MID-CAREER ENCOUNTERS

On the Edge of Space (1978)

Sketches for a Mayan Odyssey (1982)

Obbligato with Cello (1983)

Poem-Chanting Tower (1988)

The Prospect Poems (1990)

Memento Amori (1993)

Retrievals (1995)

Sonata Sonnets (1997)

Las Espinas (1997)

13 X 13 X13 (1998)

4 poems from  SKETCHES FOR A MAYAN ODYSSEY (1982)

FRANK'S POEM

His face thrust at the sea like a hatchet,
dared the wind.  He could have been a model
for a Mayan frieze.  He smoothed his mustache
with a hooked finger and started to speak.

But a sudden shout of laughter, a call
from the surf, a passing blonde barely dressed
in a black brief and oiled flanks, distracted.
His eyes were glazed with the glare of the sun.

I lay back and waited for him to speak.
The clouds were rolling high; there would be rain
before night.  He was far too elegant
to have been a patriarch.  It's crazy.

He could have lead the charge at Entebbe,
or played the role.  But now he sat beside
his wife and stared at the sea.  Overhead,
large birds with thin black wings were hovering.

Each day at dawn I had seen him running
on the sand, tall, thin as a skeleton.
He moved as if he might shatter, strewing
his bones along the beach like blanched driftwood.

I had seen his wife reach out to touch him
as if there were something that she would say,
some moment of tenderness, some comfort
before she withdrew to her own silence.

Or once, when the clouds had come suddenly
and dark from the east, he had turned to her
and spread his towel about her shoulders
and lead her quickly away to shelter.

Nothing, I thought, nothing in such gestures
but what might pass between old companions
who have seen much of the world and, with time,
have found that there is nothing more to say.

I sat up as with another question
of banality.  But something kept me
silent — some fear of the reality
that might lie behind that refined facade.

Somewhere out there, where my eyes saw only
a fading horizon, he must have seen
something else, some vanished frigate, a raft
of survivors once again on the move.

OUR GUIDE ON A FIELD OF STONE

He stood before a dome of crumbling stone
and drew, with crooked stick, a map in dust:
"East and west," he said; "where it all began
and where it ends."  He had a warrior's face
carved in stone, the gnarled body of a gnome;
when he looked at us, his eyes were agates,
glittering and folded in soft leather.
"I'll wait," he said, and slowly we dispersed
across the sun-blanched field.
                                                  I climbed some steps,
wandered corridors, touched the long noses
of their gods, and felt as if I were lost.
Two ladies from the club, agile and old,
compared the notes they'd taken from their books.
I followed, admired their dispensation,
and finally returned to where our guide,
sitting on the head of a stone serpent,
enjoyed a thin shade and harmless questions.
Finding my own stone fragment from the past,
lying half-hidden, crumbling in the grass,
I settled to listen.
                              Surely, I thought,
in all the creases of that face, in eyes
so intense, there's wisdom, and something else,
some strength and hardness, a fine endurance.
My followed ladies asked, with their blue smiles,
about the restoration of the steps;
a redhead in a gingham dress wanted
to know about the carvings on the wall;
a little man in shorts demanded lunch.

No, I said to myself, no, that's not it.
Those are not the questions to probe at truth;
whatever it may be, it can't be found
in just this restoration of the past.
I hoped to catch his eye, to call aloud,
to strike some fire from the flint of his heart.
"It is time," he said, "that you returned.  Lunch
will be served in an hour."  And that was all
he said.
                As we left the fragmented field,
dust whirled across the silent stones, settled;
no shadow softened the rampant temples.
Do I imagine, now in retrospect,
that, as he leaned against his tree, alone,
he laughed, and that the drowsy birds flew up,
circled the field and landed at his feet?

A LASCIVIOUS RABBIT AT THE BAR

1

At seven they gather about the bar,
fresh from sex, sleep, and shower, faces flushed
from a day in the sun, hair damp, a trace
of perfume holding in the air.  Music
blares too loud to identify; voices
rise in hopeless competition, raw edged
and trivial; bodies sway together
and apart, thigh on thigh, weaving red silk
and yellow linen on a ground of white.
And I...?  From an alcove behind the bar,
shapeless in gray robes, a heavy dreamer
with no other vision but this array
of oiled flesh, I tallied the body's pride.

2

Almond eyed and delicate, black hair
resisting a wind that blows always
through open arches, moving in time
to music only she could have heard,
she wove, irremissibly, a net,
soft as silk, about her tall German.
One morning, just as the sun pushed up
the edge of the sea, and gulls flew high
to catch light and call a new warning,
we met on a parapet and talked
of resigned fathers from old China,
of the insatiable hunger
of men.  Dry eyed and indifferent,
"I can but move as my body moves,"
she said and left me to find her bed.

3

"Do I," he whispered through music,
"look all right?"  He turned on his toes
that we might admire the tight fit.
"I had them specially tailored
for me in New York."  His girls were
always older, as thin as he;
and when they lay upon the beach,
their bodies stretched to receive sun,
and turned that our eyes might admire
the taut skin, I had to look to
my own vulnerability.

4

There's a beat to this music
that stirred the air at the bar,
a beat the body answers,
no melody, harmony
I can never imagine.
My alcove gave me distance,
a dark stage from which to watch,
a cage for self protection.
And from this isolation,
self-imposed, insisted on,
I remembered the deep curve
of an urn that once held ash,
the body's dry residue,
and, in colors of the earth,
a lascivious rabbit
with open books at his feet.
I imagine a potter
at the edge of a king's court
that glitters with sheets of gold
and the sheen of tall feathers;
how he must have envied them,
those warriors in the green plumes
of their deadly games.  Even
in their victory and death
he must have, from time to time,
in quickly recorded deeds,
sniffed his own fragility.

5

"Mind rot," he called it, laughing; "it is what
happens in sun."  And he called together
the Degenerate Sand-Surfers to hold
to the end of the bar, to strut and watch,
to wait for another call to dinner—
Malinkov, fresh and fat from Montreal
by way of Paris, and perhaps Kiev,
on the sleek jet of a grateful client.
He ordered drinks for which he would not pay.
"It's true," he said, "I must fly to Mustique.
All you girls will be so disappointed."
I saw him once, all alone at midnight,
stroking the cool sand at the water's edge.

6

That night she was escorted again
by the tennis coach, a third her age,
whose burnt body moved like a dancer's,
in control of its own grace.  But she
was graceless though firm in her layers
of white lace, her hair an illusion,
a smile brittle on the weathered face.
"Ahhh," she sighed, shuffling to the music,
"I shall dance again upon the stage
and sing sad songs of this lonely age."

7

The beat of the music stopped, and trumpets
carried a clear fanfare for late dinner,
a lifting of tall glasses and laughter.
There was a new order in the movement,
a gathering together for purpose,
a direction, a slow drifting away.
"We'll save a place," someone called as I stayed
to enjoy the unaccustomed silence.

The tables were deserted, chairs awry,
the ice slowly melted to pale liquid.
The gods had moved on, their bodies held high
in rich defiance.  And I was left with
the remnants, a trace of perfume, the oil
from bodies lingering on thick cushions,
a catch of laughter drifting back to this
solitary table where I still sat.

I knew that I would, before photographs
were mounted in their album, remember
in unkind phrases and aching envy
those bodies that moved on so easily.
Would I, if I could, be the dark warrior
at whom the lascivious rabbit stares?
Would I be the maiden dressed in feathers
teetering again at the sacred well?

It's a long time between visits, I thought;
too much time for snow, for the summer's heat,
too much time to read, think, and be alone.
Gathering my robes about me to rise,
I paused for a brief moment to look out
at the dark:  the moon broke free from a cloud
and dropped a thousand lights upon the sea.
While my place waited for me at table.

EPILOGUE

There's another odyssey that takes place
at my typewriter after I've returned
when I'm faced with the empty page, when left
with memories and the lingering scars
on the body; and ignobility
would be in not knowing, in not caring,
what it all was I had experienced,
or in a refusal to play again
the flickering, badly lit tape, to sort
tired but infinite possibilities.

Surely Ulysses himself, the suitors
slain, Penelope tamed, would have wondered
and faced with renewed joy his empty page.
But that's too romantic, an illusion
of my own disaffected craft.  It was
another lascivious rabbit, blind
and too tired to follow him to the west
on the last adventure, who put it down
in tracings of his own despair or hope.
For Ulysses, the sun and endless sea
provided just another shitty day
in paradise with only dissolving
memories of all those vague goddesses
with whom he'd slept.  Even Penelope,
as Tennyson implied, grew fat and shrill;
and all that was left was a weak body,
an old ship full of rot, and a hot wind
that might take him on toward the Blessed Isles.

But I'm abashed by envy, for I know
that Homer had more than his own despair,
more than lonely watchings of the battle.
Despite the brawling in the open court,                                              
the drunken cries, the whimpering of dogs,
he had his slides to throw upon a wall
of men and gods; and when his boy brought out
the scuffed and worn lyre, when he stood before
the lingering fire, tuned his strings, and sang
in a low voice, harsh and crumbling with age,
even the drunken sailors hushed their dogs.

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3 poems from POEM-CHANTING TOWER (1988)

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6 poems from SONATA SONNETS (1997)

13

The blood that splashes is neither mine nor your’s.
I’m sure it’s from a dream, or something left,
a horrid mistake, an accidental spill;
but there it is, drying on the tiles,
a gross reminder that forces are at work.

But still the birds are singing, burros call,
a rooster crows, an unfed dog is barking;
the sun has dried remainders of the storm,
sweet basil lunges through the morning’s heat.

In all that heat the blood becomes a pattern,
tile to table, table to the past.
It would take more tears than I have left
to clean the stain that’s brown now like the earth:
it’s part of what we are, just let it be.

18

He hung from railroad ties behind the house
until she cut him down and washed his face
and wrapped him in the sheets her mother left.
I never knew his name:  she would not say.

An old movie flickers through broken dreams
from waking to waking until the sun is up
and shadows pull into trees that line the hill,
and I remember a piece of the shattered past,
a friend who never calls, an old attachment
that rusted out and left the gate hanging.

Later, when shadows crawl from the far side
and the last freight heads slowly for the west,
I see his body swinging against the sky
and wonder how she managed all that weight.

22

The glass shatters as easily as my heart,
a sudden, silent fall and then the crash;
immediately my fingers feel the shards,
the splinters, the fine piercing of the skin.

“But you’re not hurt,” my father said, turning
to others who were there.  So I went out
and climbed a tree and tried to see as far
as China, beyond the hearing of the news,
beyond the listing of the dead, beyond
the midnight introversion of the world.

The wine spills at the other side of the room,
a calligraphic movement in the air,
as if the mind were stretching crimson light:
I lift my hands to find them wet with blood.

41

The end of the story:  curtains everywhere
have fallen, lights are out and stage boards creak.
I blink and try to focus on empty seats,
listen for distant traffic, swallow tears.

Or is it laughter, coughing in the wings?
I’m restless, with a touch of panic, sweat.
“You’re there,” I call and listen for the words
to rise through balconies of memory
and hope, for words that will reverberate
like instruments from another place.

The longer that I linger on the stage
and wonder where the switches are, the less
removed I feel:  I balance on the edge,
peer out and finally remember lines.

46

A narrow boat leans sharply against the tide;
the prow slaps the waves and takes my breath
until we’re steady on the way again,
somewhere between the past and what comes next.

We’ve not arrived, we’re somewhere halfway here
where the wind clears out the air and the sun appears,
the gulls circle, and the horizon disappears.
We move beyond the shiftings of the day,
by islands struggling close above the sea,
and houses that crumble slowly into mud.

We’re neither there nor here, we nod or smile
and speak in latent gestures of the heart,
no words, a lifting of the lips which crack
and bring a lingering gesture of the pain.

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3 poems from LAS ESPINAS (1997)

ESPINAS I
Vol. 1:  A — Bazouki

When Scottie was alive and blowing his bagpipes
at the county fair and church suppers, he taught us
to listen for the droning “A” that was there
before the melody and echoed afterwards
among the dry-stream rocks and dying elms.
And one afternoon in a small valley below
the last hill farm, as he played a pibroch that once
lead men to battle as it sang of an eagle’s strength,
the neighbors grew silent and even children stared:
beyond the piper, beyond the rocks, until
the last drone of that “A”,  an eagle circled
slow and high, catching light from the last sun.

His instruments have gathered dust in the rooms
that overflowed with books and photographs
and the wooden implements, inefficient and fine,
that craftsmen used to make a source for music.
He would not light the lamps as shadows fell,
but swept us up into the dark with songs
we’d laughed at back in school:  he’d push away
a block of wood and in a voice we strained
to hear, as if it came from some far hill,
naked and groping toward the moon, he whispered
the words we could never understand, his voice
not lifting far from the drone of his own worn pipes.

I pull a finger through the heavy dust
and feel a pang as the polished wood recovers
a little light and vague potentialities;
two violins, clustered pipes, and, to the side,
an old bazouki, a Grecian mandolin,
still lie as if in process of repair.
I strain to hear the sounds we’ve lost, his voice
in the corners of the room, the drone of bagpipes,
the falling clatter of a mandolin.
A silence lingers in the rooms where once
the cry of an eagle sharpened the afternoon;
I have felt the weight of tears and could not cry.

ESPINAS VI
Vol. 6:  Follow — Haswed

Can you test the strength of a rope, leaning back
from rock, knowing a drop of a thousand feet
and still hear the hawk that calls in the spaces above?
Can you slip through a sea out there within the reef,
among a panic of fish being herded
by barracuda and watch the fall of sun
through plunging depths into infinity?
Can you drop down through a narrow slit between rocks
and feel your way through the slippery darkness of nowhere
and be undistracted by a dream of the sun?
Can you follow with the arm and not pull back,
and let the heart speed on toward Armageddon?

Every line that falls across paper or canvas
has run the risk of dropping out of sight
as we hang from rock in a panic of indecision
or make repeated stumbles in the dark.
I’ve seen Arlene at a muddy entrance pause
and hesitate before slipping away
beyond the sound of a voice and watched dear Lee
push out from an anchored spot and teeter wildly
on a swaying line, laughing through clenched teeth
as he calls to the air, “I’ve got it, damn it, I’ve got it!”
and waited for Andrea to descend from darkness
at the top of the house with an image of light and pain.

We age with the dropping of a line, afraid,
reluctant and full of hope.  The backs of our hands
are creased and stained; we glance in a dusty mirror
and suddenly see we’ve got a haswed complexion,
grey at the edges, blotched in the harsh fall of light:
for a moment the irregularities
are more than we can bare, until we rip
the mirror from the wall, exalted, puzzled
by something just beyond our reach, a bolt,
a twisting of the line, something not
yet seen, a turning of mirrors, that face to face
plunge us into the depths of ecstasy.

ESPINAS XI
Vol. 11: Ow — Poisant

I had a friend who laughed at anything,
who gave me hell for my solemnity:
he’d walk about and pause before a painting
of a heavy bishop I’d just bought from Lee
and shake his head with a guttural dismissal
and turn and ask for a better glass of wine
than the last we’d had.  And once or twice I tried
to explain just why I took such pleasure in a work
of such indictment, where the paint ran down
like blood and the cross became a heavy club;
but all he’d say, in Cockney tones, was “Ow,
come off it, mate, let’s have a bit of a laugh.”

And when I placed St. Agnes beside the desk,
the split in her body at the level of the eye,
he took one look and said he’d seen enough.
“Enough torn bodies,” he muttered and went outside
and leant against the balustrade, waiting,
I suppose, for some illusive laugh to break
the tensions of the afternoon.  I’d hoped
to sit him down beside Arlene whose strength
had made that break, who wears her heaviness
like a chain of gold and polished stones; she cuts
to the armature and pulls the inside out
and outweighs me with her solemnity.

He never returned.  Oh, once or twice he’d call
and ask with what poisant matter I cluttered up
my life; he’d laugh and recommend a wine
and disappear again.  The years have passed
and I laugh no more than ever; more paintings hang,
more figures crowd the rooms, and there’s not one
that makes me laugh.  Arlene’s bodies bend
and break across such heaviness as I
rejoice in, going nose to nose with bishops
and Lee’s demonic guardians of the house. 
And still I wonder what he might have found
had he let his demons meet their match in these.

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