Sakura Park

The park admits the wind,
the petals lift and scatter

like versions of myself I was on the verge
of becoming; and ten years on

and ten blocks down I still can’t tell
whether this dispersal resembles

a fist unclenching or waving goodbye.
But the petals scatter faster,

seeking the rose, the cigarette vendor,
and at least I’ve got by pumping heart

some rules of conduct: refuse to choose
between turning pages and turning heads

though the stubborn dine alone. Get over
“getting over”: dark clouds don’t fade

but drift with ever deeper colors.
Give up on rooted happiness

(the stolid trees on fire!) and sweet reprieve
(a poor park but my own) will follow.

There is still a chance the empty gazebo
will draw crowds from the greater world.

And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing:
the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.

—Rachel Todd Wetzsteon
in memoriam

The Phone Booth

She slumps in the booth, weeping
into the phone. Asking a question
or two, and weeping some more.
Her companion, an old fellow in jeans
and denim shirt, stands waiting
his turn to talk, and weep.
She hands him the phone.
For a minute they are together
in a tiny booth, his tears
dropping alongside hers. Then
she goes to lean against the fender
of their sedan and listens
to him talk about arrangements.

I watch all this from my car.
I don’t have a phone at home, either.
I sit behind the wheel,
smoking, wanting to make
my own arrangements. Pretty soon
he hangs up. Comes out and wipes his face.
They get in the car and sit
with the windows rolled up.
The glass grows steamy as she
leans into him, as he puts
his arm around her shoulders.
The workings of comfort in that cramped, public space.

I take my small change over
to the booth, and step inside.
But leaving the door open, it’s
so close in there. The phone still warm to the touch.

I hate to use a phone
that’s just brought news of death.
But I have to, it being the only phone
for miles, and one that might
listen without taking sides.

I put in coins and wait.
Those people in the car wait too.
He starts the engine then kills it.
Where to? None of us able
to figure it out. Not knowing
where the next blow might fall,
or why. The ringing at the other end

stops when she picks it up.
Before I can say two words, the phone
begins to shout, “I told you it’s over!
Finished! You can go
to hell as far as I’m concerned!”

I drop the phone and pass my hand
across my face. I close and open the door.
The couple in the sedan roll
their windows down and
watch, their tears stilled
for a moment in the face of this distraction.
Then they roll their windows up
and sit behind the glass.

We don’t go anywhere for a while.
And then we go.

— Raymond Carver

Notes:
Peter Buchanan-Smith recently redesigned Raymond Carver’s backlist for Vintage Contemporaries, using Hido’s photographs on the covers. You can read a conversation between Buchanan-Smith + Hido about the project on The Sun & Anchor.

A Road Divided, an exhibition of recent landscapes by Hido, is on view at Bruce Silverstein Gallery through October 24, 2009.

The Phone Booth is included in Hido’s stunning 2004 monograph, Roaming. (Published by Nazraeli.)

Lines for the Fortune Cookies

I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else.

Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you–even bigger.

You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.

You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.

You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.

In the beginning there was YOU–there will always be YOU, I guess.

You will write a great play and it will run for three performances.

Please phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.

Roger L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.

Relax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.

Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.

You may be a hit uptown, but downtown you’re legendary!

Your walk has a musical quality which will bring you fame and fortune.

You will eat cake.

Who do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?

You think your life is like Pirandello, but it’s really like O’Neill.

A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.

That’s not a run in your stocking, it’s a hand on your leg.

I realize you’ve lived in France, but that doesn’t mean you know EVERYTHING!

You should wear white more often–it becomes you.

The next person to speak to you will have a very intriquing proposal to make.

A lot of people in this room wish they were you.

Have you been to Mike Goldberg’s show? Al Leslie’s? Lee Krasner’s?

At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.

Now that the election’s over, what are you going to do with yourself?

You are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.

You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?

Beyond the horizon there is a vale of gloom.

You too could be Premier of France, if only… if only…

—Frank O’Hara

Thanks to Andrew Long for this perfect pairing!

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

—Wallace Stevens

The Heart Under Your Heart

            Who gives his heart away too easily must have a heart
            under his heart.                       
               —James Richardson

The heart under your heart
            is not the one you share
so readily      so full of pleasantry
            & tenderness

it is a single blackberry
            at the heart of a bramble
or else some larger fruit
            heavy      the size of a fist

it is full of things
            you have never shared with me
broken engagements      bruises
            & baking dishes

the scars on top of scars
            of sixteen thousand pinpricks
the melody you want so much to carry
            & always fear black fear

or so I imagine      you have never shown me
            & how could I expect you to
I also have a heart beneath my heart
            perhaps you have seen      or guessed

it is a beach at night
where the waves lap & the wind hisses
            over a bank of thin
translucent orange & yellow jingle shells

on the far side of the harbor
            the lighthouse beacon
shivers across the black water
            & someone stands there      waiting

—Craig Arnold
Published: The Paris Review No. 189 Summer 2009

The Map of the World Confused with Its Territory

In a drawer I found a map of the world,
folded into eighths and then once again
and each country bore the wrong name because
the map of the world is an orphanage.

The edges of the earth had a margin
as frayed as the hem of the falling night
and a crease moved down toward the center of
the earth, halving the identical stars.

Every river ran with its thin blue
brother out from the heart of a country:
there cedars twisted toward the southern sky
and reeds plumed eastward like an augur’s pens.

No dates on the wrinkles of that broad face,
no slow grinding of mountains and sand, for—
all at once, like a knife on a whetstone—
the map of the world spoke in snakes and tongues.

The hard-topped roads of the western suburbs
and the distant lights of the capitol
each pull away from the yellowed beaches
and step into the lost sea of daybreak.

The map of the world is a canvas turning
away from the painter’s ink-stained hands
while the pigments cake in their little glass
jars and the brushes grow stiff with forgetting.

There is no model, shy and half-undressed,
no open window and flickering lamp,
yet someone has left this sealed blue letter,
this gypsy’s bandana on the darkening

Table, each corner held down by a conch
shell. What does the body remember at
dusk? That the palms of the hands are a map
of the world, erased and drawn again and

Again, then covered with rivers and earth.

—Susan Stewart

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

—Mary Oliver

Tim and I became fast friends during a slow walk under the hot sun in the South of France. We’d just been served lunch on the grounds of a fancy estate and slipped away to stroll down to a pond where two handsome and terrifying swans made their home. We were curious to have a look at those magnificent creatures, but careful not to get too close.

Blowing the Fluff Away
For E.B.

The sprig of unknown bloom you sent last fall
spent the long winter drying on my wall,
mounted on black. But it had turned to fluff
some months ago. Tonight I took it down
because I thought that I had had enough
of staring at it. Brittle, dry and brown,
it seemed to speak too plainly of a waste
of friendship, forced to flower, culled in haste.

So, after months of fearing to walk past
in case the stir should scatter it to bits,
I took it out to scatter it at last
with my own breath, and so to call us quits.
—Fooled! for the fluff was nothing but a sheath,
with tiny, perfect flowers underneath.

—Robyn Sarah

Source: Poetry (July/August 2009).

Ode to Memory

  I.

    Thou who stealest fire,
  From the fountains of the past,
  To glorify the present, O, haste,
    Visit my low desire!
  Strengthen me, enlighten me!
  I faint in this obscurity,
  Thou dewy dawn of memory.

          II.

    Come not as thou camest of late,
  Flinging the gloom of yesternight
On the white day, but robed in soften’d light
      Of orient state.
Whilome thou camest with the morning mist,
  Even as a maid, whose stately brow
The dew-impearled winds of dawn have kiss’d,
      When she, as thou,
Stays on her floating locks the lovely freight
Of overflowing blooms, and earliest shoots
Of orient green, giving safe pledge of fruits,
Which in wintertide shall star
The black earth with brilliance rare.

          III.

Whilome thou camest with the morning mist,
  And with the evening cloud,
Showering thy gleaned wealth into my open breast;
Those peerless flowers which in the rudest wind
    Never grow sere,
When rooted in the garden of the mind,
  Because they are the earliest of the year.
    Nor was the night thy shroud.
In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest
Thou leddest by the hand thine infant Hope.
The eddying of her garments caught from thee
The light of thy great presence; and the cope
  Of the half-attain’d futurity,
  Tho’ deep not fathomless,
Was cloven with the million stars which tremble
O’er the deep mind of dauntless infancy.
Small thought was there of life’s distress;
For sure she deem’d no mist of earth could dull
Those spirit-thrilling eyes so keen and beautiful;
Sure she was nigher to heaven’s spheres,
Listening the lordly music flowing from
    The illimitable years.
  O, strengthen me, enlighten me!
  I faint in this obscurity,
  Thou dewy dawn of memory.

          IV.

Come forth, I charge thee, arise,
Thou of the many tongues, the myriad eyes!
Thou comest not with shows of flaunting vines
    Unto mine inner eye,
    Divinest Memory!
  Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall
Which ever sounds and shines
  A pillar of white light upon the wall
Of purple cliffs, aloof descried:
Come from the woods that belt the gray hillside,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father’s door,
And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o’er matted cress and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,
    In every elbow and turn,
The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland;
    O, hither lead thy feet!
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds,
    Upon the ridged wolds,
When the first matin-song hath waken’d loud
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn,
What time the amber morn
Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud.

          V.

Large dowries doth the raptured eye
  To the young spirit present
    When first she is wed,
      And like a bride of old,
    In triumph led,
      With music and sweet showers
      Of festal flowers,
  Unto the dwelling she must sway.
Well hast thou done, great artist Memory.
  In setting round thy first experiment
    With royal framework of wrought gold;
Needs must thou dearly love thy first essay,
And foremost in thy various gallery
  Place it, where sweetest sunlight falls
  Upon the storied walls;
      For the discovery
And newness of thine art so pleased thee
That all which thou hast drawn of fairest
Or boldest since but lightly weighs
With thee unto the love thou bearest
The first-born of thy genius. Artist-like,
Ever retiring thou dost gaze
On the prime labor of thine early days,
No matter what the sketch might be:
Whether the high field on the bushless pike,
Or even a sand-built ridge
Of heaped hills that mound the sea,
Overblown with murmurs harsh,
Or even a lowly cottage whence we see
Stretch’d wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky;
Or a garden bower’d close
With plaited alleys of the trailing rose,
Long alleys falling down to twilight grots,
Or opening upon level plots
Of crowned lilies, standing near
Purple-spiked lavender:
Whither in after life retired
From brawling storms,
From weary wind,
With youthful fancy re-inspired,
We may hold converse with all forms
Of the many-sided mind,
And those whom passion hath not blinded,
Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.

My friend, with you to live alone
Were how much better than to own
A crown, a sceptre, and a throne!

O, strengthen me, englighten me!
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory.

—Lord Alfred Tennyson

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

—John Berryman