of utter black, her arms no less perfect than bones.

  I know a man with taste.

  He lives alone on a floor of a warehouse

  and designs machines that make nothing

  but vivid impressions of whirling,

  of ellipticity, dazzle, and flow.

  He cooks on a single burner

  Suprèmes de Volaille aux Champignons,

  has hung his brick walls with pencilled originals

  by Impressionist masters,

  and lives in smiling harmony with all that is there

  and is not there,

  minding only the traffic noise from the street.

  He and my first wife would make a pair,

  but they will never meet.

  My second wife, that flatterer, says

  I have taste.

  All decisions as to pattern are deferred to me.

  A chair, a car I chose is cheered

  when it arrives, like a bugle note, on pitch

  with all the still-humming chords

  of our clamorous, congratulatory mingling.

  It makes one blush, to be credited with taste.

  Chipmunk fur, wave-patterns on sand, white asters—

  but for these, and some few other exceptions,

  Nature has no taste, just productivity.

  I want to be, like Nature, tasteless,

  abundant, reckless, cheerful. Go screw, taste—

  itself a tasteless suggestion.

  Penumbrae

  The shadows have their seasons, too.

  The feathery web the budding maples

  cast down upon the sullen lawn

  bears but a faint relation to

  high summer’s umbrageous weight

  and tunnellike continuum—

  black leached from green, deep pools

  wherein a globe of gnats revolves

  as airy as an astrolabe.

  The thinning shade of autumn is

  an inherited Oriental,

  red worn to pink, nap worn to thread.

  Shadows on snow look blue. The skier,

  exultant at the summit, sees his poles

  elongate toward the valley: thus

  each blade of grass projects another

  opposite the sun, and in marshes

  the mesh is infinite,

  as the winged eclipse an eagle in flight

  drags across the desert floor

  is infinitesimal.

  And shadows on water!—

  the beech bough bent to the speckled lake

  where silt motes flicker gold,

  or the steel dock underslung

  with a submarine that trembles,

  its ladder stiffened by air.

  And loveliest, because least looked-for,

  gray on gray, the stripes

  the pearl-white winter sun

  hung low beneath the leafless wood

  draws out from trunk to trunk across the road

  like a stairway that does not rise.

  Revelation

  Two days with one eye:

  doctor said I had to wear a patch

  to ward off infection

  in the abraded cornea.

  As hard to get used to as the dark:

  no third dimension

  and the swaddled eye

  reporting a gauze blur to the brain.

  You feel clumsy:

  hearing and thinking affected also.

  Only your sense of smell improves

  in a world of foggy card-shapes.

  When the patch came off on Monday,

  the real world was alarming,

  bulging every which way and bright:

  a kind of a joke, a pop-up book.

  The Shuttle

  Sitting airborne on the

  New York–to–Boston shuttle

  for what seemed the thousandth time,

  I recalled what seemed a poem:

  In the time before jets,

  when the last shuttle left

  La Guardia at eleven,

  I flew home to Logan

  on a virtually empty DC-7

  and one of the seven other passengers

  I recognized as Al Capp.

  Later, at a party,

  one of those Cambridge parties

  where his anti-Ho politics

  were wrong, so wrong

  the left eventually broke his heart,

  I recalled the flight to him,

  but did not recount how sleepy

  he looked to me, how tired,

  with his peg-legged limp

  and rich man’s blue suit

  and Li’l Abner shock of hair.

  He laughed and said to me,

  “And if the plane had crashed,

  can’t you just see the headline?—

  ONLY EIGHT KILLED.

  ONLY EIGHT KILLED: everyone

  would be so relieved!”

  Now Al is dead, dead,

  and the shuttle is always crowded.

  Crab Crack

  In the Pond

  The blue crabs come to the brown pond’s edge

  to browse for food where the shallows are warm

  and small life thrives subaqueously,

  while we approach from the airy side,

  great creatures bred in trees and armed

  with nets on poles of such a length

  as to outreach that sideways tiptoe lurch

  when, with a splash from up above, the crabs

  discover themselves to be prey.

  In the Bucket

                                          We can feel

  at the pole’s other end their fearful

  wide-legged kicking, like the fury of scissors

  if scissors had muscle. We want

  their sweet muscle. Blue and a multitude

  of colors less easily named (scum-green,

  old ivory, odd ovals of lipstick-red

  where the blue-glazed limbs are hinged),

  they rest in the buckets, gripping one another

  feebly, like old men fumbling in their laps,

  numb with puzzlement, their brains

  a few threads, each face a mere notch

  on the brittle bloated pancake of the carapace.

  In the Pot

  But the passion with which they resist!

  Even out of the boiling pot they come clattering

  and try to dig holes in the slick kitchen floor

  and flee as if hours parching in the sun

  on the lawn beneath our loud cocktails

  had not taught them a particle of despair.

  On the Table

  Now they are done, red. Cracking

  their preposterous backs, we cannot bear

  to touch the tender fossils of their mouths

  and marvel at the beauty of the gills,

  the sweetness of the swimmerets. All is exposed,

  an intricate toy. Life spins such miracles

  by multiples of millions, yet our hearts

  never quite harden, never quite cease

  to look for the hand of mercy in

  such workmanship. If when we die we’re dead,

  then the world is ours like gaudy grain

  to be reaped while we’re here, without guilt.

  If not, then an ominous duty to feel

  with the mite and the dragon is ours,

  and a burden in being.

  In the Stomach

                                          Late at night

  the ghosts of the crabs patrol our intestines,

  scampering sideways, hearkening à pointe

  like radar dishes beneath the tide, seeking

  the safe grave of sand in vain, turning,

  against their burning wills, into us.

  Nature

  is su
ch a touching child.

  When his first wife and he

  had their tennis court built,

  they were going to plant cedars

  transplanted from the field

  all around the court, to make

  a windscreen.

  The digging proved hard,

  the wheelbarrow awkward,

  and they planted only one,

  at the corner.

  Now, years later, returning

  to drop off a child,

  he sees the forgotten cedar

  has grown tall enough

  to be part of a windscreen

  if there were others with it,

  if it had not grown alone.

  The Moons of Jupiter

  Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Io:

  these four, their twinkling spied by Galileo

  in his new-invented telescope, debunked

  the dogma of celestial spheres—great bubbles

  of crystal turning one within another,

  our pancake Earth the static, sea-rimmed center,

  and, like a beehive, Purgatory hung below,

  and angels scattered all throughout, chiming

  and trumpeting across the curved interstices

  their glad and constant news. Not so. “E pur

  si muove,” Galileo muttered, sotto

  voce, having recanted to the Pope.

  Yet, it moves, the Earth, and unideal

  also the Galilean moons: their motion

  and fluctuant occlusions pierced Jove’s sphere

  and let out all the air that Dante breathed

  as tier by singing tier he climbed to where

  Beatrice awaited, frosting bride

  atop the universal wedding cake.

  Not Vergil now but Voyager, cloned gawker

  sent spinning through asymptotic skies

  and televising back celestial news,

  guides us to the brink of the bearable.

  Callisto is the outermost satellite

  and the first our phantom footsteps tread.

  Its surface underfoot is ancient ice,

  thus frozen firm four billion years ago

  and chipped and peppered since into a slurry

  of saturated cratering. Pocked, knocked,

  and rippled sullenly, this is the terrain

  of unforgiven wrongs and hurts preserved—

  the unjust parental slap, the sneering note

  passed hand to hand in elementary school,

  the sexual jibe confided between cool sheets,

  the bad review, the lightly administered snub.

  All, in this gloom, keep jagged edges fresh

  as yesterday, and, muddied by some silicon,

  the bitter spikes and uneroded rims

  of ancient impact trip and lacerate

  our progress. There is no horizon, just

  widespread proof of ego’s cruel bombardment.

  Next, Ganymede, the largest of these moons,

  as large as toasted Mercury. Its ice enchants

  with ponds where we can skate and peek down through

  pale recent crazings to giant swarthy flakes

  of mineral mystery; raked blocks like glaciers

  must be traversed, and vales of strange grooves cut

  by a parallel sliding, implying

  tectonic activity, a once-warmed interior.

  This is the realm of counterthrust—the persistent

  courtship, the job application, the punch

  given back to the ribs of the opposing tackle.

  A rigid shame attends these ejecta,

  and a grim satisfaction we did not go under

  meekly, but thrust our nakedness hard

  against the skin of the still-fluid world,

  leaving what is called here a ghost crater.

  “Cue ball of the satellites”—so joked

  the National Geographic of Europa.

  But, landed on the fact, the mind’s eye swims

  in something somber and delicious both—

  a merged Pacific and Siberia,

  an opalescent prairie veined with beige

  and all suffused by flickers of a rose

  tint caught from great, rotating Jupiter.

  Europa’s surface stretches still and smooth,

  so smooth its horizon’s glossy limb betrays

  an arc of curvature. The meteors here

  fell on young flesh and left scars

  no deeper than birthmarks; as we walk

  our chins are lit from underneath, the index

  of reflection, the albedo, is so high.

  Around us glares the illusion of success:

  a certain social polish, decent grades,

  accreditations, memberships, applause,

  and mutual overlookings melt together

  to form one vast acceptance that makes us blind.

  On Io, volcanoes plume, and sulphur tugged

  by diverse gravitations bubbles forth

  from a golden crust that caps a molten sea.

  The atmosphere smells foul, and pastel snow

  whips burningly upon us, amid the cold.

  This is our heart, our bowels, ever renewed,

  the poisonous churn of basic needs

  suffering the pull of bodies proximate.

  The bulblike limbic brain, the mother’s breast,

  the fear of death, the wish to kill, the itch

  to plunge and flee, the love of excrement,

  the running sore and appetitive mouth

  all find form here. Kilometers away,

  a melancholy puckered caldera

  erupts, and magma, gas, and crystals hurl

  toward outer space a smooth blue column that

  umbrellas overhead—some particles

  escaping Io’s seething gravity.

  Straining upward out of ourselves to follow

  their flight, we confront the forgotten

  witness, Jupiter’s thunderous mass,

  the red spot roaring like an anguished eye

  amid a turbulence of boiling eyebrows—

  an emperor demented but enthroned,

  and hogging with his gases an empyrean

  in which the Sun is just another star.

  So, in a city, as we hurry along

  or swiftly ascend to the sixtieth floor,

  enormity suddenly dawns and we become

  beamwalkers treading a hand’s-breadth of steel,

  the winds of space shining around our feet.

  Striated by slow-motion tinted tumult

  and lowering like a cloud, the planet turns,

  vast ball, annihilating other,

  epitome of ocean, mountain, cityscape

  whose mass would crush us were we once

  to stop the inward chant, This is not real.

  Upon the Last Day of His Forty-Ninth Year

  Scritch, scratch, saith the frozen spring snow—

  not near enough, this season or the last,

  but still a skin for skiing on, with care.

  At every shaky turn into the fall line

  one hundred eighty pounds of tired blood

  and innards weakly laced with muscle seek

  to give themselves to gravity and ruin.

  My knees, a-tremble with old reflex, resist

  and try to find the lazy dancer’s step

  and pillowed curve my edges flirted with

  when I had little children to amaze

  and life seemed endlessly flexible. Now,

  my heavy body swings to face the valley

  and feels the gut pull of steep maturity.

  Planting Trees

  Our last connection with the mythic.

  My mother remembers the day as a girl

  she jumped across a little spruce

  that now overtops the sandstone house

  where still she lives; her face delights

  at the thought of her years translated

  int
o wood so tall, into so mighty

  a peer of the birds and the wind.

  Too, the old farmer still stout of step

  treads through the orchard he has outlasted

  but for some hollow-trunked much-lopped

  apples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood

  planted to mark my birth flowers each April,

  a soundless explosion. We tell its story

  time after time: the drizzling day,

  the fragile sapling that had to be staked.

  At the back of our acre here, my wife and I,

  freshly moved in, freshly together,

  transplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door

  gloomily, green gnomes a meter high.

  One died, gray as sagebrush next spring.

  The other lives on and some day will dominate

  this view no longer mine, its great

  lazy feathery hemlock limbs down-drooping,

  its tent-shaped caverns resinous and deep.

  Then may I return, an old man, a trespasser,

  and remember and marvel to see

  our small deed, that hurried day,

  so amplified, like a story through layers of air

  told over and over, spreading.

  The Fleckings

  The way our American wildflowers hover

      and spatter and fleck the underlying ground

  was understood the best by Winslow Homer;

  with brush and palette knife he marred the somber

      foreground field of the mountainous Two Guides

  and slashed the carpet green of Boys in a Pasture.

  So all our art; these casual stabs of color—

      Abstract Expressionism ere it had a name—

  proclaim the violence underfoot discovered.

  East Hampton—Boston by Air

  Oh dear,

  the plane is so small the baggage

  is stuffed into its nose

  and under its wings,

  like the sacs of a honeybee!

  There are six of us, mostly women.