SELVES

The morning's dark with fog--gray, still, and dripping.
An unplanned vista's hard to come by here
except when weather is bewildering

like this. The trunks are gray stripes. Branches blur
over the road. The broad-leafed rhododendron,
almost black-green, falls to a culvert where

a cold brown creek is dimpling. Then a sudden
expense of space gives onto gravel alleys--
a huge shape makes the fog the color of sandstone.

The front begins gradually to revise
itself to lions and saints and mullions, while
a fanfare of imaginary hautboys

rebounds along the pavement of the pool--
a strict plate of curbed water, definite
and empty as an eye's colorless pupil,

where later, when March haze is cut with straight
edges of sun, the architecture's self
like membrane over the abyss will float.

A rational poise--otherwise, given half
a chance, things shift, dissolving in the rash
moments of reimagining. Wet turf

with grass thick as the bristles on a brush,
winter magnolias, sodden green-bronze leaves,
seem insubstantial, stripped out of their harsh

outlines. Murky and white, the world behaves
more by the blind ambiguous rules of touch
or smell. The cedar, oranges, and cloves

spill odors from the foyer--on the porch,
mixed with the watery, grassy smell, a smell
of sexual allurement. Through the arch

is entry as into a personal
story of sex and death. As if romance
had clarified to one particular curl

of hair or tilt of nose, and love condensed
to the shiftings and the odors of one body.
The heavy vaulting hangs with Christmas valance:

a swag of holly bobs, spotted with bloody
red berries. At the focus of the hall
lies Christ the Centaur, in the child already

two natures in consort, proportional
to everyone who orbits the expensive
porcelain crèche. The gesture chills the will

with reverence for the terrible and excessive,
a strategy resisting total structure
as being only a makeshift to live

inside. The fascination's in the texture,
the gray-green themes, the dusty rose brocade,
the parquetry and paintings. Architecture

is never given in the verified--
lapse after lapse through quick sensations, dumb
desire, or still more fragile love, but lured

by beauty. So it's possible to have been
godlike, elusive, indiscreet, unsphered
like planets falling toward the parent sun.

The builder meant his structure to be shared--
the comedy of repeated dressing-rooms,
the leisurely poetic magnitude

of self-expression. It's a theme that comes
across like a refrain in all the photos,
a brutal arrogance, or else a clown's

ironic diffidence. With all the clues
the master of the house remains a hole
at the system's center, an impresario's

posture, a chest puffed out, a hooded smile,
always just to the side, or just behind
the others in the picture. His hotel

is for their entertainment. Entertained,
the fugitive encounters are the clefts
between the definite, the heaving sound

of pauses in between the words. Mist sifts
eloquently on yew and boxwood, where a cupid
is pausing in the moment of the shaft's

release. A haughty marble nymph, bare-breasted,
dances with satyrs. In the wisteria arbor
the dormant vines hang from each other, twisted

hanks of damp hair. The slate slabs of the floor
rock and boom over unimaginable cellars.
Again and again the endless senseless labor

of gathering and poise goes on, prepares,
defers the irrevocable touch, the spread
of self through its dimensions and its cures.

The garden's end is indistinct, as wide
as milky air: a chest-high wall--the back's
a sheer drop into fog. Down there a broad

landscape, supposedly, a pleasant text
rumored, alluded to, as if in little
flickers of winter sun, unrolls through parks

and vines and fields of hay and dairy cattle
to a river where the water runs in curds
on a surface like a dented sheet of metal.

The geometric rock stairs mark off chords
on the descending terraces of gravid
low bushes. In the greenhouse the huge beards

of fern accrete like crystals in the fetid
air, arched through with lemon and with laurels,
profuse red bougainvillea, and the livid

succulents. Here and there people's initials
are scraped on cactus, with their fingernails,
like signatures inscribed on walls of cells.

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