Sunday

The rain, gray god with its huge hands

has shredded the roses, and clapping,

kept us up all night, the bridge washed out,

the troll waiting to gobble a goat.

How long has he been there, wet and cold,

impatient, starving, his coat

rent with welts and matted with mist?

Father, thundering, his voice full

of  bracken and leaves, leaves that in

the autumn clogged the gutters. Who

       the billy goats stammering, pawing

the air. But I am the goat and the troll

and so cannot pass nor grant passage.

 

The high meadow filled with sweet grass!

The spindle puts the moon to bed,

the window latched, the sheets pulled tight,

pincushion star, ram butting his head,

my brother and sister behind and ahead —

his sister was no use to him either,

    she took what was his, cat’s cradle

bridge made of sharp goat’s thread. Who

goes there now, over the rickety

bridge? Tiny steps, lickety-split,

my place is in the pause between

the thunder and the bridge, Father

shouting over the torn white water,

   hoofprints mark the place last seen.

iii at the museum (bellows)

      The man in the left-hand corner

of Bellows’s picture of the Dempsey-Firpo

fight, the picture a dream, so not a real

fight — a picture of a fight — his flayed hide

just visible under his blue pinstripes,

the watcher and the fighter

indistinguishable, one inside

the other, lion and lion tamer,

the paint daubs faces or fingerprints

and the lights staring and staring across

the fretwork of the ring, and Bellows

himself, next to him, looking surprised,

as if to be there was to give himself up

without our noticing it, as we all do

 

in a gesture, or word, leaving something

behind we should have taken with us

or even guarded, a way of not letting

something be over and done with.

The fight was over in four minutes flat.

A curious thing about the painting

is that Bellows chose to show us

 

the moment when Firpo sent Dempsey

careening, with a blow to the jaw,

one of the two times he laid him out,

and we, with the spectators crammed

into the foreground of the picture

have to help push Dempsey back

into the ring where two-and-a-half

 

minutes later he will defeat Firpo,

who went down four times to his two.

In Assisi, at the Basilica di San Francesco,

in the panel in which Giotto depicts

the moment Francis gives away

his worldly goods, the palm that Francis

raises up to the hand that is reaching

 

down to him from heaven, a hand out

of the blue, open, ready to give or

receive wonders, is the same hand

in Bellows’s picture raised behind Dempsey

one wing of a dove, the impulse is

to press our own palms to it, and despite

our better judgment to hurl him back.

 

A song that Father liked to sing:

     a dozen blackbirds baked alive

but still alive when they did bring

    the pie to set before the king —

    what a flurry when the pie was cut!

       The birds cawed madly as they rose —

blackbirds flapping blackened wings

    who circled back to snip your nose!

 

       I see the moon, the moon sees me,

shining on the apple tree ...

don’t sit under the apple tree

with anyone else but me —

no no, with anyone else but me ...

sound of hurry, over the bridge.

 

As always, we want something from the dead,

even the blackbird, stiff in a kind of grassy net,

its black leather gangster feet curled up

as if holding on to something it let go —

and beyond, to the right, inevitably, a house —

black-shuttered with its high gray wing,

its bones buried deep in the earth like a beast

that once took flight, bones with the imprint

of feathers, that print repeated in the far away trees

on a rise to the left of the house, a good distance

away, as if the trees had been painted by pressing

a painted leaf to the canvas, the spine

the tablature of a feather, or fish, the scales

clearly marked in miniature, although we know

the trees are much bigger than the blackbird

so stock-still in the spiky grass, so lately landed,

its glossy mourning coat spit-shined. Under

those trees, a short distance from the house

as nowhere else in the picture, a moment

of repose, the sun on the warm bark, the circle

of cool beneath. But the bird holds us fast,

a shadow cast by moonlight, the flowers

beside it articulate as the delphiniums

in La Primavera, at the Uffizi, at which we

paused until we could look no longer at

an extreme propensity for beauty, as though it

might explode in smithereens. Autumn,

the seed pods are moth-eaten moons, dry, rattling.

In Wyeth’s more famous picture, the girl

stranded in the foreground in a clutch of weeds

her awkward limbs stretching in the hissing grass

is in the same place in the picture plane

as the blackbird, we all agreed with this,

the woman in the white hat — why a hat,

inside the museum — and her friend, smaller,

dressed all in black, black shoes, black stockings,

black dress, although it is summer.

At once we want to help her as she reaches

the unbridgeable distance of the field

and the meadow filled with rough grass

although it’s not so evident how to help her

for even now our heavy limbs twitch with

enchantment, caught in a dream in which

it is impossible to move except by slithering.

In my sleep you said I said — too many people.

The black house is a ship on the horizon,

every light on, or the moon that looks

as if it is following us but from which

we are always veering away, the white wolf

snapping at our heels, goading us to cross

the bridge or waiting for us by the water

its white face wavering under the pilings.

The girl is a blackbird in the high grass,

it is natural to mistake one for the other

when it is so difficult despite the painter’s

efforts, herculean, really, to see clearly —

 

        Puck, above a game of flashlight tag

the tiniest fairy pirouetting like a dervish —

the honeysuckle wood alit, one pointed

green-shod foot dangling, like the hand that reached

down to Francis to pull him up to heaven

or rebuke him, or the white hand coming

out of the darkness over the ring: counting

one, two, three, alley, alley, innisfree —

the three goats balking at the bridge, Father

bellowing over the rushing water

the river loud, rearing its head, foam rushing past

its eyes and ears, Father clamoring, needing

something — the moment we know

it has come to nothing.

 

The heavens shift.

And presto! the tilted abacus

of stars slides back in place, twilight’s worn edge rubbed

to a sheen. Queen, ass, Indian child, love-lit quartet, slipping

   as the constellations do

behind Gaia’s unearthly tilt

   leaving us in night’s cooler, less demanding air

where our taxi driver has his phone

on speaker: twenty minutes of harangue,

    a hornet trapped inside a troika, the driver

silent except once to say,

   interrupting the ceaseless string of epithets,

“You are the women of my dreams.”

           Lights turn from red to green,

the avenue slick before the curb. Remember? The crescent

moon scar on my knee —

           Rain patters the windshield, the lights

    from the bodega spatter lime and pink.

             A folded scene.

Above, the moon —

             another night before a halt.

 

Morning lit by evening’s lantern, the cat

a baby falling from the broken bough,

childhood’s terrible litter of fear.

I am the goat and the goat is me. I see the moon,

the moon sees me. And if I die before I wake,

the spirit leaving the body as we sleep

as Giacomo said in the gospel — who said it, where?

if the spirit leaves my body where does it go?

— and in the dark the pine knots watching

and your eyes big in the dark, and the sound of breathing.

In your sleep you said too many people.

I woke you in the dark and I took you by the hand —

How far is the moon? If I folded this piece of paper?

But then you would never get there, remember?

And your total disregard of me —

twilight’s rainbow a lasso fetching the moon from the water —

When I was walking I fell from the curb.

You did not. I did, I did.

 

 

The three children not far off

cross the road to the water

and into the hot high grass,

their feet light on the flattened

stalks of the cattails that line

the swale like pale raffia

woven expressly for that

 

purpose, as if the landscape

was a diorama made

of glassine, straw, and folded

paper. Whose children are they —

one, two, three, walking to

the ruined, silvery, splintery

boat, that looks like a whale come

 

ashore in the pocket cove

which opens at high tide like

a giantess’s compact?

There is another smaller

shadow, pulling a kite — or

no, a pull-toy dog, which barks

at an upturned horseshoe crab

 

and a stained, eyeless, gray-brown

gull. How oddly sound travels

over water. Underfoot

the sun-crazed hermit crabs run

helter-skelter to their bomb

shelters under the wet sand,

where at dead low tide the marsh

 

makes a kind of long, humped bridge

of itself to the rapt cove

and the ruined quiet. Psst says

the wind. The children run at

it, lowing their heads, making

horns with their fingers, bashing

themselves in it and through it.

 

Two days I’ve forgotten where I’m going,

New York’s crossword up and down a litter

of numbers and letters. I spin on the grid,

round hole in a square peg, each step a rope

bridge hung in air, my tongue a troll who eats

my words, my goat-fur cloak held fast by Pysche’s

brooch. “Smile, libling, you have your whole life

ahead of you.” Hold on tight. Even the dead

won’t speak to me, my sharp hooves beating

the bank’s slick grass, the bog oak’s muddy rune.

Bee disheveled on the stairs, the storm

rattling the panes. “I dreamed I walked and walked

and could not find my way.” Dear God, let me

keep my dreams to myself and do no harm.