manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.
GHOSTS
I heard a noise this morning and found two old men
leaning on the wall of my vineyard, looking out
over the fields, silent. Went back to my desk
until somebody raised the trap door of the well.
It was the one with the cane, looking down inside.
But I was annoyed when the locked door rattled where
the grain and wine were. Went to the kitchen window
and stared at him. He said something in Greek.
I spread my arms to ask what he was doing.
He explained about growing up out there long ago.
That now they were making a little walk among
the old places. Telling it with his hands.
He made a final gesture, rubbing the side
of the first finger against that of the other hand.
I think it meant how much he felt about being here
again. We smiled, even though he was half blind.
Later, my bucket banged and I saw the heavy one
pulling up water. He cleaned the mule’s stone basin
carefully with his other hand. Put back a rock
for the doves to stand on and poured in fresh water.
Stayed there, touching the old letters cut in the marble.
I watched them go slowly down the lane and out
of sight. They did not look back. As I typed,
I listened for the dog at each farm to tell me
which house they went to next. But the dogs did not
bark all the way down the long bright valley.
HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS
We think the fire eats the wood.
We are wrong. The wood reaches out
to the flame. The fire licks at
what the wood harbors, and the wood
gives itself away to that intimacy,
the manner in which we and the world
meet each new day. Harm and boon
in the meetings. As heart meets what
is not heart, the way the spirit
encounters the flesh and the mouth meets
the foreignness in another mouth. We stand
looking at the ruin of our garden
in the early dark of November, hearing crows
go over while the first snow shines coldly
everywhere. Grief makes the heart
apparent as much as sudden happiness can.
MAN AT A WINDOW
He stands there baffled by pleasure and how little
it counts. The long woman is finally asleep on the bed,
the sweat beautiful on her New England nakedness.
It was while he was walking toward the shuttered window
with sunlight blazing behind it that something
important happened. He looks down through the gap
between the shutters at the Romans and late summer
in the via del Corso, trying to find a name for it,
knowing it is not love. Nor tenderness. He considers
other times just after, the random intensity sliding away,
unrecoverable. It is the sorrow that stays clear.
This specialness inside his spirit is bonded to
a knowing he cannot remember. When he was crushed,
each minor shift of his body traced out the bones
with agony, making his skeleton more and more clear
inside him. As though floodlit. He remembers
the intricate way he would lift his arm from the bed
in the hospital, turning his hand cautiously this way
and that to find the bearable paths through the air,
discovering an inch here and there where the pain
was missing. Or the cold and hunger as he walked
the alleys all night that winter down by the docks
of Genoa until each dawn, when he held the hot bowls
of tripe in his numb hands, the steam rising into his face
as he drank, the tears mixing with happiness. He opens
the shutters, and the shutters of the other window,
so the Mediterranean light can get to her. Desperately
trying to break the code while there