Dana Gioia - 99 Poems

Or else could rip away the roof

and stare down at the dirty rooms,

the hallways turning on themselves,

and understand at last their plan—

dark maze without a minotaur,

no monsters but ourselves.

Yet who

could bear to see it all? The slow

descending spirals of the dust

against the spotted windowpane,

the sunlight on the yellow lace,

the hoarded wine turned dark and sour,

the photographs, the letters — all

the crowded closets of the heart.

One wants to turn away — and cry

for fire to break out on the stairs

and raze each suffocating room.

But the walls stay, the roof remains

strong and immovable, and we

can only pray that if these rooms

have memories, they are not ours.

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,

painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving

each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—

greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Just before noon I often hear a voice,

Cool and insistent, whispering in my head.

It is the better man I might have been,

Who chronicles the life I’ve never led.

He cannot understand what grim mistake

Granted me life but left him still unborn.

He views his wayward brother with regret

And hardly bothers to disguise his scorn.

“Who is the person you pretend to be?”

He asks, “The failed saint, the simpering bore,

The pale connoisseur of spent desire,

The half-hearted hermit eyeing the door?

“You cultivate confusion like a rose

In watery lies too weak to be untrue,

And play the minor figures in the pageant,

Extravagant and empty, that is you.”

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,

Out of the room that lets you feel secure.

Infinity is open to your sight.

Whoever you are.

With eyes that have forgotten how to see

From viewing things already too well-known,

Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree

And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.

And you have made the world and all you see.

It ripens like the words still in your mouth.

And when at last you comprehend its truth,

Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

(From the German of Rainer Maria Rilke)

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.

Eternity has festivals enough.

This is the feast of our mortality,

The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,

Pretending that we live the present moment.

But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,

This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now

Be our true habitat? The present is

The leaky palm of water that we skim

From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want

Simply by bringing us along — to see

A calendar with every day uncrossed,

A field of snow without a single footprint.

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,

The one large statue in this quiet room.

The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut

Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design

Above the chatter of the gallery.

Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—

The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.

(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)

I stood beside a gilded altar where

The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—

Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.

Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,

And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution

(Even a saint can savor irony)

When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.

They hit me once — almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,

A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?

A trembling unaccounted by their laws,

An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!

The howling of the damned can’t reach so high.

But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,

A crippled saint against a painted sky.

Sometimes a child will stare out of a window

for a moment or an hour — deciphering

the future from a dusky summer sky.

Does he imagine that some wisp of cloud

reveals the signature of things to come?

Or that the world’s a book we learn to translate?

And sometimes a girl stands naked by a mirror

imagining beauty in a stranger’s eyes

finding a place where fear leads to desire.

For what is prophecy but the first inkling

of what we ourselves must call into being?

The call need not be large. No voice in thunder.

It’s not so much what’s spoken as what’s heard—

and recognized, of course. The gift is listening

and hearing what is only meant for you.

Life has its mysteries, annunciations,

and some must wear a crown of thorns. I found

my Via Dolorosa in your love.

And sometimes we proceed by prophecy,

or not at all — even if only to know

what destiny requires us to renounce.

O Lord of indirection and ellipses,

ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction.

Slow our heartbeat to a cricket’s call.

In the green torpor of the afternoon,

bless us with ennui and quietude.

And grant us only what we fear, so that

Underneath the murmur of the wasp

we hear the dry grass bending in the wind

and the spider’s silken whisper from its web.

He sometimes felt that he had missed his life

By being far too busy looking for it.

Searching the distance, he often turned to find

That he had passed some milestone unaware,

And someone else was walking next to him,

First friends, then lovers, now children and a wife.

They were good company — generous, kind,

But equally bewildered to be there.

He noticed then that no one chose the way—

All seemed to drift by some collective will.

The path grew easier with each passing day,

Since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill.

The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom.