Christopher Buckley
Midnight Walk
after Pessoa
Most nights I can see
all the universe that’s available
from the mesa and western cliffs.
This is everything
I will ever have—glimmering
strands upon which
our theories hang . . .
even the sea that holds their light
grudgingly gives it back,
even the fish washed up
on shore, their eyes filled
with the sky.
Fog seeps in
erasing the magnolia and acacia,
leaf by leaf—likewise, I am content
to walk about in anonymity,
whistling “My Blue Heaven”
or one or another of my father’s ’40s or ’50s
tunes washing unconsciously
around in my brain,
just as I did as a child, wondering
about every molecule
under the sky.
Still, nothing stops me
thinking. I continue to sort through
the abraded artifacts, the nuts and bolts
of matter waiting to dissolve like rust,
like sea salt through my pores,
and start perhaps, somewhere
all over again . . .
Space, they tell us
now, is not eternal—there is a curtain
beyond which, beyond which . . .
and if you take up that line of thought
you could say God has more work left to do.
These clouds for instance, so many
grey washcloths hung on the horizon,
are rinsed of any suggestion—I feel emptied
just looking at them, as though I’d known
the bottom line about hope all along.
Stopping here on the breakwater,
my heart gives up its tug of war
with the stars, the wind leaving
rope burns in my hands . . .
The Way It Looks
un dia del cual tengo ya el recuerdo—César Vallejo
I’ll be carried from the church of Mt. Carmel,
out the side door in the mock-adobe wall—
midweek, and the gardener sleeping through
lunch again, “Tu, Solo Tu” or “Cielito Lindo”
leaking from the radio in his truck . . . .
A day without even one witness
for the eucalyptus trees refusing
to rearrange a single leaf in loss.
An afternoon
of empty roads and pimiento boughs, some time
before the hills sink back into the Pacific,
and the Pacific into space—a day beyond recall
despite the lemon verbena and Bermuda grass
heavy on the air.
The classrooms will have
long surrendered beneath a veil of silt,
salt air smudging the windows, or is it a final
Bible History lesson hardly anyone learned
drifting off in chalk? Aleric, the last accredited
barbarian to ride into Rome, setting his example
of the passing and glory of the world . . .
Equally,
the frayed rope ends of the bells, of the escaping
clouds—and the bundles of sticks I finally set down
among all my over-valued assets from the estate
of irony, that had theories for it all . . . purposeless,
in the end, as my brown shoes, as my mouth of ashes
kissing the butter-colored poppies, their bright
small fists shaking at the sky.
These are my personal
effects—the rain showers, the black & white light
of the ’50s taken up in its faithful opposition
to the blue, to a heaven against which, even the wind,
for no apparent reason, was also driven to its knees.