Open Shutters Read Online Free PDF Page B

September
    Evening, four weeks later.
    The next jet from the nearby Air Force base
    repeats its shuddering exercise
    closer and closer overhead.
    A full moon lifts again in the fragile sky,
    with every minute taking on
    more light from the grounded sun, until
    it’s bright enough to read the reported
    facts of this morning’s paper by—
    finally, a moon that glows
    so brilliantly it might persuade us
    that out there
somebody knows.
    A comfort once—the omniscience
    of Mother, Father, TV, moon.
    Later, in the long afternoon
    of adolescence, I lay on the grass
    and philosophized with a friend:
    would we choose to learn our death date
    (some eighty years from now, of course)?
    Did it exist yet? And if so,
    did we believe in fate?
    (What
we
thought: to the growing
    narcissist, that was the thing to know.)
    Above our heads, the clouds kept drifting,
    uncountable, unrecountable,
    like a dreamer’s game of chess
    in which, it seemed, one hand alone
    moved all the pieces, all of them white,
    and in the hand they changed
    liquidly and at once into
    shapes we almost—no,
    we couldn’t name.
    But if there were one force
    greater than we, had I ever really
    doubted that he or she
    or it would be literate?
    Would see into the world’s own heart?
    To know all is to forgive all—
    (now, where had I read that?).
    Evil would be the opposite, yes?—
    scattershot and obtuse:
    what hates you, what you hate
    hidden in cockpits, caves, motel rooms;
    too many of them to love
    or, anyway, too late.
    By now I’ve raided thousands
    of stories in the paper for
    thinkable categories:
    unlettered schoolboys with one Book
    learned by heresy and hearsay;
    girls never sent to school;
    men’s eyes fixed on the cause;
    living women draped in shrouds,
    eyes behind prison-grilles of gauze.
    Mine, behind reading glasses
    (updated yearly, to lend no greater
    clarity than the illusion
    that one can stay in place),
    look up and guess what the moon
    means by its blurred expression.
    Something to do with grief
    that grief now seems old-fashioned—
    a gesture that the past
    gave the past for being lost—
    and that the future is newly lost
    to an unfocused dread
    of what may never happen
    and nobody can stop.
    Not tired yet, wound-up, almost
    too glad to be alive—as if
    this too were dangerous—
    I imagine the synchronized operations
    across the neighborhood:
    putting the children to bed;
    laying out clean clothes;
    checking that the clock radio
    is set for six o’clock tomorrow,
    to alarm ourselves with news.

An Open Book
            
for Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001
)
    I saw your father make a book,
    instinctively, from upturned palms;
        as prayers began
    in a language I don’t understand,
    I saw he didn’t need to look.
    Your brother, sisters, others read
    from lines in their own empty hands
        that you were dead,
    or so it seemed to one who had
    nothing by heart yet but the snow.
    For days now, I’ve kept seeing how
    the volume of your coffin sank
        into the sole
    dark place in all that whiteness—like
    your newest book of poems, blank
    to you in your last weeks because
    a tumor in your brain had blurred
        more than your eyes;
    prompting your memory, a friend
    had helped you tape it word by word.
    After, at your brother’s house,
    I asked your father: “What does it mean
        when you pray with open
    hands? Are they a kind of Koran?”
    He smiled, and said I was mistaken:
    he’d cupped hands to receive God’s blessings.
    Nothing about the Book at all;
        but since I’d asked,
    here was the finest English version
    (plucked up from the coffee table—
    tattered cover, thick but small
    as a deck of cards), translated by
        an unbeliever,
    a scholar who’d found consolation
    in it when he lost his son.
    That was the closest the old man
    would come to telling me how he feels.
        I think of him
    when in my head a tape unreels
    again your coffin’s agonized
    slow-motion lowering upon
    four