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Pianos in the Woods

William Doreski

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Some of these poems have previously appeared, in different versions, in various journals. I am grateful to the editors of the following publications: Akros, Alaska Quarterly, Ascent, Aspect, Aurora, Barnwood, Brown Review, Butt, Chowder Review, Goddard Review, Great River Review,Innisfree, The Literary Review, Mind in Motion, Mississippi Review, New Stone Circle, Northern New England Review, Original Sin, Poetry Northwest, Poets, Yeggs, and Thirsties, Salmagundi,Texas Review, and the anthology Blood of their Blood (New Rivers Press).

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1................................................................6Drawing........................................................7The Anecdotes..................................................8A Synapse.....................................................10Estabrook Country.............................................11Sea Lavender..................................................12Plane Crash on Cutt's Peak....................................13From Tuckerman's Grave........................................14Great Meadows.................................................15Night Fishing on Sawyer Pond..................................17Snowshoeing to Start the New Year.............................19The Zen of Skipping Stones....................................20Dragging for Bait.............................................21Deerfly.......................................................22Alewife Crossing..............................................23

2...............................................................24Arrowhead Farm................................................25September Baptismal...........................................26Jellyfish.....................................................27Seaside.......................................................29Separate Colors...............................................30Skipping Stones in the Rain...................................31Working All Day in the Garden.................................32Red Rock......................................................33Platonic North Shore Poem.....................................35Sargasso Sea..................................................36L'Allegro, Cape Ann...........................................38Whale Watch...................................................39The Rhetoric of Empty Bedrooms................................40Poem for Sarah Orne Jewett....................................41

3...............................................................42At the Tomb of Mary Baker Eddy................................43My Face in a Renaissance Portrait.............................45Looking for my Cat, Late......................................46Minerals in the Harvard Museum................................47Sad Mail......................................................48Bitterns......................................................49Giganticism in Early July.....................................50

4Normandy......................................................51

4...............................................................54Public Housing................................................55South End.....................................................56Harlem Sunset.................................................57North of Winchester...........................................58Green Volvos..................................................59The Satire of Icy Walks.......................................60The Last Romantic.............................................61Not a Love Letter.............................................62Cancer, a Pastoral............................................63Holyoke Range.................................................64At the Grave of E.E.D.........................................65Geographies...................................................66Mount Auburn..................................................67

Afterthought....................................................68

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For Carole

I thought if I could only liveTill that first Shout got by--Not all Pianos in the WoodsHad power to mangle me--

Emily Dickinson

The best part of human language...is derived from reflections on the acts of the mind itself.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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1

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Drawing Instead of drawing from life,I've copied an Asher Duranddrawing of a tree. To free myselffrom mimicry, I've botched it--muddled contours to flattenthe trunk, lopped the crown and warpedstray limbs to swirls of dendrite. I dedicate this drawingto the shapeless man in the foreground,my rival in love and luck.No red-haired muse can help him now,puzzled by the tilting vista,befuddled by the graven imagethat has crystallized around him. This marshmallow man resembles mein the fixity of his stare--gazing like me at the poisoned pool,anxious to drink on the slightest dareand die in the true test of art.

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The Anecdotes

One dry autumn I wept aloud because a raccoon I'd been feedinghad died without visible wound.

And I recall one summer evening a blush of thunder, a news flash broadcast during a Red Sox game,a plane crash that killed a friend.

Then while I lived in England,near Oxford, I saw meadows unrolllike ancient manuscriptsrehashing our common wisdom.

Every time I walked among themI found cattle the colorof erasers bussing slowlyup and down the ranks of flowers.They moved like the hands of clocks.

Thus the calendar penetratesby means of the anecdote,the narrative, the felt detail,engaging the quickened mindwith a splay of vexed dimensions.

I understand that incidentsof travel, of the deaths of animals,of the well-wrought facts of landscapeare only figures of speech,mythmaking stalled in metaphor.

But I'm noncombatant by temperament,not by rank. I can't claim

9exemption from the rage for closure.

Therefore the anecdotesthat define me end neatly,like newsreels, with complete sentencesthat suggest the maps of mountainsI plan next winter to climb.

10Evening Thunder

Evening thunder drugs the streets.Looking up into a skythe color of pulp I allowthe ratio of self and otherto assert my distance from natureand the overwrought rhetoricthat underlies the vegetable angstof my brassy, drought-stricken lawn. The drugged streets coil like masking tapeas a sudden full-force downpourrattles my teeth and sizzleson the tarmac, every dropletbig as a dime. No one can solvethe link between weather and mind,but these small towns north of Bostonembody certain mental gestures--the narrow, patchy hill streets,the steep tin roofs, the dough-facedchildren, the storefronts brisk with flies. The thunder's big as politics,expressing the wholesale revisionsof frontiers, creating whole nationsfrom landscapes previously mapped,the bulky cloud-cover brazenas a continent: while on my lawnI'm as thoroughly drenched as if tideshad crept in to reclaim this landfor an unwritten faith in process.

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A Synapse

Yesterday in Great MeadowsI watched Vs of Canada geesecircle the wetlands, wings akimbo in a glide. Sleazy with their pocket flasks,hunters grumbledin the weeds along the river. Their guns rose like masts to catch the lightand pervert it to a blued steel dogmato prove the only good birds dead. Now what saddens the lowering skyis the way these two-family housescringe among yellowing gardens, their lack of styleas regular as socksfrozen in file on a line. Windows angled too low for the winter sunglare over streets where children pause in speech like a synapsecalmed forever in a dying mind.

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Estabrook Country

Picket lines of birch, a narrow field.Vees of geese flow north, faithfulto their one-track Canada route.Three times I've trampled the same hill,drunk all the fog from the view. The fetid soil mints grass so greenit hurts my eyes as I strainto touch the sky's erasures.Nothing's there to watch me watchthe bluets crumple in the breeze. No one notices how I hunchpast a ruined cabin, pocketsripe with flowers; no one admitsto noticing what follows me--furrowing the rich April mud,poor vegetable, my green dragon tail.

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Sea Lavender

In the slanted light the surfat Good Harbor curdles to foam.A million round and tumbled stones,perfect granite turtle eggs,rag the panting of the sudsto streamers of ivory fleece. Glazed by the yellow light, my wifewanders along the surf-poolbehind the beach, scouring for driedsea lavender. Finding none,she plucks handfuls of mare's tail,decorative but unscentedlike art when it's least redundant. Brassy as the grasping of the sea,the comparably eager letting-go,I picture myself with this glareall over me, gory and wan.A figure left over from Troy,perhaps: the hero who didn't goto Troy, who pined in his armorwhile children raved on the beachand he gazed toward Asia Minor: his thoughts, like sea lavender,mysterious, scented, out of reachof the ordinary--thrivingin the speechless rhyme of the surf.

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Plane Crash on Cutt's Peak

The wreckage cooked for hours.I'd planned to loot it at dawn,but the animals screamed all nightand deafened half my courage.Twice my flashlight caught a porkieabout to nibble my shoes.I heard dozens of them lickingthe salt-taste from the dead menand the objects they'd fondled in life. Too tired to sleep, I lived outthe crash each time I rolled overand caught the screech owls watching me.Trees flashed road maps in the wind,folding, unfolding in crazy joy.They creased me in their arms and tossed.Windmilling in the night sky,I grappled for pinholes,but the dark sheared off in chunks.I wanted to let go, but whyswap a nightmare for a corpse? I could smell the pot roast coolingas I lay exhausted by rage.My spent greed, a tough hot metal, crackled in the temperate night air.The jealous sky had slapped down menfor being birds but tempted meto touch the stars while lying safeas a glacial boulder embeddedin the mountain, still of the earth.

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From Tuckerman's Grave

From Tuckerman's grave in GreenfieldI can see the so-called Poet's Seat,a slab of tanned and weathered traprockcapped by a foursquare granite tower.Before me, the limestone tabletslowly sheds the name and dates,acid rain percolatingthrough the graven inscription,the lines of poetry nearly gone. Overhead, the midsummer skyis drab as old leather bindings.No one understands the weepingof traprock hills on gloomy days,the stained yellow stone as rustyas discarded engine blocks,half-shattered prisms so well-definedamateurs mistake them for crystalsof some obdurate ferrous ore. Versed in all the natural sciences,no Tuckerman would make that mistake,the inclination toward precisionthe salvation of Frederick's verse,which otherwise under Tennyson'sguidance would've slackened to flattergrief language should never confine. I should make a rubbing of these linesbefore they fade completely,leaving the Poet's Seat to copewith this scruffy view withoutthe presence of Greenfield's poet,as if speechless vision alone

16could solve this mutable landscapeand heal the yellow crumbling stone.

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Great Meadows

Seven geese, one-legged on the path. With a scolding like metal foldedin a car crash they're gone. Paddlingin the foggy swamp they've disappearedonly twenty feet from shore, disappointing this observer,who has walked six miles for birds-- swallow, blackbird, teal, heron. The surfaces of this world forgive everything, healingwith an ease unruffled by predatorslike the snapping turtles that dragan occasional gosling down. Standing before this spectacleof evolutionary graceI know how dull the turtle feelsin its patterned, mud-colored shell. Every move it makes in the murkseems heavy and awkward and shameful,

like the memory of how I've hurt everyone who has cared for me despite the reckless pretense I've posed in shades of ego.

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For a moment the fog liftsacross Great Meadows; the swag of geese,revealed by the sudden glare,turns to receive the sun, pleasedby themselves and their perfect sheen in the water-- every shapein nature, by this one gesture,idealized in dropping light. The big birds coo and preen, slowas the man who watches themin the mirror of his daydream,watches them distort in the vaporsof his language as he tries to solvethe poem that no more than their livescan accept a burst of shotgun fireas the climax to such sentiment-- like the name of Jehovahtoo inadequate for the love it bears, the end of all lovelike the fog on the still water,

erasures of nacreous white.

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Night Fishing on Sawyer Pond

1 An equivocal dance begins:dry flies alight, tempting the rainbows,the fish-mouths quick as spark plugs. While balancing my weaponryI can sometimes fool a troutby slowness itself, malignantto even the dullest life-style. 2 Outside the mind, nature shufflesboredom and claws. My friends call outwhile the gilded pond spinsa cyclopean eye in prayer. The compass points to the shorewhere in the pines massed dead aheadI can't help but stalk the runawaywith a cannibal hypothesis no stranger than a threat of love.On their knees over their mealmy friends sniff doom, slowly turn.... 3 Now the rainbow strikes, rejectsthe fly too late-- appetite gone: I break its spine and dump it.The trout floats belly-up in sight

20of the monster fear now mourning.

The beast glares over its shoulderto catch me as I howl with joyand the bristling mountains stare down-- one murder swapped for another,but except for one pale bellythe pond left scarless to the moon.

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Snowshoeing to Start the New Year

My snowshoes kick up stormsbehind me. The prints are butterflieswith one shoulder hunched.No one has greeted me in word or deed,why should I turn my back to pray? Each step on snowshoes mimes a slapof affection between lovers who've never met,who can affordto seem brutal while the sun hangs low in the south. Each step is one whole spoonful.I'm inside the eye;it's so blue hereI could be swimming in August seas. Two saplings fiddle in the windand re-invent my name,but the mandate of the last great snowstormcondemns my pursuit to closurehere, dwelling on sufficient fame.

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The Zen of Skipping Stones

On the obtuse geometryof the waves I'm skipping stones.Each cusp receives the blow in turnand instantly heals the private wound,passing the stone to a neighbor.Ten skips, even in this chop:I have the Zen of skipping stones,polished as the axioms of Kant. The lake unfolds beneath a hundreddraperied windows. One more stoneand I've skipped an even dozen.Words I regard as more than dutyhiss like sudden rain across the rills,reminding me that at my bestI've more intellect than thirst to slake,quicker than these dancing stones.

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Dragging for Bait

Dragging for bait, I pull froma spring pool a cluster of minnows,a handful of shredded foil.

The woods shift about me, windstruck,humorless so late in winter,the low light cunning but sureto leave tracks.

The water is stoneagainst my hands, bruising deeply. Dragging for bait in a tinyspring pool I'm sure I'm grapplingin the bowels of the earth.

The urgeto wrestle the tapeworm feedingmiles below this gentle surfaceraves with the imperativeof a thousand unread novels. The spring pool's numb about my handsas I lift a wilting net of fish,

quick and shapeless daubs of lightslack and lifeless to the touchof the mind-- quick to find faultwith nature, the self that kills.

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Deerfly

Walking along the railroad trackthrough woods north of SciticoI slap a deerfly on my headand find I've a handful of blood.

The weeds glisten. The muddy pathby the railroad winks with puddles.I lick the blood from my palmlike a demented Jesus and taste

the essential: bottomless, salty.The summer light expends itselfwithout regret. Despite the blood,or because of it, Jesus lingers

everywhere, I learned in Sunday School,his persistence our reward.Yet the holes in his hands never heal,and he walks on shattered ankles

to rebuke the world. Fresh deerflies,undeterred by their colleague's death,buzz the part in my hair, straightas the railroad track; and the north

toward which I'm walking relentsone step at a time, the surfaceof the planet conforming tothe figurative crown of my head.

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Alewife Crossing

The day's so heavy it drags meface-down the length of Alewife Brookin a daydream ornate with fish.Two kids with poles and worms relaxon the railroad bridge. The bluegillsthey're after flash about their feet.The thick light stalls in the willows. I'm trying to turn the swamp-sideof my life up to face the sun.Like the kids, though, I'm satedon a few small bluegills. Hard to feelthe miles between nature and the willevolve into cities too denseto enter; hard to heal this view. The muse glides into the willows,her cotton dress wrinkling like seaweed.How can I choose between raspberriesand the devil's gift of citieswhen I can't distinguish the personfrom the word, or long damp hairfrom the breathing of a slimy brook?

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Arrowhead Farm

Greylock, as advertised, hulksin the agate northern sky.The farmhouse in cream and green,its muscular chimney bravuraas a fist in the foliage,looks as polished as Moby-Dick. Inside, employees of the BerkshireHistorical Society sulklike squid in a sunken clipper ship.They're hungry for tourists to knock.Too far from the Sea of Japanfor the Great White Whale to wash ashore, only through a film of metaphorcan visitors grasp the state of mindthat elevated pattern bookcarpentry to vernacularmastery and rendered Moby-Dicka rural Shakespeare drama. Seen from the study window, Greylockstill taunts the unlucky Pierre,one shoulder a little stoopedthe way some of Melville's sentencesseem stooped with a subtle outrage,freighted with an age of glacierstoo bluff for the Berkshires to bear.

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September Baptismal

Elegance of swallows and cats:everything that flocks or crawlsseems innocent as clothes on the line.Of course I'm tired of Wordsworth,but note how buttery the sun looks,how beetles make lace of my beans.Though I'm subtle as a dishragstill I sometimes ache to describethe visceral fire of a mouseor the iron fangs of a violet.Elegance: all nature's the colorof cigars, but modest as cement.Note how the city of Boston growswith a vegetable persistence:even cancer's a form of life.We thrive on it, found in beef,in additives, in clumsy verse.But who needs it when good oak fallsand ruffles the landscape in loveand temper, when the killer frosthasn't heard it's named for a poet?

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Jellyfish

in Newport Harbor. Slack as crepe,they drift in slug-colored lightthey emulate. While tourists flockthrough seasonal boutiques and tavernsalong the pier, I drop to all foursand stare through a jellyfishand catch repeated and recedingin pair after pair of mirrorsmore lives than the Illustrated Manexplained with his narrative hide.

Detached from the rasp of chatter, the massed jellyfish punctuatethe silence of the harbor.Living on nothing, they driftand sigh. A slight contractionof the entire livid blotsuffices to drive them from one dark sounding to another.If a child fell in they'd sting himto death: there are that many. I'm alone on the lower level.No one sees me touch a jellyfishas it bobs on the scummy drink,a transparency sufficient to frustrate my opacity,a living sheet of letterheadupon which lies and noms-de-plumemuddle in shame, leaving the mindthat fosters the guilty drivel hardly cleaner than the water.

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Water forgives such languageonly when we drown like Shelley,or like Commodore Vanderbilt turnaway from the world in illnessafter having bought enough artto purge a plebeian blood-line.Otherwise the thickened scum curdlestill we sicken of the reek. The jellyfish gloat in thousandslike the cells of a single brain:the accumulated knowledgeof the sea expressed in a calmof possibilities, the creamof a few breaking crests offshorethe only expression of haste; as ifwithout any great irruptionheroes I'd once dismissed as deadhad gently begun to snore.

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Seaside

The odor of fish and gulls reminds usthat every day the open waterengenders new strains of grief, while the obsolescent sky appeals with the same virgin stuporthat fosters pedophilia. This granite shore's a fossil graveyardwhere the planet's failed experiments,like the most rabid atomic wastes, walk and talk and reproduce,until the bluster of our humorcompels us to listen and contrast the surf's monotonous praisewith our paragraphs that end so badly--the subject always last.

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Separate Colors

My wife and I indulge ourselvesby holding expensive dresses,Greek fishermen's shirts, and sweatersup to each other and laughingat how desperate we'd look if we spentmore to bolster our flabbyand meaty dreams of each other. Walter Dyer in his leather shopconcentrates on the Red Sox gameas he explains to an Ohiocouple how he sews his moccasins,and why despite the heavy rollsof leather they don't spark blisters. I want to embrace the franklyobese women who indulgeso lovingly in sundaes.I want to thank the ownerof the mineral and jewelry shopwho sings "Tonight" in harmonywith Johnny Mathis, her hearing aidturned up full blast in an earthe size of a clamshell ashtray. No one's quite at home in Rockport,but the mutter of the touristsand the surge on the breakwaterrhyme, separating the colorsof landscape that otherwisewould never shuck that privilegedharmony: clam-white clapboard houses,silver-shingled restaurants, yacht-blue fencing, and the yellow roses

33wrestling sunlight to conquer the view.

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Skipping Stones in the Rain

On the town pier below Norelco,early for work, I'm skipping stonesin the rain, our fifth day of it. Nahant hulks in the distance,the temperate and well-groomed lawnsslanting neatly to the sea. I'd like to lie face down and lookfor crabs and starfish all day while the rain drills harmlessly throughmy disembodied egoleft tapping one hoof on the rocks. Thus the tough Nahant gangsterswait for federal agents to dragtheir doctored accounts to court. Thus the truck drivers at Norelcowait as their trailers engorgethousands of minor appliancesto trek across the panting nation. No significance in action,only in stance. The harbor curvesaround me as I skip my stones,each light splash lost among curdled whitecaps a few inches high, stoneskip as permanent as names

35of the dead, frank as anger,innocent as the rain drippingfrom slicker to quaking thighs.

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Working All Day in the Garden

The garden tools stick to my hands:shovel, trowel. Plucking acutworm, I pinch it in half:ooze of earth-colored gut, hot soupof insect. Overhead, thundermisspells itself among the birds.My back aches with effort,every muscle tensed for weeping.A handful of manurein each squash hill, a spatterof lime for tomatoes. Thus I'm obsessed with the fruitof my body, blister and tan. But when I sit down to dealout English it's not the "body" kind--only gossip, loose as clouds,indifferent to pain, indifferentto the squash in hills, the beans in rows. I'm doing as little as a dead man decently canto project my voice through this thinsuburban heat: all the gardens,like mine, riper than the gardeners,impossibly mute against the greenof even the fleshly needs.

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Red Rock

Sunbathers sprawl like drying pelts. Stunned by audacious bikinis,I pretend to stare off toward Swampscott,over Red Rock itself. HereMary Baker Glover,later Eddy, swept by the godhead,schemed to compete with the bible and founded a "science" to lurethe unhealthy and unwiseto the school she soon would found. The prolepsis of old passionsargues from every flat face. Concentrating on distance,I merge in an isotrophyof pictorial referencesall I've learned about the settlementand early days of Lynn and Saugus, older than Boston. Egg rockand the petulant stance of Nahantmaintain an isolate poiseagainst which the brief religiousmoment of Red Rock fizzles outin a high summer tide.

38 How am I to greet this mergerof self and something else? Egg rockshimmers on a hazy sea. The beer-drinking kids pull the topfrom one of the sly bikinis,all shrieks and smiles. She covers upwith a towel and smirks my way; but I'm empty as the view,looking down on Red Rock wastingslowly away in the waves, waiting for further revelationsto explain why the world was castin treacheries of rock and flesh.

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Platonic North Shore Poem

The school year's nearly upon us,fat-assed academic foreplaybusy about its books. Last nightwe drank late over egg rolls,spare ribs, and chicken wings. Around usthe busy restaurant moaned and tossed,brickwork exposed like skin grafts,sacred pictures swaying in their frames. Gridlocked in our smalltalk,we wanted badly to go homeand wash the salt from our scabs,but the glow of bourbon had stunned usthe way a bruise-blue sunset can,ballasting sandstone in our bellies,sinking us in postmodern funk. Now from the Lynnway I noticethe sea's as green as those sunsets,vegetable dreams incarnatein a flux from which great thoughts breathe.To believe is another matter;but it's time to halt such elephantponderings, time to wring from the breezethe meet instinct to engendera world to mold over this one-- transparent but less compliantthan the gauzy old sentimentsthis brisk morning has tatteredas if scattering flocks of gulls.

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Sargasso Sea

A sullen green calm. Sea-grumbles,and the heaped weed shifts. A stinkof dead crabs, a few hulks stranded. Jetliners hovera moment in the atmosphere,then touch down in Bermuda,the nearest place for a walk. In the Sargasso, vegetable dreamsclot into beasts that slowlyevolve toward vegetable movements. Soon someone will walk on water, and a thousand miles of weedwill follow, dragging reluctant bones. Somewhere near Coney Islandthis weed-beast will step ashoreand drag a bridal veil overdrowsy New York. Citizens will waketo a dim green day. Clams and crabswill rain in the honking streets where enterprising childrenwill shell them for fancy restaurants

41while they're fresh and momently news.

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Meanwhile the beast of a million vegetable passions will entersome triple-decker in Queensand make a match with the household'smost eligible son or daughter. No one will ask, when the sea recedes,whether children of gods were abroad. Weed-smell will soak the Stock Exchange,rot the paintings in the Met. Clamshellslike beer cans will clutter the parks. Somewhere in the dark Atlanticthe Sargasso will relishthe consummation of humanand vegetable passions, the massquivering with intellectas the weed-beast and its matediscover a common language,quickening mutual surprise to seed.

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L'Allegro, Cape Ann

Off Rockport, the sea weighs lessthan documents on a lawyer's desk.Lighthouses straddle the reefs,but the yachts still lie in drydock,the trunks of their owners' Mercedesopen for access to cans of paint,polish, Fiberglas repair kits,and tools that burnish and scrape. It's good to see the rich at work,their boats cradled out of reachof winter storms. Freshly inspired,I stroll to the end of Granite Pierand skip flat slices of rockat least three skips' worth on the smoothaluminum sea. If I could sellthis one small talent I'd settlemyself in a dream-house with a view. My wife and I would sip good cognacand listen to the small stones rattleas a wave backs off, listenas sails creak and yachts dock late,and eloquently toast ourselvesfor surviving so many nightstogether, like yachts hull to hullmustered against unsportsmanlikecaprices of the weather.

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Whale Watch

Anxious to spot a gray whale,my fellow penitents linger in rows at the tidelinewhile small waves plunge and sulk.Nothing else can salve them,not even the puckish cries of sea birds. The dark sea ripens, soft as a new scab.Such raw slobber shouldn't have to notice us.How can I warn my friends the tide's reptilian, the whale a ruse?

Their sins "boil their brains in their skulls";nothing but immensity of flesh remainsto reflect what they feel of flesh--plethora of fat to crush all hopeof abstracting an ethic from this seascape,maniacal with clenching waves.

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The Rhetoric of Empty Bedrooms

While rain streams over my glassesand prattles down the storm drainsthe quarrels I've courted betray me.My carnivorous stance falters, my appetites quiver and fail. What happened to the hunger I prizedover the clash of nerves in bed,the rage of moonstruck poetry?Where are the mermaids who tamed mein my best suit, dressed to kill? What of the praise that monumentsof intellect bestow, perfectas a face smashed in a mirror?Why can't I lie, and in untruth sharethe rhetoric of empty bedrooms-- bureaus looted, curtains floatingin the iron air? Temptationhas stopped my heart a hundred times.I'm the ultimate terrorist,my hands are swift as headlines. Don't look out as I walk the streets,a glass pint of blood in each hand.My stare could burn rows of housesand leave only rain to embellishthe faithful if illiterate land.

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Poem for Sarah Orne Jewett

Sentimental epics germinateover the soft spots in my dream.I delve into swamps to recoverthe shield and helmet reportedlost there by a lone Vikingdetermined to tour all Vinland. Less obstinately histrionicis my shelf of Sarah Orne Jewettbooks, vivid in mantis-green cloth,her prose style dried like fish to fitthe old-fashioned, wide-margined pages. If only like that lone Vikingwe could leave the known world and climbone snowy mountain so aloofit wouldn't take light from the sun....But such mountains long ago sankto strains of Plato and Hesiod,never again to rear up and fillthe potholes sunk in abandoned skulls. Dreaming of poignant closures,I dust the books slowly, gratefully,as if I were Whitman tendingthe beautiful wounds of soldiers,each new scab a flower thickenedovernight into bloom. SarahOrne Jewett, similar wounds are yoursto enjoy forever. The sunbreaks over the frothing Maine coastwhere tourists in plush greedy cars

47toss fast-food containers downthe throat of the innocent view.

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At the Tomb of Mary Baker Eddy

The mock Grecian temple,too small to house an oracle,leers across a yellow October pond.Sifting the bushes for a place to peeI'm still in character,though her Victorian style of religionexcludes such persistence of flesh. The old lady, forever dead,would laugh to see me playing shyfor the sake of her stinking corpse.Pardon that phrase. I'm pleased to seeshe has left herself a temple;she who professed no faith in idolsmade an idol of herself--and denying the body, spent her old age high on morphine. Mary Baker Eddy,you doubled my life beneath meby warping my wife,lost to your phony "science."Good enough for a century past.No one believed you could die,so your lieutenants kept you rottingin your deathbed for days beforedropping the bomb on the public. Your faithful have set stone benchesacross the pond from your templewhere we all might sit and meditate.I admire the keen of the autumn pond in sunlight,the great mild brain of a prophetthinking miles into the future,

50thinking of snow.

I walked a long way to see you--though how can I be certain you've livedunless I bring that faith in historythat surely you lacked yourself? You were a small woman,you have a grandiose tombdesigned, no doubt, by yourself:knowing that on a ripe autumn dayI'd arrive and for no apparent reasondecide to rhyme itwith the holy phrase "fruit of the womb."

51

My Face in a Renaissance Portrait

Sad that the passion of babiescan't inspire their mothers slavingin factories rank with chemistry.The canned milk fed those infantsand stirred in my coffee has girdled the world with a red and white label,a lip soldered tight as a whore's. But the jury's sure I'm innocent:my tact and grace so absolutethat even graves I open dailyseem chapters of the books I wroteto stir the masses. "Like stirring mud,"my favorite philosopher noted,"and expecting it to walkand conform to human ideals." Who has encouraged whom to exhumemy face from some museumin a nation beyond the hills?Meanwhile the snow gently seedsanother ice age of faith; and stars,members of a glamorous race,move closer to examine themselvesin a portrait I'll soon abandon.

52

Looking for my Cat, Late

The green glow of the Tai Hai Restaurant,Forbidden City, Turnpike Bowlquivers, then steadies in the warmnight breeze. Not a breath of animalheat disturbs the neighborhood,not a dogbark, no rave of children.

The empty semaphore signal,the bull's eye stoned blind, stands paleand historic in the starlight.Beyond it the bowling alleywith a blaze of neon reminds methat culture is merely a style. Whether or not I find my catI'm sure to discover somewherein this void of briar and sumaca grace perhaps as terminalas sclerosis in a country inn,where the doctor smells of manureand the hospital's a hundred milestoo far to bother with you. My flashlight wilts in one hand.My cat weeps out of the weeds,drawn to me at the last momentby the way the landscape definesthe despair in our mutual need.

53

Minerals in the Harvard Museum

Minerals ripen under glass:the butterscotch of wulfenite,stilbite abrupt as a scream,kyanite and apatite,galena, pyrite, tourmaline. I browse all day and never tire.I recall the miscellanyof minerals I gatheredwhen I was half-adolescent,barely conscious of the shynesscrystallized to stone in me. Now the calm of middle ageenables me to waste a daybefore these perfect specimensonly mining engineersare lucky enough to findin unweathered pockets underground. The sigh of a child hammering stonesfor treasure evolves in the raspof an aging man in full retreatfrom a life that like fossils keeps faithwith an earth that used to be young.

54

Sad Mail

Sad mail permeates the housewith a smell of aging pulp.Envelopes limp as Dali watchesslobber from the tables and desks,their contents drooling miserablysheet after sheet on the braided rugs. If I stood naked on the porchand screamed till the children ran,the mail would flutter up goodbyeand begone forever speechless. No more means, only dreams that swaylike the pipestems at Great Meadowsthat support American Lotus--the blossoms ungainly as the brainsof a genius of sorts,out of touch with his body. The sad mail tells me stories,draws me pictures, proves me sane. I'd ask for less of it, but who,having the sinless summer skiesin which to comb his graying hair,wouldn't prefer plain language to blamefor coining such a guilty lie?

55

Bitterns

Bitterns rise from marsh grass at dusk,circle like pterodactyls,settle by the smaller beaver pondand pose as rotten brown stumps.

One grows bored standing with neckextended, so twists his head,clacks his beak, cocks himselfby kinking his neck. Shuddering

with the full force of his body,he uncorks his belching lyric,a gurgle thick as mucky footsteps, released three times to impress his mate,

who despite that grossly ardent songbusies herself with the frogs.I watch with binoculars proppedagainst my face till my arms tire.

The blackflies tease my hairline. Bluebirds tempt my attention, fluttering through my line of sight.If I unfocus, the bitterns

will blend so firmly with stickand grass I'll never find them again.Once more the twist of the neck,undulant recoil, thrust of song,

which permeates the yellow marshwithout startling frogs or shinersor ruffling the poise of the bitternsfixed against the rising mist.

56

Giganticism in Early July

Engorged on the threat of rain,I lie in a meadow staring upthrough a screen of devil's paintbrush,Queen-Anne's Lace, and purple cow-vetch. Peels of flesh, pale as milkweed,flicker down from the sky, pages from a diary kept by a foolwho never thought I'd read it. High-paid TV preachers desperatelybelieve that these plodding meadowswhere no one toils or spins are graves.The rain of flesh in sunburnt fragments sours the pasture rose, the ruein clumps. Better puzzle togetherthe ruined diary and scan itfor advice on life in the sky than lie around bored by sermonsof vegetable intent, unheardbecause of the raving of airplanesoverhead, raucous as lovers in bed.

57

Normandy

Farmhouses in tough gray rowshaunt aged soldiers who've survivedthe taunts of Catholic dogmaas well as German artillery.One American runs a caféa few miles from Omaha Beachwhere at low tide the wrecks of twenty-four ships heave up from the sandsand blurt out their stories. No truthto the rumors of children duelingwith wooden crosses stolenfrom the neat American graveyard.The proprietor of the cafeboasts a wife more French than France.He speaks without accent and nosesthrough history books every evening.The Norman Conquest of Englandis his specialty, but schoolkidsknow as much about it as he.Meanwhile the parade of tourists,a pitiful centipede,passes through the German bunkers,strokes the artillery pieceslabelled "Kaput." The sea rakesOmaha Beach for souvenirs,each small wave lifted like the hemof a skirt, more provocativethan the actual thighs of women.I've never been there, never seenthe rows of groaning ships exposedby the indecencies of the sea.Two years before I was bornit happened in a flash of airplanes.Now that my birthday's cuddling up

58once again I wish I could nameall those who've gone before me--their bodies huddled and proudas the Norman farmhouses,plaster walls forever healingmore like the psyche than the flesh.The grunt of tanks seems freshin the sea-colored breeze, the temperof the peasantry as solidas the concrete bunkers: solidas the measure of my childhood:a white face small against the smokeof a war I can't remember.

59

60

4

61

Public Housing

Dogbark, Pabst cans flat in the yard.Two kids hack and wrench a Fordthat has given up the ghost in smog.A woman forces her breasts,dried into sugar-cone mummies,upon a child who knows too much.Better not prance too gingerlyamong these soured angels--they'll smell the fear on my breath.So often I've daydreamed the knife,my wallet disemboweled in the street.

I'm sorry for the barren yard,sorry the trees are withered canes,sorry for the suffering infant,sorry those hoodlums' car's a junk. No moon ever transfixed a dogmore surely than abject povertyhas transfixed me here on Bridge Street.No one to feed, no breast to mouthe,no bloodsuckers between the toes....Only a knife to pry hard cashfrom a stranger with a silk tie,and this junked Ford to curl in when,in a hail of leaves, kid sisters,for the first time, lift their thighs.

62

South End

The streets look heavy as fleshtoday, row houses stumblingwith dry tongues thrust out. I walk slowly enough to savor plaster dust and kerosene, dulling my pores like staggers of rusty files. The streets look heavy as flesh,the body as much a burdenas the bag of groceries I watcheda woman smash against a wallwhen I moved to Boston years agofrom a small town where madnessstays home in a four-poster bed.

The rote by which I know this citywalks me downtown where skyscrapers strut,where architectural ambitionembodies acres of tinted glassbehind which we're supposed to assumethat the routine of employmentand the mind's brash geographyoverlay; while a few blocks south,old streets flayed like carcassesfoil every intention to love.

63

Harlem Sunset

Storefronts flash their Japanese goods,stagger down long blocks to the west,to the bottomless gray riverfenced with basalt cliffs. Acquiredwith public funds, vacant buildingssigh and collapse, great lungs tiredafter extraordinary lives. The taxi grumbles down bad streetswhere the driver points out his birthplace.He's friendly and wants a tipand I'll be glad to give him onefor the sake of the Harlem sunsetI enter now with a crownof trumpets, more brass than sound. The streets shrivel in perspectiveand sketch in afterglow the lives of those who despite the carnage thrive and walk on two good legs where I can only ride: chariot,as faith would have it, of fire-- the Hudson River light itselfthe medium, if not the message,through which the language of the citymakes cognates with my stammer,makes gestures with dusty brickworkupon which garrulous weaklingslike me might project our speech.

64

North of Winchester

Railroads diverge nearby. In the cleftof an obsolescent quarryI devour a bag of doughnutswhile my bicycle cools beside me.Alone with the naked sabbathI watch Boston's weary suburbsstrain on ten thousand foundationsto express their vegetable passions. Leaning against my bicycle,I puzzle over small ways to die,the way to diversify. Silentand lean, the years have slipped under melike a woman not quite in lovebut willing to give it a try. Better to spend this cloudy Sabbathbicycling the northern suburbswith my pants rolled around my kneesthan to hunch before old movieswith a pound of flesh to eat. Why should I solve the quarry depth?From the brittle cliff above menew houses sail over the viewlike cargo planes; rain beginsto soil the practiced horizontals. Converging in one lazy curve,these simple vistas and Iwarp into a single state of mind.The grim quarry cliff veils with dampas the weather's prophecies true

65themselves, and I concede myselfto the wisdom of the general ruleto redeem the fractured lands.

66

Green Volvos

The gentry bundles its babiesinto velvet and furs and hauls themto the opera, to museums--the closure of their gaseous smilesmore satisfying than warto Napoleon. Compared to them,my friends seem crass as dinosaurscrossing the local tar pit. Not that every pet is spoiled;but in Cambridge, green Volvostation wagons sit up and beg,and Daddy sports a neat brown beard,and Mummy shops at Brooks Brothers,and Baby wanders from tableto table in fancy restaurantswhile embarrassed waiters shrug. Who am I to criticize? Pigeonsflop in the gutter, newsboys pantunder Sunday bundles of ads.The day is mucus on my tongue,but I'm old and I envythe green Volvos, the pink babieswho in tennis clubs and squash courtswill never hear nasty rumorsthat not everyone is born so young.

67

The Satire of Icy Walks

Even the satire of icy walkspleases me this morning. To pretendthat the muse brings only painevokes too sullen a music,a failure of sentiment. Why won't I let her drag meamong the smiling evergreensand let sifting layers of needlessimper over us all year long?Description and homage are my tasks; who am I to believe the wrinklesof an old city undressedbefore me? Red-haired, more nakedthan I could ever learn to be,the words themselves precede out of the bloated December darkinto the pavilions of hemlockwhere even the lowest animalshave cooled their bestialityand learned the rudiments of talk.

68

The Last Romantic

Refusing the flourish of blackbirds,the handshakes of trees, I step into trafficand let the whirl of pistonsbecome the cadence that measuresthe growth of the mind. Wordsworth warned it'd come to this:technique so ripe the subject's uselessas a doctor to a dead man.Better off at the Elks' Clubor Masonic Temple--the means more fatal than the end. In traffic the brain expandslike bread dough warmed in a bowl,assuming the shape of the hillssurrounding this modest county seat,absorbing barns and trailers,digesting glacial accidentstough as problems faced by Kant.

No one survives this pencilingthrough turgid volumes,flashbacks to the dripping woods.No one lives more deeply in the unhatched eggof the skull--the atrophied bodyslouching like a vine-ripe melon. The screams and catcalls of driverson Main Street seem outdated,a language I've abandonedfor the sake of vegetable dramas

69too surly of plot to publish,nonverbal as congratulationsembodied in the sowing of seed.

70

Not a Love Letter

I want to wear you to workin silence. No onewill ask when I skinned the bear. Pot luck.We weigh in at a ton and a half,we're growing on each other. No sense of style keeps us wholesome--we're new to power,we suit each other perfectly in rags. No one can say the ego we sharewas stolen, wasn't spawned by usat the bottom of the sea. I want to wear you to workso I'll stay damp and cool all dayand suffer twinges of mildew. Later,when I peel you free,I'll find the tattoos you've inflicted on my chest and back:mute pinholes that outline the faces of those you'd served before I sold you on the human.Now you suffer for useverything we lack.

71

Cancer, a Pastoral

A dream of toads, a dream of dull brown woods.Wherever I search, I find an icondedicated to the beast in me.I can never pray through these moments of cancerwhen the body tries to emulatethe lowest creatures at hand. The moment of cancer: always fatal,but often so gradual I feelmy body crushed between strange reptiles:the faithof the runaway cells balancedby their trust in pain-- evolution pushed to the wallso that a priest could declare that being humanis all that stands between us:the toad-dream a ploy to make me believethe brain has become too small.

72

Holyoke Range

Behind a screen of cedarsSquire Dickinson's broad brick homestill conceals the speechless poetwho faded like a snow queen inside.Saturday after Christmas:heavy traffic in downtown Amherst.Ice pebbles the Dickinson walk.My feet are quick upon it,as if dancing to tiny poems.On the edge of town, the Holyoke Rangelopes like a drunken dressmaker's hem.The wind curls in the flimsy treesand sniggers; boulders flake like fishin the chill and forgetful sun.Miss Dickinson lies at anchorin the whole post-Christmas view.No one can prove she isn't home,but I hear her white dress shudderthrough the deserted college campusas she peers across the valleytoward the south, toward the mountainsthat are teeth of a jealous beastwhose passions will never wake her.

73

At the Grave of E.E.D.

Three slim arbor vitaesurge above the foursquare slabs. Violets erupt on Lavinia's turf, her stone patched orange with lichen, but Emily's tablet remains so whitesomeone must frequently scrub itto remove the dispassionatefungi that would roost in her name. As I turn away from her graveI notice a mutant coal-black squirrelfuss across the lawn. An aptgraveyard squirrel, incarnationof certain gestures of comfortshe scribbled for relatives and friends. No one could console her in return,her face blank as the Pelham hills, when her brother and sister packed herthrough the meadows to this site-- the rasp of May's crop of single-minded birdsseemingly the nearest parallelto the poems she thrust forwardinto scenery beyond her grasp.

74

Geographies

A crust of ocean, dark meringue,the continents mapped in ivory. Spiders weave pallid contours of mountains to enrapture me. I stare until I wake in China.My four eyes make islands. As the latest ice age numbsmy hands I could laugh aloud. Here someone has torn the oceanon a seam; it all leaks out. Daring a ragged overhang,a dim face stares over the edge. Just a lip of snow, then a slipstream.But I can't get inside. I could fold a thousand ways and never fit.So pure even where threadbare-- and here a green country kissesa red: forest fire, or war; there a brown spot, foxing on the page,but solitude in ten cities-- tainting the reader's nostalgiafor worlds dismissed without hard feelings or the ransom of a child's rage.

75

76

Mount Auburn

Monuments smolder in the heatlightning haze. No one's hereto step back and tell me I'm wrong.Mayflower snobbery can't stop mefrom learning the names on the graves.Every tenement is rented,every space accounted for.

The heat lightning sparks a glowin the crowns of trees. My faceskips across the artificial poolsnot more than three feet deepthat garnish the homemadescenery. No one's afraidof drowning in the decorativelittle ponds but me.

The monumentsbegin to grumble, echoing thunder blown from the Midwest,hundreds of miles away, innocentof these particular deaths. No one hears my reply. I run to catch the last bus to Harvard Square--ripping the webs and nets that fallgently from the quaking treesto trap me in the grace and lawof my own timid elegy.

77

Afterthought

78

When I consider my work I sympathize with its peripatetic qualities-- the meandering and casual associations, the sometimes awkwardly Jamesian syntax. The image of a poem as a walk, suggested by A. R. Ammons, though valuable, doesn't wholly describe either aims or product. But this metaphor juxtaposed withKeats' assertion that "If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all" animates a still-useful conception of the organic poem. When poetry flourishes it displays the decorous, pragmatic utility of foliage, and is as fully enabled by process as the act of taking a walk. But what explains the poem's status as fictional artifact and its practicalvalue to readers of widely varying disposition? The familiar notion that the poetic emotion is impersonal and artificial may explain its universality and its comforting distance from everydayfrustrations. I wouldn't want anyone to mistake the Iof my poetry for the I®MDBU¯®MDUL¯of this essay. The essay-voice explains, apologizes. The poetic voice performs an action. The expository self makes itself accessible to interrogation but the lyric self stands aloof. Consequently, the poem, secure in its self-containment and even in its radiant context, renounces the person.

But the metaphor of the organic, like pain, is self-limiting.Diametric to linear human culture, nature imposes complexity, differentiation, dissociation, and induces psychic and ecological alienation. My poems invoke and critically respond to that alienation. They derive from obsessions with landscape and otherness, and reflect the insistent geometry of various worlds I inhabit in successive moments frozen in time. What characterizes the response? The act of walking, insofar as it is an aesthetic gesture, does much to define the structure of the poem. The vegetable expression of foliage more or less captures the prolix and sometimes obscure imagery. But words mean, sometimes aggressively. Not even the most playful or non-representational poetry can escape the topicality of language. Better to contain and direct it than to slip into an easeful, indulgent patois of phonetic sensation. Poems require intellectual content as well as sensuous texture if they're to appeal to the whole person. Contextual theorizing is a poor substitute and results not only ina failure to cohere-- arguably poetry only coheres in the

79reading not the writing-- but in a drab gray disinterest, bothof the poem and the reader.

Examples of the extremes of rhetoric I sometimes invoke in myown work might include, for instance, the greenhouse poems of Roethke or the bog poems of Heaney, poems close to pure sensation,so tactile one can read them with the palm of one's hand; or in different modes, the expository clarifications of William Bronk and Robert Creeley or the academic musings of language poetry. These competing rhetorics don't have to mutually exclude. Though Ican't pretend to have achieved a lyric of balance, in which the amalgamation of disparate elements plays off against an ideationalstructure of shapely and discreet signification, such an architecture is my goal. My models are obvious enough: Herbert, Keats, Donne, Stevens, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, the Shakespeare of the sonnets. Their varied strengths represent those I hope to someday discover like trace elements in my work.

If poetry is a criticism of life it is also a reconstruction of it, a wholehearted and inclusive attempt to engage our emotional, intellectual, and sensuous selves in simultaneous complexity. Emerson best saw this and most fully understood how writing a poem affirms our humanity. To be human is to be complex and critical and to acknowledge that thinking and reacting are as inevitable as breathing. We are creatures of mind, and that is what alienates us from the nature of beasts and birds. If that is also the source of our psychic dissociation, then we should celebrate as well as attempt to heal it. Poetry is the record of our best and happiest critical acts, moments of realization when we "face the world without face," as Robert Lowell admiringly saysof his mermaid.

The poem, then, is both the organic process of its discrete evolution and the artifact that embodies that process as still-life. Abdicating responsibility toward craft and intellect is as crass as denying the primacy of the inspired moment. As Shelley observes, "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline." But the frailty of the creative act doesn't justify inadequate dramatization of the remembered moment, and doesn't excuse the poet from the task of completing a well-rounded work. The poem on the page or in the ear is a fossilized glimpse of full

80humanity: proof that once, at least, we've gloried in our powers of mind and spirit, however inadequate those powers may seem to the jaded ego. To write a poem is to walk among the ruins of undiscovered, unevolved civilizations. The fossil-poem, the meditative moment frozen on the page, is a paleontological legacy to a race that hasn't yet been born. By means of the poems we leave them the members of that future race will define themselves,as we have defined ourselves with the help of Donne, Shakespeare, Homer, Horace, Virgil, Milton, and Dante. This is a characteristichuman responsibility, and an opportunity to see ourselves as gods.