Like Happiness

Today I am walking around our town,
down to the waterfront, up the hill to the small church
that looks out across the harbor, and into the chapel
with its wonderful stained glass windows
and its one clear window with the stunning view

where I sit down a moment to cool off and whisper
a prayer for the small scorned creatures, the ones
no one appreciates, the roaches and termites,
the fire ants and slugs, though I don't much admire
these creatures either and have trouble finding
the appropriate words. So I just sit still

and try to hear the seagulls way down in the harbor,
and listen to the pigeons in the rafters, as I watch
an old woman in black shuffle slowly down the aisle.

She leaves a trail of perfume that reminds me of something.
Suddenly I'm trying to remember where we've met,
yearning to make some sort of contact,
though she has her back to me, and she's dressed all in black,
kneeling now, way up front,

as other people enter the chapel, all of them
dressed in mourning, fragrant with that perfume.
So I get up and walk out of the church instead of crying.

Outside it's too bright. Old people are feeding
pigeons in the park; the cafes are crowded.

As I pass The Fat Baguette, someone calls
the nickname that defined my childhood, the one
I tried for many years to deny and then forget,
the name no one's called me since high school, and I look up
reluctantly from the newspaper I'm carrying

to see her, the girl I've thought about so often
all these many years, suddenly transformed
into a middle-aged woman, still beautiful,
sitting there alone, standing now and smiling
as she waves, wearing black, which makes her look even

more lovely, lovely against the sea
of bright summer colors, the tablecloths and flowers,
the garish tee-shirts of the tourists drinking
pitchers of beer and laughing with raucous
good humor, saluting this most auspicious day --

I approach this woman I once loved and tell her
that's not my name now, sit down beside her,
order coffee, and ask whose funeral we're going to,
though of course I know the answer. And she starts laughing

as though I've told a joke -- you mean mine or yours? --
holds up her cup for a toast to our health,
asks me my new name, who I am these days,
and starts to cry softly, like a whisper.

You wake before dawn beside someone
you don't recognize, a dark woman who snores
from her belly as though she were churning inside.
It alarms you at first, though you're drawn
to the shape of her ears, to her neck, the way
her long black hair drapes across the pillow,
and you move over a little, naked and cool
under the covers, you nudge her so you can
observe the other parts of her body more closely.
The room is still half dark, so you listen to the tick-
tock of your wind-up alarm clock, which tells you
this is the bedroom you've slept in for years,
every evening winding that silly contraption
she gave you before you were married--so you would
remember her love each time you wound it
and set the alarm. Or else it will run down,
she'd said, and stop somewhere in the middle of the night,
and you'll just keep sleeping.
But who is this woman beside you?
Could this be your wife? She's beautiful, maybe
as lovely as your wife is. And when you get up
and wander through the bedroom, you notice that everything's
just as you left it, familiar as your own
middle-aged body: the old dog asleep
on his towel in the corner is the same mutt you bought
for your children when they were just children; the house
is full of your children's absence as you roam,
picking up books and notebooks and trinkets
they've left behind on their visits. But it's still too early
to get up. You're tired. You should go back to bed,
lie down beside this beautiful woman
who will become your wife again
in a few hours when the alarm pulls you
from dreams back into the man you've been
for so many years now it's hard to remember
who you were before you became him.

Suppose, one spring, the birds decided
not to fly north, and the animals
sleeping in the woods decided this year
they’d rather not wake, and turned over instead
for another dream.

Imagine one summer the butterflies decided
to stay in their cocoons, or the caterpillars forgot
to wrap themselves up inside themselves
and simply gorged themselves instead
until their season passed. One day the tide forgot to rise.
This is only one way of speaking for the world.

Suppose the spiders stopped weaving, mosquitoes
forgot how to suck our blood, bees
decided not to pollinate flowers.
Suppose the sea turtles never returned
to the beaches that bore them, to lay their moon-drawn eggs.
Or suppose for a moment the rivers held still
and the leaping salmon held still in mid-air.

Imagine fire stopped burning things to ash
although it still burned. It was no longer hot.
Of course that couldn’t happen. So think of something else.