“Real, the five bars of the gate
standing yet between broken hedges
though it bars nothing, nothing supports it,
even the posts gone”
Michael Hamburger
I
The sun broke through. Those simple words
cast all that had come before far back
as outremer, sealed with a light so fierce
no memory could pierce
to hook and haul the smallest fragment
up from oblivion. The twitching of a phantom
limb led him to sort and order, throw out
random certainty or doubt
while hoping, calm and hopelessly, the furled
strips of consequence and action would banner
the unencrypted word, shamefaced and inglorious,
perverse, funny, untidy, curious.
A sin or misstep no one would too severely fault
him for, excepting Savanarola or his wife.
An unintended fling or flirt, an awkward
imprudent joke, a backward
gesture, inviting itself into disappointment’s
archive. Haste and the plunge of impulse
to suck the last of an early season’s fruit
and, two-faced as Canute
commanding the vampire tides ‘Back! Back!’
It was more than gravity that bound him
to the gutter, more than opportunity
that drained the tumbler empty.
After so much sorrow, unsought or self-inflicted,
to pray for an epiphany like a neutron bomb
was simple preservation of the soul, nothing else.
Alone at night, the bells
of Baltimore Catholics and Boston Methodists
swung the night like an invading force around
his fence, his porch, his library stirring
as if each volume were veering
to its birthplace, from the diaspora to come,
once he was gone to join his family of ghosts,
so variously found and twice as variously lost,
in stone-heavy sleep, a rest beyond cost.
II
Sophomore with a freshman’s lack of self, the cheating
nights of endless reading and dissection, margins
torn with question marks and antonyms, repeating
the miracles and the marvels as if an atheist Peguy
peered over my shoulder, urging with more-than-
modest suggestion, each word’s shadow, twin, and key.
Too close a model carried the possibility of damage
(like Eliot, like Thomas), the spark in the stratosphere
a reference the eye should follow, lifting from the page.
Breeze after breeze of that famous made-up slang,
felling round it more prosaic trees, flowering
with the common bloom that failed to deliver the pang,
the thorn, the twist and choke I wished for, blown
on the sea of ignorant bliss. Here was invention
worth the envy, mining backwards and forwards, grown
in the rich black soil of my own English. A colonizing, whoring
tongue, fattening on the flattery of brief encounters.
He spun bare admirable Bradstreet with an ego’s roaring
gold, blew even Shakespeare’s drops and indentations
to an incandescent startling glow my slowpoke brain
could grasp, and always his touch reserved for celebration
the rare, the undeliverable, the uncanny refusal to show.
Wish for what the heart fears most, language the alloy
no Finnegan can deplete. Write quick as burglary or slow
as love, made for the last unpunishable time.
Not yet apprentice, I’d snuck into the garden
through a gate left purposefully unlatched, rhyme
and reason shed with each escape from ambush,
the answers in the doing and undoing of thin poor
things, forgotten in the merge of mist, the drowned lush
promises that tricked me happily into the deep end.
Each day and night the walls of the garden grew
alternately wide or narrow, and feline saw each bend
straighten in the trompe l’oeil of his distant guidance.
A pool of water might be cellophane or tin, played
on by the perpetual motion of the sun, arrogance
tipped from the saddle by arrows I couldn’t yet evade.
III
Berryman has left the room, has fled
with measured step, in quiet dignity.
The colors foreseen, the talking head
behind the lectern, owl-eyes gleam
and linger, blessing moistly a dream
of fair coeds, blazing with serenity.
From Virginian hills to Texan hills, glutted
with limited loves and dogging the ribs
of symbolisme and its heirs, my slutted
imitations of worldlier vocabularies, the sound
if not the sense of Rimbaud and Lawrence, Pound
and Eliot, Milton, Blake, and the Rossetti sibs.
By grace of Wevill, Middleton, and Ghose
the dam burst and the roster was a waterfall
of rich seduction at the hands of savage ghosts.
St.-John Perse and Paz and Ponge,
Mandelstam, Jouve, and David Michael Jones.
And among such fire, Berryman, my downfall.
The UT Varsity Cafeteria, where the German film
club met, the donnish bachelor eccentrics,
the coupon-clipping, longhaired realm
of candidates for sainthood.
Brooke’s nearby boozy neighborhood,
bad poems to sing her body electric.
Over plates of spaghetti and meatless meat sauce,
smoking not yet banned nor noted
but swirling in gusts against the vaults
above, ribbed keel-like as Sutton Hoo.
Fassbinder, Herzog, the newest who’s who
he might have felt at home with, dirty, overcoated.
The snowy landscapes of Bly left me cold
(as perhaps intended) and other namesakes
equally numb, whose lines rolled
mellifluous along the disjointed shore.
I tried hard to love them, the more
for being haunted by Henry’s busted brakes,
the tutored stutterings of 6 x 3 dreams.
I sank to robbing Roberts and grew
poor on loose change, patching cracked beams
till rain poured in like scold
and reproach. Venice shone like gold
to save me, and America vanished in the blue.
Name the others, now gone as well,
remembered with new affection, the old
respect: Duncan, hoary Frost, and Lowell.
Humbly, happily acknowledging them masters
no tangled lines of mine will surpass or
equal. Death nags, makes bold
and youthful declarations of independence
look absurd. Bright, foolish flight
into a furnace of fatal luminescence.
A mission doomed from the start,
panting to unword the dark
and hack away the scalp of night.
Berryman has left the room, the high-
wire bridge, the unforgiving ultimate hour,
the symmetry exhausting into one last try.
A Floridian suicide, a father’s moon
disfiguring the cloudless Minnesota afternoon.
A trail of falling light the measure of the tower.
IV
It’s all okay, although I know it isn’t,
this astonishing gift that no one asked for.
What Spicer said applies in both directions:
‘my vocabulary did this to me’. And yet, the store
of unused, improper nouns, the list that
amazons through dictionaries banked on either shore,
the words that herd like roaches when the lights
flash on and off, are they yours or Prospero’s?
The strutting players of the Globe, the flights
of fancy rhyming prick with dusk with lighthouse,
crammed tight till oxygen goes oxymoron
and a dog kicks a cat kicks a rat kicks a mouse.
Rein in, rain out, and leave poor Saintsbury
nursing his thumb, A Winter’s Tale subdued
by line six, a rimshot ‘what’s the hurry?’
and Conan Doyle’s White Company (in blackface)
harassing the world’s dream into a dreamworld.
Bad habits can be unlearned, and every case
of jitters fodders the doctor with a further clue.
One day he’ll nail Geryon by the tail and find
the gene for drowning skipped everyone but you.
Draughtsman running low on fish-scale and feather,
renumbering mistakes to cycle into play again.
Revision is THE lost art, not whether
it’s been said before but how, and who you were
when the word demanded tenure and took up
squatter’s rights in the nursery, claiming its cure,
once patented, would drive and push the vision
to its table-turning end. Preoccupied as any
glamourpuss, open for business with welt and lesion,
what bit of scribbling kept the wither from
the vine if not the bit that caught the Maypole
and the May Queen, shimmying a green kingdom?
Prayers rise and curses fall and poetry muddles in between,
sheltering in coffee cups until the storms pass.
It’s not okay, although sometimes it is, the lean
consumptive starving for a feverless world of fat
concupiscence, a multilingual riot urging Moors
and Christians through their paces, subtleties squashed flat
lest doubt creep in, disguised as joy, to set
the caged animals on parade – lion, bear, and peacock
disappearing in the crowd, forgiving what they can’t forget.
In the prettiest of these many pretty dreams,
stars dart and flatter with all their Tudor attributes
restored, ruby-red and blackbird blue, seams
curdling with mercury and seed. A comic bookworm
ogles bibulous Henry, capering the Field of Cloth
of Gold, ‘j’ai vu’ and ‘je desir’ to spurn
the inducements of fresh-spun webs, dew-
blanched with a bubbling femininity that chases
Harfleur and Domremy from primacy of view.
I’m not ashamed at this employment:
the arbitrary guillotine. So long as Mr. Bones
is kept at bay, delusion spices my enjoyment
and Senor Death’s-Head and Lady Gaiety
are welcome, always welcome, at least as much
as Mozart is, skipping coins to test their frailty
and resonance, a Smirnoff icicle as temporary
crutch. The doorbell rings, the guests stay seated.
Confusion is permanent.
Sorrow, only momentary.
V
May I return from time to time?
To visit with you in the halls
and courtyards, the darkened class-
rooms of some thirty years past?
Of the complaints of age, not merely mine,
each comment chosen, no pause
pregnant with intent or meaning.
All is and will be very simple,
the neutral incline of the lawn
no more, no less than on
a day long gone when, seeming
to weep, you set by your example
a test to fail at. The cribsheet
was in plain view, though
no one saw it, looking elsewhere
and believing only something rare
might satisfy your yearning for defeat.
Who was willing to go
beyond the hedges and the bars,
winning heartbreak’s trophy.
Never settling for ‘also ran’,
the phrase burned inside out and
punchdrunk, seeing stars,
ran naked after vanity.
So reverent and so stylized,
this conversation with your ghost.
One-sided, having pled the 5th,
your generosity, your gifts
constant as bedrock, your cauterized
silence merrier than most.
I learned too late that crime
is its own reward, that theft
conceals itself from critical gaze
by misdirection’s ricochet of praise.
Might I then return some time?
Revisiting the world I never left?