Birthdays

 

Celebrating this lifetime/lifeline of birthdays—

 

I perfectly remember still the June I turned twenty

between Corinth and Ephesus, 

my grandmother’s pearls running off me when 

the string broke on the ferry between land and land; 

sitting disconsolate when landed back in Athens

in the temple dedicated to the crippled god—

wanting not only all of Greece, but love. 

 

At twenty-five you wake early, thinking.

You make a pot of strong black coffee,

open wide the back door and look out:

it has been raining, but for now it's clear.

 

Though it will rain again, maybe 

this afternoon, for now the drops

like a fine bracelet of diamonds circle

the slender white arm of the birch.

 

At twenty-five the world doesn’t confuse you

anymore, its many-faceted array of promises

as bright and false as the rhinestones

you gave your mother when you were just six.

 

The world no longer frightens you—

that dark glare of water you couldn't cross.

You drive into it now headlong, throwing

bright wings of water up to either side.

 

Now you have plumbed its depths, and

calculated its circumference; and to the inch

you know the worst the world can do.

 

The coffee's bitter.  Close the door, can’t you,

somebody says—don’t let all of that cold air in.

But you are twenty-five,

and it won’t rain again now for a day or two.

 

As you hold a finger up to test the wind,

a rusty tigermoth lights on it, in passing.

 

And, being twenty-five, it is enough for now.

                           ___

 

Crippled, the god was slow.  Love wasn't to be had until the turning of another year:  fifty.  Lunch in a rustic taverna in Crete at the foot of a Turkish aqueduct, its arched face full of nesting ravens.  Just a few miles from Knossos through the sunburnt hills, sumac grown thick along the country road.  Discovering not Theseus this time, the labyrinth, the minotaur, the liberating thread of Ariadne—yet that too, all of the ancient world, everything we shared, miraculously, from those continents away.

                           ___

 

And in between, at forty-five, the birthday picnic with coworkers, friends. 

 

Sitting out one lingering evening under the cork oaks 

in the garden of Rodin sculptures, 

with the small children and black lab playing 

around Orpheus and the fallen caryatids. 

When it got dark, lighting candles in oyster shells

and opening a bottle of apple brandy from Normandy.

A parting too from good friends leaving the Bay Area—

one off to live in Mexico City, working with 

a famous old writer and watching a camera obscura

being built somewhere close to the Zócolo,

grinding spices for curries, he'll write (and later too,

another time, across the Pacific in Maui while I 

am visiting the Temple on the Hill of the Whale

on the island across the Alenuihaha Channel— 

translated as great billows smashing);

the other to Pittsburgh, whose farmers’ market 

has two farmers, both of them named Pete.

                           ___

 

At sixty-nine you wake at first light

or are lying wakeful already, dreams scattered 

long since.

 

The dark roast coffee

in the mug found in a shop window 

in Vieux-Montréal during a trip one August 

to sell books to sociologists 

(staying by chance in the hotel where 

John and Yoko sang "Give Peace a Chance" 

while famously in bed) is a commute of sorts, 

 

a mildly sloping bridge to wakefulness from sleep, 

an arbitration with the day to come; birds readying 

also in the gnarly old shelter of the near 

Monterey pine for their excited morning augury, 

a kerfuffle of song.

 

The sun is out, or not, imperfectly; the gray 

might clear this afternoon, or when June gloom 

is gone.  But it is day again, and all the days 

plaited together like a laurel wreath, 

evergreen leaves prized by the ancient Greeks, circle 

my head in lieu of dreams, declaring a small triumph—

once again!—over the primal dark.

 

Dark, though, has started crowding in betimes, 

the jagged shards of everything you've loved 

catching the light, the rough beast foretold by the poet 

now already born, howling into the sterile corridors.  

Not St. Vincent where you were born, not there—

that hospital was in another place and time—

 

close to the cathedral, only a little ways from the river

where seven wooden archangels stand watch.

Carved from old salvaged cottonwoods, painted with 

red and yellow ochres, walnut shells.  In spite of their 

vigilance, though, dangers crowd in from every side.  

 

Hatred so pure you could never have reckoned on 

its putting down taproots, those brambles quickly 

overrunning the bright world.  Invasive and malign as

Himalayan blackberry (both name and origin 

confused).  Sharper than glass shards, and impervious 

to light, except the wildfires it fuels.

 

You find a recipe for chicken with lemon, 

roasted potatoes, peas.  Vesuvio, it's called—

appropriate, for the volcanos 

all erupting now.  Etna and Kilauea and the one 

in Guatemala you hadn't heard of before.  

Oregano, unsalted butter—add those to 

the roasting pan, and kosher salt.  Ingredients

like counsel out of dreams.  

A lifetime of such dreaming, of defying this 

 

unwelcome wakefulness.  And yet it comes, 

mornings' eye-opening unrest, despite coffee and 

memories and birds.  You see the monasteries 

of Mt. Athos have been shaken 

by earthquakes, one of the domes cracked like the bell 

which it's said light gets in.  That's how it goes.  

One thing, and then another, on and on.  The knell.

 

(The contemplative archangel, Sachiel, fallen 

and broken in a storm, waiting for the santero

to revive him, to somehow make things right.

 

For you are sixty-nine,

and the collared Eurasian doves call endlessly to you

from tangled branches or the roof, message not clear

and maybe not peaceful, really, as doves are meant 

to be, but something more prophetic.  Peace 

having no chance

 

despite the peace-bearing songwriters in that 

Montreal hotel—not anymore.  But you study 

the news, the starcharts and nautical charts, 

fixing with kintsugi and little kindnesses 

those cracks (intensifying), 

fixing any way you can another day, and another.

 

And, being sixty-nine, not twenty-five ever again, 

let alone born today beside the river there, 

the humble river with its waterbirch and bridge 

to the print shop or cider press, when apples 

and pears still grew between river and  acequia—

fixing quietly is all that you can do.  

 

Take what's left in both hands, coaxing 

the glass shards out and taking pains to gather 

all the light you can 

from them.  Make of the leavings, somehow, 

something altogether fine.  

 

The mug's lip chipped over the years, maybe, 

but not where your lips touch.  

Bearing witness to the remaining light.

                                    ___

 

At seventy,

you're all these things—and more.

You are the haiku and the epic poetry, 

the Shakespeare sonnets beautifully decrying time.

 

The dark-hearted water 

scares you again—

it's gone so still.

It's so terribly deep.

But listen closely:  

frogs make quiet music 

with the water,

as they did for Basho too.

 

And see how the moon 

slips into it, silvery, 

besides. Aqueous, luminous,

adaptive as the luna moth—

that dull gray lunar crust

transformed in a heartbeat

into arpeggios of light.

 

At seventy, let me be light. 

Let me be a fleet flight of notes, 

rising, opening out and out.

 

Calm as the last awakening

in Donne's sermon,

"where there shall be 

no cloud nor sun, 

no darkness nor dazzling, 

but one equal light, 

no noise nor silence, 

but one equal music, 

no fears nor hopes, 

but one equal possession . . ."

 

This world.  

This convoluted poetry.

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