A Village Life Read online

  not because he’s forcing himself, because he’s interested.

  I guess that’s how he is with the women.

  But the friends he never leaves—

  with them, he’s trying to stand outside his life, to see it clearly—

  Today he wants to sit; there’s a lot to say,

  too much for the meadow. He wants to be face to face,

  talking to someone he’s known forever.

  He’s on the verge of a new life.

  His eyes glow, he isn’t interested in the coffee.

  Even though it’s sunset, for him

  the sun is rising again, and the fields are flushed with dawn light,

  rose-colored and tentative.

  He’s himself in these moments, not pieces of the women

  he’s slept with. He enters their lives as you enter a dream,

  without volition, and he lives there as you live in a dream,

  however long it lasts. And in the morning, you remember

  nothing of the dream at all, nothing at all.

  IN THE PLAZA

  For two weeks he’s been watching the same girl,

  someone he sees in the plaza. In her twenties maybe,

  drinking coffee in the afternoon, the little dark head

  bent over a magazine.

  He watches from across the square, pretending

  to be buying something, cigarettes, maybe a bouquet of flowers.

  Because she doesn’t know it exists,

  her power is very great now, fused to the needs of his imagination.

  He is her prisoner. She says the words he gives her

  in a voice he imagines, low-pitched and soft,

  a voice from the south as the dark hair must be from the south.

  Soon she will recognize him, then begin to expect him.

  And perhaps then every day her hair will be freshly washed,

  she will gaze outward across the plaza before looking down.

  And after that they will become lovers.

  But he hopes this will not happen immediately

  since whatever power she exerts now over his body, over his emotions,

  she will have no power once she commits herself—

  she will withdraw into that private world of feeling

  women enter when they love. And living there, she will become

  like a person who casts no shadow, who is not present in the world;

  in that sense, so little use to him

  it hardly matters whether she lives or dies.

  DAWN

  I.

  Child waking up in a dark room

  screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

  in a language nobody understands in the least—

  There is no duck.

  But the dog, all upholstered in white plush—

  the dog is right there in the crib next to him.

  Years and years—that’s how much time passes.

  All in a dream. But the duck—

  no one knows what happened to that.

  2.

  They’ve just met, now

  they’re sleeping near an open window.

  Partly to wake them, to assure them

  that what they remember of the night is correct,

  now light needs to enter the room,

  also to show them the context in which this occurred:

  socks half hidden under a dirty mat,

  quilt decorated with green leaves—

  the sunlight specifying

  these but not other objects,

  setting boundaries, sure of itself, not arbitrary,

  then lingering, describing

  each thing in detail,

  fastidious, like a composition in English,

  even a little blood on the sheets—

  3.

  Afterward, they separate for the day.

  Even later, at a desk, in the market,

  the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given,

  the berries moldy under the topmost layer—

  so that one withdraws from the world

  even as one continues to take action in it—

  You get home, that’s when you notice the mold.

  Too late, in other words.

  As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

  FIRST SNOW

  Like a child, the earth’s going to sleep,

  or so the story goes.

  But I’m not tired, it says.

  And the mother says, You may not be tired but I’m tired—

  You can see it in her face, everyone can.

  So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come.

  Because the mother’s sick to death of her life

  and needs silence.

  EARTHWORM

  Mortal standing on top of the earth, refusing

  to enter the earth: you tell yourself

  you are able to see deeply

  the conflicts of which you are made but, facing death,

  you will not dig deeply—if you sense

  that pity engulfs you, you are not

  delusional: not all pity

  descends from higher to lesser, some

  arises out of the earth itself, persistent

  yet devoid of coercion. We can be split in two, but you are

  mutilated at the core, your mind

  detached from your feelings—

  repression does not deceive

  organisms like ourselves:

  once you enter the earth, you will not fear the earth;

  once you inhabit your terror,

  death will come to seem a web of channels or tunnels like

  a sponge’s or honeycomb’s, which, as part of us,

  you will be free to explore. Perhaps

  you will find in these travels

  a wholeness that eluded you—as men and women

  you were never free

  to register in your body whatever left

  a mark on your spirit.

  AT THE RIVER

  One night that summer my mother decided it was time to tell me about

  what she referred to as pleasure, though you could see she felt

  some sort of unease about this ceremony, which she tried to cover up

  by first taking my hand, as though somebody in the family had just died—

  she went on holding my hand as she made her speech,

  which was more like a speech about mechanical engineering

  than a conversation about pleasure. In her other hand,

  she had a book from which, apparently, she’d taken the main facts.

  She did the same thing with the others, my two brothers and sister,

  and the book was always the same book, dark blue,

  though we each got our own copy.

  There was a line drawing on the cover

  showing a man and woman holding hands

  but standing fairly far apart, like people on two sides of a dirt road.

  Obviously, she and my father did not have a language for what they did

  which, from what I could judge, wasn’t pleasure.

  At the same time, whatever holds human beings together

  could hardly resemble those cool black-and-white diagrams, which suggested,

  among other things, that you could only achieve pleasure

  with a person of the opposite sex,

  so you didn’t get two sockets, say, and no plug.

  School wasn’t in session.

  I went back to my room and shut the door

  and my mother went into the kitchen

  where my father was pouring glasses of wine for himself and his invisible guest

  who—surprise—doesn’t appear.

  No, it’s just my father and his friend the Holy Ghost

  partying the night away until the bottle runs out,

  after which my father continues sitting at the table

  with an open book in front of him.

  Tactful
ly, so as not to embarrass the Spirit,

  my father handled all the glasses,

  first his own, then the other, back and forth like every other night.

  By then, I was out of the house.

  It was summer; my friends used to meet at the river.

  The whole thing seemed a grave embarrassment

  although the truth was that, except for the boys, maybe we didn’t understand mechanics.

  The boys had the key right in front of them, in their hands if they wanted,

  and many of them said they’d already used it,

  though once one boy said this, the others said it too,

  and of course people had older brothers and sisters.

  We sat at the edge of the river discussing parents in general

  and sex in particular. And a lot of information got shared,

  and of course the subject was unfailingly interesting.

  I showed people my book, Ideal Marriage—we all had a good laugh over it.

  One night a boy brought a bottle of wine and we passed it around for a while.

  More and more that summer we understood

  that something was going to happen to us

  that would change us.

  And the group, all of us who used to meet this way,

  the group would shatter, like a shell that falls away

  so the bird can emerge.

  Only of course it would be two birds emerging, pairs of birds.

  We sat in the reeds at the edge of the river

  throwing small stones. When the stones hit,

  you could see the stars multiply for a second, little explosions of light

  flashing and going out. There was a boy I was beginning to like,

  not to speak to but to watch.

  I liked to sit behind him to study the back of his neck.

  And after a while we’d all get up together and walk back through the dark

  to the village. Above the field, the sky was clear,

  stars everywhere, like in the river, though these were the real stars,

  even the dead ones were real.

  But the ones in the river—

  they were like having some idea that explodes suddenly into a thousand ideas,

  not real, maybe, but somehow more lifelike.

  When I got home, my mother was asleep, my father was still at the table,

  reading his book. And I said, Did your friend go away?

  And he looked at me intently for a while,

  then he said, Your mother and I used to drink a glass of wine together

  after dinner.

  A CORRIDOR

  There’s an open door through which you can see the kitchen—

  always some wonderful smell coming from there,

  but what paralyzes him is the warmth of that place,

  the stove in the center giving out heat—

  Some lives are like that.

  Heat’s at the center, so constant no one gives it a thought.

  But the key he’s holding unlocks a different door,

  and on the other side, warmth isn’t waiting for him.

  He makes it himself—him and the wine.

  The first glass is himself coming home.

  He can smell the daube, a smell of red wine and orange peel mixed in with the veal.

  His wife is singing in the bedroom, putting the children to sleep.

  He drinks slowly, letting his wife open the door, her finger to her lips,

  and then letting her eagerly rush toward him to embrace him.

  And afterward there will be the daube.

  But the glasses that follow cause her to disappear.

  She takes the children with her; the apartment shrinks back to what it was.

  He has found someone else—not another person exactly,

  but a self who despises intimacy, as though the privacy of marriage

  is a door that two people shut together

  and no one can get out alone, not the wife, not the husband,

  so the heat gets trapped there until they suffocate,

  as though they were living in a phone booth—

  Then the wine is gone. He washes his face, wanders around the apartment.

  It’s summer—life rots in the heat.

  Some nights, he still hears a woman singing to her children;

  other nights, behind the bedroom door, her naked body doesn’t exist.

  FATIGUE

  All winter he sleeps.

  Then he gets up, he shaves—

  it takes a long time to become a man again,

  his face in the mirror bristles with dark hair.

  The earth now is like a woman, waiting for him.

  A great hopefulness—that’s what binds them together,

  himself and this woman.

  Now he has to work all day to prove he deserves what he has.

  Midday: he’s tired, he’s thirsty.

  But if he quits now he’ll have nothing.

  The sweat covering his back and arms

  is like his life pouring out of him

  with nothing replacing it.

  He works like an animal, then

  like a machine, with no feeling.

  But the bond will never break

  though the earth fights back now, wild in the summer heat—

  He squats down, letting the dirt run through his fingers.

  The sun goes down, the dark comes.

  Now that summer’s over, the earth is hard, cold;

  by the road, a few isolated fires burn.

  Nothing remains of love,

  only estrangement and hatred.

  BURNING LEAVES

  Not far from the house and barn,

  the farm worker’s burning dead leaves.

  They don’t disappear voluntarily;

  you have to prod them along

  as the farm worker prods the leaf pile every year

  until it releases a smell of smoke into the air.

  And then, for an hour or so, it’s really animated,

  blazing away like something alive.

  When the smoke clears, the house is safe.

  A woman’s standing in the back,

  folding dry clothes into a willow basket.

  So it’s finished for another year,

  death making room for life,

  as much as possible,

  but burning the house would be too much room.

  Sunset. Across the road,

  the farm worker’s sweeping the cold ashes.

  Sometimes a few escape, harmlessly drifting around in the wind.

  Then the air is still.

  Where the fire was, there’s only bare dirt in a circle of rocks.

  Nothing between the earth and the dark.

  WALKING AT NIGHT

  Now that she is old,

  the young men don’t approach her

  so the nights are free,

  the streets at dusk that were so dangerous

  have become as safe as the meadow.

  By midnight, the town’s quiet.

  Moonlight reflects off the stone walls;

  on the pavement, you can hear the nervous sounds

  of the men rushing home to their wives and mothers; this late,

  the doors are locked, the windows darkened.

  When they pass, they don’t notice her.

  She’s like a dry blade of grass in a field of grasses.

  So her eyes that used never to leave the ground

  are free now to go where they like.

  When she’s tired of the streets, in good weather she walks

  in the fields where the town ends.

  Sometimes, in summer, she goes as far as the river.

  The young people used to gather not far from here

  but now the river’s grown shallow from lack of rain, so

  the bank’s deserted—

  There were picnics then.

  The boys and girls eventually paired off;


  after a while, they made their way into the woods

  where it’s always twilight—

  The woods would be empty now—

  the naked bodies have found other places to hide.

  In the river, there’s just enough water for the night sky

  to make patterns against the gray stones. The moon’s bright,

  one stone among many others. And the wind rises;

  it blows the small trees that grow at the river’s edge.

  When you look at a body you see a history.

  Once that body isn’t seen anymore,

  the story it tried to tell gets lost—

  On nights like this, she’ll walk as far as the bridge

  before she turns back.

  Everything still smells of summer.

  And her body begins to seem again the body she had as a young woman,

  glistening under the light summer clothing.

  VIA DELLE OMBRE

  On most days, the sun wakes me.

  Even on dark days, there’s a lot of light in the mornings—

  thin lines where the blinds don’t come together.

  It’s morning—I open my eyes.

  And every morning I see again how dirty this place is, how grim.

  So I’m never late for work—this isn’t a place to spend time in,

  watching the dirt pile up as the sun brightens.

  During the day at work, I forget about it.

  I think about work: getting colored beads into plastic vials.

  When I get home at dusk, the room is shadowy—

  the shadow of the bureau covers the bare floor.

  It’s telling me whoever lives here is doomed.

  When I’m in moods like that,

  I go to a bar, watch sports on television.

  Sometimes I talk to the owner.

  He says moods don’t mean anything—

  the shadows mean night is coming, not that daylight will never return.

  He tells me to move the bureau; I’ll get different shadows, maybe

  a different diagnosis.

  If we’re alone, he turns down the volume of the television.

  The players keep crashing into each other

  but all we hear are our own voices.

  If there’s no game, he’ll pick a film.

  It’s the same thing—the sound stays off, so there’s only images.

  When the film’s over, we compare notes, to see if we both saw the same story.

  Sometimes we spend hours watching this junk.