FOREVER
POEMS
James Longenbach
TO JOIE
CONTENTS
I
Two People
Notre-Dame
The Way I Like Best
In the Dolomites
112th Street
II
Thursday
Since February
In the Village
Venice
Via Sacra
III
Barcarolle
School Street
Song of the Sun
This Little Island
Forever
Acknowledgments
I
TWO PEOPLE
1.
Two people at the end of a dock, facing the sea, the sky.
Behind them a party, clink of glasses.
Guests still relevant to their lives
But not essential;
Parents, family friends.
Two people not yet old, but no longer young.
Before them the harbor, they’re facing west, they’re watching the sun go down.
The sky is bright, and then, remarkably, it’s dark again.
They’ve never done this before,
They’ve done it a thousand times.
The sun goes down,
The stars come out,
Even the lights above the patio are beautiful.
2.
How do you imagine the shape of one lifetime?
A circle, a tangle of lines? He knows
That if he kisses her
She’ll kiss him back,
But he waits, they’re going to spend their lives together; he knows that, too.
Behind them, growing louder, the past:
The one who left, the one who would not go away—
What happens when a wish comes true?
A room by the sea, a bed, a chair.
You’re a little sunburnt, a breeze, white curtains billowing,
And as you raise your arms
She lifts the tee shirt from your body.
Perfect gentleness, the perfect glint of pain.
3.
Where will we be in five years, five years after that?
This is a game they play.
Often they play it in a restaurant, Rue de L’Espoir.
A basket of bread, two round glasses of wine. How free they feel!
Five years from now I want us each to have a book.
We’ll live in London, maybe Rome.
Five years from that we’ll have a baby, what will we name her? She’ll be a girl.
It all comes true—everything
They ever wished
And more, two girls.
Remember the party behind them, the voices?
They never went away.
But the sound of the sea grew louder.
NOTRE-DAME
High above our heads the forest
Is burning, oaks and chestnuts almost a thousand years old.
Smoke is rising, alarms are ringing,
But down here in the past
We’re ignorant, we’re unprepared.
This boy lights a candle in a little red cup.
Maybe the girl he loves
No longer loves him.
Look at her, she’s standing right beside him; isn’t he dumb?
This boy’s going to be a father, he’s just found out.
Together with his wife
He’ll celebrate at Le Trumilou, their favorite bistro, just across the Seine.
Viollet-le-Duc is sketching a buttress.
Louis Vierne is playing Bach, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
They’re embellishers, both of them,
They can’t leave the past alone! Doesn’t anyone
Hear the sirens, see the black smoke
Billowing against the sky?
The forest is burning. Beneath it
Little flames of hope
Are burning, too.
Hope, desire, longing, fear—
This boy doesn’t know he has cancer. This boy
Doesn’t realize that, being
Who he is, he asks too much;
The people he loves need less of him.
This boy? He will live forever
In a little house by the sea.
THE WAY I LIKE BEST
Initially the fragments were discovered by Helena,
Mother of the emperor Constantine.
Where precisely, or in what circumstances,
Nobody knows for sure.
Stolen by the Persians in 614,
•
They were recovered intact by Heraclius,
Emperor of the East, in 628.
But because the blood of Jesus had rendered the wood
Imperishable, no matter
How many pieces were removed,
•
The fragments were divided into increasingly smaller fragments,
Each of them, because more easily concealed,
More valuable than the last.
Smuggled out of Jerusalem by two friars,
Entrusted to the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1366,
•
Two such splinters were delivered nel palmo,
In the palm of the hand,
To the guardian of the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista,
One of the six Venetian scuole or guilds.
There, in the Oratorio della Croce,
•
You’ll find the cross-shaped reliquary in which the splinters,
Arranged to mimic
A cross, are encased in rock crystal.
You won’t find the cycle of narrative paintings
Commemorating their acquisition, because in 1806, after dissolving the scuole,
•
Napoleon removed the paintings from the walls.
Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, Perugino—
Each depicts the reliquary.
Each depicts a miracle,
Though in Bellini’s Miracle of the Merchant Jacopo de Salis
•
The miracle is hard to find.
Jacopo, robed in red,
The only person
Kneeling in a sea
Of white-cowled celebrants
•
Carrying the cross to which he prays,
Is completely alone.
His son is dying,
It’s the feast of San Marco,
The presentation of the true cross, April 25, 1444—
•
To see the Miracle of the Merchant Jacopo de Salis properly,
As for thirty years I did not, remember that in the Scuola
It was hung above your head;
In the Accademia you’ll need to kneel.
To see the reliquary of the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista,
•
Start in the southwest corner of the Campo San Giacomo,
The one with the sycamores you like.
Cross the bridge, turn left, then right, then left again—
The first time I ever saw Venice
I loved you. The second time
•
You loved me, too.
The fifteenth I was sick,
The sixteenth well—
Somewhere, every day, a son gets out of bed.
There are faster ways to get there, simpler ways,
•
But I like this way best.
IN THE DOLOMITES
1.
The afternoon walk, it turns out, may not have been a walk at all.
Nor can I locate in the Dolomites the place
Where we met, though I remember
It with a level of detail I reserve
For things of consequence.
Snow layered in the crevices, white against black. Impossible
Patches of green where grass
Showed through, and more impossible
The gentians, still blooming, yellow against green.
For the color above our heads, heaven, the sky—
I had no word for that.
No one did; remember
This happened a long time ago.
Even if it existed in the world, in your eyes,
Blue did not exist yet in my mind.
2.
I see a rectangular, steeply sloping meadow.
At the top of the meadow a cottage,
And in front of the cottage door
Two women are standing, one with a kerchief on her head.
Children are gathering flowers,
A girl and a boy, the latter of whom is me.
And because the girl has gathered the more prodigious bunch,
I grab it from her; she runs
Up the meadow in tears. To console her
The woman in a kerchief cuts a slice of black bread,
Then slathers it with with jam.
I throw the flowers to the ground, run to the cottage,
And ask to be given bread, too.
In fact I am given some.
The woman cuts the loaf with a long knife.
3.
When I was young I had a beautiful body.
Don’t imagine me proud, you had one, too; everybody did.
Just walking down the street or
Looking out the window, sitting on a train,
Was like staring
Into the sun. Modesty
Made nothing happen
Since the parts
Were more enticing than the whole.
I read a lot of books. I drove
Long distances with the windows down. Who were
The ones with golden eyes and sunlit hair
Who lounged all day beside the river clearly
Doing something important
Though it looked like nothing at all?
4.
At twelve I returned to Bolzano for the first time.
Always I’d longed for the meadows
Of my childhood, where I’d escaped from my father even
When I could barely walk. But when I returned,
Something else excited me greatly:
A thirteen-year-old girl, the daughter of my hosts, who last I’d seen at four.
Immediately I fell in love—
My first infatuation,
Though I said nothing to anyone.
After a few days, the girl returned to school, as soon I did, too.
But in the interim I spent my afternoons
Wandering in the meadows, the mountains
Rising, as they always had, abruptly from my feet.
My fantasies were not directed at the future,
But rather sought to improve the past.
5.
Two children walking through the meadow where they were born.
Born there like animals, suckled by a she-wolf
Together in one bed, one bower.
When one of them smiled, they both smiled.
When one of them frowned,
Together they frowned, furrowed their brows, so serious, so stern!
Then together they laughed.
Together they ate, together they slept,
Their legs tangled up together,
Legs brown from the sun.
Together they forgot the past, they invented
The future, the bower, the bed—
Then it was morning. One of us got in the car,
One of us stood at the door
And waved good-bye.
6.
Knowledge, as the ancients remind us,
Is conventional; not in the sense of
Arbitrary, but because it depends
On qualities we cannot observe.
Atom, from atomos, meaning indivisible.
So if the atoms of water
Are slippery and smooth,
The atoms of salt are pointed,
While the atoms of red things quiver like flame.
On the color blue Democritus is silent.
So is Homer, who calls the sea
Oinops, wine-dark, or, more literally, wine-looking.
The hides of oxen, to our eyes brown or black,
Also he calls oinops. The sky
He calls starry, broad, iron, or copper.
7.
I’m looking at a boy and a girl, no longer boy and girl.
Together they have not only the future,
They have a past. She’s reading
Letters he’s written; he’s leaning his head against her neck,
He’s curling his arm behind her slender waist,
His fingers emerging, from my viewpoint,
Just below her breast.
Gently they’re touching her breast.
Remember how that felt?
Behind them a garden, the meeting, the pursuit.
Is the shrubbery tended or overgrown, the columbines
Luxurious because they’re trimmed?
Yellow her bodice, green the trees.
Are the branches closing off the sky, or parting
To reveal it, a smudge of blue?
8.
At this point in the narrative
I remember very little; whole years fall away.
Time, if you’ll permit me the expression, stood still.
Yes, there were children of our own, we moved to Treviso.
Then it was morning.
You were standing at the door.
Why won’t you come with me,
Why must I go alone,
Asked the first person ever to die.
When finally I admitted, to my shame, this is the worst thing
That’s ever happened to me,
What had happened was almost nothing.
But I’d never seen it before, I had no
Word to describe it,
Though it was everywhere.
9.
The windows were open, the ledges
Of the balcony broad: the sweep of the canal
And the flutter of the white curtains were an invitation to
—I couldn’t have said what. A reef, over which had broken,
Through long ages, the billows of an angry sea?
When the fog rising from the intervening
Plains and lagoons had lifted,
There they were: towers
And ramparts, battlements, pinnacles, the deepest
Of deep reds, the blackest black
Against a cobalt sky.
Mountains, stars, calves, serpents, fever,
War, fame, vice, adultery—these are among the things
That cannot take the place
Of heaven, though people have tried.
10.
In my first life, my body was fresh, unaccustomed to itself.
I learned to read, to make love.
Maybe it was like this for you, too. In my second
I was asked to be older; when I advertised
My interests they proved
Interesting to other people. What interested me?
The trees grew taller, the houses stayed the same.
And when I was summoned again
I had to count out loud—
Was this the fourth time, the fifth?
A stranger remembered me;
You lived here, he said, a long time ago. The trees
Had grown taller, the children were more beautiful than ever
Or had they always been so,
Smiling at one another, staring at the sky?
112th STREET
If only once, if ever you have the chance,
You should climb a volcano.
The hermitage at base camp, the glasses of brandy—
That’s the past.
Who wants to think about the past?
Y
ou want to push forward, climb higher, while all around you,
Inches beneath your feet,
Earth is seething, a river of liquid rock.
Will you make it to the summit—
The flying slag, the potholes
Red as an open wound?
Of course you will, it’s easy; everybody does.
So little behind you,
So much ahead—
Once, walking up Broadway
Late at night,
Both of us a little drunk, flurries in the air, Christmas trees
Lining the sidewalk, block after block—
At every corner
You kissed me.
Then the light would change.
II
THURSDAY
Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,
Is existing in the middle,
Sustaining an act of radical imagination,
I simmered a broth: onion, lemon, a big handful of mint.
The phone rang. So with my left
Hand I answered it,
Sautéing the rice, then adding the broth
Slowly, one ladle at a time, with my right—hello?—
The miracle, it’s easy to miss, is the moment when the husks dissolve,
Each grain releasing its tiny explosion of starch.
If you take it off the heat just then, let it sit
While you shave the parmesan into paper-thin curls,
It will be perfectly creamy,
But will still have a bite.
There will be dishes to do,
The moon will rise,
And everyone you love will be safe.
SINCE FEBRUARY
Russ
Your mother is driving you out of Texas,
She’s heading east on Route 10,
The top is down, the wind is blowing through her hair.