Plundered Hearts (9 page)

Disguised in a borrowed cloak and hood, Christine

Has escaped with Octave the muddle of romance.

It is midnight. They are in the greenhouse, alone

But spied upon by jealousies that mistake

Anxiety for love, the crime that requires

An accomplice. Then, for no reason,
they
mistake

Themselves, and suddenly confess—the twin

Armed guards, Wish and Censor, having fallen

Asleep—to a buried passion for each other.

The friendship shudders. In the end, as if he’s pushed

Christine toward a propeller blade for the pleasure

Of saving her, he sends the proper hero

In his place to meet her. His head still in the clouds,

The aviator races to his death, shot down

Like a pheasant the beaters had scared up for the hunt.

Christine, when she discovers the body, faints.

Her husband, the mooncalf cuckold, so that the game

Might continue, acts the gentleman, and thereby

Turns out the truest friend. He understands,

Is shaken but shrugs, and gracefully explains

“There’s been the most deplorable accident …”

One guest begins to snigger in disbelief.

The old general defends his host: “The man has class.

A rare thing, that. His kind are dying out.”

And when at last the lights come up, the echo

Of small arms fire on the soundtrack nextdoor

Ricochets into our multiplex cubicle.

Retreating up the empty aisle—the toss

Is heads for home, tails for ethnic out—

We settle on the corner sushi bar,

Scene of so many other films rehashed,

Scores retouched, minor roles recast,

Original endings restored or, better, rewritten,

So the stars up there will know what the two of us,

Seated in the dark, have come to learn

After all these years. How many is it now?

Twenty? Two hundred? Was it in high school or college

We met? The Film Society’s aficionados-

Only, one-time, late-night
Rules of the Game,

Wasn’t it? By now even the classics

(Try that tuna epaulet) show their age,

Their breakneck rhythms gone off, their plots creaky.

But reflections our own first feathery daydreams

Cast on them still shimmer, and who looks back,

Airily, is a younger self, heedless

Of the cost to come, of love’s fatal laws

Whose permanent suffering his joy postpones.

He’s a friend too. But not so close as you.

He hasn’t the taste for flaws that you and I

Share, and wants to believe in vice and genius,

The sort of steam that vanishes now above one

Last cup of tea—though I could sit here forever

Passing the life and times back and forth

Across the table with you, my ideal friend.

Even during the war, I used to get up at noon. The weariness—a damp, musky, still warm mold of myself—stayed in bed while I made coffee. If an idea disturbed this first surface of the day—like one of those tiny whirlpools that form the closer you come to the falls—it was easily ignored. I’d stand at the window in my underwear and blow on my cup and watch them drink in the café across the square. Afternoons, I’d sit in the back of the cinema, smoking, as sad and useless as a god. Long, crumpled nylons of cigarette smoke would drift up toward the projectionist’s opening, then wrap around that single beam of romance from which, in those days, everything that counted came—the orphan on the train, the machine guns and lipstick, the water ballet, the ambush in the hotel corridor. When did it start? The moment you raised your arm to wave to someone across the street? The day you didn’t answer the telephone and showed up later with your hair mussed? It wasn’t until the war ended and the men came home that they too realized what had happened. By then they had lived so long in the hills and cellars and hardened themselves against regret that they hadn’t the energy to retrieve any delicacy of feeling. Some bought that cheap religion, love, until they had no more belief to spend. Others tried the commonplace left out of their dreams: they made their beds in the morning and washed with plenty of soap, or stood round after round of drinks at the café, or counted on their children like the new government. Myself, I had my old habits, the letters to write to M., my diary, the dog. My train back—was it as long as a year ago now?—followed the shoreline by night. I could see little fires in the distance, and the moon laid like a compress on what beach the tide was giving up. By dawn the steam was settling on the fields. The tree-curtains parted to show a house on the crest of the hill, a lemon grove metallic against the blue sky, and then, closer, bullet-pocked, the red brick wall of a farm stable.
The woman beside me had awakened by then, and asked me to help her with the window. It is easy to be good when you’re not in love. You do someone a favor, and how soon you come to hate her grateful, radiant face.

after Pavese

The force of habit takes order to its heart,

As when a nurse, her basket filled with the dead

Child’s toys, has put it by the head

Of her tomb, unwittingly on an acanthus root.

Kallimachos, they say, made his capital

Of it, when around that basket the thorny leaf

Sprang up, nature pressed down by grief

Into shapes that made the loss a parable,

His idea to change the shallow bead and reel

For an imprint of afterlife apparent to all,

Bringing down to earth an extravagance.

So skill gives way to art, or a headstone

To history—the body by now left alone,

As if bodies were the soul’s ornaments.

As if bodies were the soul’s ornaments,

A mullah turned the Koran’s carpet page.

Old Babur made a couplet instead—of Age

And Youth, his “throneless days,” their violence.

The opium pearl, to ease him out of life,

Made a garden of pain. The rugs, the tent

Dissolved. A flower stall appeared. He went

On rearranging the couplet and devised,

To keep death at bay, five hundred and four

Versions. His first poem had been to a boy

From the bazaar whom for a day he had adored,

Whose glances he could still see in the dark

That lined the geometric border’s void,

Reproduced in glistening egg-and-dart.

Reproduction’s glistening egg-and-dart,

Column or carpet, whatever cultures may rest

Upon, and couples do, like Prussian drill …

Nietzsche said the poem is a dance

In chains. Molecular life enchained by chance?

The bonds of atoms formulas distill

Are strains that resonate, the elements

Held both far together and close apart.

The rose window, its creation story speechless,

Its pattern telling all, duplicates

The cross-sectioned axial view each strand

Of genetic coil reveals. Each grain of sand

Takes an eternity to articulate

History’s figure of speech for randomness.

History’s figures of speech for randomness—

    
Car-bomb, rape, skyjack, carcinogens,

    Dragon’s teeth sown in the morning headlines,

    Blips on a monitor, all this summer’s kinds

    Of long-festering terrorist violence

A final demand, its victims slumped, helpless—

How muffled they seem in my own bloodstream,

    And here in Vermont, whose coldhearted self

               Has long gone underground. The daydream

Of a hooded finch on the thistle’s globe. The stealth

Of mallow colonizing clapboard. The beard

               And turban on one last old iris. Who knows

    If the image also frees what it’s commandeered.

Meaning’s subversive, being superimposed.

Meaning, subversive because superimposed,

Signs on a dotted line of brushwood its truce,

Its terms with mountains out beyond my window’s

Squaring off with cloudspray, a crest of spruce,

The green, landlocked swell and trough this state

Navigates, a chaos first unloosed

In the crown glass whose own wavering is bated

Breath upon the waters, then onto the wide

Pine floor of my study and the kilim—ornate

But frayed—that has designs on it. As if I’d

Come ashore and a moon been brought to light

The new world’s passageways, its thread inside

The carpet’s magic, I hear something like

So strangely silent this still desert night …

so    strangely silent    this still desert night

you kneel on me to pray  lanternlight

rows of petalled guls    to guard the borders

his knot garden opposite the women’s quarters

nomad bands    a running dog    four split

leaf lobed medallions    concentric

threats    dollar signs    God is everywhere

a janissary comet    the mihrab’s stair

and doorway    the prophet’s place in his house

a sura the flame flickers on as if in doubt

the strain on paradise in its descent

hollowed out the moon jangles   the tent

pole sways    look    the heart slows

a wind that frames and fills the scene    O rose

The wind that frames and fills the scene arose

Between the mountains and the nomad camp,

Grazing the flocks, their pile of wool that combs

Had plied for spinning like stories still damp

With last night’s storm of raw material,

The strands to be drawn into the spindle’s plot,

Tightening for the warp, but nearly all

The weft yarn as loosely spun as thought.

Saffron, indigo, and cochineal,

The pots of dye have simmered through the night.

The loom is ready. Dawn sits by the fields

To stir. All color is an effect of light.

The woman dreams of patterns the sky might yield,

Of love’s unchanging aspect in starlight.

And love’s unchanging aspect—by starlight

               Whose cressets are blurred

    In the brazier’s perfumed smoke,

A bride enters her husband’s tent, her birthright

    And dowry now spread or stowed

As he sees fit, and later a child whose first

Toy is a shuttle—watches over her work.

She weaves the carpet from memory, a talent

               Her hands recollect,

    Though bound to a narrow loom

As to the tribe’s own wayworn valley,

    Its tripod stakes festooned

With skeins of past and future their lives connect

When seen and heard in the fabric’s page of text.

When seen and heard as one, a page of text

    And an urgent voice make up a history—

Matter, pattern, sources a poem selects.

    The carpet, too, is a complicity.

When grown at ten, the child may sit beside

    The other women and in time betray

Her mother’s hand, the seed pods multiplied

    On a blank expanse, in favor of her father’s way

With zigzag diagonals (he had seen

    The electric plant at Shiraz) and a few of her own

               Imaginings. By twenty she’ll have learned

To read. Hafiz says love is never free

    Of choice. The rose’s tongues, or its thorn alone.

               A palm-read pool, or its vacillating pattern.

A palm. A red pool. The vacillating pattern

Of television lights on the bloodslick.

The diplomat still seated. The powder burn

On his neck like a new neighborhood picked

Out by rocket fire from the Shuf. A note,

A warning from Hezbollah, pinned to his shirt.

The day before, ten children had almost

Escaped a mortar. How much death will serve?

The assassin’s mother and her mother’s mother

Wove carpets. Now the time for art is past.

There is no god but God. To be a martyr

Is both thread and legend. The pistol gives her wrist

The graveside ache that, as her father’s mourner,

The first stone she tossed created. And the next.

The touchstone I toss first creates but next

(Because the poem always has a shadow

Under its reliefs, unlike a carpet’s

Flat entanglements, its straight and narrow

Life without illusions, turned inward

Like a dream, or like that disinterred

Necropolis Beirut’s become of late—

The savagery of the abstract, form or faith—

And because that shadow is the natural world

The poem’s grounded in and the figures branching

Up from it, like an oasis to the approaching

Caravan lost and found in a blinding swirl

Of sand, the mirage they drink in before they turn)

Disrupts. The way things go we come to learn.