—a cough, some stars, a twinge; no more “good mornings” to the team of men in their uniforms of scrubs and gloves—just “godammit” again and again, so much vim still left in him as they stripped him bare in his uric bed and pinned him down while begging him to “please stop fighting” then strapped him in to a human crane that raised him up like a missing piece and rolled him in to the sterile bath where they washed him clean as he hung in the air and dressed him there in olive green and brought him back into his room that was not his room where they lowered him down to his special chair in which he sighed, then grinned, as if he’d won again and was ready now to greet his son who’d travelled such a long long way to say good bye.

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GR IEF IS THE R IVER W ITH A FOR EIGN NA ME My grief hath need of all the watery things . . . —George Herbert

Grief is the river with a foreign name that floods your heart with sodden things that float away but then return, pulling you in with a musical force you can’t resist for the songs inside the things that mean everything to you but nothing to anyone else—the ring, the wig, the scarf: transformers each in a current that runs between live and dead, shock and numb, which is why you imagine Earth as Heaven when you see her face on the river’s surface and think it’s real, although you know you’re singing the same old chorus Orpheus sang as he floated down to Lesbos, although you weep the same dark tears Gilgamesh wept at the gate of the sacred forest, although you swear at Kronos who leads you by the hand into the water and squeezes your chest, then threatens to drown you if you can’t say “tomorrow.”

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THE L AK E

He had already begun to cross over and see things from the other side of his room. He was already flying with invisible wings in his chair, staring ahead as I wheeled him into the hall. “Where would you like to go?” I asked. “I’ll take you anywhere.” “Outside,” he said, as if outside were everywhere he’d ever been and wanted to return to again and again. It was late April—warm and clear. I rolled him out the door at the end of the hall and into the sky. All winter long he’d been breathing the same recycled air inside his cinder block room, so even though his senses were dull and his mind half gone, he could smell the lilacs and hear the birds call out to each other their various sexual, fricative songs. “Shall we go for a swim?” he asked, gazing at the field outside his room. He saw the lake on which he’d lived instead of the field and wanted to go in. He saw the sun shining on the rye as it waved in the breeze to him to also wave. “Yes!” I said. “Yes.”

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I struggled in vain to hold him down by the handles of his chair, feeling him rise like a swing that wouldn’t come down, no matter how hard I pressed against the ground. No no’s anymore to anchor him here. “Dive off the end,” he said. “I’ll follow you in.” To which I almost said yes again but refrained this time because I couldn’t find the tone anymore to sound like the boy who had just jumped in; because only he could see the veil that lay before him as a lake expanding into a sea I couldn’t see but only hear in the distance as its waves pounded the shore and then receded beneath his chair into the vast from which they came like hands and then returned.

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ELEGY for Nancy Perkins Petty (1925–2016)

I’m so impossibly close to you now I see you everywhere, especially in the sky where even the smallest clouds keep morphing into you: your eyes, your hair, your arms, your smile. How light your step across the Earth, even as your breath began to catch and you’d call out to me: “Wait up! You always walk too fast.” You carried me in your heart from the day I was born, and also before, so now I know that you’re in everything I see, touch and smell, which is some consolation, I guess, though not enough, because I want to curse the clouds for moving the way they do like you. I want you to know I have too many words to tell your stone how much I loved you. How much I depend on only these few lines to keep me from going on and on. How much I want to stop on the garden path and wait for you.

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� III �

DUMUZI IN BLISS

He walked over to her between the rows and held her from behind, then kissed her neck. “The earth is infinite,” she said. A toad hopped at her feet. He thought it was a rock. The clouds were empty pages he couldn’t read, then could as they turned in the wind. “The ground is insatiable,” he said. A hermit thrush yodeled its password for dusk. “Hush,” she said as the earth rose up in them like sap with the force of gravity in reverse.

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DUMUZI’S WOUND

When she placed her hand on his chest then raised it slowly so only her fingertips touched, he awoke beside her as the man she loved, or so she said, which he believed, as if love were enough, as if he could wake each morning to her touch and feel so hurt with a wound he couldn’t express except to say, “My heart’s only wish is to leap like a fish out of my body and into your waters.” As if he could live with her like Adam in the Valley or Enkidu in the Steppe and still converse with the animals in all those languages she made him forget.

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DUMUZI IN GR IEF

He gazed out the window of his hotel at the esplanade where they used to walk beside the river and sit in the shade beneath the willows. Everything seemed as it had before, except for a few new buildings he tried to ignore since they obscured the view he was searching for. Only when he closed his eyes could he see beyond the river to those days when they sat together beneath the willows. His vision doubled in his squinting now at the river’s rebus in which he saw the surface glare and then her body sinking there beneath the gleaming.

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GHOST W ITH CIGAR ETTE

She lay on the couch in her living room where she cast a spell with the power to conjure an unfamiliar place as real, if not more real than the actual place that he remembered in every detail. Her sister, Ereshkigl, was also there, oblivious to her sibling’s condition as she went about her business in the kitchen, steaming spinach and baking scones, then turned to him, Dumuzi, the widower, the warrior, the dreamer, the lover, and said, “She’s no longer with us, you know.” He kneeled beside her and put his cheek to her brow and brushed her hair out of her face and whispered her name in a low soft voice, at which she opened her eyes and gazed at him, then rose from the couch in her long white dress and lit a cigarette, as she had in life.

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He watched it glow like a thurible when she drew on it, although it had no smell and the ashes fell like dust to the floor. He was both terrified and happy in this room to which she had summoned him by slipping a white blank ticket into his pocket as he kissed her good bye at the door a thousand years ago. “Sometimes you burn so clean, nothing’s left,” she said with a smile at the time, speaking in a voice that echoes still as the soft alarm he never heard but wakes to now in another room where his cigarette burns with an acrid smell and its ashes fall still glowing to the floor.

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WR ESTLER’S L A MENT At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion. —Czesław Miłosz

I Now that my wrestling days are over, I see they might as well never have been, for what’s the difference between smoke in the wind and the past? At least I have enough strength left to call them delusions and go on breathing. I want to change the name of air to ether and time to then. When I step from one stone to the next on my way to the home for aging wrestlers on the island of Utnapishtim where the nurses are also baristas who serve espressos instead of pills, I see that I slept awake inside the ring for all those years when I was famous for my range of moves: the cutter, the backbreaker, the stunner, the chokeslam, the piledriver, the facebuster. I weep recalling them and seeing them, too, on film, as if they were real and I still young. Alas, they mean nothing to me now and might as well never have been. Why do I think this? you ask. Because when I tell the facts of my glory days to anyone who’ll listen, never mind the mesomorphs

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who think they’re Gilgamesh or Enkidu, they yawn and laugh. But I can see that they’re deluded, too, and need to fight and risk their lives for as long as they can, which is their blessing, just as it was also mine. So, I say nothing in the end, catching myself too late again recalling other things for which I was also known before I touched Humbaba’s fence and fell, such joys as hunting for my bride in The Wood of Morois and strangling the dragon there, spying the backside of God on Horeb, ripping off Beowulf’s arm. II I sit beside an ancient tree and try myself before the beautiful judge I call “my dove,” “my love,” “my executioner.” “So, how do you plea?” she asks. “Guilty as charged,” I say, at which she nods with a killer smile, then asks if I’d like to allocate my crime. “I believed a dream was real,” I tell her. “Forgive my lies, if you would, sweetheart, for all of them were real at the time.” “Anything more? she asks. “You’ve heard this story before?” I say. “So many times,” she says, rolling her eyes. “So many times. It’s the oldest plea there is,

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which is why I never show mercy.” “I understand,” I say. “It’s perfectly clear.” “Would you like to make a last wish?” she asks. “I wish only to hear your sentence and to touch the bark and leaves of this ancient tree so I can say that I was here, if only for myself, like the girl who was stripped of her reasons by the puppet king, like K who was granted a vision of you in disguise at your window before he was dragged to his hole by your thugs for whom the words justice, life, and mercy mean nothing. Bless them, for they know what they do in making Friday good and teaching me a final move.”

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� IV �

CHILDR EN OF ALEPPO

The children were asking a thousand questions about why  the sky was blue and grass was green  when suddenly their tongues were stilled by an answer they never saw. Now silence rings in their place so loud a stone  can hear it in Arkansas. So why not the men inside the sky who only hear the roar beneath their wings that rip the clouds? Who believe the distance is theirs for the way it turns the heavens into a high of feeling nothing at all? In which they have everywhere to turn  as excellent pilots—really superb—with nowhere to go.

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BUZZ I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked —Walt Whitman

I searched the bank along the trail to the meadow for the honey bees that had foraged there just yesterday among the locust blossoms and sourwood trees, but were gone now, disappeared by a cloud that pressed down from above and would not scud or change its form. That spoke out of the blue in the voice of a man instead of the void. A million tiny scribes scribbled in the dirt beneath my feet, on the soles of my feet: frog, rhino, honey bee, snow leopard. . . . All clear to the naked eye without a microscope as emergencies whose names appeared on the same blue petals where the little tippler hovered just yesterday. I spat out the language I suffered in the lecture hall of the blind politician, but kept the dirt from the bank in the back of my throat to translate the buzz that was missing: “The world is sewn together with threads of every color, so everything is dressed, adorned, bedighted by the hand that moves inside the light. So everything is as stunning as the apis mellifera to the eye that sees this creature as an angel besotted with flowers.” The man grew bored with me as well—my old translation of math to myth that had no formula or Latin names.

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So how soon unaccountable indeed I became tired and sick till rising and gliding out by myself to search the bank for one elixir maker I may have missed. For the steady buzz that filled the air with the hum I loved more than words. With a music I could not sing for my lack of wings but needed to hear.

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THE DAY I waited in line, and it was raining, and it was a long wait. . . . And so I, as I waited, I grew angrier and angrier at myself for being this humble character. And finally, maybe about 10:30 or so, I got up to the head of the line and there was a guy sitting down—I was standing. We each went to a different desk. We stood. They sat. And he said, what kind of job would you like? And I don’t know where this impulse came from, but I said, “I want your job.” —Philip Levine

History sings “misery, misery.” The force that gives us meaning is terrible, bloody and sweet. So many lenses the clock holds up to the past in shades of rose, lilac, and pansy. The holy, irrevocable scenes of things as they were—ignited, burned, mistaken. The day, as in, back in . . . The day, as in the day we played both sides of the ball; the day, as in the day we talked to God, then wrote it down; the day, as in the day we lived offline in caves and drew on walls; the day, as in the day a pack of cigarettes cost a couple of dimes, the same as gas; the day, as in the first, the second, the third, the last; the day, as in the day we waited in line for how many hours to say to the man like Phil Levine,

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“I want your job”; the day, as in the day we built enormous things with only our hands, then threw away the plans; the day, as in the day no novocaine numbed the pain and we felt it to the bone.

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INQUISITION IN THE KITCHEN OF DOROTHY DAY . . . similemente il mal seme d’ Adamo gittansi di quellito ad una ad una, per cenni come augel per suo richiamo. —Dante, Inferno, Canto III, lines 115–17

“In the absence of the bone you wished away, you feel nothing in place of where it had grown, although you know for reasons you can’t explain that others have chosen to keep it as a ‘strange vestigial part’ for feeling the pain of others. So when you say such things as ‘the violence must end, but . . . ’ you give yourself away like the souls in Canto III of Dante’s Inferno who hurl themselves like spears to the other side. You treat the victims as fools and laugh at torture. Would you cook the nettle? Shop for seconds? Quick. The water’s boiling. The children are crying.”

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LETTER TO THE PR ESIDENT FROM A CITIZEN, AUGUST 21, 2019 The quoted lines in this poem are from Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Stalin Epigram.” Mandelstam was imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag near modern-day Vladivostok, where he died of cold, starvation, and illness in 1938.

I write to you, Mr. President, from inside the cell in which you’ve locked the country with ICE. It’s alive in here with “huddled masses” you call your enemy, you call “invaders,” including me—a citizen you’re holding as well in your detention center of fear and loathing of the other, although you were different, too, just yesterday in the persons of your mother and father’s father, whose middle name was Christ. I hear echoes inside these walls that are invisible but hard with history, repeating the words of martyrs that fly like birds from the past into now— this one in particular from a hole in Vladivostok: “No longer can I feel the ground beneath me . . . Whenever there’s a snatch of talk, it turns to the Kremlin Mountaineer who pokes out his finger that alone goes boom.” Do you hear? A chorus of beautiful voices is singing right here beneath this sky: “Every tyrant resurrects the same.”

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CHECKLIST

the bone that aches in the rain of lies a turnip instead of cake the fire that feeds on the breath of witnesses, even a stone, then speaks the echo of her no in the outskirts and streets the sword he brought instead of peace the red coal an angel places on the tongue like a treat the sentence of his sentence pennies worth more than gold others, and then some the tree with so many tongues that says, “The truth resides inside the wind and blows for those who hear it.” a kiss on the cheek that doesn’t turn the nerve that takes its stand by keeping its seat the pauper in the park who says, “Of these ends; it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.” the bell that heals itself by ringing a smile in the hole the eye that sees when closed waking, waking

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�V�

AT THE SLEEP CLINIC

I sat in the parking lot of the sleep clinic for an hour before my appointment staring out at the mountains in the distance that appeared as gorgeous bodies in both prone and supine positions inhaling the sky— dreaming themselves of all the ephemeral things the clouds inspire in their eternal pastime for now. How I got to this place is a mystery I can’t explain. Call it exhaustion, providence, coincidence . . . The important thing was that I was there on a couple of plains at once with an eye that was blind to itself in its socket of sky, but sharp in its vision of a hazelnut. I opened my eyes and went on dreaming, which I called a symptom of my sleeplessness. It was the condition I had developed after so many years of nearly dying from suffocating in my sleep, which was why I was there at the clinic dozing off in my car.

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But back to the mountains, sky, and the goddess who suddenly descended on me from a cloud in the guise of the cloud from which she descended— most beautiful Isis—and then translated me on the Nile because the parking lot was also the Nile and she was the Mother of Time again and I the Father who was playing dead, at least in my dream. Say it wasn’t true and I’ll say it was because it was, just as a child believes that she can fly or disappear or metamorphose into a bear and wears a costume to prove it and has friends over who believe in her magic and take part in the scenes that she makes up inside the forest of her room. So yes, my make-believe was true if also ridiculous—a private myth with legs that ran right out of my dream and onto the page of sky for all to read and believe as a myth that was like a book at evening, beautiful but untrue, like a book on rising, beautiful and true.

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So, did I wake or dream? Ha! I slept but my heart was awake, was what I wanted to tell the doctor whose name I had forgotten—that I was blessed in my exhaustion, tuned in to the blue beyond the clouds that transported me in a high, oneiric fugue in which I could hear the sounds that David heard in the hills which had no words or speech but only the silence that loves the company of a mind fused to sky. Only the heart divining the hum of stars. “Don’t give me gold, but a piece of paper,” I said to myself as a snoozing cipher because I was receiving news like a radio tuned to s station on a clear, sidereal evening when the stars are so amazingly bright they shine right through you and suddenly a voice comes clear in a phrase or two that seems absurd at first but works surprisingly well as a caption for the dream you’re having about something else that sounds so unrelated

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until you hear its echo with your third invisible ear and understand just then how deeply besotted language is with that as this and this as that in the voices of others in the atmosphere whose world-wide wings are bedighted with sacred feathers that fall like pages with all our names. I sat suspended between the dash and the heaven within me, calling it “father”, calling it “her”, calling it “nothing”. It hardly mattered as long as it was other. “Yes, the clouds are a lullaby,” I continued. “Yes, the zoo calls out to me. Yes, I took my meds, and no, they’re hardly indeterminate, friend, these metaphysical puzzles that need a dream for you to put together, that come in pieces like the clouds for you to see just where they go by closing your eyes and then remembering.” But who was writing any of this down, my recitation, and how did I remember? And did you know the sacrifice I made

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by even talking to you in my diurnal slumber? Then suddenly the noontime whistle sounded and I awoke from waking and opened the door of my car in which I’d spoken with a beautiful goddess who rescued me from inside that dark interior in which I’d died to this world but emitted such sweetness in my death from inside a cypress, she smelled me out. How still I had lain on my catafalque conceiving time—that ticking child, that mewling babe at his mother’s breast on the Nile. How alive and distant I’d been in death to the world that hangs like a jewel from the sky and lifts you up like a cloud into its blue when you dream of dying alive in your car with the windows down and a warm spring breeze blowing through. Thank goodness then for the whistle at noon that woke me in time to save me from another wait of a month or two to see the specialist who thinks that I more than likely suffer from “a pretty serious case” of apnea and would I mind spending the night in one of the clinic’s rooms,

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where his assistant, the brilliant Ms. Matoon, can hook me up to a REM machine that measures my heart and dreams? “Not at all,” I said. “By all means.”

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� VI �

DR IVE-IN

We sat so close to each other I could smell your hair as you gripped my knee and I kissed your neck in the semi dark of the drive-in theater’s parking lot. We knew the feeling of being watched from behind the screen, so we watched back, whispering a secret we swore to tell. We were double there, both watching and acting, making us up—no different than the way we lived with the knowledge that our bones were bugged by the god who flickered in the gears of the hot projector. We were so moved by the movie in the open air that we continued to stare at the screen and then the sky long after the credits ran. You rolled your window down and lit a cigarette. It was a warm September night and the stars were out. Crickets sang inside the dark as wave after wave caressed the shore of a nearby lake. Giant moths flew in and out of the sodium lamps. ‘There’s Cassiopeia,” I said. A car door slammed. 

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SEX IS

Sex is the nail that only drives part way, then bends, the trail of snakes across the Earth. Sex is the Lord of Void inside the clay that turns to flesh from breath in a single day. Sex is the salve we rub into the hurt— the sweet, addictive sweat that smells like hay. Sex is the knife we use in the dark to betray our love for nothing—cut out its heart. Sex is the fire that burns all day and into the night, the prayer too easy to say. Sex is the Wanted God who hides in the dirt— the master spy behind the lines, the gray then bleeding sky on the eighth impossible day on which we were aroused by shame to flirt. Sex is the eveningwear we wear all day— the tight reptilian suit that smells like hay.

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GODDESS OF M APLE AT EVENING

She breathed a chill that slowed the sap inside the phloem, stood perfectly still inside the dark, then walked to a field where the distance crooned in a small blue voice how close it was, how the gravity of sky pulls you up like steam from the arch. She sang along until the silence soloed in a northern wind, then headed back to the sugar stand and drank from a maple to thin her blood with the spirit of sap. To quicken its pace to the speed of sound then hear it boom inside her heart. To quicken her mind to the speed of light with another suck from the flooded tap.

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SW IMMING HOLE

The beauty on the boulder smokes a Kool. All the looks and loneliness make her want to blow the menthol out and pull it in again. She loves her dog’s fake obedience. She loves the man on the ledge who’s fat, the only one who double flips without a splash. She is the perfect judge, more intent on how a body slips into the water than the rippling pecs on those unpracticed divers. That goddamned hair the color of sun and her soprano breasts are a curse to the mesomorphs who crave her stares. Give her the fat man any day who rises from the depths like a priest forbidden prizes.

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STAG’S R EPR IEVE Yet may I by no meanes my weried mynd Drawe from the Diere —Thomas Wyatt

I watched a stag from my stand in a maple follow the scent of a hind in heat on her run below. Why shoot? I wondered, despite my need to prepare for winter this far from town. He was a god who spoke to me: Climb down and find your love, he sang. Bequeath your skin like a quilt to the one who waits for you I’ ll come again when you awake in mid-December. Shoot me then with one true arrow when you have loved, and I will feed two others.

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L AYOVER What do you think? Answer me, for the water has not canceled the sad memories in you yet. —Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 31, lines 10–12

Listen, the music of strangers here in the Eschaton Lounge where the air is thick with so many waves his fillings buzz with the frequencies of this most biblical age. I’m so lonely amidst the crowd in Terminal X that when Security booms in the voice of God For all the unfortunate obvious reasons unattended bags will be destroyed the blur between the talk talk talk of my fellow travelers and me in all my self-palaver suddenly clears into a scene from The Opera Of Me In Love With The Girl Who’s Also a Deer. The terminal doubles as a set for the hidden singer in the open. The crowd disperses in its randomness as the chorus for this performance of the errant pilot besotted with her, her— the Queen of Sheba, Beatrice, and Desdamona—the complex

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stewardess who has returned in mufti as the cynosure of today, that is, tomorrow, my blue blue beloved who’s also Laura—the woman who waits for me in every city, then flies away on duty. Who urges me to carry on the saga: “Dearest Beloved in the distance that’s also near, the songs you sang in your sleep are a lullaby here. Those little things we said in passing without a thought haunt me now you’ve taken off. I’m on the lam without you beneath a sky whose clouds scud by like captions for the dead. Only you can arrest me. I’m sitting here at the end of the bar waiting for you to find me, so tired and ready to test my theory, which is my love on the ground, vain as it is; to lie down with you right here

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at the bar, which is also the Nile in spring. Conceive a time outside of time in the form of a child whose name we keep a secret. Who plays the lyre like Orpheus and signs his name Anonymous. You know, those things we talked about in the air above Egypt, France, Ukraine, and America.”

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HOW IT WENT, MY HE ART

In steps at her command down the plank of a tall fast ship with the salt of sex across its lips. In whispers, too, to the captain— poor captain—so swayed by looks he went along to the end with blindfold on and toes curled round the board. “Recreant,” she said, and so it was—all muscle and nerve like a bird in the wind. As for its ghost, it bled like a throat slashed by a blade as sharp as her word.

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SHEPHER D

He called her name as he searched the hills. The sight of her in Heaven’s Field had stormed his heart with twisted horns and wild leaps. He read the clouds as notes to silence and hummed along, then added lyrics he sang at dusk to charm the wolves and calm the children.

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TESTIMONY

I hardly cared about the threads that read as signs of the sacrifice I made for her— my camouflage of uniforms. As for the sheets in which we slept with nothing on— what perfect copies of the clouds she commandeered. What sleeps we slept in them like coals that burned all night! We dreamed and woke, woke and dreamed for a thousand years, or so it seemed—long enough at any rate to wind the sky’s nocturnal clock beyond its hands and chimes.

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� VII �

DR E A M OF HE AVEN for Vincent Panella

I’d smoke cigars all day and into the night while I wrote and wrote without any knowledge or slightest assurance, as if anything I scribbled actually mattered or rose to a standard of literary merit. I’d bask in the smoke that did me in and call it the cloud of my unknowing, so sweet with the taste, such as it was, of Cuban soil. That would be paradise in heaven that’s so overrated as endless bliss it kills to imagine as a place for living forever, no less, with nothing to do or lips to kiss. I’d curse, therefore, with the best of them—the legion of saved—as I sharpened my pencils and smoked my Cohibas in the simple room that I’d be given with a desk for writing and bed for remembering the things I’d forgotten. And reading too, I almost forgot. I’d read and read since I’d be done with sleeping, but dreaming, no, still dreaming a lot. I’d live to live again with moments of dying to see how “lucky” I was. I’d use my body as an eidolon with invisible wings that fluttered in the void as if it were air and hummed in the dark in which I could see.

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THE BE AVERS

“They flood the pasture,” my neighbor explained when we met this morning at the property line that divides his field from mine, which is also a meadow, although I call it a pasture when talking to him, since a meadow is not a place his cows would roam, but a patch of paradise for picnics and lovers. We had just been walking around to see what damage winter had done to the fence and trees when we met at the marker and greeted each other, then broached the weather and other things regarding spring: the sap, its grade, its run, the snow, the herd, the beavers. “They’re heading this way as we speak,” he said. “I saw them in a dream last night.” Spirits, I thought, come back to teach the mysteries of building houses in water, but nodded instead like a dash-board doll. Elders in the ruse of beavers with a genius for damming, I wanted to tell him, but couldn’t stop nodding in

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agreement with his denial of the fun he has each summer exploding their houses with TNT, then shooting them from behind a wall. “Pests,” he called them, when he really meant such perfect moving targets for catching in the hairs of his .243. “Good luck,” I said in a tone he didn’t catch as I continued down the row of giant maples to the stream to see if I could find some sign of them, as I had in previous years— the prints of little hands in the loam and eaten trees, but nothing yet, just the cold dark water of Sackett’s Brook beneath the silence of a cloudless sky where a red-tailed hawk besieged by sparrows let out a cry and then another.

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VESPER

The sky is blue for reasons other than atmospheric ones. “It’s okay if you hear voices,” she said. I might have smiled at her long ago. Language strips to its bones at evening and clatters, clatters. I sit as still as the trees at dusk and watch the birds give vanity a name that has only a sound—a kind of buzz. Or is it a hum? A breeze scatters my hair that has grown over my eyes. My mother’s hand? How light her fingers have grown, and wide? How quiet her voice and clear. It is too easy to believe and therefore religious. A hawk spies me from above and circles the meadow below the house where a mouse disturbs a tuft of grass at the risk of her life. A maple’s leaves applaud the silence. No, they rustle in the breeze. Blueberry, raspberry, pear. I feel music playing inside me. “Take down its notes,” says a voice that sounds like mine but isn’t, “and lose it, lose it.” The instrument is taut, hollow, and old.

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The sky is blue because . . . The silence is sweet because . . . I point instead of speak, which is to say without saying it that I know how deafening is my voice, like all the voices that drown the music in the pit below the stage I call my emptiness.

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SUNDAY DR IVE

There was a bright blue light aglow inside the open door of the cinder block bar called Mike’s just off the road to the right about halfway between Lynchburg and Big Island. Too early for a tavern to be open, but there it was—the light above the door like a beacon calling me in to the darkness to drink like never before. The smell of petrichor on the cracked macadam sweetened the air as I drove with the windows down into the mountain that was partially shrouded by a sudden veil of Blue Ridge fog. It was a Sunday morning in late September and the churches were filled like hives in every town along the way. I sat behind the altar of my wheel, keeping to my lane on 501, singing along to Shania Twain, Emmylou, and Patsy Cline. A crow stood on the yellow line of the dangerous curve in Coleman Falls eating a possum that lay in a heap of tangled entrails like a bas relief of feelings—“They’re mine,” I said to the bird as I drove on by, then watched him flap away like the God of Shadows. I prayed for the possum who played so dead before he died the foxes and dogs let him be. I prayed for his soul when I saw a cloud in the shape of him beginning to crawl on the floor of sky into nothing at all.

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GER ALD STER N, SAPPHO, AND ANONYMOUS IN PROV INCETOW N, JUNE 29, 1995

We sat on some steps of a stairway that rose to sky above Commercial St. in Provincetown. Sappho smiled like Lilith, then lit a cigarette. I said “What is time when we’re together killing ourselves?” We were waiting for The Lobster Pot to open across the street, so we had twenty minutes or so to talk about this and that—Emily’s dog, Langston’s themes, Shelley’s poem in this week’s Atlantis—just where we’d left off the day before in our gossip about Marcabru, Levine, and Tsvetaeva. The stars gazed through the dusk like so many eyes of the dead. We grew quiet for a minute as Sappho dragged on her cigarette and I lit one up. The distillation of ocean’s breeze enveloped us like a veil the gods had woven from molecules in the atmosphere—the same divinities who’d sat just where we were sitting now before they evanesced the day before to fog and clouds and birds, leaving their emptiness on the stairs, which was also their presence: Venus, Mercury, and Mars. Our cigarettes glowed like distant lamps, as if we were already in the Underworld enjoying our fate with Baudelaire, Catullus, and Chatterton. What did we know about our fuel?

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Only that it was filling us with poems as we talked and breathed, breathed and smoked in that eternal little while which only I and Stern remember now, now that Sappho is gone—that time I call it merely to please the gods who ask for only the right details. We loafed together in that forever of waiting to enter The Lobster Pot where we continued to talk some more as we cracked our shells and sucked the meat from inside the claws that fell to our plates.

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JEFFERSON’S BATHS

I took off my clothes in the dressing room and hung them on the nail for all those skins that one brings in from the decent world. “No talking please,” read the sign above the round, historic pool with fieldstone walls and pebble bottom. I gripped the rail beside the stairs and entered slowly. The water flooded my pores with lithium, sulfur, and iron— what Sherando called the warm good medicine. I treaded with a float across the waters, then rolled on my back and stared at the hole in the open ceiling. Silence floated also on the pool like heaven’s clock. This must be what it’s like at the end, I thought, the dropping off from the lowest stair into the warmth of a vast clear sea in which we swim and fly, fly and swim, without our bodies.

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WHER E AND HOW BLOOD WAS M ADE Her sons’ dreadful bodies, buried by that mass, drenched the Earth with streams of blood, and they say she warmed it to new life so that a trace of her children might remain, transforming it into the shape of human beings. But these progeny also despising the gods were savage, violent, and eager for slaughter, so that you might know they were born from blood. —Ovid

In a sea beneath a sea without a name where waters gathered to a clarity that was also sorrow. There, in the darkness that thickened in a dream at the center of nothing, a scarlet serum formed with hypostatic stuff in a centrifuge of gelid currents that flowed in time with the moon, the moon, back and forth, until the mere idea of things themselves suggested bodies and they were formed as germs at first before becoming flies and worms and flesh, never mind the eons that turned to seconds in retrospect inside the heads of those whose brains were seeds for minds, whose thoughts progressed in a garden where innocence died and beauty was born: salt sorrow red lust stars betrayal difference depth grief violence awe trust charge order rage dust chaos sky fear gush life stain sea death flooded their hearts that hardened to stone at the taste of it.

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R ETUR N AS TICK ET

When I’m forced to return home to retrieve something I’ve forgotten, I enter a double zone that’s the same road I just went down but am returning on now with an altered vision of its sameness that turns it into another road which is so different I hardly know what to call it as I speed forward in heading back, taking in everything that’s so familiar— the fence posts, pasture, elms, and burdock— as suddenly strange through the lens of inconvenience. It’s almost a dream, but not really—more a consequence of accepting my mistake, which allows me in turn to see, if even briefly, so many things I’ve hidden, as if my mind needed to forget to save my heart from the haste that governs my life. Something shines in the distance. I call it the lamp of internal difference that needs the spark of my seeing anew to light its mantel. Then everything I see I know was once forgotten and lay in the dark behind the light. I hear the cries of them all as parts of the whole in the sough of wheels, in the absence of the single thing that I’ve forgotten, and then the loss of those I can’t redeem. They are songs as well that quiet the hum of a powerful engine and slap of tires on wet macadam. I notice, too, that the cobalt sky has now become the vault for all I feel on the road of my remembering.

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It’s my ticket for the matinee of my own showing— this turning back to fetch my wallet, this foreign film I title “Late Again” with burning captions.

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IN THE GAR DEN

I pulled weeds on my knees in the garden and prayed as I pulled, asking for bread, forgiveness, and deliverance, but nothing more—no intervention, miracle or sign. I was crawling on the ground with dirt on my knees and blood on my hands from pulling thorns. A snake slid by with a cold clear eye I took as mine to see myself with so little time. My wife called out from the porch with nothing on for me to put down my trowel and join her for lunch beneath the elm that is so tall it sweeps the sky with its verdant broom. How long had I kneeled on the wet dark earth without an answer? I bent down to feel the tongues of weeds against my ear, to listen to the traffic of worms and flies, to hear the snake repeat: “I turned your curse to bliss in the labor you thought was worse than what you had, and then your piss to holy water.”

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FROG POND

I crept up on them—a creeper among the peepers— and stood on the bank like a metronome and peeped myself a couple of times, then listened to their slow diminuendo until just one called out his shrill erotic song as if he were deaf to the sudden calm that had settled across the water, or maybe thought that he and I were so spectacular as singing partners that we could share the pond and was waiting for me to sing again, which I did, I did, like the amateur I was—so human and wrong without the others whose high professional voices drowned my drone.

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M AR ACA

The whole time I was falling I knew I was going to land somewhere, although I didn’t know where exactly, so I forgot about landing, which was a blessing, although there were moments when I thought about this in the air, which was time—mere minutes in my mind as I imagined living as falling and closed my eyes, which only enhanced my vision of the ground and the little x that was etched somewhere below that seemed avoidable, yes, as long as I was falling because it was shifting from here to there and even disappearing at times when in fact it was following me through the air with the freedom to move on its own as I dreamed and in my dreaming saw the Earth as paradise because I had known forever it seemed that walking or running from place to place, though real enough, was really only a metaphor in my sleep for flying, which was the oldest euphemism for falling and just a ridiculously beautiful reason for sticking wings

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on angels who hardly need them and would scare a bird if ever they saw one, although they look magnificent on cathedral ceilings as tropes in the atmosphere of literal heavens, but back to the scene of my falling in which I hoped I had wings enough myself to avoid my x somehow, although I heard a soft clear voice repeat, “no way my love” and I knew just then that my descent was sublime because I was terrified and had to look away from the smallest things that were magnified on the screen of my lids, but where I wondered, where was the bulb that lit these scenes from above and who replaced it when suddenly I saw the letter that marked the spot or thought I did because it was pulling me toward it with a force I couldn’t resist—such a tiny enormous letter on the ground which was precisely when the filament broke inside the bulb, leaving me in a darkness where a voice that was heavenly, yes, but also earthly, sang

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the latest hit that was unimaginable before, not just to me but everyone, so that despite the sudden darkness and this most catchy song, my descent was wondrous then as I seemed to float instead of fall, singing along, kicking my feet, flapping my arms, keeping the beat, shaking the bulb that had just blown out.

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Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the editors of the journals below for publishing the following poems, which sometimes appeared in different forms and/or with different titles. AGNI: “Reception,” “The Lake”; American Journal of Poetry: “To the End,” “Ghost With Cigarette”; Ashville Poetry Review: “Sex Is,” “Then There”; Blackbird: “Sunday Drive”; Cortland Review: “Inquisition in the Kitchen of Dorothy Day”; Gettysburg Review: “The Beavers,” “Night Walk”; Green Mountains Review: “Like Wax,” “Buzz,” “The Widow”; Hunger Mountain: “How It Went, My Heart,” “Where and How Blood Was Made”; Juxtaprose: “Dumuzi’s Wound”; Missouri Review: “Layover”; Nine Mile: “Each Stunning Thing”; On the Sea Wall: “Wrestler’s Lament”; Plume: “Return as Ticket,” “The Day,” “Vesper,” “At the Sleep Clinic,” “Nor Ever Would Be, Sadly Would Be”; Poem of the Day, Academy of American Poets: “Dream of Heaven,” “Children of Aleppo,” “Goddess of Maple at Evening”; Poetry: “Weatherman”; Poetry International: “Maraca,” “Testimony”; Poetry Society of America, Sonnet Award: “Swimming Hole” under the title “Fairy Tale”; Putney Post: “Frog Pond”; Upstreet: “Grief Is The River With A Foreign Name”; Vox Populi: “Letter To the President from a Citizen, August 21, 2019,” “In My Unknowing”; Red Wheel Barrow: “I Wept with Joy above the River” under title “How Thirsty”; Salamander: “On Encountering a Friend with Little Time at the Walpole Inn,” “Shepherd” under the title “Inside the Song,” “Then There”; Southern Review: “Stag’s Reprieve”; Tiferet Journal: “In The Garden” under the title “Prayer”; Zócalo Public Square: “Jefferson’s Baths,” “Drive-In.”

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“The Beavers” also appeared on Poetry Daily and in Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (Knopf). “Check List” appeared in What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone), edited by Martín Espada. I am grateful to the following people for their invaluable support, their patience, their keen ears, their friendship, their belief in my poems—especially during those times when I lost my own belief in them—and their inspiring company: Liz Hawkes deNiord, Ethan Canin, Bruce Smith, Jeff Friedman, Dennis Nurkse, Brian Cohen, Doug Anderson, Syd Lea, Alice Fogel, Dzvinia Orlowski, Janet Masso, Bill Kelly, Michele Burgess, Li-Young Lee, Ed Ochester, Peter Everwine, Carolyn Forché, Peter Johnson, Eric Aho, Vincent Panella, Forrest Gander, Nancy Winship Milliken, Ruth Stone, Bianca Stone, Danny Lawless, Robin Behn, and Iya Kaminsky.

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