Dana Gioia - 99 Poems

Where was it he had meant to go, and with whom?

Blessed is the road that keeps us homeless.

Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way.

Blessed are hunger and thirst, loneliness and all forms of desire.

Blessed is the labor that exhausts us without end.

Blessed are the night and the darkness that blind us.

Blessed is the cold that teaches us to feel.

Blessed are the cat, the child, the cricket, and the crow.

Blessed is the hawk devouring the hare.

Blessed are the sinner and the saint who redeem each other.

Blessed are the dead, calm in their perfection.

Blessed is the pain that humbles us.

Blessed is the distance that bars our joy.

Blessed is this shortest day that makes us long for light.

Blessed is the love that in losing we discover.

Night-born, malformed, maleficent,

pale as a pulled root,

a monster prowls the woods.

What other explanation is there

for the gutted deer, the naked

footprint by the bedroom window?

Now the neighbor’s dog

has disappeared. The back gate’s broken.

I keep the shotgun loaded.

How often now the birds

suddenly go silent in the trees.

What do they hear?

This thing of darkness I

acknowledge mine. I made it.

I let it escape. Now it returns.

Go on, you ragged underling.

Stalk me with your pitiful strategies.

Starve and shiver in the darkness.

Cry to me from the thorny ravine.

I’m safe behind locked doors.

I will not answer or embrace

the thing I have created.

I was already an old man when I was born.

Small with a curved back, he dragged his leg when walking

the streets of Copenhagen. “Little Kierkegaard,”

they called him. Some meant it kindly. The more one suffers

the more one acquires a sense of the comic.

His hair rose in waves six inches above his head.

Save me, O God, from ever becoming sure.

What good is faith if it is not irrational?

Christianity requires a conviction of sin.

As a boy tending sheep on the frozen heath,

his starving father cursed God for his cruelty.

His fortunes changed. He grew rich and married well.

His father knew these blessings were God’s punishment.

All would be stripped away. His beautiful wife died,

then five of his children. Crippled Soren survived.

The self-consuming sickness unto death is despair.

What the age needs is not a genius but a martyr.

Soren fell in love, proposed, then broke the engagement.

No one, he thought, could bear his presence daily.

My sorrow is my castle. His books were read

but ridiculed. Cartoons mocked his deformities.

His private journals fill seven thousand pages.

You could read them all, he claimed, and still not know him.

He who explains this riddle explains my life.

When everyone is Christian, Christianity

does not exist. The crowd is untruth. Remember

we stand alone before God in fear and trembling.

At forty-two he collapsed on his daily walk.

Dying he seemed radiant. His skin had become

almost transparent. He refused communion

from the established church. His grave has no headstone.

Now with God’s help I shall at last become myself.

I can imagine someone who found

these fields unbearable, who climbed

the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,

cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,

wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn

the meagerness of summer, the dry

twisted shapes of black elm,

scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape

August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging

thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,

knowing everything was just a weed,

unable to conceive that these trees

and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon

without wind, without motion,

the only other living thing

a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended

in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone

raised in a landscape short of rain—

the skyline of a hill broken by no more

trees than one can count, the grass,

the empty sky, the wish for water.

So strange to hear that song again tonight

Traveling on business in a rented car

Miles from anywhere I’ve been before.

And now a tune I haven’t heard for years

Probably not since it last left the charts

Back in L.A. in 1969.

I can’t believe I know the words by heart

And can’t think of a girl to blame them on.

Every lovesick summer has its song,

And this one I pretended to despise,

But if I was alone when it came on,

I turned it up full-blast to sing along—

A primal scream in croaky baritone,

The notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred.

No wonder I spent so much time alone

Making the rounds in Dad’s old Thunderbird.

Some nights I drove down to the beach to park

And walk along the railings of the pier.

The water down below was cold and dark,

The waves monotonous against the shore.

The darkness and the mist, the midnight sea,

The flickering lights reflected from the city—

A perfect setting for a boy like me,

The Cecil B. DeMille of my self-pity.

I thought by now I’d left those nights behind,

Lost like the girls that I could never get,

Gone with the years, junked with the old T-Bird.

But one old song, a stretch of empty road,

Can open up a door and let them fall

Tumbling like boxes from a dusty shelf,

Tightening my throat for no reason at all,

Bringing on tears shed only for myself.

California night. The Devil’s wind,

the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,

raging through the canyon like a drunk

screaming in a bar.

The air tastes like

a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?

The weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe.

Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,

lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,

and count your blessings.

Another sleepless night,

when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches

like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,

when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,

and quiet women in the kitchen run

their fingers on the edges of a knife

and eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck.

Tonight it seems that if I took the coins

out of my pocket and tossed them in the air

they’d stay a moment glistening like a net

slowly falling through dark water.

I remember

the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,

the narrow beams dissolving on the dark

surface of the lake, voices arguing

about the forms, the crackling radio,

the sheeted body lying on the sand,

the trawling net still damp beside it. No,

she wasn’t beautiful — but at that age

when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty—