Zone Journals Read Online Free PDF Page B

intensity.
I can’t remember what I thought it meant to me then,
But can remember going back to the BOQ

To sit up most of the night
drinking red wine and reading a book of poems.
Here in Virginia when I visit his room and knock
Twice on the doorjamb, and look at the rump-sprung mattress,
The spirits come and my skin sings.
I still don’t know why
but I think it’s all right, and I like it.
    â€” 23 May 1985
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    â€”Horn music starts up and stutters uncertainly
out of the brown house
Across the street: a solo,
A duet, then three of them all at once, then silence,
Then up and back down the scale.
Sunday, the ninth of June, the morning
Still dull-eyed in its green kimono,
the loose, blown sleeves
Moving complacently in the wind.
Now there are two, then all three again
weaving a blurred, harmonic line
Through the oak trees and the dogwood
As the wind blows and the sheer nightgown of daylight glints.
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    Where was it I heard before
Those same runs and half-riffs
turned through a summer morning,
Come from one of the pastel buildings
Outside the window I sat in front of looking down
As I tried to practice my own scales
of invisible music
I thought I heard for hours on a yellow legal pad?
Verona, I think, the stiff French horn

Each weekend echoing my own false notes
and scrambled lines
I tried to use as decoys to coax the real things down
Out of the air they hid in and out of the pencils they hid in …
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    Silence again. For good, now,
I suspect, until next week,
arduous harmony,
Unalterable music our lives are measured by.
What will become of us, the Italian French hom player,
These players, me, all of us
trying to imitate
What we can’t see and what we can’t hear?
Nothing spectacular, I would guess, a life
Scored more or less by others,
smorzando here, andante there:
Only the music will stay untouched,
Moving as certainly as the wind moves,
invisible in the trees.
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    â€” 12 June 1985
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    â€”North wind flows from the mountain like water,
a clear constancy
Runneling through the grapevines,
Slipping and eddying over the furrows the grasses make
Between the heaves and slackening of the vine rows,
Easing and lengthening over the trees,
then smooth, flat
And without sound onto the plain below.
It parts the lizard-colored beech leaves,
Nudges and slithers around
the winter-killed cypress

Which stand like odd animals,
Brown-furred and hung from the sky,
backwashes against the hillsides
And nibbles my cheeks and hands
Where I stand on the balcony letting it scour me.
Lamentation of finches,
harangue of the sparrow,
Nothing else moves but wind in the dog-sleep of late afternoon …
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    Inside the self is another self like a black hole
Constantly dying, pulling parts of our lives
Always into its fluttery light,
anxious as Augustine
For redemption and explanation:
No birds hang in its painted and polished skies, no trees
Mark and exclaim its hill lines,
no grass moves, no water:
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    Like souls looking for bodies after some Last Judgment,
Forgotten incidents rise
from under the stone slabs
Into its waxed air;
Grief sits like a toad with its cheeks puffed,
Immovable, motionless, its tongue like a trick whip
Picking our sorrows off, our days and our happiness;
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    Despair, with its three mouths full,
Dangles our good occasions, such as they are, in its gray hands,
Feeding them in,
medieval and naked in their ecstasy;

And Death, a tiny o of blackness,
Waits like an eye for us to fall through its retina,
A minor irritation,
so it can blink us back.
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    Nothing’s so beautiful as the memory of it
Gathering light as glass does,
As glass does when the sundown is on it
and darkness is still a thousand miles away.
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    Last night, in the second yard, salmon-smoke in the west
Back-vaulting the bats
who plunged and swooped like wrong angels
Hooking their slipped souls in the twilight,
The quattrocento landscape
turning to air beneath my feet,
I sat on the stone