and from the salt, dark room, the tight horizon line
catches nothing, I wait. Chairs sweat. Paper crumples the floor.
A lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc.
Then, in the door light: not Nike loosening her sandal,
but a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.
XXVI
Before that thundercloud breaks from its hawsers,
those ropes of rain, a wind makes the sea grapes wince,
and the reef signals its last flash of lime.
Feeling her skin cool, the housemaid August
runs into the yard to pull down clouds, like a laundress,
from the year’s meridian, her mouth stuffed with wooden pins.
She’s seen these flashes of quartz, she knows it’s time
for the guests on the beach to come up to the house,
and, hosing sand from scorched feet, let the hinges rust
in holes for another year. But an iron band
still binds their foreheads: the bathers stand
begging the dark clouds, whose spinnakers race over the dunes,
for one more day. Here, the salt vine dries
as fast as it grows, and before you look, a year’s gone
with your shadow. The temperate homilies can’t
take root in sand; the cicada can fiddle his tunes
all year, if he likes, to the twig-brown ant.
The cloud passes high like a god staying his powers—
the pocked sand dries, umbrellas reopen like flowers—
but those who measure midsummer by a year’s trials
have felt a chill grip an ankle. They put down their books
to count the children crouched over pools, and the idolaters
angling themselves to the god’s face, like sundials.
XXVII
Certain things here are quietly American—
that chain-link fence dividing the absent roars
of the beach from the empty ball park, its holes
muttering the word umpire instead of empire;
the gray, metal light where an early pelican
coasts, with its engine off, over the pink fire
of a sea whose surface is as cold as Maine’s.
The light warms up the sides of white, eager Cessnas
parked at the airstrip under the freckling hills
of St. Thomas. The sheds, the brown, functional hangar,
are like those of the Occupation in the last war.
The night left a rank smell under the casuarinas,
the villas have fenced-off beaches where the natives walk,
illegal immigrants from unlucky islands
who envy the smallest polyp its right to work.
Here the wetback crab and the mollusc are citizens,
and the leaves have green cards. Bulldozers jerk
and gouge out a hill, but we all know that the dust
is industrial and must be suffered. Soon—
the sea’s corrugations are sheets of zinc
soldered by the sun’s steady acetylene. This
drizzle that falls now is American rain,
stitching stars in the sand. My own corpuscles
are changing as fast. I fear what the migrant envies:
the starry pattern they make—the flag on the post office—
the quality of the dirt, the fealty changing under my foot.
XXVIII
Something primal in our spine makes the child swing
from the gnarled trapeze of a sea-almond branch.
I have been comparing the sea almond’s shapes to the suffering
in van Gogh’s orchards. And that, too, is primal. A bunch
of sea grapes hangs over the calm sea. The shadows
I shovel with a dry leaf are as warm as ash, as
noon jerks toward its rigid, inert center.
Sunbathers broil on their grid, the shallows they enter
are so warm that out in the reef the blear grouper lunges
at nothing, teased by self-scaring minnows.
Abruptly remembering its job, a breaker glazes
the sand that dries fast. For hours, without a heave,
the sea suspires through the deep lungs of sponges.
In the thatched beach bar, a clock tests its stiff elbow
every minute and, outside, an even older iguana
climbs hand over claw, as unloved as Quasimodo,
into his belfry of shade, swaying there. When a
cloud darkens, my terror caused it. Lizzie and Anna
lie idling on different rafts, their shadows under them.
The curled swell has the clarity of lime.
In two more days my daughters will go home.
The frame of human happiness is time,
the child’s swing slackens to a metronome.
Happiness sparkles on the sea like soda.
XXIX
Perhaps if I’d nurtured some divine disease,
like Keats in eternal Rome, or Chekhov at Yalta,
something that sharpened the salt fragrance of sweat
with the lancing nib of my pen, my gift would increase,
as the hand of a cloud turning over the sea will alter
the sunlight—clouds smudged like silver plate,
leaves that keep trying to summarize my life.
Under the brain’s white coral is a seething anthill.
You had such a deep faith in that green water, once.
The skittering fish were harried by your will—
the stingray halved itself in clear bottom sand,
its tail a whip, its back as broad as a shovel;
the sea horse was fragile as glass, like grass, every tendril
of the wandering medusa: friends and poisons.
But to curse your birthplace is the final evil.
You could map my limitations four yards up from a beach—
a boat with broken ribs, the logwood that grows only thorns,
a fisherman throwing away fish guts outside his hovel.
What if the lines I cast bulge into a book
that has caught nothing? Wasn’t it privilege
to have judged one’s work by the glare of greater minds,
though the spool of days that midsummer’s reel rewinds
comes bobbling back with its question, its empty hook?
PART TWO
XXX
Gold dung and urinous straw from the horse garages,
click-clop of hooves sparking cold cobblestone.
From bricked-in carriage yards, exhaling arches
send the stale air of transcendental Boston—
tasselled black hansoms trotting under elms,
tilting their crops to the shade of Henry James.
I return to the city of my exile down Storrow Drive,
the tunnel with its split seraphs flying en face,
with finite sorrow; blocks long as paragraphs
pass in a style to which I’m not accustomed,
since, if I were, I would have been costumed
to drape the cloaks of couples who arrive
for dinner, drawing their chairs from tables where each glass,
catching the transcendental clustered lights,
twirled with perceptions. Style is character—
so my forehead crusts like brick, my sockets char
like a burnt brownstone in the Negro Quarter;
but when a fog obscures the Boston Common
and, up Beacon Hill, the old gas standards stutter
to save their period, I see a black coachman,
with gloves as white as his white-ankled horse,
who counts their laughter, their lamplit good nights,
then jerks the reins of his brass-handled hearse.
XXXI
Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors,
white spires, white filling stations, the orthodox
&n
bsp; New England offering of clam-and-oyster bars,
like drying barnacles leech harder to their docks
as their day ebbs. Colonies of dark seamen,
whose ears were tuned to their earringed ancestors’
hymn of the Mediterranean’s ground bass,
thin out like flocks of some endangered species,
their gutturals, like a parched seal’s, on the rocks.
High on the hillsides, the crosstrees of pines
endure the Sabbath with the nerves of aspens.
They hear the Pilgrim’s howl changed from the sibyl’s,
that there are many nations but one God,
black hat, black-suited with his silver buckle,
damning the rock pool for its naiad’s chuckle,
striking this coast with his priapic rod.
A chilling wind blows from my Methodist childhood.
The Fall is all around us—it is New England’s
hellfire sermon, and my own voice grows hoarse in
the fog whose bellowing horn is the sea siren’s:
a trawler groping from the Port of Boston,
snow, mixed with steam, blurring the thought of islands.
XXXII
The sirens will keep on singing, they will never break
the flow of their one-voiced river to proselytize:
“Come back, come back!”; your head will roll like the others,
the rusted, open-mouthed tins with their Orphic cries.
The city of Boston will not change for your sake.
Cal’s bulk haunts my classes. The shaggy, square head tilted,
the mist of heated affection blurring his glasses,
slumped, but the hands repeatedly bracketing vases
of air, the petal-soft voice that has never wilted—
its flowers of illness carpet the lanes of Cambridge,
and the germ of madness is here. Tonight, on the news,
some black kids, one bandaged, were escorted with drawn baton
to police cars. The slicing light on their hoods
divides the spitters from those who should be spat on,
keeping a red eye on colored neighborhoods.
The sirens go on singing, while Lowell’s head
rolls past the Harvard boathouse, and his Muse
roars for the Celtics in the Irish bars.
They move in schools, erect, pale fishes in streets;
transparent, fish-eyed, they skitter when I divide,
like a black porpoise heading for the straits,
and the sirens keep singing in their echoing void.
XXXIII
[for Robert Fitzgerald]
Those grooves in that forehead of sand-colored flesh
were cut by declining keels, and the crow’s foot
that prints an asterisk by unburied men
reminds him how many more by the Scamander’s
gravel fell and lie waiting for their second fate.
Who next should pull his sword free of its mesh
of weeds and hammer at the shield
of language till the wound and the word fit?
A whole war is fought backward to its cause.
Last night, the Trojan and the Greek commanders
stood up like dogs when his strange-smelling shadow
hung loitering round their tents. Now, at sunrise,
the dead begin to cough, each crabwise hand
feels for its lance, and grips it like his pen.
A helmsman drowns in an inkblot, an old man wanders
a pine-gripped islet where his wound was made.
Entering a door-huge dictionary, he finds that clause
that stopped the war yesterday; his pulse starts the gavel
of hexametrical time, the V’s of each lifted blade
pull from Connecticut, like the hammers of a piano
without the sound, as the wake, reaching gravel,
recites in American: “Arma virumque cano …”
XXXIV
Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue
on the heart! Going to the Eastern shuttle at LaGuardia,
I mistook a swash of green-painted roof for the sea.
And my ears, that second, were shells that held the roar
of a burnished army scrambling down troughs of sand
in an avalanche of crabs, to the conch’s horn in Xenophon.
My eyes flashed a watery green, I felt through each hand,
channel and vein, the startling change in hue
made by the current between Pigeon Point and Store
Bay, my blood royalled by that blue.
I know midsummer is the same thing everywhere—
Aix, Santa Fe, dust powdering the poplars of Arles,
that it swivels like a dog at its shadow by the Charles
when the footpaths swirl with dust, not snow, in eddies—
but my nib, like the beak of the sea-swift heads nowhere else;
to where the legions sprawl like starfish sunning themselves
till the conch’s moan calls the slanted spears
of the rain to march on in Anabasis.
The sun has whitened the legions to brittle shells.
Homer, who tired of wars and gods and kings,
had the sea’s silence for prologue and epilogue.
That old wave-wanderer with his drowsing gaze is
a pelican rocked on the stern of an empty pirogue,
a salt-grizzled gaffer, shaking rain from his wings.
XXXV
Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger.
Sometimes the gusts of rain veered like the sails
of dragon-beaked vessels dipping to Avalon
the skittering ridges of Wales, we carried the figure
of Langland’s Plowman on the rain-seeded glass,
matching the tires with his striding heels,
while splintered puddles dripped from the roadside grass.
Once, in the drizzle, a crouched, clay-covered ghost
rose in his pivot, and the turning disk of the fields
with their ploughed stanzas sang of a freshness lost.
Villages began. We had crossed into England—
the fields, not their names, were the same. We found a caff,
parked in a thin drizzle, then crammed into a pew
of red leatherette. Outside, with thumb and finger,
a careful sun was picking the lint from things.
The sun brightened like a sign, the world was new
while the cairns, the castled hillocks, the stony kings
were scabbarded in sleep, yet what made me think
that the crash of chivalry in a kitchen sink
was my own dispossession? I could sense, from calf
to flinging wrist, my veins ache in a knot.
There was mist on the window. I rubbed it and looked out
at the helmets of wet cars in the parking lot.
XXXVI
The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines
from the ale-colored skies of Warwickshire.
Autumn has blown the froth from the foaming orchards,
so white-haired regulars draw chairs nearer the grate
to spit on logs that crackle into leaves of fire.
But they grow deafer, not sure if what they hear
is the drone of the abbeys from matins to compline,
or the hornet’s nest of a chain saw working late
on the knoll up there back of the Norman chapel.
Evening loosens the moth, the owl shifts its weight,
a fish-mouthed moon swims up from wavering elms,
but four old men are out on the garden benches,
talking of the bows they have drawn, their strings of wenches,
their coined eyes shrewdly glittering like the Thames’
estuaries. I heard their old talk carried
through cables laid across the Atlantic bed,
their gossip rustles like an apple orchard’s
in my own head, and I can drop their names
like familiars—those bastard grandsires
whose maker granted them a primal pardon—
because the worm that cores the rotting apple
of the world and the hornet’s chain saw cannot touch the words
of Shallow or Silence in their fading garden.
XXXVII
A trembling thought, no bigger than a hurt
wren, swells to the pulsebeat of my rounded palm,
pecks at its scratch marks like a mound of dirt,
oval wings thrumming like a panelled heart.
Mercy on thee, wren; more than you give to the worm.
I’ve seen that pitiless beak dabbing the worm
like a knitting needle into wool, the shudder you give
gulping that limp noodle, its wriggle of completion
like a seed swallowed by the slit of a grave,
then your wink of rightness at a wren’s religion;
but if you died in my hand, that beak would be the needle
on which the black world kept spinning on in silence,
your music as measured in grooves as was my pen’s.
Keep pecking on in this vein and see what happens:
the red skeins will come apart as knitting does.
It flutters in my palm like the heartbeat thudding to be gone,
as if it shared the knowledge of a wren’s elsewhere,
beyond the world ringed in its eye, season and zone,
in the radial iris, the targeted, targeting stare.
XXXVIII
Autumn’s music grates. From tuning forks of branches,
small beaks scrape the cold. With trembling feather,
with the squeaking nails of their notes, they pierce me, plus
all the hauntings and evasions of gray weather,
and the river veining with marble despite their pleas.
Lunging to St. Martin’s marshes, toward the salt breaks
corrugated by windy sunlight, to reed-whistling islets
the geese chevron, too high for a shadow. Over brown bricks
the soundless white scream of contrails made by jets