Midsummer

  for Elizabeth and Anna

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  PART TWO

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  XLVIII

  XLIX

  L

  LI

  LII

  LIII

  LIV

  Index of First Lines

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  I

  The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud—

  clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,

  nor the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own

  culture; they aren’t doors of dissolving stone,

  but pages in a damp culture that come apart.

  So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast

  dereliction of sunlight, there’s that island known

  to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,

  for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet’s shadow

  ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow

  through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome

  and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,

  it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,

  light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor

  around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words—

  Maraval, Diego Martin—the highways long as regrets,

  and steeples so tiny you couldn’t hear their bells,

  nor the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets

  from green villages. The lowering window resounds

  over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.

  Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets

  are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.

  It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home—

  canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as

  the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

  II

  Companion in Rome, whom Rome makes as old as Rome,

  old as that peeling fresco whose flaking paint

  is the clouds, you are crouched in some ancient pensione

  where the only new thing is paper, like young St. Jerome

  with his rock vault. Tonsured, you’re muttering a line

  that your exiled country will soon learn by heart,

  to a flaking, sunlit ledge where a pigeon gurgles.

  Midsummer’s furnace casts everything in bronze.

  Traffic flows in slow coils, like the doors of a baptistry,

  and even the kitten’s eyes blaze with Byzantine icons.

  That old woman in black, unwrinkling your sheet with a palm,

  her home is Rome, its history is her house.

  Every Caesar’s life has shrunk to a candle’s column

  in her saucer. Salt cleans their bloodstained togas.

  She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;

  now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,

  she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs.

  Her kitchen wall flakes like an atlas where, once,

  Ibi dracones was written, where unchristened cannibals

  gnawed on the dry heads of coconuts as Ugolino did.

  Hell’s hearth is as cold as Pompeii’s. We’re punished by bells

  as gentle as lilies. Luck to your Roman elegies

  that the honey of time will riddle like those of Ovid.

  Corals up to their windows in sand are my sacred domes,

  gulls circling a seine are the pigeons of my St. Mark’s,

  silver legions of mackerel race through our catacombs.

  III

  At the Queen’s Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms,

  I reenter my first local mirror. A skidding roach

  in the porcelain basin slides from its path to Parnassus.

  Every word I have written took the wrong approach.

  I cannot connect these lines with the lines in my face.

  The child who died in me has left his print on

  the tangled bed linen, and it was his small voice

  that whispered from the gargling throat of the basin.

  Out on the balcony I remember how morning was:

  It was like a granite corner in Piero della Francesca’s

  “Resurrection,” the cold, sleeping foot

  prickling like the small palms up by the Hilton.

  On the dewy Savannah, gently revolved by their grooms,

  snorting, delicate-ankled racehorses exercise,

  as delicate-ankled as brown smoke from the bakeries.

  Sweat darkens their sides, and dew has frosted the skins

  of the big American taxis parked all night on the street.

  In black asphalt alleys marked by a ribbon of sunlight,

  the closed faces of shacks are touched by that phrase in

  Traherne:

  “The corn was orient and immortal wheat,”

  and the canefields of Caroni. With all summer to burn,

  a breeze strolls down to the docks, and the sea begins.

  IV

  This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness,

  with its one-eyed lighthouse, this damned sea of noise,

  this ocher harbor, mantled by its own scum,

  offers, from white wrought-iron balconies,

  the nineteenth-century view. You can watch it become

  more African hourly—crusted roofs, hot as skillets

  peppered with cries; between fast-fry wagons,

  floating seraphic Muslims cannot make it hush.

  By the pitch of noon, the one thing wanting

  is a paddle-wheeler with its rusty parrot’s scream,

  whistling in to be warped, and Mr. Kurtz on the landing.

  Stay on the right bank in the imperial dream—

  the Thames, not the Congo. From the small-island masts

  of the schooner basin to the plate-glass fronts

  of the Holiday Inn is one step, and from need to greed

  through the river of clogged, circling traffic is

  a few steps more. The world had no time to change

  to a doorman’s braid from the loincloths of Africa.

  So, when the stores draw their blinds, like an empire’s ending,

  and the banks fade like the peaks of the Hindu Kush,

  a cloaked wind, bent like a scavenger, rakes the trash

  in the gutters. It is hard not to see the past’s

  vision of lampposts branchi
ng over streets of bush,

  the plazas cracked by the jungle’s furious seed.

  V

  The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh,

  on a damp bed. The far ocean grinds in waves

  of air-conditioning. The air is scaled like a fish

  that leaves dry salt on the hands, and one believes

  only in ice, the white zones of refrigerators.

  In muslin midsummer along Fourteenth Street, hucksters

  with cardboard luggage stacked near the peeling rind

  of advertisements have made the Big Apple a mango;

  shy as wallflowers at first, the dazed high-rises

  rock to reggae and salsa; democracy’s price is

  two steps forward and three steps back in the Aztec tango

  of assimilation, with no bar to the barrio.

  On Fridays, an exodus crawls to the Hamptons.

  Spit dries on the lips of the curb, and sweat

  makes the furniture float away in islands.

  Walk the breezy scrub dunes from Montauk to Amagansett,

  while the salt of the earth turns into dirt in the cities. The vista

  in dusty travel windows blooms with umbrellas

  that they cannot go back to. Rats, biting the hands

  that fed them. In that drugged dance of dealers,

  remote-controlled by a Walkman like he can’t stop,

  Jesus propositions a seersucker suit, “Hey, mister,

  just a sec …” The thumb of an Irish cop

  rolls his bullets like beads. Glued to his own transistor.

  VI

  Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat’s yawn.

  Trees with dust on their lips, cars melting down

  in its furnace. Heat staggers the drifting mongrels.

  The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails

  round Woodford Square the color of rusting blood.

  Casa Rosada, the Argentinian mood,

  croons from the balcony. Monotonous lurid bushes

  brush the damp clouds with the ideograms of buzzards

  over the Chinese groceries. The oven alleys stifle.

  In Belmont, mournful tailors peer over old machines,

  stitching June and July together seamlessly.

  And one waits for midsummer lightning as the armed sentry

  in boredom waits for the crack of a rifle.

  But I feed on its dust, its ordinariness,

  on the faith that fills its exiles with horror,

  on the hills at dusk with their dusty orange lights,

  even on the pilot light in the reeking harbor

  that turns like a police car’s. The terror

  is local, at least. Like the magnolia’s whorish whiff.

  All night, the barks of a revolution crying wolf.

  The moon shines like a lost button.

  The yellow sodium lights on the wharf come on.

  In streets, dishes clatter behind dim windows.

  The night is companionable, the future as fierce as

  tomorrow’s sun everywhere. I can understand

  Borges’s blind love for Buenos Aires,

  how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hand.

  VII

  Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains

  or cheap prints hide what is dark behind windows—

  the pedalled sewing machine, the photos, the paper rose

  on its doily. The porch rail is lined with red tins.

  A man’s passing height is the same size as their doors,

  and the doors themselves, usually no wider than coffins,

  sometimes have carved in their fretwork little half-moons.

  The hills have no echoes. Not the echo of ruins.

  Empty lots nod with their palanquins of green.

  Any crack in the sidewalk was made by the primal fault

  of the first map of the world, its boundaries and powers.

  By a pile of red sand, of seeding, abandoned gravel

  near a burnt-out lot, a fresh jungle unfurls its green

  elephants’ ears of wild yams and dasheen.

  One step over the low wall, if you should care to,

  recaptures a childhood whose vines fasten your foot.

  And this is the lot of all wanderers, this is their fate,

  that the more they wander, the more the world grows wide.

  So, however far you have travelled, your

  steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied—

  or why should you suddenly think of Tomas Venclova,

  and why should I care about whatever they did to Heberto

  when exiles must make their own maps, when this asphalt

  takes you far from the action, past hedges of unaligned flowers?

  VIII

  A radiant summer, so fierce it turns yellow

  like the haze before a holocaust. Like a general,

  I arrange lines that must increase its radiance, work

  that will ripen with peace, like a gold-framed meadow

  in Brueghel or Pissarro. No, let the imagination range wherever

  its correspondences take it, let it take its luck

  on the roads, a Flemish road fenced with poplars,

  or grind with Rimbaud the white shale of Charleroi;

  let it come back tired to say that summer is the same

  everywhere. Black leaves churn in its bonfires, rooks

  clatter from my hair, and where is the difference?

  The heart is housebound in books—open your leaves,

  let light freckle the earth-colored earth, since

  light is plenty to make do with. Midsummer bursts

  out of its body, and its poems come unwarranted,

  as when, hearing what sounds like rain, we startle a place

  where a waterfall crashes down rocks. Abounding grace!

  IX

  It touches earth, that branched diviner’s rod

  the lightning, like the swift note of a swallow on the staff

  of four electric wires, while everything I read

  or write goes on too long. Ah, to have

  a tone colloquial and stiff,

  the brevity of that short syllable, God,

  all synthesis in one heraldic stroke,

  like Li Po or a Chinese laundry mark! Walk

  these hot streets, their signs a dusty backdrop stuck

  to the maundering ego. The lines that jerk

  into step do not fit any mold. More than time

  keeps shifting. Language never fits geography

  except when the earth and summer lightning rhyme.

  When I was greener, I strained with a branch

  to utter every tongue, language, and life at once.

  More skillful now, I’m more dissatisfied.

  They never align, nature and your

  own nature. Too rapid the lightning’s shorthand,

  too patient the sea repeatedly tearing up paper,

  too frantic the wind unravelling the same knot,

  too slow the stones crawling toward language every night.

  X

  No subtle fugues between black day, black night,

  no grays, no subterfuge in this straight light.

  A smoky, churning dark, shot with the white-hot pokers

  of street lamps. The beast with two backs growls from the bushes,

  and the harbor hisses like a whore over its fence.

  When sonnets come, they come not single spies but in

  battalions. They breed like larvae from your boredom. Sin

  finds its own level, so, like a rising fish, you are drawn

  to surfaces, passing again the simplified silhouettes

  outside hot cinemas. Summer is one-dimensional

  as lust, and boredom like a whetstone grinds a knife

  or a pen. Above the flat, starlit roofs, ambition

  is vertical. You miss the other city’s blazing towers,<
br />
  passing repeated hedges of hibiscus, allamanda, croton.

  Walk around the black summer streets like an automaton—

  midsummer sticks to your thoughts like a damp shirt.

  Your life and your work are here, both transient powers.

  In phosphorescent sludge, black schooners

  break into silver one last time, as the moon sets.

  XI

  My double, tired of morning, closes the door

  of the motel bathroom; then, wiping the steamed mirror,

  refuses to acknowledge me staring back at him.

  With the softest grunt, he stretches my throat for the function

  of scraping it clean, his dispassionate care

  like a barber’s lathering a corpse—extreme unction.

  The old ritual would have been as grim

  if the small wisps that curled there in the basin

  were not hairs but minuscular seraphim.

  He clips our mustache with a snickering scissors,

  then stops, reflecting, in midair. Certain sadnesses

  are not immense, but fatal, like the sense of sin

  while shaving. And empty cupboards where her dresses

  shone. But why flushing a faucet, its vortex

  swivelling with bits of hair, could make some men’s

  hands quietly put aside their razors,

  and sense their veins as filth floating downriver

  after the dolorous industries of sex,

  is a question swans may raise with their white necks,

  that the cockerel answers quickly, treading his hens.

  XII

  To betray philosophy is the gentle treason

  of poets, to smile at all science, scorning its instruments;

  these lines will wilt like mayflies, or termites butting

  a hotel lamp to pile in a dust heap at its pediments,

  kamikazes or Icari singed in empirical radiance,

  thoughts off-the-cuff scorched in the sight of reason.

  How profound were they, anyway, those sheeted blighters,

  the Stoics, muttering in their beards what every kid knows,

  that to everything there is a time and a season,

  that we never enter a river or the same bed twice?

  The smokeless fire of time scared Heraclitus—

  he saw this hotel lamp, midsummer, and the inner light as