Rock Harbor Read online

idea purely; and

  then of a man convinced

  he has justified

  brilliantly himself to

  himself; and then

  of the yearling that,

  haltered at

  last, remains

  still to be gentled, to be

  broken-to-ride, although

  no yearling, not a horse

  ever, and not dream.

  I turned.

  I could see,

  across the room,

  heaped there like fouled

  linen like memory like

  detritus stepped

  away from, the truth of

  —of myself: glintless,

  yes, but no

  more so for my having (how

  long?) disavowed it.

  Suggestive of sorrow,

  or the cool irreversibility that

  attaches commonly to

  larger mistakes

  of judgment—so did it

  lie there: undiminished.

  I take it, in the darkness, to my face.

  LOOSE HINGE

  Of the body: most,

  its resilience, have you

  not loved that, its—its

  endingness,

  that too?

  And the unwitting

  prayer getting made

  between them,

  as when we beat at

  what is closed,

  closed against us, and call

  the beating, in time,

  song. To have been

  among the hands

  for which the stone lets go

  its sword,

  or the tree its gold

  crepitating

  bough,

  what must that

  feel like? With what speed

  does the hero grow

  used to—necessarily—

  the world’s surrender

  until—how

  else—how call it

  strange, how

  not inevitable? Heroes,

  in this way at least, resembling

  the damned

  who are damned

  as traitors, some

  singing We could not

  help it, others

  Fate,

  Circumstance,

  X

  made me—as if

  betrayal required more than

  one party, which it

  does not.

  Admit it: you gave

  yourself away. We are

  exactly what

  we are, as you

  suspected, and—

  like that—the world

  obliging with its fair

  examples: rain and,

  under it, the yard

  an overnight field

  of mushrooms,

  the wet of them, the yellow-

  white of, the

  nothing-at-all, outside

  themselves, they

  stood for. You’ve been

  a seeming

  exception only. Hot;

  relentless. Yourself the rule.

  THE THRESHING

  A sweetness, say—

  and coming, on me. Or, in

  almost-squares,

  light dismissible at

  first as that which,

  surely— Did I

  dream that?

  Between

  what by now lies far

  behind, and what

  ahead still, gets

  forged a life that,

  whether or not I can

  recall having

  called it mine own

  —or say so

  now—will have been

  the case, notwithstanding:

  as when a smaller

  fate, this time, fumbles

  clear of one larger, flies

  free, how the usual

  questions—is this

  nature? design?

  whose?—

  alter none of the

  particulars of escape,

  of the being foiled.

  If the world is

  godless, then

  an absence I am

  always with, and

  it with me. Or

  else the world is

  stitched with gods and

  unavoidably I am

  with them,

  they with me.

  To be reduced to

  nothing, literally, but a life

  to lose; to surrender

  that, also, to those

  whispering Yes, yes,

  that also— Isn’t this

  the idea? To give, even

  full well knowing that

  they might take it,

  they might not, their

  gaze—as if by some

  city more new

  and glittering than

  the last one graced

  briefly then lifted

  out of—their gaze

  distracted.

  Point at which

  who seeks, with the

  swerveless patience that

  hunger, for a time,

  affords, shall find

  his target—stilling,

  stopped. No room

  for wanting. —Was this

  not the idea?

  The hands: as if only

  made for this—

  Should the eyes not

  be, already,

  shut,

  then you must shut them.

  THE SILVER AGE

  Naturally, the lawn fills

  in, where you

  repaired it.

  Of the two

  trees left,

  one dying,

  the parts of the tree

  across which disease gets

  laid, like a map,

  out,

  and the other parts,

  putting forth still their

  late, bright,

  October buds—berries—

  which one?

  What’s to

  stay for, in a slow

  drama whose end we know

  already?

  This morning,

  it seems impossible,

  that question, to have ever

  asked it,

  that I did not

  always recognize

  a pleasure—

  baroque,

  acquired—findable

  only inside the particular

  chord that an ever-building body

  of evidence

  makes, finally,

  with the very fact it can’t

  help but

  lead to.

  After which, though

  a bit surprised where,

  before, was hope, or

  doubt, We suspected

  as much, we say. We knew

  all along

  what the light would

  be like—

  a grazing

  weightlessness; what

  leaves, in turn;

  sprawl of the sleeper’s

  legs

  his chest

  his face

  TO BREAK, TO RIDE

  That, nightly,

  some blooms fold,

  some open; how

  the opossum at the same

  hour forages the same swatch

  of yard; and the moth,

  a shadow, all

  over again navigates

  more shadow—

  There’s a knowing born

  of conquering;

  conscious at first,

  or never, reflexive finally,

  a mastery of pattern,

  how a thing changes—

  light,

  a difference in it,

  an absence of—

  the better to mark and

  react in turn to

  when, of a sudden, pattern

  stops: where

  is danger?

  what is safe? This

  kind of knowing, it is like
/>
  a ladder. It is

  scales, in music:

  though I believe that the earth

  rotates, what I

  notice more is

  the moon appearing,

  what I’d rather

  remember is another

  story—concerns a boat,

  routine, the bearing

  away of one

  brightness, the fact

  of others,

  smaller, more of. How

  still, beside me. The difference

  between us the same as

  that between a garden

  shaped by patience,

  attention,

  plan,

  and a field to which

  an unexpected heat in late

  October brings

  now the worker bees

  confused, instinctive,

  back. If a sadness

  to it, then

  a sadness, one that

  no more lets me go than

  I let it go. It is waste,

  to worry. We shall never

  be more close than we are now.

  ENTRY

  As if an ark—

  or,

  like one, how slow …

  How it does not seem

  to leave the shore or

  want to so much as—more,

  whatever it must, already, it is

  letting go.

  On the water, a stillness that

  should not be

  so terrible. Why

  is it? What so satisfied,

  before, about distortion

  that, now, I miss it?

  There should be birds,

  sky-strung, and

  following, isn’t that what

  happens in the wake,

  at first, of a sea

  departure? To have

  ever heard such or—once

  heard—to have

  trusted in it—

  Which is worse,

  the incidental, or the more

  deliberate? How

  much of what seems

  deliberate isn’t, is

  instead unavoidably

  inherent, a fact

  of character, of the self

  no one chooses—

  incidental, therefore. The blame

  that lies always

  somewhere matters

  here—seems to—no

  more than whether I wave or don’t

  at the nothing, almost, left

  to wave at. I am

  farther, even, than I imagined,

  or hoped for, or

  against— Which?

  There should be custom,

  conduct, some

  compass fashioned out of

  rules by which to fix

  not on failure’s

  occurrence—what needs

  no marker—but on,

  of that occurrence, what degree

  exactly. Surely even a

  precision concerning

  the difficult-to-admit-to will have

  had its pleasures? The air,

  for example, heavy,

  less with blooming than with

  the thought of. A collapse

  of vision; the rise,

  accordingly, of craft—

  here,

  between the two, where neither

  one, to the other, gives

  ever itself up

  entirely, the narrowest space,

  opening:

  it shuts behind me.

  THREE

  BLUE SHOULDER

  Come here.

  See how the boughs pass

  idly over, across

  one another, return

  after, as a hand

  can do

  with what never will be

  possessed—only

  wanted, touched only—

  and then to its original position come

  less unpunished than

  untempted toward what is punishable

  back slowly.

  This is the way

  a house shakes

  in a wind—the way, in the throat,

  song does. Hear it? This is

  the kind of rain that

  so much looks like not

  stopping, we get used to it,

  an end to falling becomes

  the last thing we expected,

  and—there, an ending. I think

  pleasure is like that, or

  can be, I think

  you are.

  The snow,

  what remains of it, slides

  melted, free from an earlier

  stranding-place among

  storm-stunted rhododendrons—

  the leaves in turn find

  again the pose of here-no-there

  remembering,

  or asking,

  what did a snowlessness

  once resemble? To ask as much

  maybe should not

  be to open, however

  narrow, a door

  on suffering—I think it can be. If you

  will not stay, go now.

  SPOKEN PART, FOR COUNTERTENOR VOICE

  I. Carolina Window

  Through the glass, spillage—

  no longer half-explaining

  the story—becomes the story:

  limb tree thicket

  until, further, the wooded miles.

  A field of view, which is to say

  finite. Making what is

  continuous and whole

  seem discrete, divisible, as

  if to the material world and our

  vision of it could be assigned

  the same properties, which

  is impossible—a variety, at

  best, of hoping. Not hope itself.

  II. Window, Graham Chapel

  Against the figured pane

  the hours lean, almost—

  time a ghost, granted only

  part of its wish: substance, but

  without visibility. —Color, or

  the light, angling shine,

  something gives to the face

  of Christ the look of one who

  understands, like never before,

  damage as the song with which

  the sleeve of God comes lined.

  Necessity to shadow, as any

  wind to the branch inside it.

  There’s a flaw in the glass.

  ROCK HARBOR

  The wind was high—it gave to your

  hair a lift in equal parts gradual,

  steep, disarming—

  I love a storm,

  and said so; by I have always

  loved better the wreckage after,

  I did not mean instead of, but

  a preference.

  To the air, an edge

  anyone would call arctic—isn’t

  that why we left it nameless? To

  your face, a look I’d admired before

  in the bodies of those who seem

  not so much indifferent as made

  ignorant, or stunned as if by

  sudden luck, or else repentant and

  in payment, somehow, for what

  all price falls like an irrelevance,

  a stole, an expensive sail in a

  calm away from. Sex

  as a space available where neither

  loss nor regret figures—imagine

  that.

  Or not having, finally, to take

  anything away—in the form of

  photographs of the mostly ice

  that the harbor’s water, the shore

  past that, the street after had

  become; or as words like those

  that came to me: green, kind of,

  lit almost, but as if from within

  in places, a spill but

  an arrested one, less force than

  the idea of it, block and edge like

  the chance for pattern, but


  spent now or only, from the very

  start, false

  —false and singing.

  The wind was high; it exaggerated

  what you were already, a man

  returning toward shelter he can’t

  see yet, but believes just ahead

  exists, the sort of man for whom

  to doubt at all is treason. By

  not unfaithful, I understood I

  could mean both things: I’d do

  nothing I’d promised not to—

  Also, there is nothing I’ll forget.

  FOUR

  TRADE

  Bending—as no

  flower bends—

  casting the difficult rule

  of his attention upon an elsewhere

  that accordingly broke open

  into a splendor that, too,

  would pass,

  I am resigned,

  mostly,

  said the emperor,

  to a history between us less of loss than,

  more protractedly, of losing—

  and, having said as much, said

  nothing else to the man to

  whom he’d said it;

  whom, for years now, he’d called

  variously paramour,

  consort,

  sir; who, for

  himself, said nothing;

  who from where he was seated could

  see, and easily,

  each at its labeled and color-coded slip

  moored slackly,

  the bows of the ships of the Fleet

  Imperial, about which

  what he found, just

  then, most worth admiring it

  is impossible, anymore, to

  say exactly:

  the trim of them,

  flawless, sleek—reminiscent, in

  that way, of almost any line from Ovid; or

  when there was wind,

  how the bows tipped,

  idly,

  in it;

  or the stillness, afterwards,

  that they found; or the way they seemed to.

  TO THE TUNE OF A SMALL, REPEATABLE, AND PASSING KINDNESS

  In the cove of hours-like-a-dream this

  is, it isn’t so much

  that we don’t enjoy watching

  a view alter rather little, and each time

  in the same shift-of-a-cloud

  fashion. It’s the

  swiftness with which we

  find it easier, as our cast

  lines catch more and more at nothing,

  to lose heart—

  All afternoon, it’s

  been with the fish as with

  lovers we’d come to think of as

  mostly forgotten, how

  anymore they less often themselves

  surface than sometimes

  will the thought of them—less

  often, even, than that, their names …

  But now the fish bring to mind

  —of those lovers—

  the ones in particular

  who were knowable

  only in the way a letter written

  in code that resists

  being broken fully can be