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.