The Beauty Read online

  whose throat knows no aging

  or a few words

  from the second century,

  stumbled on once in translation—

  “I come from the river, husband,

  its brushy bank left these scratches.”

  Made to be seen through, for pleasure.

  QUARTZ CLOCK

  The ideas of a physicist

  can be turned into useful objects:

  a rocket, a quartz clock,

  a microwave oven for cooking.

  The ideas of poets turn into only themselves,

  as the hands of the clock do,

  or the face of a person.

  It changes, but only more into the person.

  MY LIFE WAS THE SIZE OF MY LIFE

  My life was the size of my life.

  Its rooms were room-sized,

  its soul was the size of a soul.

  In its background, mitochondria hummed,

  above it sun, clouds, snow,

  the transit of stars and planets.

  It rode elevators, bullet trains,

  various airplanes, a donkey.

  It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.

  It ate, it slept, it opened

  and closed its hands, its windows.

  Others, I know, had lives larger.

  Others, I know, had lives shorter.

  The depth of lives, too, is different.

  There were times my life and I made jokes together.

  There were times we made bread.

  Once, I grew moody and distant.

  I told my life I would like some time,

  I would like to try seeing others.

  In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.

  I was hungry, then, and my life,

  my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep

  our hands off our clothes on

  our tongues from

  PERSPECTIVE: AN ASSAY

  Makes one wall darker than the other,

  leaving a corner.

  Makes one leaf more red than another, leaving a tree.

  Blocks with an earthquake, an illness, a phone call,

  what once seemed important.

  Holds one perfume close, indelible, while others fade.

  Is cubic from every direction, except when rounded.

  Sneezes at ardor, boredom, despair.

  Cannot in general be found, yet is everywhere local.

  Likes magic, for which it is frequently useful.

  Likes dice.

  Likes everything just as it is, then just as it is, then just as it is.

  Enjoys folding anything—

  card hands, laundry, letters, elbows and knees.

  Hums softly in Giotto, loudly in Tintoretto.

  Likes mirrors, windows, old portraits, taking the long view—

  This Chinese scroll, for instance, unrolling as if without limit

  its small boat, downrushing river, and strolling deep-sleeved officials

  in oddly shaped caps,

  the curious horse looking out

  from behind the long-needled pine it’s been momentarily tied to forever.

  ORDINARY RAIN. EVERY LEAF IS WET.

  The landscape by Dürer

  of a dandelion amid grasses

  its flowers

  done with the first opening

  not yet gone into the second

  these too will finally bend toward the earth

  exiles

  writing letters

  sent over the mountains by friendly horses and donkeys

  THINGS KEEP SORTING THEMSELVES

  Does the butterfat know it is butterfat,

  milk know it’s milk?

  No.

  Something just goes and something remains.

  Like a boardinghouse table:

  men on one side, women on the other.

  Nobody planned it.

  Plaid shirts next to one another,

  talking in accents from the Midwest.

  Nobody plans to be a ghost.

  Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen.

  Soon enough, they’ll be the ones

  to stumble Excuse me and quickly withdraw.

  But they don’t know that.

  No one can ever know that.

  I WAKE EARLY

  I wake early,

  make two cups of coffee,

  drink one,

  think, go back to sleep,

  wake again, think,

  drink the other.

  To start a day over

  is a card game played for no money,

  a ripe tomato,

  a swimming cat.

  Time here:

  lukewarm,

  with milk and sugar,

  big and unset as a table.

  I wake twice.

  Twice the window

  unbroken, transparent.

  Twice the cat’s nose and ears above water.

  Twice the war (my war)

  is distant,

  its children’s children are distant.

  IN A KITCHEN WHERE MUSHROOMS WERE WASHED

  In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed,

  the mushroom scent lingers.

  As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale.

  As a person who’s once loved completely,

  a country once conquered,

  does not release that stunned knowledge.

  They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels,

  clownish puffballs.

  Lichens have served as a lamp-wick.

  Clean-burning coconuts, olives.

  Dried salmon, sheep fat, a carcass of petrel set blazing:

  light that is fume and abradement.

  Unburnable mushrooms are other.

  They darken the air they come into.

  Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken.

  HONEY

  Music comes with instructions:

  pianissimo, forte.

  In Nō plays the actors wear masks,

  so their souls can be seen:

  wild-haired old woman, callow young priest.

  Each morning I wake in strange country,

  my bed made of strange wood.

  Time arrives clockless.

  Rain poses hieroglyphic, with bent knees,

  shoulders askew, arms lifting

  from out of the future

  the future—

  a box labeled neither

  “Requests” nor “Suggestions.”

  What is, what will be,

  is honey.

  Touched, it sticks to the fingers.

  Andromeda overhead, silent.

  Below, ears, eyes,

  an aching elbow,

  Chekhov, the laboring bees.

  HAMPER

  As sunlight or darkness fits itself

  around lamp, table, or mountain,

  silence stitches itself

  around hopes, thoughts, and words.

  Some hear it

  the sound of their own speech

  coming back from where they are dead.

  Some find it summer-cool pillow,

  winter wool coat.

  Some tack their names

  on its door and step inside.

  And if in that room there is happiness

  so without measure

  you cannot keep your eyes open to see it,

  and if in that room sorrow bends

  like late nettles in sleet,

  the silence will be there also to greet them,

  setting each in its wicker hamper

  on a plaid blanket, two sleepy puppies.

  FLORISTS’ ROSES

  color of a library wall

  in Venice

  bred

  to stay on the stem

  hands of an old woman

  on an old chicken

  pull them off

  “for the petals”

  she says

  whil
e remembering

  the sudden mercilessness

  between lovers

  MOP WITHOUT STICK

  I am on my knees again,

  mop without stick,

  over old fir trees turned into flooring.

  A thought stood once in the middle,

  near the cookstove, left heel and right heel.

  Left hand and right hand, I wash around it.

  Thought without handle,

  thought without hands, without lemons or Serengeti.

  One breath, another,

  one corner of cotton in water wets the whole cloth.

  THE PROBLEM

  You are trying to solve a problem.

  You’re almost certainly halfway done,

  maybe more.

  You take some salt, some alum,

  and put it into the problem.

  Its color goes from yellow to royal blue.

  You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem,

  as into a Peruvian quipu of colored string.

  You enter the problem’s bodegas,

  its flea markets, souks.

  Amid the alleys of sponges and sweets,

  of jewelry, spices, and hair combs,

  you ponder which stall, which pumpkin or perfume, is yours.

  You go inside the problem’s piano.

  You choose three keys.

  One surely must open the door of the problem,

  if only you knew only this:

  is the quandary edible or medical,

  a problem of reason or grief?

  It is looking back at you now

  with the quizzical eyes of a young, bright dog.

  Her whole body pitched for the fetch,

  the dog wants to please.

  If only she could ascertain which direction,

  what object, which scent of riddle,

  and if the problem is round or elliptical in its orbit,

  and if it is measured in foot-pounds, memory, or meat.

  IN PRAISE OF BEING PERIPHERAL

  Without philosophy,

  tragedy,

  history,

  a gray squirrel

  looks

  very busy.

  Light as a soul

  released

  from a painting by Bosch,

  its greens

  and vermilions stripped off it.

  He climbs a tree

  that is equally ahistoric.

  His heart works harder.

  A CHAIR IN SNOW

  A chair in snow

  should be

  like any other object whited

  & rounded

  and yet a chair in snow is always sad

  more than a bed

  more than a hat or house

  a chair is shaped for just one thing

  to hold

  a soul its quick and few bendable

  hours

  perhaps a king

  not to hold snow

  not to hold flowers

  LIKE THE SMALL HOLE BY THE PATH-SIDE SOMETHING LIVES IN

  Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,

  in me are lives I do not know the names of,

  nor the fates of,

  nor the hungers of or what they eat.

  They eat of me.

  Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me

  whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

  And in my streets—the narrow ones,

  unlabeled on the self-map—

  they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,

  and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,

  in hours uncounted by the self-clock,

  they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.

  There too have been the hard extinctions,

  missing birds once feasted on and feasting.

  There too must be machines

  like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.

  A few escape. A mercy.

  They leave behind

  small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

  WET SPRING

  The practical castle is cold.

  All around it the world is a stream bed.

  A few well-placed openings

  under the windows

  let rain weep back outward.

  The rain is string

  for wrapping a package no one knows

  the inside of, they just keep trying to mail it.

  Perhaps it is licorice. Perhaps it is kindness.

  The package so large even wetness becomes an umbrella.

  MANY-ROOFED BUILDING IN MOONLIGHT

  I found myself

  suddenly voluminous,

  three-dimensioned,

  a many-roofed building in moonlight.

  Thought traversed

  me as simply as moths might.

  Feelings traversed me as fish.

  I heard myself thinking,

  It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.

  Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,

  the usual footsteps above me.

  Washed my face again with hot water,

  as I did when I was a child.

  ANYWHERE YOU LOOK

  in the corner of a high rain gutter

  under the roof tiles

  new grasses’ delicate seed heads

  what war, they say

  ANATOMY AND MAKING

  In Chinese painting, there are flowers with bones,

  flowers that are boneless.

  Also in trees, men, mountains, horses, and houses.

  A calcium not subject

  but angle

  the brush is held by, minerals into.

  Fox hairs are soft,

  yet fox bones and fox teeth are in them.

  Dragon veins, the space between mountains is called.

  Lu Ch’ai wrote, “When painting a rock, paint all three of its faces.”

  I think of the two Greek masks, one laughing, one weeping,

  and then of the third he would have found missing—

  mask-face of wonder? of anger? of rigor?

  a child’s look before sleep?

  Lu wrote,

  “There is only one thing to be said here: rocks painted fully are living.”

  And then, of painting people,

  “Hands slipped into sleeves are warm, no feeling of coldness.”

  I CAST MY HOOK, I DECIDE TO MAKE PEACE

  The bee does not speak to me.

  The whale does not speak to me.

  The horse is silent.

  History does not speak to me.

  Arachne is only a spider.

  Nothing says “you” if I offer “I,”

  “I” if I proffer “you.”

  I would go

  to the Counter of Complaining—

  there was one,

  a hut of new pine wood

  at the base of the Yellow Mountains in China,

  the door was open, a woman sat in the chair—

  but nothing says “counter,”

  nothing says “yellow” or “mountain.”

  Erased dust of the chalkboard, barnacle,

  less sleep than bed—

  what can I do, faceless, with no one to kiss or shout at?

  I cast my hook, my vote against it,

  I decide to make peace.

  I declare this intention but nothing answers.

  And so I put peace in a warm place, towel-covered, to proof,

  then into an oven. I wait.

  Peace is patient and undemanding, it surpasseth.

  And the bulldozers move

  from the palace of breaking to the places of building.

  And the students return to their classes.

  Tuna swim freely.

  The sky hoists the flag of the sky.

  All this in the space of a half-page, a little ink,

  a small bite of hubris

  sweetened with raisins and
honey.

  I begin to consider what I will make of tomorrow’s speechless.

  A PERSON PROTESTS TO FATE

  A person protests to fate:

  “The things you have caused

  me most to want

  are those that furthest elude me.”

  Fate nods.

  Fate is sympathetic.

  To tie the shoes, button a shirt,

  are triumphs

  for only the very young,

  the very old.

  During the long middle:

  conjugating a rivet

  mastering tango

  training the cat to stay off the table

  preserving a single moment longer than this one

  continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before

  and the penmanships love practices inside the body.

  TWELVE PEBBLES