The Rain in Portugal (6 page)

If you were in the mood to get out the paint box

and paint some goats grazing in Italy,

this would be an excellent time to do it.

There's five of them up on a grassy slope

above this spa in Umbria where a day pass

at 22 euros allows me to swim in the pool,

soak in the thermal baths,

or just lounge in a chaise under an umbrella,

all of which leaves me little time to paint goats.

I will tell you they're all good-sized goats,

two being mostly white, making for a nice contrast

with the green and blond hillside,

the other three being darker—brown and grey.

So think about finding your way down here,

flipping open the old paint box

and getting right to work,

so that some day propped up on mother's mantel,

or even framed, will be your oil painting

titled “Five Lovely Goats” or “Five Lonely Goats,”

your handwriting being what it is,

prompting mother, who always confuses the two of us,

to shake her cane in your face and shout

“And what would the likes of you be doing

in a swimming pool in Umbria of all places?!”

If I had to pick a favorite

from the four heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa,

it would have to be Álvaro de Campos,

cast in the role of the Jaded Sensationist.

This morning nothing much is going on,

just the cat re-curling herself on a chair

and the tea water coming to a boil—

a scene Álvaro would have found entirely sufficient,

he who failed to start or finish anything,

who prefers the window

to the door, tomorrow to today

or better still, the day after tomorrow,

that citadel of stillness, unspoiled

by ambition or labor, unblemished even

by a hand lowering a needle onto a record

or moving a deck chair to a place in the sun.

Yes, I like the dreamy Pessoa

who avoids streetcars and markets,

and who, like the snowflake, barely exists at all,

but that's not to say I don't care for the others.

Right now, out my back window,

all four Pessoas are chasing one another

around a big tree, holding on to their hats,

each one somehow dressed more outlandishly

than the others. Above them a pale sky,

white clouds moving like sailboats over Portugal.

I can see it all from my couch where

I'm playing a few sad tunes on the piccolo.

Meanwhile, the tea water has boiled away,

and the crown of flames is working on the kettle,

and the cat has moved to another spot.

She loves the unmade bed, the mountainous sheets.

That was the day we made love

in a room without a bed,

a room of tall windows and a rose ceiling,

and then we moved outside

and sat there on a high deck

watching the pelicans dive into the waves

as we drank chilled white wine,

and after a little while

I put a finger in your hair and twirled it,

and you smiled and kept looking at the sea.

It must have been almost seven

when I found the car keys and kissed you

because you said you would make us

an interesting dinner

if I picked up some things at the market.

And the blue sky was still illuminated

as I walked across the parking lot

and through the electric doors,

for the days of the year

were now increasing by the minute,

and I will not soon forget how,

after I had filled the basket

with two brook trout,

asparagus, lemons, and parsley,

rum-raisin ice cream, and a watermelon,

the check-out girl—

no more than a junior in high school—

handed me the change

and told me to have a nice day.

As usual, it was easy to accept the lake

and its surroundings,

to take at face value the thick reeds

along the shore, a little platoon of ducks,

a turtle sunning itself on a limb half submerged,

and the big surface of the lake itself

the water sometimes glassy, other times ruffled.

Why, Henry David Thoreau or anyone

even vaguely familiar with the role

of the picturesque in 19th century

American landscape painting

would feel perfectly at home in its presence.

And that is why I felt so relieved to discover

in the midst of all this familiarity

a note of skepticism,

or call it a Dadaist paradox.

And if not a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde

then surely a sign of impertinence was here

in the casual fuck-you attitude

so perfectly expressed by the anhinga

drying its extended wings

in the morning breeze

while perched on a decoy of a Canada goose.

I sometimes wonder about the thoughtful Roman

who came up with the notion

that any problem can be solved by walking.

Maybe his worries were minor enough

to be banished by a little amble

along the paths of his gardens,

or, if he faced a tough one—

whether to invite Lavinia or Pomponia to the feast—

walking to the Coliseum would show him the one to pick.

The maxim makes it sound so simple:

go for a walk until you find a solution

then walk back home with a clear head.

No problem,
as they used to say in ancient Rome.

But one night, a sticky one might take you

for a walk past the limits of a city,

beyond the streetlights of its suburbs,

and there you are, knocking on the door of a farmer,

who keeps you company on the porch

until your wife comes to fetch you

and drive you and your problem back home,

your problem taking up most of the back seat

and staring at your wife in the rear-view mirror.

And what about the mathematician

who tried to figure out some devilish

mind-crusher like Goldbach's conjecture

and taking the Latin to heart,

walked to the very bottom of Patagonia?

There he stood on a promontory,

so the locals like to tell you,

staring beyond the end of the hemisphere,

with nothing but the cries of seabirds,

waves exploding on the rocks,

clouds rushing down the sky,

and him having figured the whole thing out.

Is there anyone out there

who can name a movie about a writer

of the eighteenth or nineteenth century

that does not feature a fireplace

into whose manic flames are tossed,

usually one at a time,

the pages of a now lost literary masterpiece?

The scene could be a manor house or a hovel,

the fire doesn't know the difference

any more than it can distinguish a chit

from a poem that could change the direction of literature.

The culprit is usually a rival,

or the wife, driven mad by neglect,

or a mistress, her damp hair in tendrils,

but the best destroyer of all is the author himself

standing transfixed by the mantel

as he undoes all the good he has ever done.

And that is what I saw tonight

here from my chair across the room—

an actor playing Coleridge burning

the fresh, hand-written pages of “Kubla Khan,”

his drug-haunted face flickering above the flames.

So far, I have been immune to such romance.

All my good pages are right here on the desk.

The only fire in this house is

the pilot light burning in the kitchen.

My wife kissed me and went to bed hours ago,

and my only rival was killed in a duel

on a snowy field somewhere in Russia

one hundred and thirty-five years ago today.

When you told me you'd been invited to one,

I pictured a room full of tiny bachelors

in miniature slacks and natty sports jackets

and in the background a stack of boxes

tied with bows, which one of them would get to open.

But first they would have lots of drinks

and clink their little glasses

of peaty single-malt whiskeys

and talk about cars and the sport of the season

until a long awkward silence would set in

and one of them would suggest they go out

and look for some single women their size,

leaving the badly wrapped presents unopened in a pile.

And none of that would have occurred to me

if there were a separate word for a party

thrown for a woman looking forward

to pulling a big white dress over her head,

maybe a word from Hindi, or a brand new one,

instead of just an old word with a suffix

tied to its bumper along with a bunch of empty tin cans.

Again I woke up to no one's smile

unless you count the face

formed by the closet doorknob,

the tiny mouth of the keyhole

looking comically surprised at its bulbous nose.

It was Stephen Crane's month

on my Calendar of American Authors,

but he was clearly not smiling,

and my grandfather looked displeased

at the frame I had chosen for his portrait.

Not ornate enough,
his eyes seemed to say.

The lid on the piano was closed

so I could not see its lavish smile,

but then who comes gamboling to the rescue

but Elsie the Cow, grinning broadly

from her place on the carton of milk

I was tipping into my bowl of cereal.

Commendable is the constancy of her glee,

sustained all through the night

in the darkness of the refrigerator

then unveiled in the sunny kitchen of morning.

And encircling her head is a garland of daisies,

woven no doubt by someone on the farm,

who then entered the pasture

and settled them around her magnificent neck.

Likely, it's the handiwork of a girl,

maybe one of the daughters, perhaps an only child.

But where is she now?

When did she leave?

And by what river or seashore does she dwell?

I was sitting cross-legged one morning

in our sunny new meditation room

wondering if it would be okay

to invite our out-of-town guest

to Frank's dinner party next weekend

when it occurred to me

that I wasn't really meditating at all.

In fact, I had never meditated

in our sunny new meditation room.

I had just sat cross-legged

now and then for 15 or 20 minutes

worrying about one thing or another,

how the world will end

or what to get Alice for her birthday.

It would make more sense

to rename the meditation room

our new exercise room

and to replace all the candles,

incense holders, and the little statues

with two ten-pound hand weights

and a towel in case I broke a sweat.

Then I pictured the new room

with nothing in it but a folded white towel,

and a pair of numbered hand weights—

an image of such simplicity

that the sustaining of it

as I sat cross-legged under a tall window,

my palms open weightlessly on my bare knees,

made me wonder if I wasn't actually

meditating for a moment then and there

in our former meditation room,

where the sun seemed to be brightening

as it suffused with light the grain

in the planks of that room's gleaming floor.

I'm not going to put a lot of work into this

because you won't be able to read it anyway,

and I've got more important things to do

this morning, not the least of which

is to try to write a fairly decent poem

for the people who can still read English.

Who could have foreseen English finding

a place in the cemetery of dead languages?

I once imagined English placing flowers

at the tombstones of its parents, Latin and Anglo-Saxon,

but you people can actually visit its grave

on a Sunday afternoon if you still have days of the week.

I remember the story of the last speaker

of Dalmatian being tape-recorded in his hut

as he was dying under a horse-hair blanket.

But English? English seemed for so many of us

the only true way to describe the world

as if reality itself were English

and Adam and Eve spoke it in the garden

using words lik
e snake, apple,
and
perdition
.

Of course, there are other words for things

but what could be better than
boat,

pool, swallow
(both the noun and the verb),

statuette, tractor, squiggly, surf,
and
underbelly
?

I'm sorry.

I've wasted too much time on this already.

You carry on however you do

without the help of English, communicating

with dots in the air or hologram hats or whatever.

You're just like all the ones who say

they can't understand poetry

but at least you poor creatures have an excuse.

So I'm going to turn the page

and not think about you and your impoverishment.

Instead, I'm going to write a poem about red poppies

waving by the side of the railroad tracks,

and you people will never even know what you're missing.