Ontario Gothic
1.
The dwarf maple caught my attention
in an ominous way, its purple,
its deep purple leaves shredded gloves
that gesture “Don’t worry, don’t worry,”
among floating albino basketballs of hydrangea
among other things the people landscaped
like fake lashes round the top of the eye
that then all summer takes in clouds
and anything else passing over, including
one has to assume
the neutral look
on a passenger’s face glancing down from a window seat.
2.
Halfway there he squeezed between the shoulders of the seats
to join his wife and me in back. I need hardly tell you
what a stretch it was, wedging my arm between the driver’s seat and door
to steer with the tips of my fingers,
sidewalks in those parts just wide enough for a car.
Why he wanted me to take the wheel
I was too busy not getting us killed
to unravel; there was the traffic, a thing
coming at us with its mouth wide open, and in back
the two of them
whispered in their corner,
taking up very little space,
less than was right,
and then less and less, gasping at the joke he’d set in motion.
Argus, or Fear of Flying
A seagull at home in this valley steps into air
above the river. I’d like to follow
it holding the wind to account while flinging
itself out into it. Remove in reading
and being the music when you listen--
not that you moved back but forward into
remove--saw you off a wall patched with lichen,
consortium of air and electric currents
it’d be difficult to itemize
expressing you across the river.
It deepens like a mind accruing images.
I keep the beat, the tune a repetition,
indifferent its source or whether
rock and roll or country, junkier the more
immense, as with all the airborne arts,
and you keep your distance, convexity,
of feeling, and relations of the third person
vis-à-vis a situation.
It’s crucial to no more than misplace
claims on what might go down with the pilot’s
resourcefulness--it cannot look too
casual--faculties both stirring up
and yielding to motion bestowing lift.
The statues of Hermes littering Europe
with little fins at head and feet don’t conjure
the fact articulated through my limbs
when I read about Zeus flying him in
on winged sandals to murder the diligent
freakish strangely beautiful giant
tasked by the jealous wife with guarding
the innocent mistress--you see there’s always
demand for aviation--in which the god’s
center of gravity over his lofting
feet emerges as something palpable,
autonomous disc near the pelvis
of an ally that’s never not mobile.
Pillow
How solitary
and resolute you look in the morning.
A stoic in your cotton sleeve.
Do you dream of walking out
rain or shine
a truffle balanced on your sternum
and passing me on the sidewalk?
Or is that a smile
because you interpret nothing
and statelessness is where you live?
How calmly you indulge my moods.
See you tonight, by the sovereign chartreuse
ceramics at the Met.
Let’s hear what you’d do differently.
Tumbler
It was too much
to hope for to
hope we would know
when too much was
too much to hope
for.
New Life
From the fields of a calendar, its snow
packed firmly into squares, I farmed you.
Following some paperwork you shipped west
and I flew home economy.
An interval like summer passed before a van found my house
and tilted you off the dolly.
Tucked behind hedges and twilight, with a screwdriver
I pried the lid and under
petals of bubble wrap
your eyes open,
blue as an infant’s
and equally foreign.
That your English came back as fast
as it did was more than anyone could’ve asked.
You soon made friends
just as I’d predicted.
You sleep in the spare room--no closet or chair
but a window onto something green and unconflicted.
Afternoons were tennis, sandwiches,
and drills recalling the yellow bike, the seven stitches.
I know it tires you.
Mustn’t overdo it.
Your memory worked pretty well
considering the mirror time put to it.
In thinking back you’ll try to invent
the future: you see us growing ancient,
say, twenty-nine, translated
in dad’s shirts and ties.
It’s the past, when brother and sister
were all footsoles and eyes
together in a wood as steep as the Tyrol
that looms up unannounced, always a surprise.
Unrequited
He’d have called to say the sill is overrun
with moss, there’s moss on the light fixtures, moss
on his prepositions, when he bends and unfastens
himself from bed, he finds moss on his clothes,
a soft green runway of fuzz in the most
interesting section of his underwear.
I know what you need, the law’s wide dry hands
trying to bucket the truth: And nothing but
the small transparent sphere that breaks and fills
the moss’s thousand tiny throats. Let’s imagine
for a minute he has the soil, is really in it--
Levin moving through the rows with a scythe.
His feeling is metaphor so complete
it’s the hum alone on loan from the hive.
A Package Tour
It’s not untrue to say that Paní Barvíková was a great-grandmother
or she and three others were great-grandmothers
although they were unknown to one another
and to themselves as great-grandmothers.
Before those four, there were eight. Then sixteen,
and at thirty-two we could charter a bus (with room
for their trunks) and tour the Loire, chateaux already then antique.
It’s a costume drama of uncertain date; be not too dogmatic
in your visualization but do picture us
looking fabulous.
These being the days a woman’s body’s
respected absolutely in its tyrannical seasons
the better to be exploited absolutely.
I called them by their unpronounceable names:
Paní Vejvodová, Paní Frgalová.
Old tapestries of politeness swung substantially between us.
Even the legal rapes that bit them into keeping
secrets from themselves had hit them early enough at least
to yield fat little dividends.
From time to time
one of them would touch my hair or take my arm,
laying a gentle claim.
I saw one whispering into hands cupped
to a window; her words appear
as subtitles in the making-of documentary.
Even the wealthiest, most finely dressed, most widely read
in Romance languages shrank beside the poise of the French,
and so plus ça change.
They were my mothers, all,
but I was their guide,
I hoisted a furled umbrella.
I had my career, it’s important to me
to do some work of significance
or do my work conscientiously.
At night the Château de Chenonceau is lit with torches like a cake.
Aristocrats in period dress play their forefathers
in a hedge maze floodlit from below.
Puddles of rouge under the eyes
of also most of the men, perukes and heels impelling them to caper.
Some comic scenes when I mistake a few for great-grandmothers.
You know we’ve grown close because now
there’s something close to rivalry between us. Quietly in clusters
they agree their lives meant something regardless,
regardless of my arrival.
Why did you show us all these things?
What do you bring besides information?
Meanwhile I’d begun to sense, although this sense
was gradual and liable to withdrawing,
that I didn’t depend on them to feel entire.
I hated to leave them
I couldn’t refrain from saying
in their bad marriages.
And then I was here,
remembering the ovals of their faces
like blank money,
as if this could win me some advantage,
as if it might incline you to be generous.
Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele
[a painting at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome]
A solid quarter
of it is blotted burnt umber
for the hull, a scripted curve, as if color
bricked over and over
could send a sailboat blowing from the canvas as matter.
Similar:
shipping the goddess from a backwater
then setting her up here.
And I’m the golden retriever.
Eyeballed from behind, female with yellow hair
contending with a hawser.
Manifestly unafraid to show my rear.
“Sip antiquity from my spot on the Tiber!”
Daylight buzzing like an amphitheater.
Not everyone is born to be a master.
He did sketch Michael roosting with his sword
on the grave of the Roman emperor
in perspectival miniature,
echo of the statue in the fore.
More on her later,
all the eunuchs and bees you can muster.
If you had to name the gesture
of the frontman with the beard
and frock of a Church Father
gaping at me from the future,
you could do worse than basta--hands perpendicular
to the ground, each white palm a semaphore,
head tilted halfway between concern
and something he won’t declare.
To all the girls Bernini loved before
I’d say, caveat emptor.
The deathless ars
longa, vita brevis guys will have me clutch a carved
toy boat but this provincial follower
of Raphael goes for the ocean liner.
Reality’s my kind of metaphor.
The heavens circulate with the times on the far
horizon and I don’t have anywhere
to be except this unambiguous shore.
Tumbril
You have to hope we
soon exhaust all hope because
you sense one final hope
and maybe the true one
can be hoped for only
after every hope has lost
its head.
