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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