David St. John

They were sitting on the thin mattress He’d once rolled & carried up the four floors To his room only to find it covered nearly all Of the bare wood Leaving just a small path alongside the wall & between them was the sack Of oranges & pears she’d brought its neck Turned back to expose the colors of the fruit & as she opened a bottle of wine He reached over to a tall stack of books & pulled out The Tao& with a silly flourish Handed it across the bed to her   she looked up & simply poured the two squat water glasses Half-full with wine & then she Took the book   reading silently   not aloud As he’d assumed & suddenly he felt clearly She knew the way Two people must come upon such an understanding Together of course but separately As the moon & the wave remain individually one

So the tide forgets, as morning Grows too far delivered, as the bowls Of rock and wood run dry. What is left seems pearled and lit, As those cases Of the museum stood lit With milk jade, rows of opaque vases Streaked with orange and yellow smoke. You found a lavender boat, a single Figure poling upstream, baskets Of pale fish wedged between his legs. Today, the debris of winter Stands stacked against the walls, The coils of kelp lie scattered Across the floor. The oil fire Smokes. You turn down the lantern Hung on its nail. Outside, The boats aligned like sentinels. Here beside the blue depot, walking The pier, you can see the way The shore Approximates the dream, how distances Repeat their deaths Above these tables and panes of water— As climbing the hills above The harbor, up to the lupine drifting Among the lichen-masked pines, The night is pocked with lamps lit On every boat offshore, Galleries of floating stars. Below, On its narrow tracks shelved Into the cliff’s face, The train begins its slide down To the warehouses by the harbor. Loaded With diesel, coal, paychecks, whiskey, Bedsheets, slabs of ice—for the fish, For the men. You lean on my arm, As once I watched you lean at the window; The bookstalls below stretched a mile To the quay, the afternoon crowd Picking over the novels and histories. You walked out as you walked out last Night, onto the stone porch. Dusk Reddened the walls, the winds sliced Off the reefs. The vines of the gourds Shook on their lattice. You talked About that night you stood Behind the black pane of the French Window, watching my father read some long Passage Of a famous voyager’s book. You hated That voice filling the room, Its light. So tonight we make a soft Parenthesis upon the sand’s black bed. In that dream we share, there is One shore, where we look out upon nothing And the sea our whole lives; Until turning from those waves, we find One shore, where we look out upon nothing And the earth our whole lives. Where what is left between shore and sky Is traced in the vague wake of (The stars, the sandpipers whistling) What we forgive.If you wake soon, wake me.

Out in the orchards the dogs stood Almost frozen in the bleak spring night & Mister dragged out into the rows Between his peach trees the old dry limbs Building at regular intervals careful pyres While the teeth of the dogs chattered & snapped & the ice began to hang long as whiskers From the globes along the branches & at his signal we set the piles of branches ablaze Tending each carefully so as not to scorch The trees as we steadily fed those flames Just enough to send a rippling glow along Those acres of orchard where that body— Sister Winter—had been held so wisely to the fire

after Baudelaire Quiet now, sorrow; relax. Calm down, fear ... You wanted the night? It’s falling, here, Like a black glove onto the city, Giving a few some peace ... but not me. I think, well, almost everyone I know Loves to be whipped by pleasure—right, Killer?— As they stroll the boardwalk, parading their despair. So why don’t you come too? But instead, with me, Away from all these tattered ghosts leaning off The sky’s balcony like last year’s lovers; We’ll watch everything we regret step from the sea Dripping ... while the dead sun drags its arc Towards China. Shroud of my heart, listen. Listen— How softly the night steps toward us.

Tired of his dark dominion ... —George Meredith It was something I’d overheard One evening at a party; a man I liked enormously Saying to a mutual friend, a woman Wearing a vest embroidered with scarlet and violet tulips That belled below each breast, “Well, I’ve always Preferred Athens; Greece seems to me a country Of the day—Rome, I’m afraid, strikes me As being a city of the night ... ” Of course, I knew instantly just what he meant— Not simply because I love Standing on the terrace of my apartment on a clear evening As the constellations pulse low in the Roman sky, The whole mind of night that I know so well Shimmering in its elaborate webs of infinite, Almost divine irony. No, and it wasn’t only that Rome Was my city of the night, that it was here I’d chosen To live when I grew tired of my ancient life As the Underground Man. And it wasn’t that Rome’s darkness Was of the kind that consoles so many Vacancies of the soul; my Rome, with its endless history Of falls ... No, it was that this dark was the deep, sensual dark Of the dreamer; this dark was like the violet fur Spread to reveal the illuminated nipples of The She-Wolf—all the sequins above in sequence, The white buds lost in those fields of ever-deepening gentians, A dark like the polished back of a mirror, The pool of the night scalloped and hanging Above me, the inverted reflection of a last, Odd Narcissus ... One night my friend Nico came by Close to three a.m. —As we drank a little wine, I could see The black of her pupils blown wide, The spread ripples of the opiate night ... And Nico Pulled herself close to me, her mouth almost Touching my mouth, as she sighed, “Look ... ,” And deep within the pupil of her left eye, Almost like the mirage of a ship’s distant, hanging Lantern rocking with the waves, I could see, at the most remote end of the receding, Circular hallway of her eye, there, at its doorway, At the small aperture of the black telescope of the pupil, A tiny, dangling crucifix— Silver, lit by the ragged shards of starlight, reflecting In her as quietly as pain, as simply as pain ... Some years later, I saw Nico on stage in New York, singing Inside loosed sheets of shattered light, a fluid Kaleidoscope washing over her—the way any naked, Emerging Venus steps up along the scalloped lip Of her shell, innocent and raw as fate, slowly Obscured by a florescence that reveals her simple, deadly Love of sexual sincerity ... I didn’t bother to say hello. I decided to remember The way in Rome, out driving at night, she’d laugh as she let Her head fall back against the cracked, red leather Of my old Lancia’s seats, the soft black wind Fanning her pale, chalky hair out along its currents, Ivory waves of starlight breaking above us in the leaves; The sad, lucent malevolence of the heavens, falling ... Both of us racing silently as light. Nowhere, Then forever ... Into the mind of the Roman night.

Standing at the glass-paneled wall of Liza’s kitchen at the old house half-hidden Over a mile up Canyon Road in Joshua’s gated compound I’m just smoking a joint & looking down at the dusk dusting the Malibu lights as they flare Along the coastline below & I can hear the ripped-up Buick fenders & Caddy bumpers slammed around out in the barn studio as they’re slowly Torched into art as Joshua moves the spitting arc-welder Over armatures of rebar shaping a dozen abstract guitars or mandolins while its Acetylene tongue ticks in the black shade of his visor Once in a while his back-in-the-day transistor radio hooked on a nail bent in the wall Cuts through the sizzle with a hit of his that’s slipped Lately back into fashion & I’ve watched him slowly lift the head of that torch until it angles Against the turquoise plastic moon of the radio dial As if he might melt it all back to a few black platters — those times as lost as song

Some days I am happy to be no one The shifting grasses In the May winds are miraculous enough As they ripple through the meadow of lupine The field as iridescent as a Renaissance heaven & do you see that boy with his arms raised Like one of Raphael’s angels held within This hush & this pause & the sky’s lapis expanse? That boy is my son & I am his only father Even when I am no one

for my son The way a tired Chippewa woman Who’s lost a child gathers up black feathers, Black quills & leaves That she wraps & swaddles in a little bale, a shag Cocoon she carries with her & speaks to always As if it were the child, Until she knows the soul has grown fat & clever, That the child can find its own way at last; Well, I go everywhere Picking the dust out of the dust, scraping the breezes Up off the floor, & gather them into a doll Of you, to touch at the nape of the neck, to slip Under my shirt like a rag—the way Another man’s wallet rides above his heart. As you Cry out, as if calling to a father you conjure In the paling light, the voice rises, instead, in me. Nothing stops it, the crying. Not the clove of moon, Not the woman raking my back with her words. Our letters Close. Sometimes, you ask About the world; sometimes, I answer back. Nights Return you to me for a while, as sleep returns sleep To a landscape ravaged & familiar. The dark watermark of your absence, a hush.

There’s a mystery By the river, in one of the cabins Shuttered with planks, its lock Twisted; a bunch of magazines flipped open, A body. A blanket stuffed with leaves Or lengths of rope, an empty gin bottle. Put down your newspaper. Look out Beyond the bluffs, a coal barge is passing, Its deck nearly Level with the water, where it comes back riding High. You start talking about nothing, Or that famous party, where you went dressed As a river. They listen, The man beside you touching his odd face In the countertop, the woman stirring tonic In your glass. Down the bar the talk’s divorce, The docks, the nets Filling with branches and sour fish. Listen, I knew a woman who’d poke a hole in an egg, suck It clean and fill the shell with gin, Then walk around all day disgusting people Until she was so drunk The globe of gin broke in her hand. She’d stay Alone at night on the boat, come back Looking for another egg. That appeals to you, rocking For hours carving at a hollow stone. Or finding A trail by accident, walking the bluff’s Face. You know, your friends complain. They say You give up only the vaguest news, and give a bakery As your phone. Even your stories Have no point, just lots of detail: The room Was long and bright, small and close, angering Gaston; They turned away to embrace him; She wore The color out of season, She wore hardly anything at all; Nobody died; Saturday. These disguises of omission. Like forgetting To say obtuse when you talk about the sun, leaving Off the buttons as you’re sewing up the coat. So, People take the little They know to make a marvelous stew; Sometimes, it even resembles you. It’s not so much You cover your tracks, as that they bloom In such false directions. This way friends who awaken At night, beside you, awaken alone.

I saw my mother standing there below me On the narrow bank just looking out over the river Looking at something just beyond the taut middle rope Of the braided swirling currents Then she looked up quite suddenly to the far bank Where the densely twined limbs of the cypress Twisted violently toward the storm-struck sky There are some things we know before we know Also some things we wish we would not ever know Even if as children we already knew & so Standing above her on that bridge that shuddered Each time the river ripped at its wooden pilings I knew I could never even fate willing ever Get to her in time