heard her voice then, just a sound, no word
I understood. She was on the backseat
of the taxi, her hand moving in that universal
gesture summoning me. It was all gesture,
and tone, something in her voice,
and the meeting of eyes.
We had no language between us.
I went with her in the taxi through the smog and blare
of late afternoon traffic: motorcycle rev, the guttural
diesel and brake of stop-and-go trucks. My hotel not far,
a drop-off, I figured, on the way to her own destination.
Maybe out of the way entirely. I’ll never know.
I paid the driver what he said and some extra odd coins.
The woman—I could see now she was old
and beautiful, deep lines in her face, as though
she’d earned them—had slid over the seat to where
I’d just sat. As the car pulled off, we both
opened our hands on the window between us,
all the fingers and thumbs matching up.
I who have had faith in language, what the sentence
can say, one human to another—it’s clumsy,
the telling of this story which should be a song
without words, oboe and strings perhaps,
a ballet of gesture, grace of the body itself,
a language I don’t know but desire,
without the heat and noise of words.
One
Painting the Bathroom
I’m getting the hang of it, drawing the line
without level or square, green next to white,
blue next to green. Edge the crown, the corners.
Brush and caulk freehand, without blue tape.
In his splotchy white overalls, the professional painter
told his secrets: keep your brush loaded,
lay it on, keep it wet, one or two strokes, that’s it.
Given time, given space. Easier said than done.
Altogether elsewhere, north, in a house by the sea,
the landscape’s all circles and arcs. No, to be exact,
it’s inexact squiggles—tangles, and unexpected
headland hills undulating, a shore of irregular
marshes and marsh flats, blurry margins all around
in six rectangular windows, a sheen on the water.
I learned to paint by numbers, two Pomeranians,
eight plastic rounds of oily colors. In the beginning,
it was nothing but faint blue lines on cardboard,
obsessive hairy streaks of white and tan.
One thing, I discovered, could become another.
Now it’s all Rothko and Benjamin Moore, soft
but definitive box squares of Cloud White,
Tapestry Beige (a kind of fresh light celery),
Hale Navy on the vanity with the white knobs.
Colors of matter gathered from the landscape.
Earth, pollen, weed tucked into an apron,
ground, boiled, mixed in a mud hut.
Pots and walls colored with the potions.
First cause of all beauty beyond knowing.
Slow day here. Fog settled in. What I thought
was a marsh hawk is, closer, a vulture, wheeling
and tilting. Nothing’s dead yet. Tiny people,
a couple? a father and daughter? are walking the spit.
Their dog off leash runs ahead, waits for the humans,
who ignore him. They must be talking. He runs again.
It’s too soon for the kitesurfers I saw yesterday,
four of them under power-red curves catching good air.
I’ve become a contemplative, of textures, of what
I can feel between finger and thumb, of what happens
that is not balance or clarity, that comes not from
knowledge or training, that is at the edges of mystery
where light is changed and water tidal, where dark
green jags of cypresses mass along Bodega Bay.
Swan-Boat Ride
from a fragmented draft of an Elizabeth Bishop poem
never completed
In the Boston Public Gardens
when I was three, a live swan paddled
among artificial birds, pontoons fitted
with tall wood wings and yellow pedals.
The white paint peeled like feathers.
As our boat drifted in the dead water,
my mother’s hand meddled idle
in the wet—dirty, cold, and black,
then proffered a peanut from a sack.
A thing to do to amuse a daughter.
Ungracious,
