The Beauty Read online

  A Hand Holds One Power

  A hand holds one power,

  whose exercise requires the hand be empty.

  The Woman, The Tiger

  The woman, the tiger, the door, the man, the choice.

  Riddles are soulless.

  In them, it is never raining.

  Tri-Focal

  the cat sleeping

  paw prints of bear in the road-sand

  a day moth confusedly walking the glass between them

  I Know You Think I’ve Forgotten

  but today

  in rain

  without coat without hat

  Still Life

  Loyalty of a book

  to its place on the shelf

  in a still life.

  Like that,

  the old loves continue.

  A man I once asked a question of has died; his son sends a letter.

  A thirsty mouse turns a river.

  A stone turns a river.

  Bodiless words turn us.

  Human Measures

  a woman in a distant language sings with great feeling

  the composer’s penciled-in instructions to sing with great feeling.

  Immigration & Hunger

  I misread the journalist’s sentence:

  “In this human drama, the police ate the supporting actors.”

  Humbling: An Assay

  Have teeth.

  For Fifteen Years

  A woman says to her daughter,

  for fifteen years,

  “For the first time now,

  I am feeling my age, for the first time.”

  A blessed life.

  Each day’s yesterday was joyous.

  Each year completed was good.

  A map open on one table, a guidebook on the other

  “I am here.

  I want to be nowhere but here,”

  says the still hanging apricot,

  growing rounder

  like a page from Lewis Carroll.

  Making & Passing

  New new new new new

  bluster the young birds in spring.

  An old branch holds them.

  Generation.

  Strange word: both making and passing.

  I WANTED ONLY A LITTLE

  I wanted, I thought, only a little,

  two teaspoons of silence—

  one for sugar,

  one for stirring the wetness.

  No.

  I wanted a Cairo of silence,

  a Kyoto.

  In every hanging garden

  mosses and waters.

  The directions of silence:

  north, west, south, past, future.

  It comes through any window

  one inch open,

  like rain driven sideways.

  Grief shifts,

  as a grazing horse does,

  one leg to the other.

  But a horse sleeping

  sleeps with all legs locked.

  A COMMON COLD

  A common cold, we say—

  common, though it has encircled the globe

  seven times now handed traveler to traveler

  though it has seen the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an

  seen Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi

  seen the emptied synagogues of Krasnogruda

  seen the since-burned souk of Aleppo

  A common cold, we say—

  common, though it is infinite and surely immortal

  common because it will almost never kill us

  and because it is shared among any who agree to or do not agree to

  and because it is unaristocratic

  reducing to redness both profiled and front-viewed noses

  reducing to coughing the once-articulate larynx

  reducing to unhappy sleepless turning the pillows of down,

  of wool, of straw, of foam, of kapok

  A common cold, we say—

  common because it is cloudy and changing and dulling

  because there are summer colds, winter colds, fall colds,

  colds of the spring

  because these are always called colds, however they differ

  beginning sore-throated

  beginning sniffling

  beginning a little tired or under the weather

  beginning with one single innocuous untitled sneeze

  because it is bane of usually eight days’ duration

  and two or three boxes of tissues at most

  The common cold, we say—

  and wonder, when did it join us

  when did it saunter into the Darwinian corridors of the human

  do manatees catch them do parrots I do not think so

  and who named it first, first described it, Imhotep, Asclepius, Zhongjing

  and did they wonder, is it happy sharing our lives

  as generously as inexhaustibly as it shares its own

  virus dividing and changing while Piero’s girl gazes still downward

  five centuries still waiting still pondering still undivided

  while in front of her someone hunts through her opening pockets for tissues for more than one reason at once

  THIS MORNING, I WANTED FOUR LEGS

  Nothing on two legs weighs much,

  or can.

  An elephant, a donkey, even a cookstove—

  those legs, a person could stand on.

  Two legs pitch you forward.

  Two legs tire.

  They look for another two legs to be with,

  to move one set forward to music

  while letting the other move back.

  They want to carve into a tree trunk:

  2gether 4ever.

  Nothing on two legs can bark,

  can whinny or chuff.

  Tonight, though, everything’s different.

  Tonight I want wheels.

  ONCE, I

  Once, I

  was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,

  sleepy and nameless.

  As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.

  Light on the neck-nape

  of time

  as two wings of one starling,

  or lovers so happy

  neither needs think of the other.

  IN DAYLIGHT, I TURNED ON THE LIGHTS

  In daylight, I turned on the lights,

  in darkness, I pulled closed the curtains.

  And the god of More,

  whom nothing surprises, softly agreed—

  each day, year after year,

  the dead were dead one day more completely.

  In the places where morels were found,

  I looked for morels.

  In the houses where love was found,

  I looked for love.

  If she is vanished, what then was different?

  If he is alive, what now is changed?

  The pot offers the metal closest to fire for burning.

  The water leaves.

  HOW RARELY I HAVE STOPPED TO THANK THE STEADY EFFORT

  A person speaking

  pauses, lets in

  a little silence-portion with the words.

  It is like an hour.

  Any hour. This one.

  Something happens, much does not.

  Or as always, everything happens:

  the standing walls keep

  standing with their whole attention.

  A noisy crow call lowers and lifts its branch,

  the crow scent enters the leaves, enters the bark,

  like stirred-in honey gone into the tea.

  How rarely I have stopped to thank

  the steady effort of the world to stay the world.

  To thank the furnish of green

  and abandon of yellow. The ancient Sumerians

  called the beloved “Honey,” as we do.

  Said also, “Borrowed bread is not returned.”

  Like them, we pay love’s tax to bees,

  we go o
n arranging the old notes in different orders.

  Desire inside A C A G G A T.

  Forgiveness in G T A C T T.

  In a world of space and time, arrangement matters.

  An hour has no front or back,

  except to those whose eyes face forward,

  whose tears blur thought and stars.

  Five genes, in a certain arrangement,

  will spend this life unrooted, grazing.

  It has to do with how the animal body comes into being,

  the same whether ant or camel.

  What then does such unfolded code understand,

  if it finds in its mouth the word important—

  the thing that can be carried, or the thing that cannot,

  or the way they keep trading places,

  grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living.

  Last night, the big Sumerian moon

  clambered into the house empty-handed

  and left empty-handed,

  not thief, not lover, not tortoise, just looking around,

  shuffling its soft, blind slippers over the floor.

  This felt, to me, important, and so I looked back with both hands

  open, palms unblinking.

  What caused the fire, we ask, meaning, lightning, wiring, matches.

  How precisely and unbidden

  oxygen slips itself into, between those thick words.

  AS A HAMMER SPEAKS TO A NAIL

  When all else fails,

  fail boldly,

  fail with conviction,

  as a hammer speaks to a nail,

  or a lamp left on in daylight.

  Say one.

  If two does not follow,

  say three, if that fails, say life,

  say future.

  Lacking future,

  try bucket,

  lacking iron, try shadow.

  If shadow too fails,

  if your voice falls and falls and keeps falling,

  meets only air and silence,

  say one again,

  but say it with greater conviction,

  as a nail speaks to a picture,

  as a hammer left on in daylight.

  I SAT IN THE SUN

  I moved my chair into sun

  I sat in the sun

  the way hunger is moved when called fasting.

  OF AMPLITUDE THERE IS NO SCRAPING BOTTOM

  In certain styles of Chinese painting,

  three diagonal brushstrokes balance a mountain.

  Like that, the word for happiness

  keeps inside it the word for chance. For haplessness, also.

  You wanted to be ignorant, unknowing, thunderstruck, gobsmacked.

  Wanted to be brought to your knees

  by the scent of mushrooms you couldn’t know whether to pick.

  When the violent, brilliant goshawk,

  excessive and unforgiving, drove you from her nesting,

  she battered your head with its own blunt weight of animal being.

  The big, deaf bear in both lanes of the dark

  was a grandmother’s fake pearl necklace suddenly real.

  You ate the stories of others

  because your own were already inside you and you were still hungry.

  You wanted to sleep in a house you could walk the outside of,

  windowed and simple, and find on it one day a door—

  green-peeling, padlocked—you’d never guessed at.

  You found the house, you entered, ate there, slept.

  But however you rummaged and plundered the inside,

  that door, that blind-hinged door, kept opening elsewhere.

  THE ONE NOT CHOSEN

  Third sister,

  aunt one forgets to send a card to.

  Boy on a bench, second smallest,

  not quick, not precise, not cunning.

  Culled chick, branch-bruised peach,

  chair wobbly, unused, set in a corner.

  For some, almost good, almost lucky

  not to be chosen,

  though equally accidental—

  the thirty-year-buried land mine

  chooses the leg of another.

  (How the mouth struggles

  to say it: lucky, good.)

  Most are not chosen, most mostly watch.

  So it must be.

  The watched

  (not escaping pride, not truly minding)

  bemoan their responsibilities,

  so many anxieties, demands, complications.

  And still: any rabbit the center

  of its own rabbit world,

  its universe axis a nest of tamped-down grasses.

  It looks out its ground-level eyes,

  is warm, is curious, hungry,

  its heart beats faster or slower

  with its own rabbit fate.

  A rabbit’s soul cannot help

  but choose its own ears, its own paws,

  its own startlement, sleepiness, longings,

  it has a rabbit allegiance,

  and the pink nose, which

  could have been drawn in charcoal

  by Dürer’s sister, but wasn’t,

  takes in its own warmth and fur-scent,

  glints pinkly,

  pinkly alters the distant star’s light

  in its own cuniculan corner

  among vast and unanswerable worlds,

  without even knowing it does so.

  SNOW IN APRIL

  “There, there,” the awkward uncle

  comforts

  the crying infant.

  “There, there,” he repeats,

  agreeing:

  Here, here is the only possible problem.

  Soon now, there and here

  will both move along,

  a lullaby about snow falling in a snowy pasture.

  FEBRUARY 29

  An extra day—

  Like the painting’s fifth cow,

  who looks out directly,

  straight toward you,

  from inside her black and white spots.

  An extra day—

  Accidental, surely:

  the made calendar stumbling over the real

  as a drunk trips over a threshold

  too low to see.

  An extra day—

  With a second cup of black coffee.

  A friendly but businesslike phone call.

  A mailed-back package.

  Some extra work, but not too much—

  just one day’s worth, exactly.

  An extra day—

  Not unlike the space

  between a door and its frame

  when one room is lit and another is not,

  and one changes into the other

  as a woman exchanges a scarf.

  An extra day—

  Extraordinarily like any other.

  And still

  there is some generosity to it,

  like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

  THREE MORNINGS

  In Istanbul, my ears

  three mornings heard the early call to prayer.

  At fuller light, heard birds then,

  waterbirds and tree birds, birds of migration.

  Like three knowledges,

  I heard them: incomprehension,

  sweetened distance, longing.

  When the body dies, where will they go,

  those migrant birds and prayer calls,

  as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer?

  With voices of the ones I loved,

  great loves and small loves, train wheels,

  crickets, clock-ticks, thunder—where will they,

  when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

  AWAY FROM HOME, I THOUGHT OF THE EXILED POETS

  Away from home,

  I read the exiled poets—

  Ovid, Brecht.

  Then set my books that night

  near the foot of the bed.

  All
night pretended they were the cat.

  Not once

  did I wake her.

  ALL SOULS

  In Italy, on the day of the dead,

  they ring bells,

  from every church and village in every direction.

  At the usual times, the regular bells of the hour—

  eleven strokes, twelve. Oar strokes

  laid over and into the bottomless water and air.

  But the others? Tuneless, keyless,

  rhythm of wings at the door of the hive

  when the entrance is suddenly shuttered

  and the bees, returned heavy, see

  that the world of flowering and pollen is over.

  There can be no instruction

  to make this. Undimensioned

  the tongues of the bells,

  the ropes of the bells, their big iron bodies unholy.

  Barred from form, barred from bars,

  from relation. The beauty—unspeakable—

  was beauty. I drank it and thirsted,

  I stopped. I ran. Wanted closer in every direction.

  Each bell stroke released without memory

  or judgment, unviolent, untender. Uncaring.

  And yet: existent. Something trembling.

  I—who have not known bombardment—

  have never heard so naked a claim

  of the dead on the living, to know them.

  IN SPACE

  In space

  (the experiment