Becoming Light Read Online Free PDF

Forest
    Living in a house
    near the Black Forest,
    without any clocks,
    she’s begun
    to listen to the walls.
    Her neighbors have clocks,
    not one
    but twenty clocks apiece.
    Sometimes
    a claque of clocks
    applauds
    the passing of each day.
    Listen to the walls
    & wind your watch.
    Poor love, poor love,
    have they caught you
    by the pendulum?
    Do they think they’ve
    got you stopped?
    Have you
    already gathered how,
    living near the Black Forest,
    she gets by
    on cups of borrowed time?

The Artist as an Old Man
    If you ask him he will talk for hours—
    how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers
    raw with cold, and later painted bowers
    in ladies’ boudoirs; how he played checkers
    for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;
    how he fled the border to a country
    which disappeared wars ago; unfriended
    crossed a continent while this century
    began. He seldom speaks of painting now.
    Young men have time and theories; old men work.
    He has painted countless portraits. Sallow
    nameless faces, made glistening in oil, smirk
    above anonymous mantelpieces.
    The turpentine has a familiar smell,
    but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies.
    Perched on the maulstick, it nears the easel.
    He has come to like his resignation.
    In his sketch books, ink-dark cossacks hear
    the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow.
    His pen alone recalls that years ago,
    one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear
    which, poised, seemed pointed straight to pierce the sun.

The Catch
    You take me to the restaurant where one
    plays god over a fish tank. The fat trout
    pace their green cage, waiting to be taken
    out of an element. Who knows what they know?
    There are thirteen in a tank meant
    for goldfish. I don’t care which one I eat.
    But the waiter expects a performance,
    con brio. This is a ritual
    solemn as wine-tasting or the Last Judgment.
    Eating is never so simple as hunger.
    Between the appetite and its satisfaction
    falls the net, groping blindly in dark water.
    The fish startle and thrash. You make your catch,
    flourishing a bit for the waiter
    so as not to be thought a peasant. You force
    air into the trout’s gills as if he were Adam,
    and send him squirming toward the kitchen
    to be born. Then it’s my turn. I surprise
    myself with my dexterity, almost
    enjoying the game. A liter of wine
    later, the fish return, foppishly dressed
    in mushrooms and pimentos, their eyes
    dreamily hazed. Darling, I am drunk. I watch you pluck
    the trout’s ribs out of your perfect teeth.

At the Museum of Natural History
    The lessons we learned here
    (fumbling with our lunchbags,
    handkerchiefs
    & secret cheeks of bubblegum)
    were graver than any
    in the schoolroom:
    the dangers of a life
    frozen into poses.
    Trilobites in their
    petrified ghettos,
    lumbering dinosaurs
    who’d outsized themselves
    told how nature was
    an endless morality play
    in which the cockroach
    (& all such beadyeyed
    exemplars of adjustment)
    might well recite the epilogue.
    No one was safe
    but stagnation was
    the surest suicide.
    To mankind’s Hamlet,
    what six-legged creature would play
    Fortinbras? It made you scratch
    your head & think
    for about two minutes.
    Going out, I remember
    how we stopped to look at
    Teddy Roosevelt,
    (Soldier, Statesman, Naturalist,
    Hunter, Historian,
    et cetera, et cetera).
    His bronze bulk (four times life size)
    bestrode Central Park West
    like a colossus.
    His monumental horse
    snorted towards the park.
    Oh, we were full of Evolution & its lessons
    when (the girls giggling madly,
    the boys blushing) we peeked
    between those huge legs to see
    those awe-inspiring
    Brobdingnagian balls.

To James Boswell in London
    Boswell—you old rake—I have tried to imitate
    your style; but it is no use; my dialogues are
    all between my selves: and though I sit up late,
    make endless notes and jottings that I hope will jar
    my memory—it is in vain—for in the end
    I have no Dr. Johnson but myself.
    The difference is (I think) between our lives. You