Three Sonnet Series by John J. Parman

Three Sonnet Series

John J. Parman

To revive poems as a medium, I started writing sonnets. I used one of Shakespeare’s as a model, but then played with it. I was inspired by Frederick Seidel, who writes unrhymed sonnets, but I also found that I had a talent for rhyming. A session with an editor, herself a poet, led me to set sonnets aside she felt they were old-fashioned. I come back to them, though, and the three series I’ve included here, originally collected in CommonPlace , a personal journal I started in 2009, seem worth a small book.

Omaha Beach

A bedroll out on the sidewalk, a drunk asleep, my father noted, their home smashed, my mother jarred awake, the Atlantic between them. “Something has happened to George, but he’s okay!” A story repeated: how she knew, how knowing was a curse. What if someday he were dead? She would know. It was her fear that her vaunted sixth sense would betray her the dead make that last call, I know, like my late friend, gone at thirty. Her story ended happily for us: our lives continued with the survivor. So naturally I liked the story. Where would I be had he died? Not here.

I was twelve when we went to Normandy, saw Omaha Beach, Blois’ twice-curved stairway, ate a seven-course meal, or so it seemed, with a family my grandfather knew, bourgeois. The old lady, lost in her reverie, wasn’t lost on me; even then I knew where memory can take you. It must be some remnant of my past, my own sixth sense, aware what burns in us, what flows fire or river, call it what you will. He was manifestly there, my grandfather Joe, who waltzed through France twice, remembered fondly. This was my twelve-year-old version. The truth is more complicated, or maybe not.

In war, tomorrow is all that matters. “The day after will take care of itself.” I can’t say this was my father’s credo. Perhaps it was “Live for the day,” but this lacks his optimism, always believing that he’d manage to survive, looked out for, although for what reason, who knew? The gods are not to be questioned; just go with it. In peace, today matters more, so begin by setting aside whatever can be: not dust from the road, but motes in the eye, blinding us to others’ unfolding. As they live in time, they prove mutable: like Heraclitus’ river, not the same.

4. Sometimes the wind blows the curtain outward and the reverie begins: how it was, how it was whether it proved true or false. It all comes back, mocking those distinctions. I have them, too. Don’t think I can forget. Did my grandfather? Love leaves its traces. There is no black or white, to me, just was Just was with its sounds, smells, tactility, and fecundity fulfilled, deflected. In reverie, still afloat, not yet sunk beneath the waves, with no apparent sign, no wreckage, no survivors, a true end. Or so it seems, yet always the debris washes up, bleached, takes on a new meaning.

Won’t repeat them, I was told, yet mistakes, like much else, are never quite the same from one to the next; we blunder anew. Pointless to think we won’t, although we do. Life admits no duality, mistakes cohabit with perfection, the pure lie down in the mud, snort and roll around like the animals they are, enlightened for blazing moments and then not at all. Progress is ruled out, I was told. “Just sit!” “Just sit!” is all there is. Minds land on walls, delusion persists some call it practice. As destiny shapes us haphazardly, don’t expect error not to follow suit.

The trajectories of the lives we lead embrace like lovers, and then sometimes not, ripped from each other’s arms, perhaps, or else sacrificed to some higher truth and lost to each other for a time; no matter how long or short it proves to be, point is we unfold along with life, cannot know. Our folly is to pretend to ourselves we do, pretend we are exempt from this. The glancing blows we suffer in consequence are from the outset almost guaranteed yet we persist, driven on by longing. Persevere this is our human fate. There’s no way to know except to embrace.

Signs abound. We wonder which pertain to us. We know the telltale ones our bodies make, stigmata of desire, clear or hidden, The god Eros is indiscriminate, and we have only hints of what we seek. Mars may be like this, too, strewing the beach with false hopes, each abandoned with a cry, amid rattling of guns, cannon fodder, each alone within the crowd, begging Mars to be spared. Thus, the usual process is foreshortened, the span of a beachhead. Seeing it at last, there’s no turning back. Those who lived pressed on. Above the beach, the luckless dead were buried in long rows.

Once Karen said, “What the gods give us cannot be rejected, being their gifts.”

I believe we have some hand in our fate, choosing its broad outlines perhaps karma does this for us, so eventually we are content to be, and accept as given life’s real nature and our place within it rising and falling like the tide. Curlews haunt the beach, not questioning its bounty. With alacrity they find sustenance. They did so even then, despite the dead, the last living things glanced by some of them. We often affirm how lucky we are. That luck begins with being here at all.

The Barn Partitas

Much that could not be written: the look back, often in company small wonder, then, her wariness. He scanned the long horizon: roads sinuous and tree-lined, shrines, chapels, terraces, rooms with views, cars and ferries all the possible venues that figure when someone else is the journey’s purpose. Can one explain the road as lived? Reason has no answer. When questioned about it, the IChinggave him “Splitting Apart,” apt and to him optimistic: things must break so something new can gather force, appear.

“Things must”: how fate permeates the road! And each one sees it as it is for her.

The Road

"And what would that look like?" she might have asked. The question looks ahead, if doubtfully, but his mind tends toward retrospect: what's formed has taken place, associative scenes stretching back to time’s bending point, where he regained consciousness of self and others. The scenes arrive like Swedenborg’s heaven: not a great distance when they first appear from where he is or was. The observer in these scenes is also present, a filmmaker’s eye, but more holistic in what he takes in on the journey through: green walls behind the mosquito netting; white cotton with its narrow line of wet.

"Abandon no one": his maxim, not that it was believed. Love and friendship mix badly between the sexes; they want one or the other. He learned this slowly, noting along the way that, unfolding, time opens life up, makes it possible to find the river again in that space. And while she may only put her toes in, there’s a glint of warmth in her eyes and voice. All because time has turned the ground over and those wildflowers that betrayal scorched emerge and flower in a new season. The gate is always there, the hedgerow sometimes a wall, else more of a curtain.

Predict he would take up another? It seems perverse. An umbrella rolled up is like a baby without a mother, he thinks. Or is it the other way? Pup or pop, dad or daddy: which is which? Bride on bride, groom on groom, the issue deferred, he imagines, arranged, left on the side until after the wedding, matters blurred. Who first asks whom? Groom on bride, bride on groom all permutations are permissible, lawful in two senses. Crossing the room, she walks the way women walk: visible. How many crossings, then, before the slam, despite amour, despite the wham and bam?

Less an old story than a new one: one tries to learn from experience, but then experience is new. It’s never done telling how it is, will be, once again. And so, the room is new, and the terrace, also, the brightness here, the darkness there their stories come around like a Ferris wheel, like houses on a cliff, truth or dare. In short, we may as well call any place OK for our purposes, and not wait for the tide to run out. There’s so much space between A, B, a canyon of this date and that, the emptiness I noted, such quiet, if quiet matters, matters much.

Encounters

Perhaps it’s true, these charges leveled. I could see it. My history precedes me: a life smooth to the touch and yet beveled, even knife-like, and sharpened to a T. Yes, it may be true. I feel like smoking or playing slow music in a dark room. There may be a blue lamp, someone soaking, barely vertical, diktat from the womb. You know how the chorus goes, the long moan, the short gasp. Yes, definitely like this. I’m sure I’m guilty as charged on the phone. (But one could also say, “An odd life, miss.”) Imagination plays a role, a touch of ambiguity, small hints and such.

The word from eight (the hexagram): union. Life has its hubs or maybe its nodes. One finds one’s place, tries to avoid confusion. The whole is organic after all, fun while it lasted, you could say, a tear welling up, but then it orbits around the brass ring you missed might just reappear, only golden this time, and what’s lost is found. The whole is dramatic after all; full of everything that leavens existence black bees abuzz or the massive white bull that carried Europa north. “Resistance is futile,” she thought, tightening her hold; imagining its heft had made her bold.

Melancholic, I read: analytic and literal. Mix sanguine in and then you get what Hegel called dialectic. (It can seem bipolar, now and again.) Literal, yes, that rang a bell: a clue why metaphors sink like lead in quicksand. The glass, famously half empty: that’s due to some negative universe, a band most often playing in a minor key? Mix sanguine in and things look much brighter. It takes hold so quickly. The chemistry is such that everything soon seems lighter. When that glass fills up, claret or amber, the bow, taken up, regains its camber.

"Ask someone else," the woman said, turning back to whatever it was, blocked from my sight. In the cafés of life, I'm still learning to distinguish a wrong move from a right. We spoke of art as he drank his wine, art that sometimes lived in, the remove as slight as one remembered. Did he give a start? Time's distance is no match for the flight of memory. Like how I can hear you as they must have, too, your door ajar. "Sounds like thunder," they might have said. If they knew, geologic terms could have made the rounds seismic, perhaps, or volcanic but then memories fork, don't they, now and again?

Notes to Self

Sometimes only boughs are visible, near as passersby on crowded city streets, close enough to touch, but we hold back, fear to touch the way we might have between the sheets. A different season the hedges form a square, a distant bell sounding, the sea fog-edged: Held in the mind, these thoughts ward off despair, even as the boughs bend close, winter full-fledged. They say there are hot springs hereabouts, far or near, I know not. Heat intuited glimmers in consciousness like a faint star and yet proves faithful and deeply rooted. Somewhere in this Milky Way, steam rises. Make for that, a traveler surmises.

They each write out their provisos: how much emptiness exists between points A, B. He wonders why he now declines to touch. She asks him what, if not this, love could be? These are fair questions. Somewhere there’s a street that isn’t haunted by the past. Somewhere there’s a house, a garden, a bed, a sheet with no story. “In heaven, too we share everything with a doubled eternal,” the Zen master told his listener. A spoon was the object doubled, not infernal, but ordinary as the waxing moon. In the middle of her night, he awoke to find it was that moon, not her, that spoke.

A road, we call it, a path, but river, as Heraclitus suggested, feels right. How slowly It moves, often, a sliver of life at a time, fluid yet so slight that it falls beneath our notice, gone from consciousness. What carries us along, we ask ourselves. Is this a boat we’re on? Who steers it? The words of a sailor’s song mix with those of mermaids, sirens whose breasts are like the hills that skirt the river’s edge. Garlanded, they push and pull, plot their tests of bravado for the boys on the ledge. They’re up there, too, the girls, shedding a fin, then half-drowned payment for their plunging in.

A shady figure, some would argue. Won’t get no denial from me. This is Jung’s territory, so why deny it? Don’t think I’m gonna. “I like it when he comes,” now there’s a phrase to warm a liar’s heart. And God knows deception’s my middle name. Yeah, keeping a straight face, playing the part the shady life’s not easy, a long game if you can keep it going, and I did, waiting by the telephone, cooling heels out on the road, staying low and well hid, reading the racing forms and copping feels. “It’s all too much! I am a slave!” No more. The pledge: “Nobody’s fool, nobody’s whore.”

Inside the room, inside the head: one could write stories of such stasis: nothing goes right or wrong; there’s neither must do nor should. Around the desk, around the chair, life flows like a mysterious substance. Women come and go. The book lies upside-down, tent of paper and board, small markings like Zen, those koans, so hard to read, if they meant anything to anyone else: doubtful. Cats also come and go. A jay lands, screams. The mind wanders in its confining skull. Somewhere, it thinks, a woman dreams or creams. Wake! A cloud of sanguinity draws close. A black bee, meandering, snorts a dose.

The moon appears and disappears, first round then a vessel, pregnant, soon round again. I watch and time passes. I miss the sound. I miss the heat. Why do I not stir then? The question was posed elsewhere: Would it shut? But no, it hangs open, adrift in my doubts about setting out for the coast. Abrupt thoughts crease the stillness. I hear distant shouts, but the sound missed isn’t heard, nor is heat tangibly beneath my hand. These are felt like the moon’s passage, like the ever-sweet taste I crave eyes rolled back, a deep hue smelt, how I measure the seasons I’ve striven and striven, a mind split, feelings riven.

Notes to Others

In the midst of months, each day divides the time as pre- and post-, like a gate that’s opened and closed, before and after. A slow climb up a road to a boxwood park; we spend an hour there, then climb again where hawks drift in the wind. Stones, a fence, clear air, the sea distant, iron blue. We take walks. Cold in the morning, rising slow, your hair: divided time up like salt, and after, cleft, the line inexact but fixed, bone dry when you left. Between sadness there’s laughter. Divided and divided, yes, and why? Smote the sea and it opens, life confides; the corollary unsaid: time divides.

Sometimes I see the film the music makes. Would you be in it? There are no traces amid the scenery poems aren’t outtakes but I can picture it: our two faces (I’m looking up, your head is turned) close in, talking like we used to do. And outside is the changing view. On a map, a pin or pins, rather, would mark our high tide. Variations like those I’m hearing now would do well in this film we made, suited to its mood’s wobbling course. I wonder how the happy ending they want is mooted?

“Define happy,” La Rochefoucauld might write, skeptic that he was, doubtful yet so right.

Odd how the body sings its final note. We aren’t supposed to watch. A crime, they say. We know the clip by heart, even by rote: the hood, the speech, defiance, one to pay the price of being in the wrong place, time, the wrong century, wrong era. “No dice! You worship at another altar, slime!” and other epithets that aren’t so nice, as if nice matters when they cut your throat. What is it you think in those last moments? Odd how the body sings its final note despite the droning man and his torments. English, they said, a recruit to the cause. As for the cause itself, I see some flaws.

Poison, he told her, but she demurred. Pain ensued, although not before bliss. That, too. Dire, he repeated, but she demurred. Rain fell, metaphorically, but nothing’s true exactly, nothing’s as it’s depicted here. So, the road in retrospect has its death, its depths of sadness, hearts ravaged, seared. At points, human beings run out of breath, caught in those small rooms of contradiction, airless, cut off from the rest of life. All grinds massively to a halt, no friction left to spark love. It’s the end of the ball. The door is always there, the saying has it, but the music can still be heard, can’t it?

He wrote of borderlands transgressed, the bounds so readily passed through, despite knowing how unbending life can be. Making rounds, it came to seem, riding the range, sowing no wild oats, however much desired. A ring, not a badge, a vow, not much use, a waiting, waiting game. She grew tired, he thought, or was it him, cutting them loose in hopes that life would bring them somewhere new? He still rode the range, but slowly. Fences make good neighbors, he thought. “Rode it with you” in his head, despite distance, defenses. Mending fences is not the worst pastime. Builds character, they say. Must be sublime.

The Senses

“Memory,” the title read. Notice the cleft almost hidden amid the tropical points of reference? Nominally he was in his dotage, yet the flame still lingered: the oceanic concubine fingered in moonlight, her moaning against the buzz of whatever the lizards failed to cull. Wet the way women get, his fingers deft with practice, the one means he still had left. Thinking back, it seemed almost comical to be reduced to this trick, how it was in youth when some pliant schoolgirl lingered long enough to be felt up, her head cocked, feet apart no lizards, but the memory.

Did she notice him, his eyes fixed on her, line dancing along the periphery, gestures toward a sky that reminded him of the lapping Caribbean Sea, blue with bars and shoals, the pelicans skimming? He could picture her at home in that scene. Would she come closer, answering his wish? If the room emptied out, then just the two, alone in the semi-dark, the palm fronds swaying, imaginary though they were. Or would he come for her, carried along by the rising and falling of the song?

Gravely she thanked him as he left; no kiss but only words, the kiss left unspoken.

Long legged with dark slippers, tatami cushioning the blow, hair clipped, wedding ring a bronze band, and a boy's face. Can't you see? Her neck is how a lover views it. Sing, oh muse, of how her back would arch, taken dog-wise, wet from earlobes caressed, parting lips somewhere along the way. Mistaken as we sometimes are, drifting, departing all too soon, those cries still echoing, walls marked, sheets torn by hands grasping. Holding still until taken, taken until spent, balls aching as they sometimes do, no ill will, mistaken as we sometimes are, depart too soon, drifting, humming, playing one's part.

A surprise to find paradise out back, Straightlaced on the outside, like a Russian dacha within. French influenced, no lack of creature comforts. “Nothing Prussian,” he might have said. His friend’s wife outlived both, his real wives ailing and absent. “In France,” she told me. “Heart attack.” So, first half a loaf and then none. And yet nothing seemed askance. This may be the territory old age brings us to, when transience really takes hold. The last scenes played out on this earthly stage need a few actors still standing, though old, French-style armchairs, shelves of books, leather-bound, blue walls, distant chatter the only sound.

Love & Death

Whatever else he might have been, he thought, an opportunity wasn’t it. Still, he could see why the word came up. Squandered is how time can feel when expectations falter. The transformation shocks us. Love charts a path that rarely proves tenable, yet nothing’s lost, the IChingadded, soon after, but after what, exactly? Words like disaster came to mind. But was it? There they were, as close as ever, despite the distance on some levels. The frisson drops away, the venues change. “It may just be this,” she told him a while back. Yes, it may. Our reality, he’d say.

I want to write out love’s true story: talk accompanies love, does it not? Before and after is the rule, but sometimes we talk throughout, albeit in single words or more, short phrases or demands. Conversation comes in between, those moments of cooling after the long sprint, the respite of come, when our beings briefly reign, no fooling, as twin monarchs of all we survey: bed and linen, walls, a view. For some reason the mind is freed. Unwritten, what is said, yet remembered, some of it: the season, what you asked, how I felt; reality consisting then of us, we two, only.

I want to write out love’s true story: hearts melded into flesh, is that how it is? The truth of love many scenes, many parts! Each folds back on the other how it is. He takes her trembling self in hand, rocket that she is. He’s like a match, and as dumb, column-straight, ignition in his pocket, then bent down at the gate, mind switched to numb. How like a horse plowing, running blindly! Love is a field to him; love is a course. That another’s aflame, a rising sea behind those eyes, deep in the matted source these facts pass like trees and houses, the road south, the beaten path, the curve of lips, her mouth.

I want to tell the truth about love. Death can come as a relief when it goes wrong. Breathless, they say, but then there’s no more breath, no space, no room, no road: end of a song you sang in harmony and counterpoint, in reality and in illusion. Love softens you up, puts you out of joint severely, a sure cure for delusion. You stand on the balcony and look down. Below are the dead, their quiet sleep, still as stones amid a field of green and brown. They make no comment. Jumping holds no thrill, they seem to say, as if the dead could talk. You could leap or wait. You could take a walk.

In one sense, visceral, then burned, scattered; in another, each and every, imbued how quickly memory attaches, grips one's sideways glance of things, raises places from their background status. One picks them up; one picks up on them. Present here, one says, telling a story that overlays death with what lives on. I used to picture it slipping between time's folds, a shimmering into and out of material life. It's not quite the Noh play I imagined. Despite the flames and ashes, so much persists: not just what we trash or give away, nor what we think we see. Being here, he, too.

Morphine clears a path; it was requested, he learned at the wake. The bigger friar of the two perhaps he was a father set his remarks on women and offspring: how life’s quickening registered as joy. (Invoking it seemed oddly apropos.) Three generations of the female line were noted. The eldest, recently dead, witnessed this mutely. His theory (self-awareness persists a bit) foundered on a body from which all signs of life had departed. “All used up” came to mind, admirable in its economy of means. No doubt that material life loses its spark.

The paper flowers, the father, granddad, the graves like Chinese cities, all the dead arrayed. What a war they had! Not so bad until it plowed them under. What was said went mostly unspoken. Silence, a sound often written, slices through time and space. The dead either hear us or not. It goes ‘round, the silence between us; face to face it would be different or else diffident, depending on your mood. How are you, then? I ask each time, less and less confident I know how you are, really. Well, amen. Mass is over and we’re both still alive. We could talk. I could see you, raise you five.

Table Music

All else that can’t be said is written: backs of envelopes in old steamer trunks for the executors to mine, smitten by the prospect of affairs, those drunks ambling along sidewalks in anecdotes: the muse puts up with this with how it is when writers sit down to write. How she smotes some handy object, the muse, with this biz floating past and not safely bottled up. Everything that can’t be said is uncorked, filling glasses, even the loving cup. They toast the many times a straight road forked. The muse looks glumly on. Plot’s familiar, she thinks. Forks are closer than they first appear.

2. The easel in view, the artist off to a place in truth less distant.

3. The sight of the yarn brought it back to mind the crinkled, lucent surface of black hair rising from those oyster lips. Oh, to find such beauty, a beauty hidden down there between her thighs! He saw her narrowed eyes and Borromini smile, strands obscuring breasts as she leaned over. The moans and cries he heard again, their traces echoing along the mind’s hallways, knocking the dust off ancestral paintings. The wide armchair with its repressed maiden, tied down, her lust straining in its taut embrace, was still there, but the red-stained sheets were rolled up. Once soaked, the stiff white cotton marked where she’d been stroked.

Some set out to prove the thing, a spent youth hanging in the balance they made themselves. Some cross the channel to ply their troth or revive the things placed too soon on shelves deemed out of reach, out of touch. Their lives left them stranded. From islands they look out and marvel how far away. Be they wives or husbands, they neither ignore nor flout the bell frustration rings, the handy boat “Desire” that tempts them to pull anchor and set their compass toward another. The winds are dodgy and their charts unsure, yet, undaunted, they trust what the gods give, assume it won’t be short and abortive.

Side by side, they cooked. Deep in his heart he felt those tendrils, their barbs.

In life’s midst, in the dark wood or near it, they encounter their damaged selves, mirrored. They make a pact. Too soon they forget it. Repair ensues, but then they’re caught, scissored by whatever in haste they ignored: the encyclopedic contradictions; lists of those hurt, angered, their feelings gored; the press of living doubled lives that shun all that surrounds them, or try to shun them. Yet they have their reasons. Like the spring moths that break out into a brief world, these men and women, trailed by their luminous cloths, fly headlong into flames a blazing torch consumed save the handful they only scorch.

I saw a film in which facsimiles of love abounded. I don’t think our love is fake. Frustrating, yes, perhaps a tease, yet real in spite of all of the above. On another occasion, on a deck, she sat reading and I felt what one feels. Across the canal, mountains what the heck, one thinks later, after the blood congeals: heart spinning on the street, the kind of grief that’s a facsimile of grief, both fake and real, like us on the deck, a belief in the lives we lead and the love we make. A man and woman grapple with this now. I’m done grappling. I don’t even know how.

8.

Drawn-out, Côte d’Azur living, lungs burning, a gun begged for, nearly fetched a pistol. An honorable age, filled with learning, but can it really be said, "I am full"? Handsome still, his mind the draw with women, as perhaps it mostly is bulls excepted if some semblance of rutting's wanted. Then "I am full" applies, but he, respected, took them conversationally, his mind clearing the orgasmic rows that women plant and harvest on their own, as men find if they take the time to notice. Amen, they think, this game can be played out until the lungs burn and life at length must be stilled.

It should be easy, they think, but it’s not. Easy to plunge, but hard to swim, laden as they are by families. They say hot invites the plunge, but it slips the blade in, invariably. Why is this? The good we humans do, the intent to do well, falls apart. They always think it could be different, if they could sidestep the hell of suffering: she suffers, he suffers this repeated and destructive pattern a track to nowhere, track without buffers, set on sand, not those sturdy ties. Slattern and of no fixed abode: this is the dead weight the laden share: no home, no common fate.

10.

Oddly, the choices seem arbitrary, a product of chance. One factor is time: the order of things, their chronology. Is life so reduced or is it sublime? Because if the latter, does the value not transcend the weighing of each event? Is the value not in life itself? You and the world, as you say. Why were we sent if not to savor all of it, good and bad? Do these categories apply to love, for example, with its happy and sad, a sea in which we founder, heads above the waves sometimes only barely, our hearts afloat or weighted down, whole or in parts?

11.

The illusive character of matter invites us to lay our hands on it. Houses, cars, incomes, all of the chatter about money, which Freud called shit, just shit, but we see it as tangible, ours, and are loathe to give it up. And, like this, we prefer decades to a few hours once things have moved beyond the stage of kiss, possession being nine-tenths of the law west of the Pecos, but not every world runs that way. You came, clearly, and we saw, but what we gave each other was just curled up in five fingers: time’s glowing ball, round and true, tossed then gone, gone without a sound.

12.

Curiously, time’s glowing ball is close at hand. Should the game resume?

13.

“No no,” he hears her cry. “Like those street games, a feint to trick the mind, deceive the heart the ball is here, the ball is there. It shames me to think I was taken in, so don’t start!”

Yes, no both apply when there’s no ending. The intermission: they stood with the crowd and wondered how they fell out, tickets sending them to different seats, one head in the cloud, the other looking sideways. Was she there? His crowd as she imagined “Your people.”

Not the chorus of names, each with a where, she wraps around her like a coat a steeple could hardly stand out more, but she denies it all: “So much less here than meets the eyes.”

14. Desire is all speed once triggered, like a greyhound in love with rabbits.

15. “Everything is movement,” I read. Poets “align constantly with the flight of time.” Tzara knew firsthand how far from MoetChandon the lives of poets were. Sublime words became a noose in the hands of black shirts and icepick-wielding apparatchiks. No wonder his wariness: off-the-rack bureaux sprang up like weedlots, full of ticks. Some poets edged their way, a starving lot save the few rich wives and patronesses, save the doctors and insurance men, not writing revolution but of tresses shaken in summer’s waning light, a leg seen briefly, a doorway, “Don’t make me beg.”

16. A damp house in France, music from another world as he read each word.

17.

At the institute up the hill, the talk revolved around the Great Fugue. Beethoven brooks no explanation, he thought. A walk might suit them, alone together, but then the repeated theme: No place to go. Turn it upside down like composers do, it still lookes like frustration. It tested his wit wondering how to carve out space and not kill bystanders. The maestro sought love in vain, he read not an easy man, though brilliant. They flip whole stanzas who are parched of rain and go unwed. They long to rut and pant. Love is spontaneous, Tzara wrote, yet Horace bemoaned the temple fate he met.

18. Wood, built solidly, to be caressed or beaten hard as mood demands.

19. Then the streets were only her. Roused from sleep he made his way to the post, to use the word it wasn’t a storefront with screens and deep into the day by then, a day tipped toward strung out, disrupted by thoughts of her. Aix had its charms, its peculiar shops, women sitting vacantly inside selling pecks of baubles to the students. Corsican Mafia, his son said, laundering cash that better lines of work brought in: drugs, sex, discoteques, festivals, the wedding bash for the Russian tycoon. He longed for text. Fate arranged a preview: Men who smolder when wives assert prompt them to be bolder.

20.

Vesuvius erupts and men say prayers. He chose to hang in, although she’d question what that meant, if anything. Naysayers abound and rumors cause indigestion. Events unfold and it all looks for naught. Despite this, he knew what he’d seen. Meetings happen when they happen. It can’t be taught, to know what to do. After the greetings we’re on our own. What was the plan? It’s lost somewhere in the cosmos. To him, a vow spoke to knowing, being sure, but the cost was harder to know then than it is now, when he waits to see where life will take them, every one on this stage, women and men.

21.

Beneath the Machado museum’s floor of polished concrete, two decades laid down, a descent by stairs accessed through a door: the ancient foundations. Some Roman, gown in hand, fidgeting, telling others what and where the arches rising, holding up a building that in time became, well, not secular but serving Christ highers up like Him. The enormous walls, pressing in, the darkness at a turn of a switch: Death stood nearby, dressed in black, neat as a pin. “We all play this waiting game. Out of breath?” He made a show of sympathy. His teeth glistened. “Exiting will be such a relief.”

22.

Sometimes he chooses evening clothes, black tie, and other times he circles lazily like a shark or, feigning sleep, he waits by rivers. Sometimes a match is handily produced to light the gas in the tire or a last ounce of will induced to pull the trigger, slash the flesh, tug the wire. Sometimes he sidles in, pleasantries full as the glass of morphine he has ready, his eyes alive with excitement, parties in the offing: funerals and wakes. “Steady on, old man,” he says, “you made your sorties, it’s time to wrap it up,” then beckoning those who tote it up, make a reckoning.”

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