Wild Is the Wind Read online

  rising. Blood’s what the wound keeps gushing.

  WHAT I SEE IS THE LIGHT FALLING ALL AROUND US

  To have understood some small piece of the world

  more deeply doesn’t have to mean we’re not as lost

  as before, or so it seems this morning, random bees

  stirring among the dogwood blossoms, a few here

  and there stirring differently somehow, more like

  resisting stillness … Should it come to winnowing

  my addictions, I’d hold on hardest, I’m pretty sure,

  to mystery, though just yesterday, a perfect stranger

  was so insistent that I looked familiar, it seemed

  easier in the end to agree we must know each other.

  To his body, a muscularity both at odds and at one

  with how fragile everything else about him, I thought,

  would be, if I could see inside. What’s the word

  for the kind of loneliness that can feel like swimming

  unassisted in a foreign language, for the very first time?

  BLACK AND COPPER IN A CRUSH OF FLOWERS

  Weapons thrown aside, despite

  duty; smell of sorrow recalling mostly the sea,

  even many years inland; lions devouring, right in

  front of you, your best horse: everything’s

  somebody’s history. Once, beside a windbreak of pines

  and holly trees, I was told to forget having heard

  what I was pretty sure

  I’d just heard, he said, looking

  through a window in whose reflection I carefully

  watched myself undressing, not being looked at, and

  not minding especially, though Yeah and meanwhile

  all of it amounting to what now exactly, mister, I

  wanted to say, but—

  who says that? Rampant: that’s

  what they call a lion when shown standing on its hind

  legs in heraldry, heraldry as in symbols like crowns,

  double roses, severed hands with lace cuffs arranged

  so, across a breastplate, a shield, letterhead, affectation

  born from a pride that’s, by now,

  also history. Who can

  say what’s true in the end? Other than the flexed

  claws of it, extending outward from inside the body—

  and those parts, accordingly, where indifference flourishes

  going hushed, a moment—I hardly know what

  the truth’s for, really. If I’m frightened, shouldn’t I be.

  All my life, I’ve stowed what I loved most

  safe away.

  IF YOU GO AWAY

  When death finds me, if there be sight

  at all, let me see as the torn

  coyote does, turning its head

  briefly, looking not with understanding but

  recognition at where the flesh falls open around

  a wound that more resembles

  the marsh violet’s petals, that hard-to-

  detect-at-first darkening that happens—soft,

  steadily—toward the flower’s throat. Why not

  let go of it, I used to think, meaning that

  instinct by which the body shields itself

  from what threatens it unexpectedly—a fist,

  the next so-called unbearable

  question that’s bearable after all, voilà,

  surprise … I know death’s

  an abstraction, but I prefer

  a shape to things, though the shapes

  are changeable. In my latest version,

  death is a young man with a habit for using

  one side of his mouth to blow his hair slightly

  up from his brow, while with the other half he

  mutters things like Each time I leave,

  it’s like I’ve left forever. Behind him,

  stray cabbage moths lifting up from

  the catalpa’s blossoms make it seem as if

  one bloom had flown free

  from the others, fluttering mirror from a clutch

  of still ones. There’s a kind of love that

  doesn’t extend itself both ways

  between two people equally because it doesn’t have to.

  WHAT THE LOST ARE FOR

  Here, before these shadows that,

  in their disappearing, returning,

  then falling as softly again

  elsewhere, have sometimes

  seemed the first and last lesson

  left on the nature of power, though

  they are not that, I bow my head,

  I bend my knee. I hardly care,

  I think, anymore who goes there,

  only let me pass—however

  flawed—among them, my fears

  not stripped from me, but kept

  hidden as, more often than not,

  just beneath stamina, somewhere

  grace, too, lies hidden. Nobody

  speaks to me as you do. Nowhere

  water-lit do the leaves pale faster.

  ROCKABYE

  Weeping, he seemed more naked

  than when he’d been naked—more, even, than when

  we’d both been. Time to pitch your sorrifying

  someplace else, I keep meaning to say to him, and then

  keep not saying it. Lightning bugs, fireflies—hasn’t what

  we called them made every difference. As when history

  sometimes, given chance enough, in equal proportion

  at once delivers

  and shrouds meaning … About love: a kind

  of scaffolding, I used to say. Illumination seemed

  a trick meant to make us think we’d seen a thing more

  clearly, before it all went black. Why not let what’s broken

  stay broken, sings the darkness, I

  make the darkness

  sing it … Across the field birds fly like the storm-shook shadows

  of themselves, and not like birds. Never mind. They’re flying.

  HIS MASTER’S VOICE

  —See that’s the thing you’re not getting, though, the part about

  honesty being at worst a bruising experience, at best

  a bruisable one …

  *

  I woke regretting everything all over again, since when is that

  a crime?

  *

  And then woke wanting the kind of sentence whose

  unfolding brings to mind a road

  so untraveled that

  indistinguishable brown birds do their dust-bath thing

  right there, in the middle of it, to either side the shot

  bedragglement of wild dahlias, their fake-looking posture

  of half collapse, swoon of summer, the heat behaving

  the way eventually the facts do with a truth more difficult

  to touch than usual, that same

  haloing out, around it, think

  sea anemones when seen from above, through water, and softly waving …

  THAT IT MIGHT SAVE, OR DROWN THEM

  I have seen how the earth erodes differently

  from the way that trust does. Likewise,

  I know what it means, to come to love

  all over again the very mistakes I

  also know, looking back, I might better have

  strayed clear of. Two points make a line—but

  so does one point, surely, when pulled at

  once in two opposed directions: how

  to turn away from what’s familiar, for

  example, toward what isn’t

  defines hope well enough, but can define,

  too, despair … When I look around

  at all the wood that’s drifted ashore, been

  bleached clean, and stranded, I think

  to be stranded must mean giving in

  to whatever forces make of strandedness

  over time such smooth-to-the-hand forms

&n
bsp; of trophy as these before me now, each one

  distinctive. There’s a light that can make

  finding a thing look more than faintly

  like falling across it—you must kneel,

  make an offering. I threw my compass away

  years ago. I have passed through that light.

  GENTLY, THOUGH, GENTLE

  Now that neglect only half excuses the field’s contagion,

  it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing

  to shy from, this is not

  nostalgia, you must look at it,

  try to, just as steadily as, for entire days, you watched

  bees ferry water up from the moss-conquered

  birdbath to their hive, presumably, in the chestnut’s

  branches, that moment-at-last in summer when

  the release that fall will be

  again seems possible, the way

  within aggression you still want to believe

  always something more tender, given a chance, will show

  too, eventually, as if “flowers

  first, then the fruit” were what you’d meant

  all along by a clean arrangement, the door this time

  closing not so slowly, your hand turning the lights down

  democratically upon the heat, the night, its night song …

  THE WEDDING

  Where there’s nothing but shade, ever,

  he plants sea oats and ferns, lamb’s ears for

  the soft down that covers them, that he calls

  fur. His

  “shadow garden.” A grown man,

  around whom the air itself, sometimes, seems

  to tremble like a man trying hard not to, lest

  he seem unmanly. For his own part, he says

  mercy may well be the better part of conquest,

  but

  Take No Prisoners has gotten him this far—

  why mess with it now? Things like that; out of

  nowhere. And then, as if the truth required it—

  his version, anyway—whole stretches of silence,

  for hours after, long enough to start dreaming up

  impossible reasons for why the pines barely

  move, like it’s because they’ve

  gone stiff with

  superiority over the other trees, doomed

  to leaflessness soon enough … Let them strut,

  if that’s strutting, he’ll say, addressing

  who knows what—the clouds, his hunting dogs,

  as if it made

  no difference. —And this, once:

  So much of life already gets spent fucking loss

  and/or getting fucked by it, he said, looking

  hard at me, Don’t you want to find happiness?

  MORE TENDERLY OVER SOME OF US THAN OTHERS

  And the wheel, as promised,

  in time turning; the light Homeric now, now merely

  Virgilian, predictably

  flashing off the waves that toss between

  sincerity and authenticity in the storm’s wake, If they can make

  no difference, why these feelings? And the whole crew gone missing …

  THE WAY ONE ANIMAL TRUSTS ANOTHER

  Somewhere between what it feels like, to be at

  one with the sea, and to understand the sea as

  mere context for the boat whose engine refuses

  finally to turn over: yeah, I know the place—

  stumbled into it myself, once; twice, almost. All

  around and in between the two trees that

  grow there, tree of compassion and—much taller—

  tree of pity, its bark more bronze, the snow

  settled as if an openness of any kind meant, as well,

  a woundedness that, by filling it, the snow

  might heal … You know what I think? I think if we’re

  lost, you should know exactly where, by now; I’ve

  watched you stare long and hard enough at the map

  already … I’m beginning to think I may never

  not be undecided, about all sorts of things: whether

  snow really does resemble the broken laughter

  of the long abandoned when what left comes back

  big-time; whether gratitude’s just a haunted

  space like any other. This place sounds daily

  more like a theater of war, each time I listen to it—

  loss, surprise, victory, being only three of the countless

  fates, if you want to call them that, that we don’t

  so much live with, it seems, as live for now among. If as

  close as we’re ever likely to get, you and I, is this—this close—

  A STILLNESS BETWEEN THE HUNTING AND THE CHASE

  Because there’s been trouble—but when

  isn’t there?—this time to do with the people, after

  years of forgetting, suddenly unforgetting that while

  tribute can mean acknowledgment, respect, etc., it’s

  also meant, historically, the price to be paid for

  what was never freedom—it only looked like that—

  the king’s mounted his horse. Disappointment?

  If there’s any inside me, he thinks, let it work

  the way hunger in falcons makes the eye

  more keen. He knows enough, if not everything,

  about vision being sight, vigilance a form of sometimes

  looking and sometimes prayer, if attention is

  prayer, as every half century or so someone seems

  eager to say again, like it’s the first time … In the one

  dream left from childhood, there’s always a ship,

  just now visible; still far. But this is waking,

  and this his favorite horse, whom he’s never named,

  that’s how much he loves her, though she’s

  branded, sure, the way all his horses are: “Without

  mystery, what chance for hope”—in Latin, on the left

  flank where it catches the light, loses it, the king

  sashless and in flight, though it looks processional,

  he thinks—stately, almost—as the newly fallen believe

  at first there’s still a plan available: they’ll save themselves.

  BEFORE THE LEAVES TURN BACK

  Though I’ve shot the owl down, it hasn’t stopped its trembling,

  so I have to still it. I cup my hand as for a shield, a sign—both—

  until it looks like my idea, at least, of mercy beside the one

  wing where I’ve broken it … A bit of brightness on the side,

  please, if there’s some for sparing—I’m pretty sure that’s how

  the song goes. I don’t know yet that an owl’s wing, when nailed

  to a barn’s door, means protection—otherwise, I’d keep it; but

  that time in a life when the kind of happiness that’s made in part

  from sorrow isn’t yet the only kind: I can hear it finishing. Where

  are you? The only sound, for miles, is the sound of finishing.

  FOR IT FELT LIKE POWER

  They’d only done what all along they’d come

  intending to do. So they lay untouched by regret,

  after. The combined light and shadow of passing

  cars stutter-shifted across the walls the way,

  in summer,

  the night moths used to, softly

  sandbagging the river of dream against dream’s

  return … Listen, it’s not like I don’t get it about

  suffering being relative—I get it. Not so much

  the traces of ice on the surface of four days’

  worth of rainwater in a stone urn, for example,

  but how, past the ice,

  through the water beneath it,

  you can see the leaves—sycamore—where they fell

  unnoticed. Now they look suspended, like heroes

  in
side the myth heroes seem bent on making

  from the myth of themselves; or like sunlight, in fog.

  CRAFT AND VISION

  Though the casting of light can’t really be called—not at

  least believably—in any way a property of shipwreck

  once the wrecking’s done with, what harm’s left, now,

  in saying so? As for those who would argue otherwise,

  let them. Always, if it’s wanted badly enough, there’s

  somewhere a findable veil just waiting to be lifted or pulled

  slowly aside, classic revelation, a word that itself at its

  root has a veil within it, somehow making the word feel

  all the more like proof, as if proof meant nakedness, as if one

  and the same—darkness

  and weather; force, and sex. Every

  thing I do I had to do a first time, even if I’ve forgotten it;

  after that, I think the rest, what follows—the second time,

  the last, etc.—it’s all just translation, this life coming down to

  the same three questions I’m told—and believe, most days—

  it always has: What happened, what didn’t happen, who does it

  matter to? Write what you must, then walk away from it is

  not the hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn, by any stretch,

  only one of the hardest. Witness, then blindness—that’s a way

  of putting it. To be clear, by blindness I mean the deepest

  blue possible, good cotton, not silk, the blindfold.

  CROSSING

  Now that, at best, we’d rowed halfway across the woods

  that we mostly thought of our lives as—despite the fact

  of water—accepting our position, and understanding it,

  still mattered, but not like remembering what

  the point had been, why we’d set out at all, from

  the very start: to release something, but what? whatever

  the erotic version might be of a soul we ourselves scarce

  believed in? A persuasive sound to that, but if nothing else

  we’d at least learned to trust sound only so far, even as

  we’d had to figure out the hard way to stop giving out trust

  as if trust were sex, and not what more often just gets