The Surveyors Read online

  “Whoa” and “Whoa”—and you might look down on him

  as being so much smaller than the poet,

  though his paycheck is larger;

  you might call the poet more sophisticated;

  but just you try to do it, try to say something symmetrical

  and yet so unexpected.

  If I were a cultural critic, now

  would be the time to claim that this commercial

  is a thirty-second hymn to imperialism,

  to the astronaut’s arrogation of the air, and the boy’s

  father’s conquering of the wide-open American spaces,

  that it’s a hymn to masculine muscle, to boundless

  consumption, to wanting and wanting despite

  our having so much, but the truth is

  that although I’ve seen this ad a dozen times now

  and vow to memorize the Mercedes, the BMW, whatever it is,

  I never recall the make of the car

  or even its color.

  All I remember is how very efficient

  the commercial is, as elegant as an engine,

  how gently funny, how affectionate its gesture at the human

  manufacture of wonder, and I reflect

  that the artist is one who sometimes commands the courage

  to pare everything down to two iterations

  of one word that cannot be translated.

  WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARENTS

  It isn’t what he said in Casablanca

  and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless

  we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris.

  They’re in our baggage, or perhaps are baggage

  of the old-fashioned type, before the wheels,

  which we remember when we pack for Paris.

  Or don’t remember. Paris doesn’t know

  if you’re thinking of it. Neither do your parents,

  although they say you ought to visit more,

  as if they were as interesting as Paris.

  Both Paris and your parents are as dead

  and as alive as what’s inside your head.

  Meanwhile, those lovers, younger every year

  (because with every rerun we get older),

  persuade us less, for all their cigarettes

  and shining unshed tears about the joy

  of Paris blurring in their rearview mirror,

  that they’ve surpassed us in sophistication.

  Granted, they were born before our parents

  but don’t they seem by now, Bogart and Bergman,

  like our own children? Think how we could help!

  We could ban their late nights, keep them home

  the whole time, and prevent their ill-starred romance!

  Here’s looking at us, Kid. You’ll thank your parents.

  VIERGE OUVRANTE

  Marvelous and a little sick

  that her immaculate ivory

  self is sawn into a triptych

  from her uncrowned head straight down

  the neck, the breastbone, and the lap

  enthroning her bisected son.

  Magnetic on the double-door

  refrigerator of her white

  body, he is miniature

  but mature, an all-suffering

  king already killed, reborn,

  who elevates one hand in blessing

  while the other must hold steady

  the great globe on his knee, the whole

  world that is his baby—

  or will be when the world’s redeemed.

  But this is France, the year 1200,

  and to the sculptor it has seemed

  both beautiful and necessary

  that the hinged, compliant Virgin

  unfold the living allegory

  buried in her anatomy,

  as if some holy madman surgeon

  scarified there, in the three

  small panels, the naked guts of sin

  coiled and twisting in the back-

  story of the coming Passion:

  instead of one loved child who grows

  within her, here are multiple

  horror shows, the Man of Sorrows

  mocked along his bitter path,

  the stations of the Cross that lead

  to the death she’s pregnant with.

  Come the French Revolution, she

  too will be a thing of scorn.

  Turned into a children’s toy

  fitted with four wheels and a cord

  to pull around the Queen of Heaven,

  what to do but be drawn forward

  to Baltimore, where now, a vision

  butterflied on her stand, she’s propped

  up like the one Book’s one edition?

  She knows the future is past mending.

  Why look to her for an opening

  for some other ending?

  THE BICKERS

  It’s as if he’s edible

  himself, the overfed young man

  clutching a greenish pair of gloves

  like a bunch of steamed asparagus.

  His wavy hair is chestnut. His face

  is packed with juice, a pale pink cherry

  topping the pudding of his body,

  or topping what tops it first, the white

  dollop of a scalloped collar.

  His velvet cloak is a salmon color.

  Even the golden frame that hems

  him in is delicious, its baroque

  buttercreams of ornament

  the slathered icing on the cake.

  His counterpart, a perfect match

  (at least by the measure of the canvas

  and the same resplendent frame),

  hangs just to his left. How strange

  I’d walked past without noticing.

  The painter’s skill is just as fine:

  that lifelike treatment of the hand

  holding a small, improving book;

  the black shape of the suit set off

  by a paper-white, fine-pleated ruff

  and a bearded, balding head. A man

  who’s prosperous but moderate,

  diligent and slightly peeved—

  the languid young man’s father, surely.

  Bartholomeus van der Helst

  painted them both, I’m reading now,

  in 1642. They were

  the famous Bickers of Amsterdam.

  The Bickers! Savor too the name.

  Picture the Bickers’ League, a band

  of seven family politicians

  holding office all at once.

  Andries, the father here, was mayor

  time and again, a mercantile

  diplomat who sought to make

  the world safe for his shipping routes.

  Thanks to pragmatists like him,

  the Eighty Years’ War stopped at last.

  That was a topic van der Helst

  would paint too, as a grand tableau:

  Banquet at the Crossbowmen’s Guild

  in Celebration of the Treaty

  of Munster. Here the revelers are,

  deaf to whatever caused the war,

  shaking hands and doffing hats,

  lifting refilled pilsner glasses,

  and letting their long hose fall down

  into their floppy, wide-cut boots.

  Poor Andries, meanwhile—stuck

  beside that spoiled brat on the wall,

  his only child, Gerard, who ate

  the fruits of other people’s work!

  Opposites attract, and yet

  one Bicker only can endure

  at the Rijksmuseum gift shop

  as a refrigerator magnet.

  Gerard, of course. Who’d want his dad,

  that pious trading magnate, for

  a souvenir of all that’s sour?

  It hardly matters he had cause.

  The old war of the generations

  outlives all truces, and remainsr />
  rich fodder for our snickering.

  Taking a seat at the café,

  I order waffles with whipped cream

  and can hear the Bickers, bickering.

  LITTLE MEN

  Two men I’ve loved loved little men

  when they were little children—

  tin soldiers they could push around

  the carpet in their little fists.

  They could play all antagonists,

  make sound effects for every sound,

  but were peremptory and unfair

  as those Olympian puppeteer

  gods in the Iliad. All alone

  each boy beat the odds and won.

  And stunned the enemy the next day

  from some new flank, and changed which war

  it was, and pretended uniforms

  were colors other than they were.

  And rarely put the toys away

  because war is eternal.

  (Myself, I’d had a paper doll

  I dressed, and dressed, and dressed to kill.)

  Of these two boys who ordered all

  the playroom into battle, one

  grew up to be a novelist.

  Reader, I married him; we lost.

  The other rose in rank to Colonel,

  draft-numbered for a distant war

  nobody wanted anymore,

  and nobody is more pacifist.

  We read the daily news in bed,

  updates to the casualty list

  that verifies more little men

  have won, and winning’s what to have.

  And me? Which side should I be on?

  Hope too is eternal.

  I’m on his side, beside my love:

  the story rests here with my head

  against the drumbeat in his chest.

  SMOKING THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

  A flickering black-and-white

  documentary reel

  recalls them at their feast:

  long tables spread with fragments

  in Aramaic and Hebrew,

  with tags in Arabic

  numerals like place cards

  for scholars in white shirts.

  It’s 1952,

  five years since Bedouin

  shepherds broke a pot

  in a cave; and in their lab

  the puzzle-solvers laugh

  at something, with a silent-

  movie hamminess.

  “Turn this way.” (You imagine

  the voice of the cameraman.)

  One of them looks up

  from a snippet of Scotch tape

  he’s affixing to a scrap

  of antiquity (the next

  generation’s task

  will be, we know, to scrape

  a yellow gum from the text),

  while the sun—the very sun

  of Creation—illuminates

  through flung-open windows

  the crumbling manuscripts

  darkness kept legible

  over millennia.

  The young man resumes his work,

  pressing a curled parchment

  flat with one hand, and raising

  with the other hand his half-

  finished cigarette,

  a tiny, perfect scroll

  of paper that burns his lungs

  pleasantly, as an era

  is vanishing in smoke.

  ST. FLORIAN WITH BURNING CHURCH

  Funny how you can pass time and again

  the same things in the same room and not see them.

  Somehow, pacing for years through this museum,

  I’ve slighted three-foot-high St. Florian

  and now I stop. Why now? Saint who? Consult

  smartphone: apparently, he was a cult

  figure, often featured with a pail

  of water like this, ever tipped to douse

  the flames engulfing, at his feet, a house—

  no, it’s a church, but to a dollhouse-scale.

  Medieval artists played with small and large:

  the point here is that Florian took charge.

  His pose is wooden; then again, he’s made

  (as is the water and the fire) of wood

  and everything about them is a falsehood.

  “Light a fire,” the legend says he said,

  “and I will climb to Heaven on it.” One

  comment like that, your bio is all done—

  a millennium passes and the fire motif

  has gotten out of hand; a Roman soldier

  martyred in 304 C.E., now you’re

  a fetish throughout Europe, and (good grief)

  credited with extinguishing whole towns.

  In real life, though, it’s Florian who drowns

  and sinks to the bottom, poor unread footnote.

  They club him, scourge and flay him; for good measure,

  they throw him in the Enns, the local river,

  a millstone dangling from his soft young throat.

  Later, a woman named Valeria takes

  his body from the deep: and thus his relics

  travel through Noricum (in present-day

  Austria), to Linz, then Cracow, where

  the church named after him commands the square.

  Today in Poland, all you have to say

  is “Florian!” on the phone: it’s understood

  as code, even now, to call the fire brigade.

  Submission is the mark of all the saints,

  too humble to protest how history paints

  their acts in its canonical report.

  As for the rest of us, who knows our sins?

  Some vague, antique offense occurred near Linz,

  famous for Hitler and the Linzertorte.

  ADVANTAGE FEDERER

  The Holy Roman Empire comes to mind

  tonight, as I sit among the nineteen thousand

  in Madison Square Garden, which is not

  anywhere near Madison, nor is it square,

  nor is it a garden.

  Still, even Voltaire

  could have found something holy about it,

  partly because the real Placido Domingo

  is in the stands, enduring the microphone

  somebody jams in his face on the Jumbotron;

  and also because, loud as opera, in a cloud

  of dry ice from the locker room pit,

  a herald’s voice proclaims that it is Fed

  himself parting the crowd, and by god that’s him,

  the Greatest of All Time.

  His opponent gets some hoopla, but how can he rate?

  I scrutinize Roger’s legs (shapely and human,

  in shorts trimmed by a gold tuxedo stripe)

  with the same imploring attention I’ve seen him train

  on the face of his racket

  in close-ups on TV; and look, he’s doing it now,

  plucking pensively at the Wilson logo,

  the W in the mirror: I am the man,

  I can do this. All the chanters agree he can:

  let’s go, Roger, let’s go!

  And yet…although our tickets buy us space,

  time is an ace; the match is whizzing by.

  First set, second, third. Now he has lost.

  Now all the talking, graying heads can say

  into their cameras gravely: How long can he last?

  Oh but elation has the highest ranking!

  Surely I’m winning, simply by being alive

  while Roger Federer is thirty-three

  and playing like an angel and also blessing

  the sponsors and the “Baby Fed” Dimitrov:

  “I’d like to thank Grigor for beating me.”

  Seventh Avenue is seventh heaven

  as I float out into the evening, hardly aware

  of the rain when I open my umbrella’s face

  to stare into it, as Federer might stare.

  TENNIS IN THE SNOW

  You looked up from
your book, and apropos

  of nothing, asked: Did I ever tell you

  I played tennis once in the snow?

  No, I said. You didn’t. Where was this?

  Tennis in the snow! you said again.

  It was…in Colorado. No, in Kansas.

  I was a young captain.

  Did you win?

  I don’t know. I’d play this guy at the base.

  Marty. I can see us laughing,

  slipping and sliding all over the place.

  Were tennis balls still white back then?

  (A smile from you.) No, they were yellow

  already. This was the late eighties.

  It wasn’t all that long ago.

  Oh, I said. That’s a shame.

  I’m picturing the big white flakes

  whirling around, and part of the game

  was that you guys could hardly tell

  the difference between falling snow

  and the big white fuzzy tennis ball

  or even the full moon that would seem

  to lob over your heads that night,

  like a movie or a dream.

  It was daytime, you said. Nice story, though.

  Sorry, I said. I should leave it there.

  I just wanted to be mixed up in it,

  the place where your memories are.

  THE SURVEYORS

  Also, I had a dream, about a year and half ago, that I read a poem called “The Surveyors,” and it was by you. Does this poem exist? I cannot remember any of the words, only that there were all four seasons in it, and that there were nice descriptions of a chain being made taut, the running out of the chain, over and over…

  for Matthew Yeager, who wrote me this letter

  Dear Matt,

  I’m sorry to say “The Surveyors” does not exist,

  despite my being haunted by your question

  for a long while now, imagining time and again

  that the past can change; that the poem is on the list

  of things I did once, because you dreamed it of me.

  It’s true, I regret, I’ve never put all four

  seasons into one poem, though the Shakespeare

  sonnet I love most keenly, 73

  (“That time of year thou may’st in me behold”),

  implies them, and I wish I’d made a gesture

  at least of homage. But when I read your letter

  in the autumn of my life, I felt no cold;

  I heard Vivaldi’s “Spring” scrape violins

  over and over, like the running out of chains.

  “Over and over, like the running out of chains”—