The Wrecking Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

some
over-wintering bird,
before they even notice.
    Healed by distance
and a landscape opening
under broken sun, I like this
mirror-less, flawless world
with no people in it,
only birds.
    Unmissed, I can see myself again
in this great unfurling — the song,
the fledged leaf, the wing;
in these strong trees that
twist from the bud: their grey
beginning to green.

DURING DINNER
for Beatrice Monti della Corte
    I tried to tell the Baronessa
she shouldn't cut the
biancospino

and certainly never bring it here indoors.
In my country you fetch

death into the house with hawthorn,
I cried;
but seeing I hadn't impressed her
with my folklore, tried again.
Better to leave it, wild,

standing like smoke in the olive groves

or in the hanging valley down below,

than set it on the dresser

and give us all bad luck.

Then, changing tack:
It was Christ's crown and the faeries' bed,

I said to my hostess, my poor confessor,
getting her attention back,
but 'Ladies' Meat' is another name

because it smells of sex and it smells of death.

Then brilliantly I second-guessed her:
For years I was only able to smell one.

Now I can only smell the other!

And with that — heaven bless her —
she rose, and left the table.

ARSENIO
after Montale
    The wind-devils stir up the dust
and swirl over the roof-tops, waltzing
down the empty driveways
of all the grand hotels, where the horses
stand, hooded and stock-still
by the blaze of windows,
noses to the ground.
You go down the promenade, facing the sea
on this day of rain, this day of fire,
when a fusillade of castanets
shakes out the stitches of this
tightly woven plot of hour on hour on hour.
    It is the call of another orbit:
follow it, go down to the horizon,
impending, overhung
by a lead-grey waterspout, a twister
more restless than the waves it spirals over,
a long salt whirlwind, whirlpooled to the clouds.
You must go down to where your feet
squeak on the wet shingle, catch
in the tangle of seaweed: this
is the moment, perhaps,
the long-awaited moment
that will save you from the end of your journey,
your days like links in a chain — motionless
progress, Arsenio, the familiar
frenzy of paralysis.
    Listen: among the palm-trees
the tremulous stream of violin music
drowned, as it begins, by the thunder's
rolling iron drum.
The storm is at its sweetest
when the white eye of the Dog Star
blinks open in the brief blue
and the evening seems so distant
though it's coming soon enough;
lightning etches the sky, branching sudden
through the blushing light
like some tree of precious metal;
listen: the rumble of the gypsy drums...
    Go down into the hurled, headlong dark
that's turned this noon into a night of lit globes
swaying down the shore —
and out there, where sky and sea
are all one shadow, slow fishing boats pulse
with acetylene —
till anxious drops
start from the heavy sky, and the earth
steams as it drinks it down, and you
and the world around have rain
lapping at your ankles; drenched awnings flag
and flap; you hear nothing but the giant shearing
hiss of water hitting the ground, the wheeze
of hundreds of paper lanterns
crumpling on the street.
    And so, lost among the sodden mats and wickerwork,
you are a reed that drags its roots behind you;
they cling so tight you'll never be free;
trembling with life, you can only stretch out
to a ringing emptiness of swallowed grief;
the crest of that old wave rolls you,
overwhelms you again,
everything that can reclaim you
does — street and porch and walls and mirrors — all
lock you in with the frozen myriad dead;
and if you feel the brush of some gesture,
the breath of a word,
that, Arsenio,
might be the sign — in this dissolving hour —
of a strangled life that rose for you; the wind
carrying it off with the ashes of the stars.

DRESS REHEARSALS
    On the final evening
headlights swarm down the hill like lava
making brief beds
of moving embers you can almost hear
the night extinguishing.
Darkness slides over itself,