Second Empire Read online

  in the house of sweets. We ate cake at intermission

  in order to stay awake.

  SCENE FROM CARAVAGGIO

  Meanwhile, the artist’s hand

  spreads black against black,

  the rest of him offscreen, grinding

  colors—divine wine for the lips, underside-

  of-watercress for the skin—glancing back toward me,

  as if I am in the picture.

  Watching him, alone

  in lived time, I feel anachronistic, like the fedora

  he wears, the cigarette he holds

  against his lips with two fingers.

  The screen I watch is a canvas strewn

  with nudity, with the taken-

  down, everything happening all

  too late. The artist paints an angel, posed

  on a box with a quiver,

  though in the glow of the film, I can see

  he is only a model with props in a studio.

  Artificial light

  burns in the stillness,

  chiaroscuro. The other half

  veiled and equivocal, like the room

  in which I myself am staged.

  In which the screen illuminates

  my mouth and forehead and eyes.

  In which the difference between an angel

  and a boy with wings is real.

  MIRROR

  You’d expect a certain view from such a mirror—

  clearer

  than one that hangs in the entry and decays.

  I gaze

  past my reflection toward other things:

  bat wings,

  burnt gold upon blue, which decorate the wall

  and all

  those objects collected from travels, now seen

  between

  its great, gold frame, diminished with age:

  a stage

  where, still, the supernatural corps de ballet

  displays

  its masquerade in the reflected light.

  At night,

  I thought I’d see the faces of the dead.

  Instead,

  the faces of the ghosted silver sea

  saw me.

  ANTIQUE BOOK

  The sky was crazed with swallows.

  We walked in the frozen grass

  of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.

  Trees shook down their gaudy nests.

  The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.

  I was jealous of the river,

  how the light broke it, of the skein

  of windows where we saw ourselves.

  Where we walked, the ice cracked

  like an antique book, opening

  and closing. The leaves

  beneath it were the marbled pages.

  DESCRIPTION

  Where you were, everything was becoming ice.

  The paved courtyard, the windows looking out onto it.

  You traveled back and forth between buildings on a bus,

  passing trees and umbrellas

  inverted in the wind. You moved back and forth.

  I was elsewhere, in a small studio

  painted white so many times the walls were thick with it.

  Once a poet told me, Your eyes are whores.

  Once description was all I thought I needed

  to bridge things. And snow shawled the branches.

  And you took the keys from your pocket. And snow feathered the grass

  which was mine to remember and forget.

  AMOR VINCIT OMNIA

  Some nights, we lived that way: like a horse

  carrying his rider, unseen, into a village—

  There was nothing to do there but memorize

  each other.

  Returning, we smelled of where we’d been:

  the markets, the metal troughs, the trees,

  the hands that touched our heads.

  OCTOBER 29, 2012

  Nothing changes at the seaside house.

  You wait out this tempest in the Windsor chair, away from the windows.

  There are books for your eyes:

  one about Pound as a young man, one with photographs

  of glaciers. For your hands:

  frozen dough thawing. Towels in the dryer.

  There is music; a crate of CDs you purchased

  when you were younger, when you resisted solitude by listening

  to massive collaborations:

  32 violins, 6 French Horns, 8 double basses, a piccolo.

  The one on top is Mahler’s fifth,

  conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who was buried

  with that score across his heart. Someone extinguishes

  the lamps along the beach. Mahler drowns out

  the weather against the roof.

  KEYS TO THE CITY

  Didn’t rain choke the animal throats

  of the cathedral sputter

  against the roofs of the city didn’t the flight

  of stairs rise up above the cobbled street

  didn’t the key clamor

  in the lock flood

  the vestibule with clattering didn’t we climb

  the second flight

  toward the miniature Allegory

  painted on the ceiling

  and touch the flat-faced girls

  winged part animal

  who did not flinch and did not scamper

  SEA INTERLUDE: STORM

  Where the sky, Chinese red, dropped

  its rawboned chin to the sea, that darkness

  opened, hollow as an empty boat:

  it could not hold itself; nor the seabirds,

  where they fled or resisted,

  tossed like heavy, black stones toward the shore.

  With the fuss and tumult of a thousand feathers

  fanning open, the surge, black-throated,

  drank of itself, like a ritual, then folded

  its wet wings across the shoals and sandbanks,

  sated at last as from self-love. That night, I clung

  like a feeding gull to the sureness of flesh:

  a man’s chin bristled against my stomach

  like the breakers’ dim retreat on sand.

  BRIGHT WALLS

  It was not penitence I sought, standing outside

  the bedroom in the old apartment

  where you had spent the night alone.

  To bend, to kneel before some greater force—

  that was no longer what I wished.

  Clouds blew in from the coast, and I felt

  the sun abandoning the window behind me,

  making the bright walls suddenly colorless,

  obscuring everything, for a moment,

  that I wanted. When I finally entered,

  I saw you still asleep—a wet strand

  of hair tucked behind your ear, the husk

  of your body—and lingered there for a minute,

  before walking upstairs to shut the windows.

  EROTIC ARCHIVE

  We sleep in his bed

  among his silent books.

  Though I never knew him,

  I’ve spent my life thinking it’s his ghost

  I belong to.

  We pass his books

  between us. We read inscriptions

  meant for him. We record them

  dutifully. Remembering

  the blue room of an evening,

  I look past the window

  the light changes through,

  past the boats

  with their tied-up sails and canvas covers.

  The window shows

  the sea as unattainable

  and distant as art,

  our lovers far away.

  THE HARBOR

  Afterwards everything whitened

  like paper or breath—

  The room was suddenly anchored to itself,

  the chains stopped groaning.

 
I knew I could not leave with you.

  The sea outside was like the sea

  on the map. A sea-god was blowing

  into a crosshatched arc of sails.

  PURPLE

  From the Phoenicians, they learned to extract

  the color from shells.

  When their dogs ate sea snails along the coast,

  their dogteeth were dyed purple—that’s how the Phoenicians knew.

  To darken it,

  the Romans added black, which came from soot, from scorched wood,

  which abounded, one imagines, in an empire.

  THE SHIPS

  from an inscription of Augustus

  “All the Germans

  of that territory

  sought by envoys

  my friendship

  The far reaches

  of what any Roman had ever seen

  opened to me

  the mouth

  of the Rhine the water

  swallowing the gold-

  colored hulls

  What gods

  would I find in the forests

  in the riverbanks

  scattered

  with precious stones

  I sailed my ships

  on the sea dark

  and full of meaning

  When

  our sails first caught

  the wind

  of the Cimbri it was rough

  as their language

  I watched

  their shirtless oarsmen

  maneuvering

  the oars

  I watched the ships

  running their fingers

  through the water

  of the Roman people”

  BRAYING

  Now is the time we hear them coming back,

  when the first sunlight drops to the field

  like an animal being born, slick and shivering

  where it falls. Their hooves grind against the earth,

  wheat is pounded in a mortar

  with a pestle, freed from its husks and impurities.

  What wickedness clings to me, it sticks

  to the last. I will keep my mouth with a bridle.

  FLY

  What the richest man in Rome feared most of all,

  Pliny tells us, was losing his sight. The man wore Greek charms

  around his neck in order to prevent it. He carried a living fly

  in a white cloth that he might keep seeing.

  Perhaps he thought the fly’s many eyes were a blessing.

  Apologizing, devising elaborate rituals—what

  will I carry? I have been counting ways

  of keeping you.

  SECOND EMPIRE

  The water, for once,

  unmetaphysical. Stepping over

  the stones, you pulling

  your shirt over your shoulders.

  The flesh-and-

  blood that constitutes you

  could have been anything and yet

  appears before me

  as your body. Wading out again,

  I am a little white omnivore

  in the black water,

  inhaling avidly

  the absence of shame.

  We lie on our backs

  with our underwear on.

  The soul is an aristocrat.

  It disdains the body,

  staring through the water

  at the suggestion of our human forms.

  NIGHT FERRY

  I. DEATH IN VENICE

  Everywhere the city looks over my shoulder.

  The air grows colder

  and sticks to wet stones, the old houses rescued

  from the rising water, even the covered boat where I take refuge

  from the wind, still it tousles the pages

  of my guidebook. The ferry disengages

  from the docks, and I am far away. The Adriatic salts

  the undersides of boats

  as they depart from the city, fade.

  I lean and see what is made

  in their wake. I know I will not find my dissolution

  here in this city of water and stone,

  where I’m a hierophant

  to the past. They enchant

  me, these things. I always knew

  they’d make the veil I’d glimpse things through.

  Tonight, distantly, the cold air

  comes off the square,

  where all those people, bundled in winter coats,

  line up to buy tickets for the boats.

  Everywhere the city disguises

  them from each other. The black ferry moves. The water rises

  in the dark.

  The people disembark.

  II. THE MARRIAGE OF THE SEA

  The city remembered nothing of what I dreamed.

  Only how strange it seemed

  from the water when the Doge’s hand,

  or his black glove, opened,

  and he released the ring

  to wed the Adriatic, and the ring

  settled twice:

  first, on the lagoon’s surface,

  which represented, I thought,

  the comfort

  of the living moment, and which yielded to the ring; and, later,

  in the earth beneath the water,

  which was fierce

  as history, and which yielded to it also, after many years,

  and found stasis in the past,

  which was its rest,

  not in the luster

  of ceremonies, but in the darkness which comes after.

  III. SELF-PORTRAIT IN VENETIAN MASK

  The mask with a long, sharp beak

  I found, an antique

  in a store of relics, displayed

  on the wall. The mask I tried on. Like a shade,

  it kept me from my life. You, too, have wished

  for something else, you have vanished

  almost fully, the mask said, as if a mask critiquing

  itself could convince me it was not my own mouth speaking.

  IV. SERENITY

  The city cleaved things: together

  and apart: a bridge restrained one ancient house from another:

  the whole city was reflected below

  the city: the bridge where they hanged prisoners: the tableau

  of bodies held suspended

  as on a frieze, splendid

  with color and movement: thousands

  of bits of glass: small islands

  of gold and purple and bronze glued

  into images: a pagan nude

  with a feather: halos in concentric rings: the rudder

  cut its dark path through the water,

  pushing wake to either side, as if sorting testimonies of love

  from jealousy: from above,

  it must have looked like the black canal was rent

  apart, halved, no matter where I went.

  SEA INTERLUDE: MOONLIGHT

  Nearly asleep, I thought of the wrecked

  fishing ship—its hull, scuffed and split

  open, scraped clean of its entrails

  by the rusty brine that now pools

  around the timbers, scouring the sand.

  Searching for you in the hollow cage

  of its body, the ribs of copper and wood

  which once held men, I sensed a trembling,

  as from a distant wharf, the dull thunder

  of a body cast back into another

  like a beach sea-worn to obedience:

  my hunger, fallen into air from the mouth

  of language; and the moonlight stiffening

  around it like a mollusk’s silver shell.

  THE SURROUND

  That summer I was looking for an antidote

  to art. I woke up early and spent

  mornings swimming, wading out

  with tiny piping plovers, whose nests

  along the strip of beach had been roped of
f

  with netting as protected land.

  I wanted lust to exhaust itself. I wanted