and one half-blind old man who sits
each day beside the empty pond
mumbling to himself in dialect.
The village boys throw stones at him,
but he will never leave, and there
is no one left who knows if he
was once the servant or the sire.
MOST JOURNEYS COME TO THIS
an Italy of the mind
I.
Leave the museums, the comfortable rooms,
the safe distractions of the masterpiece.
The broken goddesses have lost their voice,
the martyr’s folded hands no longer bless.
Footsteps echo through the palaces
where no one lives. Consider what you’ve come for.
Leave the museums. Find the dark churches
in back towns that history has forgotten,
the unimportant places the powerful ignore
where commerce knows no profit will be made.
Sad hamlets at the end of silted waterways,
dry mountain villages where time
is the thin shadow of an ancient tower
that moves across the sundazed pavement of the square
and disappears each evening without trace.
Make the slow climb up the winding alleys.
Walk between houses shuttered close for midday
and overhear the sound of other lives,
the conversations in the language you
will never learn. Make the long ascent
up to the gray stone chapel on the hillside
when summer is a furnace open to the world,
and pause there breathless in the blinding sun
only one moment, then enter.
For this
is how it must be seen to understand:
by walking from the sunlight into darkness,
by groping down the aisle
as your wet skin cools and your eyes adjust,
by finding what you’ve come for thoughtlessly,
shoved off into a corner, almost lost
among the spectacle of gold and purple.
Here in the half-light, covered by the years
it will exist. And wait,
wait like a mirror in an empty room
whose resolutions are invisible
to anyone but you. Wait like the stone
face of a statue waits, forever frozen
or poised in the moment before action.
II.
But if the vision fails, and the damp air
stinks of summer must and disrepair,
if the worn steps rising to the altar
lead nowhere but to stone, this, too, could be
the revelation — but of a destiny
fixed as the graceless frescoes on the wall—
the grim and superannuated gods
who rule this shadow-land of marble tombs,
bathed in its green suboceanic light.
Not a vision to pursue, and yet
these insufficiencies make up the world.
Strange how most journeys come to this: the sun
bright on the unfamiliar hills, new vistas
dazzling the eye, the stubborn heart unchanged.
WAITING IN THE AIRPORT
On the same journey each of them
Is going somewhere else. A goose-necked
Woman in a flowered dress
Stares gravely at two businessmen.
They turn away but carry on
Their argument on real estate.
Lost in a mist of aftershave,
A salesman in a brown toupée
Is scribbling on his Racing Form
While a fat man stares down at his hands
As if there should be something there.
The soldiers stand in line for sex—
With wives or girlfriends, whoever
They hope is waiting for them at
The other end. The wrapped perfume,
The bright, stuffed animals they clutch
Tremble under so much heat.
Lives have been pulled cross-continent.
So much will soon be going on
But somewhere else — divorces, birthdays,
Deaths and million-dollar deals.
But nothing ever happens here,
This terminal that narrows to
A single unattended gate,
One entrance to so many worlds.
MEN AFTER WORK
Done with work, they are sitting by themselves
in coffeeshops or diners, taking up the booths,
filling every other seat along the counter,
waiting for the menu, for the water,
for the girl to come and take their order,
always on the edge of words, almost without appetite,
knowing there is nothing on the menu that they want,
waiting patiently to ask for one
more refill of their coffee, surprised
that even its bitterness will not wake them up.
Still they savor it, holding each sip
lukewarm in their mouths, this last taste of evening.
ROUGH COUNTRY
Give me a landscape made of obstacles,
of steep hills and jutting glacial rock,
where the low-running streams are quick to flood
the grassy fields and bottomlands.
A place
no engineers can master — where the roads
must twist like tendrils up the mountainside
on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.
Where tall black trunks of lightning-scalded pine
push through the tangled woods to make a roost
for hawks and swarming crows.
And sharp inclines
where twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,
scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly
to find an unexpected waterfall,
not half a mile from the nearest road,
a spot so hard to reach that no one comes—
a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies
and nesting jays, a sign that there is still
one piece of property that won’t be owned.
BECOMING A REDWOOD
Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,
And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.
Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.
And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.
Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.
The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,
and the last farmhouse light goes off.
Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.
You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,
Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.
A CALIFORNIA REQUIEM
I walked among the equidistant graves
New planted in the irrigated lawn.