Rather than hold his hands properly
arched off the keys, like cats
with their backs up,
Monk, playing block chords,
hit the keys with his fingertips well
above his wrists,
shoulders up, wrists down, scarce
room for the pencil, ground
freshly to a point,
piano teachers love to poke
into the palms of junior
pianists with lazy hands.
A field of thistles, díscharging
concentric waves of negative
theology, on a mountainside,
2010, May 23rd (is Whitsuntide),
would certainly
suffice as a source of the ever-obtainable not
enough sought
state of subtle shock
if he’ d close
this computer
and walk up the summit road
until the sea’ s in view. And maybe in
At six I lived for spells:
how a few Hawaiian words could call
up the rain, could hymn like the sea
in the long swirl of chambers
curling in the nautilus of a shell,
how Amida’ s ballads of the Buddhaland
in the drone of the priest’ s liturgy
could conjure money from the poor
and give them nothing but mantras,
the strange syllables that healed desire.
I lived for stories about the war
my grandfather told over hana cards,
slapping them down on the mats
with a sharp Japanese kiai.
That was not the summer of aspic
and cold veal. It was so hot
the car seat stung my thighs
and the rearview mirror swam
with mirage. In the back seat
the leather grip was noosed by twine.
We were not poor but we had
the troubles of the poor.
She who had been that soft snore
beside the Nytol, open-mouthed,
was gone, somewhere, somewhere
there was a bay, there was a boat,
Twelve dollars sixty cents,
& the fact that there is no blood no storm
can’ t wash into dirt, that the time for these words
is already ended,
that for all the rain that has been here before
so have I.
& there is less water in the world
I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’ t know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
And if all those who meet or even
hear of you become witness to what you are —
a white country of blight beneath the last snows of
spring. Could we remain quiet on earth
and bear it, the war we make inside
what is — it’ s a long time to be here, to be still,
to feel the rot inside now — bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars
at the edge of a field where we are once again
taken from ourselves. Could we remain here,
witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply,
capable of feeling
while in contact with another?
I look at the red-tiled roofs outside,
at all the angles
facing the white-blue cloudless sky
like the creases in Bellini’ s angel’ s
silver-blue dress, Tintoretto’ s white one
that’ s practically transparent in his
Annunciazione at the San Rocco
— cloth complex as thought!
Then the bells start, flood the void.
Out of the water call
my luminous breath,
into the bird, intending serpent, red,
who shakes himself, white,
out of that forest body, black.
Red gourd head spirit of the bush,
your breath is speech;
your speech is ordinary, pure.
I take you from the blue
glass of my sacred windows,
I ring you cold upon my father’ s weights.
About the age of twenty, when the first hairfall
signals that nature is finished with the organism
and we just begin to conceive the use of women
(having been all this time
more enamored of the fountain than the cistern),
we retire to nursing homes,
whether they be kaleidoscopic gardens
aimed like a blunderbuss of hermeticism at our neighbors,
or a desperate dream safari through old Zambesi,
where the suicidal waves of angry natives
give the illusion that we are advancing rapidly,
