Dana Gioia

California night. The Devil’s wind, the Santa Ana, blows in from the east, raging through the canyon like a drunk screaming in a bar. The air tastes like a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain? The weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe. Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture, lights turned out, windows shut against the storm, and count your blessings. Another sleepless night, when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek, when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand, and quiet women in the kitchen run their fingers on the edges of a knife and eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck. Tonight it seems that if I took the coins out of my pocket and tossed them in the air they’d stay a moment glistening like a net slowly falling through dark water. I remember the headlights of the cars parked on the beach, the narrow beams dissolving on the dark surface of the lake, voices arguing about the forms, the crackling radio, the sheeted body lying on the sand, the trawling net still damp beside it. No, she wasn’t beautiful—but at that age when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty— “Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?” Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl. Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm, packs of coyotes come down from the hills where there is nothing left to hunt.

The dead say little in their letters they haven't said before. We find no secrets, and yet how different every sentence sounds heard across the years. My father breaks my heart simply by being so young and handsome. He's half my age, with jet-black hair. Look at him in his navy uniform grinning beside his dive-bomber. Come back, Dad! I want to shout. He says he misses all of us (though I haven't yet been born). He writes from places I never knew he saw, and everyone he mentions now is dead. There is a large, long photograph curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago. My parents sit uncomfortably among tables of dark-suited strangers. The mildewed paper reeks of regret. I wonder what song the band was playing, just out of frame, as the photographer arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot? Get out there on the floor and dance! You don't have forever. What does it cost to send a postcard to the underworld? I'll buy a penny stamp from World War II and mail it downtown at the old post office just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve. Surely the ghost of some postal worker still makes his nightly rounds, his routine too tedious for him to notice when it ended. He works so slowly he moves back in time carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses. It's silly to get sentimental. The dead have moved on. So should we. But isn't it equally simple-minded to miss the special expertise of the departed in clarifying our long-term plans? They never let us forget that the line between them and us is only temporary. Get out there and dance! the letters shout adding,Love always. Can't wait to get home! And soon we will be.See you there.

Turning the corner, we discovered it just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on— a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long resting between the noisy avenues. The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window glowing through the ivy-decked facade promised lives as perfect as the light. Walking beneath the trees, we counted all the high black doors of houses bolted shut. And yet we could have opened any door, entered any room the evening offered. Or were we deluded by the strange equations of the light, the vagrant wind searching the trees, that we believed this brief conjunction of our separate lives was real? It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost, a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth, a curl of smoke flaring from a match, haunting a world it could not touch or hear. There should have been a greeting or a sign, the smile of a stranger, something beyond the soft refusals of the summer air and children trading secrets on the steps. Traffic bellowed from the avenue. Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall, and at the end what else could I have done but turn the corner back into my life?

“We're going,” they said, “to the end of the world.” So they stopped the car where the river curled, And we scrambled down beneath the bridge On the gravel track of a narrow ridge. We tramped for miles on a wooded walk Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk. Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore. We came to a bend, where the river grew wide And green mountains rose on the opposite side. My guides moved back. I stood alone, As the current streaked over smooth flat stone. Shelf by stone shelf the river fell. The white water goosetailed with eddying swell. Faster and louder the current dropped Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped. I stood at the edge where the mist ascended, My journey done where the world ended. I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky, The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton. He carried a rose inside his coat each day to give a beautiful stranger—“Better to die of love than love without regret.” And those who loved him soon learned regret. “The simplest surreal act is running through the street with a revolver firing at random.” Old and famous, he seemed démodé. There is always a skeleton on the buffet.

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds start up again. The crickets, the invisible toad who claims that change is possible, And all the other life too small to name. First one, then another, until innumerable they merge into the single voice of a summer hill. Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour, fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure. And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone can bear to be a stone, the pain the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust. Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill, rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light. The old windmill creaks in perfect time to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass, and the last farmhouse light goes off. Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt these hills and packs of feral dogs. But standing here at night accepts all that. You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon, moving more slowly than the crippled stars, part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls, Part of the grass that answers the wind, part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows there is no silence but when danger comes.

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing, The one large statue in this quiet room. The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb. The docents praise my elegant design Above the chatter of the gallery. Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts— The perfect emblem of futility. Mendoza carved me for a country church. (His name’s forgotten now except by me.) I stood beside a gilded altar where The hopeless offered God their misery. I heard their women whispering at my feet— Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead. Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall, And I became the hunger that they fed. I broke my left wing in the Revolution (Even a saint can savor irony) When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel. They hit me once—almost apologetically. For even the godless feel something in a church, A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is? A trembling unaccounted by their laws, An ancient memory they can’t dismiss. There are so many things I must tell God! The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high. But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch, A crippled saint against a painted sky.