Dana Gioia - 99 Poems

“Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?”

Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door

catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.

Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,

packs of coyotes come down from the hills

where there is nothing left to hunt.

Half an hour north of Grand Central

the country opens up. Through the rattling

grime-streaked windows of the coach, streams appear,

pine trees gather into woods, and the leaf-swept yards

grow large enough to seem picturesque.

Farther off smooth parkways curve along the rivers,

trimmed by well-kept trees, and the County Airport

now boasts seven lines, but to know this country

see it from a train — even this crowded local

jogging home half an hour before dark

smelling of smoke and rain-damp shoes

on an afternoon of dodging sun and showers.

One trip without a book or paper

will show enough to understand

this landscape no ones takes too seriously.

The architecture of each station still preserves

its fantasy beside the sordid tracks—

defiant pergolas, a shuttered summer lodge,

a shadowy pavilion framed by high-arched windows

in this land of northern sun and lingering winter.

The town names stenciled on the platform signs—

Clear Haven, Bullet Park, and Shady Hill—

show that developers at least believe in poetry

if only as a talisman against the commonplace.

There always seems so much to guard against.

The sunset broadens for a moment, and the passengers

standing on the platform turn strangely luminous

in the light streaming from the Palisades across the river.

Some board the train. Others greet their arrivals

shaking hands and embracing in the dusk.

If there is an afterlife, let it be a small town

gentle as this spot at just this instant.

But the car doors close, and the bright crowd,

unaware of its election, disperses to the small

pleasures of the evening. The platform falls behind.

The train gathers speed. Stations are farther apart.

Marble staircases climb the hills where derelict estates

glimmer in the river-brightened dusk.

Some are convents now, some orphanages,

these palaces the Robber Barons gave to God.

And some are merely left to rot where now

broken stone lions guard a roofless colonnade,

a half-collapsed gazebo bursts with tires,

and each detail warns it is not so difficult

to make a fortune as to pass it on.

But splendor in ruins is splendor still,

even glimpsed from a passing train,

and it is wonderful to imagine standing

in the balustraded gardens above the river

where barges still ply their distant commerce.

Somewhere upstate huge factories melt ore,

mills weave fabric on enormous looms,

and sweeping combines glean the cash-green fields.

Fortunes are made. Careers advance like armies.

But here so little happens that is obvious.

Here in the odd light of a rainy afternoon

a ledger is balanced and put away,

a houseguest knots his tie beside a bed,

and a hermit thrush sings in the unsold lot

next to the tracks the train comes hurtling down.

Finally it’s dark outside. Through the freight houses

and oil tanks the train begins to slow

approaching the station where rows of travel posters

and empty benches wait along the platform.

Outside a few cars idle in a sudden shower.

And this at last is home, this ordinary town

where the lights on the hill gleaming in the rain

are the lights that children bathe by, and it is time

to go home now — to drinks, to love, to supper,

to the modest places which contain our lives.

Noon — and the shadows of the trees

have fallen from the branches. The frail

blue butterflies still flutter hungrily

among the weeds, and a few pale flowers

climb up the yellow hill and fade away.

The scarred brown lizards lie immobile

in the dust. A line of ants

picks clean the carcass of a frog.

Only the smallest things survive

in this exhausted land the gods

so long ago abandoned. Time

and rain have washed the hero’s face

from off the statue. The sundial

stands perpetually in shade.

The bankrupt palace still remains

beyond the wall that summer builds,

doors bolted shut, the roof caved in,

the ancient family without heirs,

and one half-blind old man who sits

each day beside the empty pond

mumbling to himself in dialect.

The village boys throw stones at him,

but he will never leave, and there

is no one left who knows if he

was once the servant or the sire.

I.

Leave the museums, the comfortable rooms,

the safe distractions of the masterpiece.

The broken goddesses have lost their voice,

the martyr’s folded hands no longer bless.

Footsteps echo through the palaces

where no one lives. Consider what you’ve come for.

Leave the museums. Find the dark churches

in back towns that history has forgotten,

the unimportant places the powerful ignore

where commerce knows no profit will be made.

Sad hamlets at the end of silted waterways,

dry mountain villages where time

is the thin shadow of an ancient tower

that moves across the sundazed pavement of the square

and disappears each evening without trace.

Make the slow climb up the winding alleys.

Walk between houses shuttered close for midday

and overhear the sound of other lives,

the conversations in the language you

will never learn. Make the long ascent

up to the gray stone chapel on the hillside

when summer is a furnace open to the world,

and pause there breathless in the blinding sun

only one moment, then enter.

For this

is how it must be seen to understand:

by walking from the sunlight into darkness,

by groping down the aisle

as your wet skin cools and your eyes adjust,

by finding what you’ve come for thoughtlessly,

shoved off into a corner, almost lost

among the spectacle of gold and purple.

Here in the half-light, covered by the years

it will exist. And wait,

wait like a mirror in an empty room

whose resolutions are invisible

to anyone but you. Wait like the stone

face of a statue waits, forever frozen

or poised in the moment before action.

II.

But if the vision fails, and the damp air

stinks of summer must and disrepair,

if the worn steps rising to the altar

lead nowhere but to stone, this, too, could be

the revelation — but of a destiny

fixed as the graceless frescoes on the wall—

the grim and superannuated gods

who rule this shadow-land of marble tombs,

bathed in its green suboceanic light.

Not a vision to pursue, and yet

these insufficiencies make up the world.

Strange how most journeys come to this: the sun

bright on the unfamiliar hills, new vistas

dazzling the eye, the stubborn heart unchanged.

On the same journey each of them

Is going somewhere else. A goose-necked

Woman in a flowered dress

Stares gravely at two businessmen.

They turn away but carry on

Their argument on real estate.

Lost in a mist of aftershave,