Good Company
“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God . . . This world is
so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen.” —Jorge Luis Borges
ill-starred,
lacking all prospects for eternity — Wislawa Szymborska
Autumn again, and I side with Szymborska
with regard to eternity, our dim chances,
and subscribe to a theology of falling leaves,
a floss of milkweed—dead souls scattered
on the wind—
where Titian or Veronese
might come to mind, but where there’s not
a scrap of evidence that the vainglorious
are floating on the clouds.
If there’s anything
to know beyond the whistle-stop of our cells,
my dear departed comrades are the ones who
know it, and they’re not saying. . . .
And when
I raise my hand toward a shooting star
spiking the gullet of night, it’s plain to see
nothing’s going to come of this world,
its self-important idiocies as we go on breaking
each other’s bones. . . .
Given an alternative
and half a chance, I’d have gone off with Spinoza
to grind lenses. A few scars of light above
the stone pine, the background of the sky
with its useless leitmotifs—choose something
you think adds up.
And what’s more,
even if my grey cells go on replaying Ben Webster’s
For All We know, it’s no dice, all bets are off
each time we breathe in another cargo of atoms
that could have as easily been exhaled by
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins as Sappho, Hikmet,
or Parmenides. . . .
So this evening, beneath
the arbor, I click on the string of bulbs, sit back
and rejoice with a glass of something French,
with good company, and though I don’t have
2 words of Polish, Wislawa’s Selected comes through
clearly in translation—splendidly plain-spoken,
sly, clockwork wit and logic, a boat of irony
skimming the waves of our befuddlement—and
I do the best I can with my schoolboy Spanish,
hobbling along with Borges’ El Hacedor—
everything I keep thinking about with only a flicker
of the indifferent hope, the inner fire, he had.
So each fall no appeals, no promises—only
the fermentation of leaves abandoning us
to November . . . to a marine layer like a rope
uncoiled down the coast where it doesn’t look
like anyone’s holding onto the other end. . . .
In Nogales
to Jim Harrison
In the ages of a writer . . .how quickly the short run becomes the long run. JH
I’m at the cantina, on the patio waiting to order . . . I’m reading your translations, figuring you’d have to have been 5 or 6 when Neruda was in Vera Cruz, had you met him . . .? But my math’s a disaster even before a few beers. Either way, who doesn’t love his images like bottle rockets lighting up the blue, the sea music of his odes? I send almost as many saludos to the sky for yours, for the cutouts of our souls—the transmigration of our spirits into birds—despite common sense that says if there’s anything infinite, it gives our bones, the drift of stars, a miss. . . .
So despite a shrine near the church of The Sacred Heart, I think it’s a long shot the Virgin appeared hereabouts on an abalone–shaped cloud and saved anyone from their sins or more over-time shifts? 0 & 00 come to mind given the casino across the way with its slot machines, and our fates. By now, I know my luck, and am not moving from this table where I’m ½-way content watching the light dissolve like hope over the hills, my own translations having turned out like stabs at a Polish menu, guessing what might be close to menudo con pata. For the time being, I lean back in this rawhide chair, enjoying the rolling compas of a guitarist hovering on the air like a pirated CD of revelation. . . .
Not so long ago we stood in a schoolyard in short pants, in poplin suits from J.C. Penney, or lit up a Lucky Strike outside the dance, then, to our lasting regret, we sported tweed coats from the thrift, camouflage that admitted us to conferences in Portland or San Antonio where we weren’t reading, where Marxist Materialists debated the scholars of dust at no-host bars after another insufferable snoozer on New Historicism, after interviews where the odds against us were clear going in. . . .
What matters tonight is where this dog’s come from? Is this the one you fed your empanada to, making a last-ditch attempt to reaffirm our humanity? Did she ride along from Montana so you wouldn’t hightail it off to Cuba for the Havana Club and Montecristos, a fishing trip thrown in? I’m looking at the crutch of stars holding up the dark, or holding off the dark—I can never decide? And though I can’t count for beans, I’m aware that there are 200 billion galaxies—and looking out there a few thousand nights, I’ve grown more than a little tentative. . . .
So to hell with being reasonable. I’ll stand the guitarist another drink, order the red wine, carnitas, sopas—the whole 9 yards with manteca and chips that might clog the veins or arteries, which ever one it is. I’ll take my time extending some appreciation for the music, for the poems, and slip the dog a bite or two under the table, in English, then in Spanish, until my plate sparkles and both of us stare back at the stars without a 2nd thought.
Spindrift
Ha de ser en el aire:
Un mundo
Donde yo llego a respirar con todos
Mis silencios acordes. —Jorge Guillén
Saturdays, the bell tolls . . . the dead are carried
away, and not once have I heard El Rancho Grande
drifting from the groundskeeper’s radio. . . .
We’re here
and then we’re not . . . nothing to see beyond the dust
that’s never dropped its case against us. Nothing much
has changed, no one remembers past a week ago
Tuesday . . .
all the same, I shine my shoes every Monday
in case something turns up, in case the jet stream dips down
inadvertently with rain.
I set out Saltines, a tin of sardines
for lunch, knowing it costs something to grow old,
knowing I have enough miseries stored in the attic,
that the roof is mortgaged to wind.
I walk along
keeping my head down, and the sea doesn’t give me
a 2nd thought as I salute the breakers, the spindrift clinging
to the sky as if salvation might be up there. . . .
Salt collects
on my eyelids, my forehead . . . fog seeping into my mind,
turning it greyer, like dead feathers, like the unknown
weight of a cloud.
May the world forgive my nonsense
delivered con gusto throughout the years, forgive me for
walking barefoot past the bone yard and never remembering
to cross myself or look over my shoulder.
What remains
after roses are pruned, after the whitecaps’ empty interjections?
Just the indefinite light of evening, a few ribbons of starlight
and mist paused above a world where I’m breathing, in a last
harmony with all the silences.
Last Dispatch from Fresno
Contrary to early reports,
I didn’t die young on Arthur Street—
the one running perpendicular to Olive,
a few blocks down
from the music store with that ancient piano
in the window—
but worked part-time, all the time,
though I had chiles, eggplant,
and runner beans in the back yard,
3 slender nectarines hovering
like angels along the house-side.
I didn’t disappear in the rail yards,
amid creosote or crepe myrtle,
or take up a default position
at the pitiful zoo, the peacocks there
calling out like drowning men.
I could find my way blindfolded
to the Santa Fe Hotel at 4:30
for the cheap 6-course meals
with sheep herders, and late night to
the Eagle Café for Les Paul
& Mary Ford on the jukebox with
Vaya con Dios since 1953 . . .
my compadres and I thinking
we understood what we were up against
after an absolution
of a 1/2 dozen beers.
Anapests of wind slipped through ash trees
each morning,
and if you were up early, you might catch Saroyan
or Veinberg peddling a bike
through the Tower District where
I was stationed
by a swamp cooler with a jar of sun tea, yellow pad,
and a $4.95 fountain pen from Osco Drugs
to compile my reports,
where waste baskets filled with assumptions,
dog-eared discards
of introspection—
a rogue jay shrieking from the fruiting mulberry
suggesting there was little beyond
the Water Tower but clouds,
which, as I observed,
were uncooperative as well.
Evenings,
back yards cooling, we updated our list
of insider trading-
prize-hand-offs in NYC,
recalling Hikmet standing outside that
run-down house in Istanbul,
just an apple in his hand, as we tossed
some scraggly chicken legs on the hibachi.
We held our 2-bit
celebrations beneath a wandering arithmetic
of stars that led
past Old Doc’s and the merciless displays
of Brunello di Montalcino
and Saint-Estéphe,
to Piemonte’s Deli and bargain bottles of Carignane,
a grape brought via Italy by Phoenicians,
a while before we began
keeping tabs, before I learned to forgive
my inability to suffer pedants
in blue blazers and striped ties
researching the rhetoric of dust.
I left town after Leonard went through
the last of the chile verde,
and Jon had fired up the grill in his wisteria arbor
with chicken hearts
and sausage from Sam’s a final time.
I left my old Nikes on the porch,
gold ones with blue wings
flashing along the sides as I ran
up Arthur and down Palm
through my early 30s. . . .
For the record,
I went MIA mid-life
teaching ESL in Yugoslavia, and somewhere
just outside Philadelphia, but kept sending out
my communiqués
despite the misleading dialectics of loss, a lack of response—
despite stars coming out,
syllables of the dark building behind them,
and time passing through the world
like grit settling on my glasses
as I drifted down the valley—
all of it reflected in the breakdown
of our cells, fractures in the sky,
the range of possibilities that remained
and came to nothing
in the sun-scraped hills in back of a cemetery
of pioneers where no one’s gone for decades,
the plastic flowers bleached
to the color of tule fog.
No use, anymore, making the 1/2-day journey—
who would know me
standing in front Ming’s Chinese on Van Ness,
Grocery Outlet on Blackstone,
or the Chicken Pie Shop on Olive?
No faithful dog of memory
to greet me in Roedding Park where
I go to reconnoiter, to speak to ghosts,
to hear volleys and thwacks echo
from tennis courts,
Phil and a bunch of us playing madcap doubles,
in the lost light of those last summers
that won’t burn through
my hands again.
For any good it’s done,
I always saw eye to eye
with Einstein, and am a deeply religious
non-believer, but carry on
filing my reports on the faithless
movements of fair-weather clouds
which saved no one,
moored in the disbanded republics of air. . . .
Tonight, looking up to the old scars of light,
hitting the mortal skids,
I have no one to call on, no one to blame
other than this wren refusing
to break the code
and reveal the enigma of our withering bones,
the fact that finally we were all
we ever had . . .
gloriously insolvent
on the sidewalks, where I was happy,
and fortunate
not to die
young on Arthur Street.
Last Chance Motel
Anche il mare
tra non molto sara come il fuoco, avvampante. — Cesare Pavese
This is what we get for following
the example of clouds brooding
along the shore, for sitting
in the ossuary of dusk among
sun-burnt eucalyptus whose subject
could well be hopelessness,
the way they lean out over
the cliff. . . .
Crows pecking the eyes
out of a fish washed up on shore
recant nothing they’ve ever done,
and though the night has no bones,
it’s walking, as sure as anything,
right toward us. . . .
Little more
than wind pushes me along this path
where I take on the dying light,
recalling compadres in the somber
discourse of autumn—Omar shuffling along,
tipping his hat to senoritas, whistling his way
into an ode, and in The Chicken Pie Shop,
Jon saluting the cook who’s scrambling up
his gizzard omelet.
Until they fall,
the cypress and tamarisk filter toxins
from our air. . . as for any residual effects,
such as joy, it’s long gone with the riptide
and undertow of time tugging at the cliff,
no one about to tap you on the shoulder
and explicate the syntax of starlight,
eternity’s indefinite forms.
Before we
know it, the earth will be too hot for
water to exist . . . so what for New York,
Helsinki, the last hut in Punta Arenas?
For now, it looks like we’ll have to settle
for this small motel on the outskirts of hell
where we might bump into an old mate,
bum a smoke with a final pleasantry or two
before suffering another theorist who says
we can’t interpret our own thoughts,
or find the least refuge in them . . .
though I could tell shit from Shinola
at the get-go.
So how far back
do we have to look to find where
we were breathing easy, evenly
beside the jasmine and nasturtiums,
no one petitioning the infinite nothing
regardless of the mortal insurgency
of our cells? 49 or 50 seeming old
until we arrived there
ready to walk away
from the church and ashes of hope. . . .
Nevertheless, I’m going to sit here
for as long as I can, translating whatever
of the past surfaces beneath this
neon road sign, blinking off and on,
on and off . . . like the stars, like us.
for Frank Gaspar
