Arts & Sciences

Ah Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would you do with it?
I’ d take my earrings out of hock,
Marry a blind man,
And live on a tree-lined block.

But Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would your mother say?

After death, my father
practices meticulously
until the Bach is seamless,
spun glass in a dream,
you can no longer tell
where the modulations are,
or the pedal shifts
or the split fingerings...

if he rests
it’ s to wind the metronome
or sip his cup of ice...

The kids should visit a history museum
in their senior year, to understand disgrace as
one form of Clinton’ s victory. On the other hand
the European Community foreign debt gives
everybody bad dreams. So we do need to solve
the problem of students reading difficult things
that will lead them astray: why did Rimbaud
turn from socialism to capitalism? As if

To be free of situations,
To live from day to day without events

Looking at Mapplethorpe’ s Polaroids, I learn that he
liked shoes and armpit crotch-shots of men and women,
both shaved and un’ — all giving a good whiff to the camera.
But best of all are his pictures of ordinary phones
which convey a palpable sense of expectancy as if
at any moment, one of the fabulous, laconic nude men
strewn about might call. One could pick up the receiver
and hear the garbled sound of ancient Greek and Roman
voices reveling in the background. But even when silent,

Geneticist as driver, down the gene
codes in, let's say, a topless coupe
and you keep expecting bends,

real tyre-testers on tight
mountain passes, but instead it's dead
straight, highway as runway,

helix unravelled as vista,
as vanishing point. Keep your foot
down. This is a finite desert.

You move too fast to read it,
the order of the rocks, the cacti,
roadside weeds, a blur to you.

Every hour or so, you pass a shack
which passes for a motel here:
tidy faded rooms with TVs on

Wake me in South Galway, or better yet
In Clare. You'll know the pub I have in mind.
Improvise a hearse — one of those decrepit
Postal vans would suit me down to the ground —
A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash
Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash
With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone
On the coast road from Kinvara down toward Ballyvaughan.

I

It starts in sadness and bewilderment,
The self-reflexive iconography
Of late adolescence, and a moment

When the world dissolves into a fable
Of an alternative geography
Beyond the threshold of the visible.

And the heart is a kind of mute witness,
Abandoning everything for the sake
Of an unimaginable goodness

On a backwards-running clock in Lisbon,
By the marble statue of Pessoa;
On an antique astrolabe in London
Tracing out the sky above Samoa,

Thousands of miles away — in time, in place,
Each night conspires to create a myth
That stands for nothing real, yet leaves you with
The vague impression of a human face.