As It Begins With A Brush Stroke On A Snare Drum

The plaza was so still in that moment two years ago that

everything was clear,

As if it had been preserved beneath a kind of lacquered

stillness, &, for a while,

I did not even notice the pigeons lifting above the sad tiles

of churches,

Or how they must have sounded like applause that is not

meant for anyone;

I must not have noticed that blind woman on the corner who

begged coins

For a living, who had one eye swelled shut entirely while

the other, a thin film

Of glaucoma over it that had taken on the lustreless sheen

of a nickel,

Was held wide open to witness spittle on the curb. And soon

the band

In their sun-bleached military uniforms were tuning up beneath

the blossom of rust

Covering the gazebo, its eaves festooned with the off-white

spiderwebs of unlit Christmas lights.

And that girl, Socorro, her smile surfacing voluptuously as

an unspoken thought

Again, was selling gardenias—their petals already beginning

to appear

Faintly discolored around the edges—from a basket she carried

on her head

In an unwobbling stillness; Martin was selling chicklets but

no one bought

Chicklets anymore; no one bought the little squawking birds

or the cheap stone

Animals turned out on a lathe in Veracruz, either; no one

wanted his shoes shined.

By then the band was playing show tunes from My Fair Lady

& South Pacific & was

Interrupted only once because of a routine demonstration by

the Communists, who,

Mostly, were demonstrating because it was Sunday & because

that is what they did,

On Sundays. After a while I started walking vaguely away

beside some fading stonework,

Which in fact is not called Our Lady of Perfect Solitude nor

even Our Sister

Of Perpetual Solitude, but simply Santo Domingo. I do not

know why I walked near it then,

& passed without entering.

*

Still, in the painting the children kept skating, & the others

are probably

Walking home from school at this moment in their yellow

raincoats, with

The stale smells left on wax paper locked in their lunch pails.

That woman

Keeps brushing her hair, & so somewhere it is still 1970 &

the riot police

Are spilling Out of their buses. On the marsh above the

Sound there were egrets,

There were black swans nesting in the rushes; the canal was

warm, & salty.

There was a cabin filling with so much moonlight I almost

believed I could

Dissolve in it if I sat very still, & I sat very still. I watched

my son

Skating at the edge of a pond in his sleep. It was summer

by the time

I finally saw the painting in Brussels & counted each one of

the children as if

To make sure they were still there, & then gradually

lost count, & in the dream

Of the plowman on the hill there must have been the face

of an English poet

Looking as lined as a maple leaf pressed between the pages

of a book. Beneath it

The Danube is gliding, & I am just holding his book now,

not even needing to read it

Anymore as I cross into the frontier—green wheat, alfalfa, a

feeling of distance

In it all like sleep or rain reclaiming some lost, rural Missouri

slum town until

It no longer exists—& now the Hungarian checkpoint, where

guards with stars

The shade of American lipstick on their caps will enter &

seem proud of the unchipped,

Deep blue enamel on their machine guns. Most of them are

just poor teen-agers

From the surrounding villages & farms . . . & innocent, &

The only glamour that is left

On the Orient Express

Is a soiled, torn doily on an armrest.

Rhyme then, rhyme & dream, but in the other painting,

which is not a painting,

They are trudging home from school in the rain which is like

a kind of sleep

When one of them thinks the mind is not the mind in the

unbewitched, meticulous,

First shaping of numbers on a blackboard; it is only the

shadow of a skater over

A white pond. There is a sea beyond it, roughened by

whitecaps, & the mind

Moves first one way, then another, then both ways at once,

& then one long

Glide past the pines that look black from this far away, but

aren't black.

The boy's friend is saying he "hates school, but only sort

of." But the child's

Not listening, he is thinking that something he painted was

something he dreamt,

And then some of the dream got mixed in with the paint,

& then with recess,

The afternoon, this long walk in the rain, & now he will

never get it sorted

Out . . . In the story, the boy, falling, must have thought his

father had wings

Unlike his own, & real. That is why the myth is so clear,

& so cruel,

And why we survive it. Yellow rain gear. Black woods. Gray

sky. Home

Is where you can forget some things, the boy is thinking,

because he is

Tired from having to walk for so long & because he has left

his galoshes

At school & his shoes are wet as he unthinkingly turns his

back to me now,

Goes up the worn, slick steps of a front porch, & the door

closes. And,

Because I am not allowed to see it, there is a glass of milk

on the table,

The stairs behind it are dark, & from a narrow upstairs

window there is

A glimpse of the sea, & later, in his dream, there is sometimes

a father,

And then it is more like a story about a father, & then it is

the hush of ice

Over a pond's surface. In spring, when it begins to thaw,

there is a little

Noise underneath it like steel sighing, if steel could sigh as

it seems to,

Sometimes—when you are walking home alone on a trestle

above a river & there

Is a broken pattern of geese above it, a vee decomposing, a

sky mottled with blue

And some clouds. It is like a father dissolving, & setting you

free, & what

Has the father ever achieved that will outlast his own

vanishing? And so

The boy spits over the raillng & watches the silvery web

of it falling

And thinning until it is gossamer, a filament untying itself

forever & saying

Exactly what forever always meant to say—that this long pull

of spring tide in the river

Needs nothing, nothing except its one momentary witness,

a boy pausing

Above it all on a bridge.

*

In Oaxaca, after the bomb went off, there were nevertheless

a few seconds . . .

A pure stillness in which I could hear the fountain in the

plaza, distant traffic,

The sudden silence of birds. Then everyone was rushing

through the streets

Toward a place where sound had been, a place that wasn't

there. It is funny,

But the sound of a bomb, a few seconds after it has gone

off, is no longer even

Surprising. In a little while it seems only right, & sad. I sat

in the balcony of a restaurant

Overlooking it all, & read a poem by Alberto Blanco in the

magazine edited by Paz,

And waited for the place to open, & in the next hour watched

the plaza

Gradually fill with the usual crowds . . . those who love, or

those who think they love,

Novelty; & change.