Becoming Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

alchemy.
    He’s fortunate to have a perfect muse.
    A live-in muse, who cooks inspiringly;
    And sometimes after an ambrosial meal,
    He’ll grab his pen, composing feverishly
    A perfect poem, describing in detail
    The salad, wine, the roast in buttery baste.
    And reading it, his musing wife agrees
    That every line smacks of his perfect taste.

Autumn Perspective
    Now, moving in, cartons on the floor,
    the radio playing to bare walls,
    picture hooks left stranded
    in the unsoiled squares where paintings
    were,
    and something reminding us
    this is like all other moving days;
    finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life,
    hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit,
    and burned-out matches in a corner;
    things not preserved, yet never swept away
    like fragments of disturbing dreams
    we stumble on all day…
    in ordering our lives, we will discard them,
    scrub clean the floorboards of this our home
    lest refuse from the lives we did not lead
    become, in some strange, frightening way,
    our own.
    And we have plans that will not tolerate
    our fears—a year laid out like rooms
    in a new house—the dusty wine glasses
    rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves
    sagging with the heavy winter books.
    Seeing the room always as it will be,
    we are content to dust and wait.
    We will return here from the dark and silent
    streets, arms full of books and food,
    anxious as we always are in winter,
    and looking for the Good Life we have
    made.
    I see myself then: tense, solemn,
    in high-heeled shoes that pinch,
    not basking in the light of goals fulfilled,
    but looking back to now and seeing
    a lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl
    in a bare room, full of promise
    and feeling envious.
    Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives
    forward
    into the future—as if, when the room
    contains us and all our treasured junk
    we will have filled whatever gap it is
    that makes us wander, discontented
    from ourselves.
    The room will not change:
    a rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint
    won’t make much difference;
    our eyes are fickle
    but we remain the same beneath our suntans,
    pale, frightened,
    dreaming ourselves backward and forward
    in time,
    dreaming our dreaming selves.
    I look forward and see myself look back.

The Nazi Amphitheatre
    Abandoned by their parents
    in a wood,
    Hansel & Gretel
    found this place:
    a child’s nightmare
    run wild with weeds;
    blank stage for the hero,
    seats stepping off:
    optical illusions;
    poles for flags flapping:
    cheering tongues;
    pines bayonetting the sky;
    a forest formed
    of all the fears
    in night’s imagination.
    Now we come upon it hand in hand,
    see nothing but an earthen bowl
    littered with bottle bits
    & condom wrappers,
    disowned by the town,
    harangued by rain,
    the focus of conflicting
    memories. (“Hitler spoke here.”
    “No, he never did.”)
    —As if it mattered.
    This place is a house
    bought by a manic
    & not remembered
    later in the asylum.
    Invisible from the city,
    forgotten in a gothic forest,
    it waits for Hansel & Gretel
    (us perhaps) to wake up,
    dreaming some recurrent dream.

By Train from Berlin
    A delicate border. A nonexistent country.
    The train obligingly dissolves in smoke.
    The G.I. next to me is talking war.
    I don’t “know the Asian mind,” he says.
    Moving through old arguments.
    At Potsdam (a globe-shaped dome,
    a pink canal reflecting sepia trees)
    we pull next to a broken-down old train
    with REICHSBAHN lettered on its flank.
    Thirty years sheer away leaving bare cliff.
    This is a country I don’t recognize.
    Bone-pale girls who have nothing to do with
    home.
    Everyone’s taller than me, everyone naked.
    “Life’s cheap there,” he says.
    But why are we screaming over a track
    which runs between a barbed wire corridor?
    And why has it grown so dark outside,
    so bright in here
    that even the pared moon is invisible?
    In the window we can only see ourselves,
    America we carry with us,
    two scared people talking death
    on a train which can’t stop.

Near the Black