Dana Gioia - 99 Poems

A salesman in a brown toupée

Is scribbling on his Racing Form

While a fat man stares down at his hands

As if there should be something there.

The soldiers stand in line for sex—

With wives or girlfriends, whoever

They hope is waiting for them at

The other end. The wrapped perfume,

The bright, stuffed animals they clutch

Tremble under so much heat.

Lives have been pulled cross-continent.

So much will soon be going on

But somewhere else — divorces, birthdays,

Deaths and million-dollar deals.

But nothing ever happens here,

This terminal that narrows to

A single unattended gate,

One entrance to so many worlds.

Done with work, they are sitting by themselves

in coffeeshops or diners, taking up the booths,

filling every other seat along the counter,

waiting for the menu, for the water,

for the girl to come and take their order,

always on the edge of words, almost without appetite,

knowing there is nothing on the menu that they want,

waiting patiently to ask for one

more refill of their coffee, surprised

that even its bitterness will not wake them up.

Still they savor it, holding each sip

lukewarm in their mouths, this last taste of evening.

Give me a landscape made of obstacles,

of steep hills and jutting glacial rock,

where the low-running streams are quick to flood

the grassy fields and bottomlands.

A place

no engineers can master — where the roads

must twist like tendrils up the mountainside

on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.

Where tall black trunks of lightning-scalded pine

push through the tangled woods to make a roost

for hawks and swarming crows.

And sharp inclines

where twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,

scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly

to find an unexpected waterfall,

not half a mile from the nearest road,

a spot so hard to reach that no one comes—

a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies

and nesting jays, a sign that there is still

one piece of property that won’t be owned.

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds

start up again. The crickets, the invisible

toad who claims that change is possible,

And all the other life too small to name.

First one, then another, until innumerable

they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.

Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,

fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers

snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.

And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone

can bear to be a stone, the pain

the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.

Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,

rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall

and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.

The old windmill creaks in perfect time

to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,

and the last farmhouse light goes off.

Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt

these hills and packs of feral dogs.

But standing here at night accepts all that.

You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,

moving more slowly than the crippled stars,

part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,

Part of the grass that answers the wind,

part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows

there is no silence but when danger comes.

I walked among the equidistant graves

New planted in the irrigated lawn.

The square, trim headstones quietly declared

The impotence of grief against the sun.

There were no outward signs of human loss.

No granite angel wept beside the lane.

No bending willow broke the once-rough ground

Now graded to a geometric plane.

My blessed California, you are so wise.

You render death abstract, efficient, clean.

Your afterlife is only real estate,

And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

I would have left then. I had made my one

Obligatory visit to the dead.

But as I turned to go, I heard the voices,

Faint but insistent. This is what they said.

“Stay a moment longer, quiet stranger.

Your footsteps woke us from our lidded cells.

Now hear us whisper in the scorching wind,

Our single voice drawn from a thousand hells.

“We lived in places that we never knew.

We could not name the birds perched on our sill,

Or see the trees we cut down for our view.

What we possessed we always chose to kill.

“We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim,

And when we died, they laid us on her breast,

But she refuses us — until we earn

Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed.

“We are so tiny now — light as the spores

That rotting clover sheds into the air,

Dry as old pods burnt open by the sun,

Barren as seeds unrooted anywhere.

“Forget your stylish verses, little poet—

So sadly beautiful, precise, and tame.

We are your people, though you would deny it.

Admit the justice of our primal claim.

“Become the voice of our forgotten places.

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

We are like shadows the bright noon erases,

Weightlessly shrinking, bleached into the void.

We offer you the landscape of your birth—

Exquisite and despoiled. We all share blame.

We cannot ask forgiveness of the earth

For killing what we cannot even name.”

“We’re going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”

So they stopped the car where the river curled,

And we scrambled down beneath the bridge

On the gravel track of a narrow ridge.

We tramped for miles on a wooded walk

Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk.

Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor

While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore.

We came to a bend, where the river grew wide

And green mountains rose on the opposite side.

My guides moved back. I stood alone,

As the current streaked over smooth flat stone.

Shelf by stone shelf the river fell.

The white water goosetailed with eddying swell.

Faster and louder the current dropped

Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped.

I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,

My journey done where the world ended.

I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,

The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

I enter the temple of my people but do not pray.

I pass the altars of the gods but do not kneel

Or offer sacrifices proper to the season.

Strolling the hushed aisles of the department store,

I see visions shining under glass,

Divinities of leather, gold, and porcelain,

Shrines of cut crystal, stainless steel, and silicon.

But I wander the arcades of abundance,

Empty of desire, no credit to my people,

Envying the acolytes their passionate faith.

Blessed are the acquisitive,

For theirs is the kingdom of commerce.

Redeem me, gods of the mall and marketplace.

Mercury, protector of cell phones and fax machines,

Venus, patroness of bath and bedroom chains,

Tantalus, guardian of the food court.

Beguile me with the aromas of coffee, musk, and cinnamon.