MERCURY DRESSING To steal a glance and, anxious, see Him slipping into transparency The feathered helmet already in place, Its shadow fallen across his face (His hooded sex its counterpart) Unsteadies the routines of the heart. If I reach out and touch his wing, What harm, what help might he then bring? But suddenly he disappears, As so much else has down the years. Until I feel him deep inside The emptiness, preoccupied. His nerve electrifies the air. His message is his being there. THE FRAME Fussily ornate and merely decorative, Wreaths of fruited branchlets and fluttering ribbons Echoing the scrolled plasterwork On moldings around the mirrored Parlors where a patron Could straighten his collar, Reliefs embellished with glass beads To mimic his beloved's brooch, Rosettes cast in pairs and affixed with foil and wax, Then coated with gesso and gilded to seem carved, Or cross-hatched textures scratched onto the surfaces Of curling leaves and hammered for the fine matting Of metal with tiny pocked points, The crinkled foil of gold pressed down Onto the moistened bole For a burnished veneer That aligns the soft candlelight On the apostle's face with what Shines more severely from the Savior's fingertip, Is not the sort of frame I prefer to enclose What I should figure on as an allegory Of someone's sense of what he puts between himself And the world. I prefer the frame Whose entablature seems to shield What it displays, withhold What has been given it To help explain the mysteries Of the child sent to redeem us. From architrave to plinth, balusters upholding What the crested lunette oversees, the rigid Vocabulary of antiquity admits No distractions, nothing to lead the eye away From the perfected cityscape And room, where a sad pale woman Under a stone cherub The color of the clouds Holds something that she knows will die.
A friend sits beside her, peeling An apple. In the distance, three men on horseback Look up at her window, the darkness in a frame. A V I E W O F T H E S E A The argument had smoldered for a week, Long enough for the fine points of fire, Banked from the start against self- righteousness, To have blurred in the pale ash of recrimination. I couldn't tell which wound would be the deeper To stay on, behind the slammed door, Forcing you to listen to me talk about it With others, or to leave you altogether. What caused the argumentanother crumpled Piece of paper with a phone number on it Felt at last as lost as all the bright Beginnings, years back. And then . And then You were standing at the sink with your back to me And must have sensed me there behind you, watching. Suddenly you turned around and I saw in your eyes What all along had been the reason I loved you And had come to this moment when I would be forced To choose but could not because of what I had seen, As when the master of the tea ceremony, Determined to embody his ideal, Had constructed a room of such simplicity That only a decade of deliberating its angles And details was in the end required of him, A wooden floor so delicately joined That birds still seemed to sing in its branches, Three salmon- dyed silken cushions On which the painted quince petals trembled, A pilled iron kettle disguised as a sea urchin, Each cup the echo of cloud on wave, And on the long low wall, a swirling mural Of warlords and misty philosophers, The Ten Most Famous Men in the World, Floating at its center the gold- leafed emperor .
Who, rumors having reached the court, Was invited to come approve the great design, But when he saw.