Soon After Rain Page 2
its molten waves slapping me.
The wash of heat then drowning me,
all I could do was hope
that, falling asleep, I’d drop
below my shivering agony—
this turn of the world would maul me
and I’d blindly collapse unless I found
some way to seize a notion of heat
to warm myself illusorily, to beat
this cold that drills through skin and bone.
II.
Dark Drifting Clouds
The air both heavy and still, a drift
of clouds came darkly in today.
The look of things threatening, though no clouds formed.
I stayed on point. I’ve watched tornadoes form.
I’ve seen quick lightning strikes. I’ve seen thick walls
of rain come down and fly sideways, the drive
of wind so hard I wondered what would break:
big limbs, electric lines, home walls, or what?
A wildness in the air can undo all.
Nineveh on Five Again
Nineveh, called Mosul now, is on fire again,
and day and night its skies are aflame again.
The worldly people I knew there were kind,
but shocks from bombs have jolted them again.
Mosques and churches have exploded then sunk
back into clay, back into sand again.
The place has been attacked and torched before,
but scourges keep assaulting it, again and again.
The clouds the explosions make seem abstract when
we mute, as we do, the bombs’ noises again.
Buds, lore said long ago, burst into bloom
in the sky when rockets explode again and again.
But few plants bloom in this sky, and few survive
the war today — ashes blow about again.
Exiled from what once seemed so much like home,
I’m back again — I’m in my home again.
But part of me is still where Jonah went:
that great city where he heard God again.
The people there, and the king, repented then,
though Jonah turned sullen and angry again.
When I was there, the wind was high and hot —
of course, I thought that I was home again.
There was no need in me for sullenness:
Jonah and I had parted ways again.
The Changing Clouds
All day the clouds appeared then disappeared,
with restless sky becoming blue again,
then turning dark again, as if sky had
been bruised — but bruised, I have to ask, by what?
A darkness staining air now gave it weight,
a weight that brought a strain to back and neck
that night. All night, it seemed, the thunder rolled,
the forks of lightning striking roofs and trees.
But in the morning nothing seemed the least
bit scorched. Had lightning been then nothing more
than dream, a passing fantasy that kept
alive somehow an air of mystery,
a deep impression of a battered world?
Or was that battered world a fictive thing?
A Clown Show in the Sky
That hawk awhile ago was floating high
upon a current waving through the air
then suddenly its flight turned restless when
a scissortail took perch upon its neck
and started pecking at its shifting skull
to gather in a good fresh meal of lice.
The hawk’s now flying desperately to rid
itself of this head-pecking passenger —
but clownlike, birds know how to play the wind,
no matter if the wind or hawk begins
to twist or dive or tilt or roll to shake
the nuisance off — those efforts all will fail.
I’ve seen these scissortails ride winds in ways
that look as if they’re climbing walls,
as if they’ve rearranged the wind so they
can hang in air — they’re conjurers that like
to ride bare-backed the backs of birds like this:
the talon-beaked, cold-eyed and fang-clawed hawk.
God made these big-winged birds, the smaller bird
suggests, to be fine toys for those of us
who love to ride the air on backs and necks
and heads of dangerous things like raptor birds
whose reputation for ferocity
is such a sweetly entertaining thing.
A Dimness in the Air
I like the way vast clouds obscure
the sky and stir cool breezes free.
I like the way a dimness in
the air can calmly settle me
and while that happens stir me free
from knotlike twists of blinding thought —
the world so often shadow-rich
that blindness might see more than sight.
I like the heights of temple roofs
that lift my gaze toward blinding glares
that make me wince and turn away,
the light too bright for open eyes,
but steeples are instructive things —
they help to make past present now —
the urge to see so much like sight
itself I see to see what sees.
I also like the fact of crypts
that lie below the praying place
because they turn my thoughts toward home,
toward sky, back to the living past
where hymns I’ve sung now sound in me,
and finding voice again they sound
the depths in me that I don’t see
until closed eyes bring shadows near.
Low Clouds Dark
Dark clouds hang low today. The wind
was high all night: the curtains slapped
the walls, doors banged against their frames:
a restless night, one full of noise.
The sounds
kept jolting me out of a deep
and sudden-coming sleep until
the summer morning came, the light
a low dim wave. The wind had died,
but gusts of new wind came, the light
still dim,
the sky still overcast, but no
rain fell, no thunder and no sheets
of lightning in the sky — clouds low,
a restless air about, inside
and out.
The Rhythms of Rain
An icy wind drove rain and hail
aslant — sleet too swept hard
across the parking lot
as waves of all three battered me.
I wasn’t caught — I’d run by choice
straight for my car.
I have no urge to wait storms out —
it’s never bothered me
to run within big winds.
But now the air is still, and rain
is falling softly now.
The hail and sleet have stopped.
Forked lightning, though, has not,
and thunder says the lightning’s close.
It might well be this storm’s not done.
Walking Where Nineveh Was
Late one morning as the searing heat rose —
our countries still friends then — I walked
to Nineveh’s ruins, to the beer barley field
that covered them then: so little excavated —
a ragged exposure of the ancient wall
and a courtyard with a fire-scorched floor —
but in view on a hill near Mosul’s new edge
stood Jonah’s Mosque — its tower and walls
clay-red and old. It stood like a citadel.
A thistle-clotted ditch ran like a moat
around the weedy, bermlike wall.
This was where
Jonah had come. This
was where new friends of mine would die,
though we did not know that then — none
of us talking about that ambiguous gift
called amor fati. The sun was blistering me,
and the Tigris, like the Danube, had run red,
but the river was green then, and cold.
Would Kurds try to take their region back?
How long would the ghosts of Assyrians ride
these wind-blasted plains? How many more
tyrants would rule the way they wanted to?
How many more would grease the language slick
to shift the shapes of speech, to divert us all
from the agonies of futureless lives?
My legs heavy and the noon heat dizzying,
I turned away from the smothered ruins
of this ancient site. I had a long walk left
before I was back in my room, the place itself
passing for home: this land was marking me.
The river’s new course now below me, this place
had been huge when great cities were few.
Beyond the Town
Near the mountain’s base
the stream’s so cold
its shock numbs you,
but don’t walk through it.
There’s a bridge ahead,
a large pine trunk
above the stream that leads
back into the forest.
The slope’s rise is steep
but if you stay with it
you’ll emerge at timberline
and a high rock wall.
Short of breath, keep on.
Slant your trek upward.
Summits measure us
more than we measure them.
A music takes shape
when you crunch through snow.
As long as you walk
you’ll be able to hear it.
Chills
A chill has settled in.
I don’t want to be outside.
My bones still feel brittle
from just awhile ago
when I went out to wheel
the trash bin to the street.
Bone-bites assaulting me,
I could not stop shivering.
I could not get warm.
I can’t stop shivering now.
This shaking’s miserable.
I want to curl asleep,
to squeeze tightly asleep,
and let a weight of covers
press this cold away.
A Contradictory Brightness
The winter moon so bright
I had to turn away
or else I’d find my eyes were scorched,
and they’d been scorched before.
The night’s cold flash of light
had stunned me.
Although the moon-bleached sky
seemed still, and night here breathless,
no star blinked and no breeze stirred.
The Spears of Zeus
The fires in the air seem a world away,
except for the presence of shifting light
casting shimmers upon the slate-gray sky,
the night turning into an ocean storm,
and earth itself an undulant mound
receptive to powers now in the air,
lightning insisting that earth’s thighs spread,
lightning a plow forking between them
into the earth’s ripe flesh —
a wind-waved meadow now on fire.
III.
Sky Over Knossos
1
Myceneans weren’t threatening me
as they had the Minoans,
but because I’d been thrown back on self
by phantoms I wasn’t yet sure were real,
I was probably poor company in Knossos,
that femininely powerful place
whose huge amphoras and horned parapets
sang sweet worlds through labyrinthine rooms.
Burning off clouds, spring’s sun
helped keep my demons at bay.
Then leaving that place I went to a place
where thousands of years ago
ships had stopped to trade —
the ghosts of their keels
still grooved the stone —
and nearby was a bay
where Paul had docked near anchorites’ caves.
People still picnicked there
and day and night made love there —
and exploring those rooms myself,
I found the rhythms of a distant past
suited me better than the recent past —
the sun that day was scorching me.
2
Gods had been born in the hills near there.
Daedalus had built his plane near there,
and a freak of a beast once frightened the place,
and large-breasted women danced
and, leaping, front-flipped over bulls,
and olive oil softened skin, seasoned pots,
and wine freed talk into song,
and sky and land remained mates
in ways my own world had not.
This was the place that for years
had needed no fortification.
This was the place that burned away grief,
and though the soil was rocky and thin
crops came in each year — gods lived in the air,
and for a time, cave and bay and sky were mine
Odysseus Sowing Salt
1
So naked he went to the field one day.
He knew how wrong the world could be, how dumb
the Atreid brothers were, how bad blood stained
the beach and sea, how wasted time would be
if he were separate from Penelope.
He did not care that foreign battles might
give him the illusion of being a god —
he had no taste for this new war, and if
a sorry man has trouble keeping his
wild wife at home, as Menelaos did,
too bad, but don’t expect someone like me
with no complaint about the way things are
at home, he said, to pull up stakes and leave.
The rules of hospitality, I know,
are clear: a good guest does not run away
with his host’s wife — but if one does I’m not
responsible for that man’s misery.
Why should a man like me, one happy with
his own good wife, turn up his heels and run
away to help avenge a fool’s bad luck?
Unwelcome sight, he saw the Spartan boats
and, feigning madness, grabbed a sack of salt
and, butt bare, ran into an untilled field.
His spies who read the winds had told him who
was coming after him to take his troops
and ships to rescue Helen and sack Troy.
If they think that I’m mad, he’d told his wife,
they’ll go away, leave you and me alone.
They’ll surely leave a crazy man at home.
So confident, he sang and cast handsful
of salt out over rock and dirt, but when
the Atreid brothers came, they sulled then laughed.
Thick-voiced, they aped what their advisors said.
They said his bent toward trickery was so
well known — this damn salt farm was just a stunt,
another selfish ruse — he’ll do just fine.
So off he went with them. His navy led
the way into the pitching swells of waves,
and having learned how long ago to love
his fate, he did not grieve for home for long,
though only now Athena knew how much
the sea would come to hate this man and toss
his fleet like fired clay pots against harsh rock
and into soundless, blinding
depths of sea.
2
Then turning down the chance to be a god,
he found his way back home, though he’d
been gone from wife and son for twenty years.
And well-disguised, he found Penelope
had been as wily as he’d been, but that
was not odd news — sometimes truth was a toy.
They’d both known that, and both enjoyed the fact.
So back home now, but still disguised — he looked
so frail — a hunchback wobble-footed, scab-skinned
old man whose rheumy eyes could pierce a rock.
He watched the rank, freeloading crew as they
all failed to string his bow. So none was man
enough, their weakness showed, to have the queen.
Then shuffling feebly to the front as if
he were a weak and halt decrepit man,
Odysseus strung the bow the leechlike men
could not begin to string. A gasp then hushed
the place, and he then cleared the place of trash,
his son a warrior standing with him now.
Then shedding years, the sham of years, he and
Penelope went to their bed that night,
and soon they both were full of hearty laughs
when she recalled his salt-crop stunt, and I,
she said, I had to sing when I recalled
that time, the way you looked that day, mad-eyed,
your hair a studied fright, and body bare
when you pranced out into the field to sow
your salt, your bumper crop of salt, to try
to trick that idiotic, now-dead crew
who’d conjured up a war to get that air-
head Helen back, as if when caught she’d swoon,
so glad to be back with that stump she’d left.
And as her voice trailed off, she nestled up
against Odysseus’ chest and closed her eyes.
And God was kind to them. God slowed the world
that night and gave the two a longer night
than they might otherwise have had that night.
Seasickness
Soon after we set sail from Crete to Santorini
the sea began heaving our boat toward horror,
throwing my guts and the guts of the 300
with us into weak-legged delirium —
no one well enough to care that, desperate and weak,
we’d have no Philip of Macedon come by