Interrupted Meditation

Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside.

And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone

of the palest amber, veined with a darker gold,

thinnest lines of gold rivering through the amber

like—ah, now we come to it. We were not put on earth,

the old man said, he was hacking into the crust

of a sourdough half loaf in his vehement, impatient way

with an old horn-handled knife, to express ourselves.

I knew he had seen whole cities leveled: also

that there had been a time of shame for him, outskirts

of a ruined town, half Baroque, half Greek Revival,

pediments of Flora and Hygeia from a brief eighteenth-century

health spa boom lying on the streets in broken chunks

and dogs scavenging among them. His one act of courage

then had been to drop pieces of bread or chocolate,

as others did, where a fugitive family of Jews

was rumored to be hiding. I never raised my voice,

of course, none of us did. He sliced wedges of cheese

after the bread, spooned out dollops of sour jam

from some Hungarian plum, purple and faintly gingered.

Every day the bits of half-mildewed, dry, hard—

this is my invention—whitened chocolate, dropped furtively

into rubble by the abandoned outbuilding of some suburban

mechanic’s shop—but I am sure he said chocolate—

and it comforted no one. We talked in whispers.

“Someone is taking them.” “Yes,” Janos said,

“But it might just be the dogs.” He set the table.

Shrugged. Janos was a friend from the university,

who fled east to join a people’s liberation army,

died in Siberia somewhere. Some of us whispered 'art',

he said. Some of us 'truth.' A debate with cut vocal chords.

You have to understand that, for all we knew, the Germans

would be there forever. And if not the Germans, the Russians.

Well, you don't 'have to' understand anything, naturally.

No one knew which way to jump. What we had was language,

you see. Some said art, some said truth. Truth, of course,

was death. Clattered the plates down on the table. No one,

no one said 'self-expression.' Well, you had your own forms

of indulgence. Didn't people in the forties say 'man'

instead of 'the self?' I think I said. I thought 'the self'

came in in 1949. He laughed. It's true. Man,

we said, is the creature who is able to watch himself

eat his own shit from fear. You know what that is?

Melodrama. I tell you, there is no bottom to self-pity.

This comes back to me on the mountainside. Butterflies—

tiny blues with their two-dot wings like quotation marks

or an abandoned pencil sketch of a face. They hover lightly

over lupine blooms, whirr of insects in the three o'clock sun.

What about being? I had asked him. Isn't language responsible

to it, all of it, the texture of bread, the hairstyles

of the girls you knew in high school, shoelaces, sunsets,

the smell of tea? Ah, he said, you've been talking to Milosz.

To Czeslaw I say this: silence preceeds us. We are catching up.

I think he was quoting Jabes whom he liked to read.

Of course, here, gesturing out the window, pines, ragged green

of a winter lawn, the bay, you can express what you like,

enumerate the vegetation. And you! you have to, I'm afraid,

since you don't excel at metaphor. A shrewd, quick glance

to see how I have taken this thrust. You write well, clearly.

You are an intelligent man. But—finger in the air—

silence is waiting. Milosz believes there is a Word

at the end that explains. There is silence at the end,

and it doesn't explain, it doesn't even ask. He spread chutney

on his bread, meticulously, out to the corners. Something

angry always in his unexpected fits of thoroughness

I liked. The cheese. Then a lunging, wolfish bite.

Put it this way, I give you, here, now, a magic key.

What does it open? This key I give you, what exactly

does it open? Anything, anything! But what? I found

that what I thought about was the failure of my marriage,

the three or four lost years just at the end and after.

For me there is no key, not even the sum total of our acts.

But you are a poet. You pretend to make poems. And?

She sat on the couch sobbing, her rib cage shaking

from its accumulated abysses of grief and thick sorrow.

I don't love you, she said. The terrible thing is

that I don't think I ever loved you. He thought to himself

fast, to numb it, that she didn't mean it, thought

what he had done to provoke it. It was May.

Also pines, lawn, the bay, a blossoming apricot.

Everyone their own devastation. Each on its own scale.

I don't know what the key opens. I know we die,

and don’t know what is at the end. We don’t behave well.

And there are monsters out there, and millions of others

to carry out their orders. We live half our lives

in fantasy, and words. This morning I am pretending

to be walking down the mountain in the heat.

A vault of blue sky, traildust, the sweet medicinal

scent of mountain grasses, and at trailside—

I'm a little ashamed that I want to end this poem

singing, but I want to end this poem singing—the wooly

closed-down buds of the sunflower to which, in English,

someone gave the name, sometime, of pearly everlasting.

Source: Sun Under Wood (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1996)