Dear Lowell,
           Berkeley had its first fall rain
this afternoon: droplets still shine along
the plum tree’s wrinkled twigs outside my window,
at rest in their forks or clinging to the curled
edges of leaves dark as the Pinot Noir
pressed, casked, aged and poured from grape clusters
harvesting now seventy miles north of here.
Five months ago plum branches shook thick green
shadows against the pane and hid the shouts
of children out of school who dropped their bikes
below the limbs they straddled to take all
the fruit unripe.
Berkeley had its first fall rain
                I put on “Nessun dorma”
to remind me: while Puccini’s last
tenor aria overwhelms the soundtrack
of Jack Hazan’s film, the artist runs a long
stainless steel kitchen knife into his painting
— atonal soprano rasps from its parting weave
score the crescendo as his shaking white
knuckles lock on the canvas to tear through
the figure of his lover’s painted face
because it wasn’t true.
                         Later, he’ll start
over, darker hills from the south of France
for his background, and leave a space pure white,
its clear-cut vacancy outlined for the loved
image to fill when he’s composed it from
thirty snapshots taken one afternoon
in Kensington Gardens: each locks the boy
in the same awkward pose, as if the lens
looked and looked at its model, trying to find
and fix the one he looks for when he turns
so stiffly inward.
                      Watching the painter’s hands,
I thought how one I meant to love would not
stand still inside the likeness I had made
but broke out of that settled clearing to
become another person and swept through
everything I felt true like a dull scythe
over and over
                                  till the simple world
of darkened windows, quiet streets and sidewalks
quailed in the clear double ranks of slowly
counted lampposts, as if in their sharp line
nothing could hold its ground but took cover,
and what I walked in were the travesties
I kept in mind to people cryptic regions
only desire inhabited. Every named
and graceful thing they stood in place of fell
silent.