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Heaven

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    THE MIND AFTER EVERYTHING HAS HAPPENED


    Perpetual peace. Perpetual light.
    From a distance it all seems graffiti.
    Gold on gold. Iridescent, torqued phosphors.
    But still graffiti. Someone's smear on space.
    A name. A neighborhood. X. X was Here.
    X in the House. A two-handed engine
    Of aerosols hissing Thou Shalt Not Pass
    On fiery ground. A shot-down Aurora
    Borealis. That raised areola
    At the tip of the tongue of I or Thou.
    Benedict Robinson, text me, if you know:
    If Hell is a crater to a crater
    To a crater to a crater, what then
    Is Heaven, aside from its opposite,
    Which was glorious, known, and obvious?


    KINGDOM COME

    Not knowing the difference between Heaven
    And Paradise, he called them both Heaven.
    So when he shrugged at the thought of a god
    Blanched in the lights of implausible heights,
    Thumbing the armrests of a throne, that was
    Heaven. And when he stared out at the sea,
    Feeling familiar to himself at last,
    He called that Heaven, too. And nothing changed
    About either Paradise or Heaven
    For it: Paradise retained its earthen
    Glamour; and Heaven, because it can't stand
    For anything on its own, like the color
    Of rice or a bomb, was happy to play
    Along, was happy just to be happy
    For once, and not an excuse for mayhem.


    THE ODYSSEY, BOOK 11, LINES 538–556

    The soul of swift-soled Achilles, hearing me
    Praise his son, silvered, and then was gone,
    His long strides causing him to blend, light-bent,
    Into the shining, maize-meadow cloudbank
    Shadowed by that one solitary tree
    It takes sixteen years for light, let alone
    A soul, to cross.

            The other dead, who thrived
    Though they had died, rejoiced at seeing me
    And sang, one by one, to me; and I in
    Turn said back to one after the other
    That the song that soul sang was a blessing
    And that I had never heard anything
    Like it; which was true, but also, I must
    Admit, they bored me to tears, tears that their
    Surprisingly still finite knowledge took
    As tears of pure joy from hearing them sing.

    Only Ajax Telamoniades
    Kept away, arms crossed, refusing to speak,
    Dim-starred and disappearing into his rage.
    All because of a simple spar of words,
    A mere speech, and winning Achilles' armor.
    Athena above and those men at the ships
    Decided that, not me, although it's true
    He never stood a chance. By custom he
    Should have been given the matchless metal.
    How I wish I hadn't won that contest.
    How the ground closed over his head for it.
    What a fool I can be. Ajax. Who knew
    No equal in action but for the one
    Man who surpassed him, just-fled Achilles,
    So capable of happiness despite
    All that happened because he washed up here,
    Heaven: this implausible place for us.

    Strange that Ajax is also in Heaven
    Despite ending his legendary life.
    In the end he's won, but he doesn't seem
    To understand he's won. Poor Ajax —
    As always, I thought I had winning words,
    And so I said to him with unreturned gaze:
    "Son of great Telamon, mighty Ajax,
    War tower, shake free of your anger.
    There's no one to blame but Zeus, and look —
    He is no longer here, friend. Paradise
    Has found you and given you an eternal
    Roof under the one tree of High Heaven.
    Zeus treated us so terribly, and you,
    Whom he should have loved like his strongest son,
    You worst of all.
            — But that's history
    Now. Come, my strong brother, lord and deserved
    Winner of all Achilles wore and was,
    Come, be with us here; let me hear the light
    Of Heaven in your voice; and let me know,
    Because I love you, how you (of all men!)
    Ended up in the keen of this endless berm."
    But Ajax, gift-eyed, said nothing to me
    And took his seat under the rowan tree.


    LITTLE SONG

    Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
    Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
    Then they switch. It's quite an earnest affair.
    They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A horn
    Blares its inner air to brass. A girl shakes
    Her ass. Some dude does the same. The music's
    Gone moot. Who doesn't love it when the bass
    Doesn't hide? When you can feel the trumpet peel
    Old oil and spit from deep down the empty
    Pit of a note or none or few? So don't
    Give up on it yet: the scenario.
    You know that it's just as tired of you
    As you are of it. Still, there's much more to it
    Than that. It does not not get you quite wrong.


    BOYS

    We'd cut school like knives through butter, the three
    Of us — Peter, Stephen, and I — to play
    Just about all the music we knew,
    Which meant that from nine in the morning till
    Steve's parents, the ever-patient Murtaughs,
    Would get home from work, I played guitar,
    Peter played bass, and Steve (who'd end
    Up becoming a guitarist by trade
    When we went separate ways, to separate
    Schools, in separate states), Steve at this point
    Played the drums. We dreamed of power trios
    And powered our way through song after song,
    Including ones Steve and I wrote — like
    "Hey, Regina" and the lamentably
    Titled "String Her Up." Sometimes we tried out
    Some Yes, a long "Hey Joe," the stereo phaser
    Was my signature sound, and I'd bend in
    And out of notes, imply arpeggios
    Only to solo over them, tapped, frowned
    Through anything in a major key, felt
    My way home on Steve's map of snares, Pete's rope.
    We'd play an entire Zeppelin album,
    Usually the first or second, then stray
    By chance into the longer, later songs
    Like bees that float down and drown in a pool.
    We'd break for lunch and then get back at it,
    As though we had a gig to get ready for,
    Or a demo to cut, the cassette deck
    Rolling its eyes as it whirred round and round.
    Peter, as is the nature of bassists,
    Held the tunes together and kept things light.
    Years later, I assumed he was dead.
    My Telecaster glares at me at night now
    From inside the hard case by my bed —
    And the calluses on my fingertips
    Have long since softened. The six-minute solos
    At some point became poems it took two months
    Minimum to make seem seamless. Steve
    In the meantime thrived in the Triangle,
    Became Stevie, married Emily; Pete
    I know less about. He posts on Facebook
    Cheerfully about the Light, the Great Light
    That glows in all of us, sends the occasional
    White dove in the occasional shared shot,
    A sun resting on a cloud like a pearl
    In its mooted gray shell. Nostalgia courts
    Me. I'm nearing forty, we were boys —
    And I should let us be. But nostalgia
    Spreads quickly through the ashes of our youth,
    Making ferned fires out of blue beliefs.
    When the dark would come, we'd show each other
    Our blisters, the painful white whorls peeling,
    Our red palms upwards, outstretched and unread.


    THE STARRY NIGHT

    Night frees its collar from around its neck
    And walks slowly past the two bathing bears
    Wading in the black stellate subheaven.
    They know nothing that's happened or that will.
    Their implausibly radiant malaise
    Deepening the starry night and its great
    Astral ambivalence towards small things
    Like bread and Bernardo's first glimpse of the ghost.


    THE EMPYREAN

    And then the doors drew back and I could see,
    Scaling up the high void, plum and pear-green
    Parapets, pomegranate balustrades
    Portioned by molten silver trim that
    Sizzled as it spiraled up and down
    The skied poles like boas scoured by lightning.
    No structure met them there: they just met air;
    Balustrade and parapet, unseen, seen,
    Floating where in principle they should be,
    As though they were the establishment, and
    Not the embellishments. I touched my face
    To make sure it, too, was still there. Felt for
    It as a frightened fish feels for deeper
    Water —. "Who the hell's Heaven is this?"
    I asked that half of myself I thought
    Might have recognized some familiar thing
    Under that star-beleaguered dome, that void,
    Where giants moved against the blinding backdrop
    So quickly my mind understood them as
    Moving slowly as though it were being
    Lapped on a track. This was not a Heaven
    Of my invention. And that's what scared me:
    That I didn't make it or dream of it;
    I didn't believe in it or buy it.
    And yet there it stood: the supreme city;
    Feral, spurned, and up on its hind legs
    Like a bear before a walker in the woods.


    THE BARYCENTER

    Alpenglow ripening the mountain peaks
    Into rose-pink pyramids steeped in clouds.
    How this light, like a choir of silence,
    Queues in the air to sing the snowy mass
    To shine, I don't know. And yet the chilled dusk,
    Remarkable and rude, runs rouge and glows

    As though the blue poem of the Earth desired,
    And became, the great rose poem of Heaven,
    With its champagne peaks and savage thickets
    And shrub and break and tangling bushes.
    The poem that revolves in two directions
    At once, circling us in two directions.


    MEASURE FOR MEASURE

    Alone in Woody Creek, Colorado,
    I fell asleep reading Measure for Measure,
    Right at the part where the Duke delivers
    His Old Testament decision of haste
    Paying for haste, and leisure answering
    Leisure, like quitting like, and (wait for it)
    Measure for measure. I saw it performed
    Once, in Stratford; I was maybe twenty.
    I only remembered the "measure still
    For measure" part, until now. It stuck
    With me. But the rest of it was wiped clean
    From my memory; all of Stratford, too.
    Still, the way the actor leaned on that half
    Line, "measure still for measure," as though it
    Were the measure of his self, measure still
    For measure, all these years, I remembered
    Being the heart of the play, its great gist;
    But I forgot it was a death sentence.
    Whether Angelo deserved such a fate,
    Or Isabella's ability to
    Rise above the mire, doesn't matter:
    Death, not beauty, woke me.
            My neck aches.
    All of Shakespeare feels like lead on my chest,
    Not for death, let's face it, death awaits us,
    Usually with less prescient language,
    But death measures us with a noun's contempt
    For our imagination, being death
    But not dying, making do, like when I
    Turn from the Bard, look outside, and behold
    A herd of a hundred elk, surviving
    The snow as they know how — being elk;
    An hour ago they were in the hills,
    But now they graze a mere five feet away,
    Their world othered by these austere windows;
    The massive seven-pointer, chin held high
    To prevent his thick neck from crashing down,
    Hoofs the snow and starts towards me, but then turns
    To compass the valley between his horns.


    NOTHING OF A BLUE REMAINS

    Finally, under thick cover of night,
    The snow fell, without wind, and fat as plates.
    Wine-rested, I rose a little before five,
    Cowed by the darkness of this quiet mountain,
    With lion and elk and pheasant roaming
    Eight thousand feet above any ocean,
    And that much closer to the gates of Heaven
    Smuggled somewhere within this small lark's mind
    As it sits patiently on a bare branch
    Hardly startled when I turned the porch light
    On. Something in me, something struggling
    Inside me, starts slowly now to feel soothed.
    But it's neither from the solitude nor
    From the barest blue the black sky became
    As dawn turned her silver key in the door.
    It will snow here for days. The air is whiter
    Than whiteness. Nothing of a blue remains
    But for two plump blue jays I'd failed to see
    Until the larks began on the final
    Tree spotted with snowed juniper berries.
    The runts scattered as the two jays
    Landed, then three, then four, then six, then eight;
    They had been watching the larks all along.
    Waiting for them to find what's there to be
    Found amid several feet of snow. The tree
    Bent but would not give way. And when the jays
    Twisted their thankless trunks to pry the dangled
    Dark scarlet globes from the tips of their twigs,
    They fell, one after the other, like blue
    Shards from a shattered stained glass. Then, the larks
    Came back and continued as they had been,
    Nibbling at what they wanted or needed,
    Indifferent to the interruption. Or,
    Were they the interruption? These are things
    That only the end knows. But the end, like
    All I've ever told you, is uncertain.


    MIRROR FOR THE MIRROR

    This night sky won't always be so Rothko,
    Won't always be something you've seen before.
    Otherwise, it would always be what it
    Was in sheerest separation of is
    And as: self separated from self, self
    Unparadised, as though there were a place
    Somewhere at the end of an endless bridge,
    A continent of light, called Paradise.


    MONDAY MORNING IN SNOWMASS, COLORADO

    The wintered trees shine white in the white sun
    Daydreaming of West Indian dawn —,
    Of palms that line the bright back of a beach,
    The mazy green hem of a paradise
    My parents knew as "home" or "here," conceived
    Me there to think their hearth far off
    From the Yankee blood in my heart because
    Geography is fate and here is mine,
    The winter, the nude trees like splintered spears
    Souvenired to earth by the fallen
    In the promise of coocoo coocoo coooo
    And, eventually, again, the stirring
    Bloom, and the evergreens down the dirt road,
    All one, up the mountain path, towards the sun.


    PARADISO, V: 91–93

    And, as the swift-shank sinks into its mark
    Before the bowstring has time to calm—
    So did we speed into the Second Heaven.


    SIN VERGÜENZA

    She practices in the mirror before
    She has to tell them. But what to wear?
    And which tongue to tell them in?

    One will curse, scream, run
    Upstairs, refuse to come down.
    The other will just slowly tsk

    Shaking his head in shame and silence,
    Silence crawling on top of itself
    And making more of itself in still more silence.

    With disgust saying, "This is sin, you know.
    And to shame us like this: ¡la vergüenza!"
    Then the mother, who'd run out as though she'd tasted fire

    But still wanted to be in the middle of things, booms:
    "¡LavergüenzaHijasuciaLavergüenzaLavergüenzaAimíAiai AyúdenosVirgen!"
    Trapped in two dimensions, naked in the mirror

    She decided finally to wear white. It's the burden
    Of our generations to repeat injury
    At times even before injury occurs.

    Sin bares las vergüenzas.
    And perhaps she will tell them
    She loves him

    Though she practiced saying to the mirror
    That she loves herself
    Without shame.


    LUCAS AND MARK

        I sit sandwiched between two Chuck Closes:
    Luckless "Lucas," made up of small fat dots
    Bursting against black-backgrounded colors,
    His unkempt hair, unkempt beard, unkempt stare
    Shot past the small bench between him and "Mark."
    No one in the Met has ever looked more eager
    To be at the Met than "Mark." Every pore
    And razor scrape happens. His bucktoothed grin,
    His out-of-focus neck and shoulders share
    The running joke of being real with us.
    Like Buscemi he is a look of love.
    His union-grade plastic frames reflect lights
    He alone sees. And now, in twos and threes,
    Fans pose with "Mark"'s huge head — the Italian
    Girls, bronzed in expensive peasant dresses,
    Throw up peace signs and then blow him kisses.
    — Meanwhile, "Lucas," left alone to brood
    On his side of the room, where he is real
    From a distance, instead of the crazed pixels
    He's revealed to be up close, drops his eyes
    Onto me, as though he knows I'm watching
    And hopes I know that he's really a man.


    THE BEATITUDES OF MALIBU


    I

    Walking across the PCH, we looked
    Up and saw, big as the butt of a pen,
    Jupiter, fat with light and unheighted.
    I looked back at the waiting traffic stalled
    At the seaside road's salt-rimmed traffic lights
    As they swayed to the Pacific's not-quite-
    Anapestic song of sea and air —
    The raw and sudden crick of crickets —
    The cars, suddenly silent as cows —
    And blue Malibu blackening like a bee.


    II

    A poem is a view of the Pacific
    And the Pacific, and the Pacific
    Taking in its view of the Pacific,
    And the Pacific as the Pacific
    (Just like that: as though there's no Pacific)
    Ends. A poem is the palm of the ocean,
    Closing. It or she or he is merely,
    Which means it or she or he is a mar.
    But a mar made up of temperament and
    Tempo — the red weather in the heart.


    III

    I'm about to get this all wrong, I know:
    Santa Monica behind me, the ocean
    To my left, Jupiter high above me,
    And Malibu somewhere in my mind, flecked
    With mist and dusk and Dylan and strange grays
    In the sunsets that stripe the seaside hills
    Like the tricolor of a country made
    Of beauty, the dream of beauty, and smog.
    Sadly, in my mind it's always snowing;
    Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here.


    IV

    Along the thin pedestrian passage
    Beside the PCH, just off Sunset,
    Mel Gibson chants of beginnings and ends
    And lies and facts — Jews and blacks being
    Both the lies and facts. His face is ruddy
    Like bruschetta. He storms at the police
    Because fuck them. He's wearing his T-shirt
    Like a toga. He schools them his toga
    Wisdom from toga times. He offers them
    His toga. They offer him a ride —.


    V

    Arun's car carried us like metaphor
    In a poem or painting; moving meaning;
    Moving the current; being the current;
    The terse tug of tides: still the great glamour;
    Still, even as we speed on the 110,
    The music in my head, the Jupiter
    Of the mind's unstemmed Pacific Ocean
    As it unfurls in the vapor trail of
    Malibu, fragrant in far-off fluorescents,
    Like a nocturnal flower calling you.


    VI

    Then Downtown LA and LA Live surged
    Up, like marginalia on a newly
    Turned page, spangled with bland suggestions,
    Fiery accusations of its own
    Brilliance that descend into indifference.
    We speed nearer and it grows. We veer and
    It grows. We park and it grows. Close your eyes.
    Now look. And it has grown. Yo la quiero.
    But I should know better, if just because
    You can smell the injustice in the air.

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Excerpted from Heaven by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Copyright © 2015 Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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