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The Gazing Eye Falls Through the World - for Ono No Komachi, 834-880 A. D.
Philadelphia, almost dawn. The Delaware stares Back like lilies. In their ten thousand sets of eyes
A hawk's claw moon again, hung barely,
And there goes a train clearing snow For someone beautiful. And while she isn’t sure
Why, she’s dreaming of moving again While a Japanese poem whisks by in shapes the snow makes:
As certain as color Passes from the petal, Irrevocable as flesh The gazing eye falls through the world.
The heart does break.
Ono No Komachi did not beg for her beauty back On the streets of Kyoto, and the boys running Past her did not throw carp at her feet,
Nor did they force her to see her age anymore Than she already had, for she was fire, only
Smarter. Yet, I exist, is the line she hides.
Her eyes, hazel if the sun glanced her face As she turned away from the street and toward the sea,
Would tell it another way, distilling, as they had for years, The Sea of Japan until it was a shawl draped across her back,
Its wind carrying the scent of a snuffed candle, until She was a little snow drifting onto white paper
Containing no lines… ~ ~ ~ A stack of white paper, in fact, packed In a box and taken cross-country.
Even if this story weren’t true, I’d still tell it.
I traveled with a woman whose eyes reminded me of Komachi’s,
And on a train stranded outside Strongsville, Ohio, We held hands as long as we could.
The trees rustling lullabyed like waves.
I'm keeping this picture.
In another, the man--crack, angel dust, loss--who clicked the camera Must have said Smile sweetie because she is,
In one of those blue Nantucket chairs.
Her feet don't touch the grass, and behind us An afternoon drifts
Into Michigan, a horizon of stains stirring A song from a wren I used to be able to hear.
These kinds of epiphanies, friends, rise as blown snow, As flame. The cosmos is trapped inside me,
And her, now, and her muffled laughter Into my arm that day,
Her laughter and surprise mingling with pity
At the man shifting his legs and arms, looking As though he were fretting an equation he couldn’t factor
Into this last decade of his life, one failed attempt At kicking after another,
How he almost moved in concert with things Around him, with the august music of snow and Mozart
He could see from the high window of his room. And now it’s me fretting over that day when he held The camera, zoomed us in, raised a finger, then pressed
The ball of his hand to his temple, the gesture
Of Aquinas flirting with confusion, only
To disappear into a fog covering all things Worth glimpsing, as it always does, because
He had resumed his sermon, the one with no ending, Whose ellipses carry the scent of ecstasy:
Sulfur of a snuffed flame and crystal-led breath Blossoming by his heart.
He shook, briefly, and dropped the camera to the grass,
Indifferently as a dirty shirt, or notepad full of slant rhymes, And sat under a dogwood.
She couldn’t speak, so she laughed.
If laughter is a kind of music whose theme is forgetting, Then I hear it transposing a temporary affliction,
Happiness, perhaps; belief
In an incalculable beauty of numbers;
The sound of her voice hailing a taxi to the airport. ~ ~ ~ And so once more the scene is full of perfect reminders,
Whatever form harmony decides not to take:
The Delaware carrying a baby carriage, wheels-up;
A rusted muffler pushed into its bank; and deeper still,
Her freckled forehead when she used to lean over me As I napped in our yard, the past kissed and set spinning, even then…
And now … the searing bliss of the runner’s high I’ve learned to acquire, sapphire gin on the rocks.
And the names we gave, the smallest stories Of a flocculent sun that seemed to matter once:
Jelly Bean, Baby Man, Gloria & Zeus, Honey Suckle…. I’ve tried to forget, and tried. In time,
I will, with practice, and extravagant, long-winded lists.
Still, they were all we had, so we held onto them, Almost fiercely, and without any regard
For reality, whatever that may come to be.
Today, it’s a river, snow in the form of words, Me humming a Paul Desmond riff, for sadness
Gravitates toward other sadnesses.
Each night, after his third scotch, and feeling an air Pearl-pure in his lungs, he’d light a Lucky, drag, then ride
The lowest b flat his alto allowed.
The smoke grew from the bell like a lily, Trickled through its keys,
And when he was done, streamed the rest From his nose with a grunt.
This was triage for the soul, and while cancer transcribed itself Onto his lungs, he could taste the purl of heaven,
Which came from the reed.
It burned a little and carried a hint of tobacco, maple wood,
And Glenlivet 18.
When he leaned over to kiss the girl he thought he saw and knew, There was an empty space with lilac still lingering.
Actually, there were many, Though their names became one drawn-out phrase Whose root was in the key of loss,
Or b flat. It’s easy
To get lazy in a world like this, to let the shoulders slump Under serenity’s lassitude,
To let the eyes fall through it all, like light.
Near the end, she and I simply stopped listening Because what we had to say amounted to a gesture
Of confused indifference:
A flick of hair over the shoulder, tapped ash, the head bent Back, as though to climax, a throat
Opened and releasing its smoke, enhancing And ending slowly all the rhythms of pleasure the body allows.
It takes a while to figure this.
It’s meant to.
Good-bye anticipates both sides of nothing.
* * * *
A Letter to My Friend After Staring at O’Keeffe’s Nothing is Less Real Than Realism Out here, I feel there’s something I’ve
forgotten…
1. The Soul Dear Chris, I’ve been thinking about my grandfather, I’ve been trying to place his face right in front of mine
Because his name is my name.
I’ve been staring at bones, blossoms, The reach of light through a deer’s skull,
Black places painted gray, and here, some blue drifting Through a pelvis. In that distance glazed with moon,
I can almost make out my bone-smooth soul.
But in this one, O’Keeffe retreats To language, plain, direct, exact,
Which reminds me that the light O’Keeffe has conjured is oil.
At least, that’s how I imagine it.
Imagining involves belief. Maybe I stare, not after my grandfather, But because I’d forgotten about the soul. So let me
Imagine it walking up a dusty path at night, a coyote Thirty paces behind, a rattler poised in the brush;
And when the soul stops to catch its breath,
The coyote sings and the rattler curls around herself In prayer, counting the beads of her tail.
And what of this stillness descending upon the three of us, From where wind frightens itself?
Is that wind composing the soul, Or is it the soul’s altitude teasing me
Out of memory and into a more intimate blue?
2. A Name Because our twenty-six letters Are darkness, are as fluent as the sky
Reflecting on itself in a greasy puddle showing Outer space, I write my grandfather’s name.
Nothing seems more real.
Still, I can’t see him.
What’s a name, Chris, other than an idea standing For something else, something that stops
Listening and stands on its own--
Without a word or nod, walks out Of the room where its friends and family go on talking
Over each other, and someone lights a Montecristo And blows a pillow of smoke
That perhaps resembles the soul‘s ascension.
But, the name, where does it go?
Maybe it walks, maybe it stirs the sea and shuffles the clouds. It blasts sand into glass, glass into dust.
It ripples the puddle, shatters its image.
When it thirsts, it makes itself Heard in a coyote’s song, and takes up house In one of O’Keeffe’s oils.
If I stare long enough, I can hear the scrape Of someone writing my name for the first time.
3. The Real Nothing is real, Chris, nothing.
That’s why I stare, now, at this picture that doesn’t exist: My grandfather holding me an hour after I’m born.
That’s why O’Keeffe abandoned light For a few words swept eastward:
Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis That we get at the real meaning of things…
Saying it doesn’t makes it so, but a belief in nothing can mean everything
The soul won‘t say. For example,
If the soul accepts its own society,
It does so by rising out of bed; it disconnects The tubes, it lets the monitor hum its lone piercing note; it leaves
The door slightly ajar, Which lets a little blue bleed through
From the hospital‘s farthest corner, Where a baby’s cry circles down the hall.
* * * *
Sun Shower with Snow for M.
Right now I’m sipping coffee, thinking about you, how we once kissed on Church Street, how the cold, suddenly, disappeared as stars hovered in their glass coats then came in close to catch a glimpse because they know that first kisses stop time every time; and when I lift the cup to wake in the world where you are, I look up at this sky shining, turned on, blinding, a rush of pink and gold and white, a flowing hush ocean-sized where a young girl and her mother close their eyes and catch crystals on their tongues.
Window II I am speaking, of course, of men inclined to be in harmony with themselves. - Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”
My copy of The Stranger has notes and underlinings all over in three or four colors: "memory triggers a realization of exile;" and Camus: "I said it was all pretty simple;" me again: "his disintegrating memory opens an enlarged capacity for my own memories, which I‘ll lose;" Camus again: "No, there was no way out, and no one can imagine what nights in prison are like;" and again: "I would stretch out, look at the sky, and force myself to find something interesting about it." I hear this book. Camus brandishes understatement like a shiny revolver, I want his clarity, his response always a subtle and confident "Yes" to every question: "… for the first time in months, I distinctly heard the sound of my own voice. I recognized it as the same one that had been ringing in my ears for many long days, and I realized that all that time I had been talking to myself." Moralist, playboy, honest politician, my transparent mirror through which the world becomes eternal and obsolete, why do we do that? To feel more or less alone? |
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* * * *
Objective-Subjective Exercise: II Death: obligatory plurality - Jacques Roubaud
It was a free service. We were a journalistic enterprise. There's something to lying. One of the harder parts is knowing. Insert your story here. The fact is I'm trying to imagine this. I'm straightening my tie. I shake the man's hand sitting across from me. He hands me his obituary. He tells me he has written all four single-spaced typed pages himself. That I must run it word for word. His trench coat is tan. His hat is gray. His glasses are thick. His posture is proud. Veins emboss the bones in his hands. The skin is light brown. I smell mothballs, cigarettes, coffee, newspapers. I think no. He says I've got six months to do it. I might not be here in six months. Borges talks about how certain he is in his hope extending as long as the future. He wants new words based on the old ones. This requires hope. The examples he gives are visuals at dawn or dusk. He went blind. He offers shifts in the day's color. He likes the sky purple stretched to orange. He likes the world winding up and winding down. He says "we say 'twilight'" if we're remembering an end. He doesn't refer to mornings. The point is clear. We know we would say "dawn." He wants something specific and swooping that embraces all the senses at a moment's notice. Buenos Aires, June 14, 1926, 6:18 a.m., rain-just-stopped smell, street lamp on, trolley clank, horse trot, oranges, cold watch clicking, no one word and wanting one.
* * * *
Meditation on Preparatory Depression This is the time when the patient may just ask for a prayer, when he begins to occupy himself with things ahead rather than behind. - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Deep into summer, there’s little sleep. Most nights, I’m on the cusp until dawn, thick with sweat and regret. This morning, it’s cicadas. They must be wringing their wings, that rapid whine of somnolence. I have no dream to forget or subconsciously argue with, no climax of a nightmare to twitch my body up, no gauzy residue of some dome-lit redemption. Repetition, the droll music of counting sheep and Hail Marys, soft murmurs of my childhood insomnia. Then forms float from trees. Some leaves falling early. Tall grass sways elegantly in a breeze’s indecipherable, unmistakable weave whipped up, not by the sea sliding, but by an ambulance crying by. So much for a pastoral. Still, there must be something ideal enough I want. Coffee, cigarettes, chat by the water cooler: “Morning,” “How’s the weekend shaping up?,” “The kids?” All that’s mustered after the lags in traffic, all that’s smiled through after the squeeze in, then out, of the subway like chattel. All we hide and know, denial on full throttle. Knowing where the day has gone, is going. Tomorrow, I will walk the thirty-three blocks to the Holocaust Museum. The time it will take. Dull flashes of guilt will glimmer like snowflakes at night. And after, I will hail a taxi. The driver will nod where to?
* * * *
Meditation on a Suicide …if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. - Milan Kundera
True enough. But, I still can’t say how or why I would want to leave this world on my own terms. Listening to Brubeck’s “Take Five” doesn’t take long, relatively speaking, and it never gets above the level of a quiet conversation, like those held in confessionals or movie theaters right after the lights dim. It’s just piano, bass, and drums shuffling unvertiginously, and Desmond avoids the root all he can, his lines slipping like sunlight on a butterfly. Every time I put it on, I wait for the solos that take off, not like a wren, but a Harley or Mustang, a drunk Marine-something so American objects on shelves shiver, and then fall off. But it never happens. Maybe they were on to something with this resignation from their lives that were trying to go everywhere on four chords and five beats. But then again, they didn’t resign; all they did was reject the fundamental union of improvisation, which was their lives, because they could. Like I said, I don’t know. Don’t trouble yourself with what it is I want. We want to look at each other sometimes, the kind of look that’s uneasiness laced with desire, or the other way around. Around here, they’re unidentical twins, so it doesn’t much matter. Right now, for instance, I’m looking at Andrew Wyeth’s nude Helga, On Her Knees. After a while, I want her, and I’m almost convinced she wants me too, except she’s been looking down at a pillow all this time and her face is as flushed as bruised peaches. Her hands are behind her. I can’t imagine holding them enough to go through with it. The more I look at it, the more I see that she’s never been comfortable with this. So without ever touching the skin behind the ear, or kissing all the way down the inner forearm, we’ve turned each other down. And all this “passion,” which is how Wyeth described it, is timeless. No wonder she was looking away. There’s nothing like anonymity suffused with passion for all eternity. It smothers, I think, and it leavens. I think it’s all about becoming attainable, and being unattainable because there was a time when I was a part of God. I was provisionally eternal, back then. I can’t say for sure whether or not I liked it, but why wouldn’t I? When I was seven, I told Father Donahoe how my week was going. After a cough, he gave me ten Hail Mary’s and ten Our Father’s. I kneeled there for forty-five minutes. My back ached. This was my privilege, to be cleansed as such. I was the last to leave chapel that day, and Sister Amadeus kept me after that to clap out the erasers, punishment for failure in small Catholic towns. I found out that taking the Lord’s name in vain also involved singing “fuck-shit-damn, fuck-shit-damn” to the tune of “Three Blind Mice” to no one in particular. B. told me this. He walked me through shit for years. We were taught that God was in the details, that we were made in God’s image. I know I’m wrong, but I sit down and try to figure out a way to become attainable to God again. Nothing, so far, has been deemed acceptable, or worked, for that matter. B. grew up one town over from me. They’re both unacceptable towns to be raised in, unless you’re a Catholic, or at least Episcopalian. Even then, it might not do any good. When B. went and shot himself in front of St. Joe’s, where we were baptized, the pigeons in the eaves flew off in every direction, like veins and arteries or the lines on a map. The sky held still behind all this. That was his way out, and I’ll love him for it. I’d better because I’m scared to death for him. It is God’s nature to reject what was once a part of him. So what does that make B.? Oh, not now Whitman. I still love you, but please not today. Every single morning, at 6:30, pigeons fly out of those eaves when Mrs. McMurtry presses the bass pedals on the organ with her feet, as if she were walking through mud. Every blessed morning, and, occasionally, when I hear that unseemly shudder of surprise in some pigeons’ clutter of wings, I feel closer to the truth than anyone.
* * * * Unfinished Love Poem - for James Wright
Like I've been saying All along, I'm not sure Where they've gone Off to. Why can't I think Of that place as full Of lovers secretly kissing In unmodified light? This afternoon's rain settles Along my jaw. I hope my bus is late. Three beers by noon, And now I go to chop The rows of onions For my bosses who mark Up the booze for us all. We keep coming back. This is the life I've got. I make salads from hearts Of iceberg picked by migrants Who curse and bless This country, state, and town; Their corner with the motel Whose windows acquire a sheen Over them as they drink Five-dollar Cuervo And spit it into their hands To slick back their hair, Desiring the unattainable Strippers who pass through Once a month. Oh Sweet Jesus, I keep imagining The regulars and the lawyers drunk Again, sliding off their chairs. What I really like About the clearest days Isn’t the light itself. At the trolley stop in Sharon Hill, Where I grew up and most can't Leave, I'd stand there With the two bums, Big Bob and Chicken Man. For being desolate, they dressed Nice. They stank, though, And sniffed glue every chance They could. Otherwise, They no longer seemed to desire a thing, Not even the other's shadow On the hottest afternoons, flirting With oblivion, waving to it As it floated by quiveringly Over their ears, White and light as milkweed. Trying to think of them again, In their polyester suits And dress shirts Buttoned all the way up To their scruffed wattles, Whose collars resembled a hit pigeon I saw once by the curb -- Its wings lifting slightly As another A. Duie Pyle rig From Pittsburgh barreled through Sharon Hill, where I grew up, Without stopping until it hit The limits of West Philly -- I can see they have Completed that agenda the dead Stars have laid out, and I don't know Where they are now. So it is This bus stop We all end up at, Telephone wires swaying Between oceans, the sun Hovering right there, between Our fingers, with all its busted light. I've heard it called a lot Of things, not one of them Accurate. The pines And maples dripping with rain, For example, have their Latin Names that make them Seem larger, which I can remember Well enough most days, Which I love.
* * * *
Night Sky - after Vallejo
A clear, cool night--as the Times predicted. Sleep will come if I lay my head and listen To the waves departing again like childhood.
Yes, sleep will come if I stare long enough Toward the floodlit lot and black steel of the fire Escape where two teenagers, kissing, feel something
I’ve forgotten the name of. Above their almost Endless kissing, an entire nation of fireflies Scatters their affection as light over asphalt.
Sunday still. Black stone sky that fills each hour, Let it rain--it’s so predictable. My yellow bones Sing the wrong notes, it hurts some, but I listen.
Everything was possible once from that old table Where I sat drawing shapes of asphodel and ash-- So, tell me, again, that your elegy will be rain, a poem
Of fireflies and waves washing the bodies of gulls And lost fathers in casual swells onto the shore Of your one and only sea, one voice making straight
And slow the path of time. No matter, I will be Right here on a Sunday, a Sunday like this one, Dusk-light like shimmied water blanching the alley
Into a kind of parchment, the windows staring, The lines of laundry swaying then straightening, Hissing lazily as they do…and there on the fire
Escape, the boy with the red hat, that’s me, once, With a longing for distance, more or less. More Or less, Alexander Long is dead--he’s been sitting
Out here all night thinking there would be time, Which is also here, undulating like the shadows Of steam rising from his coffee, and the Times
Carefully folded on the small table. No one hated him, The blurb might say, though he seemed to ignore them As he sat shaded by the poplars, reading, his lips
Moving for someone perhaps he couldn’t quite see Yet, or simply something, with practice, he chose To ignore. Inside the Times, more weather that will
Surely come, sudden-death victories and predictable Vacancies, ink on the cloud-dull paper, flesh becoming Words beneath the quiet demarcations of the rain.
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