As everyone knows, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio
Led the French invasion of Milan in 1499
And later commissioned Leonardo da Vinci
To build him a tomb which -- no surprise! --
Was never built. His tombless ghost haunts
Leonardo's designs, frightening no one
If we did our job right you'll scarcely hear it:
Just a very soft click when twilight starts
If we were in a hurry, though, there might be
A rasp or a shrill squeak. We've an arrangement
With certain corvids for such occasions.
Who make themselves conspicuous so you'll think
It was just a contrary grackle or some angry crows.
When he was a clothing cutter my grandfather Max
Didn't go home during busy season but slept,
As did the other workers, on the cutting tables
Or on piles of fabric. At the beginning of the season
Their dreams expected to find them in their beds
And, disappointed, might be seen moving slowly
Through the late-night streets, cursing their ill-fortune.
Max's friend Shepsie -- his real name is lost now
And may have been lost then -- had just one dream
It was ragged from having been dreamt so often
And though the tailors did their best for it,
Sewing up holes and patching it with remnants,
The police sometimes arrested it for vagrancy.
According to legend, Clytie
After staring at Apollo in his chariot
As he each day rode through the sky
Became a sun-staring flower
Either a marigold or a sunflower
Or, some say, a purple heliotrope
Given how myths work I'm sure Clytie
Didn't get a choice or she'd have said
None of the above and stayed a nymph
Gods, though, do what they please
Most likely they were reassigning
Redundant nymphs so Echo became a voice,
Arethusa a fountain and Clytie put down roots
If the gods had asked me I'd have advised
Letting Clytie be or, if they were set on
Her being a flower, I'd say marigold.
My father's gardens always had marigolds
Usually around the edges.
Praying to a wine god is always
A chancy business but, if you must:
Smiling Dionysus wins all hearts;
Angry Dionysus burns down houses
Not caring who's inside;
Faceless Dionysus is too drunk
To remember who he is. (Scholars say
He's the one who thought hitching panthers
To a chariot was a really good idea.)
In Guercino's drawing of Mary Magdalene
She lies on a beach, plainly troubled.
God or someone with the authority
To dispatch angels has sent her three;
Two of them loll on clouds. The third,
Wings outspread, hovers above her
Playing a violin. She looks surprised;
This strikes me as a fair reaction.
(I've no good reason for my belief
That the angel is playing Stardust.)
You've rented an elephant and a giraffe,
Put Silenus on a donkey, hired sturdy Bacchantes
To keep him from falling off. You've a chariot
With panthers hitched to it and any number
Of gleeful drunken folk one of whom
Is blowing a long horn. Bacchus, though
Isn't here; drinking glass after glass won't bring him.
Propped in his cart, loosely holding
The panthers' reins, is some local god
Without even a face yet. How beautiful he is!
How extremely terrifying!
This is possibly the worst scarecrow
In the entire world:
An old hat and some ragged pants
Hanging on a cross with a long stick
Leaning purposelessly next to it.
The farmwife throws up her arms
Telling the scarecrow it's all
A matter of attitude.
One day the authorities come by, saying
You've been selected to carry the world;
Atlas is forgiven at last and while they've nothing
Against you they've nothing for you either.
You protest, saying isn't Atlas huge, a very giant
And strong as a mountain? A common misperception
They say. He's actually small and frail;
A pipsqueak any wind could carry off. No one
Has the strength to carry the weight of the world.
Atlas did it for the same reason you will:
We're telling you to.
I've been trying to write a poem
About the Death of Dido but my tablet,
Having no respect for the classics,
Keeps changing it to the Death of Fido
Which would be a different thing entirely.
A stone in the middle of a sidewalk square
About an inch and a third long by three quarters
Of an inch wide. A little scuffed; if a rock
Can lead a hard life this one has. I pick it up
Of course -- I've been picking up rocks for most
Of my life. When I was a kid I'd bang them open
With a bigger rock not because I'd the makings
Of a geologist but to see the inside and to smell
The gunpowder smell two rocks pounded together make.
A grey stone, flat on one side, rounded on the other.
It can't have been on the sidewalk long; someone
Would have kicked it into the grass or the street.
Waiting for me, then. The round side fits
Into the hollow of my fingers, the flat accepts
My thumb rubbing it. A worry stone, perhaps.
I put it in my pocket. It may be that this stone
Was meant not for me but for Rebbe Aaron
My ancestor who was kept from floating off
By the stones in his pocket . He died in 1772
But stones, notoriously, have only hazy notions of time.
Once in a while I write a poem about
My ancestor Aaron of Karlin who could,
According to legend, fly or at least float and who
Might have drifted who knows where if his wife
Hadn't put stones in his pocket. Recently,
I've become more interested in his wife who,
Like me, her descendant, couldn't fly
Or if she could didn't make a fuss about it.
About my ancestor Reb Aaron tradition and my mother
Agree: he could fly. Nothing fancy, mind you;
He wasn't a show off and didn't do Immelmans
Or Figure-8s in the skies over Karlin. Mostly he floated
Just a bit off the ground, rising higher when he prayed
Or was lost in thought. His wife (who was also
My ancestor, come to think ofit) would slip rocks
Into his pockets so he wouldn't float away entirely.
When Virginia Woolf had had enough of being Virginia Woolf she
Put stones into her pocket (quare: pocket or pockets?
How many stones?) and went into the River Scouse
(Thirty-five miles long; considerably polluted now
But probably less so on March 28, 1941)
If you had to guess would you say she walked, dove
Or jumped headlong into the Scouse?
Or did she spin around, looking at the world
(Just then, just there) so she could describe it if it fortuned
That she survived? And tell me something
About those stones -- smooth river-rocks do you think
Picked up idly and then inspiring the thought
"These would do nicely if I wanted to drown"?
Whatever became of those stones? Do they sit
In a vitrine somewhere, next to the bezoars?
"Stones found in a dead writer's pocket; stones
Recovered from the belly of a toad."
In the room a red teapot and
A grey-green rug. Three chairs and
A cat sitting on one of them. A shelf
Filled with sea-shells. A lamp.
Pen and ink and paper on
A thin-legged table. A box
Filled with sand. Old Ono No Komachi
Talking to her much younger self.
In a corner Death quietly listening,
His cup of tea growing cold.
The man whose shadow I am
Has begun to shrink but not rapidly
As would be proper. At high noon
He doesn't disappear and at sunset
He doesn't grow tall. Turn out the light
And he remains! According to him
Plato discovered that all things here
Are shadows of better things elsewhere
So he is a shadow of his true self and I
Am a shadow of the idea of shadowness.
I ask if his true self ever treats shadowness
To a meal or at least a cup of coffee.
He says probably not since his true self
Hasn't the shadow of a thin dime.
 |
When my grandmother was young
And hadn't met the man she didn't like
But married anyway she lived in an orphanage
Though only half an orphan and worked
In a cigarette factory in Lvov. She now refuses
To appear in my dreams as I remember her --
Small and grey; smaller and greyer
Every time I saw her -- but only as she was
At fifteen -- quick, sharp-tongued, defiant --
And the one girl who understood the workings
Of the tempermental Bonsack Cigarette Roller
Which could roll 5000 cigarettes an hour
If made to feel loved and appreciated.
There's a poem right now that's
Nohow mine but keeps buzzing around
Saying I should write it down before
Its words faint from exhaustion and leave
Punctuation marks hanging in the air.
It's for sure not one of my poems and seems to be
About a girl named Loretta. Loretta has
Her points and her problems but the poetry of her
Gets right by me. I try to go back to my book but Loretta,
Who thinks I should be writing, looks through my eyes
And wants to know what makes the book more interesting
Than she is. It's not that, I'm sure the right author
(Who isn't me) will come along and turn you
Into a National Book Award and a life of
Reciting you at colleges and book clubs and
Perhaps a bowling alley. What's your book about? she says
And I say it's about Carnival season in Venice in
1755 and Casanova's having an affair with a nun
Who dresses as a man sometimes. How's it come out? she says
And I say Unhappily. The nun falls in love with
Another nun who leaves her for the French ambassador
And Casanova grows old, sitting in a library and writing books.
The nobleman has given it
The merest toe-tap but the ball
Soars into the sky where it hangs
Pretending its a stitch-seamed moon
A finished sculpture
Of an unfinished angel
One wing is entire
The other stops halfway
Allowing him to fly
Only in circles so that
He walks when tasked
With some miracle or,
If it's urgent, runs.
The Portuguese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes
Often dreamed of flying as did my father;
Lobo Antunes flew by himself; my father
With the assistance of angels. Sometimes,
If they were in a hurry, the angels
Would toss my father back into his bed
Through an open window.
This never happened to Lobo Antunes
Who had, however, problems of his own.
