to both of our problems, but until he awoke

  our gazes interlocked like the strengths of sumo wrestlers too caught up

  in the effort of contention even to grunt.

  And the sky swooped at the blue harbor, and the great green steel bridge

  trembled with its traffic, and the machines

  keeping alive the terrified and comatose beneath us hummed,

  and the icons of old haircuts grinned in fading color,

  and all was as the earth is, poised in space between contending wishes,

  until a sharper rap from the intelligent gull, or else

  a more pointed clearing of my throat, awoke

  the Demiurge, who, with not

  a further wink, sized us both up

  and nimbly reached for his bag of old bread and his scissors.

  The Code

  Were there no rain there would be little noise,

  no rustle on the roof that we confuse

  with our own bloodbeat on the inner ear,

  no braided gurgle in the gutter, no breathing

  within the tree whose shelved and supple bulk

  sifts the rain to a mist of small descents.

  A visitor come from a cloudless planet

  would stand amazed by the tumults of our water

  and feel bereaved. Without the rain

  the taxi wheels would pass like wind on sand

  and all the splashing that excites our lovers

  fresh from drinks would be a chastening calm;

  the sky would be devoid of those enormous

  witnesses who hang invisible

  until our wish to see brings forth in focus

  their sliding incandescent shapes.

  Without the rain the very links of life

  would drift still uncemented, a dream of dust.

  Were there no rain the windowpanes

  would never tick as if a spy outside,

  who once conspired with us to ferret out

  the secret code, the terms of full concord

  with all that is and will be, were signalling

  with a fingernail, I’m back, I’ve got the goods.

  Island Sun

  When the albums of this century’s intermingling

  are assembled, I hope a page will show

  two sunburned young honeymooners from Woonsocket,

  Rhode Island, or an aged duo from Short Hills,

  New Jersey (he in green pants, she in pink pleats),

  gazing into the teeth of a black steel band

  beating away and pealing in full flight

  while the tropical moon leans lopsided overhead—

  lopsided because its face is tilted differently

  at these holiday latitudes, just as the air

  yields different constellations, and summer

  is not a season to be earned but always there:

  outside the louvered door, the vertical sunlight

  like a face of childhood, too good to be true.

  The steel band wears mismatching tank tops

  and speaks an English too liquid to understand.

  Ghosts, we flit through a phantasmal summer

  we have earned with dollar-shaped months of living

  under clouds, in cold cities that are clouds.

  We burn. Our noses have been painted red!

  For the white translucent fish that flutter

  away from our glass masks, the turquoise water

  is paradise; but what of the mahogany man

  entranced in his shack by the sea-grape tree?

  His irises are like licked Lifesavers, so thin.

  He smiles to see us rob him of the sun,

  the golden pain he has anesthetized with rum.

  Let’s play that he’s invisible. Six days

  of sand like sugar, salt baths, and soft nights,

  and you have learned to love your body again:

  as brown as a stranger beheld in a mirror

  whose back is gilded each time the planet turns.

  Pain

  Pain flattens the world—its bubbles

  of bliss, its epiphanies, its upright

  sticks of day-to-day business—

  and shows us what seriousness is.

  And shows us, too, how those around us

  cannot get in; they cannot share

  our being. Though men talk big

  and challenge silence with laughter

  and women bring their engendering smiles

  and eyes of famous mercy,

  these kind things slide away

  like rain beating on a filthy window

  when pain interposes.

  What children’s pageant in gauze

  filled the skull’s ballroom before

  the caped dark stranger commanded, Freeze?

  Life is worse than mere folly. We live

  within a cage wherefrom escape

  annihilates the captive; this, too,

  pain leads us to consider anew.

  Sleeping with You

  One creature, not the mollusk

  clamped around an orgasm, but

  more loosely biune, we are linked

  by tugs of the blanket and dreams whose disquiet

  unsettles night’s oily depths, creating

  those eddies of semi-wakefulness wherein

  we acknowledge the other is there

  as an arm is there, or an ancestor,

  or any fact admitted yet not known.

  What body is warm beside mine,

  what corpse has been slain

  on this soft battlefield where we wounded

  lift our heads to cry for water

  and to ask what forces prevailed?

  It is you, not dead, but entrusted

  at my side to the flight the chemical mind

  must take or be crazed, leaving the body

  behind like matériel in a trench.

  The moon throws back sunlight into the woods,

  but whiter, cleansed by its bounce

  amid the cold stars, and the owls

  fly their unthinkable paths to pluck

  the velvet mole from her tunnel of leaves.

  Dreaming rotates us, but fear

  leads us to cling each to each as a spar

  is clung to by the shipwrecked

  till dawn brings sky-fire and rescue.

  Your breathing, relaxed to its center,

  scrapes like a stone on rough fiber,

  over and over. Your skin, steeped

  in its forgetting, sweats,

  and flurries of footwork bring you near

  the surface; but then your rapt lungs slip

  with a sigh back into the healing,

  that unpoliced swirling of spirit

  whose sharing is a synonym for love.

  Richmond

  The shadows in his eye sockets like shades

  upon a bearded hippie, Stonewall Jackson

  stares down Monument Avenue toward where Lee

  sits on an even higher horse. The cause

  was lost but lingers in the faintly defiant

  dignity of the pale-gray, Doric dollhouse

  from whence Jeff Davis, conscientious Satan,

  directed our second rebellion: a damn good try.

  Brick graciousness prevails; across the James

  wood houses hold black pensioners, and Poe’s

  ghost haunts a set of scattered tombs, musei

  exposing to Northern visitors his quills,

  a model of his muddy city, and

  an etching of, wry-necked in death, Virginia.

  Gradations of Black

  (Third Floor, Whitney Museum)

  Ad Reinhardt’s black, in Abstract Painting 33,

      seems atmosphere, leading the eye into

  that darkness where, self-awakened, we

  grope for the bathroom switch; no light comes on,

      but slowly we perceive the corners of his square


  black canvas to be squares just barely brown.

  Frank Stella, in Die Fahne Hoch, aligns

      right-angled stripes, dark gray, upon black ground

  granular and lustrous, like the magnified

  skin of a tattooed noble from Niger.

      The black of Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red

  holds grief; small lakes of sheen ebb away,

  and the eye, seeking to sink, is rebuffed

      by a much-worked dullness, the patina of a rag

  that oily Vulcan uses, wiping up.

  While Clyfford Still, in his tall Untitled,

      has laid on black in flakes of hardening tar,

  a dragon’s scales so slick the viewer’s head

  is mirrored, a murky helmet, as he stands

      waiting for the flame-shaped passion to clear.

  With broad housepainter’s brush and sweeping hands

  Franz Kline, in Mahoning, barred radiance; now each

      black gobby girder has yielded cracks to time

  and lets leak through the dead white underneath.

  The Furniture

  To things we are ghosts, soft shapes

  in their blindness that push and pull,

  a warm touch tugging on a stuck drawer,

  a face glancing by in a mirror

  like a pebble skipped across a passive pond.

  They hear rumors of us, things, in their own rumble,

  and notice they are not where they were in the last century,

  and feel, perhaps, themselves lifted by tides

  of desire, of coveting; a certain moisture

  mildews their surfaces, and they guess that we have passed.

  They decay, of course, but so slowly; a vase

  or mug survives a thousand uses. Our successive

  ownerships slip from them, our fury

  flickers at their reverie’s dimmest edge.

  Their numb solidity sleeps through our screams.

  Those photographs Victorian travellers

  produced of tombs and temples still intact

  contain, sometimes, a camel driver, or beggar; a brown

  man in a gallabiya who moved his head, his life

  a blur, a mere smear on the unflinching stone.

  Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes

  Ode to Rot

  Der gute Herr Gott

  said, “Let there be rot,”

  and hence bacteria and fungi sprang

  into existence to dissolve the knot

  of carbohydrates photosynthesis

  achieves in plants, in living plants.

  Forget the parasitic smuts,

  the rusts, the scabs, the blights, the wilts, the spots,

  the mildews and aspergillosis—

  the fungi gone amok,

  attacking living tissue,

  another instance, did Nature need another,

  of predatory heartlessness.

  Pure rot

  is not

  but benign; without it, how

  would the forest digest its fallen timber,

  the woodchuck corpse

  vanish to leave behind a poem?

  Dead matter else would hold the elements in thrall—

  nitrogen, phosphorus, gallium

  forever locked into the slot

  where once they chemically triggered

  the lion’s eye, the lily’s relaxing leaf.

  All sparks dispersed

  to that bad memory wherein the dream of life

  fails of recall, let rot

  proclaim its revolution:

  the microscopic hyphae sink

  their fangs of enzyme into the rosy peach

  and turn its blush a yielding brown,

  a mud of melting glucose:

  once-staunch committees of chemicals now vote

  to join the invading union,

  the former monarch and constitution routed

  by the riot of rhizoids,

  the thalloid consensus.

  The world, reshuffled, rolls to renewed fullness;

  the oranges forgot

  in the refrigerator “produce” drawer

  turn green and oblate

  and altogether other than edible,

  yet loom as planets of bliss to the ants at the dump.

  The banana peel tossed from the Volvo

  blackens and rises as roadside chicory.

  Bodies loathsome with their maggotry of ghosts resolve

  to earth and air,

  their fire spent and water there

  as a minister must be, to pronounce the words.

  All process is reprocessing;

  give thanks for gradual ceaseless rot

  gnawing gross Creation fine,

  the lightning-forged organic conspiracy’s

  merciful counterplot.

  To Evaporation

  What lifts the ocean into clouds

  and dries our ink upon the page?

  What gives the porous pavement, an hour after rain,

  its sycamore-bark-splotchy steaminess

  as molecules of H2O leap from the fading film

  to find lodging in air’s loose lattices?

  Evaporation,

  that random breach of surface tension

  by molecules “which happen to acquire exceptionally high

  velocities.” Brave “happening”!—they fly

  the minute distance across

  and join another state of matter,

  sacrificing, as they depart, heat

  to the attraction of the molecules still water,

  like a wedlocked beauty leaving behind

  her jewels as she flees to a better lover.

  Fidelity of process!

  The housewife trusts

  the sheets left out upon the line to dry,

  and on Anguilla, where I spent a winter once,

  the natives trusted

  the great salt pond behind our home to yield

  its annual harvest of sublimated salt.

  All around us, water is rising

  on invisible wings

  to fall as dew, as rain, as sleet, as snow,

  while overhead the nested giant domes

  of atmospheric layers roll

  and in their revolutions lift

  humidity north and south

  from the equator toward the frigid, arid poles,

  where latitudes become mere circles.

  Molecular to global, the kinetic order rules

  unseen and omnipresent,

  merciful and laughingly subtle like the breathing of naiads.

  The ladies of Anguilla, lilting in their kerchiefs,

  with pale-nailed black hands would spread

  their festive damp wash

  on the bushes around their shacks to dry,

  the scents of skin and soap and oleander confounded

  in this process as elemental

  as the rain showers that would fall so quickly that

  sun, caught shining,

  made of each hurtling drop a spear of fire.

  As a child I—

  I,

  the tiniest of nominatives, the atom that “happens”—

  watched the blood dry on my wounds

  and observed how a cup of spilled water

  would certainly vanish

  with no more cause than time,

  leaving behind as stain

  only the dust its tumble of molecules had gathered

  or, if the cup had been sweet, the sugar

  left faintly behind as precipitate.

  Trivial matters!

  But I exulted

  in the sensation of delivery,

  of vapor carrying skyward, just as gravity

  hurled water, twisting, down the sink and scummed gutter;

  these processes

  transpiring without my guilt or willing

  were pure pleasure:

/>   unseeable wheels interlocking beyond

  all blame and duty and self-exertion,

  evaporation

  as delicate as mist,

  more mighty than a waterfall.

  Ode to Growth

  Like an awl-tip breaking ice

  the green shoot cleaves the gray spring air.

  The young boy finds his school-pants cuffs

  too high above his shoes when fall returns.

  The pencilled marks on the bathroom doorframe climb.

  The cells rereplicate,

  somatotropin

  comes bubbling down the bloodstream, a busybody

  with instructions for the fingernails,

  another set for the epiderm,

  a third for the budding mammae,

  all hot from the hypothalamus

  and admitting of no editing,

  lest dwarves result, or cretins, or neoplasms.

  In spineless crustaceans

  the machinery of molting is controlled

  by phasing signals from nervous ganglia

  located, often, in the eyestalks, where these exist.

  In plants

  a family of auxins,

  shuttling up and down,

  inhibit or encourage cell elongation

  as eventual shapeliness demands,

  and veto lateral budding while apical growth proceeds,

  and even determine abscission—

  the falling of leaves.

  For death and surrender

  are part of growth’s package.

  “It’s just the eye’s way of growing,”

  my ophthalmologist euphemizes

  of the lens’s slow stiffening

  and irreversible presbyopia.

  Skin goes keratinous,

  the epiphyses of the long bones unite with the shaft,

  and “linear growth comes to an end.”

  Comes to an end!

  Our aging’s a mystery, as is our sleep:

  the protein codes, transactions more elaborate

  than the accounts of a thousand dummy trusts,

  have their smuggling secrets still.

  The meanwhile, let us die

  rejoicing,

  as around us uncountable husks