North Point North: New and Selected Poems

Like faces floating on the surface of a dream,

On the surface of a swimming pool

Once the holocaust was complete.

And then I passed through stages of belief

And unbelief, desire and restraint.Ad interim, until they began to seem quaint

And I began to feel myself a victim of coincidence,

Inhabiting a film whose real title was my name --

Inhabiting a realm of fabulous constructions

Made entirely of words, all wordsUntil they meant whatever "I might mean.

But they're just fragments really,

No more than that.

A coast away,

And then across an ocean fifty years away, -- Bewitchment of intelligence by leaves —

A body floating clothed, facedown,

A not-so-old philosopher dying in his bed

-- At least I "thought I felt those things.

But then the line went dead

And I was back here in the cave, another ghost

Inhabiting the fourth part of the soul

And waiting, and still waiting, for the sun to come up.

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

Tell Mr. DeMille I'm ready for my close-up.

---In ItalyFor Henri Cole

1. Hotel Solferino

I was somewhere else, then here. Somewhere else: call it an idea

Lingering in the air like the faint smell of a rose

Insensibly near;

Or call it a small hotel

Towards the end of Via Solferino,

With a window open to the sun

And the sounds of automobiles on the street below

And adistant bell.

Call it any time but now,

Only call it unreal. In time's small room

Whatever lies beyond its borders

Couldn't have been, like an imaginary perfume

Nobody knows how

To even dream of again. In the extraordinary world where

Nothing ever happens, when in something like the way

A poem begins

I entered upon a street

I'd never imagined before, all the while

Concealed by that close sense of self That seemed to repeat

My name, that tried to consume

My entire world, that brought me to the entry

Of a small hotel where an image

Of my own face stared at me from another country,

From another room.

2. Expulsion from the Garden

It's hard to remember one was ever there,

Or what was supposed to be so great about it.

Each morning a newly minted sun rose

In a new sky, and birdsong filled the air.

There were all these things to name, and no sex.

The children took what God had given them --

A world held in common, a form of life

Without sin or moral complexity,

A vernal paradise complete with snakes --

And sold it all for a song, for the glory

Of the knowledge contained in the fatal apple.

At any rate, that's the official story.

In Masaccio's fresco in the Brancacci Chapel

The figures are smaller than you'd expect

And lack context, and seem all the more tragic.

The Garden is implicit in their faces,

Depicted through the evasive magic

Of the unpresented. Eve's arm is slack

And hides her sex. There isn't much to see

Beyond that, for the important questions,

The questions to whichone constantly comes back,

Aren't about their lost, undepicted home,

But the ones framed by their distorted mouths:

What are we now? What will we become?

Think of it as whatever state preceded

The present moment, this prison of the self.

The idea of the Garden is the idea

Of something tangible which has receded

Into stories, into poetry.

As one ages, it becomes less a matter

Of great intervals than of minor moments

Much like today's, which time's strange geometry

Has rendered unreal. And yet the question,

Raised anew each day, is the same one,

Though the person raising it isn't the same:

What am I now? What have I become?