Halpern - Something Shining: Poems

POETRY

Traveling on Credit

The Lady Knife-Thrower

Street Fire

Life Among Others

Seasonal Rights

Tango

Foreign Neon Selected Poems

TRANSLATIONS

The Songs of Mririda, by Mririda n' Aft Attik Orchard Lamps, by Ivan Drach (co-translator)

EDITOR

Borges on Writing (co-editor)

The American Poetry Anthology

The Antaeus Anthology

The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories

The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of

Contemporary Short Stories

On Nature

Writers on Artists

Reading the Fights (co-editor)

Plays in One Act

Our Private Lives: Journals, Notebooks, and Diaries

The Sophisticated Cat (co-editor)

Not for Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating

The Autobiographical Eye

NONFICTION

The Good Food: Soups, Stews and Pasta (co-author) Halpern's Guide to the Essential Restaurants of Italy

AS ALWAYS,
FOR J EANNE & L ILY

The definition of beauty is easy;
it is what leads to desperation.

PAUL VALRY

Isn't he the man with crimson socks
and the slow loris climbing
like the hour hand from his shoulder,
over his ear and up
to the pale dome of his head?

The man's face shines with affection.
He's an honest man and his pet,
lackadaisical but not dispassionate,
is devoted and clear about the nature
of their relationship. There are times

to eat and times to climb, the two things
a loris is always in the act of.
As the man turns, nearly in slow motion,
the slow loris peers
from behind his left ear and a smile

begins to spread like a sunrise
on his face. A word
takes shape in his mouth as his hands
reach into the air-reach out
as the word moves forward,
a word of arrival, recognition hovering before him.

They are small enough to find and care for a tiny stone.
To lift it with wobbly concentration from the ground,
from the family of stones, up past the pursed mouth

for this we are thankful-to a place level with her eyes
to take a close look, a look into the nature of stone.
Like everything, it is for the first time: first stone,

chilly cube of ice, soft rise of warm flesh, hard
surface of table leg, first and lasting scent of grass
rubbed between the tiny pincer fingers. And there is

the smallest finger poking the air, pointing toward the first heat
of the single sun, pointing toward the friendly angels
who sent her, letting them know contact's made.

We believe their color makes some kind of difference,
the cast of it played off the color of hair and face.

But it makes no difference, blue or brown,
hazel, green, or gray, pale sky or sand.

When sleep-burdened they'll turn up into her,
close back down upon her sizable will.

But when she's ready for the yet-to-come
oh, they widen, grow a deep cool sheen

to catch the available light and shine
with the intensity of the newly arrived.

If they find you they'll hold on relentlessly
without guile, the gaze no less than interrogatory,

fixed, immediate, bringing to bear what there's been
to date. Call her name and perhaps they'll turn to you,

or they might be engaged, looking deeply into the nature
of other things-the affect of wall, the texture of rug,

into something very small that's fallen to the floor
and needs to be isolated and controlled. Maybe

an afternoon reflection, an insect moving slowly,
maybe just looking with loyalty into the eyes of another.

Who went to market?
Who stayed home?
This one goes,
this one doesn't.
This one eats

the flesh
of grass-eating mammals,
this one does not.
In the 17th century
Bash-delicate master

of the vagaries of who
went where
wrote to one he loved not of market
and not of meat

but something brief,
abbreviated,
like five unburdened toes
fluttering like cilia
in the joy of a drafty room

You go,
I stay.
Two autumns.

The Signature

Who knows how they get here,
beyond the obvious.
Who packaged the code

that provided the slate for her eyes,
and what about the workmanship
that went into the fingers,

allowing such intricate movement
just months from the other side?
Who placed with such exactness

the minute nails on each
of the ten unpainted toes?
And what remains

beyond eye and ear, the thing
most deeply rooted in her body
the thing that endlessly blossoms

but doesn't age, in time
shows greater vitality? The thing
unlike the body that so quickly

reaches its highest moment only
to begin, with little hesitation,
the long roll back, slowing all the way

until movement is administered
by devices other than those devised
by divine design. The ageless thing

without a name, like air, both resident
and owner of the body's estate.
But this thing, only partially

unpackaged, sings
through the slate that guards it,
contacts those of us waiting here

with a splay of its soft,
scrutinizing fingers.
Her spirit is a sapling thing,

something green, still damp
but resolute, entering this world
with an angel's thumb pressed

to her unformed body at the very last,
a template affixed to her body
when they decided it was time

to let her go, for her to come to us
and their good work was done.
An angel's thumbprint, a signature.

They turn up, no longer nameless,
their bodies clear, so nearly pure
they appear in morning light transparent.

They turn up and one day look at you
for the first time, their eyes sure now
you are one of theirs, surely here to stay.

They turn up wearing an expression of yours,
imitating your mouth, the smile perfected
over years of enduring amusing moments.

They turn up without a past, their fingers,
inexact instruments that examine what carpets
their turf, what they inherit through blood.

They turn up with your future, if not in mind
very much in the explosive story of their genes,
in gesture foreshadowing the what's-to-come.

They turn up with your hair-albeit not much
of it-something in the color, the curl of it
after the bath, its bearing after sleep.

They turn up already on their own, ideas
of their own, settling on their own limits,
their particular sense of things.

They turn up and we have been waiting,
as they have without knowing. They turn
into this world, keeping their own counsel.

When we are no longer the only ones you
come home to, remember us, too.
If the infinite stars of night
end up finite in sunlight
come on home, daughter, our girl, our first light.

Stippled, if you were after distance.
A layered sky, mackerel

a mackerel sky over mackerel seas.
The light platinum off the pines

and coastal sycamores, yellow foliage
and mottled birch like lightning