Zone Journals Read online

Step back and let your story, like water, go where it will,

  Cut down your desires,

  alone, as you are, on the white heart of the earth.

  —The sadness of Sunday train rides in the rain,

  Little gardens and back yards

  Bellied up to the buffed tracks,

  Their wet laundry and broken toys beside TO LET signs,

  Crushed Styrofoam cups

  small pockets of old ice turned out,

  The joyless twitter of wheels

  and couplings turning and changing,

  Whole centers of villages

  Scooped out and fenced in for a high-rise or a car park,

  Anguish of bitten trees, slow

  Bull’s-eyes of raindrops in flat, colorless water pools,

  And all the south of England

  Under the sponge,

  no one in sight but the yellow-slickered rail workers

  Standing like patient, exotic birds

  On the outskirts of Redhill, or upline from Hayward’s Heath,

  One on one leg, as though poised for frogs,

  The desolate, wax faces

  Of young mothers gripping their children from side to side

  In the fleshed, electric light,

  stunned by

  Something they never asked for,

  Something like somebody else’s life, that they’ve been given,

  Sadness of platforms, black umbrellas

  Doleful on benches, half-opened, damp,

  Tedious sense

  Of expectation, the clouds

  Continuing on for days past our destinations …

  (December)

  —Noon like cicada wings,

  translucence remembered, half-sheets

  Of light over light on the black stones

  Of the crescent walk and bodices of the rhododendron,

  Red eye of the whirring sun—

  December comes out of the ground

  Shedding its skin on the bare trees,

  And hovers above the northern sky

  Wings like new glass,

  wings like a thousand miles of new glass—

  How sweet to think that Nature is solvency,

  that something empirically true

  Lies just under the dead leaves

  That will make us anchorites in the dark

  Chambers of some celestial perpetuity-

  nice to think that,

  Given the bleak alternative,

  Though it hasn’t proved so before,

  and won’t now

  No matter what things we scrape aside—

  God is an abstract noun.

  —Flashback: a late September Sunday,

  the V & A courtyard,

  Holly and I at one end,

  Bronze Buddha under some falling leaves at the other:

  Weightlessness of the world’s skin

  undulating like a balloon

  Losing its air around us, down drifting down

  Through the faint hiss of eternity

  Emptying somewhere else

  O emptying elsewhere

  This afternoon, skin

  That recovers me and slides me in like a hand

  As I unclench and spread

  finger by finger inside the Buddha’s eye …

  —London 1983

  March Journal

  —After the Rapture comes, and everyone goes away

  Quicker than cream in a cat’s mouth,

  all of them gone

  In an endless slipknot down the sky

  and its pink tongue

  Into the black hole of Somewhere Else,

  What will we do, left with the empty spaces of our lives

  Intact,

  the radio frequencies still unchanged,

  The same houses up for sale,

  Same books unread,

  all comfort gone and its comforting …

  For us, the earth is a turbulent rest,

  a different bed

  Altogether, and kinder than that—

  After the first death is the second,

  A little fire in the afterglow,

  somewhere to warm your hands.

  —The clean, clear line, incised, unbleeding,

  Sharp and declarative as a cut

  the instant before the blood wells out …

  —March Blues

  The insides were blue, the color of Power Putty,

  When Luke dissected the dogfish,

  a plastic blue

  In the whey

  sharkskin infenestrated:

  Its severed tailfin bobbed like a wing nut in another pan

  As he explained the dye job

  and what connected with what,

  Its pursed lips skewed and pointed straight-lined at the ceiling,

  The insides so blue, so blue …

  March gets its second wind,

  starlings high shine in the trees

  As dread puts its left foot down and then the other.

  Buds hold their breaths and sit tight.

  The weeping cherries

  lower their languorous necks and nibble the grass

  Sprout ends that jump headfirst from the ground,

  Magnolia drums blue weight

  next door when the sun is right.

  —Rhythm comes from the roots of the world,

  rehearsed and expandable.

  —After the ice storm a shower of crystal down from the trees

  Shattering over the ground

  like cut glass twirling its rainbows,

  Sunlight in flushed layers under the clouds,

  Twirling and disappearing into the clenched March grass.

  —Structure is binary, intent on a resolution,

  Its parts tight but the whole loose

  and endlessly repetitious.

  —And here we stand, caught

  In the crucifixal noon

  with its bled, attendant bells,

  And nothing to answer back with.

  Forsythia purrs in its burning shell,

  Jonquils, like Dante’s angels, appear from their blue shoots.

  How can we think to know of another’s desire for darkness,

  That low coo like a dove’s

  insistent outside the heart’s window?

  How can we think to think this?

  How can we sit here, crossing out line after line,

  Such five-finger exercises

  up and down, learning our scales,

  And say that all quartets are eschatological

  Heuristically

  when the willows swim like medusas through the trees,

  Their skins beginning to blister into a 1000 green welts?

  How can we think to know these things,

  Clouds like full suds in the sky

  keeping away, keeping away?

  —Form is finite, an undestroyable hush over all things.

  A Journal of True Confession

  —Power rigs drift like lights out past the breakwater,

  white, and fluorescent white,

  The sea moving them up and down

  In the burgeoning dawn,

  up and down,

  White as they drift and flicker over the salmon run,

  Engines cut, or cut back,

  Trolling herring bait or flasher lures,

  the sea moving them up and down,

  The day’s great hand unfolding

  Its palm as the boats drift with the tide’s drift:

  All morning we slipped among them,

  Ray at the boat’s wheel

  Maneuvering, baiting the double hooks, tying and cutting,

  Getting the depth right,

  Mark and I

  Watching the rods as their almost-invisible lines

  Trailed through the boat’s wake,

  waiting for each to dip:

  And when it came

  We set the drag and played him,

  the salmon jumping and silver,

  Then
settled like quick foil in the net’s green …

  Later, ground zero, the Straits of Juan de Fuca

  sliding the fog out

  Uncharacteristically, sunlight letting its lines down

  For a last run,

  glint from the water like flecked scales,

  Everything easing away, away,

  Waves, and the sea-slack, sunset,

  Tide’s bolt shot and turned for the night,

  The dark coming in,

  dark like the dogfish coming in

  Under the island’s eyelid, under and down.

  —15 July 1984

  —Lashed to the syllable and noun,

  the strict Armageddon of the verb,

  I lolled for seventeen years

  Above this bay with its antimacassars of foam

  On the rocks, the white, triangular tears

  sailboats poke through the sea’s spun sheet,

  Houses like wads of paper dropped in the moss clumps of the trees,

  Fog in its dress whites at ease along the horizon,

  Trying to get the description right.

  If nothing else,

  It showed me that what you see

  both is and is not there,

  The unseen bulking in from the edges of all things,

  Changing the frame with its nothingness.

  Its blue immensity taught me about subtraction,

  Those luminous fingerprints

  left by the dark, their whorls

  Locked in the stations of the pilgrim sun.

  It taught me to underlook.

  Turkey buzzards turn in their widening spins

  over the flint

  Ridged, flake-dried ground and kelp beds,

  Sway-winged and shadowless in the climbing air.

  Palm trees postcard the shoreline.

  Something is added as the birds disappear,

  something quite small

  And indistinct and palpable as a stain

  of saint light on a choir stall.

  —6 August 1984

  —I can write a simple, declarative English sentence,

  Mancini said,

  drinking a stinger and leaning back

  In his green chair above the Arno.

  And not many can say that,

  He added, running the peppermint taste

  Around on his tongue.

  Out on the river,

  Down below Prato, the sun was lowering its burned body

  Into the shadows.

  Happy birthday, Lieutenant,

  He quipped, and ordered another round.

  Twenty-four years ago, and dog days, indeed, Fortunatus.

  Six months later

  (flash-forward across the Aegean),

  Tell Laura I Love Her PA’ed the ship’s lounge, the Captain’s arm

  Around my shoulders, full moonlight and Jesus

  everything in the sky

  Was beautiful …

  I ducked out and turned back down to 2nd Class,

  His sweet invective lotioning my right ear.

  And stingers that night as well, for hours out of Piraeus,

  Mancini grinning like Ungaretti,

  And then he said, What?

  The stars are fastening their big buckles

  and flashy night shoes,

  Thunder chases its own tail down the sky,

  My forty-ninth year, and all my Southern senses called to horn,

  August night hanging like cobwebs around my shoulders:

  How existential it all is, really,

  the starting point always the starting point

  And what’s-to-come still being the What’s-to-Come.

  Some friends, like George, lurk in the memory like locusts,

  while others, flat one-sided fish

  Looking up, handle themselves like sweet stuff:

  look out for them, look out for them.

  —25 August 1984

  —Cicadas wind up their one note to a breaking point.

  The sunlight, like fine thread, opens and closes us.

  The wind, its voice like grasshoppers’ wings,

  rises and falls.

  Sadness is truer than happiness.

  Walking tonight through the dwarf orchard,

  The fruit trees seem etched like a Dürer woodcut against the sky,

  The odd fruit

  burined in bas-relief,

  The moon with its one foot out of the clouds,

  All twenty-one trees growing darker in a deepening dark.

  When the right words are found I will take them in and be filled

  through with joy.

  My mouth will be precious then,

  as your mouth is precious.

  If you want to hear me, you’ll have to listen again.

  You’ll have to listen to what the wind says,

  whatever its next direction.

  —9 September 1984

  —It’s all such a matter of abstracts—

  love with its mouth wide open,

  Affection holding its hand out,

  Impalpable to the impalpable—

  No one can separate the light from the light.

  They say that he comes with clouds,

  The faithful witness,

  the first-begotten of the dead.

  And his feet are like fine brass,

  His voice the perpetual sound of many waters.

  The night sky is darker than the world below the world,

  The stars medieval cathedral slits from a long way.

  This is the dark of the Metamorphoses

  When sparks from the horses’ hooves

  showed us Persephone

  And the Prince’s car in its slash and plunge toward Hell.

  Seventy-four years ago today,

  Dino Campana, on the way back

  From his pilgrimage on foot

  To the holy chill of La Verna inside the Apennines

  To kiss the rock where St. Francis received the stigmata,

  Stopped in a small inn at Monte Filetto

  And sat on a balcony all day

  staring out at the countryside,

  The hawks circling like lost angels against the painted paradise of

  the sky,

  The slope below him

  a golden painting hung from the walnut tree:

  The new line will be like the first line,

  spacial and self-contained,

  Firm to the touch

  But intimate, carved, as though whispered into the ear.

  —25 September 1984

  —The dragon maple is shedding its scales and wet sides,

  Scuffs of cloud bump past the Blue Ridge

  looking for home,

  Some nowhere that’s somewhere for them,

  The iris teeter and poke on their clubbed feet:

  October settles its whole weight in a blue study.

  I think of the great painters in light like this,

  Morandi’s line

  Drawn on the unredemptive air, Picasso’s cut

  Like a laser into the dark hard of the mystery,

  Cézanne with his cross-tooth brush and hook,

  And sad, immaculate Rothko,

  whose line was no line at all,

  His last light crusted and weighed down,

  holes within holes,

  This canvas filled with an emptiness, this one half full …

  Like the sky over Locust Avenue. Like the grass.

  —5 October 1984

  —What disappears is what stays …

  O’Grady stories abound.

  Born one day later than I was, my alter ego,

  He points at me constantly

  Across the years

  from via dei Giubbonari in Rome, spring 1965,

  Asking me where the cadence is,

  Dolce vitaed and nimbus-haired,

  where’s the measure we talked about?

  His finger blurs in my eye.

  Outside the pictur
e,

  the Largo looms in the bleached distance behind his back.

  I look for it, Desmond, I look for it constantly

  In the long, musical shape of the afternoon,

  in the slice of sunlight pulled

  Through the bulge of the ash trees

  Opening like a lanced ache in the front yard,

  In the sure line the mockingbird takes

  down from the privet hedge

  And over the lawn where the early shade

  Puddles like bass chords under the oak,

  In the tangent of 4 p.m., in the uncut grass,

  in the tangle and tongue-tie it smooths there …

  But our lines seem such sad notes for the most part,

  Pinned like reliquaries and stopgaps

  to the cloth effigy of some saint

  Laid out in the public niche

  Of a mission or monastery—

  St. Xavier, hear me,

  St. Xavier, hear my heart,

  Give my life meaning, heal me and take me in,

  The dust like a golden net from the daylight outside

  Over everything,

  candles chewing away at the darkness with their numb teeth.

  —19 October 1984

  —According to Freud, Leonardo da Vinci made up a wax paste

  For his walks from which

  he fashioned delicate animal figurines,

  Hollow and filled with air.

  When he breathed into them, they floated

  Like small balloons, twisting and turning,

  released by the air

  Like Li Po’s poems downriver, downwind

  To the undergrowth and the sunlight’s dissembling balm.

  What Freud certainly made of this