Midsummer Read online

  remains. Earlier and earlier the brownstones darken.

  Now the islands feel farther than something out of the Georgics.

  Maple and elm close in. But palms require translation,

  and their long lines stiffen with dead characters.

  Vergilian Brookline! By five, then four, the sun sets;

  the lines of passengers at each trolley station,

  waiting to go underground, have the faces of actors

  when a play must close. Or yours, looking up from a desk,

  from a play you hadn’t reread for several years.

  The look on the face of the sea when the day is finished,

  or the seats in an empty theater, each one with its reasons

  for what went wrong. They didn’t know your language,

  the characters were simple, there was no change of seasons

  or sets. There was too much poetry. It was the wrong age.

  XXXIX

  The gray English road hissed emptily under the tires

  since the woods still drizzled. The sound was like foam

  mixed with island rain, but the rain was Berkshire’s.

  He said a white hare would startle itself like a tuft

  on the road’s bare scalp. But, wherever it came from,

  the old word “hare” shivered like “weald” or “croft”

  or the peeled white trunk with a wound in “atheling.”

  I hated fables. The wheezing beeches were fables,

  and the wild, wet mustard. As for the mist, gathering

  from the mulch of black leaves in which the hare hid

  in clenched concentration—muttering prayers, bead-eyed,

  haunch-deep in nettles—the sooner it disappeared

  the better. Something branched in that countryside

  losing ground to the mist, its old roads brown as blood.

  The white hare had all of England on which to brood

  with its curled paws—from the age of skins and woad,

  from Saxon settlements fenced with stakes, and thick

  fires of peat smoke, down to thin country traffic.

  He turned on the fog lights. It was on this road,

  on this ridge of earth long since swept bare

  of his mud prints, that my bastard ancestor swayed

  transfixed by the trembling, trembling thing that stood

  its ground, ears pronged, nibbling him into a hare.

  XL

  Mist soaps the motel room’s window vigorously

  every half hour. On tour, in this small town,

  I feel like a drummer selling colored poetry

  in samples bright as autumn, wondering if I sound

  as if my voice were flattering the flag

  with differences worse than a different R.

  Through the cleaned glass I watch a sparrow perch

  on a black branch with a tattered crimson fringe

  on some tree I can’t name, though I am sure

  Sparrow could sing it like a citizen;

  that sassy tilt knows where the answers are.

  Like palms outlined against the hill’s oasis,

  the furniture yields to the evening.

  Between the V made by your parted socks,

  stare at the charred cave of the television.

  Before its firelit image flickers on

  your forehead like the first Neanderthal

  to spend a whole life lifting nouns like rocks,

  turn to the window. On a light-angled wall,

  through the clear, soundless pane, one sees a speech

  that calls to us, but is beyond our powers,

  composed of O’s from a reflected bridge,

  the language of white, ponderous clouds convening

  over aerials, spires, rooftops, water towers.

  XLI

  The camps hold their distance—brown chestnuts and gray smoke

  that coils like barbed wire. The profit in guilt continues.

  Brown pigeons goose-step, squirrels pile up acorns like little

  shoes,

  and moss, voiceless as smoke, hushes the peeled bodies

  like abandoned kindling. In the clear pools, fat

  trout rising to lures bubble in umlauts.

  Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that

  the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen,

  that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse.

  Now I see her in autumn on that pine bench where she sits,

  their nut-brown ideal, in gold plaits and lederhosen,

  the blood drops of poppies embroidered on her white bodice,

  the spirit of autumn to every Hans and Fritz

  whose gaze raked the stubble fields when the smoky cries

  of rooks were nearly human. They placed their cause in

  her cornsilk crown, her cornflower iris,

  winnower of chaff for whom the swastikas flash

  in skeletal harvests. But had I known then

  that the fronds of my island were harrows, its sand the ash

  of the distant camps, would I have broken my pen

  because this century’s pastorals were being written

  by the chimneys of Dachau, of Auschwitz, of Sachsenhausen?

  XLII

  Chicago’s avenues, as white as Poland.

  A blizzard of heavenly coke hushes the ghettos.

  The scratched sky flickers like a TV set.

  Down Michigan Avenue, slow as the glacial prose

  of historians, my taxi crawls. The stalled cars are as frozen

  as the faces of cloaked queues on a Warsaw street,

  or the hands of black derelicts flexing over a fire-

  barrel under the El; above, the punctured sky

  is needled by rockets that keep both Empires high.

  It will be both ice and fire. In the sibyl’s crystal

  the globe is shaken with ash, with a child’s frisson.

  It’ll be like this. A bird cry will sound like a pistol

  down the avenues. Cars like dead horses, their muzzles

  foaming with ice. From the cab’s dashboard, a tinny

  dispatcher’s voice warns of more snow. A picture

  lights up the set—first, indecipherable puzzles;

  then, in plain black and white, a snow slope with pines

  as shaggy as the manes of barbarian ponies;

  then, a Mongol in yak’s skin, teeth broken as dice,

  grinning at the needles of the silent cities

  of the plains below him up in the Himalayas,

  who slaps the snow from his sides and turns away as,

  in lance-like birches, the horde’s ponies whinny.

  XLIII

  Tropic Zone / i

  A white dory, face down, its rusted keel staining

  the hull, bleeds under the dawn leaves of an almond.

  Vines grip the seawall and drop like olive-green infantry

  over from Cuba. This is my ocean, but it is speaking

  another language, since its accent changes around

  different islands. The wind is up early, campaigning

  with the leaflets of seagulls, but from the balcony

  of the guesthouse, I resist the return

  of this brightening noun whose lines must be translated

  into “el mar” or “la mar,” and death itself to “la muerte.”

  A rusty sparrow alights on a rustier rain gauge

  in the front garden, but every squeak addresses

  me in testy Spanish. “Change to a light shirt. A

  walk on our beach should teach you our S’s

  as the surf says them. You’ll recognize hovels,

  rotting fishnets. Also why a white dory was shot

  for being a gringo.” I go back upstairs,

  for so much here is the Empire envied and hated

  that whether one chooses to say “ven-thes” or “ven-ces”

  inv
olves the class struggle as well. So, be discreet.

  Changed to a light shirt, I walk out to Cervantes Street.

  Shadow-barred. A water sprinkler or a tank approaches.

  The corners are empty. The boulevards open like novels

  waiting to be written. Clouds like the beginnings of stories.

  ii

  The sun is wholly up now; things are white or green:

  clouds, hills, walls, leaves on the walls, and their shadows;

  dew turns into dust on the quiet municipal cedars.

  The sprinkler rolls past as “the wrong done to our fathers”

  weeps along empty streets, down serene avenidas

  named after stone poets, but the sprinkling only grows

  traffic. When noon strikes the present-arms pose

  of sentries in boxes before the Palace of Governors,

  history will pierce your memory like a migraine;

  but however their flame trees catch, the green winds smell

  lime-scented,

  the indigo hills lie anchored in seas of cane

  as deep as my island’s, I know I would feel disoriented

  in Oriente, my tongue dried to a coral stone.

  Along white-walled, palm-splashed Condado, the breeze smells

  of a dialect so strong it is not disinfected

  by the exhausts of limousines idling outside the hotels,

  while, far out, unheard, the grinding reef of the Morro

  spits out like corals the indigestible sorrow

  of the Indian, bits for the National Museum.

  Blue skies convert all genocide into fiction,

  but a man, drawn to the seawall, crouches like a question

  or a prayer, and my own prayer is to write

  lines as mindless as the ocean’s of linear time,

  since time is the first province of Caesar’s jurisdiction.

  iii

  Above hot tin billboards, above Hostería del Mar,

  wherever the Empire has raised the standard of living

  by blinding high rises, gestures are made to the culture

  of a remorseful past, whose artists must stay unforgiving

  even when commissioned. If the white architectural mode is

  International Modern, the décor must be the Creole’s,

  so, in a terra-cotta lobby with palms, a local jingle

  gurgles of a new cerveza, frost-crusted and golden,

  right next to a mural that has nationalized Eden

  in vehement acrylics, and this universal theme

  sees the golden beer, the gold mines, “the gold of their bodies”

  as one, and our two tropics as erogenous zones.

  A necklace of emerald islands is fringed with lace

  starched as the ruffles of Isabella’s bodice,

  now the white-breasted Niña and Pinta and Santa María

  bring the phalli of lances penetrating a jungle

  whose vines spread apart to a parrot’s primal scream.

  Then, shy as the ferns their hands are bending, stare

  fig-nippled maidens with faces calm as stones,

  and, as is the case with so many revolutions,

  the visitor doubts the murals and trusts the beer.

  iv

  Noon empties balconies, but the arched eyebrows

  of the plaza are not amazed at the continuum—

  a fly drilling holes in a snoring peon’s face,

  the arched shade of patios humming with audible heat,

  and long-fingered shadows retracting to a fist.

  The statue’s sword arm is tired, he’d like to dismount

  from his leaf-green stallion and curl up in the shade

  with the rest of his country. And that’s how it was

  in the old scenarios, a backdrop for the hectic

  conscience of the gringo with his Wasp’s rage at tedium,

  but now in the banana republics, whose bunches of recruits

  look green in fatigues, techniques of camouflage

  have taught the skill of slitting stomachs like fruits,

  and a red star without a sickle is stitched to a flag.

  Now the women who were folded over wrought-iron

  balconies like bedsteads, their black manes hanging down,

  are not whores with roses but dolls broken in half.

  On a wall a bleeding VIVA! hieroglyphs speeches

  that lasted four hours in marathon dialectic.

  Sand-colored mongrels prowl round a young Antigone,

  her face flat as an axe of pre-Columbian stone.

  At the movies, I still love it when gap-toothed bandidos laugh

  in growling pidgin, then grin at the sudden contradiction

  of roses stitching their guts. In colonial fiction

  evil remains comic and only achieves importance

  when the gringo crosses the plaza, flayed by the shadows of fronds.

  v

  “Wherever a thought can go back seventy years

  there is hope for tradition in these tropical zones.”

  The old men mutter in white suits, elbows twitching like pigeons

  on their canes, under the dusty leaves of the almonds

  that grant them asylum from paths ruined by bicycles,

  from machines with umbrellas dispensing franks and cones.

  Their revolution is that things come in circles.

  The socialists do not appreciate that.

  But old almonds do, and there is appreciation

  in the tilt of a cannon’s chin to the horizon,

  and applause from the seawall when a crash of lace

  is like that moment of flamenco, Ah, mi corazón,

  that moment of flamenco when the dancer’s

  heels rattled like gunfire and, above her tilted comb, her

  clapping hands were like midnight on a clock!

  For each old man, in his white panama hat,

  there is no ideology in the light: this one

  shakes his cane like a question without answers,

  that one riddles the militia with his smiles,

  another one leans backward in a coma

  of silence—when lilies opened like Victrola horns,

  when dusk spread feathers like a fighting cock,

  and down the Sunday promenade for miles

  the Civil Guard kept playing “La Paloma”

  and gulls, like doves, waltzed to the gusting lace

  and everyone wore white and there was grace.

  vi

  You’ve forgotten the heat. It could burn from a zinc fence.

  Not even the palms on the seafront quietly stir.

  The Empire sneers at all thoughts in the future tense.

  Only the shallows of this inland ocean mutter

  lines from another sea, which this one resembles—

  myths of analogous islands of olive and myrtle,

  the dream of the drowsing Gulf. Although her temples,

  white blocks against green, are hotels, and her stoas

  shopping malls, in time they will make good ruins;

  so what if the hand of the Empire is as slow as

  a turtle signing the surf when it comes to treaties?

  Genius will come to contradict history,

  and that’s there in their brown bodies, in the olives of eyes,

  as when the pimps of demotic Athens threaded the chaos

  of Asia, and girls from the stick villages, henna-whores,

  were the hetaerae. The afternoon tide ebbs, and the stench

  of further empires—rising from berries that fringe

  the hems of tyrants and beaches—reaches a bench

  where clouds descend their steps like senates passing,

  no different from when, under leaves of rattling myrtle,

  they shared one shade, the poet and the assassin.

  vii

  Imagine, where sand is now, the crawling lava

  of military co
ncrete. Sprinkle every avenue with the gray

  tears of the people’s will. Tyranny brings over

  its colonies this disorientation of weather. A new ogre

  erects his bronzes over the parks, though the senate

  of swallows still arranges itself on benches

  for the usual agenda, and three men can still argue

  under a changed street sign, but the streets are emptier

  and the mouth dry. Imagine the fading hysteria

  of peeling advertisements, and note how all the graffiti agree

  with the government. You might say, Yes, but here are

  mountains,

  park benches, working fountains, a brass band on Sundays,

  here the baker still gives a special twist to the end

  of his father’s craft, until one morning you notice

  that the three men talk softly, that mothers call

  from identical windows for their children to come home,

  that the smallest pamphlet is stamped with a single star.

  The days feel longer, people resemble their cars

  that are gray as their uniforms. In the millennium,

  most men, at night, sleep with their eyes to the wall.

  viii

  If you were here, in this white room, in this hotel

  whose hinges stay hot, even in the wind off the sea,

  you would sprawl, knocked out by la hora de siesta;

  you couldn’t rise for the resurrection bell,

  or the sea’s gong ringing with silver, you’d stay down.

  If you were touched, you’d only change that gesture

  to a runner’s in that somnambulist’s marathon.

  And I’d let you sleep. Things topple gradually

  when the alarm clock, with its conductor’s baton,

  begins at one: the cattle fold their knees;

  in the quiet pastures, only a mare’s tail switches,

  feather-dusting flies, drunk melons roll into ditches,

  and gnats keep spiralling to their paradise.

  Now the first gardener, under the tree of knowledge,

  forgets that he’s Adam. In the ribbed air

  each patch of shade dilates like an oasis

  to the tired butterfly, a green lagoon for anchor.

  Down the white beach, calm as a forehead