of cutting some sweet deal with Uncle Sam.

  Street murder scents the gentle, saline air.

  SUN SPOT EXPLODES, BECOMES METROPOLIS.

  White millionaires’ drab palaces still peep

  behind the drooping bougainvillea, but

  the crash, as in slow motion, widens out;

  the moon keeps skidding through the gilded clouds.

  Fly

  What have we done this winter to deserve

  this plague of giant flies? They breed in the house,

  being born to batter and buzz at the glass

  of windows where sunshine shows a world of snow.

  Stupid out of season, they are easy to swat,

  and some can’t seem to fly, but run across

  the kitchen linoleum in a comical hurry,

  more like a frantic man than you would think.

  Stupid myself one noon, I watched one primp

  head-down on a sunstruck kitchen wall.

  He rubbed his face on his rotating head

  with forelegs finer than a pencil line;

  a cleansing seemed in progress, bit by bit.

  He held each wing out stiff, its rainbow shadow

  projected down the wall diagonally,

  and scrubbed the membranes with a fussy leg.

  All creatures groom, but who would figure that

  a fly, which thrives on dirt, could be so nice?

  His head and legs were like a watchworks ticking,

  but spaced by intervals of what seemed thought.

  His interlocking parts’ complexity

  was photocopied by his lengthened shadow,

  a sharp mechanical drawing sunshine drew:

  each twitch, each quick caress of mouth-parts,

  each hinge of animate anatomy.

  Up from a maggot had arisen this tower

  of microcosmic beams, their third dimension

  craned outward to contain a fourth, called life.

  So how can I crush construction so rare?

  A bomber flattens cities but cannot see

  the child in the map, the network of girders.

  Swat not, not I at the moment, all eye.

  Flurry

  There is an excited nonserious species of snowstorm,

  flurrying flakes thick as goosefeathers, actualized air,

  that dies in an instant, succeeded by watery sunshine

  and the ponderous dull of a gray winter day, like a flurry

  of love some old gentleman once underwent, to think back on,

  his duty to Eros fulfilled, and the world none the worse for it.

  Bindweed

  Intelligence does help, sometimes;

  the bindweed doesn’t know

  when it begins to climb a wand of grass

  that this is no tree and will shortly bend

  its flourishing dependent back to earth.

  But bindweed has a trick: self-

  stiffening, entwining two- or three-ply,

  to boost itself up, into the lilac.

  Without much forethought it manages

  to imitate the lilac leaves and lose

  itself to all but the avidest clippers.

  To spy it out, to clip near the root

  and unwind the climbing tight spiral

  with a motion the reverse of its own

  feels like treachery—death to a plotter

  whose intelligence mirrors ours, twist for twist.

  July

  Deep pools of shade beneath dense maples,

  the dapples as delicious as lemon drops—

  textures of childhood, and its many flavors!

  The gratefulness of cool, the bottles of

  sarsaparilla and iodine-red cream soda

  schooled like fish, on their sides,

  in the watery ice of the zinc-lined cooler

  in the shade of the cherry trees

  planted by the town baseball diamond,

  where only grown-ups cared what the score was

  and the mailman took his ups with a grunt

  that made the crowd in its shirtsleeves laugh.

  The sun kindled freckles like a match

  touching straw, and beneath a tree

  a quality reigned like the sound of a gong,

  solemn and sticky and calm. Then the grass

  bared the hurry of ants, and each blade

  bent to some weight, some faint godly tread

  we could not see. The dapples

  were not holes in the shade but like pies,

  bulging up, and air tasted of water,

  and water of metal, and metal of what

  would never come—real change, removal

  from this island of stagnant summer,

  the end of sarsaparilla and its hint

  of licorice taste, of sassafras twig,

  of things we chewed with the cunning of Indians,

  to whom all trees had souls, the maples no more

  like birches than clouds are like waterfalls.

  The dying grass smelled especially sweet

  where sneakers had packed it flat,

  or out of the way, in the playground corner,

  where the sun had forgot to stop shining.

  This was the apogee, July, a month

  like the piece of a dome where it flattens

  and reflects in a smear high above us,

  the ant-children busy and lazy below.

  To a Dead Flame

  Dear X, you wouldn’t believe how curious

  my eyebrows have become—jagged gray wands

  have intermixed with the reddish-brown, and poke

  up toward the sun and down into my eyes.

  It hurts, a self-caress that brings tears

  and blurred vision. Aches and pains! The other day

  my neck was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head

  to parallel-park. Another man

  would have trusted his mirrors, but not I;

  I had the illusion something might interpose

  between reality and its reflection, as happened with us.

  The aging smell, X—a rank small breeze wafts upward

  when I shed my underwear. My potency,

  which you would smilingly complain about,

  has become as furtive as an early mammal.

  My hair shows white in photographs, although

  the barber’s clippings still hold some brown.

  At times I catch myself making that loose mouth

  old people make, as if one’s teeth don’t fit,

  without being false. You’re well out of it—

  I tell you this mentally, while shaving

  or putting myself to bed, but it’s a lie.

  The world is still wonderful. Wisps of mist

  were floating off your old hill yesterday,

  the hill where you lived, in sight of the course

  where I played (badly) in a Senior Men’s

  Four-Ball in the rain, each green a mirage.

  I thought of us, abed atop that hill,

  and of how I would race down through your woods

  to my car, and back to my life, my heart

  enormous with what I newly knew—

  the color of you naked, the milk of your sighs—

  through leaves washed to the glisten of fresh wounds.

  What desperate youthful fools we were, afraid

  of not getting our share, our prize in the race,

  like jostling marathoners starting out,

  clumsy but pulsingly full of blood.

  You dropped out, but we all drop out, it seems.

  You never met my jealous present wife;

  she hates this poem. The living have it hard,

  not living only in the mind, but in

  the receding flesh. Old men must be allowed

  their private murmuring, a prayer wheel

  set spinning to confuse and stay the sun.

  Back from Vacation

  “Bac
k from vacation,” the barber announces,

  or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan.

  They are amazed to find the workaday world

  still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs,

  their customers having hardly missed them, and

  there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders,

  the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas,

  the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved

  in foreign languages, the beggars, the flies,

  the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities.

  But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims.

  Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit,

  warm as if never shucked. The world is so small,

  the evidence says, though their hearts cry, “Not so!”

  Literary Dublin

  Damn near where’er you look, a writer’s ghost:

  round plaques declaring Oscar Wilde slept here,

  or Brendan Behan took a drink, or Patrick

  O’Scrittore boarded for a year

  as debt and desperate hopes revolved him through

  the tattered brown-bricked streets, the blank-faced

  Georgian rows, no pair of doors alike.

  The scandal of them all, James Joyce, who sinned

  against the Holy Spirit, said the Church,

  is now a tourist souvenir, can you believe

  it?—a bust in St. Stephen’s Green, Bloom’s route

  all traced in a tidy pamphlet by some Yank,

  and Daedalus’s execration hung

  above the city like a blind man’s blessing.

  Elderly Sex

  Life’s buried treasure’s buried deeper still:

  a cough, a draft, a wrinkle in the bed

  distract the search, as precarious as

  a safecracker’s trembling touch on the dial.

  We are walking a slack tight wire, we

  are engaged in unlikely acrobatics,

  we are less frightened of the tiger than

  of the possibility the cage is empty.

  Nature used to do more—paroxysms

  of blood and muscle, the momentous machine

  set instantly in place, the dark a-swim,

  and lubrication’s thousand jewels poured forth

  by lapfuls where, with dry precision, now

  attentive irritation yields one pearl.

  Celery

  So near to air and water merely

  and yet a food, green,

  fibrous like a ribbed sky at sunset,

  diminishing inward

  in nested arcs to a shaving-brush heart

  paler than celadon:

  the Chinese love you, and dieters,

  for you take away

  more calories in the chewing

  than your mass bestows,

  and children, who march around the table

  to your drumbeat,

  marking crisp time with their teeth,

  your dancer’s legs long as they leap.

  São Paulo

  Buildings to the horizon, an accretion

  big beyond structure: no glass downtown shimmering

  with peacock power, just the elephantine

  color of poured concrete repeated in clusters,

  into the haze that foots the horizon of hills,

  a human muchness encountering no bounds.

  From the hotel window, ridged roofs of ruddy tile,

  the black of corrugated iron, the green

  and yellow of shopfronts, a triangular hut

  revealed survival’s piecemeal, patchwork logic.

  All afternoon, the view sulked beneath my room

  in silence—a city without a city’s outcry.

  And then a pronouncement—thunder?—overruled

  the air conditioner’s steady whir, and a tapping

  asked me to look. The empty, too-full view

  held thousands of foreshortened arrows: rain,

  seen from above, a raying angelic substance.

  I felt lifted up, to God’s altitude.

  If the rain was angelic, why not men and their works?

  Their colorless habitations, like a drenched

  honeycomb: men come in from the country

  to the town’s crowded hope, the town grown

  to a chaos but still open to the arrows

  of Heaven, transparently, all life a veil.

  Rio de Janeiro

  Too good to be true—a city that empties

  its populace, a hundred shades of brown,

  upon its miles of beach in morning’s low light

  and takes the bodies back when darkness quells

  the last long volleyball game; even then,

  the sands are lit for the soccer of homeless children.

  A city that exults in nakedness:

  “The ass,” hissed to us a man of the élite,

  “the ass has become the symbol of Rio.”

  Set off by suits of “dental floss,” girls’ buttocks

  possess a meaty staring solemnness

  that has us see sex as it is: a brainless act

  performed by lumpy monkeys, mostly hairless.

  Still, the herd vibrates, a loom of joy

  threaded by vendors—a tree of suntan lotion

  or of hats, or fried snacks roofed in cardboard—

  whose monotonous cries in Portuguese

  make the same carnival mock of human need.

  Elsewhere, chaste squares preserve Machado’s world

  of understated tragedy, and churches

  honored in their abandonment suspend

  the blackened bliss of gold. Life to the living,

  while politicians dazzling in their polish,

  far off in Brasília’s cubes, feign impotence.

  Brazil

  To go to the edge is to discover

  the edge to be the center. Cabral

  was on his way around Africa

  and passed an unexpected, endless coast.

  The king bestowed the land, but few

  the donatários who cared to come.

  Of those that did, most yearned to find gold

  and go home. Still, life grew its holds—

  churches, whores, the whole caboodle.

  The Indians knew how to die, the slaves

  had rolling, fetching eye-whites. Sugar paid,

  and the sense of banishment dimly shifted.

  To arrive at self’s end is to embark again

  upon love’s narcissistic enterprise.

  Upon Looking into Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home

  Yes, this is how it was to have been born

  in 1932—the having parents

  everyone said loved you and you had to love;

  the believing having a wonderful life began

  with being good at school; the certainty

  that words would count; the diligence with postage,

  sending things out; the seeing Dreyer’s silent Joan

  at the Museum of Modern Art, and being

  greatly moved; the courtship of the slicks,

  because one had to eat, one and one’s spouse,

  that soulmate in Bohem-/Utop-ia.

  You, dead at thirty, leaving blood-soaked poems

  for all the anthologies, and I still wheezing,

  my works overweight; and yet we feel twins.

  At the End of the Rainbow

  Is this the bliss for which you’ve tried to live?

  The motel room, 10:45, alone,

  the last book signed, the thunderous applause

  still tingling in your body. The polite

  exchanges with the distant relatives

  who drove a hundred miles or so (as if

  they didn’t trust a thing but downright seeing),

  the nervous banter with your guardian,

  the bearded chairman of the writing program

  (between you in
the dark car like a dagger

  his own slim oeuvre), the silken-faced coeds,

  their smiles as warm as humid underpants—

  all gone, endured. The square made bed. Hi-tech

  alarm clock, digital. The john. The check.

  Academy

  The shuffle up the stairs betrays our age:

  sunk to polite senility our fire

  and tense perfectionism, our curious rage

  to excel, to exceed, to climb still higher.

  Our battles were fought elsewhere; here, this peace

  betrays and cheats us with a tame reward—

  a klieg-lit stage and numbered chairs, an ease

  of prize and praise that sets sheath to the sword.

  The naked models, the Village gin, the wife

  whose hot tears sped the novel to its end,

  the radio that leaked distracting life

  into the symphony’s cerebral blend.

  A struggle it was, and a dream; we wake

  to bright bald honors. Tell us our mistake.

  LIGHT VERSE

  Mountain Impasse

  “I despise mountains,” Stravinsky declared contemptuously, “they don’t tell me anything.”

  —Life

  Stravinsky looks upon the mountain,

      The mountain looks on him;

  They look (the mountain and Stravinsky)

      And both their views are dim.

  “You bore me, mountain,” says Stravinsky,

      “I find you dull, and I

  Despise you!” Says the mountain:

      “Stravinsky, tell me why.”

  Stravinsky bellows at the mountain

      And nearby valleys ring:

  “You don’t confide in me—Stravinsky!

      You never tell me anything!”

  The hill is still before Stravinsky.

      The skies in silence glisten.

  At last, a rumble, then the mountain: