Faithful and Virtuous Night Read online

  I had accepted substitutes.

  It was challenging to use the bright colors,

  the ones left, though my aunt preferred them of course—

  she thought all children should be lighthearted.

  And so time passed: I became

  a boy like my brother, later

  a man.

  I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem

  there is no perfect ending.

  Indeed, there are infinite endings.

  Or perhaps, once one begins,

  there are only endings.

  THEORY OF MEMORY

  Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.

  A SHARPLY WORDED SILENCE

  Let me tell you something, said the old woman.

  We were sitting, facing each other,

  in the park at ____, a city famous for its wooden toys.

  At the time, I had run away from a sad love affair,

  and as a kind of penance or self-punishment, I was working

  at a factory, carving by hand the tiny hands and feet.

  The park was my consolation, particularly in the quiet hours

  after sunset, when it was often abandoned.

  But on this evening, when I entered what was called the Contessa’s Garden,

  I saw that someone had preceded me. It strikes me now

  I could have gone ahead, but I had been

  set on this destination; all day I had been thinking of the cherry trees

  with which the glade was planted, whose time of blossoming had nearly ended.

  We sat in silence. Dusk was falling,

  and with it came a feeling of enclosure

  as in a train cabin.

  When I was young, she said, I liked walking the garden path at twilight

  and if the path was long enough I would see the moon rise.

  That was for me the great pleasure: not sex, not food, not worldly amusement.

  I preferred the moon’s rising, and sometimes I would hear,

  at the same moment, the sublime notes of the final ensemble

  of The Marriage of Figaro. Where did the music come from?

  I never knew.

  Because it is the nature of garden paths

  to be circular, each night, after my wanderings,

  I would find myself at my front door, staring at it,

  barely able to make out, in darkness, the glittering knob.

  It was, she said, a great discovery, albeit my real life.

  But certain nights, she said, the moon was barely visible through the clouds

  and the music never started. A night of pure discouragement.

  And still the next night I would begin again, and often all would be well.

  I could think of nothing to say. This story, so pointless as I write it out,

  was in fact interrupted at every stage with trance-like pauses

  and prolonged intermissions, so that by this time night had started.

  Ah the capacious night, the night

  so eager to accommodate strange perceptions. I felt that some important secret

  was about to be entrusted to me, as a torch is passed

  from one hand to another in a relay.

  My sincere apologies, she said.

  I had mistaken you for one of my friends.

  And she gestured toward the statues we sat among,

  heroic men, self-sacrificing saintly women

  holding granite babies to their breasts.

  Not changeable, she said, like human beings.

  I gave up on them, she said.

  But I never lost my taste for circular voyages.

  Correct me if I’m wrong.

  Above our heads, the cherry blossoms had begun

  to loosen in the night sky, or maybe the stars were drifting,

  drifting and falling apart, and where they landed

  new worlds would form.

  Soon afterward I returned to my native city

  and was reunited with my former lover.

  And yet increasingly my mind returned to this incident,

  studying it from all perspectives, each year more intensely convinced,

  despite the absence of evidence, that it contained some secret.

  I concluded finally that whatever message there might have been

  was not contained in speech—so, I realized, my mother used to speak to me,

  her sharply worded silences cautioning me and chastising me—

  and it seemed to me I had not only returned to my lover

  but was now returning to the Contessa’s Garden

  in which the cherry trees were still blooming

  like a pilgrim seeking expiation and forgiveness,

  so I assumed there would be, at some point,

  a door with a glittering knob,

  but when this would happen and where I had no idea.

  VISITORS FROM ABROAD

  1.

  Sometime after I had entered

  that time of life

  people prefer to allude to in others

  but not in themselves, in the middle of the night

  the phone rang. It rang and rang

  as though the world needed me,

  though really it was the reverse.

  I lay in bed, trying to analyze

  the ring. It had

  my mother’s persistence and my father’s

  pained embarrassment.

  When I picked it up, the line was dead.

  Or was the phone working and the caller dead?

  Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps?

  2.

  My mother and father stood in the cold

  on the front steps. My mother stared at me,

  a daughter, a fellow female.

  You never think of us, she said.

  We read your books when they reach heaven.

  Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of your sister.

  And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger,

  tightly wrapped in my mother’s arms.

  But for us, she said, you wouldn’t exist.

  And your sister—you have your sister’s soul.

  After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries.

  3.

  The street was white again,

  all the bushes covered with heavy snow

  and the trees glittering, encased with ice.

  I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.

  It seemed the longest night I had ever known,

  longer than the night I was born.

  I write about you all the time, I said aloud.

  Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.

  4.

  Outside the street was silent.

  The receiver lay on its side among the tangled sheets;

  its peevish throbbing had ceased some hours before.

  I left it as it was,

  its long cord drifting under the furniture.

  I watched the snow falling,

  not so much obscuring things

  as making them seem larger than they were.

  Who would call in the middle of the night?

  Trouble calls, despair calls.

  Joy is sleeping like a baby.

  ABORIGINAL LANDSCAPE

  You’re stepping on your father, my mother said,

  and indeed I was standing exactly in the center

  of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been

  my father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so.

  You’re stepping on your father,
she repeated,

  louder this time, which began to be strange to me,

  since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it.

  I moved slightly to the side, to where

  my father ended and my mother began.

  The cemetery was silent. Wind blew through the trees;

  I could hear, very faintly, sounds of weeping several rows away,

  and beyond that, a dog wailing.

  At length these sounds abated. It crossed my mind

  I had no memory of being driven here,

  to what now seemed a cemetery, though it could have been

  a cemetery in my mind only; perhaps it was a park, or if not a park,

  a garden or bower, perfumed, I now realized, with the scent of roses—

  douceur de vivre filling the air, the sweetness of living,

  as the saying goes. At some point,

  it occurred to me I was alone.

  Where had the others gone,

  my cousins and sister, Caitlin and Abigail?

  By now the light was fading. Where was the car

  waiting to take us home?

  I then began seeking for some alternative. I felt

  an impatience growing in me, approaching, I would say, anxiety.

  Finally, in the distance, I made out a small train,

  stopped, it seemed, behind some foliage, the conductor

  lingering against a doorframe, smoking a cigarette.

  Do not forget me, I cried, running now

  over many plots, many mothers and fathers—

  Do not forget me, I cried, when at last I reached him.

  Madam, he said, pointing to the tracks,

  surely you realize this is the end, the tracks do not go farther.

  His words were harsh, and yet his eyes were kind;

  this encouraged me to press my case harder.

  But they go back, I said, and I remarked

  their sturdiness, as though they had many such returns ahead of them.

  You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confront

  much sorrow and disappointment.

  He gazed at me with increasing frankness.

  I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.

  Now I spoke as to an old friend:

  What of you, I said, since he was free to leave,

  have you no wish to go home,

  to see the city again?

  This is my home, he said.

  The city—the city is where I disappear.

  UTOPIA

  When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it. But how will I know, the child asked, it is the right train? It will be the right train, said the woman, because it is the right time. A train approached the station; clouds of grayish smoke streamed from the chimney. How terrified I am, the child thinks, clutching the yellow tulips she will give to her grandmother. Her hair has been tightly braided to withstand the journey. Then, without a word, she gets on the train, from which a strange sound comes, not in a language like the one she speaks, something more like a moan or a cry.

  CORNWALL

  A word drops into the mist

  like a child’s ball into high grass

  where it remains seductively

  flashing and glinting until

  the gold bursts are revealed to be

  simply field buttercups.

  Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me.

  And yet, my silence was never total—

  Like a curtain rising on a vista,

  sometimes the mist cleared: alas, the game was over.

  The game was over and the word had been

  somewhat flattened by the elements

  so it was now both recovered and useless.

  I was renting, at the time, a house in the country.

  Fields and mountains had replaced tall buildings.

  Fields, cows, sunsets over the damp meadow.

  Night and day distinguished by rotating birdcalls,

  the busy murmurs and rustlings merging into

  something akin to silence.

  I sat, I walked about. When night came,

  I went indoors. I cooked modest dinners for myself

  by the light of candles.

  Evenings, when I could, I wrote in my journal.

  Far, far away I heard cowbells

  crossing the meadow.

  The night grew quiet in its way.

  I sensed the vanished words

  lying with their companions,

  like fragments of an unclaimed biography.

  It was all, of course, a great mistake.

  I was, I believed, facing the end:

  like a fissure in a dirt road,

  the end appeared before me—

  as though the tree that confronted my parents

  had become an abyss shaped like a tree, a black hole

  expanding in the dirt, where by day

  a simple shadow would have done.

  It was, finally, a relief to go home.

  When I arrived, the studio was filled with boxes.

  Cartons of tubes, boxes of the various

  objects that were my still lives,

  the vases and mirrors, the blue bowl

  I filled with wooden eggs.

  As to the journal:

  I tried. I persisted.

  I moved my chair onto the balcony—

  The streetlights were coming on,

  lining the sides of the river.

  The offices were going dark.

  At the river’s edge,

  fog encircled the lights;

  one could not, after a while, see the lights

  but a strange radiance suffused the fog,

  its source a mystery.

  The night progressed. Fog

  swirled over the lit bulbs.

  I suppose that is where it was visible;

  elsewhere, it was simply the way things were,

  blurred where they had been sharp.

  I shut my book.

  It was all behind me, all in the past.

  Ahead, as I have said, was silence.

  I spoke to no one.

  Sometimes the phone rang.

  Day alternated with night, the earth and sky

  taking turns being illuminated.

  AFTERWORD

  Reading what I have just written, I now believe

  I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been

  slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly

  but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort

  sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.

  Why did I stop? Did some instinct

  discern a shape, the artist in me

  intervening to stop traffic, as it were?

  A shape. Or fate, as the poets say,

  intuited in those few long-ago hours—

  I must have thought so once.

  And yet I dislike the term

  which seems to me a crutch, a phase,

  the adolescence of the mind, perhaps—

  Still, it was a term I used myself,

  frequently to explain my failures.

  Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings

  now seem to me simply

  local symmetries, metonymic

  baubles within immense confusion—

  Chaos was what I saw.

  My brush froze—I could not paint it.

  Darkness, silence: that was the feeling.

  What did we call it then?

  A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed,

  to the tree that confronted my parents,

  but whereas they were forced

  forward into the obstacle,

  I retreated or fled—

  Mist covered the stage (my life).

  Characters came and went, costumes were changed,

  my brush hand moved side to side

  far from the canvas,

  side to side, like a windsh
ield wiper.

  Surely this was the desert, the dark night.

  (In reality, a crowded street in London,

  the tourists waving their colored maps.)

  One speaks a word: I.

  Out of this stream

  the great forms—

  I took a deep breath. And it came to me

  the person who drew that breath

  was not the person in my story, his childish hand

  confidently wielding the crayon—

  Had I been that person? A child but also

  an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom

  the vegetation parts—

  And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted

  solitude Kant perhaps experienced

  on his way to the bridges—

  (We share a birthday.)

  Outside, the festive streets

  were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights.

  A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder

  singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano—

  Bravo! the door is shut.

  Now nothing escapes, nothing enters—

  I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert

  stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)

  on all sides, shifting as I speak,

  so that I was constantly

  face-to-face with blankness, that

  stepchild of the sublime,

  which, it turns out,

  has been both my subject and my medium.

  What would my twin have said, had my thoughts

  reached him?

  Perhaps he would have said

  in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument)

  after which I would have been

  referred to religion, the cemetery where

  questions of faith are answered.

  The mist had cleared. The empty canvases

  were turned inward against the wall.

  The little cat is dead (so the song went).

  Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.

  And the sun says yes.

  And the desert answers

  your voice is sand scattered in wind.

  MIDNIGHT

  At last the night surrounded me;

  I floated on it, perhaps in it,

  or it carried me as a river carries

  a boat, and at the same time

  it swirled above me,

  star-studded but dark nevertheless.

  These were the moments I lived for.

  I was, I felt, mysteriously lifted above the world

  so that action was at last impossible

  which made thought not only possible but limitless.

  It had no end. I did not, I felt,

  need to do anything. Everything

  would be done for me, or done to me,