Becoming Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

spend
    the morning at the coffee house, nourish yourself
    with talk and kippers before proceeding on to dine.
    A ramble across London perks the appetite.
    Every step is an adventure; the written line
    distills itself from life. How can you help but write?
    I consort with books while you see men, haunt the shelves
    where your London lies buried. Your book once opened,
    I become the ghost, a pale phantom who delves
    into your life to borrow moments penned
    two hundred years ago. I roam your world ignored—
    while my own life, waiting outside, questions my motives.
    A man should never live more than he can record
    you say; but what if he records more than he lives?
    My journal swarms with me and even I am bored.
    I am all my personae—children, lovers, wives,
    philosophers and country-wenches. Though I give them
    different robes and wigs to wear, all converse alike;
    all reason falsely with the same stratagem;
    each suspects the logic of the other, dislikes
    him, yet cannot prove him wrong. Petty cavils
    grow to monstrous issues, belabored arguments
    resolve themselves only in sleep; darkness prevails.
    Only the living find solace in common sense.
    Safe, preserved from the rape of the world, I grow
    dishonest, and pen my crooked words, for one can lie
    with ease about those things the world will never know.
    Conversation—that clearinghouse for thoughts—denied,
    the mind gets gouty and the conscience needs a cane.
    Notions unuttered seem to echo through the brain—
    and our monologues are doomed to the same end.
    We all think better—interrupted by a friend.

Death of a Romantic
    He died in Rome, in all that sunlight,
    the Spanish Steps full of trysting lovers,
    Bernini’s watery boat still sinking
    in the fountain in the square below.
    And even if they weren’t lovers
    who crowded the burning steps that day—
    but businessmen complaining of the heat,
    tired tourists or prowling gigolos—
    he had to bear his dark delirium
    while the world breathed and sweated outside.
    It was no day to die—his tongue dumb
    with fever, and all his senses raging
    out of tune—The slow continuo
    of fountains, weakly pulsing,
    a disembodied rhythm robbed of song—
    and all that unexpected, wide-flung sky
    shattered hourly by bells, the frenzied
    flapping of a lone bird’s wings
    —determined—in a wilderness of air.
    The sunlight fades now, eyes bound burning
    within their fleshy lids—they close to see
    kaleidoscopes of light, the spectrum suns,
    —those fiery self-consuming hearts that blaze
    one final time, against finality
    like embers flaring in a gust of breath
    —when death—the silent, steadfast muse,
    the faithful lover—comes to consummate
    a long flirtation.

Eveningsong at Bellosguardo
    Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:
    di doman non c’e certezza .
    —Lorenzo di Medici
    In the poplars’ lengthening shadows on this hill,
    amid the rows of marigolds and earth,
    and through the boxhedge labyrinth we walk,
    together, to the choiring twilight bells.
    Their fugue of echoes echoes through the hills
    and sings against this time-streaked, flowering wall
    where breezes coax the potted lemon trees,
    the pendant, yellow fruit and shiny leaves.
    Beneath the flaming watercolor sky,
    the cultivated, terraced drop of hill,
    a gleaming city with its towers and domes,
    the Arno shimmering as it drowns the sun.
    Chameleon-like, I am transformed by light,
    and wine has blurred the edges of the night.
    What gifts I give on this or any night
    may be refracted in another light.
    You understand this in a foreign tongue,
    but vaguely, for these things will not translate.
    I feel it in the cadence of your walk:
    you are not one whom moonlight can create.
    And you will think the loosening of these thighs,
    the sudden, urging whiteness of the throat
    are muted but distinctly pagan cries
    and in your triumph you will fairly gloat.
    Tonight the unplucked lemons almost gleam.
    And with their legs, the crickets harmonize.
    The trees are rustling an