Fanny Howe

Second Childhood

Fear & hope are — Vision

WM BLAKE

Second Childhood

For the Book

Yellow goblins

and a god I can swallow.

Eyes in the evergreens

under ice.

Interior monologue

and some voice.

Weary fears, the

usual trials and

a place to surmise

blessedness.

The Garden

Black winter gardens

engraved at night

keep soft frost

on them to read the veins

of our inner illustrator’s

hand internally light

with infant etching.

Children booked

on blizzard winds

and then the picture

is blown to yonder

and out of ink:

the black winter verses

are buds and sticks.

Parkside

Stone walls and chalk scratches

for different ages.

None of us could be sure now

how many we were or where.

There were hurtful pebbles,

cracked windows

and bikes. We cut the butter

and the day’s bread evenly.

We were children and a metal bed.

Twelve loaves

and five thousand baskets.

Five baskets,

twelve pieces of dough.

Twelve times five and butter

for a multitude.

Bread made — that is—

with twelve thousand

inhalations of leaven.

My Stones

A pebbled island

is a kind of barge:

seaweed blackened

another glacial strand.

White quartz.

Some green mermaid’s tears.

(A cask of bottles shattered.)

That home of mine

lost four inches

to erosion and great white sharks

but we kept floating.

I even found bedside stones

to play with in the night.

A colorful set to pretend

I could now see Ireland

from Boston.

Evening

Christmas is for children

on an English hill.

Simple, dismal,

and blissful,

a few little balls and crystal.

Dark by 4 p.m.

but you can ride your scooter

up the hill and down

in the arctic rain

each drop a dimple

on a—

and a silver handle

in a drain and a boy

can stand beside your hand

at the window

of a store full of cribs

and tinsel

before an icon

of the infant

with the news

rolled in his hand.

Xing

Odense is in Denmark and where are we now?

In a flying sleigh en route to Odessa.

The Black Sea is steaming below.

We sweep like snow-crystals every which way.

We who? My baby and me.

Off to the left, the sky is fleece.

In our warm sleigh and north of Norway,

away, away, what fun we are having!

More snow coming, more souls.

Baby lashes the dogs with a strand of her hair.

Her round face is circled with ermine.

Between Delays

You’re like someone crossing a border daily

a person who is to itself unknown.

You’re like a fragment that can’t find what has lost it

or illuminate

what’s going on or what it’s seeing through.

Are we a child or a name?

John, John, John and John,

you’re all so far from me.

Each like a walking stick inert

until picked up.

A person, the first I—

with few verbs left.

Vertical even when you laugh.

For Miles

Sunset in DC comes at 4:56.

This is nearly the same time as sunset in LA

when the El Royale sign lights up.

Sunset in Shannon comes several minutes earlier in the day.

Sunsets in Hong Kong and Havana are just about the same but far away.

Sunset in Chile and sunset in New Zealand

are only six minutes apart on different days.

The length of today in Boston is nine hours and fifty-one minutes.

The length of today in DC is ten hours and seven minutes.

I knew there was a difference between cities.

Don’t worry. You didn’t have to tell me about the bulge in the circumference.

If the light is shining in the House, Congress is still in session.

Of course the shape of earth is an oblate spheroid

wider in the middle by very few miles.

Even here on 21st Street, I can feel the sun moving in Vancouver.

There are twelve hours of light on one day in October.

I only needed to exist to know that the sun turns around the earth

and everything else at the center of the universe.

Loneliness

Loneliness is not an accident or a choice.

It’s an uninvited and uncreated companion.

It slips in beside you when you are not aware that a choice you are making will have consequences.

It does you no good even though it’s like one of the elements in the world that you cannot exist without.

It takes your hand and walks with you. It lies down with you. It sits beside you. It’s as dark as a shadow but it has substance that is familiar.

It swims with you and swings around on stools.

It boards the ferry and leans on the motel desk.

Nothing great happens as a result of loneliness.

Your character flaws remain in place. You still stop in with friends and have wonderful hours among them, but you must run as soon as you hear it calling.

It does call. And you climb the stairs obediently, pushing aside books and notes to let it know that you have returned to it, all is well.

If you don’t answer its call, you sense that it will sink towards a deep gravity and adopt a limp.

From loneliness you learn very little. It pulls you back, it pulls you down.

It’s the manifestation of a vow never made but kept: I will go home now and forever in solitude.

And after that loneliness will accompany you to every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema, and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near your hand like a habit.

But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it.

It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself against you.

You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you made finally, when it was unnecessary.

If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would you ask it to go?

How would you replace it?

No, saying good-bye would be too embarrassing.

Why?

First you might cry.

Because shame and loneliness are almost one.

Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share.

Loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems to need a little more time on its own.

The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams

The monk is a single

and so am I

but which kind?

All of them

from young to wild

and the boyish one

(mine) cared for the weak

until there was no one

to care for him

besides an old woman

who lived as a she.

I became a penitent

sequentially:

first in sandals

then in boots

then with a hood

and bare feet.

Now night-bound, now nude, then old.

Another brother and I took a train with a view of mountains

floating in water

out of Limerick Junction

to Heuston Station where Wittgenstein

tried to discover emotion.

He hit a horizon.

“Philosophy should only be written as poetry.”

In a Sabbath atmosphere you stand still and look backwards

for time has ceased its labors

and no cattle tremble.

You can contemplate the peripheries

and for a flash see the future as a field in a semi-circle.

Everything is even on the Sabbath. The died and the living.

Each person or place wants you as much as you want another.

Towards a just

and invisible image

behind each word

and its place in a sentence

we must have been sailing.

Scarcely defended, best

when lost from wanting perfect sense.

But still, recognizable.

Be like grass, the phantom told us:

lie flat, spring up.

Our veils were scrolls

you couldn’t walk into

but only mark the folds.

I’ve lost my child at the bend where we parted.

We will never come back to that hour.

Let me write about the place again the path so sandy

and the table cloth blowing in a wind from Newfoundland.

It was here it began. She left her bouillabaisse untouched

and headed out on the train.

Sort of, soft, gold at sunset, turrets and sandals

were hard to identify so many copies.

Let me concentrate on ancestral faces

and I will recognize hers

before my powers fail and our DNA has been smeared

on cups and cigarettes, bottles and gloves, bowls and spoons

and replicated, sucked or kissed into the lips of strangers.

I have to pass through the estuary

to investigate breakdown as a trail of nerve-endings

at the beginning of everything.

Scrapes like threads seeking holes.

It’s a strange textile that serves as a road map.

This one did:

its blue led to the edge.

Where could a fabric begin and end except as a running woman

who sews and passes it along?

So I ran with it in my hands.

A kind of eucharist.

No break in its material from the first day on earth

to the Sabbath where all are equal

and the cows covered in sackcloth.

Where has my mind gone?

The bloody thieves

are very quick.

You may have noticed I’m naked

and sliced by glass.

Soon words will be disappeared

and then the Celtic church

and seven friends

I will not name.

One word that contains

so many:

dearth, end, earth, ear, dirt, hen, red, dish, it and

I must examine each part

then cut the ropes without a heart and set out.

The slide downhill on my back to a ledge

and the sea out there and a city

to the left of the mud.

The place they call an area

preparing for an earthquake. Under-shade and crowds

of hungry old people lining for bread.

One woman collapsed on her side

and another helped her up

and I was let into the bunker

by the best kind of communist.

There was orange vomit on a large cape over a large woman.

The hills! No bells.

I went down for what reason.

Not to enter a cell.

Luckily no one was white.

We discovered we were in a loft space from the olden days

that I indicated pleased me

because I couldn’t get my body out no matter what.

I paused long enough to encounter

a slender elder with the delicate posture of a Rastafarian.

The people were indifferent as they are to whites but polite.

The lean man showed me the door in colorful clothing.

But there was a huge blast from the building beside us

And we ran up rickety stairs to look at what

was now a structure speared with broken glass and stone.

A worker was already being transported on a stretcher.

We looked around at the mess then went inside to discuss

our love of failures, every one of us.

I hauled so many children after me

with ropes and spears and nets

like sea-creatures that others would eat

without them I have no purpose.

As in the Gospel account, I believed in their belief.

But now there would be what? For he, the little one,

was kneeling and saying, You must run.

The lover I still loved stayed near the door

so I raced off, you stood, when the police came

seeking coherence in everything.

The total machine of retribution presses on.

Regardless of a prayer or what a person did.

This is incredible.

We’re breaking up.

A Trappist led me around as one of him

to a ship heading for the country where they edit the best films.

There was a city on deck: residential with pleasing evening trees

and then a downtown area until we couldn’t tell the suns

from the portholes on board.

The ship would transport us to a staging dock in Iona.

I would lose my luggage from the twentieth century

(though its particles and buckles were forged in eternity)

and make my private vows to the creator

in every theater we entered.

Together we traveled in a boat as it filled with night-water

from the bottom up.

By night-water one means fear.

So the refilling is adding a sting to the salt.

Living naked

still leaves you covered

by a surface of wood, feathers, fur or skin.

Bare skin, blue skin: a muff of lambskin

over the ears where the thief can get in.

It’s lucky the mind freezes before the heart.

Back there is the string of mountains your uncle painted

and you lost. Out there is the clotted cream

on a raspberry tart that he couldn’t finish.

There is the goose and the blackbird, the brindled donkey

and the trap. They stand on the thin black thread of your lineage.

Your scissors are split, your fiddle is cracked, its strings are thin

and your mouth is dry, your clothes American.

No more rush of notes as if a window is open inside.

Only if you are insane or asleep

and the gods and animals

pound their way in

on a divine night wind.

Second Childhood

I have a fairy rosary called Silver who answers questions when I dangle her in the sun at the window.

So I’ve asked her if I have a big ego and she swings from side to side to say no.

We have other children for friends.

We don’t understand why we are here in the world with horrible grown-ups or what the lessons are that we’re supposed to learn.

It’s not helpful for us to hear ourselves described in religious, geriatric or psychological terms, because we don’t remember what they mean.

One cruel female said, “Don’t laugh so much. You’re not a child.”

My cheeks burned and my eyes grew hot.

I decided to stop becoming an adult. That day I chose to blur facts, fail at tests, and slouch under a hood.

School was my first testing ground. I misunderstood lessons, assignments, meanings of poems and stories, and misinterpreted the gestures of characters in novels. I was awestruck by geology but mixed up the ages of rocks. I stared and giggled, and refused to take orders and was punished.

Throughout my life I have remained vague and have accepted the humiliation it brought, almost as if stupefaction were a gift. I willfully repeat my mistakes over and over and never learn from experience.

Every day has been a threat to this attitude so I avoid obligations.

For example, last night I dreamed I was on an airplane that was open to the sky and a storm was coming from a hive of stars, and I wanted to sit beside my daughter to watch the wind as we strapped ourselves tight to the invisible seats and stayed awake in the air.

If we had been grown-ups, we wouldn’t have been able to see the stars or the storm. We would have perished.

So my commitment to childhood has once again been affirmed.

Read the signs, not the authorities.

You might think I am just old but I have finally decided to make the decision to never grow up, and remain under my hood.

We are like tiny egos inside a great mountain of air.

Pressed upon by the weight of ether, we can barely breathe.

One ego is like a spider clutched to a web of its own making.

It turns to enamel and hardens on fulfillment.

Many egos fill up the whole body, every part to the tiniest hair.

Some egos are like fingernails that have been stifled by brittle paint.

All egos have something impersonal about them. They live deep inside like viruses and unlike gods who play in outer air.

But this ego covered my face with spider-dust as I lay in my bassinet.

Today I keep seeing gauze of a crystal kind, another kind of web of a type that doesn’t harden but swings and shimmers.

It’s the web-hood of a lost spirit.

At birth a baby failure is unconscious of the shadow that covers her face: it’s from the success leaning over her crèche smudging out the color in her cheeks.

The failure is born to measure the shadow of success. This is the failure’s mission.

The secret hood around her face indicates her vocation.

The success arrives in triumph, and is instantly obsolescent, while the failures keep trying, failing and reproducing until another success is born. It could be centuries from their lifetime.

It’s NOT ironical but logical that the failure is the one who recognizes success and identifies its potential in her enemies.

She it is who keeps their egos alive with her tears.

She is their harshest critic, she who can separate the fraud from the living, the cold from the lukewarm.

She is still a failure, a tiny ego who can’t quite rise to the occasion of being. She is driven by longing.

And she has crazy rules: “If your whole body can’t breathe the air, your prayers are incomplete. No nail polish!”

I think the gods and goddesses were the last good grown-ups on earth. Once I saw them walking to a party along a beach and I could make out their shadows like a line of pines in an ocean breeze. They were laughing and calling to each other. Still they were always aware of their mortal children’s prayers and answered them, sometimes in the form of mist, sometimes with needles of sunlight.

The gods existed outside the ego-world though they were certainly jealous and angry. Now some of them are pots and pans and wax and marbles, balls and kettles, rope and puddles. They emit a crackling sound when lightning hits the ground, and give people shingles. Other gods have chosen to break out to heaven where they blend into pastel and ride comets once a year. Sometimes it’s hard to walk with so many gods bouncing around so I use a broom, rosary or cane to wave them away.

Progress

I have never arrived

into a new life yet.

Have you?

Do you find the squeak

of boots on snow

excruciating?

Have you heard people

say, It wasn’t me,

when they accomplished

a great feat?

I have, often.

But rarely.

Possibility

is one of the elements.

It keeps things going.

The ferry

with its ratty engine

and exactitude at chugging

into blocks and chains.

Returning as ever

to mother’s house

under a salty rain.

Slave up, slave down.

I want to leave this place

a postulant.

The gas stove is leaking

and the door of the refrigerator

stained with rust.

The mugs are ugly

and there are only two forks.

The walls are black

and soft, the bed a balloon

of night-clothing.

The stairwell sloped

to a dragger’s pace.

There are big windows

with blind-slats dusty

and gray. Street life

goes all night and at dawn

freedmen shout and

laugh outside the kitchen.

Where does life begin?

In the lamb or in its threads?

If a man is numb

beat him.

If mute, shout

Say my name!

If he’s still wearing

that coat, scream

Mercy, mercy!

and stroke it.

We drop the shadows where they are then

return to them

when the light has grown heavy.

You’ll take your time lugging the weight into our room

or stand over there in the shade.

We’ve never been too sure that we exist as the earth does.

We’re most at home in water

that soaks up the letters in our brains.

It could be we’ve been dry too long.

A spirit is a mess when excess spoils it.

I see them through the slats

and crack of the open window.

A cold rain. Leaves flipped

and palsied.

The river is brown near

the sand, loose banks and twigs

stick at the edge and a lilac’s

silhouette of a dog.

How in the dark hole can I hide

if I can’t get outside?

Then I won’t remember

what I did to deserve it.

That arch and bridge

will form a shape of repentance.

If I’m hanging,

then judgment has been passed.

And I am hanging

upside-down

head swinging towards the moon.

Years of inversion.

A face in a mirror displaced

by its position outside silver.

And so?

Next will come muscle,

a little grief but no shoulder.

You’re learning how to be a unit

with an infinite in its attic.

It’s not difficult.

Light is the last message.

Then white streaks like oil paint

are the first to appear along the wet railing.

The ghost was soaked

and swelled into a human being

so close to resurrection

I could see the genius

of institutional religion.

Examine your conscience

until you are a postulant

who has only one sin to offer God.

Soon you’ll wash that thing off

(scented by its parallel past) and pause.

What were your feet thinking in their hurry

to connect the parts?

Get the children to the other side!

What children? You were the one running.

There was never any other.

Now the sun is like a yolk that broke

into the corridor.

Sleepwalk through its gold

and you will see the original glitter

that lit our move to the lounge.

“I’m looking for a restaurant

with a baby spoon and knife.”

“May I consult my psychic?”

A long shadow will mean your back’s to the sun

and you can’t empty the space you occupy anymore

expecting to see another opening.

The moods of strangers

determine your day.

Will the driver be kind?

Please God let him be.

This is poverty, not just

second childhood

in a divided city.

But my thanks to the soul-heat

of the one who works the register

and shakes the bag.

Infinite nesting pushes all matter

towards emptiness:

child-nodes,

tree-droppings

with a root element of null.

None is always included

in every cluster

of children.

Nothing in nothing

prepares us.

Yet a fresh light was shed

on immortality

for me climbing the stairs

firm foot first.

Everything was in the banister:

crows on branches, crickets,

architects, handsaws and democrats.

Red moon at 3 a.m.

Why Did I Dream

Why did I dream of Mohammed today?

Through the folding sheets he expressed his relief

that his words reached no modern critics.

He was, he said, only a poet.

I think I know what he meant

like the Uzbek scenes

that make up that whole trilogy by Ali Khamraev.

The robot that Nebuchadnezzar owned

was hard to pull apart or analyze without ruining

each click.

A series of scenes that could never take place

might drive people to theorize.

I tried the night after

but woke up struggling with machines

a helpless elder with fingers too weak to bend the bits around the neck.

Flame-Light

In Anatolia (where I’ve never been) the saffron hills seem to border

an ocean and the orange car lights mime the same in the sky.

A hospital and autopsy room and the body are being ripped apart without respect:

A heart slapped in a bucket: dirt in the trachea and lungs.

A hospital worker was better than a physician to the body.

Good with her hands in a bucket

like a worker at the till in a supermarket.

She said we have everything in reverse.

As an example a red corpuscle flew from the corpse

onto the collar of the detective

who could name the properties in a drop of blood

and this way prove there is no God.

The Cloisters

You stand with the rest of the children holding hands.

Your little aunt with a fox-skin on her shoulder is showing you

unicorns in a tapestry and the words:

“Please wash and love me.”

Did she go to heaven when the membranes

of The Book were flipped

by the wind on the hospital roof?

She wanted to, and not.

Smoke from the vent gray sheets on which some days are written

flew apart in entropy’s tendency towards a disorder seemingly insane.

Angelopoulos

Pulpy islands streak the fog and unify the effect of gray.

Even electric lights have contours of shade

because there’s too much stuff from the recent past,

a gray glassiness behind every lens.

Silver is always weak.

Three church spires in one little city pebbles of rain.

Again, the electric lights: in a strand like citrine.

Globs of errors open for the two

gay guys railing markers over wet piers.

A sick flag buffers in air. Why is the boy dancing?

He’s white and seems to want attention.

But it’s the fatherless children the father follows.

Sometimes

Sometimes a twinkle

gets in my eyes.

It’s like a rhinestone

on a prom dress.

It shoots light

so bright I can’t blink

without tears.

If I pump my temples

with my fists

and close my eyes

it reddens in blood.

This is only one possibility

besides the metaphysical.

Sometimes it’s

a prick of sweat

or a word or a prophet

sweating at a bus stop.

There are gangs

who would kill to know what to name

such a gem because there is none.

A Child in Old Age

Every room is still a mansion to you:

you who wants to live in an Irish hotel!

To sit in a lobby beside the fire with your feet in a chair.

To stare at the other children seeking asylum.

Your brain is a baby.

And all the ancients are in it still.

Your heart is a channel

and a crib for them.

They rarely come down

or out in the light

but steer you awkwardly with their cries.

Your brain is still becoming

an independent being

while your heart always needs air.

I had an infant who was an orphan who lived between my ears.

Its sobs could only be heard

when it circled the pump.

How it hurt!

Another infant lived like an octopus fully exposed

with a skull like a bottle cap inside its thought.

It was the arms of my heart.

A heart is a mind that’s only trying

to think without an unconscious.

The tentacle is a brain too.

And its adaptable jelly’s

just as intelligent as human blood.

Sometimes you look into a baby’s eyes.

“Bless her,” you suggest to passersby

yourself being old and unnecessary.

But no one does.

Please, you beg. The tears of an infant can be bottled and hidden

for special occasions.

One drop on your tongue and you won’t ask for more.

You’ve thought this somewhere before.

Born Below

Born below a second time.

The shade of the first cast across and down.

Never shakes it off.

Her mouth.

“Don’t smile. It’s ugly. You’ll get lines.”

The shade symbolizes an object in front of the sun:

a blotted person

and subversion.

Her hand over her eyes indicates she herself is blocking the light.

Never the best.

The best has good taste and self-preservation, pride in property.

What will we do with the others?

She grows very little without light but stays weak

(and hangs at the apartment window

lacking attention doesn’t adapt).

She’s a midget in a mighty nation.

An eclipse of the face.

What could be the value of being shaded

in broad daylight.

Of being aged in the night.

Of learning the secular rule of life.

The Coldest Mother

I can only follow one stone through

to its interior: and I do.

An amethyst from Achill.

The stone is transparent violet.

Firelight plays with its color the way eyes play with tears.

It’s cold where east is north and the earth is flat

and a person grows old.

Equivalence — no matter at what distance.

The fluttering snow is at the mercy of

ever-increasing crescents crossing circles

measured by squares, dashes,

fish bladder, almond patterns, placenta.

The folks up higher know everything of illness.

I saw a child rolled in a cloak of snow

to kill his fever.

Irregular heart, aortic stenosis,

rheumatism, atrial fibrillation, vertigo, blood clots,

deafness, colitis and poor eyesight.

Scars on a wrist and internal stitches,

headaches, PTSD from winter accidents,

childbirth. Sorry, this is ordinary

stuff for a cold mother. At the end

she wants to live in comfort like a pearl in an oyster.

She can chill here in peace and suck on ice.

The sun is warm, the northern lights are curtains

blowing across the heavens to which I float.

Every faraway ice floe leads to fairies.

And every boat leads to material sciences.

I know about both of them

and I still believe they’re too much alike.

White icebergs float or sink

under the wings of Aer Lingus.

Bling wobbles on a window:

it’s the sun our beloved.

See the monk on the Skellig squeeze and rub

his frosty eyes

when he spots twelve swans

and a little girl

on a purple amethyst in the ocean foam.

An early scene

innerly seen:

random sprays

of snow across Fresh Pond

(far below freezing

in Fahrenheit)

could be a white man’s torso

who escaped a hospital

and shed his sheet and slid

happily face down on a mud-streaked mass

of ice. Could be cyclamen

with its leaves like violets

or refugee camps in Syria.

I must not lose heart.

It takes sixteen years for

a soul to cross the silvery ice

to the forbidden fields of grace

never knowing if it’s fair

to choose self-starvation over health care.

I was such a cold mother a mineral was a flower.

Dear Hölderlin

(for Maureen Owen)

Years ago in a migration

we each carried our own

rug and pillow,

telescope and strings.

Our tent was portable and able

to be dismantled.

It could be rolled

and stuffed very fast.

Flowers and grass

still grew freely and sea-lilac

had already cracked

the tarmac. So there was sustenance.

At the estuary nearby

two continents had split apart

and a curlew

flew alone and crying.

Carefully a book

would be buried

with iodine and wine

and food that doesn’t rot.

The cross is a good marker

for an avenue and white clover,

trampled where little

sweet pea is growing higher.

Down the hill comes a poet

with ginger hair, he puts

violets inside his hat,

herbs and water and says:

There was once music here,

a round table

and gang prayer,

and an exploding glacier.

Women kept each tent clean

until one cried,

I’m going to take care

of myself.

We heard her packing

the woods into her tote

like a nymph

managing a shipwreck.

After that, for us all

empathy was our only hope.

A Vision

Some old people want to leave this earth and

experience another.

They don’t want to commit suicide. They want to

wander out of sight

without comrades or luggage.

Once I was given such an opportunity, and what did

I find?

Mist between mountains, the monotonous buzz of

farm machinery,

cornstalks brown and flowers then furrows

preparing to receive seeds for next year’s harvest.

A castle, half-ruined by a recent earthquake still

highly functional.

Computers, copying machines and cars.

It was once a monastery and home for a family

continually at war.

Cypress trees and chestnut and walnut trees. A swing

hanging long from a high bough,

where paths circle down, impeding quick escapes by

armies or thieves.

I was assigned the monastic wing that later became

a granary.

Brick-red flagstones, small windows with hinged

casements

and twelve squares of glass inside worn frames.

From the moment I entered the long strange space,

I foresaw an otherworldly light taking shape.

Scorpions lived in the cracks.

I came without a plan, empty-handed except for my

notebooks from preceding days.

This lack was a deliberate choice: to see what would

be revealed to me by circumstances.

I took long walks that multiplied my body into

companionable parts.

Down dusty roads and alongside meadows,

and pausing to look at the mountains and clouds,

I talked to myself.

Mysticism “provides a path for those who ask the way

to get lost.

It teaches how not to return,” wrote Michel de Certeau.

One day I had the sense that there were two boys

accompanying me everywhere I went.

I could not identify the boy on the left,

but the one on the right was overwhelmingly himself.

Someone I knew and loved.

The other one was very powerful in his personality,

an enigma and a delight.

His spirit seemed to spread into the roads and

weather.

Silver olive trees and prim vineyards.

Now a rain has whitened the morning sky but every

single leaf holds a little water and glitter.

Mirror neurons experience the suffering that they see.

A forest thick with rust and gold that doesn’t rust.

I saw a painting where the infant Jesus was lying on

his back

on the floor at the feet of Mary

and his halo was still attached to his head.

And another painting where there were about forty

baby cherubs

all wearing golden halos. Gold represents the sun as

the sun represents God.

Outside wild boars were still roaming the hills.

Maize, sunflowers, honey, thyme, beans, stones,

olives and tomatoes.

Rush hour in the two-lane highway.

Oak tree leaves curled into caramel balls.

A Franciscan monk sat on a floor reciting the rosary, a concept borrowed from Islamic prayer beads centuries before.

Figs, bread, pasta, wine and cheese.

These are not the subconscious, but necessities.

People want to be poets for reasons that have little to

do with language.

It is the life of the poet that they want, I think.

Even the glow of loneliness and humiliation.

To walk in the gutter with a bottle of wine.

Some people’s lives are more poetic than a poem

and Francis is certainly one of these.

I know, because he walked beside me for that

short time

whether you believe it or not. He was thirteen.

That night I drank walnut liqueur, just a sip, it tasted

like Kahlua.

The inner wing of a bird is the color of a doe.

And the turned-over earth is the color of a nut, and a bird,

but soon it will be watered for the green wheat of spring.

Flying up the hill on the back of the motorbike in the warm Roman air was like drinking from the fountain of youth.

Umbrella trees along the Tiber.

I walked on the rooftops across Rome, including a grassy one, and one where a palm grew out of a crack in the rocks.

I was carrying an assortment of envelopes containing paintings and notes for my Mass but they could not be managed easily because their shapes were irregular.

Some had juttings, some were swollen, the color red was prominent. They depicted divided cities, divided into layers, not all in a line. A layer cake sagging under the weight of accumulated dust, dirt and now grass.

Each layer had been purchased at the cost of decades, even centuries of hand-hurting, back-breaking slave labor. Caveat emptor!

Broken columns, mashed marble friezes and faces. The triumph of greed

was written across my storyboard. The city was a

mighty and devouring creation,

a creature with a crusted skin.

Even in the city you look for a place that welcomes you. You actually want to be found!

Being found is the polar opposite of making a vow.

You are a pot of gold and not the arc of the rainbow.

When you sit down on a stone, face up to the sun, you can’t help but think, Mine, mine.

And you don’t have to promise anything to anyone in time.

You may be called to a place of banality or genius,

but as long as it is your own happiness that responds to it,

you are available to something inhuman.

Mozart sat at the piano for the better part of every day.

All over the world monks have lived in desert hovels as scribes, prophets, mendicants.

They are the extreme realization of one aspect of human personality

that tends towards lack of possession and solitude.

There was a hole in the roof of the Pantheon where

we were told

that the snow fell through onto the relics of Catherine of Siena

the mystic and onto the porphyry.

A man in Rome told me that a monkey climbed down a wall

holding an infant in his arms and in remembrance

there is a statue of the Madonna

on the very rooftop where he began his descent.

Alas

For you, what is happiness?

Black tiles and slant

of ribbed clouds.

A child’s rainbow

with a house under it.

Clothes in the washer

clapping all night.

Acknowledgments

Thanks as ever to the editors of Graywolf Press and to the staff and atmosphere of the Vermont Studio Center and to the kind people of Civitella Ranieri. For help along the way, my thanks to Rae Armantrout, Christian Wiman, William Corbett, Carolyn Forché, Isaac Slater, Richard Kearney, Elizabeth Robinson, Linda Norton, Carmine Cerone, Xandra Bingley, Lynn Christoffers, and to the exemplary life of Joeritta de Almeida.

I would like to thank the editors of the following publications that published my poems and the poems of so many others:

American Poet, The Baffler, Consequence, The Economy, Epiphany, Fact-Simile, Fire (UK), Golden Handcuffs, The Harvard Review, The Lamb (Song Cave chapbook), New Orleans Review, Pataphysics, Paul Revere, Plume, Poetry, The Straddler, Talisman, The Volta, and Water~Stone Review.

About the Author

Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including most recently Come and See, The Lyrics, and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. She received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement, and she has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. She lives in New England.

Content

Fanny Howe
Second Childhood

Second Childhood

For the Book

The Garden

Parkside

My Stones

Evening

Xing

Between Delays

For Miles

Loneliness

The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams

Second Childhood

Progress

Why Did I Dream

Flame-Light

The Cloisters

Angelopoulos

Sometimes

A Child in Old Age

Born Below

The Coldest Mother

Dear Hölderlin

A Vision

Alas

Acknowledgments

About the Author