Time with the Season
Time with the season; only she doth carry
June in her eyes, in her heart January.
---The Spring, Thomas Carew
Three or four things had fallen
into my lap unexpectedly,
a vacation home and some
mysterious ailment causing
me to roll over onto the stone
floor by the hotel pool
shaded by a few sickly
palms recesses where
tireless minds display
their most secretive
and affordable memories.
You can’t convince me
that I was sharing in some
collective hallucination
for a new season and/or a
companionable nostalgia
for the Greeks. Can we map
ourselves in the gaze of
the Medusa? What if the graph
of set expectations
was itself unmoored and
you no longer knew where
you were standing?
To remain goal oriented
across a span of time as
one does for a dead-line
with purposes unknown.
Something you said in passing
about how we can no longer tell
the seasons by the fruit
we find at the market. I guess
there was something practical
to learn in the nursery---
I was riveted to a view of the
ocean and the beach ball---The wind
didn’t stop. Without identity all
is lost. Paper is scarce.
If we use less we’ll have little
to say. My affairs turn out badly,
the sky papered over with flimsy
nuances. They cross the limit---
You’d think, by now I’d be used
to the rain stealing the light
and the girls in galoshes waiting
for the drug stores to open.
Is ordinary fruit no longer
acceptable? Must it be pomegranate
or mahogany antique? Are puzzlers
found only on $ 100 bills?
Are the plazas to be unshaven,
trickling down to the poor
like a useless tear?
When sitting next to beautiful
people the most endearing
object was always you.
Anyway, you’ll never
get to know them, not even
their Christian names, with
the terrible onslaught
of breakfasts, brunches,
and phone calls, all that
schlepping and shelving because
you don’t want anything extraneous
in your way. Some liked
the gorging, yet nothing happened
and they flew away beyond
a white wall. Can you keep up?
It’ll take weeks to fill you
in on the savory details.
Me, I’m doing ok up here in my
crumbling crow’s nest. Land ho ( I guess)
a newly minted land called Israel,
not part of any one person.
Its boulevards go quickly by,
flanked by houses not built
to be lived in, flagstones
for you to walk on or between.
A joyful evening on a sad occasion
is better than the reverse,
I suppose. Nights after my father’s
death I carried my briefcase
up and down the stairs to a carrel
in the library. Dorm life was
sublime, with its moon-shaped
elevator dials. Footnotes
come to mind and a subsequent march
in a continuous succession
of goose steps. Then after a month
long hiatus I resumed
donating blood to the Red Cross.
Research made everything take
longer, even writing.
A parade of authors.
As the visible world
disappeared the word, spit or
spirit entered my mind like a distant
steam boat. The fan’s steady whirr
of where...where? Lulls, scolds,
come back into the beyond.
The darkness of a plum high in the plum tree.
Are a deer and her fawn
in early morning watchful,
on “alert” a dream or a naive conceit?
Thinking they are unobserved,
they bed down in the mulch,
leaves flickering between
light and shadow. To wander
from room to room, so quiet,
a hair descends, steps
creak, a little inscrutable
world in a pinprick.
This shelter of neglect and
decades long delay, whiskered
white repairs fall from
the sky and exit or
enter. The poor light up
the island, whispering
the “truth” about “lonesome”
George, the tortoise who
ignored his companion
for ten years before
attempting to mate
with her again. Then he died.
A black bird caught a worm
it could not eat all at once.
Feigned affection bounces
right off me, shining
the x-ray beam on the paint
chips in Van Gogh’s beard,
which may have staved off his
madness. Van Gogh’s leaky
jar placed in a marsh, its cross-
hatched reflection on
the still surface of the water.
The day wore on as if it had
been etched in with a stencil,
or with slanting pencils
of sunlight and in the hedges,
a swarm of fireflies blink on
and off, undisturbed ashes
from a cigarette---
mosquitoes thicken as if running
from a garden hose and in
the Red Hook of tomorrow one last
dangling red bee.