I’LL CALL YOU THIS AFTERNOON,
I’ll call you nowhere, now
here: the cardinal’s almost almost
almost, quite. Until the winter solstice
there is less light
than night. Then a whole other
manna, in a manner of
speaking. But darkness is so much
faster than light. Have you
noticed that if you go into a room
that is completely dark and flip
the switch, you see the light
enter the room but don’t
see the darkness leave? At dawn
we watch the light appear
while night slips out
unseen like the tide before
it leapfrogs in. Chablis
not only rhymes with sea
but comes from, remembers
the sea: its chalky, stony
salinity. The best come from
grapes grown on a prehistoric
sea, limestone and clay soils
full of fossilized shells
and marine skeletons. In the Middle Ages
and Renaissance, the depiction of
the rotting body became
an art form. Sculptors carved
cadaver tombs, double-decker like
the buses in London or the bunk beds
I once argued over with
my brother: on top, the reclining
effigy of a person as he appeared
in life—clothed and sometimes praying
or reading—and on the bottom
a naked corpse laced
with worms. Ligier Richier, a pupil
of Michelangelo, sculpted the transi—
the transition from body
to dust—of René de Chalon, still standing
in the church of Saint-Étienne: unraveled
muscles and flaps of skin
dangle from bones as he grasps
his rib cage with the right hand, his left reaching
up to hold a space that once held
his dried heart. One of Dickinson’s correspondents
likened her handwriting to the fossil tracks
of birds. Where they were headed
cannot be said, so I’ll call you
what I was going to say
was, what I meant, I always
thought that like Aeneas, clinging
to the wreckage after the Trojan fleet
has gone down: Someday, even this
will be recalled with pleasure.
