Middle Earth Read online

  like ice in a champagne bucket. Time was plunging forward,

  like dolphins scissoring open water or like me,

  following Jenny’s flippers down to see the coral reef,

  where the color of sand, sea and sky merged,

  and it was as if that was all God wanted:

  not a wife, a house or a position,

  but a self, like a needle, pushing in a vein.

  MEDUSA

  A vulture rose and flapped across the sand

  as we approached. At the lookout, others

  perched stiffly, like little martyred saints, with gaudy

  red heads. It was too hot and I wanted

  to go home. Soaring on thermals everywhere,

  wood storks conveyed their own way of being,

  not debunking violence, but commingling with it,

  as if freedom meant proximity to danger.

  When I poked the wet, mahogany mud,

  it felt like something human I had my hand on,

  as if the earth were a girl’s black-haired head

  being lifted up in a great clatter that ebbed

  and flowed, like sea foam or a red sky or pain

  obscuring pleasure in a flesh tunnel.

  SNOW MOON FLOWER

  In this place of rice fields,

  metrical mountains and little bubbling canals,

  it was not the self against time

  or the self blurred by flesh, it was the self

  living without any palpable design.

  Common egrets floated on broad bowed wings.

  A rooster crowed at dawn and the body—

  graceful, alert—slanted gently toward the sun.

  In the night gloom, a ground spider jumped

  around the shortwave radio

  on which a samisen played,

  and fawnlike creatures ventured out of the pines,

  observing in my windows a solitude

  as pure as a bowl of milk.

  But outside the gate of this place,

  there was another mirror world,

  connected only by a dark path of sticky stones,

  where there were goat smells and little cries,

  hooves pawing and flying beetles. No man could resist it.

  No man could endure it. The long shadows

  fell on the mind like nails in a plank,

  taking one beyond the surface of things,

  into the deepest places, not of man’s griefs

  but of man’s truths, which cut deep,

  if they did not tear us apart, like a field of thorn,

  as the dark tops of the trees shone complacently

  and a changing light filtered and breathed

  against the lonely surface of everything.

  BLUR

  Little Lamb,

  Here I am,

  Come and lick

  My white neck.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  1

  It was a Christian idea, sacrificing

  oneself to attain the object of one’s desire.

  I was weak and he was like opium to me,

  so present and forceful. I believed I saw myself

  through him, as if in a bucket being drawn

  up a well, cold and brown as tea.

  My horse was wet all that summer.

  I pushed him, he pushed me back—proud, lonely,

  disappointed—until I rode him,

  or he rode me, in tight embrace, and life went on.

  I lay whole nights—listless, sighing, gleaming

  like a tendril on a tree—withdrawn

  into some desiccated realm of beauty.

  The hand desired, but the heart refrained.

  2

  The strong sad ritual between us could not be broken:

  the empathetic greeting; the apologies

  and reproaches; the narrow bed of his flesh;

  the fear of being shown whole in the mirror

  of another’s fragmentation; the climbing on;

  the unambiguous freedom born of submission;

  the head, like a rock, hefted on and off moist earth;

  the rough language; the impermeable core

  of one’s being made permeable; the black hair

  and shining eyes; and afterward, the marrowy

  emissions, the gasping made liquid; the torso,

  like pale clay or a plank, being dropped;

  the small confessional remarks that inscribe

  the soul; the indolence; the being alone.

  3

  Then everything decanted and modulated,

  as it did in a horse’s eye, and the self—

  pure, classical, like a figure carved from stone—

  was something broken off again.

  Two ways of being: one, seamless

  saturated color (not a bead of sweat),

  pure virtuosity, bolts of it; the other,

  raw and unsocialized, “an opera of impurity,”

  like super-real sunlight on a bruise.

  I didn’t want to have to choose.

  It didn’t matter anymore what was true

  and what was not. Experience was not facts,

  but uncertainty. Experience was not events,

  but feelings, which I would overcome.

  4

  Waking hungry for flesh, stalking flesh

  no matter where—in the dunes, at the Pantheon,

  in the Tuileries, at the White Party—

  cursing and fumbling with flesh, smelling flesh,

  clutching flesh, sucking violently on flesh,

  cleaning up flesh, smiling at flesh, running away

  from flesh, and later loathing flesh,

  half of me was shattered, half was not,

  like a mosaic shaken down by earthquake.

  All the things I loved—a horse, a wristwatch,

  a hall mirror—and all the things I endeavored to be—

  truthful, empathetic, funny—presupposed

  a sense of self locked up in a sphere,

  which would never be known to anyone.

  5

  Running, lifting, skipping rope at the gym,

  I was a man like a bronze man;

  I was my body—with white stones

  in my eye sockets, soldered veins in my wrists

  and a delicately striated, crepelike scrotum.

  Sighs, grunts, exhales, salt stains, dingy mats,

  smeared mirrors and a faintly sour smell

  filled the gulf between the mind and the world,

  but the myth of love for another remained

  bright and plausible, like an athlete painted

  on the slope of a vase tying his sandal.

  In the showers, tears fell from our hair,

  as if from bent glistening sycamores.

  It was as if Earth were taking us back.

  6

  In front of me, you are sleeping. I sleep also.

  Probably you are right that I project

  the ambiguities of my own desires.

  I feel I only know you at the edges.

  Sometimes in the night I jump up panting,

  see my young gray head in the mirror

  and fall back, as humans do, from the cold glass.

  I don’t have the time to invest in what

  I purport to desire. But when you open

  your eyes shyly and push me on the shoulder,

  all I am is impulse and longing

  pulled forward by the rope of your arm,

  I, flesh-to-flesh, sating myself

  on blurred odors of the soft black earth.

  Acknowledgments

  For their encouragement, I am indebted to the editors of the following publications, where poems, sometimes in different form, were originally published:

  The American Poetry Review: “Ape House, Berlin Zoo,” “Medusa,” and “Powdered Milk.” The Atlantic Monthly: “Black Camellia” and “Landscape with Deer and Figure.” Fence: “Middle Earth.
” Literary Imagination: “Swans,” “Melon and Insects,” “Cleaning the Elephant,” and “Veil.” The New England Review: “Insomnia” and “Necessary and Impossible.” The New Republic: “Mask,” “Icarus Breathing,” and “My Tea Ceremony.” The New Yorker: “Self-Portrait in a Gold Kimono,” “Casablanca Lily,” “Myself with Cats,” “Kyushu Hydrangea,” “Pillowcase with Praying Mantis,” “Radiant Ivory,” and “Snow Moon Flower.” The Paris Review: “At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop.” Slate: “Original Face” and “Crows in Evening Glow.” The Yale Review: “The Hare” and “Fish and Watergrass.” Poems, Poets, Poetry (edited by Helen Vendler): “Kayaks.”

  I would also like to record my thanks to the Japan—U.S. Friendship Commission for a Creative Artist Fellowship, which enabled me to live in the country of my birth during part of the composition of this book. My thanks also to the Bogliasco Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the American Academy in Berlin for hospitality and solitude during residencies.

  ALSO BY HENRI COLE

  The Visible Man

  1998

  The Look of Things

  1995

  The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge

  1989

  The Marble Queen

  1986

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2003 by Henri Cole

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2003

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