“If only.” Said only if a mixed-media retrospect
is also being salvaged, the herringbone chevron
a swimmer inscribes on the mirroring lake.
At midnight, to wake up staring into the glare
of a flashlight, not knowing whose hand holds it,
your casehardened skeptic meanwhile
bent on finding the loved thing, the beloved person.
(And, later, how to spend the rest of his death.)
Quests can succeed when mind plunges
to the elbows in a notebook bound to its helical
spine, an upward winding to no known goal.
xxx
Whitman, chanting his “pent-up, aching rivers,”
pentameters as a calculated prison, the turnkey
resented, petitioned for release. But how many
can rock the cradle of unmetered lines?
No use wagging finger at the age group coming up
if it has stopped freestyling and instead
takes five. The beat goes on and may engender
a pentagram, a star in freedom’s crown.
xxx
Let it be. The main propeller’s material, the story,
what we’ve seen, heard, and can’t help saying.
Then metaphor adds a small burst of propulsion
like that trick of the striped-shirt gondolier,
the ragazzo who, besides poling forward, sometimes
deploys a kick against the brick wall his boat comes near,
the craft jouncing forward a blip faster. Night falls
on the Lagoon. Above the candle, an upward trickle of heat,
wavering the objects seen through it, a pane of ancient
window glass or crinkles at the corners of smiling eyes.
Darkened rooms have cast their velvet spell,
but do they equal the figurative magic of
Daphne, quick-change artist rapt in her myth.
O Evening Star, won’t you tell us your secret?
No. You belonged to the Silent Era, when action
spoke louder than words, when fans, just like that and forever
fell in love. Autumn and its red leaves. On sunlit flagstones
a mourning cloak rests, pumping the bellows of its wings.
Rumbling, rattling sounds go with the earthward tilt
of the helicopter’s nose as it lifts off and seems to fall
upward. An hour slips by, and you almost see them,
paratroopers, swung like heavy pendulums as they
float down under their nylon hemispheres.
For how many years have we lived with the old,
gory hellhole of war? Our clouded Oversoul granted each
country some mild compensation, one part of that,
the citrus and freesia fragrance of an angel’s wing.
Or this eroded, worm-holed conch, bisected,
the whorled centenarian innards exposed. Whichever
rubbery mollusk built it is gone, architect
of its own gallery, a Frank Lloyd Wright spiral
each season secreting an ampler room, always
steadily outward. Turn back now—but to what ocean,
and in which year? The sea’s year, forever Year One.
xxx
DNA, given that you gave us conscious love, just when
did you knit together the staircase of your proteins?
Life on the third solar rock is captive, and the day
comes when, having loved enough, we get off
the wheel of existence and won’t return. Case in point:
he sat on his chair with all the aplomb of an eggplant,
youth with the build of a power forward, but solicitous,
like a flight attendant. The requisite flag close by,
all present able to see how its red and white bands
were sewn together, slight bunching of the stitching
in both colors. One trumpeter’s face reflected itself bent
as a blue note in the bell of his horn. Little Sousa wakes up,
hoofing, woofing, to beat the band. Let’s do it…
Monegasques and Spanish Basques do it. Even actors
wearing masks do it. Diplomacy by other means.
The landline with its silver rings, its circus rings,
its Olympic rings, its drug rings. All of it. I do thee wed.
And am struggling to get over composer’s fears—
in hopes of the revelations ingenuity can
(weirdly) make, forays into the mind’s subbasement,
where cards are dealt to the noise of jokes and curses.
xxx
Remember that fictional character who, a prisoner
(and a four-flusher) in the Chateau d’If, asserts, “I come
not to worship God but to replace him”? No more
easily replaced, I’m afraid, than a beloved. Do it,
and the world is everything that a case of whisky
or TB is. When a portrait comes to life, it comes to warn.
Down corridors of the burning building you see the red
EXIT signs; within seconds they blink off. Out on the lawn,
alive or dead anyone’s guess, a crumpled figure,
like a wadded-up sheet of paper. Because when driving
the undertaker stays in the fast lane, and at last overtakes
even draft-dodgers. It’s like being a Gothic misericord,
whose job is to bear the daily burden of a rump
resting on it while solemn monks chant. Love? Always about
someone’s music, always about some rhythmic project.
Coffeemaker, we hear you drip; drip; vamping till ready.
Dawn’s early light, and a first swig, when the caffeine addict
surveys a field of sunflowers, each with a shiner
in its cyclops eye. Counting the steps of the sun.
Yes, a boost, to stumble on a painter working
outdoors, easel and all, the handle of his brush
clenched in his teeth. Making the work breathe demands
owning it, even if property is theft, even then.
xxx
Under darkening skies, the sea, just as he did, wears
an old black leather jacket, wrinkling and stretching.
False starts and kids who stutter always inspire sympathy.
Times when you get a Hallmark card so dumb
your eyes fill up with tears at the sweetness. Something
canine about him. A pug that inspires doting, though skillful
as a PD sniffer dog. Think back far enough, and
the waterfall springs into reverse, drawing up its veils.
Just you wait and see. (I can wait.) The electric
fan’s oscillation pushes cool air through the room,
gust after four-second gust, ruffling papers and ruffling
them again, again. Doubt and dread whirled
and rattled in the dice cup my head was. Click-click
Snake eyes, if anyone wonders. Love counters
(and winner takes) all. You’ve known psyches that adopt
a private-eye approach to relationships,
with an erotic imaginary amounting to, let’s say,
arrested development, never getting further
than locker-room bravado. Panting, avid to be
otherminded, one could do worse than undergo
benthic storms in the unconscious. By now, the number
of departed friends is greater than those still living.
Over the millennia too many clay containers had escaped
the hands holding them and smashed; one ancient morning,
an inspired ceramist thought of adding fired handles. Cups
now get only one, but their lifespans have much
improved, extending their lease and the plot.
xxx
“His biography slipped on its racing silks
and was off!” Valldemossa, nestled in the interior
mountains of Mallorca. Hamlet where a monastery
housing Carthusian monks had functioned for centuries
until dispersed by secular decree. Chopin’s Paris
internist, concerned, doubtful, proposed retreat
to a milder climate. Within months the composer,
arm in arm with George Sand, arrived and unpacked
their trunks in Palma. Chopin: “A sky like turquoise, a sea
like lapis lazuli, mountains like emerald, air
like heaven.” Picture her at a window, flourishing
a handkerchief as he returns from his promenade.
Or from the local doctor who hinted at “consumption.”
Deny and ignore. The boho lovers’ unchurched ways,
too lurid for pious Palmans, suggested it was time
for libertinage to move inland and set up shop
in the Charterhouse cells. Cold and damp surprised them,
if not their joint resistless slide into ill temper.
Unfazed, the author wrote a memoir, the composer
a new opus. One of the Preludes we call “The Raindrop,”
linking its repeated notes to precipitate tap-taps
falling from the eaves. Maybe. You’ll see someone address
himself to the piano, play very well, then lean
back from the keyboard, arms in a straight line,
and turn a pleased face towards you. Like that. Throwing
his car into reverse, my driver corkscrewed around
and put his right hand behind the seat, hitching up a little
to look backward as he steered with the left hand flat
against the turning wheel. Warmth that brims and spills.
Doors to the Omniana storehouse open on cities, cascades,
a statue, a leopard, vine leaves, illuminated pages,
caverns, cumulus clouds, colonnades, lilacs, pietàs,
mosaics and chamber music. Sum the contents up
as … unintentional glory, silver-gilt frieze of events
we witnessed together. The lifelike brevity of it.
xxx
