Love Comes First Page 2

  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.

  —JOHN KEATS

  Three seated women

  play three lyres

  on the lekythos

  you gave me.

  They have been playing

  for centuries—silent music

  which reaches

  only certain ears.

  Their music has not yet

  cracked the clay.

  In the midst of the cacophony

  of my demonic city,

  I hear them singing—

  about love, death, lust,

  trust, betrayal—

  all the old songs.

  . . .

  Their plucked strings

  bring me back

  to Sappho’s island—

  green as the mossy perpetuity

  of poetry,

  a well so deep

  it does not echo

  when you fall into it . . .

  Sappho’s island

  is not like the other

  burning isles of Greece.

  It is green as that perpetual well,

  shimmery with silver olive leaves,

  round with golden grapes.

  Its arms embrace

  two deep bays

  which seem like lakes

  but mysteriously open

  out to the sea

  through narrow channels

  like birth canals.

  It is a female island

  singing in the sea.

  . . .

  Some say the head of Orpheus

  was washed up on its shores,

  still singing,

  after the Maenads tore him

  limb from limb.

  Legs dangling from the deck

  of a borrowed sailboat

  into the glaucous light

  of the eastern Aegean,

  I thought of you

  and the love we share

  for unheard music.

  This lekythos once held

  perfumed oil for a marriage

  or a burial.

  Does any drop remain?

  We have been tuning

  our lyre strings

  for twenty years.

  Shall we celebrate

  before we mourn?

  IN THE CLOUD FOREST

  In the cloud forest

  where the golden pumas leap,

  flicking their rainbow tails

  among emerald frogs

  and verdant parrots with red combs,

  the spirits of the Incas sleep

  waiting to be born again.

  They will appear in a world

  without Spaniards, empty of conquistadors,

  weaving their many-colored Quechua odes,

  calling on mother earth and father sun,

  to ripen their fat maize,

  trickling clear water from the Andes

  into a sacred music

  unheard by European ears.

  Without the wheel, without gunpowder,

  innocent of smallpox, measles, plague,

  what further wonders will they conjure?

  . . .

  Machu Picchu hovers between earth and sky

  balanced on a ledge of cloud,

  making tapestries of sunlight and solstice

  in the pure, blue Andean air.

  Who owns the future of the Incas?

  Not Pizarro with his saddlebags of gold,

  not Pachacuti the earth-mover,

  not the military juntas of Peru.

  The virgins of the moon

  are waiting patiently to calibrate

  the Inca future

  on the high, green ledge

  of their astronomical observatory.

  They are waiting for the planets to align.

  I am waiting, too.

  POEM FOR A FAX COVER SHEET

  Hating cameras, Plato said:

  Look how everything grays

  with duplication, blurs

  at the edges. The Parthenon:

  a postcard! And who are

  those clowns loitering in

  the (Kodacolor) agora?

  Negatives of negatives?

  AGAINST GRIEF

  Sometimes we are asked

  to carry

  more than we can bear,

  and the weight

  is so heavy

  that it seems easier

  to lie under the earth

  than to stride upon it,

  easier to stretch out

  in a damp grave

  than to stand up

  and salute the sun.

  The past is a block of granite

  suspended over your head

  by a thin, gold wire

  or a grand piano

  floating up

  to a ninth-story window

  carrying all the chords

  it has ever played,

  or a portmanteau falling

  from the old wire rack

  of a long-distance train—

  the Trans-Siberian Express

  possibly—

  or the rusty red train

  that hoots

  from Beijing

  to Hong Kong,

  carrying all the dreams

  of the world’s

  most populous nation.

  But the past

  is only the past.

  It takes

  your present

  to keep it alive.

  The present is bright copper,

  untarnished silver

  slippery as moonbeams;

  it is burnished gold.

  It sings:I am all the riches

  you will ever have.

  Afternoons in bed,

  fresh raspberries

  and cloudberries,

  clear water

  from a confluence

  of mountain streams . . .

  Catch me if you can!

  Grab me!

  I am a kiss, a caress,

  a slice of yellow lemon,

  a crystal tumbler of mineral water

  studded with bubbles.

  Drink me, Alice!

  The chemistry

  of the present

  is volatile—

  you must leap

  into its test tube

  with both bare feet

  or it will turn

  to base metal

  and come back to earth.

  There is time

  enough for that.

  Meanwhile, dance

  on the bubbles

  in your glass

  as you were meant to.

  Even a goddess cannot

  grieve if she wants

  to create new life.

  I DREAMED THAT THE SEA

  I dreamed that the sea

  had begun to swallow the land

  and my old redwood hot tub

  was full of dying shellfish—

  crayfish missing claws, clams putrid

  with death, opulent aphrodisiacal oysters.

  You said: “The sea has washed up

  unanswered questions.”

  But I live on a high rock ledge

  miles above sea level.

  If the sea reaches me here,

  it will reach us all

  and things submerged for eons

  will die, gasping in their exoskeletons.

  In my dream, I am building

  an ark for these creatures—

  and for myself—

  though perhaps we are all past saving

  even if we have such dreams.

  FIGS

  Italians know

  how to call a fig

  a fig: fica.

  Mandolin-shaped fruit,

  feminine as seeds,

  amber or green

  and bearing large leaves

  to clothe our nakedness.

  I believe it was

  not an apple but a fig

  Lucifer gave Eve,

>   knowing she would find

  a fellow feeling

  in this female fruit

  and knowing also

  that Adam would

  lose himself

  in the fig’s fertile heart

  whatever the price—

  . . .

  God’s wrath, expulsion,

  angry angels

  pointing with swords

  to a world of woe.

  One bite into

  a ripe fig

  is worth worlds

  and worlds and worlds

  beyond the green

  of Eden.

  RISOTTO

  The integrity of

  the single grain of rice,

  sun and water

  fused in a starchy cup

  to be filled up

  with the essences

  of our lives,

  the rich brown broth

  infused with saffron,

  garlanded by

  tidbits of porcini

  more precious

  than platinum

  or gold.

  I stand here

  endlessly stirring

  the ingredients of our lives,

  watching the rice expand,

  lose its translucency,

  and become

  a palimpsest

  of fused flavors.

  Oh, leftover life

  in the sizzling skillet!

  Stir, stir, stir

  until you have concocted

  that ecstatic paste,

  harbinger of heaven,

  manna of Milano—

  risotto!

  IN VINO VERITAS

  I used to love it—

  the first hit at the back of the neck.

  The promise of love,

  of poetry, of sex—

  all in the chime and tinkle

  of the mouth-blown glass.

  What was I looking for

  in those crystal depths?

  Transport to

  a realm

  of pure spirit?

  Transparency?

  Transcendence?

  It was never there.

  But I remember

  the dream.

  Dear God, may

  I find it again

  with my own elixir.

  HENRY JAMES IN THE HEART OF THE CITY

  We have a small sculpture of Henry James

  on our terrace in New York City. . . .

  Nothing would surprise him.

  The beast in the jungle was what he saw—

  Edith Wharton’s obfuscating older brother . . .

  He fled the demons

  of Manhattan

  for fear they would devour

  his inner ones

  (the ones who wrote the books)

  and silence the stifled screams

  of his protagonists.

  To Europe

  like a wandering Jew—

  WASP that he was—

  but with the Jew’s

  outsider’s hunger . . .

  . . .

  face pressed up

  to the glass of sex,

  refusing every passion

  but the passion to write.

  The words grew

  more and more complex

  and convoluted

  until they utterly imprisoned him

  in their fairy-tale brambles.

  Language for me

  is meant to be

  a transparency,

  clear water gleaming

  under a covered bridge.

  I love his spiritual sister

  because she snatched clarity

  from her murky history.

  Tormented New Yorkers both,

  but she journeyed

  to the heart of light—

  did he?

  She took her friends on one last voyage,

  through the isles of Greece

  on a yacht chartered with her royalties—

  a rich girl proud to be making her own money.

  The light of the Middle Sea

  was what she sought.

  All denizens

  of this demonic city caught

  between pitch and black

  long for the light.

  But she found it

  in a few of her books . . .

  while Henry James

  discovered

  what he had probably

  started with:

  that beast, that jungle,

  that solipsistic scream.

  He did not join her

  on that final cruise.

  (He was on his own final cruise.)

  Did he want to?

  I would wager yes.

  I look back with love and sorrow

  at them both—

  dear teachers—

  but she shines like Miss Liberty

  to Emma Lazarus’ hordes,

  while he gazes within,

  always, at his own

  impenetrable jungle.

  FOR GRACE IN THE HOSPITAL

  for Grace Darling Griffin, 1922-1998

  The pink parasols

  of the weeping cherry

  remind me to give thanks

  for another spring—

  so unearned,

  pure gift

  we were never promised,

  always given.

  You, my friend,

  caught between

  letting go

  and not letting go—

  your body a shipwreck,

  your soul a sail

  hungering

  for its big wind—

  what shall I tell you?

  . . .

  That I need you here?

  Selfish!

  That you mothered

  me and my words

  with your abundance,

  your Ceres-given gift

  to make the earth blossom,

  your amazing grace?

  Grace, Grace, Grace,

  what you have given me

  can be passed on only

  like mother’s milk.

  It is not intended

  to be kept.

  Weeping cherry

  whipped by the wind,

  I hold you flowering

  in my heart.

  Please stay.

  SMOKE

  The last time I got stoned,

  turning the pages of memory as if they were a book,

  I wrote with smoke

  in the margins of my life

  knowing that the future and past

  are all one

  and that the moment NOW is all we ever have.

  Looking for lovers on the blink rims of our eyes

  writing with smoke on the ceilings of our lives,

  a paisley curtain that never stops moving,

  a neon sign that never stops blinking—

  mind expanding into eternity

  with or without us.

  Oh, smoke—

  that we are and will become—

  let me follow your spirals to the light,

  leaving my body behind,

  leaving my mind.

  II.

  PEOPLE WHO CAN’T SLEEP

  THE GOD OF THE CHIMNEYS

  What are the Jews after all? A people that

  can’t sleep and let nobody else sleep.

  —ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, The Family Moskat

  For what angry God

  arching backward over the world,

  his anus spitting

  fire, the fetid breath of his mouth

  propelling blood-colored clouds,

  his navel full of burnt pitch and singed feathers,

  have we given our eyes, our teeth,

  our eyeglasses, bales of our hair,

  and the magic of our worthless gold?

  For what angry God

  who tested Job,

  and Abraham,

  Moses, Esther,

  Judith with the sever
ed head of Holofernes—

  for what atonement do we walk

  again and again

  into the ovens?

  . . .

  Invited with our industry,

  our instruments—

  bookbinding, goldhammering,

  silversmithing—

  given a ghetto, gold stars, curfews,

  after some centuries,

  we burst its seams

  with our children and riches.

  Then we are invited

  into the ovens to die,

  leaving our gold molars behind.

  Who are the Jews after all—

  but a people without whom

  we would have to confront

  the void in our own echoing hearts?

  The symbol of our phoenix yearning

  to rise

  on the ashes of death?

  People of the dream,

  moving through history’s

  insomnia,

  people who can’t sleep.

  WHEN JEW KILLS JEW

  What does it mean

  when Jew kills Jew,