Man and Camel

EXCERPT

Man and Camel

On the eve of my fortieth birthday

I sat on the porch having a smoke

when out of the blue a man and a camel

happened by. Neither uttered a sound

at first, but as they drifted up the street

and out of town the two of them began to sing.

Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—

the words were indistinct and the tune

too ornamental to recall. Into the desert

they went and as they went their voices

rose as one above the sifting sound

of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,

its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed

an ideal image for all uncommon couples.

Was this the night that I had waited for

so long? I wanted to believe it was,

but just as they were vanishing, the man

and camel ceased to sing, and galloped

back to town. They stood before my porch,

staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:

“You ruined it. You ruined it forever.”


Black Sea

One clear night while the others slept, I climbed

the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky

strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,

the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming

like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long,

whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach

of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,

the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,

and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.

The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood

on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea

break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear . . .

Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all

that the world offers would you come only because I was here?


Mother and Son

The son enters the mother’s room

and stands by the bed where the mother lies.

The son believes that she wants to tell him

what he longs to hear—that he is her boy,

always her boy. The son leans down to kiss

the mother’s lips, but her lips are cold.

The burial of feelings has begun. The son

touches the mother’s hands one last time,

then turns and sees the moon’s full face.

An ashen light falls across the floor.

If the moon could speak, what would it say?

If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.


My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green

and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials

in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed

with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,

feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered

what I would become and where I would find myself,

and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant

that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard

my name as if for the first time, heard it the way

one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off

as though it belonged not to me but to the silence

from which it had come and to which it would go.


From the Hardcover edition.