Howard Moss

Some bloodied sea-bird’s hovering decay Assails us where we lie, and lie To make that symbol go away, To mock the true north of the eye. But lie to me, lie next to me; The world is an infirmity. Too much of sun’s been said, too much Of sea, and of the lover’s touch, Whole volumes that old men debauch. But we, at the sea’s edge curled, Hurl back their bloody world. Lie to me, like next to me, For there is nothing here to see But the mirrors of ourselves, the day, Clear with the odors of the sea. Lie to me. And lie to me.

The startling pleasures all broke down, It was her first arthritic spring. Inside her furs, her bones, secure, Suddenly became a source of pain And froze on a Saturday afternoon While she was listening to “La Boheme.” Strength had been her weakness, and Because it was, she got to like The exhilaration of catastrophes That prove our lives as stupid as we think, But pain, more stupid than stupidity, Is an accident of animals in which, once caught, The distances are never again the same. Yet there was another Jane in Jane: She smelled the inside of a logarithm, And felt a Gothic arch rise in her chest, Her clavicle widening to bear the weight Of the two smooth plumb lines of her breasts, The blueprints forming an enormous skirt Around her body. Arch and star and cross Swung like little lights inside her head, A church and temple rising from the floor, Nave and transept and an altar where, Unbidden, she saw a kind of sacrifice; The knife was in her hand, the stick, the whip; She cried at her cruelty and cried to be Outside of her defenses. And just then, The windows buckled in, the paintings cracked, The furniture went walking by itself, All out of her control. And it was pain That let her know she was herself again: She wore a cloak of fire on her skin, And power, power floated up to her.

“Wake to the sun,” the rooster croaked, First bird of the day. The world, light-flecked, Chiselled its lineaments into form. Where was all that fine light coming from? “Trance at the wonder,” the second sang. Whose five dry notes urged the ongoing Afternoon on. “Why wake and stir?” It asked. And asked. There was no answer. “Live through the muddle.” That from the next one. Not very helpful. It looked like rain, Or fog in the offing. Twilight. Then It sang again from an oak or pine. Silence. How I waited for the fourth! Time was a negative dipped into its bath, The dark a fixative that slowly made For every windowpane its window shade. No messages arrived. No music bared The soul for its penitence. Up the stairs No hint of a footfall. The night passed. “Croak by your hand,” said the crow at last.

I wove myself of many delicious strands Of violet islands and sugar-balls of thread So faintly green a small white check between Balanced the field’s wide lawn, a plaid Gathering in loose folds shaped around him Those Princeton mornings, slowly stage-lit, when The dawn took the horizon by surprise And from the marsh long, crayoned birds Rose up, ravens, maybe crows, or raw-voiced, Spiteful grackles with their clothespin legs, Black-winged gossips rising out of mud And clattering into sleep. They woke my master While, in the dark, I waited, knowing Sooner or later he’d reach for me And, half asleep, wriggle into my arms. Then it seemed a moonish, oblique light Would gradually illuminate the room, The world turn on its axis at a different slant, The furniture a shipwreck, the floor askew, And, in old slippers, he’d bumble down the stairs. Genius is human and wants its coffee hot— I remember mornings when he’d sit For hours at breakfast, dawdling over notes, Juice and toast at hand, the world awake To spring, the smell of honeysuckle Filling the kitchen. A silent man, Silence became him most. How gently He softened the edges of a guessed-at impact So no one would keel over from the blow— A blow like soft snow falling on a lamb. He’d fly down from the heights to tie his shoes And cross the seas to get a glass of milk, Bismarck with a harp, who’d doff his hat (As if he ever wore one!) and softly land On nimble feet so not to startle. He walked In grandeur much too visible to be seen— And how many versions crawled out of the Press! A small pre-Raphaelite with too much hair; A Frankenstein of test tubes; a “refugee”— A shaman full of secrets who could touch Physics with a wand and body forth The universe’s baby wrapped in stars. From signs Phoenicians scratched into the sand With sticks he drew the contraries of space: Whirlwind Nothing and Volume in its rage Of matter racing to undermine itself, And when the planets sang, why, he sang back The lieder black holes secretly adore. At tea at Mercer Street every afternoon His manners went beyond civility, Kindness not having anything to learn; I was completely charmed. And fooled. What a false view of the universe I had! The horsehair sofa, the sagging chairs, A fire roaring behind the firesecreen— Imagine thinking Princeton was the world! Yet I wore prescience like a second skin: When Greenwich and Palomar saw eye to eye, Time and space having found their rabbi, I felt the dawn’s black augurs gather force, As if I knew in the New Jersey night The downcast sky that was to clamp on Europe, That Asia had its future in my pocket.

We have the whole evening ahead of us, We think, our eyesight starting to weaken, We must have missed the houselights growing dim, But how could that moment have escaped us when The roots of the paper trees struck water And transformed themselves into the real thing— This nervous wood at the edge of a small, Provincial town whose still lifes waken To find that they’re portraits after all And subject to the risk of animation? Tonight we may discuss—after the Chopin Nocturnes, after the I-don’t-know-how-many Performances of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata— The gradual reduction of Roman columns, The disease of too many lakes and clouds. Do cobblestones have a future? Is rain Removable? Depressing mornings find Characters in bed who have no reason To get up, the light a yellowish half-light Mirroring the mind, its sad affections. At the lake, a flat of faultless summer Is being taken down, the view abandoned; The puzzled players change their places. Once You might have found them walking in an orchard, The blossoms opening their mouths to speak And song occurring as if it were natural; Now that trees uproot themselves and bankrupt Agriculture wanes in its drying furrows, Property and battlefields turn out to share A fate in common—they exchange hands. Shrines “fallen out of the perpendicular,” Stones “that have apparently once been tombstones”— We are on someone’s estate not far from Moscow. How simply the sun goes out like a match! How deeply the wounds stay on the surface! He said the best that can be said for property: It lets an old man fall in love with landscape, Lets so many trees have a chance to be noticed, Allows the self-interested birds to preen, Until the property is lost again. To an upstart creditor who sells the trees For lumber, then, to the sounds of saws, Tramps through the hallway in his dirty boots To explain, in tears, the dreary motivation: His mother’s dying, his young wife’s in love With a boor . . . The Babel of trouble starts; Among all the hells that go on talking, Only one is real, though it is silent, And everything leads up to it—to lose The land, to lose the very ground you stand on. If the temporary brilliancies gather once more In the middle distance, and the modal lark Persuades the summer evening to reveal One private little splendor not for sale, Still, a gunshot, onstage or off, Tells us what no one is prepared to know: Love is a tourniquet tightening its bands Around the slowly dying wrist of freedom, Futility’s a spinster bending over A book of household accounts forever. Bathed in the acid of truth, all things Become possible: to be a cold snake At an interview, to live on scraps of soap To keep oneself warm, to resemble a cat Constantly stalking the shadow of nothing, To the horse’s clop-clop outside the window, Or the sound of a guitar from a neighboring room, The doctor, with a smile, asks, What is man? A hero about to be done-in for good? A villain about to be rescued by pain? The governess is wearing her old forage cap. That’s Epihodov playing his guitar. Astrov is talking about trees. We could be Racing the wolves at thirty below In a ravine whiplashed by snow, or slowly Succumbing to boredom in a seaside town, Waiting for a future that will never be, The heat getting worse, far off the waves Pounding faintly late in the moonlight, At a low moment in our lives.

There might be the quibble of birds and the swag Of a river and a distantly belled Altar of animals, softly spoken; Certainly cattail, sumac, and fern Would rise from the marshes nearby, revealed In forms too perfect to envy trees— Not trying for larger and larger keepsakes. Cryptic and subtle green, hedgerows Hiding mysterious deer, the start Of a rabbit, as if towers and clouds Had suddenly shadowed an open field— These would be the events of the day, Life having narrowed down to please Natural hungers and thirsts, the grass Thick at our feet, and, above our heads, The stars, their fireworks anemones. What shall I say of the house? Or you? Only industrious ghosts would know How lazily cropping up the view Would make the impossible possible; Nothing but weekdays would blankly graze On time’s oblivious pastures, free At last of motive and thought, and we, Becoming ourselves so naturally, Would never say, looking up at the sky, Another life is shining in the sky.