PILGRIMAGE
I’ve never been to Jerusalem,
though I live near a synagogue
and have read a few times
the five books of Moses, a few
of the Prophets, even Ezra, even Job.
I’ve never been to Jerusalem,
though I’ve heard how the stones
of the wailing wall are mortared
with paper-scraps and prayers.
I’ve never held the taste
of that sea in my mouth,
or known the clandestine scent
of jasmine and rifle-smoke
mixing in the morning air.
I’ve never watched a woman carry
armloads of water over the dust,
bent and nodding under the weight of it,
as though it too were a child,
heavy as the dead-weight of water.
I could go on naming the deserts
I have never known, the love
in those deserts I have never made,
the wine below those sharp suns
I have never had, as when knowing,
making and having were the
necessary tools to get this good
and difficult work of ours done.
I’ve never been to Jerusalem,
though the Jews of my city
recite their beliefs, muttering
through the streets like all of us,
picking voices from the air,
lucky as fruit, saints that we are,
dazzled with all the madness of fathers.
When I make my way to the gates
of that city, I will set up my cart
of fruit and iced-tea, and chant
like the east-side criers of my youth
the Hebrew names of berries and pears.
I will knock on the stones
long into the night, wild
with sadness, with joy,
teetering under all the gifts
my tired arms can bear.
NOTES FOR A POEM ABOUT A DREAM ABOUT MY DAUGHTER IN WHICH
MOTHS UNEXPECTEDLY APPEAR
First, the air: a snapped black sheet,
a constellation of bruised plums, cold
like the dull, undangered edge of a knife.
Next, the way the planet swings, rocking
in its tresses, a voice like water,
a mouth like a dish of kisses. Later,
after the weather shifts, clamps down, and
stays, my daughter comes in from the yard,
a white sack behind her trilling with moths—
thousands of orange-winged, red-tipped moths,
eye-spots like a world of vision.
I think for a minute of cottonwood leaves,
the underside of late-maple, or stemless
berries eddied up at the sharp turning of a creek.
I think how flowers can name themselves,
my mouth being shaped by trillium, trillium, trillium.
The laundry bag blooms like a breath, lifts,
and flurries open: and the room fills
with what wings are, my daughter
gleaming at the clever, whirling world,
her hands pulsing with in- and exhalations,
readying us all to be lifted.
ALL MORNING ABOUT LOVE
I’ve tried to write
all morning about love,
a fable of this married life,
as though it were a trophy
won against glimmering odds
and what we ought to do
is hang it spot-lit and shining
by the phone in the kitchen.
But I keep coming back to talk
of the season, the glissando of
rain coaxing the last few million
leaves from the last few thousand
limbs that still bare them.
I keep coming back to the sadder
adagio side of the world,
as though it were a hemispheric
thing, my pitiful life in the
Tropic of Sorrow, (something like that).
But I turn and turn from this self-
indulgent whine, the way a season
turns (there it is again), the way
the light just now is turning
in the top of a spruce—
a blue spruce I notice when
I put my glasses on. So this
is a poem about love, a poem
of love, a love poem—why not
call it what it is? And when
I think of our married years
I think of what we have done
with our bodies, the flexing
and leaping, the staggering of
our human shapes which are
(as Whitman tells) all soul,
exalting in those brief glimpses
of heaven this separating
skin of ours cannot keep us
from reveling in, revealed.
And I think of the time we walked
by the river and you mentioned
the festival of flower-strewing
(Japanese or Jewish, I can’t remember
which), wondering aloud
what the current would do
with all that blossoming.
Or the time we went to hear
the singing of Schubert songs,
and there in the middle of some
up-rushing splendor of notes, the
laughter came and came till we
snorted, the joy almost choking us.
It’s a long way from the weekend
we camped high in the Rockies,
where the cougar circled our tent
all night, the silence of his
padding broken only by the
sonorous unearthly earthliness
of his growl—brought down, I thought,
by the scent of your monthly blood.
I stared so hard into the absolute
pitch of that lightlessness, I thought
something would give out (my fear,
its hunger), as you rolled back over
into your comfortable snore.
I hefted the twelve-D weight
of my boot—the only imagined weapon
at hand—and saw myself clubbing
that dangerous beauty as he sliced
through the tent to maul you like lunch.
I’d say a few words about the color
of the rocks in the river we followed
out of there, about the piping
of those tiny gray river-pipers
we stopped an hour to watch in the
daylight’s bright lull. But I
promised to stick to the matter at hand,
as though one of those rocks, one
of those piping pipers weren’t part of it,
weren’t even the whole resonant thing.
I know so little about it, love,
young as I am, stupid and inarticulate.
Rivers know much more. Rocks the
rivers gleam over know. I think
we should listen to what they say,
the names of the world caught and returned,
the way we’d listen to an old Rabbi
rocking and muttering at his booth
on the corner, or even to some
drunk, rough-tweeded Irish sage,
careening on his bicycle down any
Wicklow hill. So I’ll offer
great praise to the glory of maps,
the geography of bodies, the whole
terrain of listening. Praise
to the mapping and naming of all
these countries we invent as we go,
stumbling into them, crushed
and dazed with the local wine.
I hope you have a sense of what I mean
by this, of what I want to say.
There is more, of course—the night
we made love in the library,
slipping in and searching out
our favorite stacks—much more.
But it’s getting late, the rain is
stopping, and I want to get this off to you.
Forgive my ramble, love, forgive the
sadness of the season that won’t
let me go. I’ll be back in a week,
my basket brimming with dried leaves,
wild to trace what the lamplight does
to the shadows on your collar-bone
and scapula and shoulder.
ELEGY FOR ZAC
(for P.Z.L., 1976-97)
Somewhere the sea is wrecking itself against
the jags and corrugations of the shore. But not here.
Somewhere a stone the size of a house slips off its
millennial
mooring, a steep incline of mountainside that has held it in place
this age-long reach of ages, and thrashes its way
through talus and decimated patches of snow until gravity
gives it once more a place to rest. But not here.
Somewhere a man turns his head at an unexplainable noise;
a woman squints up from a book, taps two fingers on her
knee,
goes back to the world on the page; somewhere a boy
walking a country road stoops for an old penny, flips it
once off his thumb like a planet, then shines it on his pants-leg,
grinning hugely for the gleam. But not here. Not here.
Here, a man wakes at the bottom of an empty well,
the ring of sunlight so far away, so faded and oblique,
he knows the world is over, he knows whatever world goes on out there
is not his world, the words for the things he knows not
his words.
And he knows then that the poets have been wrong, that death,
as dominion, is a wing, a window, a way to reshape this
swirl of dust—that to conjugate the derivations of dying
is also a language of home, also a way of being, even by
not being,
in the world. To curse, to bless, to say over and over
the name of a man who, with his going, leaves a space in
the world
that words will never fill. Let our words be his words, our
bodies his body, let us shine these days until they gleam
and become, like a life, worth saving.
