HOWARD MOSS

VENICE

Its winged lion stands up straight to hide
The source of pain: the reign of the unnatural.
One cannot tell how really false the real is.
One cannot tell how real the really false is.
Seen in one light, we apprehend the Beautiful:
The thinnest minarets of lattice lacework
Tangibly recovered from the hardest natural
Elements command our endless homage:
One doorway makes our human lives seem trivial.
In yet another light, a scabrous limb of Venus,
Dangling in rank water, rots to golden bone---
The swank and stink of the imagination
Beautifully gone bad. Its waterways re-weave
The only city that has seen itself
Reflected in the mirror of its very eye,
Made-up, each century, in vain for views
No one can now remember. How the painters lie,
Taken altogether, in their fabrication!
Even the Adriatic, static in its green,
Evokes no known sea. From the campanile,
One sees, face down, a short, ceramic fish
Glittering its red-tiled scales below.
Exquisite emphases and subtle losses
Make up its tide. For power, four bronze horses,
Brought from Byzantium, outpace the sun.
Dwindling to our shadows in outside salons
Where orchestras of afternoon rehearse our evening,
We sound the very history of fear we felt
Through all the shorter histories of fear we feel.
Is it true, we think, our sorry otherness
Is to fall in love with beasts whose beauty ruins us?
Those beasts are everywhere, though Venice says
Lions to be golden must be painted gold.

The Silences

1.
Now you are back at your window,
Where you live in a strange city,
Now I no longer see you,
Your face is slowly forgotten,

As you are forgetting to watch me,
And I will forget to remember
How lately alike was our wanting,
That wanting which ends in hurting.

Wherever you were, your presence
Still clings to all things in absence;
There is also the pain of touching
What you touched without ever knowing,

And the trees hold the rain in silence
As the rain makes the birds stop singing;
In the sea is a pool where the pressure
Of you body still seems to be moving.

Your body is still and is moving,
As I remove from each mirror
The frost where your face was reflected,
As if coldness could be abstracted.

Silence is pain. You hear it
Most when you cannot bear it.
Tell me if you can bear it,
Far body and near spirit.

2.
The air bears nothing on it.
No. But I saw this minute

You slowly move upon it;
Then there was light within it.

I see it now no longer,
That light when late we linger

Upon the shore, the distant
Sun growing less persistent,

The moon being not quite present,
And the stars still evanescent.

3.
Trance I have loved so surely,
Surely your naked branches have me,
I who have loved your comely
Body of branches moving toward me.

Night to sleep so safely
Even the pang of others' dreaming
Comes over distance faintly,
That is to be less lonely, only

What is there still rearming
The arms I take up in the dark,
The olive branch extending
Into an arrow's pointed ending?

4.
Moonlight is half of sleep
And the keepsake of the deep.

I plunge into sleep's sure crater.
Slowly it fills with water.

Your hands that can never reach me,
How all of their labors touch me!

Weeping at their occasions,
The seasons turn the seasons,

A sound not unlike the ocean's.

5.
The inward pleasure of water edges
Drifts as the shifting color battens
On dead wood, filling the golden pockets
Of fall with the falling brown detritus
Of unloved leaves as my eyes go searching
For faces among the stain of the going
Wood on an island filled with the samples
Of revived and reviving underpinnings,
Whose death under white fall soon is coming
But to rise up again in greening
Time. And, in time, the dead start growing.

6. 
Now I am back at my window,
Where I live in a strange city,
Now you no longer see me,
My face is slowly forgotten,

And the trees hold the rain in silence,
As the rain makes the birds stop singing;
My body still seems to be moving
That wanting which ends in hurting.

Elegy for My Father

Father, whom I murdered every night but one,
That one, when your death murdered me,
Your body waits within the wasting sod.
Clutching at the straw-face of your God,
Do you remember me, your morbid son,
Curled in a death, all motives unbegun,
Continuum of flesh, who never though to be
The mourning mirror of your potency?

All you had battled for the nightmare took
Away, as dropping from your eyes, the sea-
Salt tears, with messages that none could read,
Impotent, pellucid, were the final seeds
You sowed. Above you, the white night nurse shook
His head, and moaning on the moods of luck,
We knew the double-dealing enemy:
From pain you suffered, pain had set you free.

Down from the ceiling, father, circles came:
Angels, perhaps, to bear your soul away.
But tasting the persisting salt of pain,
I think my tears created them, though in vain,
Like yours, they fell. All losses link: the same
Creature marred us both to stake his claim.
Shutting my eyelids, barring night and day,
I saw, and see, your body borne away.

Two months dead, I wrestle with your name
Whose separate letters make a paltry sum
That is not you. If still you harbor mine,
Think of the house we had in summertime,
When in the sea-light every early game
Was played with love, and if death's waters came,
You'd rescue me. How could I take you from,
Now, if I could, its whirling vacuum.

The Hand

I have watched your fingers drum
Against each other: thumb against
The fore- and middle-finger. When
Tension leaves your hand alone,
Your face slides back its screen, I see
Such streams begin, such gardens grow
That you must hide more than you hide,
And I must know more than I know.