Chilean Love Song, and: Scenes Abroad, and: Apogee, and: The Modern Lotus Eaters, and: The Street Hawkers

Chilean Love Song

Con cariños á Pablo y Gabriela*

Tonight I could write the saddest lines. Could write of nothing. No thing. Not hay. Not hinges. Tonight I could write the saddest lines. How nothing is the silence. How hairy as a golden bear. Tonight I could write the saddest lines. I used to love my nothing. Sometimes nothing loved me too. In nights like this, I took my nothing in my arms. In nights like this, I showered her little neck with kisses. I killed one of me. One I did not love. Now the other women cry for their sister. Go fashion another of hawk and feather, of mouse claw, of desert sand and cactus needle. If you can make her, I will take her back. If you cannot, she was never mine.

Scenes Abroad

I

Paris. At twenty in this city, I was afraid of everything. Out of the jet’s huge belly, we detached from our own hour into this other. Set down into foreignness I’d trembled, as “other” as a bride.

Now, in a marriage to myself that will last 60 years, I have outlived the first chapter. My hands, no longer so precious nor so impotent. My faults, familiar and forgivable. My neck, laced with no metaphors. My ears hear pretty well. Not better.

And now we can start seeing other people— me and I. The rapture of a dome. The voice of the contralto in the square transport me but say nothing about me. And these ancient and endlessly rewritten buildings: are in some ways like me, but are neither me nor mine.

II

A young man refinishes a 16th-Century door with a knife and a ruler on the rue Belleyme. An old man in a work coat lacquers the mortar of a brasserie that has perked a century on his corner.

Geometries of responsibility, restoration, reinvention. A young woman in a blue coat carries tulips under one arm. Red to light up her 18th-Century flat. The city’s rituals seem bound to this rhythm:

to reinvent what you mustn’t wish back. The young lovers languish on benches in the square smacked flat with a love that can’t outlast time. But the benches themselves speak resilience here: We have seen dukes and stars and turpentine.

Apogee

Effigy of darkness, darkening sorrow. A container of dreams. The dreaming awaken, container of lustless, how the lustless imagine. They poise on the doing, always not doing. Rain on a sea cleft, rain on a cliff face. The darkness of wit. The wetting of darkness. I came and I came. I came and I loved you. Rain in the windows; and the clock hand descended.

The Modern Lotus Eaters

We eat to remember, not forget. We eat the flat hands of the pond. We eat the grass till grass is gone. The plant is bitter, fibrous, green. We taste the slick night on our tongues. We swallow up the fog and dirt. Our bellies, hard with ancient chert. With fragrant Anne’s lace, snowy queen. We eat as quickly as we can: crisp autumn leaves that scuffle on. We eat the glances that are gone. We eat the silence of a street. Our lives point backward, swallowing sleep, for only what we eat, we keep.

The Street Hawkers

For Bob Bowen, on August 14th at the Antioch Library Reading

Who will speak for the fruit Abundant in the summer harvest? This guy on the corner of San Gabriel

And First, wearing his red baseball cap Backward, salutes us with a bag Of cherries and leaps into traffic

With a jaunty hand. Who will speak For crates of oranges ripened on the tree, For the great waves of zucchini

Trucking to the markets. And when the markets Turn them away, for the workers who take in These fruity orphans and lift them up

On each summer corner Like a flag, like a shield, like some Dangling offer of surrender?

In median strips Beside shut...