The Gates of War
Impatient—no, enraged,
did Juno thunder down
to open the Gates of War,
and with her meaty arm
push the reluctant door?
Or was she just a trope
unseen by human eyes,
abstraction in a form
of adamant disguise,
a massive allegory
needed for the story
in a goddess’s shape?
There had to have been a point
when everything transformed:
some line in the sand crossed,
some liminality.
Isn’t a gate a door?
A threshold. There you are.
There had to have been a moment,
the after and before:
no war gave way to war.
The sleepy land caught fire,
and through the open gate
soldiers issued forth,
battle steeds pawed the earth.
For all this to take place,
surely there was some cause:
the angry goddess? Fate?
Powerful hidden laws?
Or are these all the same?
Until the gate was open,
war could not begin.
And without a war
the tale could not go on.
War sets a plot in motion.
Agency, intention,
history, invention:
narrative moves ahead.
What prompts this mass migration
our mortal eyes can’t see.
Insert a goddess there,
baleful and resentful,
swooping down through the air
to press the button. So
envision it once more:
Allecto spreads her wings
(they hiss with snakes) and flies
down from the upper skies
to her lair beneath the earth
to wait until she’s called
(as she will be) once more.
Juno’s task too is done.
The carnage has begun.
Hesitation
gives way to orchestration,
but on the podium
no one is visible.
Who conducts a war?
Once started, it goes on,
marching in the dust
toward some horizon
as far as we can see.
Rose Petals
Classical Outlook I left
at the endocrinologist’s office
on Sixty-eighth Street, where
the other reading matter
was Living Well with Osteoporosis.
At the ophthalmologist
on Seventy-sixth Street, Yale Review.
The only other choice was Wine Spectator.
Let someone else waiting for their pupils to dilate
read Philip Somebody on Steven Spielberg’s
career-long obsession with the dad phenomenon.
At the audiologist on Fifty-sixth Street
(nothing there to read but Hearing Health),
the London Review of Books.
Hudson Review at the dentist on Fifty-fourth Street,
where the magazine rack featured a tattered People.
The impulse to do this, or something like this,
isn’t unique to me. In Barbara Pym’s
novel Quartet in Autumn,
a character who turns out to be mortally ill
likes to dispose of her empty cat food cans
(though not before she’s rinsed them out)
by depositing them one or two at a time
in the empty spaces at the ends of shelves
in the local library.
I rinse mine too.
The containers I’ve been leaving around town
are empty in that what I wanted
to extract from them I have extracted.
I sometimes find I like what I’ve given away
better once it’s gone,
but never enough to try to get it back.
Publishing a poem or a book of poems
and releasing it expectantly into the world
is like dropping a rose petal
into the Grand Canyon
and waiting for the echo, as Don Marquis,
author of Archy and Mehitabel
and sixteen forgotten other books
famously said. Or not so famously.
Not otherwise, as Vergil or Horace might have put it,
does one quietly distribute quarterlies
for people in doctors’ waiting rooms
possibly to pick up and then to glance at
(if they can peel their eyes away from their phones)
if only to pass the time,
if only to nudge their thoughts however briefly
away from what may be about to happen,
if only to remind them to attend
to the world’s vast serendipity and the smaller
clues left by an anonymous donor
in the autumn of her life.
Secondhand Prose
Downstairs on Main Street, Secondhand Prose,
whose single room is crammed with rows:
cookbooks, memoir, mystery,
fantasy, travel, history—
prose, with a spritz of poetry.
In summers past, year in, year out,
I’d stopped and browsed and often bought.
But this was not a buying season.
I was here to deaccession:
two-box limit per customer.
The salesperson, a volunteer
(redhead; noncommittal stare),
turned to the boxes I’d lugged in,
fished out each book, and one by one,
held it up, opened, to her face.
She didn’t seem to use her eyes.
What could be given to Secondhand Prose?
The deciding factor was her nose.
Was she after rot or mold?
These books had weathered many cold
winters in a clammy room
until, each summer, readers came—
potential readers, I should say,
literate in a different way.
This summer I took one last look,
made up my mind, and shut the book.
The sniffing seemed a stringent test,
but my two boxes’ worth all passed.
Afterwards it occurred to me:
had what she sniffed so carefully
not been mildew, mold, or grime?
Could she have been inhaling time?
Each book was a repository.
She couldn’t pause to read each story,
but, breathing in its essence, she
might absorb its history . . .
A passing notion, likely wrong.
Ruthless, I passed the books along.
I thanked the woman with red hair.
The books piled high—I left them there
(waiting at home were plenty more)
and climbed the stairs and opened the door.
Street level. Sunlight. Fresh air.