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That's enough of those.

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This is a poem that
I'll read right

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after the prose poems because I
thought it was a poem in verse,

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and Michael Cuddihy thought
it was a prose poem.

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And I'll let you
decide which it is.

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It's called Not Going
to New York, A Letter.

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And I think it's like these
in that I let myself ramble.

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I don't believe--
well, it wanders.

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Not Going to New York, A Letter

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Dear Dan, this is a letter
of apology, unrhymed.

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Rhyme belongs to the
dazzling couplets of a rival.

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Survival is the art around here.

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It rhymes by accident
with the rhythm

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of days, which arrive like
crows in a field of stubble corn

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in upstate New York in February.

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In upstate New York
in February, thaws

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harden the heart against
the wish for spring.

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There was not one thing in
the barren meadows, not muddy

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and raw fleshed.

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At night, I dreamed
of small, black snakes

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with orange markings,
disappearing down there holes,

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of being lost in the
hemlocks, and coming

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on a clearing of
wild strawberry,

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sunlight, abandoned apple trees.

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At night, it was mild
noon in a clearing.

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Nothing arrived.

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This was a place left to flower
in the plain cruelty of light.

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Mornings, the sky was opal,
the windows faced East,

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and a furred snow reassume
the pines, but arrived only

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modeled in the field so that
its flesh was my grandmother's

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in the kitchen of the
house on Jackson Street,

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and she was crying.

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I was a good boy.

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She held me so tight when
she said that smelling like

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sleep rotting, if sleep
rots, that I always knew

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how death would come to get me.

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And the soft folds of
her quivering white neck

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were what I saw, so that
sometimes, on an airplane,

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I looked down to snow
covering the arroyos

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on the East side of the Sierra,
and his grandmother's flesh,

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and I look away.

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On the house on
Jackson Street, I

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am the figure against the
wall and Boehner's painting,

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The Breakfast Room.

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The light is terrible.

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It is wishes that are fat
dogs, already sated, snuffling

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at the heart in dreams.

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The table linen is so crisp,
it puts an to fantasies

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of rectitude, clean hands,
high art, and the blue

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beside the white
and the striping

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is the color of the
river Loire when

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you read about it in
old books and dreamed

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of provincial breakfast.

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The sun, the color of bread
crust, and the fruit icy cold,

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and there was no terrified
figure dwarf-like, and correct

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disappearing off the edge of
Boehner's, The Breakfast Room.

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It was not grandmother
in the breakfast room.

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It was not grandmother
weeping in the breakfast

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room or the first thaw dream
of beautiful, small snakes

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slithering down holes.

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In this life that is
not dreams but my life,

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the clouds above the bay
are massing toward December,

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and gulls hover in
the storm-pearled air.

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And the last of
last season's cedar

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spits and kindles in the fire.

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Summer dries us out
with golden light here,

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so winter is a kind of spring.

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Wet trees, a reptile odor
in the Earth, mild greening.

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And the seasonal mists
lie across one another

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in the quick
darkening of the days.

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Kristen and Luke are
bent to a puzzle.

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Some allegory of
the quattrocento

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cut in a thousand, small, uneven
pieces which on the floor,

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they recompose with rapt
leisurely attention.

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Kristen asks, searching
for a piece round

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at one end, fluted at the other,
do you know what a shepherd is?

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And Luke, looking
for a square edge

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with the sprig of
Italian olive in it,

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makes a guess, somebody
who herds sheep?

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My grandmother was not so old.

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She was my mother's mother.

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I think the night
before, my father

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must have told her we
were going to move.

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She held me weeping, probably,
because she thought she

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was about to lose her daughter.

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We only buried her this year.

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In the genteel
hotel on Leavenworth

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that looked across a mile
of human misery to the bay,

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she smoked regally,
complained about her teeth.

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Luke watched her wide-eyed
with a mingle look

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of wonder and religious dread.

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She seemed so old.

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And once, when he
reached up involuntarily

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to touch her withered cheek,
she looked at him a while,

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and patted his cheek
back, and looked

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at me askance and
winked, and said,

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"Old age ain't for sissies."

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This has nothing to do with
the odd terror in my memory.

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It only explains it.

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The way this winter
weather makes life

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seem more common place, and at
a certain angle, more intense.

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It is not poetry where
decay and a created radiance

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lie hidden inside words the
way that memory folds them

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into living.

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Oh, Westmoreland,
thou art a summer bird

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that ever in the
haunch of winter

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sings the lifting up of they.

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Pasternak translated those
lines from Shakespeare.

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I imagine a Russian summer,
the smell of Jasmine

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drifting toward the porch.

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I would like to get on a plane.

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But I would also like
to sit on the porch

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and watch one shrink to
the hovering of the gulls,

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and glint in the distance,
circle East toward snow,

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and disappear.

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He would have noticed the
articles as a native speaker

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wouldn't.

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A bird in the haunch,
and understood

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a little what persists.

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When eyes have closed,
lattice shadow on his face,

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he murmured the phrase,
in the dark vowels

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of his mother tongue.

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