The Unraveling Strangeness Read online

  Long may these days

  stay drowsy

  in their tempo,

  sweet as they sing our way home.

  AFTER HORACE (I, V)

  I wonder what skinny, sweet-smelling boy

  holds you, tangled

  in the roses of your unreal garden.

  Although you tie your blond hair

  back with such lovely practiced grace,

  he will grieve at your moods to come;

  in stunned surprise he will stare

  at the darkening waters that you trouble.

  Because he thinks you are his alone,

  for him you are the light;

  to him you seem content,

  the way you seem so real to the pitiless boys

  always on the verge of you.

  I wrote my prayer on the temple wall.

  I hung my dripping clothes to dry

  and bowed to the gods of the sea.

  AFTER HORACE (II, V)

  She is not strong enough yet

  to carry the wife’s

  double plow on her neck,

  or to bear the force of the bull’s weight, pounding.

  She thinks only of her ghostly fields

  where she burns back the sun’s

  sultry light

  in the shallows

  and runs through the marsh grass unfolding.

  But don’t taste those unripe grapes

  until they are dappled purple

  by autumn,

  until they are clustered in their true and dark light.

  Wild in his work,

  Mr. Time will give her

  all of the days

  that he will take from you,

  but she will want even more

  than the one whose white neck

  shone like the moon on night sea,

  more than the clever, fey visitor

  whose hair and sweet boy’s face

  baffled the girls around him

  gathered to ask him his sex.

  WHY PLATO LEFT FOR MEGARA

  Imagine your old teacher

  has died

  in the gray broken

  columns of pious script

  as he calculated

  the weight of his loss,

  the unbribed jailer

  only a shadow,

  like the law

  was only a shadow

  that the teacher had exposed

  to the nagging light

  of being

  someone. Imagine

  that your name

  is not uncommon

  among Greeks,

  so you must keep moving,

  because he who knew all

  has passed

  into the never,

  into the right understanding

  of the soul’s revenge

  on the body, into the justice.

  ON THE EVENT OF MY UNTIMELY DEATH

  Let the fires of sweet redemption

  burn my tired body into ash,

  and spread that ash

  among the limestone boulders

  old as God

  in the cold waters of the Little J

  below the spired Presbyterian church.

  You may even want to wet a line there,

  especially in late May

  where I caught my first great

  brown trout on a caddis

  trailed lovely by its delicate emerger.

  Thank God I let that fish go.

  It swam upstream and away,

  then turned into a spirit

  that promised many fish to come.

  Sunder my ashes there.

  FINDING THEIR BODIES AT HOME

  A solitary dove

  came to rest in the dying willow

  just as the dusk was rising,

  a detail, which in itself

  was meaningless

  until the dove came back

  a second time

  to the willow,

  dying of omens,

  and I thought I saw

  dark shapes slide by

  in the light between the branches.

  I thought I saw the wings

  of a dubious angel,

  so I forever keep my guard,

  and like you,

  I waited for the dove to come back

  as long as the light allowed,

  and then I waited in the dark

  so that my eyes took on

  that different seeing,

  until I felt the breath and songs

  of things who come out in the dark,

  their bodies drifting all around me.

  BY THE SUBURBAN SWIMMING POOL

  For one whole night and most of

  all the next day,

  the little dog was missing,

  its people

  worried about the lowering temperatures.

  Two other dogs,

  who I believe were

  close friends of the missing,

  clicked their nails

  back and forth

  across the tile floor in worry.

  Posters were distributed

  among the neighbors

  and tacked to light poles

  up and down the streets.

  I had no rights in the matter.

  I didn’t even know the little dog

  or why he had run away,

  but he must have had his reasons.

  MEETING MR. DEATH

  You could say I

  kept my cool

  when I met Mr. Death.

  I even made him

  laugh

  by offering my

  hand to shake

  in the bullet-torn

  morning hours,

  and then I said,

  Are you looking at me?

  and he got the joke. Death

  gets the joke

  or else

  our whole lives

  are a lie and a waste.

  He didn’t take my hand,

  but he laughed at my jokes

  and he made me feel

  welcome inside the grace

  he still wore,

  shawl of the ghostly

  angel he had been

  but could not remember.

  Mr. Death,

  he was hanging around some

  pals of mine, some

  boys of the unspeakable

  rapture of war. He

  could have had me that morning

  too, when I looked away

  to the monsoon-heavy

  river

  where the bodies

  had come to rest

  in the last eddies,

  but he changed his mind.

  NOTES

  Part One

  “Immorality of Beauty” is for Nguyen Ba Chung (a thousand bows).

  “Nixon” is in memory of President Richard Milhous Nixon.

  Every spring in Hinckley, Ohio, people gather to wildly celebrate the annual return of the vultures.

  Part Two

  “Incident at Eagle’s Peak” is for Richard O.

  Part Three

  “Time After Time” was inspired by the lines “you may cradle my honey/whimper in your fresh bite,” from Camilla Rose, in a letter.

  “That Towering Feeling” is for Toby.

  “After Horace (I, V)” and “After Horace (II, V)” represent unforgivably liberal translations of two Horatian odes.

  “By the Suburban Swimming Pool” is for Jack Myers.

  “Meeting Mr. Death” is for Tim O’Brien.

 

 

 
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