If I Were Fernando Pessoa
I would stare at you like lava down a mountain, steady and without
cease, but silent, keeping the secrets, until I could get home and conjure
the man who might love you—
I would create myself as a guitarist who would make music like
the morning light melodic arpeggios of birdsong—
I would dance with you in our garden to that music, both of us
in lust and anonymous—
I would insist my love spawn and grow like a rain forest all around
you, vines entwining your legs, leaves making shade while the vapors
steamed from the ground and the humus crumbled into ever more
soil, yet you would never know that it was me—
I would send a serpent slithering through that jungle and into your
dreams, and you would startle awake and walk to your employment,
stopping to buy a coffee from me, the shy barista—
he would ask you out and become your love, and take you to live in Buenos
Aires, Barcelona, Marseille, Milan, Mexico City, where we would take up with
the writers and smoke, pretending we were elsewhere—
I would wake you in the middle of the night and tell you glorious stories
of my legendary friend Ricardo, the croupier, and my life as a sailor, and
again and again and again, how you, my love, are timeless and more
beautiful than any woman I met in Minoa or Constantinople—
or I would pass nights in darkness, you holding me in comfort as I hid
from the chatter of my other selves—
I would tell you my name—the one my mother gave me, or at least the one
that I thought I remembered—
I would say all this, in Portuguese, in Latin, in French, in Spanish, and it would
be a poem of which I would not be ashamed, because I would be Pessoa, several
of the greatest poets who have ever lived, and the men any woman, especially you,
would love—
we would go dancing, each of me whirling and stomping fandango, fado, every so
often my left arms around your waist and our right hands clenched and extended in
the gentlest hint of tango, as we told you how we had gathered our selves into one,
a carefully curated bouquet of desire that you could clutch to your chest as you
enjoyed a standing ovation from the crowded proscenium of my love …
1968
Five years since I sat in my father’s sad
tensed lap while the black and white
rites for the President cast a shadow
through a vast and sinister November
night
through our tiny flickering Philco
(the widow’s black gloves, dress, and netted
veil shot straight through with static)
Five years after that I devoted myself to drinking
so much bottled Fanta and cans of Nehi
that my tongue bloomed the orange-pink
of the hide of a Sendak carnivore
that woodland creature who threatened to devour
the child whole
So I became a scout, and mastered the privacy
of the lurking dark until the night of the lacerating spring
killing of King. And that summer I spent my nights
in secret,
inhaling Smokey and Aretha, that helpless poetry, praying
love or sex would be the balm that kept me afloat
while I swam and survived days full of words—Tet, Bobby, Grant
Park—that I did not comprehend yet heard
without end
Then, that sunlit autumn there was a child
down by the Fox, skipping river rocks, singing
one love song or another, wondering
where all that water would be in a week, tomorrow,
or fifty years
This was before you were born, and that
boy was me, rendering with a boyish falsetto
his dirge for a world that he knew
was already beyond him—
saying a little prayer,
and waiting for you—
Against Facebook
I have no desire to reconnect
with Bobby from wood shop, wanting
to sell me insurance
or sparkplugs—
nor Sheldon, strangely full of latter-day
remorse for stealing Kind of Blue
and Hotel California from my dorm
room at Colby—
I do not wish to be found by Wendy, yearning
to recapture (what I admit I may have felt
as well) a moment of electricity
between us at the company picnic
that year when we both were assigned
to Carol Stream.
I prefer to be alone, dreaming of a software
much grander and infinitely more useful—
a platform that would not link, but
launch—a catapult to propel me from cyberspace
into space-time:
an American flight from Dallas to Salt Lake,
August 2008, and the elaborately coiffed
attendant who noticed me reading Praise
and who with her arm
across the seatback leaned into me
and recited from memory
the poem on page 27.
I need an algorithm that will calculate
and create the astronomic telemetry
from here to Francine Jackson,
the high school beauty I loved as a freshman: she
was so far and so strangely
above me she may as well have been
a constellation. Zuckerberg, build something
useful, something
that gives me back that evening on Lighthouse
Beach the year I lived in Evanston, Aphrodite
herself stroking the thick ruff of her retriever
as she looked
up and smiled with so much heat and kindness
that I kept walking, stunned, thinking
then and most days since,
what if—
Marriage
In bed, naked and after,
reading, silently, annotated
copies of the same book.
Arkhê Kakôn
The Greeks knew things happen:
to the man working on his tractor
who lifts his head to find
his brother-in-law standing there,
hands clasped, speechless—
to the woman who wakes from dreamless
sleep in a fluorescent room without
windows to find she is no longer
considered legally sane—
to the disaster-wracked, freshly homeless
voices on the radio, the grainy
litany of their lives, a song
of “never the same”—
*
We recognize the symbols:
in the sirens’ pierce, the blue light
painting the night, flags folded
into tight isosceles, flowers
strewn on newly pregnant graves,
rosaries stroked in lieu
of the beloved’s hand—
at the ocean’s ebb or edge, a man
on television stares past the camera
and says, “sometimes you ain’t lucky
enough to get killed.”
*
So we invoke the patience of Job,
who argued with the sky—
and Akhmatova and her woman without a face
who knew that there is always something left
to lose, a grief beyond description—
except for the lean of a lone tree along
a ridge, or the silent, roof-torn
torched car along the road, or the man
in a black suit, inching from a taxi—
the moment when pain becomes
memory: one remembers to remember
those they cannot forget, to let
them go wherever
it is they must go, and wait.
