Error

It remains to be seen if I lose my way
In a meadow somewhere beyond today
In a season foretold, perhaps, in a future
Whose accent is a footfall on dry leaves
Or the murmur of a sibyl beside a stream
That sharply flows into the cave mouth,
Into undergrowth none walks out of.
That is one story. There are a few others
Illustrated by Doré: the ancient wood
That one moment's false step will prove
Permanent and unrecognizably pathless:
The forest known in retrospect as Error,
Whose root lies tangled in wandering.
Once upon a time to fall fully awake
And descend to a height. The journey starts
At the omphalos lip, the navel ring
Where the blackened stone circle charms
The wayward into mounting slowly down
Granite steps, past the silenced Geryon,
Deeper and deeper yet, until one thrust
And there's starlight, hearing a highway's
Whine, a factory whistle, a far siren
Calling you out of brambles and stone
Only to find the hillside started from:
Your fabled self, lying there error prone.

- first published in The Paris Review

Chekhov's "The Student" (April, 1894)

For hours now the Last Supper has been over,
And the beating almost over, and morning's cry
Yet to be heard by the workmen in the courtyard
Warming themselves by the hasty fire, and Peter,
Near the agony in the garden, feeling something
Terrible happening, blinking back stale sleep,
Peter turns his face from strangers' stares.
"This man also was with Jesus." Then others
Slowly turning toward him with cold interest,
And his own voice, thick-tongued: "I do not know him."

That the cock crows not then but at the third No
Must tell us much about the nature of faith,
How it leans on separations, how it robes simple
Gestures--a hand waving from an open window--
With deferral, as if real knowledge only comes after,
As though Peter could only see what he'd done
Upon going from the high priest's courtyard
And, alone, weeping bitterly in the dawn.
That much we can understand, but why then
Does Chekhov revisit this known, hard ground
With a pensive student who, on his way back

From a failed hunt, thinks how this same chill
Easter wind must have blown in Rurik's age
And scourged the hungry poor in the years
Of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible?
Wind, wind, hunger, icy needles of rain. . .
The same as then-until, coming on two widows,
A huge, shapeless old woman in a man's overcoat
And her putty-faced daughter washing a kettle,
The student asks if he might share their fire,

Saying, as he does, that St. Peter had on such
A night warmed himself before a fire, on such
A cold, extraordinarily long and terrible night.
Murmuring welcomes, they bring him inside,
And soon he finds himself describing in detail
That part of the gospel which is Peter's betrayal:
"…thus I imagine it: the garden deathly still
And very dark, and in the silence came
Sounds of muffled sobbing-" Here his account
Breaks off when the absently-smiling Vasilissa

Suddenly weeps, burying her eyes in her apron;
Whereupon her daughter, herself bowed down
By sickness and filth, blushes and turns away.
The student, for all his theology, is speechless.
There's nothing for it now but to step out,
With empty game-bag, and find his moonlit
Way back home across the ancient marsh.
Only then does he see in the waterlogged
Meadow, well beyond the river's sedges,
Something remarkable: a high-walled garden

Looming green against a background of sand.
Nineteen hundred years crossed in heartbeats!
In that kindled instant all the world's travails
Drop from his shoulders. Just twenty-two,
He has found the very quick of faith.
Gone are hunger, sleet, and useless words.
Gone! Ah, we leave him there at century's end,
Before he has returned to his village
--And all that returning would surely mean--
In this, this the briefest of the master's stories.

- first published in The Paris Review

Library

Paulatim lachrymas rerum experentia tersit.
-Petrarch

Father's books lying on the living room floor
Must be divided into threes: art history,
Classical letters and, left from my days here,
Unsteady stacks of quasi-educational lore
That show yellowing Geographic scientists
Perennially lost in rain forest mists.
An instant choice will cull some from the rest
So they may become mine-a banausic test.

Prewar light glimmers in the apartment:
A shadowplay that summons an adolescence
Of slammed doors and risible nothings
Hurled at retreating parental backs
--The most telling blows always soliloquy--
As I stormed and wept and read in silence.
Now forty, a smiling private man, I stare
At a word trove given sons to share.

Some are dated in the first blank page: 1
January 1938 this reads, as if a resolution
Made (and kept?); this ruddy leather edition
States simply Property of --with no name given.
I gesture toward the emptiness of gifts
Prematurely bestowed in illness's ruin,
And blow, blow dust off an enfeebled spine,
Filling lungs with belletristic grime.

It's all some forgotten chore from a childhood
The hall mirror charitably declares was good.
Pictures of other libraries fill my head:
Weighty tomes I hauled to girlfriends' walkups,
Barely unpacked before again in boxes;
Or Sophoclean dramas, lost to ancient fires,
Which exist in name only; or that fable
Of an infinitely circular Library of Babel

Borges saw as self-referential: nooks,
Corridors, dead ends, twisting stairwells:
Bibliographic cargo cults and infidels.
In his bed, dreaming of a golden age of looks
And cars, booze and fine clothes, my father snores
And chokes and comes to. . . . Sunlight pours
Into empty bookcases. Where in hell are they?!
If memory then corrects, questions stay

And, refracting off walls, gather numb force
As I read a volume plucked at random
Only to start up when hoarse ripples burn
My innermost ear: Where, where, where?
Soon my father will awaken to find no air.
One tattered cover shows a boy's ray-gun
Pointed to the sun: the future, that much is clear.
Somewhere where this library can cohere.

Nearly finished, I stumble on Petrarch's Epistles
And, apropos of age, find: In that passing, I shall
not seem myself: another brow, other habits, a new form
of the mind, another voice sounding. . . . Father whistles
Down the hallway for his lackadaisical firstborn.
Little by little, experience wipes dry our tears.
The job's done-leaving me to calculate the years
I withheld my love, and the years I've left to mourn.

- first published in The Paris Review

History of the Mediterranean

Not as Braudel did it, the hegemonies
Of trade and the grand sweep. Nor yet
As those three-walled frescoes studded
With the sweat of innumerable angels.
I mean the gravity of feeling
Whose small wave without acclaim scatters
Redolent sand. Or a cheap hotel lobby:
Widow and son talking beside a pillar
Of no particular importance
But that their marvelous lives lend.
Luxury bereft of years' weight, no
Chiseled imprimatur, marble freed
From the centurion's implacable shadow.

So, the day's gauntlet thrown, stand
On this Tuscan hill and watch as noon
Ripples the flax of distant homes.
In ahistorical sunlight we murmur,
Repeating the ever-to-be-repeated.
Pull your dress off and find the wind.

- first published in Antaeus

Knowing Greek

Once it seemed possible, those boys
Peeking out of gun slits at the German line
Or on graves detail, wet, miserable,
Oblivious to the dawn's miserable joys.
I hardly know what to say to their faces
Locked away in the secret history of the war,
The Great one, which everyone knows was lost,
Really lost, at Versailles. Sure, I could go
To pastured no-man's land, yet another
In a shambling line of the misinformed,
Staring, too ready to honor landscape.
What have we learned? A teacher's question.
Russell's Principia Mathematica proved false,
No doubt, and the decades have never ceased
From accelerating to where I now sit
In the Elgin Room ("De Greeks were Godes!"
Shouted Fuseli at first seeing the marbles),
Contemplating the beauty that brought Byron
To fight for liberty against the Turks
--Broken by marsh fever at Missolonghi,
His valet Fletcher still with him. Shelley,
Legend has it, drowned with a Greek play
Stuck in a pocket. "We are all Greeks," he said.
In Rome, you can see the piazza where
His friend's bedsheet burned. Keats had no Greek.
He wrote his sonnet to Chapman's Homer
Out of ardor for an epic Englished.
For him, too, breathing and Greek came together,
If only as absence, some swift final pain.
"Yes, on to Pi, / When the end loomed nigh"
--So Hardy's newly dead Liddell to long dead Scott
On their alphabetical quest, and I
Look again at the forms the good Lord saved
To steal and bury in this London sanctuary.
Athanatos, deathless; psuche, soul: engraved
On my mind since ephebe days at City College
Where I copied out my own slim lexicon.
Marathon may be more important than
Hastings "Even as an event in English history" (Mill),
But noting the shortness of their upper lips,
Carlyle vexed the painter Watts by claiming
Pheidias's sculpted men lacked "cleverness."

Yes. Once it seemed possible, those boys
With their classical educations bursting
Like gods from mud, kissing reddening stones
Still redder under a pockmarked plain.
All those undying souls writing home
As the first mechanized war stole their words,
As lads became men, and honour came to what?
You're never so right as when you're dead,
The marbles seem to say; or with Peleus to his son,
Always be the champion; or, with Weil,
Force is any X that makes a thing out of a mortal
--A sudden swarm of centuries gone wrong.
In marmoreal light I raise a chastened hand:
Beauty is truth, a sick youth's equation.
Trenches lie on the surface of my palm.

- first published in The Paris Review