style="font-size:15px;"> enough, and yet I will go on craving. I have an artist’s most
irrational faith in what can be made from what seems to be
nothing. See,
I could say Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker, or
that it brings me to my senses, or strips me of illusion, or
that there is every possibility that what I don’t see can still
illuminate me.
Fable
Let me touch one soul by my art, he said. I have a fire.
But he wondered: what if the whole world refuses to hear?
He was good for a while at throwing brilliant bouquets
of words. He could make you see with a splash of vowels.
Color your mind by metaphors, story. Editors loved
him. What happened? If you’re reading this,
he found the real diamond, better bliss,
an end large enough to surpass all he loved.
He revised to the woods, stopped publishing. The owls
survey his notebooks, words for the sky, not bookcases.
There are unknown splendors in every corner, without fear.
He will have a bonfire some night, without regret, or desire.
Arizona
On a small island
in the green water of a harbor
a ship sits upright on the sandy bottom
barely visible in clouds of murk and hearsay
under my eight- nine- ten-year old feet.
Beautiful Hawai’i has on her endless summer.
On a day like this things were blown to pieces.
“Men died here”: but it doesn’t translate
to my experience. The circle of island
sits in a sky of perfect light. Only the sun
breaks on these waves. The ship is berthed
in its own past, its sky too remote to imagine.
It’s the first place I remember, tall blue
over adobe wall, the roadrunner highlighted
like a flash of lightning. The light was like
another world, white shouting, forever
in my eye. Everything was gathered,
every measure fled. Everywhere,
to this day, the sky is Arizona.
The Jewish Bride
for Ruth Valerio
She ran away with another man, he said.
He took to gardening every weekend,
his allotment a little island of sanity
at the edge of Berlin. He rebuffed
well-meaning friends, wanted to tend
his cabbages undisturbed. Each week
he took a basket and a different book
to picnic in the Rosenkohl. After a few years
there were only potatoes to till, but it was still
his oasis from the terror of war or grief,
a place to bring the solace of black market
Lachs, French wine, the baker’s last loaf,
fifty square meters he could call the future.
Around him the world spun out of control.
He used Mark notes to stuff the cracks in the shed,
brought blankets and rags, mementoes, a rug.
When the Allies came, he opened the door
and led her, thin and pale and well read,
in the circle of his arms in the sunlight.
Every night was Passover, she said.
Big Clouds Far Away
the wind blew hard all night
I tossed, threw off blankets, didn’t dream
woke to the sound of thunder, worried
had I left something out
at dawn there was a shorn sky, white
hazed, and big clouds far away
I mowed the lawn slowly, thinking
of tornadoes, disease, love
all the things that could roar over unannounced
anything that could sweep me away
Salzburg, Republic of Austria, July 2006
In order not to repeat history, it is not enough to know it,we must know ourselves, and our complicity.
—Schilling
Some days you have to take what you can get
and that day my mother was too sick
to find yet one more crowded pavement café
and the worst of it was, sitting there in
my habit, I had to see it all unfold: the tired
couple with their small child, the empty table
and the promise of refreshment, and then
the waiter descending in a blaze of jeers,
scathing looks and torrid gestures, and watch
the
