Breakers: New and Selected Poems
Excerpt

Little Testament

To wake on my fortieth birthday

buried in this pile of gifts

and not question how they

or I got here

but proceed with the inventory,

all tatters and extra coda,

and salvage for you what I can

from whatever is fake and forgettable:

Something old, something new, something

borrowed, stolen, scavenged,

a lot simply looted

from the pleasures and shambles of the day.

Tobacco, wine, sacks of cash,

a menagerie, a matador’s doormat

and a little bull,

The Sultan of Passion’s Manual,

a semi-epithalamion,

Sonata for Brutality and Vegetable,

snapshots, a winged thing,

what looks like a self-portrait

of Ponce de Leon’s younger brother, Pounce.

Pick or choose,

keep or toss.

Welcome to a firesale at the local Cornucopia.

Please excuse the whiff of chaos.

Forty years old

and I still can’t see myself

planting flowers

on either the dark edge of heaven or hell.

Though in either place

I can guess which would flourish,

I have a better idea

of what thrives here.

ITEM: And so, instead of a bribe

for my gravekeeper,

I leave a trillium,

a lovely plant

that smells like rotten meat,

or any other flowering contradiction

whose colors attract bees

but whose stench draws flies;

whose pollination depends

on an insult as well as beauty.

And I guess you can get to Limbo

the same way you got here:

by mistake.

And I like to think

you can still get to heaven

with the right disguise.

But in either place

I’d be disappointed

if monotony were more than a buzz.

I hope to hear

a frequent hum of satisfaction,

or inspiration,

the little wings of an immensity,

a thought in god’s mind.

But I’ll settle for a bumblebee.

According to the known laws

of propriety and aerodynamics

it shouldn’t get off the ground

but does, half wonder and

—by sheer force of will—half ridiculous.

Bees, after all, got me started on this,

their loose formality.

I had seen a lump of gold in the road,

and looking closer realized

it was a pile of them, bees

who like ferocious translators

had taken on the shape

of what they were devouring: a dead frog.

And I thought: François Villon,

Form Giver! Merci beaucoup!

ITEM: Ah, dear Formalists,

how you persevere.

You whose sleek instinct

for the unanswerable

has been thwarted, whose wish to fly

has left you often unable to crawl,

whose high romance slithers in lines

like a fuse of clarity,

like a slow trickle over chrome,

only to quietly go down the drain,

please accept my gratitude in the form of

The Snake’s Fable:

How an anaconda becomes

trapped by what it seeks.

How it squirms through a fence

and swallows the egret

that was left as bait.

How it then fails to escape

through the narrow fenceposts.

How its length becomes more distorted

—the shape of the bird, the form

within the form, as if it had caught

its own soul

and choked on it.

You can have your snake and egret too.

ITEM: Now for you, my several friends,

in honor of your trust,

your warmth, your jokes:

Champagne . . . in a dirty glass.

Though not just any glass:

the finest old Venetian,

so light and clear you would think

the Air herself

had placed her hand in yours

and a cool secret on your lips.

How light touches its delicate rim,

curves into serenity with a smirk,

the glint that was in the eye

of its maker, the Venetian

who tried to get glass this thin

believing that it would shatter

if ever a drop of poison

were added to the wine.

It was a doge-eat-doge world alright.

And not just any champagne.

A magnum, a Methuselah

of The Blushful Hippocrene.

In the Cellars of the Pearly Dark,

a rack reserved for each of you.

You can sip it like a wolf,

you can lap it like a dog,

guzzle it like a Vandal,

swig it like a saint.

You can take the bottles

(Why do they, like hearts,

always seem heavier when empty?)

and toss them through the skylight.

Hell’s bells . . .

Or any goon’s chance

to scatter the angels

who from their withering heights

leer down

through the glare of everything

to see you embrace

under your bedsheet,

your sail of unconcern,

as it luffs above you

and every broken thing you own.

ITEM: Or keep the bottle,

for this Famous Ship in a Bottle Kit,

a replica

of the Sultan of Passion’s Flagship.

Built to reign over a great lake

that almost dried up

before she was launched

—and afterward,

as everyone expected,

did just that—the majestic ship

plowed through the crud-laden waters

and ever-encroaching shoreline

like an agitated duck

that keeps a last puddle clear

on a freezing pond;

constantly on the move,

in ever-tighter circles,

all futility and quacking isolation,

while the squalid wordlings

in her crew

sang "Gimme Dat Ole Time Derision"

and the last of the lake

evaporated under the hull,

leaving their ship

as high and dry as a cathedral.

ITEM: Junior Visigoth, puerile drudge,

instead of standing forlorn

on a sultry pier

on a Sunday morn

fishing for rats,

take the job you were born for:

—Calvary to the rescue!—

Managing the Souvenir Concession

at St. Pat’s.

Though behind

that tintinabular cash register,

you’ll never lose sight

of your mascot.

High on a scavenger’s vantage point,

the tallest tree on that hill,

the dead one without a branch,

perched like a black flame

on a candle,

illuminating nothing

—less than nothing—for miles around,

there he’ll be, your ragged crow.

ITEM: And the few hawks

always ready to zero in

on any vital thing,

they belong to you, dear Cynic.

You get to stand further out

in the future,

so whenever another horde appears

grunting before the wide-open gates

of this new century,

you’re the one who gets to tell them

they’re too early.

The one to tell them

they are not the first to stare

into the cold beauty of indifference

without a god to defend them.

They’ll look over your shoulder.

They’ll want to see the womenfolk.

They’ll ask if thoughts

will now enter their minds

like nudes in a fog.

They’ll want to kiss an aerodrome.

But you will get to tell them

that no matter where they turn

—city, lake, plain—

the view will stop them

dumb in their tracks,

will spread right through them

as it does you,

so clear and strange

like a disappointing vision,

spread flat and low

across the lake

with such ease,

the urge to say anything

lies scattered out there

with the shadows of a breeze.

Their horses lick the frost

off the ground,

their banners droop,

they’re finally lost.

They’ll look into your face

and into a distance beyond winter,

beyond change,

further than any hunger

has ever led them.

And overhead, in the only bough

whose leaves have yet to fall

—leaves stiff, leaning in the last direction

the wind blew them—

your flag still flies.

Clockwise, the hawks slip away.

ITEM: And you, occasional poet,

I award you a ton of sympathy,

a place to dump it,

and this variation on a theme:

It’s not the heat, it’s the cupidity.

It’s not the squalid kitchen,

the boiled chicken, the burnt sneaker,

the steam in a white sink.

It’s not the four million tons

of cosmic dust

that gravity gathers

and drops on earth each day.

It’s your own squandered magic,

the weight of your own quiet voice.

It’s the peculiar sense of nothing

when the middle of nowhere shifts again.

It’s the quiet, disappointing extreme,

another long-deserted drive-in movie

at high noon, titles

still dangling from the marquee

in busted poems, speaker wire

ripped from rusted pipe,

dry weeds in the gravel.

It’s the endless intermission,

the stalled ocean,

the blank screen’s faded lunar curve

tilted high over the asphalt’s faded waves.

ITEM: And out of this,

occasional Nihilist,

there’s no quick way for you,

but in the occasional detail, a general direction;

in the scuffed moss, an idle clue,

softness rooted in granite;

in the cool, quiet wood, a place

to think or hope; in birch leaves

and splayed branches

layered with shadows of leaves,

a kind of listening;

in mud and leaf mold, a deer track;

in the brush, a sapling

corkscrewed by a vine;

in jumbled stone, pieces

of an eventual flow;

in a cracked rock, a lucky streak;

in an old bone, an unexpected lightness;

in cloudbanks of lush green hills

fading into clouds, a world on the rise;

in a blackened, overgrown foundation,

a matter of fact;

in a scorched chimney, a new nest;

in fern and laurel, a hard twist

and a gentleness;

in the hemlock, in its lowest limb,

an easy reach or heavy wing’s descent;

in its gently splintered shade,

a dark end in a kind and crystal eye;

in the well, in its clogged shaft,

a little song of loss (maybe yours, maybe not);

in the spiderweb that spans it,

anticipation’s skeleton;

in the red spider

that makes it tremble,

a cunning gentleness, a quick heart,

maybe yours, maybe not.

ITEM: To my wife, Ann,

I leave this littered house

and all it contains:

the comfort, the disarray, the panic,

the splendid lamps

that shine through the oaks,

the windows high and wide,

and the constellation

that we’ve traced

in winter’s long view of the stars.

Each place we’ve known, each point

a knot in The Great Net,

cast from childhood to Asia, across

the longitude and lassitude of our time;

this notion, that there is

no end to what we are,

that tangled, snagged, and drawn,

the routes of our coming and going

converge here, gathered in the lights

spread over these black hills

and clustered in the city’s heights,

for us to haul it in,

full of whatever we’ve done,

wherever we’ve been.

ITEM: To my son, Alexander,

I bequeath with love and admiration

the Arc de Triomphe.

And here’s why:

To commemorate

the golden attitude you displayed

in the first moments of your life,

the magnificent arc you made

when the doctor

held you aloft in the cold air

and you twisted and turned,

scattering everyone

in the delivery room

as you pissed all over us.

ITEM: To my daughter, Helen,

I leave a prime Elysian lot,

that island-meadow

you rode into

late one afternoon

and let your horse wade at will,

stir up wildflower

and milkweed

in the purpling blue,

so that the silver seed

hovered far around you,

made you smile

amid innumerable smiles

and raised in a casual swarm

years of waves and glinting wings.

Whatever favor, whatever truth

there was of Elysium

filled your eyes

and you laughed at the mystery of things

like one of god’s spies

when the sun

coaxed your soul into sight

then drew your name

in the air, Loved-of-Light.

(Or perhaps you saw it all

in a less mawkish way:

the grinning spirits,

the exaltation of shoppers

as they enter The Celestial Mall.)

ITEM: Dead-eye Dick,

the jubilant realist, where did he go?

And the bouncers

at the Tempus Fugit Funeral Parlor,

who gave them the heave-ho?

Polly and Esther,

the scrawny Rip-snorter

and Capability Jones?

The Fearless Fucker, the Blizzard Dancer,

when the bottles slipped

out of their frozen gloves,

where did they go?

Where does the hasty music lead?

The happy rat-tracks in the snow?

What happened to Elmer

and Daffy, Big Bertha, and Limp Louie?

Bashful, Happy, and Grumpy?

Comatose, Ecstatic, and Berserk?

What are all these blanks

in the summer street?

Whatever happened to that guy

who used to catch bullets in his teeth?

To them, to anyone

humbled, stricken by the beauty

the world gives and takes,

here’s the long and short of it:

In any of the blooming zeroes

one cloud sprinkles offshore,

in any crater on the moon,

lay down this life.

ITEM: Now, last readers,

I offer dypsomanic immunity

to any place you wish,

where all you need to do

is relax, stroll, hold hands

like absurdity and squalor,

and admire the indolent harbors

and unfinished memorials

to The Spirit of Laziness.

Where bridges and hours

span a mile or two more

than they did before,

confident splendors

suspended above the monstrous clamor,

the furious view

of another life below.

Where you don’t have to spend

nights in a damp park

listening to swans fart in their sleep.

No more mornings that leave you

dizzy and stranded

on a pile of junk and generosity

or meandering

through zoos in rainlight,

the steamy cages,

the great apes whimpering in the mist,

the washed-out posters

announcing yet another concert

by Smug Paul and The Hedonists.

Now, for you, the tidal music

of evening resumes,

with its dockside antics and lunar revelry,

the private balcony

from which you can watch divers

as their flashlights

scan the harbor floor

for the pianos you’ve tossed to them.

Here’s the chance

to catch up on sleep you lost long ago.

Find a loose hour or two

in a pile of rose leaves

steeped in sunlight and spilled wine,

in the kindlier motions

of silence and vagrant time

that may wake you on the move,

like the only birds in an early breeze,

like fish in a strong current,

like dirty spirits in starlight

—wake on the silver heels

of gods who vanish into their own jokes.

ITEM: Until then, forget all this clutter

but take this pearl.

It is the hard light, the soul

of the laziest thing that ever lived.

I didn’t get around to—

I couldn’t decide what to wrap it in,

which unfinished poem

or squandered conceit.

It would be easier

just to rip a page out of a book.

One that I remember describes

how in World War II

the writer Malaparte

while crossing the Lake Ladoga convoy route

during the siege of Leningrad

looked down through the ice

and saw innumerable human faces,

beautiful glass masks,

staring up at him.

Their lips thin and worn,

their hair long, their eyes large and clear

like delicate icons—the images of those

killed while attempting to cross

the only supply line to a ruined city.

Their bodies, submerged all winter,

had been swept away by the first spring currents,

but what remained, the expression their faces

had left etched in the ice,

he said it was serene

and that their eyes seemed to follow his

as he walked across the lake.

Or instead of that page,

I could use those stanzas by Arnaut Daniel

that Pound translated:

"Though all things freeze here,

I can naught feel the cold,

For new love sees, here

My heart’s new leaf unfold;

So am I rolled

And lapped against the breeze here:

Love, who doth mold

My force, force guarantees here.

Aye, life’s a high thing,

Where joy’s his maintenance,

Who cries ’tis a wry thing

Hath danced never my dance.

I can advance

No blame against fate’s tithing

For lot and chance

Have left the best thing my thing."

Or, instead of wrapping the pearl,

why don’t I just roll it over to you,

ahead of the morning.

Let your eyes grow accustomed to it

as they did to the depths of the night,

and find how between your fingertips

it is a toy of thought.

Seed of obstinance, prize

of mood, sand and tide,

it is not the ball of light

that others wish the world to be

but what little sense

it can yield in a year and a day.

It is my own gift of darkness,

less than I mean, all I can say.