Nothing by Design Read online

  fixing the middle distance.

  5.

  From which the village climbs again,

  receding from

  the valley in switchbacks

  (we can tell because

  of that minuscule vehicle

  ducking in and out of trees)

  to scale the face of the first

  cloud-haloed

  mountain in a series

  of mountains, each slipped

  neatly behind the last:

  ever-flatter and -duller

  file folders of color,

  emerald to jade to a faded

  wafer of blue so watery

  it comes out of sumi-e.

  A Japanese- or Chinese-

  Italian scroll, a vertiginous

  landscape hung

  in the empty niche

  between the open French windows.

  6.

  When did the puddle

  of rain on the balcony

  chair disappear?

  I thought I was looking.

  Did it drip through the slats?

  Evaporate? What?

  7.

  Sun picks out

  the young olive trees

  positioned widely in a field

  with their new shadows,

  as if gawkily waiting

  to be tagged in a game.

  And on the lake, finally,

  all agitations, tremblings

  longed-for are visible:

  slubbed yellows, prismatic

  pinks like the costly

  shantungs of Como

  smoothed out on a counter,

  cupped again, crumpled,

  marveled at, lifted

  to light; set aside.

  8.

  Behind the brooding,

  regrouping humidity,

  lightning

  is assembling all our

  slate-blue, shifting

  late afternoons into one simple,

  zigzagged, single-minded line:

  not here yet, but

  coming on schedule

  like the ferry pushing

  off from Varenna,

  appointed to veer this way.

  CONSTELLATIONS

  His parents want him to play less.

  Well then, they should have thought ahead—

  they knew the type of mind he had;

  Dad never should have taught him chess.

  But face it, Dad’s still limited

  at seeing long-term consequences.

  Dumb strategies, those lame defenses—

  it makes him sad, alone in bed

  on a Saturday night, beneath a quilt

  his mother calls a floral chessboard;

  at only five years old, he’d floored

  them both by beating him. (It’s guilt,

  not sadness, that he’s really feeling:

  he gets the picture faster than

  they’ll ever fathom.) Tonight again

  he looks up at his stickered ceiling

  for the vision of the infinite

  Grand Master. There, instead of glue-on,

  glow-in-the-dark stars, the view

  some guys make do with, he has eight

  squares by eight: a constellation

  of white on black, a sixty-four-

  tile universe, a dizzy dance floor

  on which his moves, some combination

  he thought of, might not have been seen

  once in the game’s unending annals.

  King-usurping gambits, channels

  around the wide skirts of the queen.

  He should be “thinking about dating,”

  his mother says. As if he isn’t!

  She seems to think he’s self-imprisoned

  here, that some brave girl is waiting

  to rescue him, like Rapunzel, from

  the castle. Of course he’s desperate

  to kiss them, to plunge into that sweet

  wet something: but thinking hard can summon

  even that sensation. It’s long

  since he has bothered clasping, lifting

  a piece: admittedly, the shifting

  of objects on a plane isn’t wrong,

  if you need that, but he’s in a space

  mentally where he needs no square

  markers above him to know he’s there,

  sliding a checkmate into place.

  How not resolve it, knight after knight,

  side-sneaking bishop, stalwart pawn?

  He’ll probably be up till dawn

  with this endgame—genius, if he’s right—

  but even when sleep’s stubborn law

  overtakes him, some new dream position

  may break the surface: if not a win,

  he thinks, at least a draw.

  CARDINAL NUMBERS

  Our heads down, two of a

  kind, we’re reading at either end

  of the red sofa.

  Is it a one in a million

  chance? Not that such

  a thing would happen—

  that each of us

  would look up to catch

  on the wing that moment—

  but that we speak in unison

  when (framed in a mullion

  of double windows)

  two cardinals descend

  to a fiery perch

  on a barren pear tree.

  Perfectly twinned,

  they’re content to stand

  for pure ornament,

  to be bright but dumb:

  “like red bows

  tied to the boughs.”

  That’s what we both said.

  Attachment is in

  the air, evidently.

  So we note, in tandem,

  another twosome

  mirroring them:

  the marvelous,

  upright, waxen ear-

  trumpets of amaryllis

  propped on the sill,

  their double-bloomed red

  deaf to the blaring

  echo outside;

  blind to the cardinals

  that are blind to our staring.

  Off the pair flies

  to amaze somewhere else.

  Our two pairs of eyes,

  back and forth like birds,

  flit from the plant

  to twice-read words.

  OUR FRIENDS THE ENEMY

  Christmas 1914

  Were they mad?

  They kicked the severed head

  of the football across the frozen mud

  like Ajax running wild in the field:

  it was sheep he killed

  when he’d thought he’d been slaughtering

  Odysseus and Agamemnon.

  Now it was either the war to end

  all wars, or Armageddon,

  but surely they’d been out of their wits

  picking their way across No Man’s Land

  unarmed but for brandy and cigarettes

  and pictures of girls they liked.

  In no time the chaps with cameras

  were snapping photographs—

  Tommy swapping his cap for the spiked

  pickelhaube on Fritz.

  It started, Colonel, the night before.

  Sir, I can explain…

  The Jerrys who wanted them dead so close

  all along the front

  they could hear them clear

  as the stars, singing “Stille Nacht.”

  Some of the boys sang back:

  “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

  A friendly taunt:

  “Engländer! Engländer!”

  And all ablaze,

  the candles in rows

  on the Germans’ Christmas trees.

  How did they dare walk across?

  They’d trod their way through worse before—

  lads underfoot in the muck;

  now the day was cold enough those poor

  contorted stiffs
/>   were coated in merciful rime.

  As for them, whose time

  hadn’t come, you could say that squalor

  was the better part of valor.

  You could call it a sort of luck

  not standing in standing slime in the trench.

  Not fraternizing with the rats

  but clambering over the parapets

  with a few of your rations in hand.

  Sergeant Bernard Joseph Brookes

  of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles

  wrote in his diary:

  In the afternoon I went out

  and had a chat

  with our friends the Enemy.

  And the football game?

  It was a sort of courtship

  before the first, last, passionate fusion.

  Or it felt like the smiling sorrow

  after you and your girl have split up.

  But nothing forgiven, furious, tomorrow.

  The Germans won, 3 to 2.

  On Boxing Day

  the mercury rose, and the mud.

  It was agreed—

  let the dead bury their dead—

  and side by side, they dug.

  They laid them in who hadn’t played

  but had already lost:

  each a tidy Christmas package

  tied with a cross.

  II

  THE AFTERLIFE

  NORA

  Even in death your radiance follows me.

  Or leads me. You’re ahead of me on the sidewalk,

  pushing your baby’s pram as I push mine,

  and you swing your head to greet someone driving by,

  your sheet of black hair the shiniest anyone

  has ever seen; you don’t even understand

  that nobody in her thirties shines that much,

  nobody laughs so musically at jokes

  that are not that funny. Whatever it was I said

  twenty years ago, whatever anyone said

  no longer is heard, or can be, the way you took it

  because you’re not here to beam it back, to turn it

  funny or beautiful—even the saddest things

  you somehow made useful to us who were sad

  with those infinite eyes of yours, looking right at us,

  that Oh that was all acceptance. Even in death

  that swept down upon you, death that locked you shut

  and the No that is locked inside your name now, Nora,

  I see the Ra for sun god, too, which is silly,

  but you’d understand; I take it for your radiance

  that even now in the darkness follows me.

  THE AFTERLIFE

  Oh shabti allotted to me, if I be summoned or if I be detailed to do any work which has to be done in the realm of the dead … you shall detail yourself for me on every occasion of making arable the fields, of flooding the banks or conveying sand from east to west; “Here am I,” you shall say.

  —BOOK OF THE DEAD

  1.

  They’re looking a little parched

  after millennia standing side

  by side in the crypt, but the limestone

  Egyptian couple, inseparable

  on their slab, emerge from it as noble

  and grand as you could ask of people

  thirteen inches tall.

  The pleasant, droopy-breasted wife

  smiles hospitably in her gown

  (the V-necked sheath “a style popular

  for the entire 3,000-year

  Pharaonic period”).

  Her skin is painted paler than his:

  a lady kept out of the sun.

  Bare-chested in his A-line kilt,

  her husband puts his spatulate

  best foot forward, so as to stride

  into a new life.

  Not mummies; more like dummies.

  Not idols, yet not merely dolls.

  Stocky synecdoches

  of the ruling class, they survey

  an entourage of figurines

  at work providing necessaries

  for long days under the reigns

  of dynasties still unborn.

  To serenade them, here’s a harpist.

  A dwarf even in life—

  a mascot to amuse the court

  whose music must not be cut short.

  A potter modeling vessels that seem,

  like him, already fired in a kiln.

  Six silos of wheat,

  imaginary granaries.

  A woman of stone grinding grain,

  as she would have, on a quern of stone.

  A woman winnowing grain in a pan.

  Another on her knees, kneading.

  A brewer mashing a vat of beer,

  a butcher slitting the throat

  of a heifer for the hereafter.

  2.

  What had it felt like, that credence

  in the afterlife of art?

  To die, as the departed did,

  comforted by the guaranteed

  incarnation of a statuette;

  to feed then on that slaughtered meat?

  To take a leap from the stock-still

  tyranny of the literal?

  To see the miniature, the fiction

  as a grow-in-the-dark depiction

  of the soon-to-be actual?

  3.

  Aboveground, thought was evolving.

  So many lords and ladies died;

  not everyone could be supplied

  with a finely sculpted retinue

  of laborers to keep them living.

  And how were the high ones to keep

  so many minions at their task?

  The overseer with his whip

  became a smiling, bland convention:

  one foreman for every ten or so

  farmers with a hoe.

  It wasn’t only math.

  Something unforeseen

  was undermining transfiguration—

  a canny, efficient faith

  that less detail might well stand in

  for the stand-in;

  a simplicity of encryption.

  Hundreds and hundreds of years passed.

  Alabaster, faience, wood,

  the scale of the factotum totems

  dwindled as numbers multiplied;

  jostled in the mass graves

  of toy-box coffins, they were transported

  by a procession of living slaves

  a little distance, and slipped

  into their niches in the crypt

  for the shelf life of eternity.

  Thumb-sized effigies wrapped

  in bandages of holy script,

  the hieroglyphed Book of the Dead.

  Words. The nominal vow to work,

  not the enactment of work.

  The shabti held one stylized tool,

  barely identifiable—

  and were serene as Christian saints

  with their hatchets and wheels, the instruments

  of a recurring martyrdom.

  In time they grew more mummiform,

  cross-armed at the chest

  or armless. Finally, curiously, at rest—

  like zeros who were something

  in being nothing,

  place markers of their own

  as much as of the master’s soul.

  4.

  And on the wall of a vault,

  an artist has drawn himself—

  or a cunning substitute—

  at work, shaping a life-sized shabti

  designed to be his twin:

  a goateed dandy that our mute,

  vainglorious ventriloquist

  settles on one knee.

  Profile to profile, they stare

  into the mannered mirror

  of one another.

  In whatever kingdom this was

  (by now, the blink

  of one kohl-lined, almond eye),

  what did people think was the life span

>   of the stunt man who betokens man?

  The shabti sent to make shabti?

  But the question too has shrunk,

  eroded to vocabulary—

  one fine old potsherd of a word

  to be carried from the museum

  like any other item

  in the museum shop:

  a replica necklace, a postcard.

  The visitor is illiterate.

  What did that stone scroll say,

  meant to convert someday

  to the thing it represents, papyrus?

  Even the scribes couldn’t read.

  Something about the god Osiris

  who came back from the dead.

  She must be going.

  Feels for the gloves in her pockets,

  empty hands for her hands.

  Opens a door to Chicago,

  where a fine dust is ticking

  coldly onto everything;

  where she is still alive, and it’s snowing.

  IT’S HARD TO SAY

  That’s what you say a hundred times a day.

  Yet we keep asking.

  (“How was your morning? Did you like the nurse?”)

  The worse you get, the louder we keep asking—

  as though, if you heard better, you could say.

  Two adjectives bob up sometimes, depending.

  Good things you call “amazing.”

  (“How was the garden? Did you like the birds?”)

  Things are either “terrible” or “amazing.”

  Nothing is in the middle. It’s the ending,

  the drawn-out ending, of your verbal life.

  “It’s hard to say,”

  you say, as though by thinking you’d remember

  your sentence: word by word, still less to say.

  This man here is your son. I am his wife,