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The flowers that I left in the ground,
that I did not gather for you,
today I bring them all back,
to let them grow forever,
not in poems or marble,
but where they fell and rotted.
And the ships in their great stalls,
huge and transitory as heroes,
ships I could not captain,
today I bring them back
to let them sail forever,
not in model or ballad,
but where they were wrecked and scuttled.
And the child on whose shoulders I stand,
whose longing I purged
with public, kingly discipline,
today I bring him back
to languish forever,
not in confession or biography,
but where he flourished,
growing sly and hairy.
It is not malice that draws me away,
draws me to renunciation, betrayal:
it is weariness, I go for weariness of thee.
Gold, ivory, flesh, love, G-d, blood, moon—
I have become the expert of the catalogue.
My body once so familiar with glory,
my body has become a museum:
this part remembered because of someone’s mouth,
this because of a hand,
this of wetness, this of heat.
Who owns anything he has not made?
With your beauty I am as uninvolved
as with horses’ manes and waterfalls.
This is my last catalogue.
I breathe the breathless
I love you, I love you—
and let you move forever.
There are some men
who should have mountains
to bear their names to time.
Grave-markers are not high enough
or green,
and sons go far away
to lose the fist
their father’s hand will always seem.
I had a friend:
he lived and died in mighty silence
and with dignity,
left no book, son, or lover to mourn.
Nor is this a mourning-song
but only a naming of this mountain
on which I walk,
fragrant, dark, and softly white
under the pale of mist.
I name this mountain after him.
Whatever cities are brought down,
I will always bring you poems,
and the fruit of orchards
I pass by.
Strangers in your bed,
excluded by our grief,
listening to sleep-whispering,
will hear their passion beautifully explained,
and weep because they cannot kiss
your distant face.
Lovers of my beloved,
watch how my words put on her lips like clothes,
how they wear her body like a rare shawl.
Fruit is pyramided on the window-sill,
songs flutter against the disappearing wall.
The sky of the city
is washed in the fire
of Lebanese cedar and gold.
In smoky filigree cages
the apes and peacocks fret.
Now the cages do not hold,
in the burning street man and animal
perish in each other’s arms,
peacocks drown around the melting throne.
Is it the king
who lies beside you listening?
Is it Solomon or David
or stuttering Charlemagne?
Is that his crown
in the suitcase beside your bed?
When we meet again,
you all in white,
I smelling of orchards,
when we meet—
But now you awaken
and you are tired of this dream.
Turn toward the sad-eyed man.
He stayed by you all the night.
You will have something
to say to him.
aaahhh
I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me,
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.
An orchard of shore trees
precise because of autumn
etches its branches
in the grey silk river
The edge of the sky
fills up with blue and soft sand
A barge bearing lights
like the leaning faces
of motionless immortal sailors
trails behind
a cat o’ nine tails
made of dark chain
punishing the silken water
We never see the river
run blood red
The yellow sun is lost forever
Its loyal sky
is crumbling
like a slow avalanche
into its thickening edge
of soft blue sand
Darkness makes
a home for the world
The serpents
rise swanlike from the water
hurl their narrow tongues
at the iron hulks
of the dreaming tethered ships
If there are humans left like me
along this natural shore
they do not dare cry out
My coat is the colour
of the ruined sky
my fingers
of the soft blue sand
When I uncovered your body
I thought shadows fell deceptively,
urging memories of perfect rhyme.
I thought I could bestow beauty
like a benediction and that your half-dark flesh
would answer to the prayer.
I thought I understood your face
because I had seen it painted twice
or a hundred times, or kissed it
when it was carved in stone.
With only a breath, a vague turning,
you uncovered shadows
more deftly than I had flesh,
and the real and violent proportions of your body
made obsolete old treaties of excellence,
measures and poems,
and clamoured with a single challenge of personal beauty,
which cannot be interpreted or praised:
it must be met.
[...]
Tonight the sky is luminous. Roads of cloud repeat themselves like the ribs of some vast skeleton.
The easy gulls seem to embody a doomed conception of the sublime as they wheel and disappear into the darkness of the mountain. They leave the heart, they abandon the heart to the Milky Way, that drunkard’s glittering line to a physical god….
[...]
JAN 15, 2007 SICILY CAFÉ
And now that I kneel
At the edge of my years
Let me fall through the mirror of love
And the things that I know
Let them drift like the snow
Let me dwell in the light that’s above
In the radiant light
Where there’s day and there’s night
And truth is the widest embrace
That includes what is lost
Includes what is found
What you write and what you erase
And when will my heart break open
When will my love be born
In this scheme of unspeakable suffering
Where even the blueprint is torn
THE INDIAN GIRL
You’re waiting. You’ve always been waiting. It’s nothing new. You’ve waited whenever you wanted anything, and you were waiting when the kettle sang to the canary and the Indian girl let you make love to her secretly before she died in a car accident. You were waiting for your wife to become sweet, you were waiting for your body to become thin and muscular, and the girl from India, in her apartment on Mackay Street, she said, Leonard, you’ve been waiting for me all afternoon, especially when we were all listening to the canary in your wife’s kitchen, that’s when it really got to you, the three of us standing in front of the cage, the kettle whistling and our great expectations for the canary, the song that was going to lift the three of us out of the afternoon, out of the winter—that’s when the waiting was too much for you, that’s when I understood how deeply and impersonally you desired me, and that’s when I decided to invite you into my arms. Supposing she said this to herself. And then I drove her home and she invited me up to her apartment and she did not resist my profound impersonal affection for her dark unknown person, and she saw how general, how neutral, how relentlessly impersonal was this man’s aching for her—and she took me to the green Salvation Army couch, among the student furniture, she took me because she was going to die in two weeks in a car accident on the Laurentian highway, she took me in one of her last embraces, because she saw how simple I would be to comfort, and I was so grateful to be numbered among her last generous activities on this earth. And I went back to my wife, my young wife, the one who would never thaw, who would bear me children, who would hate me for one good reason or another all the days of her life, who would know a couple of my friends a little too well. We stood, the three of us, listening to the duet of the canary and the kettle, the steam clouding the windows of our kitchen on Esplanade, and the Montreal winter shutting everything down but the heart of hope. Mara was her name, and she came to visit us, as we made visits in those days, driving through the snow to meet someone new.
1980
I used to keep a full picture of her
Hidden on my laptop
Then I thought:
I can’t do this again
And I dragged it (reluctantly)
To the little trash basket
Which I did not empty for quite a while
from 'elevator mirrors'
little vignette in pano?