This blog is officially closed.

I gave up my belief in God
Relinquished all my doubt
So what is it I've left myself
To think and write about?

CHURCH

My neighbor took me to her church last week
--sanctuary, rather, filled with God
where ladies sang and fainted in the aisles.
The preacher spoke in tongues. I knew I was
the only nonbeliever in the crowd,
and yet I found my voice and spoke aloud.

SCHOPENHAUER & HIS MOTHER

When Mother, the famous novelist,
pushed me down a flight of stairs,
I took it as a kind of sign
to reconsider my affairs.

In posterity, I told her,
she'd be remembered just through me.
Her laugh was cruel, and so was mine--
it seemed we laughed identically.

OXFORD, APRIL 2005

Everything was perfect then.
I forced myself to fall in love.
I spent hours at the Bodleian
with the poet from Bromsgrove

while heavy rain undid the river
and dreams of God obscured my sight.
Nothing was repeated, ever.
The fountain basins filled with light.

PORTRAIT

She sits in her car with the windows rolled up, slumped
between the seatback and the door. It’s the end
of October, but the sun still beats the windshield
into a blinding sheet of light. She notices

the mountains, blue and hulking, in the distance,
like a child’s drawing of a monster,
pinned to the wall of a cubicle. A sandwich
sits beside her on the passenger seat, untouched,

wrapped in tinfoil, inside a paper bag. She’s listening
to public radio. A four-hundred-year-old symphony
is playing. It’s easy to forget, for just a moment, that these

are her legs in black polyester pants, that these are her fingers
with their ragged nails and paper cuts, that her job
is contained within that fortress they call a building, that happiness
lies perhaps a hundred miles north or east of here.

On her way home she’ll make a left at Torrey Pines, drive past
the rundown bungalows, fifteen-mile-per-hour
school zones, guard dogs so thin you could count their ribs, and

she will remember suddenly her body: her hands
on the steering wheel, her back against the leather seat.

STRANGERS

She tries to forget the anxiety of leaving the house,
tries to busy herself with other things, the
water spots on the silverware, the dog whining to be
let out, the weekly grocery list: a quart

of milk, a dozen eggs, new bags for the vacuum cleaner. She tries
to remember what her neighbor told her once:
The years you suffer are the best; the years you’re happy
teach you nothing. What

is she afraid of? The young mother
and her gaggle of boys taking turns
pushing each other in the shopping cart? The man
waiting in line for his cappuccino and
a double-shot half-decaf skinny latté
for his wife? She can feel their eyes

on her already, judging her,
her hair (unstyled), clothes (baggy jeans and
shower sandals left over from college), the way she holds

the muscles of her face while talking to the store clerk,
inquiring about the price
of tomatoes, a can of beans. Her sister

would have her believe it’s a form
of narcissism, this obsession with appearances, her flaws and imperfections.

She knows better: she’s learned to gauge
the cruelty of those eyes like
little hooks catching on the back of her sweatshirt. They
can see what’s underneath (the flimsy

t-shirt soaked with sweat), the contents
of her pockets (a wadded tissue,
a stick of gum). She knows how much they hate her—
loathe her—for being
so bold to take up space in their world.

CONVALESCENCE

The rain has been heavy, intermittent, dull
against her bedroom window. Outside
the wisteria on its slender trellis reminds her

of an image she saw once
in leaded glass. What is sacred
is now utterly and immediately
so, flaunting its beauty
redeemable in light, the thick gold
afternoon sun like fingers braiding
and unbraiding the vines, refracted

blue, aquarium blue, Mary’s color, salt sea-
light pattered on the floor when you step
inside the chapel, color of water moving
and changing over crude slabs of stone. This

is what it feels like to be well, or
almost well—to know again the sacrament
of hope, like a penitent, and know,
at once, she made the world her hell.


DISTANCES

Gently, she lifts the shell of the dead insect
from its resting place on the carpet beside
her desk, deposits it

into the wastepaper basket and resumes
her work, taking pen in hand, as though
nothing had happened. And nothing has,

not really, in the world. She already knows
the endless distances of things, of people
from each other and themselves, knows of loss
and the stillness that follows. The silence.

She knows of dishes drying on the kitchen
counter in the sun, the hollow blast
of sirens along the expressway, the neighbors’
garage light blinking on when a night jogger
flits past on his way home. She knows

that everyone lives somewhere else and leaves
their bodies to carry on the tasks of life
and rain comes in fits and starts
and children kick a muddy soccer ball in the front yard
or take their piano lessons wishing to be outside
on sunny days. The distances are there,

in their music, and change comes slowly,
if at all. In the evening after the children
have gone to sleep, through a window she can see
the small blue flicker of a television set.

REMEMBRANCE

I stand on the platform, watching you
step off the train. You’re different—
thinner, maybe, as though
the excess flesh has burned away. The years
pass through my fingers like the cold rain
falling on your coat, your hair,
your lips chewed raw.

Our train slides backwards, past
the darkened woods, the frozen
pond. The stars dull like heirlooms
in the morning sky. I recognize
the town, our little street. I hear the clink
of china; it’s Grete in the kitchen,
making breakfast. The lilac blooms
in the window, filling the whole house
with its scent….And the delicate tension
returns to your shoulders. You sit at your desk,
back straight, composing a letter
to your Brüderlein in England. Quietly,
I enter the study. You turn.

WINTER LIGHT

When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
—Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Early March. The ice stretches thin
over the pond’s dark
face. Now and then
a skater falls through,
does not come up. The buds
flush green, retreat
into their shells. In the immensity
of my forgetting, in the quiet
space of a single gesture, there,
a sprig of lavender appears
beside your hand. I hear
the first movement of Beethoven’s
Second, but that
is just the phonograph. All day
our sitting room brims
with sound. I should have
held you in the winter light,
held you
even as you held yourself against it.

BEETHOVENSTRAβE

Perhaps I’ll never understand why
you left me at night, left behind
the cloudy dregs of your after-dinner drink,
the scent of your perfume and pearls, warm
around your neck, then
cold from the icy wind in the Beethovenstraβe.

You said there is only one reality, that we
simply occupy different givens and so
indulge in the passage of time. Your time
has passed: the birds, drunk on cherry apples,
no longer congregate at your windowsill
three streets away. I’ve let you go.

Late September. Already the fires
have started in the south. The smoke
stings my eyes, and I remember
the day you held me at the center
of your rage, dark and perfectly calm,
then lashed me with your words.
But it was always what you didn’t do,
what you didn’t say, that hurt me.

THE LIVES OF OBJECTS

I share my home with carnival mirrors and tarnished silver, amulets in the shape of abacuses and African masks, dolls with molting hair and cracks around the cheeks where too many times they had been kissed by little girls, curios painted creamy white to cover half-finished portraits of ladies named Opal and Francesca in their pearls now shrunk to the size of babies’ teeth, a cold clair de lune rounding the blackened sylvan-scape on the far wall, moose heads with graying nostrils and sentient marble eyes that fix me with disdain, a flock of dead pocket watches sunk into a drawer like chandeliers in Triton’s ballroom, stacks of magazines and books long out of print which still hold a measure of interest for the transient, the lover, those who exist outside of time.

LEAVING CAMP

The campers wake before the sun
in their cabins on the lake.
The saddest day has now begun--
the roses tremble on the stake.

No pick-pock of the tennis ball
disturbs the silence of the day,
no berries stud the bush this fall;
the baskets all are stored away.

The crunch of tires on the drive,
the hugs hello and tales exchanged--
the adults and their world arrive,
and everything you know has changed.


IVYLAND

The last time I saw you, children
rushed at each other in the twilight that never seemed
to end. These days
I wake at dawn, still in my body, and the slow
ache of your absence goes through me.

BACK TO SCHOOL SHOPPING

Rows of unsharpened pencils
in their little cardboard containers,
stiff-backed notebooks, wide-ruled,
with oversize margins for the diligent
students of life as it is.

This is how it was: me,
in the vainglorious shade
of the oak, my Homer and Ossian
tucked neatly in my leather satchel
beside the pencil case and peanut butter
sandwich, waiting for the bus
under the chemical blue of the sky.


THE GHOST

I am the ghost. Once, like you,
I wore a cloak of human flesh,
and when it no longer fit, they
drained my blood and buried me
at Rosehill. They marked the plot,
like all the others, with a wooden cross.

One night, out of sheer
boredom, I walked back
to town, to the house
where I used to live. That sound
the pipes make on winter mornings,
and why your dog comes back
with his tail between his legs, and why
you always seem to have trouble
sleeping--look no further. It is I.

AUTUMN RAIN

I couldn’t sleep last night
or this morning. The clock
ticks slowly on the bedside table.
I imagine the sound
each cold drop of rain makes
as it falls on the burnished leaves
of the linden tree.

Nothing feels right
now that you’re gone, the arrangement
of silverware on the kitchen table, the way
this lambswool sweater irritates my skin
after a bath, how little
occurrences become catastrophes: the dog
coming in from the rain, a bird’s wing
in his teeth, the feathers rimmed with blood.

FOG

Fog blurs the faces in the family portraits.
Nothing separates their fate from yours.

Days like this, a part of you breaks off,
speaks in a voice tainted by poor health,

impending war. The dog scratches at the door,
whines to be let out. You let him out.

The sky drops over the chalk cliffs. Lobstermen
come back with empty traps, maybe a boot

that floated up from the carcass of a whale.
On the jetty, someone has left a wetsuit,

arms spread wide on that vacant space of rock,
as if embracing a thing which has no name.

THE SISTERS

Quietly, with great dignity,
she draws up her knees
in a corner of the room and opens
The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The other two are polishing their nails
as the TV blares. The eldest
doesn't hear it. Autumn comes.
Werther revisits his hometown, rejoices
in the linden tree's maternal
shade. Already within him, the snow
has begun to fall.

A shard of empathy
breaks off and lodges in her heart.

LULLABY

for J.M.

The river flows into the star;
the fullness holds the lack:
and should I choose to travel far
you’d always take me back.

Of all the things you love me for
my darkness is the one
that always seems to pour and pour
and never quite be done.

So leave me to these quiet things,
your breath, the starry night—
wait until the mock-dove sings,
and we will be all right.


THE HOMECOMING

Imperceptibly August slides on
into the twilight of the year,
the hard blue sky
and the cold autumn rains.

I’ve been away for years.

The shady avenues, the leaves
so green they’re gold, the sorrows
of the schoolyard, and the quiet
child governed solely by his feelings—

I’ve known them all: they haven’t
changed, resistant
to perception; they shake it off
like Homer his translations.


THE BLOOD-VASE

Days pass
like light through a prism.

On the table, the little ceramic vase
narrows itself to hold no more
than a few drops of blood.

I saw you this morning
when you came in from the garden
after pruning the roses; I saw you
hold your cut finger
over the vase, which closed around it
like the last days of a childhood.


LITTLE TRAGEDIES

Oedipus

Once I held my mother
in her darkest place;
now the light surrounds us,
I cannot see her face.

Hamlet

Blue-and-diamond dawn
breaks me open there,
at Wittenberg, at home:
I suffer everywhere.

Werther

And so I lose myself
inside your lambent gaze—
those things we can’t say now,
unsayable always.


NIGHT PIECE

The fan clicks rhythmically
on the ceiling as the lamp
braids the long hair
of darkness: on the dresser,
remnants of a girlhood:
a silver Celtic knot
on a chain with a broken
clasp, a bottle of pomegranate
lotion, three-quarters
empty, abandoned letters
to boys who died at war.

LULLABY

Don't pray at the arbor, don't wish on a star:
when night descends, don't be afraid--
you have a Creator, of course you were made,
and I, my darling, will never be far.

Loss is beautiful. Even if it never
returns, that other self which you've let go of
like a balloon into the glare above
the gold dome of the capitol, it takes its place,
quietly, among the stars.

THE PONDS OF BOSTON

Some pitted by rain like spotted mirrors, others
green and smoky as Venetian glass,
choked with weeds and hidden
in the woods, some shallow as the palm
of a hand, and clear to the bottom, bright
with koi; still others dark and turbid, stirred
from underneath, some salty to the taste
like tears, brittle surfaces on which the water lily
and the hyacinth unfold, proliferate—
(and if a church bell were to strike, they would
shatter like a pane of glass—)

Across Chandler's Pond, the medieval
stone towers of Boston College; in a darkened
room a student reads about the future
from the past, his life shining quietly
within him like a lamp turned low—the brief
gleam of a flashlight, the cottages
reflected darkly in the water, afraid almost
of themselves

LITTLE TRAGEDIES

All the wonders and complexities a star can hold
you can hold—
no human wish exceeds you

*

Beloved, you who do not
exist, you who never were
but always dwelt in me
the unextinguished flame

*

And so I lose myself inside your gaze—
what is unsayable now
is unsayable forever



THE LEAVING

To die. To speak that word.
There is so much in death I do not
understand, the bright room
stripped away, the pain
receding like a distant ship, and still
we cling to one another, as if
even in our leaving we are
not alone.


JAMAICA POND SUITE

1

The sun plays piano on the water, unsure
of what keys to strike, a timid
student, hiding every now and then
behind a cloud as from its master.

We instruct it into being with our vision--touch
here, then there--scintillating the pond
to fullest splendor.

2

Love, you said, is a portrait of Hope
reaching into the ether, unsure
of what she grasps--what lies beyond
the painting, this canopy of blue? Up there,
no hand can touch her, no beloved
can obstruct her sight.

3

Lovers, when they separate, are
children again--with no one to cling to, no one
to keep them from their thoughts, they
descend into themselves, into that corpus of unknown
desires, and rise again, the hyacinth
unfolding on the water.

FOR THADE CORREA

This morning when you lift the veil
of sleep and take her hand and drink
from her eyes as from a deep Germanic
pool, feel again the stirrings
of her voice which were infused in you
without your noticing.

*

As August recedes into the slow
September of your thoughts, do not
wish again for the fullness of summer,
the shining pond between the trees,
but hold it within you, unbroken
and invisible as a circle drawn in water.

*

Remember that nothing is ever lost, only
transfigured: the river flowing back
into the unseen spring, the errant
star returning to the fold at dawn,
the horns of the stag
breaking mercilessly into bloom.

CAIRO

City of false gods and prophets, home of
Sutekh, precursor to Baal, the one who
dazzles, the pillar of stability. City
that speaks in whispers, city whose voice
is the creaking of melon carts in the dusty streets
of the bazaar, the muezzin’s call to prayer
that shatters the palaces of air between the mosques
and minarets frail as the spine of a bird,
city that watches you like a beggar with one
glass eye and a toothless sneer, watches you
undress after luncheon in the hotel room
of your beloved, holds her up to you like a mirror
and again you are alone. Earlier today
you followed a man dressed all in white
whose wife makes purses from the hides of ostriches
and crocodiles. You know the Nile
intimately, you are its dearest friend, you floated
downstream in a straw basket before
you were born. City whose song is a lament
for Antinous, city whose heavy, inverted stars
are the sorrows of Hadrian. The continent of Africa
sways on a gold chain around your neck. Jesus
takes your arm, walks beside you, and
tells you things He never told His disciples.
Cars go counterclockwise around the traffic circle
outside your window as the Coca-Cola marquee
embeds itself like rhinestones in the fabric
of the evening sky. Taxis
flash their beams in the interminable twilight.
You sit on the end of your bed, you think of her, you hold
the country of Egypt and all its curiosities
like blue dice in the palm of your hand. Down in the lobby
the turbaned men sit for hours smoking hookah; the scent
of melon, of lotus perfume, drifts through your open
window, and your private demons rage. Pharaoh’s
armies march into the city, leaving behind
muddy handprints, child-sized, on the walls
of an abandoned leather factory. You hear
a woman calling on her God, charming a rare
music from the deep silence of her mandolin. Your room
is the calm center of the world.

EVENING

Evening falls like rain
on the village square as the fruit dims
in the pewter bowl on the shore
of the kitchen island. The vintage
breathes a little, loosening its cork
in the air like the tenor
clearing his throat before the silent crowd.
Tonight the tide goes for a walk while
the seaside mansions dream, and a boat,
hard against the Chinese lantern of the sky,
opens its saffron sails.

POSSESSIONS

There is nothing I can truly call my own—
even my voice once belonged
to the harpsichord; my voice
was the fractured music of angels
moving in their crystal spheres, the touch
of God like a light left burning
all night long in the infirmary
keeping vigil over the sick. Once my eyes
were a view of meadows sunk
in swamps, reclaimed by the holy,
the forthright, the lilies of the valley….
Let us revisit that meadow, gazed upon
by ladies in white dresses, the stems
of chilled wineglasses melding to their fingertips
while gentleman stand behind, not seeing
the truth for the curls of their mistress’ hair….
The painter, in his studio, knows this.
He has seen them move back and forth for years
through the obscure galleries of his mind,
commenting on this or that object, opening
Wunderkabinetts and starting open-mouthed
at things they couldn’t quite identify but which
looked vaguely human,
their reflections in a darkened mirror.

This morning opens onto a great expanse—
God is everywhere, have you heard?
He is the grass on which we sit, calm in one another’s presence, wanting for nothing;
He is the optimal temperature for human thought, the fruits
that drop, full to the point of bursting through their skins, into our laps;
He is the laughter of children we fail to hear,
so deep in our private rapture we have lost ourselves;
He is the narrow gate, the untrodden path through the garden.
If He is made of earth, I would like to disappear into His body.

In the garden you lose all sense of time and place—
you see the young poets, saints, and prophets
dying in the past. You see Keats
breathing deeply to displace with air
the darkness that has settled in his lungs, and the plash
of the Bernini Fountain in the Plaza di Spagna
has done no good. Where was He then,
our Lord and Savior? Who, in His absence,
had He entrusted to heal the sick,
to lay hands upon the consumptive world,
to let these perfecti die so young,
disgraced, their names engraved in water?

The world, at times, is more than its reflection
in the green eye of the pond
at the center of the Public Gardens, the swan boats
breaking the soft impression of the clouds
on the shaken surface of the water.
In the shade of the plane tree, a fountain
marks the passing of the day, from the angel
of grief to the basin never really full.
We cannot feel it happening, this change,
but when we look again, into the pool,
a different pair of eyes will greet us.

Beyond, the opalescent windows of the church,
the sanctuary lantern with its seven angels
offering their globes of fire,
the cold hard pews and the altar
with its promise of salvation,
the body and the blood of Christ
which become our own.
We are welcome here; this is our home.
Nothing shall disturb the intimate silences
within us, where all things come to rest.
A belief in the soul is a belief in perpetual stillness.
We do not change; we just expand, diffuse,
like vapor in the air; our perspectives shift,
we can possess all kingdoms;
we continually retreat into the inner chambers
of the soul, the cloisters of the heart,
falling back and back into the stars.
That is why, when you step into the church,
you experience a sense of loss: the self
is given up, surrendered
to the force that gave it life. Every truth
begins in sacrifice. When you step outside
into the blinding brightness of a Sunday morning,
your self returns: transfigured.

Under the arbor, the prophetess
entwines a snake around a wooden cross,
the blue sky aching at its prime
where it hinges on the honeysuckle
and the briar rose, the jasmine
winking out, the bells of blue wisteria
silencing their fragrant hearts.
When you reach the gate, know that this is
not the end; in heaven, I have heard,
each garden opens endlessly into another.

THE SCIENTIST

I didn’t know you then,
that summer when I sat in the dark
with the confocal microscope
and watched the stage light up with cells,
when I autoclaved the instruments
and brought in the mouse hearts
on a silver tray to examine and dissect,
when I weighed the lungs, the liver, and the spleen
in the balance of my hands
with the salt that would preserve them,
or produced the jars of formalin
where they would float, small and sacrosanct
as the finger of a saint
or the baby in the freak show.
O my love, had I known you then,
what could I have said
to prove to you the beauty of my work?
What would you have done
if the jars cracked in your hands?
Had you known me then, you said,
you would have broken them yourself.

ST. SIMONS

They drove down from Macon on Friday morning. Jason was behind the wheel. Beth sat shotgun and fiddled with the stereo. Sara sat in the back seat looking out the window. Ted complained.

Beth took the Shanghai Lounge Divas disc from its case, put it in the CD player, and leaned her head back on the seat while a song called "Plum Blossom" played.

They were crossing the causeway to St. Simons. The music superimposed itself on the landscape, a plum-colored haze of marshland that gave way to Spanish moss-covered trees and cottages with screened porches lining the shaded streets.

Beth was reminded of her grandparents' house in Naples, Florida--the drowsing cicadas, the golf course behind the house, the story Nana used to tell about the children who got eaten by an alligator, Granddad's rocker on the front porch, the morning he woke up and thought he was being sent back to Bougainville to fight the Japanese. Beth heard Nana's voice as she lay dying on the lanai.

Beth had hated Nana; hated her grumping and moaning about having five children and never getting a chance to go to the conservatory and study violin and play in an orchestra and give concerts around the world. Yes, Beth hated Nana; but she loved her just the same.

Beth's thoughts wandered to the pile of unpublished poems and stories locked away in her desk drawer at home. She'd been adding to the pile since she graduated from college two years ago. Beth's mother harped on her to stop letting these papers languish and moulder and urged her to send them to magazines. Beth knew she should but something prevented her. Deep down she thought no one would read them, that she wasn't a good enough writer. She had a habit of comparing herself to Fitzgerald, O'Connor, McCullers; Faulkner, even. She hated being a young writer. What she wanted to do was bypass her early period and go straight for the middle-to-late. The height of her nonexistent career.

She sighed.

She looked over at Jason driving, staring straight ahead, squinting slightly. Of her three best high school friends, Jason Anderson was the only one who represented the Ideal--well bred, smartly dressed, mind honed on a T-square. Jason's father was an architect who had designed some of the finest homes in the Macon area and now on St. Simons and the adjoining Sea Island. Jason was currently in Yale's architecture program and intended to work for his father until he could open a firm of his own, preferably on St. Simons, as he enjoyed the balmy weather.

The four of them arrived at Jason's grandmother's house and went inside. It was much darker than it looked from the outside; the wood floors were finished to a black cherry color, and the patterned wallpaper was either navy or midnight blue. The furnishings were oddly heavy for a summer house; all the windows were covered with thick drapery. Two French doors opened onto the lanai.

They put their duffel bags in the two bedrooms and went to the beach.

It seemed an ideal beach day; the sun shone hotly through the gauze of clouds, the humid air. They stuck their umbrella in the sand and spread out their beach towels underneath, then rushed out to the ocean. It was warm as bathwater. Beth, Sara, and Jason waded out together while Ted swam ahead.

He was almost to the sandbar when Jason turned his head and shouted, "Hey, you got the DTs or something?" Jason, in a moment of brilliance several years ago, had reclaimed the abbreviation "DTs" and decided that it would mean "Deep Thoughts" instead. Whenever somebody wandered off by himself, he obviously "had the DTs."

Ted stood up on the sandbar and gave Jason the finger.

Jason rolled his eyes and turned back to Beth and Sara. Beth admired his profile against the gray-green waves and the distant yachts full of champagne and lobster-colored rich people on their way to the Caribbean.

"Hey, Jason," Sara said. "Remember when you led that summer book salon?"

Beth remembered that day well: it was the first day of their junior year, and Jason, dressed in his khakis and white polo shirt emblazoned with an "H" for Hannaford Academy, sauntered to the front of the classroom at the teacher's request and sat atop one of the desks and proceeded to guide the class through the ash-heaps and millionaires of The Great Gatsby. He'd asked some pretty heavy questions that not many people answered, either because they hadn't read the book or just didn't want to get their class president started on the finer points of Jazz Age culture.

Floating on her back, Beth began reciting what she thought she could remember of Fitzgerald: "My father told me, son, don't turn up your nose at people because you've had advantages they haven't had....I'm p-paralyzed with happiness....Gatsby believed in the orgastic future receding before us a little each year...."

"Quit it," Jason said, splashing her. She splashed back.

"I'm going out to the sandbar to rescue Ted," she said. She could just see the top of his head over the waves.

"Storm's coming," Sara said, pointing west, where thick gray clouds were piling into thunderheads.

There was a streak of lightning. People were already stirring onshore; soon they'd be making their exodus.

"Hey, Ted," Beth shouted. "Your hero's coming to save you!"

"I don't need a hero," he shouted back.

Beth stopped paddling and stood up. The water was so shallow it barely came to her shoulders. She knew he was only joking, but his words stung; he didn't need her. Maybe nobody did.

She realized she'd drifted out away from the others and waded back to shore. Sara was sitting under the umbrella. It had started to rain. The wall of gray clouds was almost directly overhead.

Ted joined them and sat down silently under the umbrella.

"Where's Jason?" Beth asked.

Ted shrugged. "I thought he was with you."

"Jason!" Sara called.

The three of them walked down to the shore. They waited a moment before calling his name again. Beth saw a couple of kids still out in the water, but no Jason. She figured he'd drifted out as she had and surfaced on another part of the beach.

Ten minutes later he still didn't show. They were beginning to worry. The lifeguard blew his whistle, calling everyone out of the water for the last time. It was raining even harder.

Ted calmly took down the umbrella, placed it in its plastic sleeve, and shook out his towel. Sara went to the lifeguard chair to ask if the lifeguard had seen Jason.

"How are you so calm?" Beth asked Ted. "Aren't you worried about Jason? I mean, he's only been our best friend since the first grade."

Ted's face darkened. "Gatsby wasn't a hero, you know."

"What?"

"Gatsby."

"I heard you. What are you talking about?"

"He wanted to be some kind of tragic hero, but he couldn't."

As if on cue, there was a thunderclap. A little kid next to them shrieked and threw a towel over his head.

"If this is your idea of a joke," Beth said, "it's not funny."

Ted grabbed her by the shoulders. It was pouring now. Behind Ted, Beth could see Sara rushing up and down the shore with the lifeguard.

"Listen to me," Ted said. "Under no circumstances could Gatsby have been a hero. It was not an age for heroism. Nobody cared. Nobody wanted to be rescued, understand? They wanted to stay stupid and beautiful and shiny. They were so far out you couldn't see 'em from the shore. Like you. Like Jason. Like everybody. So what's the difference? Sometimes you just need to let it go. Give up. Just give up!"

He released her, and she fell backwards into the sand. She reached up instinctively to her face, not knowing if the wetness on her cheeks was tears or rain or both.

She stood and looked out across the great expanse of ocean, now entirely gray and vacant, broken only by the rain.

THE DISPLAY

Captive, I say, captive--
not the butterflies with their gossamer
wings inside this greenhouse
in the lobby of the hotel
but the eyes that follow them,
watching but not really seeing,
like the great stone eyes of Ozymandias,
king of kings; some can't tell
the difference between the monarchs
mounted on the wall and the ones
that fly through taxidermied air,
through shafts of light, and land
on sponges soaked in honey, or a bouquet
of gardening shears, enclosed by silence.


STILL LIVES

Listen to Snyders and den Uyl; they say
you must live with uncertainty,
change, you must learn patience,
must learn to watch azaleas crumple in their Wan-Li pot,
must watch leaves desiccate and fall--
all things are in perpetual
decline. Watch three sparrows
peck at a vine of rotten strawberries;
watch the remains of your breakfast
rot, the milk congeal in the Venetian goblet
framed by the niche; watch the pulp flake
from the porcelain dish piled high with orange rinds,
the crumbs turn to pebbles on the gold-leaf plate; oh yes,
observe the greasy thumbprints of the waiter.
And the world will open for just a moment,
as though you were waking from some beautiful dream;
you will walk to the piano, sit down,
desultorily strike a key, the weight
of expectations lifted. What is the truth?


VENICE

All by yourself you are the world
that passed with the passing of the Doge--
the insignificant things, the barber's blade
against his cheek, the way the bottom of his ermine robes
grew damp when he walked in the rain,
the smell of grizzle on his plate
congealing among white lumps of fat,
a blot of ink or red wax seal
drying on a letter or a document of state,
flowers that droop and names that wear away....

Again you're in San Marco Square.
Evening is falling.
Stylish couples sip espresso from little china cups
as a jazz band plays and light flakes off the wedding cake Palazzo Ducale
while across the lagoon
the bells of San Giorgio Maggiore toll.