Nothing by Design Read online

  The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life from The Grave: A Poem by Robert Blair, London, 1808; engraving by Luigi Schiavonetti (1765–1810) after Blake

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Mary Jo Salter

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Salter, Mary Jo.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Nothing by design : poems / by Mary Jo Salter.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-34979-6

  I. Title.

  PS3569.A46224N68 2013

  811.54—dc23 2013001009

  Jacket images: (female northern cardinal) by John James Audubon, from Birds of America. The Granger Collection, New York; (daisy and leaves) by J. J. Rousseau from La Botanique

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-34980-2

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-34979-6

  v3.1

  TO MY DAUGHTERS

  Heavy in the womb,

  at birth light as a feather—

  not even your own mother

  can understand that riddle,

  or how you’d fill the room

  although you were so little,

  or how, once you had grown,

  you weren’t there to measure

  yet stubbornly would loom

  larger than anyone.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I THE NUMBERS

  Morning Mirror

  Pair of Bells

  Common Room, 1970

  Fractal

  The Gods

  A Toast for Richard Wilbur

  From a Balcony, Lake Como

  Constellations

  Cardinal Numbers

  Our Friends the Enemy

  II THE AFTERLIFE

  Nora

  The Afterlife

  It’s Hard to Say

  Cities in the Sky

  Over and Out

  III UNBROKEN MUSIC

  Unbroken Music

  IV LIGHTWEIGHTS

  T. S. Lightweight and Ezra Profound

  Out of the Woods

  Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.

  Urban Haiku

  Dr. Syntax and Prosody

  Kitti’s Hog-Nosed Bat

  French Haiku

  Our Ping-Pong Table

  Instrumental Riddles

  No Second Try

  V BED OF LETTERS

  String of Pearls

  The Gazebo

  Drinking Song

  Complaint for Absolute Divorce

  Bed of Letters

  VI THE SEAFARER

  The Seafarer

  VII LOST ORIGINALS

  Voice of America

  English Country Dollhouse

  Crusoe’s Footprint

  Lost Originals

  Acknowledgments

  A Note about the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  I

  THE NUMBERS

  MORNING MIRROR

  He doesn’t see me, whoever he is, who steps

  through high grass in his khakis and bow tie

  at six in the morning. I’m looking through the glass

  of my cottage at the inn, hours before

  coffee and buns begin at the conference.

  He looks as if he knows things, and will speak

  at his appointed time on experiments

  successfully conducted, with a coda

  on unforeseen, exciting implications,

  and a call for further research. The wordless calm

  of kayaks moored and mirrored, the yachts far off,

  the silver-pink lake’s lapping seem to please him.

  He may be in a blessed state of non-thinking.

  He runs a hand through thinning, tousled hair.

  A witness at the window: somehow a deer

  has sidled up, and is staring at me drinking

  my coffee. I set it down, chastised. The same

  plaintive and yet neutral gaze, as if

  she knew once and is trying to recall my name.

  I’m trying to unthink the expectations

  of my given kind, to adopt another mode, a

  curious but disinterested sense

  of otherness. (Why is it for a week

  all the deer have been either does or fawns?

  Somebody knows the answer.) She wants more

  from me, or maybe nothing; sniffs the grass,

  nibbles a bit, then twitches: her profile high,

  she bounds to the shore with leisurely, sure leaps.

  PAIR OF BELLS

  Joanna and Valerio

  went up to the campanile

  of the stone-deaf castle.

  From across the courtyard, one

  dented little bell with a skew

  clapper could be seen.

  I hadn’t noticed the bellpulls.

  But when Joanna yanked on hers,

  and Valerio took his turn,

  I heard a pair of louder bells,

  deeper, surely bigger—though

  these and both my friends remained

  entirely invisible.

  And the little bell, off-key

  and out of sync, hung on and swung—

  a third wheel like myself, moved

  to celebrate a pair of bells.

  Things happen but are parables.

  COMMON ROOM, 1970

  And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me; and I will make you to become fishers of men.

  —MARK 1:17

  It was the age of sit-ins

  and in any case, there weren’t enough chairs.

  The guys loped heavy-footed down the stairs

  or raced each other to the bottom, laughing,

  pushing their luck. But here they all crammed in,

  sophomores, born like him in ’51,

  to huddle on the floor of the Common Room.

  In a corner, a grandfather clock

  startled the hour; hammered it home again.

  He would remember that. The old New England

  rickety dignity of the furniture.

  The eminent, stern faces looking down

  from time-discolored portraits. Or maybe some

  of this was embellishment, added later on.

  The flickering, thick fishbowl

  of a TV screen, a Magnavox console,

  silenced them all. There, in black and white,

  gray-haired men in gray suits now began

  to pull blue capsules from an actual fishbowl.

  (At least the announcer said they were bright blue.)

  It was the age of drugs. These looked like giant

  Quaaludes handed out

  by a mad pharmacist, whose grimly poised

  assistant—female, sexless—then unscrewed

  from each a poisonous slip of sticky paper.

  A man affixed that date to a massive chart.

  It was filling up already. (Some poor dude

  named Bert was 7; he punched a sofa cushion.)

  As for himself, he thought

  of penny candy in a jar a million

  years ago, picked out with his brother

  most days after school. Or times he’d draw

  tin soldiers from the bottom of a stocking.

  (Born two days pa
st Christmas, he’d always seen

  that as good karma: the whole world free to play.)

  A congressman was rifling

  loudly through capsules, seized some in his fist,

  dropped all but one. Not Jeremy? Good friend,

  socked with 15. Two strangers, 38.

  Ben got 120. Would that be good enough?

  Curses, bluster, unfunny humor, crossed

  fingers for blessed numbers that remained.

  Somewhere, sometime in

  that ammunition pile awaited his:

  239. He heard the number whiz,

  then lodge safe as a bullet in his brain.

  Like a bullet in a dream: you’re dead, you’re fine.

  No need to wish for C.O. or 4-F.

  Oh thank you, Jesus God. No Nam for him.

  Yet he was well brought up.

  In decency, rather than dance for joy

  or call up Mom right then from the hallway phone,

  he stayed until the last guy knew his fate.

  Typical Roy, who’d showed up late, freaked out

  when, it appeared, his birthday got no mention.

  He hadn’t heard: they’d hosed him. Number 2.

  Before the war was lost

  some four years later, a handful in that room

  would battle inside fishbowls, most in color—

  and little men, toy soldiers in a jungle,

  bled behind the glass while those excused,

  life-sized, would sit before it eating dinner.

  He’d lived to be a watcher. And number 2

  in the Common Room that day?

  Clearly not stupid. Roy became a major

  in Independent Projects. Something about

  landscapes in oil, angles of northern sun.

  By the time he graduated, he had won

  a study grant to paint in England, where

  (so his proposal went) the light was different.

  FRACTAL

  A fish-shaped school of

  fish, each individual

  shaped like a single

  scale on the larger

  fish: some truths are all

  a matter of scale,

  in the manner that shale

  will flake into thin layers

  of and like itself,

  or a roof is made

  of shingle upon shingle

  of roofish monad.

  Scale, fish, school of fish…

  “That’s a fractal, isn’t it?”

  was your feedback when

  you ate what I said.

  “A form that’s iterated:

  output is input

  ad infinitum.”

  Must I now mull it over?

  I mulled it over.

  This aquarium,

  I thought, was a sort of think

  tank for non-thinkers

  in their open-mouthed

  safety-in-numbers forage,

  needing no courage.

  Yet so beautiful:

  mathematically serving

  one end while swerving

  in a fraction of

  a second into action:

  how do they sense when

  to advance or back-

  track, tail that guy, or swallow

  the law to follow?

  Somewhat in the line

  of Leibniz, Mandelbrot coined

  the term fractal: it’s

  the hall-of-mirrors

  parthenogenesis of

  a recursive, nonce,

  anonymously

  irregular form: i.e.,

  copies no other

  formula can make.

  (I learned that when I got home.)

  An eye on either

  side of a flat head

  is useful, I read; herring

  have a keen sense of hearing,

  but it’s not that that

  gives them their unerring

  “high polarity,”

  pooling together

  just close enough to discern

  skin on a neighbor,

  far enough to skirt

  collision. That’s a vision

  scaled for fish—but what

  human can marshal

  acceptance, much less a wish,

  for sight so partial?

  “Stand back from the glass,

  make room for the universe,”

  I thought then; “at least

  for whatever we

  can compass: iteration

  on iteration,

  until fish fill the ocean.”

  THE GODS

  I always seem to have tickets

  in the third or fourth balcony

  (a perch for irony;

  a circle of hell the Brits

  tend to call “the gods”),

  and peer down from a tier

  of that empyrean

  at some tuxedoed insect

  scrabbling on a piano.

  Some nights there’s a concerto,

  and ranks of sound amass

  until it’s raining upward

  (violin bows for lightning)

  from a black thundercloud.

  A railing has been installed

  precisely at eye level—

  which leads the gaze, frustrated,

  still higher to the vault

  of the gilt-encrusted ceiling,

  where a vaguely understood

  fresco that must be good

  shows nymphs or angels wrapped

  in windswept drapery.

  Inscribed like the gray curls

  around the distant bald spot

  of the eminent conductor,

  great names—DA VINCI PLATO

  WHITTIER DEBUSSY—

  form one long signature,

  fascinatingly random,

  at the marble base of the dome.

  It’s more the well-fed gods

  of philanthropy who seem

  enshrined in all their funny,

  decent, noble, wrong

  postulates, and who haunt

  these pillared concert halls,

  the tinkling foyers strung

  with chandeliered ideals,

  having selected which

  dated virtues—COURAGE

  HONOR BROTHERHOOD—rated

  chiseling into stone;

  having been quite sure

  that virtue was a thing

  all men sought, the sublime

  a mode subliminally

  fostered by mentioning

  monumentally.

  All men. Never a woman’s

  name, of course, although

  off-shoulder pulchritude

  gets featured overhead—

  and abstractions you might go

  to women for, like BEAUTY

  JUSTICE LIBERTY.

  Yet at the intermission,

  I generally descend

  the spiral stairs unjustly

  for a costly, vacant seat

  I haven’t paid for. Tonight

  I’ve slipped into D9.

  The lights dim. Warm applause

  and, after a thrilling pause,

  some stiff-necked vanities

  for a moment float away—

  all the gorgeous, nameless,

  shifting discordances

  of the world cry aloud; allowed

  at last, I close my eyes.

  A TOAST FOR RICHARD WILBUR

  On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his first book,

  The Beautiful Changes

  Poems like yours are, frankly, hard to beat—

  snapping and flapping from each line

  like a deceptively blank sheet

  that turns into an angel—but

  of course the image isn’t mine;

  your poems inspire the rest of us to cheat.

  So, while I’m out borrowing, let me steal

  another angel from your brain.

  I’m thinking of Bruna Sandova
l

  in your “Plain Song for Comadre,”

  who mopped the church floor seventeen

  years, and daily saw her tinted pail

  of scrubwater take the sheen of heavenly wings.

  For fifty years the beautiful change

  you’ve wrought upon the plainest things

  of this world has been like that—

  a private labor to estrange

  the eye from yesterday, so that it brings

  forward the clean habit of surprise.

  To become a “giver of due regard”

  you prayed to Saint Lucy once. I rise

  before you, glass raised, to insist

  that regarding you was never hard,

  you for whom seeing is the keenest praise.

  FROM A BALCONY, LAKE COMO

  1.

  Up close, last night’s beads of rain

  cling to the underside of the railing

  like berries to a vine.

  2.

  Is it still raining? How to be sure

  this morning, if not for the tall

  columnar cypress

  so many plummeting

  meters down, a solemn

  sentry standing at attention

  to everything that can’t be seen

  by the human eye? Only

  against such opacity

  can we discern the soundless

  drizzle, a mild

  disturbance like midges.

  3.

  A blur of terra cotta

  and ochre here and there:

  while I describe it,

  4.

  the village is clearing a little.

  Just below, a gardener’s

  broom of snapped branches

  scratches a surface,

  sidelines another heap of debris.

  On a rooftop (so far from us

  it’s a floor), a roofer

  plants his boots on the tiles,