The Surveyors Read online

  intently, and almost perfectly,

  deep down in the gorge.

  SO FAR

  All we can say so far

  is that we suffer

  for nothing.

  Not for the self, or

  for people at home.

  Not for the wisdom.

  Not for the love.

  Not for the looking

  out to the future,

  or into the nothing

  that goes back so far.

  We suffer because

  suffering’s there.

  We hadn’t been warned

  it got here first,

  that it drank all the water

  before we were born.

  Soon enough we’ll join

  all the people behind us

  who died of thirst

  and can tell us nothing

  so far.

  OLD SAW

  The cat is out of the bag,

  the horse has left the barn,

  the train pulled out of the station,

  no bridge is left to burn,

  the genie can’t be put

  back in the bottle, and

  in short, it’s long been time

  to take our medicine.

  They threw us under the bus.

  It feels as if we’re to blame.

  Maybe we are: we wonder,

  when did we turn obtuse?

  How did we lose our charm?

  Why do our old saws,

  our hats, our radio shows,

  so harmless, make them squirm?

  And do they think we love

  their swearwords and tattoos?

  If we could, we’d take a walk.

  It’s years since we could drive.

  They roll their eyes when we talk.

  They’re glad when we go to bed.

  Why did we wake today

  on the wrong side of the dead?

  DRAPERY FOR GOD THE FATHER

  for Mark Leithauser

  Wherever I turn, he’s already there—

  Dürer’s determined follower

  who has come, like me, to the museum

  to study the masterpieces.

  I study him: an old Hells Angel

  in damp, unlaundered undershirt

  from which pale tufts of armpit hair

  sprout, and make him smell

  much as Dürer must have smelled.

  He’s spellbound by A Tuft of Cowslips

  (1526, gouache

  on vellum); the blue-gray wash

  of Praying Hands; the darkening series

  of engraver’s proofs for Adam and Eve.

  Thick as the rhinoceros

  in that woodcut, he stays put—

  I skip a room or I backtrack

  and yet he blocks me, having swung

  into my lane again, a Wild One

  weaving against the traffic.

  When he and I were young, I suppose

  I could have been the girl behind him

  on the Harley, arms around his waist,

  not gaping in distaste

  at the rear view of his clothes:

  armored as one of Dürer’s knights,

  his belt is spiked, he’s trailing chains

  from the pockets of his jeans,

  and sleeving his bare arms, tattoos

  by a contemporary artist

  were needle-pricked in reds and blues

  that blend now on his skin.

  When (a miracle) at last

  he steps aside, he leaves me standing

  alone before a floating study

  for an altar triptych, lost

  in a palace fire two centuries later.

  Disembodied twice, then—since

  this is Drapery for God

  the Father: a priceless heap

  of heavy cloth fit for the shape

  that moves within it, though unseen.

  White hatching, done not with a pen

  but the thinnest paintbrush, brings

  forth the weave of light itself.

  Dazzling. I look away. And there

  he is once more, my heaven-sent

  blind date, my odd opponent

  in this afternoon’s long scrimmage:

  we make eye contact, and agree

  wordlessly to share the creator

  who made us in his image.

  MOON-BREATH

  Dark mornings staying dark

  longer, another autumn

  come, and the body one

  day poorer yet,

  from restless sleep I wake

  early now to note

  how the pale disk of moon

  caves to its own defeat,

  cold as yesterday’s fish

  left over in the pan,

  or miserly as a sliver

  of dried soap in a dish.

  Oh for a sparkling froth

  of cloud, a little heat

  from the sun! I shiver

  at the window where I plant

  one perfect moon-round breath,

  as I liked to do as a girl

  against the filthy glass

  of the yellow school bus

  laboring up the hill,

  not thinking what I meant

  but passionate, as if

  I were kissing my own life.

  THE BUTTONHOOK

  President Roosevelt, touring Ellis Island

  in 1906, watched the people from steerage

  line up for their six-second physical.

  Might not, he wondered aloud, the ungloved handling

  of aliens who were ill infect the healthy?

  Yet for years more it was done. I imagine

  my grandmother, a girl in that Great Hall’s

  polyglot, reverberating vault

  more terrible than church, dazed by the stars

  and stripes in the vast banner up in front

  where the blessed ones had passed through. Then she did too,

  to a room like a little chapel, where her mother

  might take Communion. A man in a blue cap

  and a blue uniform—a doctor? a policeman?

  (Papa would have known, but he had sailed

  all alone before them and was waiting

  now in New York; yet wasn’t this New York?)—

  a man in a blue cap reached for her mother.

  Without a word (didn’t he speak Italian?)

  he stuck one finger into her mother’s eye,

  then turned its lid up with a buttonhook,

  the long, curved thing for doing up your boots

  when buttons were too many or too small.

  You couldn’t be American if you were blind

  or going to be blind. That much she understood.

  She’d go to school, she’d learn to read and write

  and teach her parents. The eye man reached to touch

  her own face next; she figured she was ready.

  She felt big, like that woman in the sea

  holding up not a buttonhook but a torch.

  LITTLE STAR, 2015

  But soon, I’m told, I’ll lose my epaulets altogether

  and dwindle into a little star.

  —JOSEPH BRODSKY, 1940–1996

  Joseph, how is your sense of irony

  holding up in Heaven?

  Did you know, by chance, that the United States

  released in 2011

  a postage stamp in which your youthful visage

  is price-tagged at Forever?

  When did you think they’d do that for you in Russia?

  How about Never?

  Yet here you are, their little star, depicted

  in the city you called Peter;

  your troubles have been weighed at seventeen rubles

  on the poetry meter.

  Pressed like a headstrong schoolboy to the corner

  of the envelope,

  your image puts me in mind of your doting mother,

  who never
lost hope

  she’d see you again (although of course she didn’t)

  as she stood in line in

  the post office, holding a letter to be franked

  with the face of Lenin.

  A WOMAN’S TALE

  In the first scene, I’m eighteen,

  with a waist of twenty-four inches.

  I’m wearing a sweet blouse

  my mother sewed for me.

  A businessman in a suit

  comes walking down the street,

  stops in his tracks, and cries,

  “My God, you’re adorable.

  I want you to have my babies!”

  Then, good-naturedly

  shaking his head, not waiting

  for any sort of reply—

  and what on earth would I say?—

  he keeps on ambulating.

  A decade later. Another

  man has found me winning:

  this one impregnates me.

  We’d done the romantic thing,

  the ring, the honeymoon.

  Now, on a scorching day

  in July, some guy approaching

  on the sidewalk takes me in:

  at nine months gone, five-three,

  I’m nothing but a belly

  waddling along like Falstaff.

  He flings his head back to laugh—

  a belly laugh, if you will.

  That was thirty summers ago,

  and it still gives me a chill.

  LO SPOSALIZIO

  That’s the shorthand for it,

  The Marriage of the Virgin

  stuffed here in my pocket—

  a masterpiece in soft

  washable microfiber,

  a cloth six inches square

  designed to clean the lenses

  on fingerprinted glasses

  and reproduce the clear

  triumph of the rational

  (oil on poplar panel)

  in the ceremony Raphael

  composed for Mary and Joseph.

  Their modest heads incline

  to harmonize, as if

  half-note ovals penned

  on a staff made by the patterned

  stones in the piazza—

  geometries that bend

  to a vanishing point beyond

  a Romanesque, domed temple

  porticoed with arches

  along its base, except for

  (far off) a rectangular

  door that gives on air,

  blue hills and air, the future

  until it is the past.

  Perspective and proportion

  are what the bearded priest

  is authorized to join

  as he guides the husband’s wrist

  to place the ring on a destined

  finger on her hand.

  Yet every head’s its own.

  The congregation’s faces

  turn against symmetries,

  gaze this way or that

  or inward, while a number

  of background figures whisper

  like stands of distant trees.

  Even the draperies

  (the gold cloak falling from

  the bridegroom’s emerald shoulder;

  her mantle’s swag of sapphire

  wrapping the ruby gown)

  assert, for all their mass

  and balance, how the fabric

  of the moment improvises

  and unfolds as it will.

  Such, now, is the time in

  which you, my new son Simon,

  stand in your bow tie;

  you, Emily, the child

  I swaddled once, are veiled

  as only brides may be.

  Now may the mystery start.

  With nothing to espouse

  but hope as old as art,

  I clutch the little cloth

  in case need should arise

  to wipe my naked eyes.

  THE HOTEL BELVEDERE

  A June day under the Jungfrau.

  Near the railway that brought her here,

  an old woman sits on a bench.

  She isn’t facing the Jungfrau

  but the Hotel Belvedere

  which has, as its name implies,

  a beautiful view of the Jungfrau,

  a name for what she had been

  when she last saw it, maybe,

  on her honeymoon.

  She regards the hotel intently,

  studies what I assume

  were the windows of their room.

  Was it hard to come back alone,

  hobbling on that cane?

  No, not alone: her husband

  and daughter (or granddaughter—

  surely this couple’s offspring

  can’t be very young)

  have arrived with ice cream cones,

  inverted mountains where snow

  is piled on the widest end.

  They make the most of that pleasure

  before, like a magic trick,

  a tripod’s pulled from a backpack.

  Steady as you go

  is what the granddaughter says

  as she pulls the old woman up

  and the three of them, like a tripod,

  lean to make one shape

  that peaks on top, like the Jungfrau.

  But the hotel’s the backdrop.

  The camera’s timed to snap

  at a smile, and another smile;

  new pose, and it snaps again.

  Even the staring stranger

  who has no need to invent

  their story is distracted

  from the majesty of the Jungfrau,

  and heeding gestures meant

  to yield up little grandeur:

  the acts of a granddaughter

  who, when she’s old, will tell

  of the long journey they took

  back to the hotel,

  the origin of what mattered

  to a few vanished people.

  There was ice cream; and a view

  of the snowcapped Jungfrau,

  which is nowhere pictured.

  AN AFGHAN CARPET

  Bring me just notice of the numbers dead

  On both our parts.

  —HENRY V

  Centuries of illiterate

  women, think of it, making them one by one

  on portable looms, knotting the fringes by hand,

  delineating along the way

  the figured border, the either-or,

  between home ground and what’s beyond

  the raveled shore;

  between us and anonymous

  landlocked nomads in their tents.

  What is this carpet’s provenance?

  Herati pattern. Made in Afghanistan.

  Purchased years ago in Bahrain

  in a little shop where

  the chatty proprietor served tea;

  then given to me

  by you, my beloved, that scared-as-hell

  young man from Indiana, churchy

  and virtuous, who got to finish college

  before your number was up.

  You too would come to sleep in tents;

  you dressed and spoke in camouflage,

  handpicked for Intelligence.

  Clueless, I consult a map

  for what hems Afghanistan in.

  Turkmenistan, China, Pakistan,

  Uzbekistan, Iran…

  the cartographer’s inked

  lines in the sand,

  named-and-renamed

  infringements.

  Think of the line

  of elephants, as grand as time,

  thundering over the Hindu Kush

  repeatedly in these octagons

  that stand for their giant prints.

  Motifs that stomp

  the margins like a postmaster’s stamp

  over and over, he cannot stop,

  on the carpet’s envelope.

  Art as target.
Art as grid

  where secret combatants are hidden.

  Prayer rug whose standard size

  is a village square.

  What do I know?

  Nothing. But I hear it underfoot:

  the terrible, low

  warble of warplanes.

  And sometimes I see five miles high

  an enemy, silent, without a face

  in uncontested airspace,

  dropping ordnance from a leather chair

  in (can it be?) Las Vegas.

  Move in with me. This is our house.

  This will be us:

  first, we’ll get to be alive.

  And then we’ll have

  labor-saving appliances,

  megatons of mail-ordered stuff,

  an Afghan carpet, a smart TV

  larger than good taste might warrant

  but face it, our eyes

  are no longer what they were.

  Let’s sit above this homemade, nomad

  carpet woven by women

  in black shapes on fields of red.

  The spade-shapes look like missiles.

  The one-armed shapes like jugs

  seem they might put out flames.

  Each of us in a leather chair

  and primed, with a glass of wine, for tonight’s

  mystery set in some English hamlet

  where a murder is solved every week,

  let’s confess: we can’t

  unearth the carpeted names.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the editors of the journals where these poems appeared, sometimes in slightly different form.

  Ambit: “The Surveyors”

  The American Scholar: “Aloe,” “Mr. Boyfriend,” “So Far”

  The Antioch Review: “Dragnet,” “Tennis in the Snow”

  The Common: “Bratislava,” “Here I Am,” “The Hotel Belvedere,” “We’ll Always Have Parents”

  The Fiddlehead: “Little Men,” “Moon-Breath,” “A Vanity Table”

  The Hopkins Review: “St. Florian with Burning Church”

  Little Star: “Little Star, 2015,” “Vierge Ouvrante”

  National Archives (www.archives.gov) and poets.org: “The Buttonhook”

  Plume: “Advantage Federer,” “A Word from Our Sponsor”

  Poetry Northwest: “Lo Sposalizio,” “Old Saw”

  Southwest Review: “An Afghan Carpet,” “Today’s Specials”

  Women’s Studies Quarterly: “A Woman’s Tale”

  The Yale Review: “The Bickers,” “Drapery for God the Father,” “Pastry Level,” “The Profane Piano Tuner,” “Smoking the Dead Sea Scrolls”