t e r r i b l y  c u n e i f o r m

Anniversary

You’d figure the hawk for an isolate thing,
commanding the empyrean,
taking his ease in the thermals and wind
until that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek –
cruelly perfect at what he is.
With crepe myrtle igniting the streets
and flowering pansy underfoot
I’d get out there just after dawn each day,
before the sun made it over the mesquite and honey locust.
Cliff swallows rocketed low over grass,
dragonflies darted above:
every day, on the heels of first birdsong, juice-heads
sleeping rough by the culvert.
Before the heat,
before the ebb and flow of cicada whirr swallowed the world,
when the crepe myrtle was still in bloom,
when it was the flowering pansies’ time in the park and untended lots,
and still a touch of cool in the air.
I remember once, a red-tail perched close by
on a branch or utility pole.
Maybe he came down for a better look,
but I think it was so that I might better see him,
who reigned over these few acres and beyond
and what it was about him so overmastering.
An ugly sheen encouraged some gold in his russet mantle.
His belly was white.
Look at me, he seemed to be insisting.
Behold, a pure wild heartless thing,
beautiful and horrible, nothing in-between.
I one day saw him tearing at his prey:
he was in the crook of a tree, low and close at hand,
fixed on it, drunk with it, mercilessly at it,
the sound like a cleaver tearing through meat,
cruelly what he was, nothing else.
But on another day, not long after, I heard him,
perched high on a branch, calling out,
crying out in distress, piteously,
kee-eeee-arrr, kee-eeee-arrr
a harsh, descending sound, and unrelenting,
kee-eeee-arrr kee-eeee-arrr,
panicked or wounded, terrible in his dismay,
until, suddenly, from some other corner of sky
another hawk flew down to join him,
not right there on the same branch but on another, close by.
And soon after that, off they flew together,
drifting, spiralling, higher and higher
in partnered loops, wheeling and diving,
enraptured by all they were, were able to do,
not as separate beings, but as two.

published in London Review of Books, May 5 2005

Rilke: The Apple Orchard

Come just after the sun has gone down, watch
This deepening of green in the evening sward:
Is it not as if we’d long since garnered
And stored within ourselves a something which

From feeling and from feeling recollected,
From new hope and half-forgotten joys
And from an inner dark infused with these,
Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered

Under trees here like trees in a Dürer woodcut –
Pendent, pruned, the husbandry of years
Gravid in them until the fruit appears –
Ready to serve, replete with patience, rooted

in the knowledge that no matter how above
Measure or expectation, all must be
Harvested and yielded, when a long life willingly
Cleaves to what’s willed and grows in quiet resolve.

Rilke: After the Fire

Early autumn morning hesitated,
Shying at newness, an emptiness behind
Scorched linden trees still crowding in around
The moorland house, now just one more wallstead

Where youngsters in a pack from god knows where
Went rip-roaring wild and yelled and wrecked.
Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared,
The son of the place, and with along forked stick

Dragged an out of shape old can or kettle
From under hot, charred, half-consumed house-beams;
And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell,
Turned to the others present, at great pains

To make them realise what had stood so.
For now that it was gone, it all seemed
Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh.
And he was changed: as from a far-off land.

Rilke: Roman Campagna

Out of the sluggish, clogged-up city, which
Would rather sleep on, undisturbed, and dream
of its soaring baths, the road to the fever marsh –
The Appian tomb-road – heads past each last farm

And farmhouse, out under the malign
Gaze of windows that fasten on its back,
Unnerving it, driving it, ram-stam, on
Until, imploring, out of breath, in panic

And with a quick look backwards, to make sure
The windows have stopped watching, it entrusts
Its emptiness to the skies. And as the far

Aqueducts come striding up, alerted,
The skies that have absorbed its emptiness
Now substitute their own. Which will outlast it.

The Question

We’re eating outside with our friends,
Woodstock Buddhists; our kids and theirs
are lighting sticks on citronella candles
to throw them at the woods like burning spears;
the Rainbow Family of Living Light
are drumming in Magic Meadow; I’ve drunk enough
that all I want to do is close my eyes,
when a voice rings like a summons from the darkness:
my six-year-old son asking: “Dad,
is America good or bad?”

He’s heard us talking; the litany:
stolen elections, torture memos, wars;
seen the picture of the hooded man
Haj Ali, our oppressor-victim,
arms spread, posed on his box
like Jesus on his mountain
blessing the peacemakers
(but for the dangling wires)
and wants to know whose side he’s on:
his own or someone else’s side against him…

What can I say? That depends
on what rots mean by ”good” or ”bad”
or for that matter “America”,
which might be a fool and his goons
war-gaming in the White House,
but might be, say, the Women in Black
down on the Green with their banner, Bring Our
Troops Back,
or the Rainbow People up in the meadow
drumming in the full moons,
or might just be just us and our friends…?

I think how I moved here;
settled with that long shock of ease
as if in my first lawn chair,
before it could dawn on me
I’d merely exchanged the curse
of being forever elsewhere
for that of the settler – worse,
the children of settlers,
for whom the root of existence
is precisely their fathers’ sins…

He’s waiting for his answer.
I open my mouth to speak
but something stalls me; a strange
heaviness on my tongue
as if after all I’d pledged silence
or struck some nocturnal pact
over whatever act,
doubtful or downright wrong,
secures our presence here,
and I can’t seem to say a damn thing,

and he drifts away, back to his game
of fending off the trees
that look as though they’d marched up the hill
to mass at the edge of our lawn
while we sat here talking,
and a dim shame
clouds in as if there were really something to do
other than drink and chill
and listen to the drums beat
and try to keep our eyes open.