The Sign

                            *Giusto era il segno*.
                            – Montale

1

When lifers die, they’re released.
The doctor waves goodbye, the nurse,
the last important woman, cries.
The traditional clang of cups on bars
accompanies the lifer (and a guard,
relaxed for once) on his last walk beside
the cells.  Old enmities are forgotten,
like the decades-old original guilt
or protestation of innocence;
even the thought exhausted.
There’s a long-unaccustomed spring in his step,
ease in his joints.  It must be
approaching freedom that causes them
along with a new feeling: apprehension.
The guards are remarkably soft-spoken,
the man behind the wire window
patient as the lifer signs
for the box of belongings he came in with.
He recognizes the jackknife, the report card,
the puzzle, the lock of hair;
or perhaps he doesn’t but agrees
with the guard they may as well be his:
one must have something.  The gate
at the end of the corridor opens.
But the lifer is dismayed
by the glare.  It has the harshness
of a siren announcing lockdown;
the noise is like that of the dining hall.  And
the official behind the window
forgives the lifer’s lingering, perhaps
forever as he asks
if there was anything else?  Maybe a wallet?

2

The passive, the undemanding,
the frightened of life appear
obstreperous in memory:
they refuse to elect a symbol,
an epitome, but insist
each upon something individual.
An uncle dead for forty years
turns from his shrew
and leukemia to offer
a strained, familiar smile.
A marginalized kid who had
the locker next to mine mumbles
again to the pinup within,
but repeats the prayer this time
as if I should have heard it.
A girl who scuttled,
whose eyes one never saw, strides
not into that California suburb
but the desert it replaced.
At the time I thought I had no time
and, moreover, that I was alone;
that I had to develop a style
(which was not entirely a matter
of writing) before
I could return and do justice
to whatever deserved it.
And was right; and therefore
must reconstruct them all from little data,
so that all I can make
is a shroud, not a stone.

3

When we hear from Them at last,
it isn’t some coded
gift of cheap energy,
an invite to a party
of all intelligences everywhere, an intervention
or sneaky invasion, but their love-poems.
(Or songs – it isn’t clear.)
They seem to believe their poetry
is the best in the galaxy, that it defines all love
anywhere.  So that the scientists
recording it think
at first it is a theorem about love,
the concept.  Is it
one being’s work or the anthology
of a race?  That isn’t clear.
Much is unclear
apart from joy,
hot as a nova.  The villages (nests?)
along the route of the lovers
applaud and cheer (click?); they’re not much
for privacy, these guys.  There’s a wealth
of colors, but the scientists aren’t sure
which.  And as they climb the (hill?)
in full view of (life?), there’s
a sun for (him) and one for (her),
allusions to dark energy,
to visible and imagined moons
and something like us.  The translation,
tentative as it is, touches sublimity,
can bring a tear as long as one ignores
that what’s actually happening involves many
spiky enthralled limbs, and ovipositors.

4

The rabbis explain that Noah
wasn’t an absolutely good man, merely
the best of his generation.
Had a touch of the poet.  Which is why,
as he ordered his three (worthless, lazy!)
sons to keep the descent
steady and spaced, he looked
again at the animals and felt
how uniquely *real they were.
(Must be the smell.  He wondered if
he’d miss it.)  The giraffes
weaving into the distance,
the hippos hesitating
even before a universe of mud, the lions
and those who live by fear and flight
not hesitating, becoming
somehow less real as they scattered.
The dove (definitely unreal)
who had brought the olive twig had long
since vanished.  A rainbow
persisted in the drying air.
(You can turn it off now, thought Noah
privately.)  The prospect
before him would have daunted
a more imaginative man.
Mud, stinking puddles,
tree-stumps, here and there
a heap of sodden rags.  One seemed
to rise and approach him.  *You weren’t
especially good*, it said.
Noah was silent.  *I had
a wife and three kids. I paid
my taxes and the shakedowns
on time, baked good bread*.
Noah shifted uneasily.  I’m not
responsible, he said,
and nodded piously upward: He was.
*Try to tell yourself that
as you plough our bones and raise new grain
from our flesh*.  And it brandished,
laughing nastily, an empty
sleeve in Noah’s direction.
Couldn’t hurt him, but had an effect:
by the time the animals were gone,
the patriarch had developed a mania
for security.  Told the family
they’d continue to live in the Ark – make it
a strongpoint.  The First Building was a fortress.
If you seek its location,
here’s a hint: it isn’t necessarily
Armenia.

5

Unhappy families are all alike:
they have lost narrative.  He can’t
remember what the girl looked like,
only isolated scenes
like porn with a war-movie soundtrack.
His talk about leaving his wife and marrying her
retains in memory the warmth
of a divorce petition.
The rooms of the McMansion seem
like separate McMansions, distinct
pointless experiences; the car
parked on the boulevard outside (location,
location), a grinning, stupid brute.
The wife drifts shapelessly from room to room.
It’s hard to clean what isn’t dirty,
especially if you feel you have no hands.
His office calls.  He can’t remember
what he does, but knows he does it well and mimics
the noncommittal cheer he always mimics.
Then her office calls.  The son
contends with a hormonal storm,
that epilepsy which lasts ten years
exacerbated now by morons;
he yearns for success, independence, power,
his own liquor cabinet.  The daughter
suffers less, surprisingly, drily
imagining serviceable boys.
Outside, the snow of global warming falls
like the turbulent lust of middle age.
In the living room, the husband confronts the tree.
The star at the top represents hope.
A golden ball distorts a sleeping dog.
The angels in the middle branches wear
a simper that no entity, divine
or human, would put on for any reason.
This judgment lends him clarity, an anchor.
*What’s the true meaning of Christmas, Daddy?*
Well, dear, basically
a very great man came to tell us
that sexual frustration
builds credit in an afterlife called heaven.

6

For weeks, night after night,
I couldn’t see them clear,
and now am not sure
if I saw them first in childhood
when on an early visit the city scared me,
or later; or whether
the thing carved on the wall
of the enormous building
above them was a corporate logo,
eagle, hero, scales,
or a presumably more dreamlike symbol:
conflicted, hermetic, mine.
Were they the type who go
immediately from childhood
to manhood, territory, murder,
striking a terror equal to their own;
or merely hanging out,
relying on repression or support,
miraculously harmless and benign,
that miracle reversible in a moment?
I mean those youngsters dancing as one must
at the foot of a tower, whom I saw
with the doubt of one kind of childhood
that adumbrates a later fear
after the sentiment that comes between.
In either case the relief
carved on the wall of my dream
was irrelevant to them,
which is why the sign was just.