are you dreaming, Frederick?

"I will have an undergraduate class, let's say a young white male student, politically-correct, who will say: 'I am only a bourgeois white male, I can't speak.'...I say to them: 'Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?' Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very determinist position-since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak...From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will have earned the right to criticize, you be heard. When you take the position of not doing your homework--'I will not criticize because of my accident of birth, the historical accident'--that is the much more pernicious position."
--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


"Fishing at Night"
As if what waited
in the dark
were different
than what travelled
through it: a chalk
moon rose and filled
the fossil beds
with light. Print
of a crinoid,
print of a shell.
Here at the slate bar's
end, where water
swirls and eddies,
I worked the bait
into the dark, bent
my concentration
to its snags and cur-
rent, the line
going taut then
slack. It wasn't
so much the river
as it clucked
and settled over eggs
of chert, but how
it hatched itself
years deeper
in its groove,
how it whispered
obsolescence
with each cleaned hook,
my own veins
pressed like fish scales
in a sunless,
uncracked rock
or book.
--Davis McCombs


"The Spell of the Leaves"
Her husband left her suddenly. Then it was autumn.
And in those first, crisp days of a new life,
Each morning she would watch her son, a boy of seven,
Yawn before mounting the steps, glinting like a sea,
When the doors of the school bus opened.
And then she would dress, leaving the back way,
And hearing or overhearing the screen door close
Behind her, always the same, indifferent swish.
At that hour the frost on the lawn still held
Whorled fingerprints of cold, as if the cold had slept
There. Then she would climb in, she told me,
On the wrong side of the small, open car,
And sit quite still, an unlit cigarette in her hand,
And wait for him to come out and drive her
To work, as always. The first two times it happened
She was frightened, she said, because, waiting for him,
Something went wrong with Time. Later, she couldn't
Say whether an hour or only a few minutes
Had passed before she realized she didn't
Have a husband. Then she would lift herself
Awkwardly over the brake & gearshift, spilling
Gently backward into the driver's seat,
Her legs still on the wrong side a moment,
In mottled sunlight. For a second I almost glimpse
Her knees, slender & raised slightly like
A lover's. I know it's wrong to stare at them.
At this moment she is all alone; at this moment,
Because her mistake is so pathetic, she's crying.

Then she stops waiting. The car pulls out of the drive
And onto the street each day. The weeks pass, & then
The months; then the years are blending into
Tables set for two, & even anger dies.
On Sundays, hiking, the boy finds wildflowers.
They look them up in a field guide before
She places them, like stillness itself, in a vase--
Cloisonné, its gray background lustrous, lacquered.
There is a line both of them know by heart,
And the boy repeats it idly, a sentence composed
In madness while the poet sat, as still
As any flower in his cell, hearing beyond it
The cries of the asylum, & beyond that, nothing.
Nothing, though the carriages of London keep
Whispering through its hushed streets forever,
Past the silently clinging chimney sweep
In the mild drizzle of 1756;
And the poet, alone with his holy cat, watches
A dung beetle, "Whose sight is precious to God,"
Scurry across wet stone, while the boy is chanting:
"The Right Names for Flowers Are Hush'd in Heaven."
" 'Still in Heaven....' Christopher Smart," she adds.
She adds half a bay leaf to the simmering stew.

But when I think of her, nothing has happened yet.
It is this moment before she remembers
Her husband isn't there, the moment before
The Indian summers of her bare legs appear,
Then disappear, the week before the maples'
Yellowing leaves lining her street all turn
To the colors of horses: roans, sorrels, duns,
Chestnuts, bays, blacks, then a final
Liver-white quilt of Appaloosa
Unraveling over the first, brief snow.
Then the zebra shades & short days of winter.
When I think of her, she's still sitting there,
On the wrong side of the car, intent, staring,
As her thought collects in pools yet keeps
Widening until, now, it casts its spell--
And then the scene is one of great stillness ripening,
Enlarging, spreading to include the boy who sits
Like stillness itself above the graffiti carved
Into his desk by students who are older now,
And wilder. It is five minutes into his morning recess,
And the boy will not go out. He sits alone,
Listening, the classroom windowless--& he knows
The moment when the stillness finds his father
With his shoulders stopped, unmoving, in another state.
The father simply stands there now, a teapot whistling
In the cramped kitchen of his studio; he gazes
Straight ahead into what seems to him a valley
Filling with snow until the end of time.
He's seeing things. In front of him there's only
A white cupboard, some dishes, an ashtray displaying
The name of a casino. But the woman won't relent:
The spell's hush is on the boy's pencil in its tray;
It's on the desk & dry leaves pinned to the walls....
The boy listens, & does not listen, both hears
And does not hear the older students, those
Already in junior high, lounging outside
In the corridor, acknowledging each other--
Their whispers are the high, light rustling of leaves
Above the vagrant he passes on the way home,
The one intent on sleeping this world away,
A first chill entering the park as he shoves
His chapped hands deeper between his knees--
The boy watches this as if in the sleep of the other....
And all of this three years before the father
Hears a secret club of voices, steps onto an ark
Of stories, floating, three times each week,
Past him, through him, admitting its powerlessness,
And God. Forgive me, I keep watching them now,
In this moment two days after the father has slumped out,
I keep waiting for the next thing to happen,
And that is the problem: nothing happens, nothing
Happens at all. It is as if Time Itself
Sticks without knowing it in this wide place
I had mistaken for a moment, sticks
Like the tip of the father's left forefinger
To the unwiped, greasy, kitchen countertop.
--Larry Levis


"Sleeping Lioness"
1.
Even when we finally had to burn them, the gray, stately
Trunks of malagas, the tough, already yellowing limbs
Of muscats--acres of them in those years, hacked, stacked
In piles, then doused with kerosene--even their fires
Flaring all night in what were suddenly bare fields--
Looked older than the city dressed in its distant light.
Of course after the fires passed it was all for sale.
Some vacant lots were leased to milkweed & black-eyed Susans
For a few months; the pavement, billboards, the treeless yards,
And at the end of each street a sky that looked painted in.

*

What's gone is moon's silk; what's gone has rotted the circles from Luna Moth & Shasta Daisy.
Beyond the flies on the sills, beyond the stained glass with its sheep
Accumulating like curious tourists, you could hear the sound of hammering grow louder each week
In Leisure Villa & Sierra Madre. The walls of our ridiculous, rural parish,
Lined with poor reproductions of paintings meant to instruct us,
Seemed only a setting for the veiled women addicted to prayer.
What floats back now is the Virgin, a Mary holding out an apronful of bread,
A cold sea behind her & a distracted look on her face. I thought it meant
She was remembering a girlhood, the faint odor, garlic & mint, of a man
Asleep beside a tree-lined room. It was instructive, they said,
If it made you sad. It was a complete waste of time, & childhood, & so,
I suppose now it was instructive: the way the body woke alone,
The way the vineyards vanished into patterns of lime & yellow dolphins
Rising in pairs to the surface of a Formica countertop, the way
The sky began to take up residence in a few, cramped words
As I sat reading them there. The naked human body is the grave in blossom; it is both
Sad & instructive. And which withered cane from which withered vine of malagas
Would you choose to carry into Hell if you left now?

2.
for James Wright

Today, hearing the empty clang of a rope against
A flagpole, the children in school, the slow squeal of swings
In the playground, a day of rain & gusts
Of wind, I noticed the overleaf of his book--
How someone had tried hard to make
The illustration look like snow that had fallen in the shape
Of a horse; it looked, instead, like someone wrapped in bandages.
Someone alone & wrapped in bandages who could not see out,
Who would never be permitted to see out
As a gust of rain swept over the swimming pool, over
The thin walls of my apartment, twenty years ago.
If I look in the window I can see the book open on the counter;
I am reading it there; I am alone.
Everyone else in the world is in bed with someone else.
If they sleep, they sleep with a lock of the other's hair
In their lips, but the world is one short,
An odd number, & so God has given me a book of poems.
And suddenly the boy sitting there isn't funny anymore.
And in that moment the one
Wrapped in bandages wants only to look out once,
Even at a gust of rain blemishing the pool,
Even at a scuffed shoe passing.
Poor shoe, poor rain, poor sprawl of stucco & plywood.
And death, poorest of cousins, back turned
In all the photographs,
Wanting his mouth for a souvenir.

3.
In 1965, if anything was worth worshiping in that city,
It was in the old neighborhood rife with eucalyptus & a few, brooding mulberries,
It was the lioness asleep in the zoo, unmoved by the taunts
Of children or the trash they threw, sometimes on fire for a moment, into her cage.
It was the way she endured it: heat, rain, misfortune; turning on her heels always
Away from you as if there were two worlds, as if you were lost
In this one. She could have killed a man with one swipe
Of her paw, but she did not. And that is why, in the next world,
She has come back as a poem already written for her, & hidden
In this one. This one which fills us with longing. Which bores her.
In 1965 in that city, no one knew less than a boy of nineteen, still a virgin,
Still brimming over with extinct love;
His face shining with acne he'd rubbed raw with a hand towel
To make it disappear; instead, it blistered, & later,
Looking in the mirror, he thought such blisters might be
The visible evidence of the soul. Laugh, if you want to;
After all, the next world is a lioness & she moves without history, like a lioness,
And without mistakes. Besides, it's twenty years later.
By now that boy's already poured his first drink of the evening;
So have you, & no tense is as sad as the future's.
If I'm not laughing with you it's because I'm talking to myself again:

*

It should be one of those nights when you were wise & singular after
The rush & an almost virginal swirling in the veins;
Outside the motel on the outskirts, I waited.
And later I glanced out at the passing cypresses festooned in spiderwebs, or ice, & I drove.
The night you disappeared into the wholesale dark--whiskey & a cold wind & never coming home--
I sat reading in the steadfast lamplight; the story darkened,
And when you wouldn't come back,
I watched the autumn light fall across a photograph.
I watched the world take off its dress;
I saw the world's gooseflesh.
Later I saw you laughing with the others in the garden;
There was the smell of someone's cigarette,
And then the smell of crushed gravel on a driveway after a rain.

Once, there was a kind of beauty, like a sail.
It was white, like a sail, &...
Once under way, you could watch even the people you worked with grow distant, until they seemed perfectly composed,
The way a shoreline falls into place behind you. The way it appears so untroubled when you are at sea.
At sea I woke in chills, I shivered in the wake of your pleasure.
They will say all this is sad & instructive, but it isn't.
Nor is there any scent of grief in such a story.

And afterward only the ordinary, slowly closing white ocean of the arm--something to witness--
Because it is not a miracle to be here, sweeping up before dawn, & because these windowsills
Do not open onto a New World but only onto the flat dark gleaming of rails:
You can hear the scoring of steel on steel,
And through a boxcar's open door, you can see a matted swath of straw or snow for a moment in the first light;
And then the world in its one dress, the park drowsing in mist.
If only we could have held hands, as the straitjacketed mad appear to do!
But remember in that apartment twenty years ago, how--just by looking at it carefully--
It took nothing more than a scuffed shoe to get you high,
Or a dry leaf blown into a bedroom where you sat reading late at night,
Or the remembered, twisted shape of a yellowing vine you once threw--steaming suddenly in the first, warm sunlight--
Onto a pile for burning.
And later, staring into those fires, how the sleepless shape of each flame
Held your attention like someone's nakedness, a nakedness
The world clothes in light until it's a city. This city.
I leave you here, with the next world already beginning to stir, & you wide awake in this one.
This one with the first traffic beginning just beyond your doorstep in the slow gauze of dawn--
And the trees & hedges lining your street in the oldest neighborhood?
So thick now, so overgrown, they look as if they had always been there?
And the first frost?
Anything is enough if you know how poor you are.
You could step out now in wonder.
--Larry Levis


2. Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex
In the Borghese, Caravaggio, painter of boy whores, street punk, exile & murderer,
Left behind his own face in the decapitated, swollen, leaden-eyed head of Goliath,
And left the eyelids slightly open, & left on the face of David a look of pity

Mingling with disgust. A peach face; a death mask. If you look closely you can see
It is the same face, & the boy, murdering the man, is murdering his own boyhood,
His robe open & exposing a bare left shoulder. In 1603, it meant he was available,

For sale on the street where Ranuccio Tomassoni is falling, & Caravaggio,

Puzzled that a man would die so easily, turns & runs.

Wasn't it like this, after all? And this self-portrait, David holding him by a lock
Of hair? Couldn't it destroy time if he offered himself up like this, empurpled,
Bloated, the crime paid for in advance? To die before one dies, & keep painting?

This town, & that town, & exile? I stood there looking at it a long time.

A man whose only politics was rage. By 1970, tinted orchards & mass graves.

*

The song that closed the Fillmore was "Johnny B. Goode," as Garcia played it,
Without regret, the doors closing forever & the whole Haight evacuated, as if
Waiting for the touch of the renovator, for the new boutiques that would open--

The patina of sunset glinting in the high, dark windows.

Once, I marched & linked arms with other exiles who wished to end a war, &...
Sometimes, walking in that crowd, I became the crowd, &, for that moment, it felt
Like entering the wide swirl & vortex of history. In the end,

Of course, you could either stay & get arrested, or else go home.

In the end, of course, the war finished without us in an empty row of horse stalls

Littered with clothing that had been confiscated.

*

I had a friend in high school who looked like Caravaggio, or like Goliath--
Especially when he woke at dawn on someone's couch. (In early summer,
In California, half the senior class would skinny-dip & drink after midnight

In the unfinished suburb bordering the town, because, in the demonstration models,
They filled the pools before the houses sold....Above us, the lush stars thickened.)
Two years later, thinking he heard someone call his name, he strolled three yards

Off a path & stepped on a land mine.

*

Time's sovereign. It rides the backs of names cut into marble. And to get
Back, one must descend, as if into a mass grave. All along the memorial, small
Offerings, letters, a bottle of bourbon, photographs, a joint of marijuana slipped

Into a wedding ring. You see, you must descend; it is one of the styles
Of Hell. And it takes a while to find the name you might be looking for; it is
Meant to take a while. You can touch the names, if you want to. You can kiss them,

You can try to tease out some final meaning with your lips.

The boy who was standing next to me said simply: "You can cry....It's O.K., here."
--Larry Levis, from "The Perfection of Solitude: A Sequence"


"Meditation at Lagunitas"
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birth is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. The are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
--Robert Hass


"The Pure Ones"
Roads to the north of here are dry.
First red buds prick out the lethal spring
and corncrakes, swarming, lower in clouds
above the fields from Paris to Béziers.
This is God's harvest: the village boy
whose tongue was sliced in two,
the village crones slashing cartilage
at the knees to crawl to Carcassonne.
--If the world were not evil in itself,
the blessed one said, then every choice
would not constitute a loss.
This sickness of this age is flesh,
he said. Therefore we build with stone.
The dead with their black lips are heaped
on one another, intimate as lovers.
--Robert Hass