to visit the bed of an old lover.

What do I tell her—Do I fill her head

with secrets, or brush the truth like dander

from my hair? There is no balm in Gilead,

this is not manna, nor gossamer flakes

from desiccated saints whose frozen ash

melts on my tongue– it is the Cascade’s

autumn wind blowing through Snoqualmie pass,

shaking the white crowns from the evergreen.

On the outskirts of Moses Lake, a crow

skims their broken tips– like an augur’s dream

scattered by daylight on the open road,

it wings irrespective of my vision,

angling lightly over Washington.

In spring, fireweed sprouts above Puget Sound,

rose-tipped cairns that lure a flock of seagulls

downward, winter-worn, to form a hill’s crown.

In the mouth of the bay, a tugboat’s hull

severs the slack water like black fabric,

the shape of the prop-wash an oil-green trail

that opens as a fan. The captain flicks

his cigarette butt against the ship’s wheel

and turns south to the beach, taking a fix

on the basalt cliffs at the shoreline’s rim,

the chalk-white shelves collapsed above the rocks.

He charts a constellation on his arm,

the face of a hill which blooms in a rash

the birds now spiraling upward like ash.

At night, the shadow of a wolf descends

down the frozen shoulders of the forest

to settle by the window of this house–

I see her figure held within its frame

and she in turn watches me from the yard,

the shadow of a cross against her face

casting from my window upon her face–

but when the smoke above the roof descends

it drifts past every corner of the yard

and pools below the edges of the forest

and spills around the contours of her frame

to turn her from the light beyond this house

to turn her as a secret from my house.

Yet she returns to gaze upon my face

on smokeless nights, to grace my window frame

and bless the moonlit grass when night descends,

singing with her brothers in the forest

whose chorus echoes outward from the yard.

Beyond my bed, she beckons from the yard

her breath beneath the floorboards of this house

bearing winds that gather in the forest

now rising from my ankles to my face.

In dreams, the shadow of a wolf descends

slowly below my headboard to the frame

till I am frozen fast against the frame.

Her frozen breath vanishes in the yard,

her cobalt eyes recede, then she descends

the broken marble path behind the house

and leaps behind the fence’s northern face

to join her brothers deep in the forest

past the open shoulders of the forest.

I wake to see her near the window frame,

who peers from shadows cast across her face,

who warms her winter body in the yard

and leaves her restless spirit in my house.

I praise her every night when she descends,

when her shadow turns to face the forest

and smoke descends below this window frame

to fill the yard, turning her from my house.

 

(A Portrait)

 

Your breath, a white net, a gossamer veil

falling into the dark waters beside

your hand. Your hand, a coral branch, a gray

comb, now parting the curtains from your eyes.

Your eyes, two halos, fire-ringed coronas

beaming bright as moons against the blue skin

of your face. Your face, a cobalt opal,

a smooth luminescent stone balancing

upon your shoulders. Your shoulders, a wood

frame, a cross buried in the sand, pressing

into your spine. Your spine, a marble road,

a long porcelain serpent constricting

around your womb. Your womb, a burning house,

a violet light pluming into your mouth.

Entranced by the ersatz girl, an old man’s heart
wells upward into ecstasy. He stands—
a mast in unseen currents—a world apart,
blanched below the chalky night’s commands.
He floats below wisterias and willows,
their moonlit drapery pulling him along
toward her curious gaze. Her posture follows:
she bares her chest as if the wind were strong—
a child, a sacrifice of blind abandon,
she calls to him: the rocks are not your end.
The hillside, mute and stony, makes its summons
over the ones who falter, break, and bend.
He nears the edge; the dark would take him in.
She calls again—the rocks are a benediction.

 

or Ode to Countess Motorboat and Alexis (after Wallace Stevens)

I.

She pushes her cat like a sacrifice

over the soft edge of the water bed

to mingle on the rug in the sunlight

with paperbacks annotated in red

and crushed cigarette butts in coffee tins.

In the window, elongated figures

are frozen behind her saffron curtains,

like relics in primordial amber

or Greeks adorning a black-figure vase—

a primitive diorama where light

throws canted shadows over the bookcase

past the kitchen wall—while her sleeping mind

quietly imposes an obverse world

behind her eyes, the shades of Grecian girls.

II.

Like the Ergastines in procession

passing half-dazed through a marble city,

she marvels at her unbidden passions

preserved for antiquity, in a frieze

forever fixed within the pediment

above her, mounted on her bedroom wall.

Then her sable cat pounces on the bed—

she wakes, stares at the alabaster vault:

What is divinity if it can come

only in dreams, after reading a book?

She looks over to the glowing curtains,

to the strange figures with extended necks

floating, Giacometti-like, in the sun,

who, voice by voice, seem almost alien.

III.

The tyrant god invented his own birth,

invisible spirits strewn about him,

and he moved among us, composing worlds

and the stubborn leavings of his system—

with neither allegiance to earthly souls

nor fear of a god more omnipotent

to move or mitigate such requital,

to desire something other than himself.

And from his nebulous perch, divided

man in twain, giving him body thetans

to antagonize his vulnerable side

like the vultures pecking at Tityus.

The muttering king, listless in the clouds,

thus filled the world with a peculiar doubt.

IV.

She says: “I’m gladdened when my Bombay cat

returns to me—bounding from the rug.”

She floats on her wide bed, her noontide raft,

and navigates the emptiness above,

the splintered beams where every lucid thought

must interpose: “Where, then, is paradise?”

As if watching martyrs chained to a rock,

she places her hands over her eyes

to avert that ancient catastrophe,

the slow encroachment of the years

now shuffling like a chorus at her feet,

long after the sunlight has disappeared—

further into the water bed, she sinks

as it undulates on suspended dreams. 

 

I.

When Christ had driven the money-changers

out of the temple, he couldn’t foresee

the irony— two thousand years later,

I’m outside of the Vatican City

haggling over a Pope in a snow dome

as my wife digs for Lire in her purse.

There is a perverse energy to Rome,

especially inside St. Peter’s Church

where saints and martyrs vie for attention

in the tapestries, frescoes, and friezes—

even the Pieta near the entrance

eroticizes Mary and Jesus,

with their smooth bodies in blissful repose

like lovers having a post-coital smoke.

II.

Joah points to a handsome youth and swoons:

“I could see him in an underwear ad.”

For the remainder of the afternoon

I imagine the slight Italian man

in boxer briefs, tensing for a camera.

In the evening, we take our gracious hosts

to watch “Wozzeck,” a German opera,

then make our way backstage after the show

by posing as American pop stars.

Zubin Mehta fields reporter’s questions

while the lead actor drinks bottled water

and blots his armpits with a wet napkin.

“Do you speak English?” I ask in German.

“Bloody well should.” he quips. “I’m from England.”

III.

On the train back to Florence, my wife rests

as the cypress trees outside the window

gradually recede into the mist

then fade altogether in the shadows.

I stare into the distance, eyes half-closed,

and remember the previous morning:

the frantic mothers running toward the Pope

when he entered the square in a white Jeep,

comically ascending the marble steps

like Ernest Hemingway on safari,

his arms shaking as he reached out to bless

the frightened children. Then I fall asleep

and dream of a woman in the desert

wandering in the sand with a hair shirt.

IV.

I’m jostled awake in the train station,

and immediately look for a pen

to commit the images to paper.

I dreamt of the Penitent Magdalene,

Donatello’s apocryphal figure

in the museum behind the Duomo

which I had visited the week before.

In every doorway, a guard was posted

reminding the tourists: “Please do not touch.”

Their words now took the shape of a poem—

a reference to Mary being rebuffed

after Jesus Christ crawled out of his tomb

and said to her “Noli Me Tangere”

when she threw herself at his wounded feet.

V.

I was uprooted by Donatello—

my trunk carved into a woman’s body,

bent in an eternal contrapposto,

and christened the Apocryphal Mary,

Thus my creator was finished with me

and placed me in a room with large sculptures

where I stood unmolested many years—

when at last, a great flood broke through the doors,

spilling high above the window ledges.

I floated quickly past the Bargello

and saw the bottoms of the old bridges

as I traveled down the turbid Arno

behind Cimabue’s yellow Jesus

and Ghiberti’s gold Gates of Paradise.

 

San Domenico is my reliquary,
a temenos of bronze and marble—
the friars removed my head from my body
to suspend it like a thought in the altar.
I hear them chanting as they don their vestments
in the sacristy before evening Mass
and watch them in procession swinging incense,
bearing the Holy Eucharist as they pass.
Yet there is a secret I hold most dear:
no martyr died with grace or dignity,
for still my fellow prisoners peer
from the frescoes and the tapestries
with a passivity that mocks their pain;
each portrait a lie, the immurement of faith.

Spilled wine spreads to the edge of my napkin

over the course of dinner. I confess

my wife has thirteen ribs—then I open

a third bottle as we compare traumas.

The gay waiter interposes his tray

with the indifference of a Greek chorus:

“Our most popular sin is the soufflé.”

An hour later, my red napkin could pass

for a thin sheet of venison tartare.

The waiter pours two flutes of Kir Royal,

palms the bill, then impatiently stacks chairs

behind us. You lean back from the table

as if you were Isaac baring his chest

braced for a father’s judgment.

 

 

 

On the edge of a hill, on a warm day

I asked you to marry me, and you said:

“There is nothing, not one thing that remains

for me to consider.” The wedding came

and went, we settled into a long bed

on the edge of a hill, on a warm day.

In September, we tirelessly made

new friends, then lovers, who’d come to forget

there is nothing, not one thing that remains

constant in this life. We lost them in May,

and then became bitter, filled with contempt

on the edge of a hill, on a warm day.

“I love you” we said each night through the pain,

like a rote incantation to the dead.

There is nothing, not one thing that remains

sacred, I thought. By June, you moved away,

the house empty, our money divided.

On the edge of a hill, on a warm day

there is nothing, not one thing that remains.