Five Poems

Boston University, 1956: Robert Lowell’s Class

He thought his way out loud through the fame of conquered heroes and the victories of mighty generals and the rest of Whitman’s one- sentence breaths, to old Walt’s envy at the end, and we scribbled as he waxed through pauses to his own unpretentious lines, his staggered comments tapping the nail, coaxing us toward insights of our own: “precision,” “suspension,” how we “cannot paraphrase” the text—“the President in his Presidency”— what would he say next? Ink, in traces of our long-lost class, draws out the distant faces in our narrow B.U. room, where Anne and Henry are waxing free on Tuesday afternoons.

Beijing Weather Advisory

In the overcast afternoon sky the yellow-rose sun hangs over Beijing like a Tang Dynasty lantern in spring fog. Within minutes it is gone in white time as a lost golden eye in roiling scarlet flames, now a picture of light in time, that parable of memory’s dance in the dark, the pain in my hand from the hornpout lance at the fish table after dark and that lantern where my childhood lurks beyond time, where the murk hoards light for itself. That lost golden orb is the one-eyed gleam of the blind deer’s gaze and, Saul aside, the story of the Tarsus Road, the lurking glare of the blind sun’s Lost Gulch, offered the chance to come clean in the shades of life’s dark trance.

Giacometti at the Tide Pool

We emerge after sunrise to see the shadow heron printed below her scalpel gaze, framed by our poplar and the peeled spruce rail here on the island shore. All else is stilled by her brazen stare, fixing us and the pool below, and when we slowly open the camera-eye door she wafts bayward, silently in soft slow elegant downsweep flight. Now, as before, when we slept, the shore is mock serene with semiprecious daybreak colors: cooked egg-white of the noisy circling gulls, their hooked beaks open with their eerie moans, and one black cormorant streaming south. The heron stays with us through the day as the sea grinds and birches flutter behind the tall spruce blinds.

White on White: Nearing Solstice

At the edge of our whitening grass, on the maple stump beside the wraith-high blueberry bushes blending into the woods, our miniature bather bends to her lifted foot, so delicately contained within her alabaster tones, and muses on the undefined detail at her hand. With great precision, nothing seems on her mind. The snow surrounds her balancing foot and fuses white to white (smaller than Allegrain’s original in the Louvre), deeper as the storm now feathers its own afternoon design, waxen in December light as the snow drifts down. Our naked bather bends to her own affair, focused beyond her sculpted hand-coiffed hair.

Late Fall

The yearned-for bloody maple leaves disdain their overdue last transformation into autumnal hues, and the waiting game goes on. They’re merely leaves, but any version of postponed drama is local news in regions where body counts in a distant war is back- page stuff. “Give us battered New Orleans: we’ll track our hurricanes where women’s names are legion.”

Here black birches set their yellow leaves adrift, and heart-shaped ribbon fragments swirl in wind gusts under the sun, soft piles, half-curled. In the end nature neither portends nor grieves. Our metaphors assuage the cycles of death and its offspring. Autumn ebbs, and we hold our breaths.