COLLECTED

EARLY POEMS

1950–1970

ADRIENNE RICH

W.W.NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK · LONDON

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

A CHANGE OF WORLD (1951)

Storm Warnings

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

Vertigo

The Ultimate Act

What Ghosts Can Say

The Kursaal at Interlaken

Reliquary

Purely Local

A View of the Terrace

By No Means Native

Air without Incense

For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard

A Clock in the Square

Why Else But to Forestall This Hour

This Beast, This Angel

Eastport to Block Island

At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand

Afterward

The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room

Boundary

Five O’Clock, Beacon Hill

From a Chapter on Literature

An Unsaid Word

Mathilde in Normandy

At a Bach Concert

The Rain of Blood

Stepping Backward

Itinerary

A Revivalist in Boston

The Return of the Evening Grosbeaks

The Springboard

A Change of World

Unsounded

Design in Living Colors

Walden 1950

Sunday Evening

The Innocents

“He Remembereth That We Are Dust”

Life and Letters

For the Conjunction of Two Planets

POEMS (1950-1951)

The Prisoners

Night

The House at the Cascades

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS (1955)

The Roadway

Pictures by Vuillard

Orient Wheat

Versailles

Annotation for an Epitaph

Ideal Landscape

The Celebration in the Plaza

The Tourist and the Town

Bears

The Insusceptibles

Lucifer in the Train

Recorders in Italy

At Hertford House

The Wild Sky

The Prospect

Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell

Villa Adriana

The Explorers

Landscape of the Star

Letter from the Land of Sinners

Concord River

Apology

Living in Sin

Autumn Equinox

The Strayed Village

The Perennial Answer

The Insomniacs

The Snow Queen

Love in the Museum

I Heard a Hermit Speak

Colophon

A Walk by the Charles

New Year Morning

In Time of Carnival

The Middle-Aged

The Marriage Portion

The Tree

Lovers Are Like Children

When This Clangor in the Brain

A View of Merton College

Holiday

The Capital

The Platform

Last Song

The Diamond Cutters

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW (1963)

At Majority

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

Rural Reflections

The Knight

The Loser

I. I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

II. Well, you are tougher than I thought.

The Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame

Euryclea’s Tale

September 21

After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge”

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

1. You, once a belle in Shreveport,

2. Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

3. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

4. Knowing themselves too well in one another:

5. Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

6. When to her lute Corinna sings

7. “To have in this uncertain world some stay

8. “You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

9. Not that it is done well, but

10. Well,

Passing On

The Raven

Merely to Know

I. Wedged in by earthworks

II. Let me take you by the hair

III. Spirit like water

Antinoüs: The Diaries

Juvenilia

Double Monologue

A Woman Mourned by Daughters

Readings of History

I. The Evil Eye

II. The Confrontation

III. Memorabilia

IV. Consanguinity

V. The Mirror

VI. The Covenant

To the Airport

The Afterwake

Artificial Intelligence

A Marriage in the ’Sixties

First Things

Attention

End of an Era

Rustication

Apology

Sisters

In the North

The Classmate

Peeling Onions

Ghost of a Chance

The Well

Novella

Face

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Likeness

The Lag

Always the Same

Peace

The Roofwalker

POEMS (1955–1957)

At the Jewish New Year

Moving in Winter

NECESSITIES OF LIFE (1966)

PART ONE: POEMS 1962-1965

Necessities of Life

In the Woods

The Corpse-Plant

The Trees

Like This Together

1. Wind rocks the car.

2. They’re tearing down, tearing up

3. We have, as they say,

4. Our words misunderstand us.

5. Dead winter doesn’t die,

Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York

Open-Air Museum

Two Songs

1. Sex, as they harshly call it,

2. That “old last act”!

The Parting

Night-Pieces: For a Child

The Crib

Her Waking

The Stranger

After Dark

I. You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you

II. Now let’s away from prison—

Mourning Picture

“I Am in Danger—Sir—”

Halfway

Autumn Sequence

1. An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,

2. Still, a sweetness hardly earned

3. Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb

4. Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

Noon

Not Like That

The Knot

Any Husband to Any Wife

Side by Side

Spring Thunder

1. Thunder is all it is, and yet

2. Whatever you are that weeps

3. The power of the dinosaur

4. A soldier is here, an ancient figure,

5. Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,

Moth Hour

Focus

Face to Face

PART TWO: TRANSLATIONS FROM THE DUTCH

Martinus Nijhoff, The Song of the Foolish Bees

Hendrik de Vries, My Brother

Hendrik de Vries, Fever

Gerrit Achterberg, Eben Haëzer

Gerrit Achterberg, Accountability

Gerrit Achterberg, Statue

Leo Vroman, Our Family

Chr.J. van Geel, Homecoming

Chr.J. van Geel, Sleepwalking

POEMS (1962–1965)

To Judith, Taking Leave

Roots

The Parting: II

White Night (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky)

Winter

LEAFLETS (1969)

PART ONE: NIGHT WATCH

Orion

Holding Out

Flesh and Blood

In the Evening

Missing the Point

City (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

Dwingelo (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

The Demon Lover

Jerusalem

Charleston in the 1860’s

Night Watch

There Are Such Springlike Nights (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molo-dowsky)

For a Russian Poet

1. The Winter Dream

2. Summer in the Country

3. The Demonstration

Night in the Kitchen

5:30 A.M.

The Break

Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova)

1. There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses:

2. On the terrace, violins played

The Key

Picnic

Postcard

The Book

Abnegation

PART TWO: LEAFLETS

Women

Implosions

To Frantz Fanon

Continuum

On Edges

Violence

The Observer

Nightbreak

Gabriel

Leaflets

1. The big star, and that other

2. Your face

3. If, says the Dahomeyan devil,

4. Crusaders’ wind glinting

5. The strain of being born

The Rafts

PART THREE: GHAZALS (HOMAGE TO GHALIB)

The clouds are electric in this university

The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit,

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

Did you think I was talking about my life?

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon.

When your sperm enters me, it is altered;

The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature.

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

A dead mosquito, flattened against a door;

So many minds in search of bodies

The order of the small town on the riverbank,

If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

From here on, all of us will be living

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

THE WILL TO CHANGE (1971)

November 1968

Study of History

Planetarium

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, . . .

2. To imagine a time of silence

3. “People suffer highly in poverty . . .

4. We lie under the sheet

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, . . .

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

The Blue Ghazals

Violently asleep in the old house.

One day of equinoctial light after another,

A man, a woman, a city.

Ideas of order . . . Sinner of the Florida keys,

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,

There are days when I seem to have nothing

Frost, burning. The city’s ill.

Pain made her conservative.

Pierrot Le Fou

1. Suppose you stood facing

2. On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.

3. Suppose we had time

4. The island blistered our feet.

5. When I close my eyes

6. To record

Letters: March 1969

1. Foreknown. The victor

2. Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

3. “I am up at sunrise

4. Six months back

Pieces

1. Breakpoint

2. Relevance

3. Memory

4. Time and Place

5. Revelation

Our Whole Life

Your Letter

Stand Up

The Stelae

Snow

The Will to Change

1. That Chinese restaurant was a joke

2. Knocked down in the canefield

3. Beardless again, phoning

4. At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes

5. The cabdriver from the Bronx

The Photograph of the Unmade Bed

Images for Godard

1. Language as city:: Wittgenstein

2. To know the extremes of light

3. To love, to move perpetually

4. At the end of Alphaville

5. Interior monologue of the poet:

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Shooting Script

Part I: 11/69-2/70

1. We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

2. Ghazal V (adapted from Mirza Ghalib)

3. The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up.

4. In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning.

5. Of simple choice they are the villagers; . . .

6. You are beside me like a wall; . . .

7. Picking the wax to crumbs . . .

Part II: 3-7/70

8. A woman waking behind grimed blinds . . .

9. (Newsreel)

10. They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

11. The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.

12. I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.

13. We are driven to odd attempts; ...

14. Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier ...

POEMS (1969)

The Days: Spring

Tear Gas

NOTES

INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

FOREWORD

This edition contains all the poems included in my first six books, from A Change of World (1951) to The Will to Change (1971). A few previously uncollected poems of this period, which appeared in The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950–1984, are also included. I have made no revisions since those few noted in that collection. Notes to the poems are consolidated from all the books.

The one book from which I was tempted to delete poems is The Diamond Cutters, my second volume. It received much praise; but too many of the poems were, at best, facile and ungrounded imitations of other poets—Elinor Wylie, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, even English Georgian poets—exercises in style. I have let them stand, however, rather than deny what I then saw fit to publish. Many of the poems in The Diamond Cutters seem to me now a last-ditch effort to block, with assimilation and technique, the undervoice of my own poetry. With the poems in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), I began trying, to the best of my ability, to face the hard questions of poetry and experience.

The word “change” occurs in the titles of both the first and last books in this collection and in the first and the last poems. “Storm Warnings” is a poem about powerlessness—about a force so much greater than our human powers that while it can be measured and even predicted, it is beyond human control. All “we” can do is create an interior space against the storm, an enclave of self-protection, though the winds of change still penetrate keyholes and “unsealed apertures.”

Nothing in the scene of this poem suggests that it was written in the early days of the Cold War, within a twenty year old’s earshot of World War II, at the end of the decade of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a climate of public fatalism about World War III. The poet assumes that change is to be averted if it can be, defended against if it must come. (An enormous military-industrial complex, now inextricable from government, was even then being erected in the name of “defense.” The Left was beleaguered and in tatters; the new wave of the African-American movement toward full citizenship had not yet begun.) “Change” here means unpredictability, unrest, menace—not something “we” might desire and even help bring to pass.

My generation of North Americans had learned, at sixteen, about the death camps and the possibility of total human self-extinction through nuclear war. Still, at twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics. At college in the late 1940s, I sat in classes with World War II vets on the G.I. Bill of Rights; I knew women who campaigned for Henry Wallace’s Progressive party, picketed a local garment factory, founded a college NAACP chapter, were recent refugees from Nazism. I had no political ideas of my own, only the era’s vague and hallucinatory anti-Communism and the encroaching privatism of the 1950s. Drenched in invisible assumptions of my class and race, unable to fathom the pervasive ideology of gender, I felt “politics” as distant, vaguely sinister, the province of powerful older men or of people I saw as fanatics. It was in poetry that I sought a grasp on the world and on interior events, “ideas of order,” even power.

I was like someone walking through a fogged-in city, compelled on an errand she cannot describe, carrying maps she cannot use except in neighborhoods already familiar. But the errand lies outside those neighborhoods. I was someone holding one end of a powerful connector, useless without the other end. Elsewhere, I have tried to describe some of the forces that catalyzed these poems as they catalyzed the life I was living over those twenty years.*

I began dating poems in 1954. I had come to the end of the kind of poetry I had collected in The Diamond Cutters and felt embarked on a process that was precarious and exploratory; I needed to allow the poems to acknowledge their moment. From Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law on, as far as possible (some poems having been written over two or three years), I have arranged my books in chronological order as the poems were written. For my first two books, I cannot remember chronology; I do know that “Storm Warnings” was written in 1949, “Tear Gas,” the last poem in this collection (uncollected until The Fact of a Doorframe), in 1969. But some of the poems in A Change of World were written as early as 1947–1948, and the last few poems in The Will to Change in 1970. I have therefore settled on 1950–1970 as the essential time frame for Collected Early Poems.

* See “When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979) and “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986).

A CHANGE OF

WORLD

(1951)

For Theodore Morrison

STORM WARNINGS

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,

And knowing better than the instrument

What winds are walking overhead, what zone

Of gray unrest is moving across the land,

I leave the book upon a pillowed chair

And walk from window to closed window, watching

Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air

Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,

How with a single purpose time has traveled

By secret currents of the undiscerned

Into this polar realm. Weather abroad

And weather in the heart alike come on

Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change

Lies all the mastery of elements

Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.

Time in the hand is not control of time,

Nor shattered fragments of an instrument

A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,

We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black

And set a match to candles sheathed in glass

Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine

Of weather through the unsealed aperture.

This is our sole defense against the season;

These are the things that we have learned to do

Who live in troubled regions.

AUNT JENNIFER’S TIGERS

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

They do not fear the men beneath the tree;

They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.

The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band

Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

VERTIGO

As for me, I distrust the commonplace;

Demand and am receiving marvels, signs,

Miracles wrought in air, acted in space

After imagination’s own designs.

The lion and the tiger pace this way

As often as I call; the flight of wings

Surprises empty air, while out of clay

The golden-gourded vine unwatered springs.

I have inhaled impossibility,

And walk at such an angle, all the stars

Have hung their carnival chains of light for me:

There is a streetcar runs from here to Mars.

I shall be seeing you, my darling, there,

Or at the burning bush in Harvard Square.

THE ULTIMATE ACT

What if the world’s corruption nears,

The consequence they dare not name?

We shall but realize our fears

And having tasted them go on,

Neither from hope of grace nor fame,

Delivered from remorse and shame,

And do the things left to be done

For no sake other than their own.

The quarry shall be stalked and won,

The bed invaded, and the game

Played till the roof comes tumbling down

And win or lose are all the same.

Action at such a pitch shall flame

Only beneath a final sun.

WHAT GHOSTS CAN SAY

When Harry Wylie saw his father’s ghost,

As bearded and immense as once in life,

Bending above his bed long after midnight,

He screamed and gripped the corner of the pillow

Till aunts came hurrying white in dressing gowns

To say it was a dream. He knew they lied.

The smell of his father’s leather riding crop

And stale tobacco stayed to prove it to him.

Why should there stay such tokens of a ghost

If not to prove it came on serious business?

His father always had meant serious business,

But never so wholly in his look and gesture

As when he beat the boy’s uncovered thighs

Calmly and resolutely, at an hour

When Harry never had been awake before.

The man who could choose that single hour of night

Had in him the ingredients of a ghost;

Mortality would quail at such a man.

An older Harry lost his childish notion

And only sometimes wondered if events

Could echo thus long after in a dream.

If so, it surely meant they had a meaning.

But why the actual punishment had fallen,

For what offense of boyhood, he could try

For years and not unearth. What ghosts can say—

Even the ghosts of fathers—comes obscurely.

What if the terror stays without the meaning?

THE KURSAAL AT

INTERLAKEN

Here among tables lit with bottled tapers

The violins are tuning for the evening

Against the measured “Faites vos jeux,” the murmur,

Rising and falling, from the gaming rooms.

The waiters skim beneath the ornate rafters

Where lanterns swing like tissue-paper bubbles.

The tables fill, the bottled candles drip,

The gaming wheels spin in the long salon,

And operetta waltzes gild the air

With the capricious lilt of costume music.

You will perhaps make love to me this evening,

Dancing among the circular green tables

Or where the clockwork tinkle of the fountain

Sounds in the garden’s primly pebbled arbors.

Reality is no stronger than a waltz,

A painted lake stippled with boats and swans,

A glass of gold-brown beer, a phrase in German

Or French, or any language but our own.

Reality would call us less than friends,

And therefore more adept at making love.

What is the world, the violins seem to say,

But windows full of bears and music boxes,

Chocolate gnomes and water-color mountains,

And calendars of French and German days—

Sonntag and vendredi, unreal dimensions,

Days where we speak all languages but our own?

So in this evening of a mythical summer

We shall believe all flowers are edelweiss,

All bears hand-carved, all kisses out of time,

Caught in the spinning vertigo of a waltz.

The fringe of foam clings lacelike to your glass,

And now that midnight draws with Swiss perfection

The clock’s two hands into a single gesture,

Shall we pursue this mood into the night,

Play this charade out in the silver street

Where moonlight pours a theme by Berlioz?

If far from breath of ours, indifferent, frozen,

The mountain like a sword against the night

Catches a colder silver, draws our sight,

What is she but a local tour de force?

The air is bright with after-images.

The lanterns and the twinkling glasses dwindle,

The waltzes and the croupiers’ voices crumble,

The evening folds like a kaleidoscope.

Against the splinters of a reeling landscape

This image still pursues us into time:

Jungfrau, the legendary virgin spire,

Consumes the mind with mingled snow and fire.

RELIQUARY

The bones of saints are praised above their flesh,

That pale rejected garment of their lives

In which they walked despised, uncanonized.

Brooding upon the marble bones of time

Men read strange sanctity in lost events,

Hold requiem mass for murdered yesterdays,

And in the dust of actions once reviled

Find symbols traced, and freeze them into stone.

PURELY LOCAL

Beside this door a January tree

Answers a few days’ warmth with shoots of green;

And knowing what the winds must do, I see

A hint of something human in the scene.

No matter how the almanacs have said

Hold back, distrust a purely local May,

When did we ever learn to be afraid?

Why are we scarred with winter’s thrust today?

A VIEW OF THE TERRACE

Under the green umbrellas

Drinking golden tea,

There sit the porcelain people

Who care for you but little

And not at all for me.

The afternoon in crinkles

Lies stiffly on the lawn

And we, two furtive exiles,

Watch from an upper window

With shutters not quite drawn.

The gilt and scalloped laughter

Reaches us through a glaze,

And almost we imagine

That if we threw a pebble

The shining scene would craze.

But stones are thrown by children,

And we by now too wise

To try again to splinter

The bright enamel people

Impervious to surprise.

BY NO MEANS NATIVE

“Yonder,” they told him, “things are not the same.”

He found it understated when he came.

His tongue, in hopes to find itself at home,

Caught up the twist of every idiom.

He learned the accent and the turn of phrase,

Studied like Latin texts the local ways.

He tasted till his palate knew their shape

The country’s proudest bean, its master grape.

He never talked of fields remembered green,

Or seasons in his land of origin.

And still he felt there lay a bridgeless space

Between himself and natives of the place.

Their laughter came when his had long abated;

He struggled in allusions never stated.

The truth at last cried out to be confessed:

He must remain eternally a guest,

Never to wear the birthmark of their ways.

He could be studying native all his days

And die a kind of minor alien still.

He might deceive himself by force of will,

Feel all the sentiments and give the sign,

Yet never overstep that tenuous line.

What else then? Wear the old identity,

The mark of other birth, and when you die,

Die as an exile? it has done for some.

Others surrender, book their passage home,

Only to seek their exile soon again,

No greater strangers than their countrymen.

Yet man will have his bondage to some place;

If not, he seeks an Order, or a race.

Some join the Masons, some embrace the Church,

And if they do, it does not matter much.

As for himself, he joined the band of those

Who pick their fruit no matter where it grows,

And learn to like it sweet or like it sour

Depending on the orchard or the hour.

By no means native, yet somewhat in love

With things a native is enamored of—

Except the sense of being held and owned

By one ancestral patch of local ground.

AIR WITHOUT INCENSE

We eat this body and remain ourselves.

We drink this liquor, tasting wine, not blood.

Among these triple icons, rites of seven,

We know the feast to be of earth, not heaven:

Here man is wounded, yet we speak of God.

More than the Nazarene with him was laid

Into the tomb, and in the tomb has stayed.

Communion of no saints, mass without bell,

Air without incense, we implore at need.

There are questions to be answered, and the sky

Answers no questions, hears no litany.

We breathe the vapors of a sickened creed.

Ours are assassins deadlier than sin;

Deeper disorders starve the soul within.

If any writ could tell us, we would read.

If any ghost dared lay on us a claim,

Our fibers would respond, our nerves obey;

But revelation moves apart today

From gestures of a tired pontifical game.

We seek, where lamp and kyrie expire,

A site unscourged by wasting tongues of fire.

FOR THE FELLING OF AN ELM

IN THE HARVARD YARD

They say the ground precisely swept

No longer feeds with rich decay

The roots enormous in their age

That long and deep beneath have slept.

So the great spire is overthrown,

And sharp saws have gone hurtling through

The rings that three slow centuries wore;

The second oldest elm is down.

The shade where James and Whitehead strolled

Becomes a litter on the green.

The young men pause along the paths

To see the axes glinting bold.

Watching the hewn trunk dragged away,

Some turn the symbol to their own,

And some admire the clean dispatch

With which the aged elm came down.

A CLOCK IN THE SQUARE

This handless clock stares blindly from its tower,

Refusing to acknowledge any hour.

But what can one clock do to stop the game

When others go on striking just the same?

Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,

Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,

Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing

From all the restless ways we must be going

And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,

Whether around a clockface or a world.

WHY ELSE BUT TO FORESTALL

THIS HOUR

Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed

Out of the noonday sun, kept from the rain,

Swam only in familiar depths, and played

No hand where caution signaled to refrain?

For fourteen friends I walked behind the bier;

A score of cousins wilted in my sight.

I heard the steeples clang for each new year,

Then drew my shutters close against the night.

Bankruptcy fell on others like a dew;

Spendthrifts of life, they all succumbed and fled.

I did not chide them with the things I knew:

Smiling, I passed the almshouse of the dead.

I am the man who has outmisered death,

In pains and cunning laid my seasons by.

Now I must toil to win each hour and breath;

I am too full of years to reason why.

THIS BEAST, THIS ANGEL

No: this, my love, is neither you nor I.

This is the beast or angel, changing form,

The will that we are scourged and nourished by.

The golden fangs, the tall seraphic sword,

Alike unsheathed, await the midnight cry,

Blazon their answer to the stammered word.

Beneath this gaze our powers are fused as one;

We meet these eyes under the curve of night.

This is the transformation that is done

Where mortal forces slay mortality

And, towering at terrible full height,

This beast, this angel is both you and I.

EASTPORT TO BLOCK ISLAND

Along the coastal waters, signals run

In waves of caution and anxiety.

We’ll try the catboat out another day.

So Danny stands in sea-grass by the porch

To watch a heeling dinghy, lone on grey,

Grapple with moods of wind that take the bay.

One year we walked among the shipwrecked shingles

Of storm-crazed cottages along the dune.

Rosa Morelli found her husband’s boat

Ruined on the rocks; she never saw him dead,

And after seven years of stubborn hope

Began to curse the sight of things afloat.

The mother of the Kennedy boys is out

Stripping the Monday burden from the line

And looking for a rowboat round the headland.

Wonder if they stopped for bait at Mory’s

And if the old man made them understand

This is a day for boys to stay on land?

Small craft, small craft, stay in and wait for tidings.

The word comes in with every hour of wind.

News of a local violence pricks the air,

And we who have seen the kitchen blown away,

Or Harper’s children washed from sight, prepare

As usual in these parts for foul, not fair.

AT A DEATHBED IN THE

YEAR TWO THOUSAND

I bid you cast out pity.

No more of that: let be

Impotent grief and mourning.

How shall a man break free

From this deathwatch of earth,

This world estranged from mirth?

Show me gay faces only.

I call for pride and wit—

Men who remember laughter,

Brave jesters to befit

An age that would destroy

Its last outpost of joy.

No longer condolence

And wailing on the tongue.

An old man bids you laugh;

This text I leave the young:

Your rage and loud despair

But shake a crumbling stair.

Laughter is what men learn

At seventy years or more,

Weary of being stern

Or violent as before.

Laughter to us is left

To light that darkening rift

Where little time is with us,

Let us enact again

Not Oedipus but The Clouds.

Summon the players in.

Be proud on a sorry earth:

Bring on the men of mirth.

AFTERWARD

Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand

At last believing and resigned,

And none of us who touch your hand

Know how to give you back in kind

The words you flung when hopes were proud:

Being born to happiness

Above the asking of the crowd,

You would not take a finger less.

We who know limits now give room

To one who grows to fit her doom.

THE UNCLE SPEAKS IN THE

DRAWING ROOM

I have seen the mob of late

Standing sullen in the square,

Gazing with a sullen stare

At window, balcony, and gate.

Some have talked in bitter tones,

Some have held and fingered stones.

These are follies that subside.

Let us consider, none the less,

Certain frailties of glass

Which, it cannot be denied,

Lead in times like these to fear

For crystal vase and chandelier.

Not that missiles will be cast;

None as yet dare lift an arm.

But the scene recalls a storm

When our grandsire stood aghast

To see his antique ruby bowl

Shivered in a thunder-roll.

Let us only bear in mind

How these treasures handed down

From a calmer age passed on

Are in the keeping of our kind.

We stand between the dead glass-blowers

And murmurings of missile-throwers.

BOUNDARY

What has happened here will do

To bite the living world in two,

Half for me and half for you.

Here at last I fix a line

Severing the world’s design

Too small to hold both yours and mine.

There’s enormity in a hair

Enough to lead men not to share

Narrow confines of a sphere

But put an ocean or a fence

Between two opposite intents.

A hair would span the difference.

FIVE O’CLOCK, BEACON HILL

Curtis and I sit drinking auburn sherry

In the receptive twilight of the vines

And potted exile shrubs with sensitive spines

Greening the glass of the conservatory.

Curtis, in sand-grey coat and tie of madder,

Meets elder values with polite negation.

I, between yew and lily, in resignation

Watch lime-green shade across his left cheek spatter.

Gazing beyond my elbow, he allows

Significance of sorts to Baudelaire.

His phrases float across the lucent air

Like exotic leaves detached from waxy boughs.

I drink old sherry and look at Curtis’ nose—

Intelligent Puritan feature, grave, discreet,

Unquestionably a nose that one might meet

In portraits of antique generalissimos.

The study seems sufficient recompense

For Curtis’ dissertations upon Gide.

What rebel breathes beneath his mask, indeed?

Avant-garde in tradition’s lineaments!

FROM A CHAPTER

ON LITERATURE

After the sunlight and the fiery vision

Leading us to a place of running water,

We came into a place by water altered.

Dew ribboned from those trees, the grasses wept

And drowned in their own weeping; vacant mist

Crawled like a snail across the land, and left

A snail’s moist trace; everything there thriving

Stared through an aqueous half-light, without mirth

And bred by languid cycles, without ardor.

There passion mildewed and corrupted slowly,

Till, feeding hourly on its own corruption,

It had forgotten fire and aspiration,

Becoming sodden with appetite alone.

There in the green-grey thickness of the air

Lived and begat cold spores of intellect,

Till giant mosses of a rimelike aspect

Hung heavily from the boughs to testify

Against all simple sensualities,

Turning them by a touch gross and discolored,

Swelling the warm taut flesh to bloated symbol

By unrelenting watery permeations.

So from promethean hopes we came this far,

This far from lands of sun and racing blood.

Behind us lay the blazing apple tree,

Behind us too the vulture and the rock—

The tragic labor and the heroic doom—

For without passion the rock also crumbles

And the wet twilight scares the bird away.

AN UNSAID WORD

She who has power to call her man

From that estranged intensity

Where his mind forages alone,

Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,

And when his thoughts to her return

Stands where he left her, still his own,

Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

MATHILDE IN NORMANDY

From the archaic ships the green and red

Invaders woven in their colored hosts

Descend to conquer. Here is the threaded headland,

The warp and woof of a tideless beach, the flight,

Recounted by slow shuttles, of swift arrows,

And the outlandish attitudes of death

In the stitched soldiery. That this should prove

More than the personal episode, more than all

The little lives sketched on the teeming loom

Was then withheld from you; self-conscious history

That writes deliberate footnotes to its action

Was not of your young epoch. For a pastime

The patient handiwork of long-sleeved ladies

Was esteemed proper when their lords abandoned

The fields and apple trees of Normandy

For harsher hunting on the opposite coast.

Yours was a time when women sat at home

To the pleasing minor airs of lute and hautbois,

While the bright sun on the expensive threads

Glowed in the long windless afternoons.

Say what you will, anxiety there too

Played havoc with the skein, and the knots came

When fingers’ occupation and mind’s attention

Grew too divergent, at the keen remembrance

Of wooden ships putting out from a long beach,

And the grey ocean dimming to a void,

And the sick strained farewells, too sharp for speech.

AT A BACH CONCERT

Coming by evening through the wintry city

We said that art is out of love with life.

Here we approach a love that is not pity.

This antique discipline, tenderly severe,

Renews belief in love yet masters feeling,

Asking of us a grace in what we bear.

Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer—

The vital union of necessity

With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

A too-compassionate art is half an art.

Only such proud restraining purity

Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.

THE RAIN OF BLOOD

In that dark year an angry rain came down

Blood-red upon the hot stones of the town.

Beneath the pelting of that liquid drought

No garden stood, no shattered stalk could sprout,

As from a sunless sky all day it rained

And men came in from streets of terror stained

With that unnatural ichor. Under night

Impatient lovers did not quench the light,

But listening heard above each other’s breath

That sound the dying heard in rooms of death.

Each loudly asked abroad, and none dared tell

What omen in that burning torrent fell.

And all night long we lay, while overhead

The drops rained down as if the heavens bled;

And every dawn we woke to hear the sound,

And all men knew that they could stanch the wound,

But each looked out and cursed the stricken town,

The guilty roofs on which the rain came down.

STEPPING BACKWARD

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,

Next year and when I’m fifty; still good-by.

This is the leave we never really take.

If you were dead or gone to live in China

The event might draw your stature in my mind.

I should be forced to look upon you whole

The way we look upon the things we lose.

We see each other daily and in segments;

Parting might make us meet anew, entire.

You asked me once, and I could give no answer,

How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,

Official treacheries of face and name,

Have out our true identity? I could hazard

An answer now, if you are asking still.

We are a small and lonely human race

Showing no sign of mastering solitude

Out on this stony planet that we farm.

The most that we can do for one another

Is let our blunders and our blind mischances

Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.

We might as well be truthful. I should say

They’re luckiest who know they’re not unique;

But only art or common interchange

Can teach that kindest truth. And even art

Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville

Or calmed a Mahler’s frenzy; you and I

Still look from separate windows every morning

Upon the same white daylight in the square.

And when we come into each other’s rooms

Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,

We hover awkwardly about the threshold

And usually regret the visit later.

Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers—

And once in awhile two with the grace of lovers—

Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion

And let each other freely come and go.

Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards

The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,

The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.

The door may open, but the room is altered;

Not the same room we look from night and day.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom

To learn that those we marked infallible

Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.

The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,

Demanding more than we know how to render.

Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;

The human act will make us real again,

And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection’s school.

No longer wandering after Plato’s ghost,

Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,

We must at last renounce that ultimate blue

And take a walk in other kinds of weather.

The sourest apple makes its wry announcement

That imperfection has a certain tang.

Maybe we shouldn’t turn our pockets out

To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,

But all we can confess of what we are

Has in it the defeat of isolation—

If not our own, then someone’s, anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by,

A sort of ceremony of my own,

This stepping backward for another glance.

Perhaps you’ll say we need no ceremony,

Because we know each other, crack and flaw,

Like two irregular stones that fit together.

Yet still good-by, because we live by inches

And only sometimes see the full dimension.

Your stature’s one I want to memorize—

Your whole level of being, to impose

On any other comers, man or woman.

I’d ask them that they carry what they are

With your particular bearing, as you wear

The flaws that make you both yourself and human.

ITINERARY

The guidebooks play deception; oceans are

A property of mind. All maps are fiction,

All travelers come to separate frontiers.

The coast, they said, is barren; birds go over

Unlighting, in search of richer inland gardens.

No green weed thrusts its tendril from the rock face.

Visit it if you must; then turn again

To the warm pleasing air of colored towns

Where rivers wind to lace the summer valleys.

The coast is naked, sharp with cliffs, unkind,

They said; scrub-bitten. Inland there are groves

And fetes of light and music.

But I have seen

Such denizens of enchantment print these sands

As seldom prowl the margins of old charts:

Stallions of verd antique and wild brown children

And tails of mermaids glittering through the sea!

A REVIVALIST IN BOSTON

But you shall walk the golden street,

And you unhouse and house the Lord.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Going home by lamplight across Boston Common,

We heard him tell how God had entered in him,

And now he had the Word, and nothing other

Would do but he must cry it to his brother.

We stood and listened there—to nothing new.

Yet something loosed his tongue and drove him shouting.

Compulsion’s not play-acted in a face,

And he was telling us the way to grace.

Somehow we saw the youth that he had been,

Not one to notice; an ordinary boy—

Hardly the one the Lord would make His tool—

Shuffling his feet in Baptist Sunday school.

And then transfiguration came his way;

He knew the secret all the rest were seeking.

He made the tale of Christendom his own,

And hoarsely called his brethren to the throne.

The same old way; and yet we knew he saw

The angelic hosts whose names he stumbled over.

He made us hear the ranks of shining feet

Treading to glory’s throne up Tremont Street.

THE RETURN OF THE

EVENING GROSBEAKS

The birds about the house pretend to be

Penates of our domesticity.

And when the cardinal wants to play at prophet

We never tell his eminence to come off it.

The crows, too, in the dawn prognosticate

Like ministers at a funeral of state.

The pigeons in their surplices of white

Assemble for some careful Anglican rite.

Only these guests who rarely come our way

Dictate no oracles for us while they stay.

No matter what we try to make them mean

Their coming lends no answer to our scene.

We scatter seed and call them by their name,

Remembering what has changed since last they came.

THE SPRINGBOARD

Like divers, we ourselves must make the jump

That sets the taut board bounding underfoot

Clean as an axe blade driven in a stump;

But afterward what makes the body shoot

Into its pure and irresistible curve

Is of a force beyond all bodily powers.

So action takes velocity with a verve

Swifter, more sure than any will of ours.

A CHANGE OF WORLD

Fashions are changing in the sphere.

Oceans are asking wave by wave

What new shapes will be worn next year;

And the mountains, stooped and grave,

Are wondering silently range by range

What if they prove too old for the change.

The little tailors busily sitting

Flashing their shears in rival haste

Won’t spare time for a prior fitting—

In with the stitches, too late to baste.

They say the season for doubt has passed:

The changes coming are due to last.

UNSOUNDED

Mariner unpracticed,

In this chartless zone

Every navigator

Fares unwarned, alone.

Each his own Magellan

In tropics of sensation:

Not a fire-scorched stone

From prior habitation,

Not an archaic hull

Splintered on the beach.

These are latitudes revealed

Separate to each.

DESIGN IN LIVING COLORS

Embroidered in a tapestry of green

Among the textures of a threaded garden,

The gesturing lady and her paladin

Walk in a path where shade and sunlight harden

Upon the formal attitudes of trees

By no wind bent, and birds without a tune,

Against the background of a figured frieze

In an eternal summer afternoon.

So you and I in our accepted frame

Believe a casual world of bricks and flowers

And scarcely guess what symbols wander tame

Among the panels of familiar hours.

Yet should the parting boughs of green reveal

A slender unicorn with jeweled feet,

Could I persuade him at my touch to kneel

And from my fingers take what unicorns eat?

If you should pick me at my whim a rose,

Setting the birds upon the bush in flight,

How should I know what crimson meaning grows

Deep in this garden, where such birds alight?

And how should I believe, the meaning clear,

That we are children of disordered days?

That fragmentary world is mended here,

And in this air a clearer sunlight plays.

The fleeing hare, the wings that brush the tree,

All images once separate and alone,

Become the creatures of a tapestry

Miraculously stirred and made our own.

We are the denizens of a living wood

Where insight blooms anew on every bough,

And every flower emerges understood

Out of a pattern unperceived till now.

WALDEN 1950

Thoreau, lank ghost, comes back to visit Concord,

Finds the town like all towns, much the same—

A little less remote, less independent.

The cars hurl through from dawn to dawn toward Boston

Paying out speed like a lifeline between towns.

Some of them pause to look at Alcott’s house.

No farmer studies Latin now; the language

Of soil and market would confound a scholar;

And any Yankee son with lonesome notions

Would find life harder in the town today.

Under the trees by Walden Pond, the stalls

Where summer pilgrims pause beside the road,

Drown resinous night in busy rivalry

While the young make boisterous love along the shores.

He used to hear the locomotive whistle

Sound through the woods like a hawk’s restless cry.

Now the trains run through Concord night and day,

And nobody stops to listen. The ghost might smile—

The way a man in solitude would smile—

Remembering all the sounds that passed for sound

A century ago.

He would remain

Away from houses other ghosts might visit,

Not having come to tell a thing or two

Or lay a curse (what curse could frighten now?)

No tapping on the windowpane for him

Or twilight conversation in the streets

With some bewildered townsman going home.

If he had any errand, it would be

More likely curiosity of his own

About the human race, at least in Concord.

He would not come so far from distant woods

Merely to set them wondering again.

SUNDAY EVENING

We are two acquaintances on a train,

Rattling back through darkening twilight suburbs

From a weekend in the country, into town.

The station lights flare past us, and we glance

Furtively at our watches, sit upright

On leather benches in the smoke-dim car

And try to make appropriate conversation.

We come from similar streets in the same city

And have spent this same hiatus of three days

Escaping streets and lives that we have chosen.

Escape by deck chairs sprawled on evening lawns,

By citronella and by visitant moths;

Escape by sand and water in the eyes,

And sea-noise drowned in weekend conversation.

Uneasy, almost, that we meet again,

Impatient for this rattling ride to end,

We still are stricken with a dread of passing

Time, the coming loneliness of travelers

Parting in hollow stations, going home

To silent rooms in too-familiar streets

With unknown footsteps pacing overhead.

For there are things we might have talked about,

And there are signs we might have shared in common.

We look out vainly at the passing stations

As if some lamplit shed or gleaming roof

Might reawake the sign in both of us.

But this is only Rye or Darien,

And whoever we both knew there has moved away.

And I suppose there never will be time

To speak of more than this—the change in weather,

The lateness of the train on Sunday evenings—

Never enough or always too much time.

Life lurches past us like a windowed twilight

Seen from a train that halts at little junctions

Where weekend half-acquaintances say good-by.

THE INNOCENTS

They said to us, or tried to say, and failed:

With dust implicit in the uncurled green

First leaf, and all the early garden knowing

That after rose-red petals comes the bleak

Impoverished stalk, the black dejected leaf

Crumpled and dank, we should at Maytime be

Less childlike in delight, a little reserved,

A little cognizant of rooted death.

And yet beneath the flecked leaf-gilded boughs

Along the paths fern-fringed and delicate,

We supple children played at golden age,

And knelt upon the curving steps to snare

The whisking emerald lizards, or to coax

The ancestral tortoise from his onyx shell

In lemon sunlight on the balcony.

And only pedagogues and the brittle old

Existed to declare mortality,

And they were beings removed in walk and speech.

For apprehension feeds on intellect:

Uneasy ghosts in libraries are bred—

While innocent sensuality abides

In charmed perception of an hour, a day,

Ingenuous and unafraid of time.

So in the garden we were free of fear,

And what the saffron roses or the green

Imperial dragonflies above the lake

Knew about altered seasons, boughs despoiled,

They never murmured; and to us no matter

How in the drawing room the elders sat

Balancing teacups behind curtained glass,

While rare miraculous clocks in crystal domes

Impaled the air with splintered chips of time

Forever sounding through the tea-thin talk,

An organpoint to desperate animation.

They knew, and tried to say to us, but failed;

They knew what we would never have believed.

“HE REMEMBERETH THAT

WE ARE DUST”

And when was dust a thing so rash?

Or when could dust support the lash

And stand as arrogant as stone?

And where has revelation shown

Conceit and rage so interfused

In dust, that suns have stood bemused

To watch the reckless consequence?

And when did dust break reticence

To sing aloud with all its might

In egotistical delight?

Yet when the tale is told of wind

That lifted dust and drove behind

To scoop the valleys from their sleep

And bury landscapes inches deep

Till there must follow years of rain

Before the earth could breathe again—

Or when the appetite of fire

Blazes beyond control and higher,

Then sinks into the sullen waste

Of what, devouring, it effaced,

And thinly in my palm I hold

The dust of ash grown wan and cold,

I know what element I chose

To build such anger, mould such woes.

LIFE AND LETTERS

An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city

Where here and there against the febrile sky

The shaft of an unbroken column rises,

And in the sands indifferent lizards keep

The shattered traces of old monuments.

Here where the death of the imagination

Trances the mind with shadow, here the shapes

Of tumbled arch and pediment stand out

In their last violence of illumination.

By day his valet rules him, forcing him

With milk and medicines, a deference

Cloaking the bully. “Signora X was here

During your nap; I told her doctor’s orders,

You must stay quiet and rest, keep up your strength.”

He leaves the pasteboard rectangle, engraved,

Scrawled in regretful haste, and goes his way

To join a lounging crony belowstairs.

(“The old man’s not so wide awake today.”)

The ivory body in the dressing gown

(Not the silk robe the Countess sent; he spills

His milk sometimes, and that would be a pity)

Stirs in the sinking warmth that bathes his chair

And looks on summer sunlight in the square.

Below, the fat concierge points out his window

With half-drawn blinds, to tourists who inquire.

There are a few who make the pilgrimage;

They stand and gaze and go away again.

Something to say that one has stood beneath

His window, though they never see himself.

The post brings letters stamped in foreign countries.

He holds them in his fingers, turns them over.

“He always says he means to read them later,

But I should say his reading days are finished.

All he does now is watch the square below.

He seems content enough; and I’ve no trouble.

An easy life, to watch him to his grave.”

The letters still arrive from universities,

Occasionally a charitable cause,

A favor-seeker, or an aged friend.

But now it seems no answers are expected

From one whose correspondence is collected

In two large volumes, edited with notes.

What should that timid hand beneath its sleeve

Warmed by the rich Italian sun, indite

To vindicate its final quarter-decade?

No; he has written all that can be known.

If anything, too much; his greedy art

Left no domain unpillaged, grew its breadth

From fastening on every life he touched.

(Some went to law, some smiled, some never guessed.)

But now the art has left the man to rest.

The failing searchlight of his mind remains

To throw its wavering cone of recognition

Backward upon those teeming images.

New York invades the memory again:

A million jewels crowd the boyish brain

With apprehensions of an unmastered world.

The red-haired girl waves from the Brooklyn ferry,

The bridges leap like fountains into noon.

Again the train goes rocking across-country

Past midnight platforms where the reddish light

Plays on a game of checkers through the window,

Till dawn spells snow on emptiness of plains.

Once more in San Francisco Margaret wakes

Beside him in the heat of August dark,

Still weeping from a nightmare.

So by day

He looks on summer sunlight in the square.

The grinning Bacchus trickles from his gourd

A thin bright spume of water in the basin,

While the hot tiles grow cool as evening drops

Deep cobalt from white buildings. Far in air

Buonarroti’s dome delays the gold.

The old man who has come to Rome to die

Ignores the death of still another day.

So many days have died and come to life

That time and place seem ordered by his valet;

He puts them on and off as he is told.

Now he is standing bareheaded in dusk

While fireworks rain into the sea at Biarritz,

And at his shoulder Louis Scarapin

Quotes La Fontaine. The giddy winds of fortune

Make love to him that night; and he recalls

Toasts drunk by rocketlight, and Louis’ voice

With its perpetual drawl: “Mon bon monsieur . . .”

Louis, who could have made the world more sane,

But killed himself instead, a Pierrot-gesture,

His face a whiteness in the dark apartment.

The bitter coffee drunk on early mornings

With Sandra’s straw hat hanging from the bedpost,

Red roses, like a bonnet by Renoir.

And the incessant tapping of her heels

Late evenings on the cobbles as they stroll:

Splinters to tingle in an old man’s brain.

Again the consumptive neighbor through the wall

Begins his evening agony of coughing

Till one is ready to scream him into silence.

And the accordion on the river steamer

Plays something from last season, foolish, gay;

Deaf ears preserve the music of a day.

Life has the final word; he cannot rule

Those floating pictures as he ruled them once,

Forcing them into form; the violent gardener,

The two-edged heart that cuts into every wound,

Reciprocates experience with art.

No more of that for now; the boughs grow wild,

The willful stems put forth undisciplined blooms,

And winds sweep through and shatter. Here at last

Anarchy of a thousand roses tangles

The fallen architecture of the mind.

FOR THE CONJUNCTION OF

TWO PLANETS

We smile at astrological hopes

And leave the sky to expert men

Who do not reckon horoscopes

But painfully extend their ken

In mathematical debate

With slide and photographic plate.

And yet, protest it if we will,

Some corner of the mind retains

The medieval man, who still

Keeps watch upon those starry skeins

And drives us out of doors at night

To gaze at anagrams of light.

Whatever register or law

Is drawn in digits for these two,

Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,

Wardens of brilliance, as they do

Their dual circuit of the west—

The brightest planet and her guest.

Is any light so proudly thrust

From darkness on our lifted faces

A sign of something we can trust,

Or is it that in starry places

We see the things we long to see

In fiery iconography?

POEMS

(1950–1951)

THE PRISONERS

Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood,

Wounded alike by thorns of the same tree,

We seek in hopeless war each others’ blood

Though suffering in one identity.

Each to the other prey and huntsman known,

Still driven together, lonelier than alone.

Strange mating of the loser and the lost!

With faces stiff as mourners’, we intrude

Forever on the one each turns from most,

Each wandering in a double solitude.

The unpurged ghosts of passion bound by pride

Who wake in isolation, side by side.

1950

NIGHT

The motes that still disturbed her lidded calm

Were these: the tick and whisper of a shade

Against the sill; a cobweb-film that hung

Aslant a corner moulding, too elusive

For any but the gaze of straitened eyes;

The nimbus of the night-lamp, where a moth

Uneasily explored the edge of light

Through hours of fractured darkness. She alone

Knew that the room contained these things; she lay

Hearing the almost imperceptible sound

(As if a live thing shivered behind the curtains)

Watching the thread that frayed in gusts of air

More delicate than her breathing, or by night

Sharing a moth’s perplexity at light

Too frail to drive out dark: minutiae

Held in the vise of sense about to die.

1950

THE HOUSE AT THE CASCADES

All changed now through neglect. The steps dismantled

By infantries of ants, by roots and storms,

The pillars tugged by vines, the porte-cochère

A passageway for winds, the solemn porches

Warped into caricatures.

We came at evening

After the rain, when every drunken leaf

Was straining, swelling in a riot of green.

Only the house was dying in all that life,

As if a triumph of emerald energy

Had fixed its mouth upon the walls and stones.

The tamest shrub remembered anarchy

And joined in appetite with the demagogue weed

That springs where order falls; together there

They stormed the defenseless handiwork of man

Whose empire wars against him when he turns

A moment from the yoke. So, turning back,

He sees his rooftree fall to furious green,

His yard despoiled, and out of innocent noon

The insect-cloud like thunder on the land.

1951

THE DIAMOND

CUTTERS

(1955)

For A. H. C.

THE ROADWAY

When the footbridge washes away,

And the lights along the bank

Accost each other no longer,

But the wild grass grows up rank,

And no one comes to stand

Where neighbor and neighbor stood,

And each house is drawn in to itself

And shuttered against the road,

Under each separate roof

The familiar life goes on:

The hearth is swept up at night,

The table laid in the dawn,

And man and woman and child

Eat their accustomed meal,

Give thanks and turn to their day

As if by an act of will.

Nowhere is evil spoken,

Though something deep in the heart

Refuses to mend the bridge

And can never make a start

Along the abandoned path

To the house at left or at right,

Where neighbor and neighbor’s children

Awake to the same daylight.

Good men grown long accustomed

To inflexible ways of mind—

Which of them could say clearly

What first drove kind from kind?

Courteous to any stranger,

Forbearing with wife and child—

Yet along the common roadway

The wild grass still grows wild.

PICTURES BY VUILLARD

Now we remember all: the wild pear-tree,

The broken ribbons of the green-and-gold

Portfolio, with sketches from an old

Algerian campaign; the placid three

Women at coffee by the window, fates

Of nothing ominous, waiting for the ring

Of the postman’s bell; we harbor everything—

The cores of fruit left on the luncheon plates.

We are led back where we have never been,

Midday where nothing’s tragic, all’s delayed

As it should have been for us as well—that shade

Of summer always, Neuilly dappled green!

But we, the destined readers of Stendhal,

In monstrous change such consolations find

As restless mockery sets before the mind

To deal with what must anger and appall.

Much of the time we scarcely think of sighing

For afternoons that found us born too late.

Our prudent envy rarely paces spying

Under those walls, that lilac-shadowed gate.

Yet at this moment, in our private view,

A breath of common peace, like memory,

Rustles the branches of the wild pear-tree—

Air that we should have known, and cannot know.

ORIENT WHEAT

Our fathers in their books and speech

Have made the matter plain:

The green fields they walked in once

Will never grow again.

The corn lies under the locust’s tooth

Or blistered in the sun;

The faces of the old proud stock

Are gone where their years are gone.

The park where stags lay down at noon

Under the great trees

Is shrill with Sunday strollers now,

Littered with their lees.

Poachers have trampled down the maze

And choked the fountains dry;

The last swan of a score and ten

Goes among reeds to die.

We were born to smells of plague,

Chalk-marks on every door;

We never have heard the hunting-horn

Or feet on the gallery floor—

The high-arched feet of dancers

Who knew how to step and stand.

We were born of a leaning house

In a changed, uneasy land.

Our fathers curse the crooked time

And go to their graves at last;

While some of us laugh at doting men,

And others sigh for the past.

And the dazzled lovers lie

Where summer burns blue and green,

In the green fields they’ll be saying

Can never grow again.

VERSAILLES

(Petit Trianon)

Merely the landscape of a vanished whim,

An artifice that lasts beyond the wish:

The grotto by the pond, the gulping fish

That round and round pretended islands swim,

The creamery abandoned to its doves,

The empty shrine the guidebooks say is love’s.

What wind can bleaken this, what weather chasten

Those balustrades of stone, that sky stone-pale?

A fountain triton idly soaks his tail

In the last puddle of a drying basin;

A leisure that no human will can hasten

Drips from the hollow of his lifted shell.

When we were younger gardens were for games,

But now across the sungilt lawn of kings

We drift, consulting catalogues for names

Of postured gods: the cry of closing rings

For us and for the couples in the wood

And all good children who are all too good.

O children, next year, children, you will play

With only half your hearts; be wild today.

And lovers, take one long and fast embrace

Before the sun that tarnished queens goes down,

And evening finds you in a restless town

Where each has back his old restricted face.

ANNOTATION FOR AN EPITAPH

A fairer person lost not heaven.

—Paradise Lost

These are the sins for which they cast out angels,

The bagatelles by which the lovely fall:

A hand that disappoints, an eye dissembling—

These and a few besides: you had them all.

Beneath this cherubed stone reclines the beauty

That cherubs at the Chair will never see,

Shut out forever by the gold battalions

Stern to forgive, more rigorous than we.

Oh, we were quick to hide our eyes from foible

And call such beauty truth; what though we knew?

Never was truth so sweet and so outrageous;

We loved you all the more because untrue.

But in the baroque corridors of heaven

Your lively coming is a hope destroyed.

Squadrons of seraphs pass the news and ponder,

And all their luxury glitters grand and void.

IDEAL LANDSCAPE

We had to take the world as it was given:

The nursemaid sitting passive in the park

Was rarely by a changeling prince accosted.

The mornings happened similar and stark

In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay

Watching today unfold like yesterday.

Our friends were not unearthly beautiful,

Nor spoke with tongues of gold; our lovers blundered

Now and again when most we sought perfection,

Or hid in cupboards when the heavens thundered.

The human rose to haunt us everywhere,

Raw, flawed, and asking more than we could bear.

And always time was rushing like a tram

Through streets of a foreign city, streets we saw

Opening into great and sunny squares

We could not find again, no map could show—

Never those fountains tossed in that same light,

Those gilded trees, those statues green and white.

THE CELEBRATION

IN THE PLAZA

The sentimentalist sends his mauve balloon

Meandering into air. The crowd applauds.

The mayor eats ices with a cardboard spoon.

See how that color charms the sunset air;

A touch of lavender is what was needed.—

Then, pop! no floating lavender anywhere.

Hurrah, the pyrotechnic engineer

Comes with his sparkling tricks, consults the sky,

Waits for the perfect instant to appear.

Bouquets of gold splash into bloom and pour

Their hissing pollen downward on the dusk.

Nothing like this was ever seen before.

The viceroy of fireworks goes his way,

Leaving us with a sky so dull and bare

The crowd thins out: what conjures them to stay?

The road is cold with dew, and by and by

We see the constellations overhead.

But is that all? some little children cry.

All we have left, their pedagogues reply.

THE TOURIST AND THE TOWN

(San Miniato al Monte)

Those clarities detached us, gave us form,

Made us like architecture. Now no more

Bemused by local mist, our edges blurred,

We knew where we began and ended. There

We were the campanile and the dome,

Alive and separate in that bell-struck air,

Climate whose light reformed our random line,

Edged our intent and sharpened our desire.

Could it be always so—a week of sunlight,

Walks with a guidebook, picking out our way

Through verbs and ruins, yet finding after all

The promised vista, once!—The light has changed

Before we can make it ours. We have no choice:

We are only tourists under that blue sky,

Reading the posters on the station wall—

Come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

There is a mystery that floats between

The tourist and the town. Imagination

Estranges it from her. She need not suffer

Or die here. It is none of her affair,

Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.

Her bargains with disaster have been sealed

In another country. Here she goes untouched,

And this is alienation. Only sometimes

In certain towns she opens certain letters

Forwarded on from bitter origins,

That send her walking, sick and haunted, through

Mysterious and ordinary streets

That are no more than streets to walk and walk—

And then the tourist and the town are one.

To work and suffer is to be at home.

All else is scenery: the Rathaus fountain,

The skaters in the sunset on the lake

At Salzburg, or, emerging after snow,

The singular clear stars at Castellane.

To work and suffer is to come to know

The angles of a room, light in a square,

As convalescents know the face of one

Who has watched beside them. Yours now, every street,

The noonday swarm across the bridge, the bells

Bruising the air above the crowded roofs,

The avenue of chestnut-trees, the road

To the post-office. Once upon a time

All these for you were fiction. Now, made free

You live among them. Your breath is on this air,

And you are theirs and of their mystery.

BEARS

Wonderful bears that walked my room all night,

Where are you gone, your sleek and fairy fur,

Your eyes’ veiled imperious light?

Brown bears as rich as mocha or as musk,

White opalescent bears whose fur stood out

Electric in the deepening dusk,

And great black bears who seemed more blue than black,

More violet than blue against the dark—

Where are you now? upon what track

Mutter your muffled paws, that used to tread

So softly, surely, up the creakless stair

While I lay listening in bed?

When did I lose you? whose have you become?

Why do I wait and wait and never hear

Your thick nocturnal pacing in my room?

My bears, who keeps you now, in pride and fear?

THE INSUSCEPTIBLES

Then the long sunlight lying on the sea

Fell, folded gold on gold; and slowly we

Took up our decks of cards, our parasols,

The picnic hamper and the sandblown shawls

And climbed the dunes in silence. There were two

Who lagged behind as lovers sometimes do,

And took a different road. For us the night

Was final, and by artificial light

We came indoors to sleep. No envy there

Of those who might be watching anywhere

The lustres of the summer dark, to trace

Some vagrant splinter blazing out of space.

No thought of them, save in a lower room

To leave a light for them when they should come.

LUCIFER IN THE TRAIN

Riding the black express from heaven to hell

He bit his fingers, watched the countryside,

Vernal and crystalline, forever slide

Beyond his gaze: the long cascades that fell

Ribboned in sunshine from their sparkling height,

The fishers fastened to their pools of green

By silver lines; the birds in sudden flight—

All things the diabolic eye had seen

Since heaven’s cockcrow. Imperceptibly

That landscape altered: now in paler air

Tree, hill and rock stood out resigned, severe,

Beside the strangled field, the stream run dry.

Lucifer, we are yours who stiff and mute

Ride out of worlds we shall not see again,

And watch from windows of a smoking train

The ashen prairies of the absolute.

Once out of heaven, to an angel’s eye

Where is the bush or cloud without a flaw?

What bird but feeds upon mortality,

Flies to its young with carrion in its claw?

O foundered angel, first and loneliest

To turn this bitter sand beneath your hoe,

Teach us, the newly-landed, what you know;

After our weary transit, find us rest.

RECORDERS IN ITALY

It was amusing on that antique grass,

Seated halfway between the green and blue,

To waken music gentle and extinct

Under the old walls where the daisies grew

Sprinkled in cinquecento style, as though

Archangels might have stepped there yesterday.

But it was we, mortal and young, who strolled

And fluted quavering music, for a day

Casual heirs of all we looked upon.

Such pipers of the emerald afternoon

Could only be the heirs of perfect time

When every leaf distinctly brushed with gold

Listened to Primavera speaking flowers.

Those scherzos stumble now; our journeys run

To harsher hillsides, rockier declensions.

Obligatory climates call us home.

And so shall clarity of cypresses,

Unfingered by necessity, become

Merely the ghost of half-remembered trees,

A trick of sunlight flattering the mind?—

There were four recorders sweet upon the wind.

AT HERTFORD HOUSE

Perfection now is tended and observed,

Not used; we hire the spawn of Caliban

For daily service. In our careful world

Inlay of purple-wood and tulip, curved

To mime the sheen of plumes and peacocks’ eyes,

Exists for inspection only. And the jars

Of apple-green and white, where wooing’s done

In panels after Boucher—such we prize

Too well to fill with roses. Chocolate, too,

Will not again be frothed in cups like these;

We move meticulously, ill at ease

Amid perfections. Why should a porcelain plaque

Where Venus pulls her pouting Adon on

Through beds of blushing flowers, seem unfit

For casual thumbprint? Ease is what we lack.

There’s a division nothing can make sweet

Between the clods of usage and the toys

We strum our senses with. But Antoinette

Ran her long tortoise-shell and silver comb

Through powdered yellow hair, and would have laughed

To think that use too mean for art or craft.

THE WILD SKY

Here from the corridor of an English train,

I see the landscape slide through glancing rain,

A land so personal that every leaf

Unfolds as if to witness human life,

And every aging milestone seems to know

That human hands inscribed it, long ago.

Oasthouse and garden, narrow bridge and hill—

Landscape with figures, where a change of style

Comes softened in a water-colour light

By Constable; and always, shire on shire,

The low-pitched sky sags like a tent of air

Beneath its ancient immaterial weight.

The weather in these gentle provinces

Moves like the shift of daylight in a house,

Subdued by time and custom. Sun and rain

Are intimate, complaisant to routine,

Guests in the garden. Year on country year

Has worn the edge of wildness from this air.

And I remember that unblunted light

Poured out all day from a prodigious height—

My country, where the blue is miles too high

For minds of men to graze the leaning sky.

The telegraph may rise or timber fall,

That last frontier remains, the vertical.

Men there are beanstalk climbers, all day long

Haunted by stilts they clattered on when young.

Giants no longer, now at mortal size

They stare into that upward wilderness.

The vertical reminds them what they are,

And I remember I am native there.

THE PROSPECT

You promise me when certain things are done

We’ll close these rooms above a city square,

And stealing out by half-light, will be gone

When next the telephone breaks the waiting air.

Before they send to find us, we shall be

Aboard a blunt-nosed steamer, at whose rail

We’ll watch the loading of the last brown bale

And feel the channel roughening into sea.

And after many sunlit days we’ll sight

The coast you tell me of. Along that shore

Rare shells lie tumbled, and the seas of light

Dip past the golden rocks to crash and pour

Upon the bowl-shaped beach. In that clear bay

We’ll scoop for pebbles till our feet and hands

Are gilded by the wash of blending sands;

And though the boat lift anchor, we shall stay.

You will discover in the woods beyond

The creatures you have loved on Chinese silk:

The shell-gray fox, gazelles that at your sound

Will lift their eyes as calm as golden milk.

The leaves and grasses feathered into plumes

Will shadow-edge their pale calligraphy;

And in the evening you will come to me

To tell of honey thick in silver combs.

Yet in the drift of moments unendeared

By sameness, when the cracks of morning show

Only a replica of days we’ve marred

With still the same old penances to do,

In furnished rooms above a city square,

Eating the rind of fact, I sometimes dread

The promise of that honey-breeding air,

Those unapportioned clusters overhead.

EPILOGUE FOR A

MASQUE OF PURCELL

Beast and bird must bow aside,

Grimbald limp into the wings.

All that’s lovely and absurd,

All that dances, all that sings

Folded into trunks again—

The haunted grove, the starlit air—

All turns workaday and plain,

Even the happy, happy pair.

Harpsichord and trumpet go

Trundling down the dusty hall.

That airy joy, that postured woe

Like the black magician’s spell

Fall in pieces round us now,

While the dancer goes to lie

With the king, and need not know

He will jilt her by and by.

We were young once and are old;

Have seen the dragon die before;

Knew the innocent and bold,

Saw them through the cardboard door

Kiss the guilty and afraid,

Turning human soon enough.

We have wept with the betrayed,

Never known them die for love.

Yet, since nothing’s done by halves

While illusion’s yet to do,

May we still forgive ourselves,

And dance again when trumpets blow.

VILLA ADRIANA

When the colossus of the will’s dominion

Wavers and shrinks upon a dying eye,

Enormous shadows sit like birds of prey,

Waiting to fall where blistered marbles lie.

But in its open pools the place already

Lay ruined, before the old king left it free.

Shattered in waters of each marble basin

He might have seen it as today we see.

Dying in discontent, he must have known

How, once mere consciousness had turned its back,

The frescoes of his appetite would crumble,

The fountains of his longing yawn and crack.

And all his genius would become a riddle,

His perfect colonnades at last attain

The incompleteness of a natural thing;

His impulse turn to mystery again.

Who sleeps, and dreams, and wakes, and sleeps again

May dream again; so in the end we come

Back to the cherished and consuming scene

As if for once the stones will not be dumb.

We come like dreamers searching for an answer,

Passionately in need to reconstruct

The columned roofs under the blazing sky,

The courts so open, so forever locked.

And some of us, as dreamers, excavate

Under the blanching light of sleep’s high noon,

The artifacts of thought, the site of love,

Whose Hadrian has given the slip, and gone.

THE EXPLORERS

Beside the Mare Crisium, that sea

Where water never was, sit down with me,

And let us talk of Earth, where long ago

We drank the air and saw the rivers flow

Like comets through the green estates of man,

And fruit the colour of Aldebaran

Weighted the curving boughs. The route of stars

Was our diversion, and the fate of Mars

Our grave concern; we stared throughout the night

On these uncolonized demesnes of light.

We read of stars escaping Newton’s chain

Till only autographs of fire remain;

We aimed our mortal searchlights into space

As if in hopes to find a mortal face.

O little Earth, our village, where the day

Seemed all too brief, and starlight would not stay,

We were provincials on the grand express

That whirled us into dark and loneliness.

We thought to bring you wonder with a tale

Huger than those that turned our fathers pale.

Here in this lunar night we watch alone

Longer than ever men have watched for dawn.

Beyond this meteor-bitten plain we see

More starry systems than you dream to be,

And while their clockwork blazes overhead,

We speak the names we learned as we were bred,

We tell of places seen each day from birth—

Obscure and local, patois of the Earth!

O race of farmers, plowing year by year

The same few fields, I sometimes seem to hear

The far-off echo of a cattle-bell

Against the cratered cliff of Arzachel,

And weep to think no sound can ever come

Across that outer desert, from my home.

LANDSCAPE OF THE STAR

The silence of the year. This hour the streets

Lie empty, and the clash of bells is scattered

Out to the edge of stars. I heard them tell

Morning’s first change and clang the people home

From crèche and scented aisle. Come home, come home,

I heard the bells of Christmas call and die.

This Christmas morning, in the stony streets

Of an unaccustomed city, where the gas

Quivers against the darkly-shuttered walls,

I walk, my breath a veil upon the cold,

No longer sick for home nor hunted down

By faces loved, by gate or sill or tree

That once I used to wreathe in red and silver

Under the splintered incense of the fir.

I think of those inscrutables who toiled,

Heavy and brooding in their camel-train,

Across the blue-wrapped stretches. Home behind,

Kingdoms departed from, the solemn journey

Their only residence: the starlit hour,

The landscape of the star, their time and place.

O to be one of them, and feel the sway

Of rocking camel through the Judaean sand,—

Ride, wrapped in swathes of damask and of silk,

Hear the faint ring of jewel in silver mesh

Starring the silence of the plain; and hold

With rigid fingers curved as in oblation

The golden jar of myrrh against the knees.

To ride thus, bearing gifts to a strange land,

To a strange King; nor think of fear and envy,

Being so bemused by starlight of one star,

The long unbroken journey, that all questions

Sink like the lesser lights behind the hills;

Think neither of the end in sight, nor all

That lies behind, but dreamlessly to ride,

Traveller at one with travelled countryside.

How else, since for those Magi and their train

The palaces behind have ceased to be

Home, and the home they travel toward is still

But rumor stoking fear in Herod’s brain?

What else for them but this, since never more

Can courts and states receive them as they were,

Nor have the trampled earth, the roof of straw

Received the kings as they are yet to be?

The bells are silent, silenced in my mind

As on the dark. I walk, a foreigner,

Upon this night that calls all travellers home,

The prodigal forgiven, and the breach

Mended for this one feast. Yet all are strange

To their own ends, and their beginnings now

Cannot contain them. Once-familiar speech

Babbles in wayward dialect of a dream.

Our gifts shall bring us home: not to beginnings

Nor always to the destination named

Upon our setting-forth. Our gifts compel,

Master our ways and lead us in the end

Where we are most ourselves; whether at last

To Solomon’s gaze or Sheba’s silken knees

Or winter pastures underneath a star,

Where angels spring like starlight in the trees.

LETTER FROM THE LAND

OF SINNERS

I write you this out of another province

That you may never see:

Country of rivers, its topography

Mutable in detail, yet always one,

Blasted in certain places, here by glaciers,

There by the work of man.

The fishers by the water have no boast

Save of their freedom; here

A man may cast a dozen kinds of lure

And think his days rewarded if he sight

Now and again the prize, unnetted, flicking

Its prism-gleams of light.

The old lord lived secluded in his park

Until the hall was burned

Years ago, by his tenants; both have learned

Better since then, and now our children run

To greet him. Quail and hunter have forgotten

The echo of the gun.

I said there are blasted places: we have kept

Their nakedness intact—

No marble to commemorate an act

Superhuman or merely rash; we know

Why they are there and why the seed that falls there

Is certain not to grow.

We keep these places as we keep the time

Scarred on our recollection

When some we loved broke from us in defection,

Or we ourselves harried to death too soon

What we could least forgo. Our memories

Recur like the old moon.

But we have made another kind of peace,

And walk where boughs are green,

Forgiven by the selves that we have been,

And learning to forgive. Our apples taste

Sweeter this year; our gates are falling down,

And need not be replaced.

CONCORD RIVER

The turtles on the ledges of July

Heard our approach and splashed. Now in the mud

Lie like the memory of fecund summer

Their buried eggs. The river, colder now,

Has other, autumn tales to carry on

Between the banks where lovers used to lie.

Lovers, or boys escaped from yard and farm

To drown in sensual purities of sun—

No matter which; for single fisherman

Casting into the shade, or those absorbed

In human ardor, summer was the same,

Impervious to weariness or alarm.

The fisherman, by craft and love removed

From meanness, has an almanac at home

Saying the season will be brief this year

And ice strike early; yet upon its shelf

The book is no despoiler of this day

In which he moves and ponders, most himself.

That boy, watching for turtles by the shore,

Steeped in his satisfactory loneliness,

If asked could tell us that the sun would set,

Or autumn drive him back to games and school—

Tell us at second-hand, believing then

Only midsummer and the noonstruck pool.

And we, who floated through the sunlit green,

Indolent, voluntary as the dance

Of dragon-flies above the skimming leaves—

For us the landscape and the hour became

A single element, where our drifting silence

Fell twofold, like our shadows on the water.

This is the Concord River, where the ice

Will hold till April: this is the willowed stream

Much threaded by the native cogitators

Who wrote their journals calmly by its shore,

Observing weather and the swing of seasons

Along with personal cosmologies.

Henry Thoreau most nearly learned to live

Within a world his soul could recognize—

Unshaken by accounts of any country

He could not touch with both his hands. He saw

The river moving past the provincial town

And knew each curve of shoreline for his own.

He travelled much, he said—his wayward speech

Sounding always a little insolent,

Yet surer than the rest; they, like ourselves,

Ran off to dabble in a world beyond,

While he exalted the geography

He lived each day: a river and a pond.

For him there was no turning of the ear

To rumored urgencies that sought to rouse

The fisher from his pool, the serious child

From his unconscious wandering: the sound

Of desperate enterprises rang to him

Fictive as ghosts upon old Indian ground.

Lover and child and fisherman, alike

Have in their time been native to this shore

As he would have it peopled: all entranced

By such concerns in their perfected hour

That in their lives the river and the tree

Are absolutes, no longer scenery.

APOLOGY

You, invincibly yourself,

Have nothing left to say.

The stones upon the mountainside

Are not more free,

Bearing all question, all reproach

Without reply.

The dead, who keep their peace intact,

Although they know

Much we might be gainers by,

Are proud like you—

Or, if they spoke, might sound as you

Sounded just now.

For every angry, simple man

The word is but

A shadow, and his motive grows

More still and great

While the world hums around him, wild

That he should explicate.

And Socrates, whose crystal tongue

Perturbs us now,

Left all unsatisfied; the word

Can never show

Reason enough for what a man

Knows he must do.

You told us little, and are done.

So might the dead

Begin to speak of dying, then

Leave half unsaid.

Silence like thunder bears its own

Excuse for dread.

LIVING IN SIN

She had thought the studio would keep itself;

no dust upon the furniture of love.

Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,

the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,

a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat

stalking the picturesque amusing mouse

had risen at his urging.

Not that at five each separate stair would writhe

under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light

so coldly would delineate the scraps

of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles;

that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers

a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own—

envoy from some village in the moldings . . .

Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,

sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,

declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,

rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;

while she, jeered by the minor demons,

pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found

a towel to dust the table-top,

and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.

By evening she was back in love again,

though not so wholly but throughout the night

she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming

like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

AUTUMN EQUINOX

The leaves that shifted overhead all summer

Are marked for earth now, and I bring the baskets

Still dark with clingings of another season

Up from the cellar. All the house is still,

Now that I’ve left it. Lyman in his study

Peers on a page of Dryden by the window,

Eyes alone moving, like a mended quaint

Piece of old clockwork. When the afternoon

Trails into half-light, he will never notice

Until I come indoors to light the lamps

And rouse him blinking from the brownish type,

The gilt and tarnished spine of volume five

Out of the glass-doored cabinet in the hall.

Why Satires, I have wondered? For I’ve seen

The title-page, and riffled through the volume,

When he was gone. I thought that growing old

Returned one to a vague Arcadian longing,

To Ovid, Spenser, something golden-aged,

Some incorruptible myth that tinged the years

With pastoral flavours. Lyman, too, as gentle

As an old shepherd, half-apologetic

When I come bustling to disturb his dreams—

What in that bitterness can speak to him

Or help him down these final sloping decades

With kindly arm? I’ve never been a scholar—

Reader, perhaps at times, but not a scholar,

Not in the way that Lyman used to be—

And yet I know there’s acid on the page

He pores—that least acidulous of men.

While I, who spent my youth and middle-age

In stubbornness and railing, pass the time

Now, after fifty, raking in the sun

The leaves that sprinkle slowly on the grass,

And feel their gold like firelight at my back,

In slow preoccupation with September.

Sometimes I call across to Alice Hume

And meet her at the fence as women meet

To say the weather’s seasonably fine,

Talk husbands, bargains, or philosophize—

The dry philosophy of neighborhood.

She thinks perhaps how sharp of tongue and quick

I used to be, and how I’ve quieted down,

Without those airs because I’d married Lyman,

Professor at the college, while her husband

Was just another farmer. That was pride

As raw and silly as the girl I was—

Reading too much, sneering at other girls

Whose learning was of cookery and flirtation.

Father would have me clever, sometimes said

He’d let me train for medicine, like a son,

To come into his practice. So I studied

German and botany, and hated both.

What good for me to know the Latin name

For huckleberry, while the others climbed

To pick the fruit and kissed across the bushes?

I never was a scholar, but I had

A woman’s love for men of intellect,

A woman’s need for love of any kind.

So Lyman came to ask me of my father:

Stiff-collared, shy, not quite the man I’d dreamed—

(Byron and Matthew Arnold vaguely mingled

Without the disadvantages of either.)

And yet he seemed superb in his refusal

To read aloud from Bryant to the ladies

Assembled on the boarding-house piazza

Among the moth-wings of a summer evening.

His quick withdrawal won my heart. I smile

Sometimes to think what quirks of vanity

Propel us toward our choices in the end.

The wedding-picture in the bureau drawer

Has on the back in Lyman’s measured writing:

“September twenty-second, nineteen-twelve.”

I keep it in its folder, deckle-edged

And yellowing. I see myself again,

Correct and terrified on our wedding-day,

Wearing the lace my mother wore before me

And buttoned shoes that pinched. I feel again

The trembling of my hand in Lyman’s fingers,

Awkwardly held in that ungainly pose

While aunts around us nodded like the Fates

That nemesis was accomplished. Lyman stood

So thin and ministerial in his black,

I thought he looked a stranger. In the picture

We are the semblance of a bride and groom

Static as figures on a mantelpiece,

As if that moment out of time existed

Then and forever in a dome of glass,

Where neither dust nor the exploring fly

Could speck its dry immutability.

Thus I became his partner in a life

Annual, academic; we observed

Events momentous as the ceremony

To dedicate the chapel carillon

(Memorial to Edward Stephens Hodge,

Class of nineteen-fourteen). There we heard

Those sounds converge upon the rural air

That soon became familiar as a hinge

Creaking and never silenced. In our meadow

The angular young took up their bats and shouted

Throughout the afternoon, while I was pouring

Tea for the dean’s arthritic wife. For Lyman

The world was all the distance he pursued

From home to lecture-room, and home again,

Exchanging nods with colleagues, smiling vaguely

Upon a shirtsleeved trio, tanned and jostling,

Who grinned and gave him room upon the path.

I bit my fingers, changed the parlor curtains

To ones the like of which were never seen

Along our grave and academic street.

I brought them home from Springfield in a bundle

And hung them in defiance. I took a walk

Across the fields one heavy summer night

Until the college from a mile away

Looked sallow, insignificant in the moonlight.

It seemed the moon must shine on finer things

I had not seen, things that could show with pride

Beneath that silver globe. Along the walls

Of Lyman’s study there were steel engravings

Framed in black oak: the crazy tower of Pisa,

The Pyramids, rooted in desert sand,

Cologne Cathedral with its dangerous spires

Piercing the atmosphere. I hated them

For priggishly enclosing in a room

The marvels of the world, as if declaring

Such was the right and fitting rôle of marvels.

Night, and I wept aloud; half in my sleep,

Half feeling Lyman’s wonder as he leaned

Above to shake me. “Are you ill, unhappy?

Tell me what I can do.”

“I’m sick, I guess—

I thought that life was different than it is.”

“Tell me what’s wrong. Why can’t you ever say?

I’m here, you know.”

Half shamed, I turned to see

The lines of grievous love upon his face,

The love that gropes and cannot understand.

“I must be crazy, Lyman—or a dream

Has made me babble things I never thought.

Go back to sleep—I won’t be so again.”

Young lovers talk of giving all the heart

Into each others’ trust: their rhetoric

Won’t stand for analyzing, I’m aware,

But have they thought of this: that each must know

Beyond a doubt what’s given, what received?

Now we are old like Nature; patient, staid,

Unhurried from the year’s wellworn routine,

We wake and take the day for what it is,

And sleep as calmly as the dead who know

They’ll wake to their reward. We have become

As unselfconscious as a pair of trees,

Not questioning, but living. Even autumn

Can only carry through what spring began.

What else could happen now but loss of leaf

And rain upon the boughs? So I have thought,

And wondered faintly where the thought began,

And when the irritable gust of youth

Stopped turning every blade of grass to find

A new dissatisfaction. Meanwhile Lyman

Reads satire in the falling afternoon—

A change for him as well. We finish off

Not quite as we began. I hear the bells

Wandering through the air across the fields.

I’ve raked three bushel baskets full of leaves—

Enough for one September afternoon.

THE STRAYED VILLAGE

He had come nearly half a thousand miles,

And then to find it gone . . . He knew too well

Ever to be mistaken, where the hills

Dipped to reveal it first: the line of chimneys

Reflected in the unimportant stream,

The monument, worth half a line in guidebooks—

“Tower of a church that Cromwell’s army burned,

Fine early Perpendicular”—itself

Subservient neither to theologies

Nor changing styles of architecture, still

A cipher on the landscape, something clear

In that unostentatious scenery.

Well, if the tower was gone—and who should say,

Depend on any landmark to remain?

He had been too far and known too many losses

Not to be reconciled that even landmarks

Go out like matches when you need them most.

So it could be with this. But not a house,

Not anything reflected in the river

But willows that could grow by any river,

Feminine, non-committal in their postures.

Willows: a bridge then? But the bridge was gone,

The piles had left no trace, no signature

Of stones beside the water. If, indeed,

There ever had been bridge or tower or house.

That was the question that enforeigned him,

Brushed forty years of memory aside

And made of him another obtuse tripper

Staring at signposts to be reassured:

This is the place—where I grew into manhood,

The place I had to leave when I was grown?

So often he had thought a man’s whole life

Most rightly could be written, like his own,

In terms of places he was forced to leave

Because their meaning, passing that of persons,

Became too much for him.

“This is the place?”

He heard himself demand; and heard the other—

A youthful rector, by the look of him,

Pausing upon his evening stroll—reply,

“Oh, yes, this is the place. . . . The village went,

As I should reckon, twenty years ago.

Across the hill, in our town, there was once

Talk and conjecture; now you might suppose

Only the antiquarians breathe its name.

The memory of man, my friend, is short.”

“Shorter and longer than it’s credited,”

He answered; “but you say the village went?

I hardly care to ask, and yet I ask—

By flood? by fire? There used to be a tower

That Cromwell’s zealots failed to bully down.

But there’s no mark. It went? How did it go?”

“It went away. You’ve heard of men who went,

Suddenly, without partings or annulments,

Not carried off by accident or death,

But simply strayed? That was the way it went.

We went to bed on Thursday and could hear

The bells, as usual on a quiet night,

Across the hill between. On Friday morning

There were no bells. There wasn’t anything.

The landscape stood as if since Magna Carta,

Empty, as it stands now. The village had gone,

Quite without taking leave. Strayed, is the word

We found ourselves as if by acquiescence

Using to speak of it, as if we thought

Someday to come upon it somewhere else

And greet our former neighbors as before.

No one has ever found it, though. One can’t

Advertise for a village that has strayed:

‘Lost, with one early Perpendicular tower,

A village numbering four hundred souls,

With stone and wooden footbridge.’ And, as I say,

Men’s memories grow short like winter daylight.

So much gets strayed that has to be replaced—

Dogs, wits, affections . . .”

“Yes, so much gets strayed;

But one of all the things a man can lose

I thought would keep till I could come again.

It almost seems it went lest I should come,

Because I always promised I would come,

And had this latest penalty in store,

The last of losses.”

So he said goodbye,

And watched the little rector climb the hill

Back to his parish town. The stream ran on,

And all that walking was to do again.

THE PERENNIAL ANSWER

The way the world came swinging round my ears

I knew what Doctor meant the day he said,

“Take care, unless you want to join your dead;

It’s time to end this battling with your years.”

He knew I’d have the blackest word told straight,

Whether it was my child that couldn’t live,

Or Joel’s mind, thick-riddled like a sieve

With all that loving festered into hate.

Better to know the ways you are accurst,

And stand up fierce and glad to hear the worst.

The blood is charged, the back is stiffened so.

Well, on that day that was a day ago,

And yet so many hours and years ago

Numbered in seizures of a darkening brain,

I started up the attic stairs again—

The fifth time in the hour—not thinking then

That it was hot, but knowing the air sat stiller

Under the eaves than when the idiot killer

Hid in the Matthews barn among the hay

And all the neighbors through one August day

Waited outside with pitchforks in the sun.

Joel waited too, and when they heard the gun

Resound so flatly in the loft above

He was the one to give the door a shove

And climb the ladder. A man not made for love,

But built for things of violence; he would stand

Where lightning flashed and watch with eyes so wide

You thought the prongs of fire would strike inside;

Or sit with some decaying book in hand,

Reading of spirits and the evil-eyed,

And witches’ sabbaths in a poisoned land.

So it was Joel that brought the fellow out,

Tarnished with hay and blood. I still can see

The eyes that Joel turned and fixed on me

When it was done—as if by rights his wife

Should go to him for having risked his life

And say—I hardly knew what thing he wanted.

I know it was a thing I never granted,

And what his mind became, from all that woe,

Those violent concerns he lived among,

Was on my head as well. I couldn’t go,

I never went to him, I never clung

One moment on his breast. But I was young.

And I was cruel, a girl-bride seeing only

Her marriage as a room so strange and lonely

She looked outside for warmth. And in what fashion

Could I be vessel for that sombre passion—

For Joel, decreed till death to have me all?

The tortured grandsire hanging in the hall

Depicted by a limner’s crabbed hand

Seemed more a being that I could understand.

How could I help but look beyond that wall

And probe the lawful stones that built it strong

With questions sharper than a pitchfork’s prong?

If Joel knew, he kept his silence long.

But Evans and I were hopeless from the start:

He, collared early by a rigorous creed,

Not man of men but man of God indeed,

Whose eye had seen damnation, and whose heart

Thrust all it knew of passion into one

Chamber of iron inscribed Thy will be done.

Yet sense will have revenge on one who tries

To down his senses with the brand of lies.

The road was empty from the village home,

Empty of all but us and that dark third,

The sudden Northern spring. There must be some

For whom the thrusting blood, so long deferred

In alder-stem and elm, is not the rise

Of flood in their own veins; some who can see

That green unholy dance without surprise.

I only say it has been this for me:

The time of thinnest ice, of casualty

More swift and deadly than the skater’s danger.

The end of March could make me stand a stranger

On my own doorstep, and the daily shapes

Of teapot, ladle, or the china grapes

I kept in winter on the dresser shelf

Rebuked me, made me foreign to myself.

Evans beside me on that moonless road

Walked hard as if he thought behind us strode

Pursuers he had fled through weary ways.

He only said: “Where I was born and grew,

You felt the spring come on you like a daze

Slow out of February, and you knew

The thing you were contending with. But here—”

“Spring is a bolt of lightning on the year,”

I said, “it strikes before you feel it near.”

“The change of seasons is another thing

God put on earth to try us, I believe.

As if the breaking-out of green could bring

Escape from frozen discipline, give us leave

To taste of things by will and law forbidden.”

“Maybe it was the weather lost us Eden,”

I said, but faltering, and the words went by

Like flights of moths under that star-soaked sky.

And that was all. He brought me to the door;

The house was dark, but on the upper floor

A light burned in the hallway. “Joel’s asleep,”

I told him, and put out my hand. His touch

Was cold as candles kept unlit in church,

And yet I felt his seeking fingers creep

About my wrist and seize it in their grip

Until they hurt me.

“Neither you nor I

Have lived in Eden, but they say we die

To gain that day at last. We have to live

Believing it—what else can we believe?”

“Why not believe in life?” I said, but heard

Only the sanctioned automatic word

“Eternal life—” perennial answer given

To those who ask on earth a taste of heaven.

The penalty you pay for dying last

Is facing those transactions from the past

That would detain you when you try to go.

All night last night I lay and seemed to hear

The to-and-fro of callers down below,

Even the knocker rattling on the door.

I thought the dead had heard my time was near

To meet them, and had come to tell me so;

But not a footstep sounded on the stair.

If they are gone it means a few days more

Are left, or they would wait. Joel would wait

Down by the dark old clock that told me late

That night from Boston. “Evans walked me home;

We sat together in the train by chance.”

But not a word; only his burning glance.

“We stopped to have some coffee in the station.

Why do you stand like that? What if I come

An hour or so after the time I said?

The house all dark, I thought you’d gone to bed.”

But still that gaze, not anger, indignation,

Nor anything so easy, but a look

As fixed as when he stared upon his book.

No matter if my tale was false or true,

I was a woodcut figure on the page,

On trial for a nameless sin. Then rage

Took him like fire where lightning dives. I knew

That he could kill me then, but what he did

Was wrench me up the stairs, onto the bed.

The night of Joel’s death I slept alone

In this same room. A neighbor said she’d stay,

Thinking the dead man lying down below

Might keep the living from rest. She told me so:

“Those hours before the dawn can lie like stone

Upon the heart—I’ve lain awake—I know.”

At last I had to take the only way,

And said, “The nights he was alive and walking

From room to room and hearing spirits talking,

What sleep I had was likelier to be broken.”

Her face was shocked but I was glad I’d spoken.

“Well, if you feel so—” She would tell the tale

Next morning, but at last I was alone

In an existence finally my own.

And yet I knew that Evans would find reason

Why we were not our own, nor had our will

Unhindered; that disturbance of a season

So long removed was something he would kill

Yet, if he had not killed it. When I stood

Beside the churchyard fence and felt his glance

Reluctantly compelling mine, the blood

Soared to my face, the tombstones seemed to dance

Dizzily, till I turned. The eyes I met

Accused as they implored me to forget,

As if my shape had risen to destroy

Salvation’s rampart with a hope of joy.

My lips betrayed their Why? but then his face

Turned from me, and I saw him leave the place.

Now Joel and Evans are neighbors, down beneath.

I wonder what we’re bound to after death?

I wonder what’s exacted of the dead,

How many debts of conscience still are good?

Not Evans or his Bible ever said

That spirit must complete what flesh and blood

Contracted in their term. What creditors

Will wait and knock for us at marble doors?

I’d like to know which stays when life is past:

The marriage kept in fear, the love deferred,

The footstep waited for and never heard,

The pressure of five fingers round the wrist

Stopping its beat with pain, the mouth unkissed,

The dream whose waking startles into sight

A figure mumbling by the bed at night,

The hopeless promise of eternal life—

Take now your Scripture, Evans, if you will,

And see how flimsily the pages spill

From spines reduced to dust. What have they said

Of us, to what will they pronounce me wife?

My debt is paid: the rest is on your head.

THE INSOMNIACS

The mystic finishes in time,

The actor finds himself in space;

And each, wherever he has been,

Must know his hand before his face,

Must crawl back into his own skin

As in the darkness after crime

The thief can hear his breath again,

Resume the knowledge of his limbs

And how the spasm goes and comes

Under the bones that cage his heart.

So: we are fairly met, grave friend—

The meeting of two wounds in man.

I, gesturing with practised hand,

I, in my great brocaded gown,

And you, the fixed and patient one,

Enduring all the world can do.

I, with my shifting masks, the gold,

The awful scarlet, laughing blue,

Maker of many worlds; and you,

Worldless, the pure receptacle.

And yet your floating eyes reveal

What saint or mummer groans to feel:

That finite creatures finally know

The damp of stone beneath the knees,

The stiffness in the folded hands

A duller ache than holy wounds,

The draught that never stirs the sleeve

Of glazed evangelists above,

But drives men out from sacred calm

Into the violent, wayward sun.

My voice commands the formal stage;

A jungle thrives beyond the wings—

All formless and benighted things

That rhetoric cannot assuage.

I speak a dream and turn to see

The sleepness night outstaring me.

My pillow sweats; I wake in space.

This is my hand before my face.

This is the headboard of my bed

Whose splinters stuff my nightmare mouth;

This is the unconquerable drouth

I carry in my burning head.

Not my words nor your visions mend

Such infamous knowledge. We are split,

Done into bits, undone, pale friend,

As ecstasy begets its end;

As we are spun of rawest thread—

The flaw is in us; we will break.

O dare you of this fracture make

Hosannas plain and tragical,

Or dare I let each cadence fall

Awkward as learning newly learned,

Simple as children’s cradle songs,

As untranslatable and true,

We someday might conceive a way

To do the thing we long to do—

To do what men have always done—

To live in time, to act in space

Yet find a ritual to embrace

Raw towns of man, the pockmarked sun.

THE SNOW QUEEN

Child with a chip of mirror in his eye

Saw the world ugly, fled to plains of ice

Where beauty was the Snow Queen’s promises.

Under my lids a splinter sharp as his

Has made me wish you lying dead

Whose image digs the needle deeper still.

In the deceptive province of my birth

I had seen yes turn no, the saints descend,

Their sacred faces twisted into smiles,

The stars gone lechering, the village spring

Gush mud and toads—all miracles

Befitting an incalculable age.

To love a human face was to discover

The cracks of paint and varnish on the brow;

Soon to distrust all impulses of flesh

That strews its sawdust on the chamber floor,

While at the window peer two crones

Who once were Juliet and Jessica.

No matter, since I kept a little while

One thing intact from that perversity—

Though landscapes bloomed in monstrous cubes and coils.

In you belonged simplicities of light

To mend distraction, teach the air

To shine, the stars to find their way again.

Yet here the Snow Queen’s cold prodigious will

Commands me, and your face has lost its power,

Dissolving to its opposite like the rest.

Under my ribs a diamond splinter now

Sticks, and has taken root; I know

Only this frozen spear that drives me through.

LOVE IN THE MUSEUM

Now will you stand for me, in this cool light,

Infanta reared in ancient etiquette,

A point-lace queen of manners. At your feet

The doll-like royal dog demurely set

Upon a chequered floor of black and white.

Or be a Louis’ mistress, by Boucher,

Lounging on cushions, silken feet asprawl

Upon a couch where casual cupids play

While on your arms and shoulders seems to fall

The tired extravagance of a sunset day.

Or let me think I pause beside a door

And see you in a bodice by Vermeer,

Where light falls quartered on the polished floor

And rims the line of water tilting clear

Out of an earthen pitcher as you pour.

But art requires a distance: let me be

Always the connoisseur of your perfection.

Stay where the spaces of the gallery

Flow calm between your pose and my inspection,

Lest one imperfect gesture make demands

As troubling as the touch of human hands.

I HEARD A HERMIT SPEAK

Upon the mountain of the young

I heard a hermit speak:

“Purity is the serpent’s eye

That murders with a look.

Purity’s king of poisons

And duke of deadly night.

Abhor the single-minded man,

The woman lily-white.

Go cold under the heavens,

Run naked through the day,

But never wear the armored shirt

Of total Yea or Nay.

Stare into the looking-glass:

Your enemy stares you back.

Yet never cringe and hide your face;

Hear all that he will speak.

The day that glass dissolves to show

Your own reflection there,

Then change your mirror for the world,

The teeming, streaming air.

O let your human memory end

Heavy with thought and act.

Claim every joy of paradox

That time would keep intact.

Be rich as you are human,”

I heard that hermit cry

To the young men and women

All walking out to die.

COLOPHON

In this long room, upon each western pane

The sunset wreaks its final savage stain;

And we, like masquers costumed in an air

Outcrimsoning the gaudiest cock that crows,

Parade as torches and diabolos

Along the blood-red spiral of the stair.

An imminent amazement of the heart

Constricts our greetings as we meet and part.

A gesture or a word can make us turn

Ready to cry a sudden sharp goodnight;

Yet still delays the dark, still cockerel-bright

Smoulder the dyes in which we wade and burn.

Not tragical, the faces that we wear:

A modern gaiety, fitting as despair

Shall pass the hour till domes and sunsets fall.

Extravagant and ceremonious words

Rise on the air like flights of Chinese birds

Uncaged upon a fiery carnival.

What’s left us in this violent spectacle

But kisses on the mouth, or works of will—

The imagination’s form so sternly wrought,

The flashes of the brain so boldly penned

That when the sunset gutters to its end

The world’s last thought will be our flaring thought?

A WALK BY THE CHARLES

Finality broods upon the things that pass:

Persuaded by this air, the trump of doom

Might hang unsounded while the autumn gloom

Darkens the leaf and smokes the river’s glass.

For nothing so susceptible to death

But on this forenoon seems to hold its breath:

The silent single oarsmen on the stream

Are always young, are rowers in a dream.

The lovers underneath the chestnut tree,

Though love is over, stand bemused to see

The season falling where no fall could be.

You oarsmen, when you row beyond the bend,

Will see the river winding to its end.

Lovers that hold the chestnut burr in hand

Will speak at last of death, will understand,

Foot-deep amid the ruinage of the year,

What smell it is that stings the gathering air.

From our evasions we are brought at last,

From all our hopes of constancy, to cast

One look of recognition at the sky,

The unimportant leaves that flutter by.

Why else upon this bank are we so still?

What lends us anchor but the mutable?

O lovers, let the bridge of your two hands

Be broken, like the mirrored bridge that bends

And shivers on the surface of the stream.

Young oarsmen, who in timeless gesture seem

Continuous, united with the tide,

Leave off your bending to the oar, and glide

Past innocence, beyond these aging bricks

To where the Charles flows in to join the Styx.

NEW YEAR MORNING

The bells have quit their clanging; here beneath

The coldly furious streaks of morning stars

We hear the scraping of the last few cars,

And on the doorstep by the frozen wreath

Return goodnights to night. Dear friends, once more

We’ve held our strength against a straining door,

Again the siege is past, another year

Has lost the battle. You can leave us now.

The hours are done that must be clamored through

Lest darkness think us sleeping, lest we hear

Secret police engendered out of night

Advancing on our little zone of light.

Now each of us can dare to be alone,

His room no longer populous with spies

Bending above the pillow where he lies

To sow his dreams with fear that all is done,

That there’s no more reprieve, no leaf to tear

And find another January there.

So we are safe again. Goodnight, brave friends.

So may beginnings always follow ends.

Though time is treasonable, may we stand

Gathered each year, a stubborn-hearted band

Whose gaiety rises like a litany

Under the dying ornamental tree.

IN TIME OF CARNIVAL

Those lights, that plaza—I should know them all:

The impotent blind beggar shouting his songs

Of lovers, while the headlong populace

Drinks, tramples, immolates itself in action;

The bloody light of braziers on the faces

Of women who are action’s means and end,

Each a laughing Fury; the towering glass

Of those cathedral saints, whose stiffened forms,

Ruby in passing torchlight, stoop to dark

And flare again as puppets of disorder,

Lifeless without its light, but in that rout

Illumined and empowered. There’s no crowd

In nave or playhouse any more; for all

Are actors where mere pasteboard roars to heaven

Under the dropped match, and the streets alone,

The amphitheatre of great night itself,

Suffice to contain their scene. Nothing will do

But action of the senses, total seizure

Of what’s to hand. And through the swaying streets

That beggar, impotent since youth, sings on,

Ignorant of the scene, blind to his power,

The songs that send those lovers wild to bed.

THE MIDDLE-AGED

Their faces, safe as an interior

Of Holland tiles and Oriental carpet,

Where the fruit-bowl, always filled, stood in a light

Of placid afternoon—their voices’ measure,

Their figures moving in the Sunday garden

To lay the tea outdoors or trim the borders,

Afflicted, haunted us. For to be young

Was always to live in other people’s houses

Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others,

Was ours at second-hand and not for long.

The custom of the house, not ours, the sun

Fading the silver-blue Fortuny curtains,

The reminiscence of a Christmas party

Of fourteen years ago—all memory,

Signs of possession and of being possessed,

We tasted, tense with envy. They were so kind,

Would have given us anything; the bowl of fruit

Was filled for us, there was a room upstairs

We must call ours: but twenty years of living

They could not give. Nor did they ever speak

Of the coarse stain on that polished balustrade,

The crack in the study window, or the letters

Locked in a drawer and the key destroyed.

All to be understood by us, returning

Late, in our own time—how that peace was made,

Upon what terms, with how much left unsaid.

THE MARRIAGE PORTION

From commissars of daylight

Love cannot make us free.

Nights of ungracious darkness

Hang over you and me.

We lie awake together

And hear the clocks strike three.

Our loving cannot exile

The felons but and if;

Yet being undivided

Some ways we can contrive

To hold off those besiegers

Who batter round our life:

The thieves of our completeness

Who steal us stone by stone,

The patronage that scowls upon

Our need to be alone,

And all the clever people

Who want us for their own.

The telephone is ringing,

And planes and trains depart.

The cocktail party’s forming,

The cruise about to start.

To stay behind is fatal—

Act now, the time is short.

If we refuse the summons

And stand at last alone,

We walk intact and certain,

As man and woman grown

In the deserted playground

When all the rest have gone.

THE TREE

Long ago I found a seed,

And kept it in a glass of water,

And half forgot my dim intent

Until I saw it start to reach

For life with one blind, fragile root.

And then I pressed it into earth

And saw its tendrils seek the air,

So slowly that I hardly knew

Of any change till it had grown

A stalk, a leaf; and seemed to be

No more a thing in need of me,

But living by some sapience

I had not given, could not withdraw.

So it grew on, and days went by,

And seasons with their common gifts,

Till at the leafage of the year

I felt the sun cut off from me

By something thick outside my room—

Not yet a tree grown to the full,

Yet so endowed with need and will

It took the warmth and left me cold.

And first I climbed with hook and shears

To prune the boughs that darkened me,

But the tree was stubborner than I,

And where I clipped it grew again,

Brutal in purpose as a weed.

Nor did it give of fruit or flower,

Though seasons brought their common gifts,

And years went by. It only grew

Darker and denser to my view,

Taking whatever I would yield—

The homage of a troubled mind—

Requiring nothing, yet accepting

My willingness to guard its life

By the endurance of my own.

It gives me nothing; yet I see

Sometimes in dreams my enemy

Hanged by the hair upon that tree.

LOVERS ARE LIKE CHILDREN

Chagall’s sweet lovers mounting into blue

Remind me that discovery by two

Of any world the mind can wander through

Is like the time when young and left alone,

We touched the secret fringe of being one,

Back of the playground full of Everyone.

Love is like childhood, caught in trust and fear.

The statues point to omens in the air,

And yet the fountains bubble bright and clear.

Lost in the garden rank with contradiction,

We see the fences sprout for our affliction,

And the red-rose-tree curtly labelled Fiction.

Nothing to tell us whether what they mean

Is true of this or any other scene.

We only know the summer leaves are green,

Alive and dense for two to penetrate—

An exploration difficult and great

As when one day beside the schoolyard gate,

Straggling behind to glean a sunlit stone,

One first perceived and knew itself as one.

Now add this pebble to that early one.

WHEN THIS CLANGOR

IN THE BRAIN

Say a master of the track

Lightly leaped and lightly ran,

Knew his powers of chest and thigh

Clean outstripped the thought of man—

Would it not be pill and patch

And worse than queasy cripples know,

If on a day the rheum should catch

And lay that master leaper low?

Say that into certain minds

A Merlin dances, in and out,

And what he chooses, must obey

And sway the thought it thinks about—

Would it not be old folks’ home

And the dry end of the year

For the mind he left again

Unmastered, lock and stock and gear?

When this clangor in the brain

Grows perfunctory, or worse,

Put me down a sick old woman

Propped for sleep, hire me a nurse;

Till then, all things I look upon

Beat on my brain to hail and bless,

And every last and wayward power

I claim till then, and nothing less.

A VIEW OF MERTON COLLEGE

An interval: the view across the fields

Perfect and insusceptible as seen

In printshops of the High Street—sun on stone

Worn like old needlework, the sheen of grass,

Minute and ageless figures moving down

The Broad Walk under tinted trees. Awhile

Mind’s local jangling lightens, ear is eased,

Eye’s flaw is mended in such gazing, healed

By separation as through glass. Until

Sun shifts, air turns harsher, paler, rooks

Flap in the rising wind. The wind has found you,

The mortal light of day, whose envy, waste,

Irresolution tread you as you go

Guilty and human. Here as anywhere,

Peace of the mind lies through an arch of stone,

The limitations posted strict and clear:

Not to be littered or presumed upon.

HOLIDAY

Summer was another country, where the birds

Woke us at dawn among the dripping leaves

And lent to all our fêtes their sweet approval.

The touch of air on flesh was lighter, keener,

The senses flourished like a laden tree

Whose every gesture finishes in a flower.

In those unwardened provinces we dined

From wicker baskets by a green canal,

Staining our lips with peach and nectarine,

Slapping at golden wasps. And when we kissed,

Tasting that sunlit juice, the landscape folded

Into our clasp, and not a breath recalled

The long walk back to winter, leagues away.

THE CAPITAL

Under that summer asphalt, under vistas

Aspiring to a neo-classic calm,

The steaming burgeon of Potomac’s swamp

Has never quite been laid to rest. The eye

Winces in sunlight off a marble dome.

But cannot fix the face of Jefferson

Through haze of an outrageous atmosphere

By diplomats called tropic; nor can the ear

Hold to the lifeline of a single voice

Through jettisoned rumors jamming all the air.

The dollar in that city of inscriptions

Is minted among pediments and columns

Purer than newmade coin. The afternoon

Steams with the drip of departmental fountains

And humid branches breathing overhead

Down avenues where the siren’s nervous shriek

Pursues the murderer or the foreign guest

Through those indifferent noonday crowds who never

Ask, till history tells them, what they do

In that metropolis anything but Greek.

THE PLATFORM

The railway stations of our daily plight

See every hour love’s threatened overthrow.

Each afternoon at five the buses go

Laden with those who shall be false by night.

We say goodbye in rooms too bright with noise

To catch the shades of a receding voice;

We turn at the revolving door and see

Love’s face already changed, indelibly.

Not to admit we may not meet again—

This was the parting treason of our thought.

Battering down our cowardly “till then,”

Time’s traffic hems the seeker from the sought.

We take too sudden leave; the platform reels

With thunder of a thousand pounding heels,

And at the gate where one remains behind,

Though most we strain to see, we most are blind.

Dear loves, dear friends, I take my leave all day

In practice for a time that need not come.

I turn and move from you a little way,

As men walk out beyond the fields of home

In troubled days, to view what they love well—

Distance confirming for a moment’s spell,

Meeting or going, that when we embrace

We know the heart beyond the transient face.

LAST SONG

All in the day that I was born,

I walked across the shouting corn;

I saw the sunlight flash and hail

From every spire and every sail,

But most I leaned against the sky

To hear the eagles racing by,

And all the safety of the womb

Could not betray me, lure me home.

All in the day that I was wed

I saw them strew my bridal bed.

I smelled the wind across the sheets

Breathing of lavender and sweets

That neither sea nor meadow knew;

And when my bride was brought to view

I kept a hundred candles lit

All for light and the joy of it.

All in the day that I was old

I felt the wind blow salt and cold

Like seaspray on my shaking thighs

Or sand flung up to blind my eyes.

I cried for sun and the eagles flying,

But felt those fingers spying, prying,

The same that wrenched me into life

And cut my safety with a knife.

Soon they will bind me dark and warm

And impotent to suffer harm.

I shall be exiled to the womb

Where once I lay and thought it home.

The sun that flashed my first delight

Shall never learn to cleave that night;

And all the swords of danger fly

Far from the caul in which I lie.

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS

However legendary,

The stone is still a stone,

Though it had once resisted

The weight of Africa,

The hammer-blows of time

That wear to bits of rubble

The mountain and the pebble—

But not this coldest one.

Now, you intelligence

So late dredged up from dark

Upon whose smoky walls

Bison took fumbling form

Or flint was edged on flint—

Now, careful arriviste,

Delineate at will

Incisions in the ice.

Be serious, because

The stone may have contempt

For too-familiar hands,

And because all you do

Loses or gains by this:

Respect the adversary,

Meet it with tools refined,

And thereby set your price.

Be hard of heart, because

The stone must leave your hand.

Although you liberate

Pure and expensive fires

Fit to enamor Shebas,

Keep your desire apart.

Love only what you do,

And not what you have done.

Be proud, when you have set

The final spoke of flame

In that prismatic wheel,

And nothing’s left this day

Except to see the sun

Shine on the false and the true,

And know that Africa

Will yield you more to do.

SNAPSHOTS

OF A

DAUGHTER-

IN-LAW

(1963)

AT MAJORITY

FOR C.

When you are old and beautiful,

And things most difficult are done,

There will be few who can recall

Your face that I see ravaged now

By youth and its oppressive work.

Your look will hold their wondering looks

Grave as Cordelia’s at the last,

Neither with rancor at the past

Nor to upbraid the coming time.

For you will be at peace with time.

But now, a daily warfare takes

Its toll of tenderness in you,

And you must live like captains who

Wait out the hour before the charge—

Fearful, and yet impatient too.

Yet someday this will have an end,

All choices made or choice resigned,

And in your face the literal eye

Trace little of your history,

Nor ever piece the tale entire

Of villages that had to burn

And playgrounds of the will destroyed

Before you could be safe from time

And gather in your brow and air

The stillness of antiquity.

1954

FROM MORNING-GLORY TO

PETERSBURG

(The World Book, 1928)

“Organized knowledge in story and picture”

confronts through dusty glass

an eye grown dubious.

I can recall when knowledge still was pure,

not contradictory, pleasurable

as cutting out a paper doll.

You opened up a book and there it was:

everything just as promised, from

Kurdistan to Mormons, Gum

Arabic to Kumquat, neither more nor less.

Facts could be kept separate

by a convention; that was what

made childhood possible. Now knowledge finds me out;

in all its risible untidiness

it traces me to each address,

dragging in things I never thought about.

I don’t invite what facts can be

held at arm’s length; a family

of jeering irresponsibles always

comes along gypsy-style

and there you have them all

forever on your hands. It never pays.

If I could still extrapolate

the morning-glory on the gate

from Petersburg in history—but it’s too late.

1954

RURAL REFLECTIONS

This is the grass your feet are planted on.

You paint it orange or you sing it green,

But you have never found

A way to make the grass mean what you mean.

A cloud can be whatever you intend:

Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye.

But you have never found

A cloud sufficient to express the sky.

Get out there with your splendid expertise;

Raymond who cuts the meadow does no less.

Inhuman nature says:

Inhuman patience is the true success.

Human impatience trips you as you run;

Stand still and you must lie.

It is the grass that cuts the mower down;

It is the cloud that swallows up the sky.

1956

THE KNIGHT

A knight rides into the noon,

and his helmet points to the sun,

and a thousand splintered suns

are the gaiety of his mail.

The soles of his feet glitter

and his palms flash in reply,

and under his crackling banner

he rides like a ship in sail.

A knight rides into the noon,

and only his eye is living,

a lump of bitter jelly

set in a metal mask,

betraying rags and tatters

that cling to the flesh beneath

and wear his nerves to ribbons

under the radiant casque.

Who will unhorse this rider

and free him from between

the walls of iron, the emblems

crushing his chest with their weight?

Will they defeat him gently,

or leave him hurled on the green,

his rags and wounds still hidden

under the great breastplate?

1957

THE LOSER

A man thinks of the woman he once loved:

first, after her wedding, and then nearly a

decade later.

I.

I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

home from that bourgeois sacrament,

your cheek still tasting cold upon

my lips that gave you benison

with all the swagger that they knew—

as losers somehow learn to do.

Your wedding made my eyes ache; soon

the world would be worse off for one

more golden apple dropped to ground

without the least protesting sound,

and you would windfall lie, and we

forget your shimmer on the tree.

Beauty is always wasted: if

not Mignon’s song sung to the deaf,

at all events to the unmoved.

A face like yours cannot be loved

long or seriously enough.

Almost, we seem to hold it off.

II.

Well, you are tougher than I thought.

Now when the wash with ice hangs taut

this morning of St. Valentine,

I see you strip the squeaking line,

your body weighed against the load,

and all my groans can do no good.

Because you still are beautiful,

though squared and stiffened by the pull

of what nine windy years have done.

You have three daughters, lost a son.

I see all your intelligence

flung into that unwearied stance.

My envy is of no avail.

I turn my head and wish him well

who chafed your beauty into use

and lives forever in a house

lit by the friction of your mind.

You stagger in against the wind.

1958

THE ABSENT-MINDED

ARE ALWAYS TO BLAME

What do you look for down there

in the cracks of the pavement? Or up there

between the pineapple and the acanthus leaf

in that uninspired ornament? Odysseus

wading half-naked out of the shrubbery

like a god, dead serious among those at play,

could hardly be more out of it. In school

we striped your back with chalk, you all oblivious,

your eyes harnessed by a transparent strand

reaching the other side of things, or down

like a wellchain to the center of earth.

Now with those same eyes you pull the

pavements up like old linoleum,

arches of triumph start to liquefy

minutes after you slowly turn away.

1958

EURYCLEA’S TALE

I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting

for a father dawdling among the isles,

and the seascape hollowed out by that boy’s edged gaze

to receive one speck, one only, for years and years withheld.

And that speck, that curious man, has kept from home

till home would seem the forbidden place, till blood

and the tears of an old woman must run down

to satisfy the genius of place. Even then, what

can they do together, father and son?

the driftwood stranger and the rooted boy

whose eyes will have nothing then to ask the sea.

But all the time and everywhere

lies in ambush for the distracted eyeball

light: light on the ship racked up in port,

the chimney-stones, the scar whiter than smoke,

than her flanks, her hair, that true but aging bride.

1958

SEPTEMBER 21

Wear the weight of equinoctial evening,

light like melons bruised on all the porches.

Feel the houses tenderly appraise you,

hold you in the watchfulness of mothers.

Once the nighttime was a milky river

washing past the swimmers in the sunset,

rinsing over sleepers of the morning.

Soon the night will be an eyeless quarry

where the shrunken daylight and its rebels,

loosened,  dive like stones in perfect silence,

names and voices drown without reflection.

Then the houses draw you. Then they have you.

1958

AFTER A SENTENCE

IN “MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE”

The month’s eye blurs.

The winter’s lungs are cracked.

Along bloated gutters race,

shredded, your injured legions,

the waste of our remorseless search.

Your old, unuttered names are holes

worn in our skins

through which we feel from time to time

abrasive wind.

Those who are loved live poorly and in danger.

We who were loved will never

unlive that crippling fever.

A day returns, a certain weather

splatters the panes, and we

once more stare in the eye of our first failure.

1958

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

1.

You, once a belle in Shreveport,

with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,

still have your dresses copied from that time,

and play a Chopin prelude

called by Cortot: “Delicious recollections

float like perfume through the memory.”

Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,

heavy with useless experience, rich

with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,

crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge

of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter

wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

2.

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

she hears the angels chiding, and looks out

past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.

Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.

Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.

Sometimes she’s let the tapstream scald her arm,

a match burn to her thumbnail,

or held her hand above the kettle’s snout

right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,

since nothing hurts her any more, except

each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes.

3.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,

that sprung-lidded, still commodious

steamer-trunk of tempora and mores

gets stuffed with it all:   the mildewed orange-flowers,

the female pills, the terrible breasts

of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.

Two handsome women, gripped in argument,

each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream

across the cut glass and majolica

like Furies cornered from their prey:

The argument ad feminam, all the old knives

that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,

ma semblable, ma soeur!

4.

Knowing themselves too well in one another:

their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,

the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .

Reading while waiting

for the iron to heat,

writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—

in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,

or, more often,

iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,

dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

5.

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

she shaves her legs until they gleam

like petrified mammoth-tusk.

6.

When to her lute Corinna sings

neither words nor music are her own;

only the long hair dipping

over her cheek, only the song

of silk against her knees

and these

adjusted in reflections of an eye.

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before

an unlocked door, that cage of cages,

tell us, you bird, you tragical machine—

is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned down

by love, for you the only natural action,

are you edged more keen

to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown

her household books to you, daughter-in-law,

that her sons never saw?

7.

“To have in this uncertain world some stay

which cannot be undermined, is

of the utmost consequence.”

Thus wrote

a woman, partly brave and partly good,

who fought with what she partly understood.

Few men about her would or could do more,

hence she was labelled harpy, shrew and whore.

8.

“You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

and turn part legend, part convention.

Still, eyes inaccurately dream

behind closed windows blankening with steam.

Deliciously, all that we might have been,

all that we were—fire, tears,

wit, taste, martyred ambition—

stirs like the memory of refused adultery

the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

9.

Not that it is done well, but

that it is done at all? Yes, think

of the odds! or shrug them off forever.

This luxury of the precocious child,

Time’s precious chronic invalid,—

would we, darlings, resign it if we could?

Our blight has been our sinecure:

mere talent was enough for us—

glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

Sigh no more, ladies.

Time is male

and in his cups drinks to the fair.

Bemused by gallantry, we hear

our mediocrities over-praised,

indolence read as abnegation,

slattern thought styled intuition,

every lapse forgiven, our crime

only to cast too bold a shadow

or smash the mould straight off.

For that, solitary confinement,

tear gas, attrition shelling.

Few applicants for that honor.

10.

Well,

she’s long about her coming, who must be

more merciless to herself than history.

Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge

breasted and glancing through the currents,

taking the light upon her

at least as beautiful as any boy

or helicopter,

poised, still coming,

her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:

delivered

palpable

ours.

1958–1960

PASSING ON

The landlord’s hammer in the yard

patches a porch where your shirts swing

brashly against May’s creamy blue.

This year the forsythia ran wild,

chrome splashed on the spring evenings,

every bush a pile of sulphur.

Now, ragged, they bend

under the late wind’s onslaught, tousled

as my head beneath the clotheslines.

Soon we’ll be off. I’ll pack us into parcels,

stuff us in barrels, shroud us in newspapers,

pausing to marvel at old bargain sales:

Oh, all the chances we never seized!

Emptiness round the stoop of the house

minces, catwise, waiting for an in.

1959

THE RAVEN

If, antique hateful bird,

flapping through dawngagged streets

of metal shopfronts grated down

on pedestrian nerve-ends,

if, as on old film,

my features blurred and grained like cereal,

you find me walking up and down

waiting for my first dream,

don’t try to sully my head

with vengeful squirtings. Fly on,

ratfooted cautionary of my dark,

till we meet further along.

You are no dream, old genius.

I smell you, get my teeth on edge,

stand in my sweat—in mercury—

even as you prime your feathers and set sail.

1959

MERELY TO KNOW

I.

Wedged in by earthworks

thrown up by snouters before me,

I kick and snuffle, breathing in

cobwebs of beetle-cuirass:

vainglory of polished green,

infallible pincer, resonant nerve,

a thickening on the air now,

confusion to my lungs, no more.

My predecessors blind me—

their zeal exhausted among roots and tunnels,

they gasped and looked up once or twice

into the beechtree’s nightblack glitter.

II.

Let me take you by the hair

and drag you backward to the light,

there spongelike press my gaze

patiently upon your eyes,

hold like a photographic plate

against you my enormous question.

What if you cringe, what if you weep?

Suffer this and you need suffer

nothing more. I’ll give you back

yourself at last to the last part.

I take nothing, only look.

Change nothing. Have no need to change.

Merely to know and let you go.

1959

III.

Spirit like water

molded by unseen stone

and sandbar, pleats and funnels

according to its own

submerged necessity—

to the indolent eye

pure willfulness, to the stray

pine-needle boiling

in that cascade-bent pool

a random fury: Law,

if that’s what’s wanted, lies

asking to be read

in the dried brook-bed.

1961

ANTINOÜS: THE DIARIES

Autumn torture. The old signs

smeared on the pavement, sopping leaves

rubbed into the landscape as unguent on a bruise,

brought indoors, even, as they bring flowers, enormous,

with the colors of the body’s secret parts.

All this. And then, evenings, needing to be out,

walking fast, fighting the fire

that must die, light that sets my teeth on edge with joy,

till on the black embankment

I’m a cart stopped in the ruts of time.

Then at some house the rumor of truth and beauty

saturates a room like lilac-water

in the stream of a bath, fires snap, heads are high,

gold hair at napes of necks, gold in glasses,

gold in the throat, poetry of furs and manners.

Why do I shiver then? Haven’t I seen,

over and over, before the end of an evening,

the three opened coffins carried in and left in a corner?

Haven’t I watched as somebody cracked his shin

on one of them, winced and hopped and limped

laughing to lay his hand on a beautiful arm

striated with hairs of gold, like an almond-shell?

The old, needless story. For if I’m here

it is by choice and when at last

I smell my own rising nausea, feel the air

tighten around my stomach like a surgical bandage,

I can’t pretend surprise. What is it I so miscarry?

If what I spew on the tiles at last,

helpless, disgraced, alone,

is in part what I’ve swallowed from glasses, eyes,

motions of hands, opening and closing mouths,

Isn’t it also dead gobbets of myself,

abortive, murdered, or never willed?

1959

JUVENILIA

Your Ibsen volumes, violet-spined,

each flaking its gold arabesque!

Again I sit, under duress, hands washed,

at your inkstained oaken desk,

by the goose-neck lamp in the tropic of your books,

stabbing the blotting-pad, doodling loop upon loop,

peering one-eyed in the dusty reflecting mirror

of your student microscope,

craning my neck to spell above me

A DOLLS HOUSE     LITTLE EYOLF

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN

Unspeakable fairy tales ebb like blood through my head

as I dip the pen and for aunts, for admiring friends,

for you above all to read,

copy my praised and sedulous lines.

Behind the two of us, thirsty spines

quiver in semi-shadow, huge leaves uncurl and thicken.

1960

DOUBLE MONOLOGUE

To live illusionless, in the abandoned mine-

shaft of doubt, and still

mime illusions for others? A puzzle

for the maker who has thought

once too often too coldly.

Since I was more than a child

trying on a thousand faces

I have wanted one thing: to know

simply as I know my name

at any given moment, where I stand.

How much expense of time and skill

which might have set itself

to angelic fabrications! All merely

to chart one needle in the haymow?

Find yourself and you find the world?

Solemn presumption! Mighty Object

no one but itself has missed,

what’s lost, if you stay lost? Someone

ignorantly loves you—will that serve?

Shrug that off, and presto!—

the needle drowns in the haydust.

Think of the whole haystack—

a composition so fortuitous

it only looks monumental.

There’s always a straw twitching somewhere.

Wait out the long chance, and

your needle too could get nudged up

to the apex of that bristling calm.

Rusted, possibly. You might not want

to swear it was the Object, after all.

Time wears us old utopians.

I now no longer think

“truth” is the most beautiful of words.

Today, when I see “truthful”

written somewhere, it flares

like a white orchid in wet woods,

rare and grief-delighting, up from the page.

Sometimes, unwittingly even,

we have been truthful.

In a random universe, what more

exact and starry consolation?

Don’t think I think

facts serve better than ignorant love.

Both serve, and still

our need mocks our gear.

1960

A WOMAN MOURNED

BY DAUGHTERS

Now, not a tear begun,

we sit here in your kitchen,

spent, you see, already.

You are swollen till you strain

this house and the whole sky.

You, whom we so often

succeeded in ignoring!

You are puffed up in death

like a corpse pulled from the sea;

we groan beneath your weight.

And yet you were a leaf,

a straw blown on the bed,

you had long since become

crisp as a dead insect.

What is it, if not you,

that settles on us now

like satin you pulled down

over our bridal heads?

What rises in our throats

like food you prodded in?

Nothing could be enough.

You breathe upon us now

through solid assertions

of yourself: teaspoons, goblets,

seas of carpet, a forest

of old plants to be watered,

an old man in an adjoining

room to be touched and fed.

And all this universe

dares us to lay a finger

anywhere, save exactly

as you would wish it done.

1960

READINGS OF HISTORY

He delighted in relating the fact that he had been born

near Girgenti in a place called Chaos during a raging

cholera epidemic.

—Domenico Vittorini, The Drama of Luigi Pirandello

I. The Evil Eye

Last night we sat with the stereopticon,

laughing at genre views of 1906,

till suddenly, gazing straight into

that fringed and tasselled parlor, where the vestal

spurns an unlikely suitor

with hairy-crested plants to right and left,

my heart sank. It was terrible.

I smelled the mildew in those swags of plush,

dust on the eyepiece bloomed to freaks of mold.

I knew beyond all doubt how dead that couple was.

Today, a fresh clean morning.

Your camera stabs me unawares,

right in my mortal part.

A womb of celluloid already

contains my dotage and my total absence.

II. The Confrontation

Luigi Pirandello

looked like an old historian

(oval head, tufted white beard,

not least the hunger

for reconciliation in his eye).

For fourteen years, facing

his criminal reflection

in his wife’s Grand Guignol mind,

he built over and over

that hall of mirrors

in which to be appears

to be perceived.

The present holds you like a raving wife,

clever as the mad are clever,

digging up your secret truths

from her disabled genius.

She knows what you hope

and dare not hope:

remembers

what you’re sick

of forgetting.

What are you now

but what you know together, you and she?

She will not let you think.

It is important

to make connections. Everything

happens very fast in the minds

of the insane. Even you

aren’t up to that, yet.

Go out, walk,

think of selves long past.

III. Memorabilia

I recall

Civil War letters of a great-grand-uncle,

fifteen at Chancellorsville,

no raconteur,

no speller, either; nor to put it squarely,

much of a mind;

the most we gather

is that he did write home:

I am well,

how are my sisters, hope you are the same.

Did Spartan battle-echoes rack his head?

Dying, he turned into his father’s memory.

History’s queerly strong perfumes

rise from the crook of this day’s elbow:

Seduction fantasies of the public mind,

or Dilthey’s dream from which he roused to see

the cosmos glaring through his windowpane?

Prisoners of what we think occurred,

or dreamers dreaming toward a final word?

What, in fact, happened in these woods

on some obliterated afternoon?

IV. Consanguinity

Can history show us nothing

but pieces of ourselves, detached,

set to a kind of poetry,

a kind of music, even?

Seated today on Grandmamma’s

plush sofa with the grapes

bursting so ripely from the curved mahogany,

we read the great Victorians

weeping, almost, as if

some family breach were healed.

Those angry giantesses and giants,

lately our kith and kin!

We stare into their faces, hear

at last what they were saying

(or some version not bruited

by filial irritation).

The cat-tails wither in the reading-room.

Tobacco-colored dust

drifts on the newest magazines.

I loaf here leafing ancient copies

of LIFE from World War II.

We look so poor and honest there:

girls with long hair badly combed

and unbecoming dresses—

where are you now?

You sail

to shop in Europe, ignorantly freed

for you, an age ago.

Your nylon luggage matches

eyelids

expertly azured.

I, too, have lived in history.

V. The Mirror

Is it in hopes

to find or lose myself

that I

fill up my table now

with Michelet and Motley?

To “know how it was”

or to forget how it is—

what else?

Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,

Yankee nor Rebel, born

in the face of two ancient cults,

I’m a good reader of histories.

And you,

Morris Cohen, dear to me as a brother,

when you sit at night

tracing your way through your volumes

of Josephus, or any

of the old Judaic chronicles,

do you find yourself there, a simpler,

more eloquent Jew?

or do you read

to shut out the tick-tock of self,

the questions and their routine answers?

VI. The Covenant

The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze,

our fingers icy as a bunch of keys.

Nothing will thaw these bones except

memory like an ancient blanket wrapped

about us when we sleep at home again,

smelling of picnics, closets, sicknesses,

old nightmare,

and insomnia’s spreading stain.

Or say I sit with what I halfway know

as with a dying man who heaves the true

version at last, now that it hardly matters,

or gropes a hand to where the letters

sewn in the mattress can be plucked and read.

Here’s water.    Sleep.    No more is asked of you.

I take your life into my living head.

1960

TO THE AIRPORT

Death’s taxi crackles through the mist. The cheeks

of diamond battlements flush high and cold.

Alarm clocks strike a million sparks of will.

Weeping:   all night we’ve wept and watched the hours

that never will be ours again: Now

weeping, we roll through unforgettable

Zion, that rears its golden head from sleep

to act, and does not need us as we weep.

You dreamed us, City, and you let us be.

Grandiloquence, improvidence, ordure, light,

hours that seemed years, and ours—and over all

the endless wing of possibility,

that mackerel heaven of yours, fretted with all

our wits could leap for, envy batten on.

Our flights take off from you into the sea;

nothing you need wastes, though we think we do.

You are Canaan now and we are lifted high

to see all we were promised, never knew.

1960

THE AFTERWAKE

Nursing your nerves

to rest, I’ve roused my own; well,

now for a few bad hours!

Sleep sees you behind closed doors.

Alone, I slump in his front parlor.

You’re safe inside. Good. But I’m

like a midwife who at dawn

has all in order: bloodstains

washed up, teapot on the stove,

and starts her five miles home

walking, the birthyell still

exploding in her head.

Yes, I’m with her now: here’s

the streaked, livid road

edged with shut houses

breathing night out and in.

Legs tight with fatigue,

we move under morning’s coal-blue star,

colossal as this load

of unexpired purpose, which drains

slowly, till scissors of cockcrow snip the air.

1961

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

TO GPS.

Over the chessboard now,

Your Artificiality concludes

a final check; rests; broods—

no—sorts and stacks a file of memories,

while I

concede the victory, bow,

and slouch among my free associations.

You never had a mother,

let’s say? no digital Gertrude

whom you’d as lief have seen

Kingless? So your White Queen

was just an “operator.”

(My Red had incandescence,

ire, aura, flare,

and trapped me several moments in her stare.)

I’m sulking, clearly, in the great tradition

of human waste. Why not

dump the whole reeking snarl

and let you solve me once for all?

(Parameter: a black-faced Luddite

itching for ecstasies of sabotage.)

Still, when

they make you write your poems, later on,

who’d envy you, force-fed

on all those variorum

editions of our primitive endeavors,

those frozen pemmican language-rations

they’ll cram you with? denied

our luxury of nausea, you

forget nothing, have no dreams.

1961

A MARRIAGE IN THE ’SIXTIES

As solid-seeming as antiquity,

you frown above

the New York Sunday Times

where Castro, like a walk-on out of Carmen,

mutters into a bearded henchman’s ear.

They say the second’s getting shorter—

I knew it in my bones—

and pieces of the universe are missing.

I feel the gears of this late afternoon

slip, cog by cog, even as I read.

“I’m old,” we both complain,

half-laughing, oftener now.

Time serves you well. That face—

part Roman emperor, part Raimu—

nothing this side of Absence can undo.

Bliss, revulsion, your rare angers can

only carry through what’s well begun.

When

I read your letters long ago

in that half-defunct

hotel in Magdalen Street

every word primed my nerves.

A geographical misery

composed of oceans, fogbound planes

and misdelivered cablegrams

lay round me, a Nova Zembla

only your live breath could unfreeze.

Today we stalk

in the raging desert of our thought

whose single drop of mercy is

each knows the other there.

Two strangers, thrust for life upon a rock,

may have at last the perfect hour of talk

that language aches for; still—

two minds, two messages.

Your brows knit into flourishes. Some piece

of mere time has you tangled there.

Some mote of history has flown into your eye.

Will nothing ever be the same,

even our quarrels take a different key,

our dreams exhume new metaphors?

The world breathes underneath our bed.

Don’t look. We’re at each other’s mercy too.

Dear fellow-particle, electric dust

I’m blown with—ancestor

to what euphoric cluster—

see how particularity dissolves

in all that hints of chaos. Let one finger

hover toward you from There

and see this furious grain

suspend its dance to hang

beside you like your twin.

1961

FIRST THINGS

I can’t name love now

without naming its object—

this the final measure

of those flintspark years

when one believed

one’s flash innate.

Today I swear

only in the sun’s eye

do I take fire.

1961

ATTENTION

The ice age is here.

I sit burning cigarettes,

burning my brain.

A micro-Tibet,

deadly, frivolous, complete,

blinds the four panes.

Veils of dumb air

unwind like bandages

from my lips

half-parted, steady as the mouths

of antique statues.

1961

END OF AN ERA

This morning, flakes of sun

peel down to the last snowholds,

the barbed-wire leavings of a war

lost, won, in these dead-end alleys.

Stale as a written-out journalist,

I sort my gear.—Nothing is happening.—City,

dumb as a pack of thumbed cards, you

once had snap and glare

and secret life; now, trembling

under my five grey senses’ weight,

you flatten

onto the table.

Baudelaire, I think of you . . . Nothing changes,

rude and self-absorbed the current

dashes past, reflecting nothing, poetry

extends its unsought amnesty,

the roots of the great grove

atrophy underground.

Some voices, though, shake in the air like heat.

The neighborhood is changing,

even the neighbors are grown, methinks, peculiar.

I walk into my house and see

tourists fingering this and that.

My mirrors, my bric-à-brac

don’t suit their style.

Those old friends, though,

alive and dead,

for whom things don’t come easy—

Certain forests are sawdust,

from now on have to be described?

Nothing changes.    The bones of the mammoths

are still in the earth.

1961

RUSTICATION

In a gigantic pot de chambre, scrolled

with roses, purchased dearly at auction,

goldenrod and asters spill

toward the inevitable sunset.

The houseguests trail from swimming

under huge towels.

Marianne dangles barefoot in the hammock

reading about Martin Luther King.

Vivaldi rattles on the phonograph,

flutes ricocheting off the birchtrees.

Flies buzz and are gaily murdered.

Still out of it, and guilty,

I glue the distance-glasses to my eyes

ostrich-like, hoping

you’ll think me in that clearing half a mile away.

Offstage I hear

the old time-killers dressing, banging doors,

your voice, a timbre or two too rich for love,

cheering them on.

A kestrel sails into my field of vision,

clear as a rising star.

Why should I need to quarrel

with another’s consolations?

Why, in your mortal skin,

vigorously smashing ice and smoking,

a graying pigtail down your back,

should you seem infamous to me?

1961

APOLOGY

I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever

keep a cat, a dog,

a bird—

chiefly because

I’d rather love my equals.

Today, turning

in the fog of my mind,

I knew, the thing I really

couldn’t stand in the house

is a woman

with a mindful of fog

and bloodletting claws

and the nerves of a bird

and the nightmares of a dog.

1961

SISTERS

Can I easily say,

I know you of course now,

no longer the fellow-victim,

reader of my diaries, heir

to my outgrown dresses,

ear for my poems and invectives?

Do I know you better

than that blue-eyed stranger

self-absorbed as myself

raptly knitting or sleeping

through a thirdclass winter journey?

Face to face all night

her dreams and whimpers

tangled with mine,

sleeping but not asleep

behind the engine drilling

into dark Germany,

her eyes, mouth, head

reconstructed by dawn

as we nodded farewell.

Her I should recognize

years later, anywhere.

1961

IN THE NORTH

Mulish, unregenerate,

not “as all men are”

but more than most

you sit up there in the sunset;

there are only three

hours of dark

in your night. You are

alone as an old king

with his white-gold beard

when in summer the ships

sail out, the heroes

singing, push off

for other lands. Only

in winter when

trapped in the ice

your kingdom flashes

under the northern lights

and the bees dream

in their hives, the young

men like the bees

hang near you

for lack of another,

remembering too, with some

remorseful tenderness

you are their king.

1962

THE CLASSMATE

One year, you gave us

all names, hudibrastic

titles, skywrote

our gaudy histories.

We were all sparks

struck in your head,

we mocked but listened.

You filled a whole

zoological notebook

with sly generations

of should-have-beens,

were disgraced, not distressed.

Our howls died away.

Your poetry was in

paper-dart ballads

sailing beyond our noses,

in blackboard lyrics

scrawled in our own patois,

spirals of chalkdust,

inkblot manifestos

who could read today?

You less than any.

Because later you turned

to admiration of the classics

and a sedulous ear.

Still if I hear

the slash of feet

through gutters full of oakleaves

and see the boys

still unprized, unprizing,

dancing along, tossing

books and dusty leaves

into the sun,

they chant, it would seem,

your momentary quatrains,

nose-thumbing, free-lancing

poet of the schoolyard—

prize-giver and taker

now, a pillar

swaddled in laurels—

lost classmate, look!

your glory was here.

1962

PEELING ONIONS

Only to have a grief

equal to all these tears!

There’s not a sob in my chest.

Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt

I pare away, no hero,

merely a cook.

Crying was labor, once

when I’d good cause.

Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds

raw in my head,

so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.

A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain—

yet all that stayed

stuffed in my lungs like smog.

These old tears in the chopping-bowl.

1961

GHOST OF A CHANCE

You see a man

trying to think.

You want to say

to everything:

Keep off! Give him room!

But you only watch,

terrified

the old consolations

will get him at last

like a fish

half-dead from flopping

and almost crawling

across the shingle,

almost breathing

the raw, agonizing

air

till a wave

pulls it back blind into the triumphant

sea.

1962

THE WELL

Down this old well

what leaves have fallen,

what cores of eaten apples,

what scraps of paper!

An old trash barrel.

November, no one comes.

But I come, trying

to breathe that word

into the well’s ear

which could make the leaves fly up

like a green jet

to clothe the naked tree,

the whole fruit leap to the bough,

the scraps like fleets of letters

sail up into my hands.

Leiden, 1961

NOVELLA

Two people in a room, speaking harshly.

One gets up, goes out to walk.

(That is the man.)

The other goes into the next room

and washes the dishes, cracking one.

(That is the woman.)

It gets dark outside.

The children quarrel in the attic.

She has no blood left in her heart.

The man comes back to a dark house.

The only light is in the attic.

He has forgotten his key.

He rings at his own door

and hears sobbing on the stairs.

The lights go on in the house.

The door closes behind him.

Outside, separate as minds,

the stars too come alight.

1962

FACE

I could look at you a long time,

man of red and blue;

your eye glows mockingly

from the rainbow-colored flesh

Karel Appel clothed you in.

You are a fish,

drawn up dripping hugely

from the sea of paint,

laid on the canvas

to glower and flash

out of the blackness

that is your true element

1962

PROSPECTIVE

IMMIGRANTS

PLEASE NOTE

Either you will

go through this door

or you will not go through.

If you go through there

is always the risk

of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly

and you must look back

and let them happen.

If you do not go through

it is possible

to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes

to hold your position

to die bravely

but much will blind you,

much will evade you,

at what cost who knows?

The door itself

makes no promises.

It is only a door.

1962

LIKENESS

A good man

is an odd thing:

hard to find

as the song says,

he is anarchic

as a mountain freshet

and unprotected

by the protectors.

1962

THE LAG

With you it is still the middle of the night.

Nothing I know will make you know

what birds cried me awake

or how the wet light leaked

into my sky.

Day came as no clear victory,

it’s raining still, but light

washes the menace from obscure forms

and in the shaving mirror there’s

a face I recognize.

With you it is still the middle of the night.

You hug yourself, tightened as in a berth

suspended over the Grand Banks

where time is already American

and hanging fire.

I’m older now than you.

I feel your black dreams struggling at a porthole

stuffed full of night. I feel you choking

in that thick place. My words

reach you as through a telephone

where some submarine echo of my voice

blurts knowledge you can’t use.

1962

ALWAYS THE SAME

Slowly, Prometheus

bleeds to life

in his huge loneliness.

You, for whom

his bowels are exposed,

go about your affairs

dying a little every day

from the inside out

almost imperceptibly

till the late decades when

women go hysterical

and men are dumbly frightened

and far away, like the sea

Prometheus sings on

“like a battle-song after a battle.”

1962

PEACE

Lashes of white light

binding another hailcloud—

the whole onset all over

bursting against our faces,

sputtering like dead holly

fired in a grate:

And the birds go mad

potted by grapeshot

while the sun shines

in one quarter of heaven

and the rainbow

breaks out its enormous flag—

oily, unnegotiable—

over the sack-draped backs

of the cattle in their kingdom.

1961

THE ROOFWALKER

FOR DENISE LEVERTOV.

Over the half-finished houses

night comes. The builders

stand on the roof. It is

quiet after the hammers,

the pulleys hang slack.

Giants, the roofwalkers,

on a listing deck, the wave

of darkness about to break

on their heads. The sky

is a torn sail where figures

pass magnified, shadows

on a burning deck.

I feel like them up there:

exposed, larger than life,

and due to break my neck.

Was it worth while to lay—

with infinite exertion—

a roof I can’t live under?

—All those blueprints,

closings of gaps,

measurings, calculations?

A life I didn’t choose

chose me: even

my tools are the wrong ones

for what I have to do.

I’m naked, ignorant,

a naked man fleeing

across the roofs

who could with a shade of difference

be sitting in the lamplight

against the cream wallpaper

reading—not with indifference—

about a naked man

fleeing across the roofs.

1961

POEMS

(1955–1957)

AT THE JEWISH NEW YEAR

For more than five thousand years

This calm September day

With yellow in the leaf

Has lain in the kernel of Time

While the world outside the walls

Has had its turbulent say

And history like a long

Snake has crawled on its way

And is crawling onward still.

And we have little to tell

On this or any feast

Except of the terrible past.

Five thousand years are cast

Down before the wondering child

Who must expiate them all.

Some of us have replied

In the bitterness of youth

Or the qualms of middle-age:

“If Time is unsatisfied,

And all our fathers have suffered

Can never be enough,

Why, then, we choose to forget.

Let our forgetting begin

With those age-old arguments

In which their minds were wound

Like musty phylacteries;

And we choose to forget as well

Those cherished histories

That made our old men fond,

And already are strange to us.

“Or let us, being today

Too rational to cry out,

Or trample underfoot

What after all preserves

A certain savor yet—

Though torn up by the roots—

Let us make our compromise

With the terror and the guilt

And view as curious relics

Once found in daily use

The mythology, the names

That, however Time has corrupted

Their ancient purity

Still burn like yellow flames,

But their fire is not for us.”

And yet, however we choose

To deny or to remember,

Though on the calendars

We wake and suffer by,

This day is merely one

Of thirty in September—

In the kernel of the mind

The new year must renew

This day, as for our kind

Over five thousand years,

The task of being ourselves.

Whatever we strain to forget,

Our memory must be long.

May the taste of honey linger

Under the bitterest tongue.

1955

MOVING IN WINTER

Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards,

is carried piecemeal through the snow:

Headboard and footboard now, the bed

where she has lain desiring him

where overhead his sleep will build

its canopy to smother her once more;

their table, by four elbows worn

evening after evening while the wax runs down;

mirrors grey with reflecting them,

bureaus coffining from the cold

things that can shuffle in a drawer,

carpets rolled up around those echoes

which, shaken out, take wing and breed

new altercations, the old silences.

1957

NECESSITIES

OF LIFE

(1966)

I

POEMS 1962–1965

Changeray-je pas pour vous cette belle

contexture des choses? C’est la condition

de vostre creation, c’est une partie de

vous que la mort: vous vous fuyez vous-mesmes.

—Montaigne

NECESSITIES OF LIFE

Piece by piece I seem

to re-enter the world: I first began

a small, fixed dot, still see

that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack

pushed into the scene,

a hard little head protruding

from the pointillist’s buzz and bloom.

After a time the dot

begins to ooze. Certain heats

melt it.

Now I was hurriedly

blurring into ranges

of burnt red, burning green,

whole biographies swam up and

swallowed me like Jonah.

Jonah! I was Wittgenstein,

Mary Wollstonecraft, the soul

of Louis Jouvet, dead

in a blown-up photograph.

Till, wolfed almost to shreds,

I learned to make myself

unappetizing. Scaly as a dry bulb

thrown into a cellar

I used myself, let nothing use me.

Like being on a private dole,

sometimes more like kneading bricks in Egypt.

What life was there, was mine,

now and again to lay

one hand on a warm brick

and touch the sun’s ghost

with economical joy,

now and again to name

over the bare necessities.

So much for those days. Soon

practice may make me middling-perfect, I’ll

dare inhabit the world

trenchant in motion as an eel, solid

as a cabbage-head. I have invitations:

a curl of mist steams upward

from a field, visible as my breath,

houses along a road stand waiting

like old women knitting, breathless

to tell their tales.

1962

IN THE WOODS

“Difficult ordinary happiness,”

no one nowadays believes in you.

I shift, full-length on the blanket,

to fix the sun precisely

behind the pine-tree’s crest

so light spreads through the needles

alive as water just

where a snake has surfaced,

unreal as water in green crystal.

Bad news is always arriving.

“We’re hiders, hiding from something bad,”

sings the little boy.

Writing these words in the woods,

I feel like a traitor to my friends,

even to my enemies.

The common lot’s to die

a stranger’s death and lie

rouged in the coffin, in a dress

chosen by the funeral director.

Perhaps that’s why we never

see clocks on public buildings any more.

A fact no architect will mention.

We’re hiders, hiding from something bad

most of the time.

Yet, and outrageously, something good

finds us, found me this morning

lying on a dusty blanket

among the burnt-out Indian pipes

and bursting-open lady’s-slippers.

My soul, my helicopter, whirred

distantly, by habit, over

the old pond with the half-drowned boat

toward which it always veers

for consolation: ego’s Arcady:

leaving the body stuck

like a leaf against a screen.—

Happiness! how many times

I’ve stranded on that word,

at the edge of that pond; seen

as if through tears, the dragon-fly—

only to find it all

going differently for once

this time: my soul wheeled back

and burst into my body.

Found! ready or not.

If I move now, the sun

naked between the trees

will melt me as I lie.

1963

THE CORPSE-PLANT

How dare a sick man, or an obedient man, write poems?

—Whitman

A milk-glass bowl hanging by three chains

from the discolored ceiling

is beautiful tonight. On the floor, leaves, crayons,

innocent dust foregather.

Neither obedient nor sick, I turn my head,

feeling the weight of a thick gold ring

in either lobe. I see the corpse-plants

clustered in a hobnailed tumbler

at my elbow, white as death, I’d say,

if I’d ever seen death;

whiter than life

next to my summer-stained hand.

Is it in the sun that truth begins?

Lying under that battering light

the first few hours of summer

I felt scraped clean, washed down

to ignorance. The gold in my ears,

souvenir of a shrewd old city,

might have been wearing thin as wires

found in the bones of a woman’s head

miraculously kept in its essentials

in some hot cradle-tomb of time.

I felt my body slipping through

the fingers of its mind.

Later, I slid on wet rocks,

threw my shoes across a brook,

waded on algae-furred stones

to join them. That day I found

the corpse-plants, growing like

shadows on a negative

in the chill of fern and lichen-rust.

That day for the first time

I gave them their deathly names—

or did they name themselves?—

not “Indian pipes” as once

we children knew them.

Tonight, I think of winter,

winters of mind, of flesh,

sickness of the rot-smell of leaves

turned silt-black, heavy as tarpaulin,

obedience of the elevator cage

lowering itself, crank by crank

into the mine-pit,

forced labor forcibly renewed—

but the horror is dimmed:

like the negative of one

intolerable photograph

it barely sorts itself out

under the radiance of the milk-glass shade.

Only death’s insect whiteness

crooks its neck in a tumbler

where I placed its sign by choice.

1963

THE TREES

The trees inside are moving out into the forest,

the forest that was empty all these days

where no bird could sit

no insect hide

no sun bury its feet in shadow

the forest that was empty all these nights

will be full of trees by morning.

All night the roots work

to disengage themselves from the cracks

in the veranda floor.

The leaves strain toward the glass

small twigs stiff with exertion

long-cramped boughs shuffling under the roof

like newly discharged patients

half-dazed, moving

to the clinic doors.

I sit inside, doors open to the veranda

writing long letters

in which I scarcely mention the departure

of the forest from the house.

The night is fresh, the whole moon shines

in a sky still open

the smell of leaves and lichen

still reaches like a voice into the rooms.

My head is full of whispers

which tomorrow will be silent.

Listen. The glass is breaking.

The trees are stumbling forward

into the night. Winds rush to meet them.

The moon is broken like a mirror,

its pieces flash now in the crown

of the tallest oak.

1963

LIKE THIS TOGETHER

FOR A.H.C.

1.

Wind rocks the car.

We sit parked by the river,

silence between our teeth.

Birds scatter across islands

of broken ice. Another time

I’d have said “Canada geese,”

knowing you love them.

A year, ten years from now

I’ll remember this—

this sitting like drugged birds

in a glass case—

not why, only that we

were here like this together.

2.

They’re tearing down, tearing up

this city, block by block.

Rooms cut in half

hang like flayed carcasses,

their old roses in rags,

famous streets have forgotten

where they were going. Only

a fact could be so dreamlike.

They’re tearing down the houses

we met and lived in,

soon our two bodies will be all

left standing from that era.

3.

We have, as they say,

certain things in common.

I mean: a view

from a bathroom window

over slate to stiff pigeons

huddled every morning; the way

water tastes from our tap,

which you marvel at, letting

it splash into the glass.

Because of you I notice

the taste of water,

a luxury I might

otherwise have missed.

4.

Our words misunderstand us.

Sometimes at night

you are my mother:

old detailed griefs

twitch at my dreams, and I

crawl against you, fighting

for shelter, making you

my cave. Sometimes

you’re the wave of birth

that drowns me in my first

nightmare. I suck the air.

Miscarried knowledge twists us

like hot sheets thrown askew.

5.

Dead winter doesn’t die,

it wears away, a piece of carrion

picked clean at last,

rained away or burnt dry.

Our desiring does this,

make no mistake, I’m speaking

of fact: through mere indifference

we could prevent it.

Only our fierce attention

gets hyacinths out of those

hard cerebral lumps,

unwraps the wet buds down

the whole length of a stem.

1963

BREAKFAST IN A

BOWLING ALLEY IN

UTICA, NEW YORK

Smudged eyeballs,

mouth stale as air,

I’m newly dead, a corpse

so fresh the grave unnerves me.

Nobody here but me

and Hermes behind the counter

defrosting sandwich steaks.

Paeans of vox humana

sob from the walls. THIS LAND

IS MY LAND. . . . It sounds

mummified. Has no sex,

no liquor license.

I chew meat and bread

thinking of wheatfields—

a gold-beige ceinture—

and cattle like ghosts

of the buffalo, running

across plains, nearing

the abbatoir. Houses

dream old-fashionedly

in backwoods townships

while the land glitters

with temporary life

stuck fast by choice:

trailers put out taproots

of sewage pipe, suckers

of TV aerial—

but in one of them,

perhaps, a man

alone with his girl

for the first time.

1963

OPEN-AIR MUSEUM

Ailanthus, goldenrod, scrapiron, what makes you flower?

What burns in the dump today?

Thick flames in a grey field, tended

by two men: one derelict ghost,

one clearly apter at nursing destruction,

two priests in a grey field, tending the flames

of stripped-off rockwool, split

mattresses, a caved-in chickenhouse,

mad Lou’s last stack of paintings, each a perfect black lozenge

seen from a train, stopped

as by design, to bring us

face to face with the flag of our true country:

violet-yellow, black-violet,

its heart sucked by slow fire

O my America

this then was your desire?

but you cannot burn fast enough:

in the photograph the white

skirts of the Harlem bride

are lashed by blown scraps, tabloid sheets,

and her beauty a scrap of flickering light

licked by a greater darkness

This then was your desire!

those trucked-off bad dreams

outside the city limits

crawl back in search of you, eyes

missing, skins missing, intenser in decay

the carriage that wheeled the defective baby

rolls up on three wheels

and the baby is still inside,

you cannot burn fast enough

Blue sparks of the chicory flower

flash from embers of the dump

inside the rose-rust carcass of a slaughtered Chevrolet

crouches the young ailanthus

and the two guardians go raking the sacred field, raking

slowly, to what endless end

Cry of truth among so many lies

at your heart burns on

a languid fire

1964

TWO SONGS

1.

Sex, as they harshly call it,

I fell into this morning

at ten o’clock, a drizzling hour

of traffic and wet newspapers.

I thought of him who yesterday

clearly didn’t

turn me to a hot field

ready for plowing,

and longing for that young man

piercéd me to the roots

bathing every vein, etc.

All day he appears to me

touchingly desirable,

a prize one could wreck one’s peace for.

I’d call it love if love

didn’t take so many years

but lust too is a jewel

a sweet flower and what

pure happiness to know

all our high-toned questions

breed in a lively animal.

2.

That “old last act”!

And yet sometimes

all seems post coitum triste

and I a mere bystander.

Somebody else is going off,

getting shot to the moon.

Or, a moon-race!

Split seconds after my opposite number

lands

I make it—

we lie fainting together

at a crater-edge

heavy as mercury in our moonsuits

till he speaks—

in a different language

yet one I’ve picked up

through cultural exchanges . . .

we murmur the first moonwords:

Spasibo. Thanks. O.K.

1964

THE PARTING

The ocean twanging away there

and the islands like scattered laundry—

You can feel so free, so free,

standing on the headland

where the wild rose never stands still,

the petals blown off

before they fall

and the chicory nodding

blue, blue, in the all-day wind.

Barbed wire, dead at your feet,

is a kind of dune-vine,

the only one without movement.

Every knot is a knife

where two strands tangle to rust.

1963

NIGHT-PIECES: FOR A CHILD

THE CRIB

You sleeping I bend to cover.

Your eyelids work. I see

your dream, cloudy as a negative,

swimming underneath.

You blurt a cry. Your eyes

spring open, still filmed in dream.

Wider, they fix me—

—death’s head, sphinx, medusa?

You scream.

Tears lick my cheeks, my knees

droop at your fear.

Mother I no more am,

but woman, and nightmare.

HER WAKING

Tonight I jerk astart in a dark

hourless as Hiroshima,

almost hearing you breathe

in a cot three doors away.

You still breathe, yes—

and my dream with its gift of knives,

its murderous hider and seeker,

ebbs away, recoils

back into the egg of dreams,

the vanishing point of mind.

All gone.

But you and I—

swaddled in a dumb dark

old as sickheartedness,

modern as pure annihilation—

we drift in ignorance.

If I could hear you now

mutter some gentle animal sound!

If milk flowed from my breast again. . . .

1964

THE STRANGER

Fond credos, plaster ecstasies!

We arrange a prison-temple

for the weak-legged little god

who might stamp the world to bits

or pull the sky in like a muslin curtain.

We hang his shrine with bells,

aeolian harps, paper windmills,

line it with biscuits and swansdown.

His lack of culture we expected,

scarcely his disdain however—

that wild hauteur, as if

it were we who blundered.

Wildness we fret to avenge!

Eye that hasn’t yet blinked

on the unblinking gold archways

of its trance—that we know

must be trained away:

that aloof, selective stare.

Otherness that affronts us

as cats and dogs do not—

once this was original sin

beaten away with staves of holy writ.

Old simplemindedness. But the primal fault

of the little god still baffles.

All other strangers are forgiven

their strangeness, but he—

how save the eggshell world from his

reaching hands, how shield

ourselves from the disintegrating

blaze of his wide pure eye?

1964

AFTER DARK

I.

You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you

old tree of life

old man whose death I wanted

I can’t stir you up now.

Faintly a phonograph needle

whirs round in the last groove

eating my heart to dust.

That terrible record! how it played

down years, wherever I was

in foreign languages even

over and over, I know you better

than you know yourself     I know

you better than you know

yourself     I know

you     until, self-maimed,

I limped off, torn at the roots,

stopped singing a whole year,

got a new body, new breath,

got children, croaked for words,

forgot to listen

or read your mene tekel fading on the wall,

woke up one morning

and knew myself your daughter.

Blood is a sacred poison.

Now, unasked, you give ground.

We only want to stifle

what’s stifling us already.

Alive now, root to crown, I’d give

—oh,—something—not to know

our struggles now are ended.

I seem to hold you, cupped

in my hands, and disappearing.

When your memory fails—

no more to scourge my inconsistencies—

the sashcords of the world fly loose.

A window crashes

suddenly down. I go to the woodbox

and take a stick of kindling

to prop the sash again.

I grow protective toward the world.

II.

Now let’s away from prison—

Underground seizures!

I used to huddle in the grave

I’d dug for you and bite

my tongue for fear it would babble

—Darling—

I thought they’d find me there

someday, sitting upright, shrunken,

my hair like roots and in my lap

a mess of broken pottery—

wasted libation—

and you embalmed beside me.

No, let’s away. Even now

there’s a walk between doomed elms

(whose like we shall not see much longer)

and something—grass and water—

an old dream-photograph.

I’ll sit with you there and tease you

for wisdom, if you like,

waiting till the blunt barge

bumps along the shore.

Poppies burn in the twilight

like smudge pots.

I think you hardly see me

but—this is the dream now—

your fears blow out,

off, over the water.

At the last, your hand feels steady.

1964

MOURNING PICTURE

The picture is by Edwin Romanzo Elmer, 1850–1923.

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker

out under the lilac bush,

and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.

Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,

my doll lies in her wicker pram

gazing at western Massachusetts.

This was our world.

I could remake each shaft of grass

feeling its rasp on my fingers,

draw out the map of every lilac leaf

or the net of veins on my father’s

grief-tranced hand.

Out of my head, half-bursting,

still filling, the dream condenses—

shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew.

Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light

carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,

under high early-summer clouds,

I am Effie, visible and invisible,

remembering and remembered.

They will move from the house,

give the toys and pets away.

Mute and rigid with loss my mother

will ride the train to Baptist Corner,

the silk-spool will run bare.

I tell you, the thread that bound us lies

faint as a web in the dew.

Should I make you, world, again,

could I give back the leaf its skeleton, the air

its early-summer cloud, the house

its noonday presence, shadowless,

and leave this out? I am Effie, you were my dream.

1965

“I AM IN DANGER—SIR—”

“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living,

afterward famous in garbled versions,

your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield,

now your old snood

mothballed at Harvard

and you in your variorum monument

equivocal to the end—

who are you?

Gardening the day-lily,

wiping the wine-glass stems,

your thought pulsed on behind

a forehead battered paper-thin,

you, woman, masculine

in single-mindedness,

for whom the word was more

than a symptom—

a condition of being.

Till the air buzzing with spoiled language

sang in your ears

of Perjury

and in your half-cracked way you chose

silence for entertainment,

chose to have it out at last

on your own premises.

1964

HALFWAY

IN MEMORY: M.G.J.

In the field the air writhes, a heat-pocket.

Masses of birds revolve, blades

of a harvester.

The sky is getting milkily white,

a sac of light is ready to burst open.

Time of hailstones and rainbow.

My life flows North. At last I understand.

A young girl, thought sleeping, is certified dead.

A tray of expensive waxen fruit,

she lies arranged on the spare-room coverlid.

To sit by the fire is to become another woman,

red hair charring to grey,

green eyes grappling with the printed page,

voice flailing, flailing , the uncomprehending.

My days lie open, listening, grandmother.

1965

AUTUMN SEQUENCE

1.

An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,

and dreams of the subtly tyrannical.

Thirst in the morning; waking into the blue

drought of another October

to read the familiar message nailed

to some burning bush or maple.

Breakfast under the pines, late yellow-

jackets fumbling for manna on the rim

of the stone crock of marmalade,

and shed pine-needles drifting

in the half-empty cup.

Generosity is drying out,

it’s an act of will to remember

May’s sticky-mouthed buds

on the provoked magnolias.

2.

Still, a sweetness hardly earned

by virtue or craft, belonging

by no desperate right to me

(as the marmalade to the wasp

who risked all in a last euphoria

of hunger)

washes the horizon. A quiet

after weeping, salt still on the tongue

is like this, when the autumn planet

looks me straight in the eye

and straight into the mind

plunges its impersonal spear:

Fill and flow over, think

till you weep, then sleep

to drink again.

3.

Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb

flayed stiff in the wind,

half-mast on the day of victory,

anarchist prince of evening marshes!

Your eye blurs in a wet smoke,

the stubble freezes under your heel,

the cornsilk Mädchen all hags now,

their gold teeth drawn,

the milkweeds gutted and rifled,

but not by you, foundering hero!

The future reconnoiters in dirty boots

along the cranberry-dark horizon.

Stars swim like grease-flecks

in that sky, night pulls a long knife.

Your empire drops to its knees in the dark.

4.

Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

Charcoal slabs pitted with gold.

The reason for cities comes clear.

There must be a place, there has come a time—

where so many nerves are fusing—

for a purely moral loneliness.

Behind bloodsoaked lights of the avenues,

in the crystal grit of flying snow,

in this water-drop bulging at the taphead,

forced by dynamos three hundred miles

from the wild duck’s landing and the otter’s dive,

for three seconds of quivering identity.

There must be a place. But the eyeball stiffens

as night tightens and my hero passes out

with a film of stale gossip coating his tongue.

1964

NOON

Light pulses through underground chambers.

I have to tell myself: my eyes are not blue.

Two dark holes

feed at the sky.

It swirls through them, raging

in azure spirals.

Nothing changes them:

two black tubes, draining off

a lake of iris.

Cleave open my skull:

the gouts of blue

leap from the black grotto.

1965

NOT LIKE THAT

It’s so pure in the cemetery.

The children love to play up here.

It’s a little town, a game of blocks,

a village packed in a box,

a pre-war German toy.

The turf is a bedroom carpet:

heal-all, strawberry flower

and hillocks of moss.

To come and sit here forever,

a cup of tea on one’s lap

and one’s eyes closed lightly, lightly,

perfectly still

in a nineteenth-century sleep!

it seems so normal to die.

Nobody sleeps here, children.

The little beds of white wrought iron

and the tall, kind, faceless nurse

are somewhere else, in a hospital

or the dreams of prisoners of war.

The drawers of this trunk are empty,

not even a snapshot

curls in a corner.

In Pullmans of childhood we lay

enthralled behind dark-green curtains,

and a little lamp burned blue

all night, for us. The day

was a dream too, even the oatmeal

under its silver lid, dream-cereal

spooned out in forests of spruce

skirting the green-black gorges,

thick woods of sleep, half prickle,

half lakes of fern.

To stay here forever

is not like that, nor even

simply to lie quite still,

the warm trickle of dream

staining the thick quiet.

The drawers of this trunk are empty.

They are all out of sleep up here.

1965

THE KNOT

In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood.

For years I never saw it,

years of metallic vision,

spears glancing off a bright eyeball,

suns off a Swiss lake.

A foaming meadow; the Milky Way;

and there, all along, the tiny dark-red spider

sitting in the whiteness of the bridal web,

waiting to plunge his crimson knifepoint

into the white apparencies.

Little wonder the eye, healing, sees

for a long time through a mist of blood.

1965

ANY HUSBAND TO ANY WIFE

“Might I die last and show thee!”

I know: you are glycerine,

old quills, rose velvet,

tearstains in Middlemarch,

a style of getting into cabs, of eating fruit,

a drawer of stones, chains, seeds, shells, little mirrors:

Darling, you will outlive yourself, and me.

Sometimes the sea backs up against a lashed pier,

grinding and twisting,

a turmoil of wrecked stuff

alive and dead. And the pier stands groaning

as if the land depended on it.

We say it is the moon that draws these tides,

then glazes in aftercalm

the black, blurred face to something we can love.

1965

SIDE BY SIDE

Ho! in the dawn

how light we lie

stirring faintly as laundry

left all night on the lines.

You, a lemon-gold pyjama,

I, a trousseau-sheet, fine

linen worn paper-thin in places,

worked with the maiden monogram.

Lassitude drapes our folds.

We’re slowly bleaching

with the days, the hours, and the years.

We are getting finer than ever,

time is wearing us to silk,

to sheer spiderweb.

The eye of the sun, rising, looks in

to ascertain how we are coming on.

1965

SPRING THUNDER

1.

Thunder is all it is, and yet

my street becomes a crack in the western hemisphere,

my house a fragile nest of grasses.

The radiotelescope flings its nets

at random; a child is crying,

not from hunger, not from pain,

more likely impotence. The generals are sweltering

in the room with a thousand eyes.

Red-hot lights flash off and on

inside air-conditioned skulls.

Underfoot, a land-mass

puffed-up with bad faith and fatigue

goes lumbering onward,

old raft in the swollen waters,

unreformed Huck and Jim

watching the tangled yellow shores

rush by.

2.

Whatever you are that weeps

over the blistered riverbeds

and the cracked skin of cities,

you are not on our side,

eye never seeking our eyes,

shedding its griefs like stars

over our hectic indifference,

whispered monologue

subverting space with its tears,

mourning the mournable,

nailing the pale-grey woolly flower

back to its ledge.

3.

The power of the dinosaur

is ours, to die

inflicting death,

trampling the nested grasses:

power of dead grass

to catch fire

power of ash

to whirl off the burnt heap

in the wind’s own time.

4.

A soldier is here, an ancient figure,

generalized as a basalt mask.

Breathes like a rabbit, an Eskimo,

strips to an older and simpler thing.

No criminal, no hero; merely a shadow

cast by the conflagration

that here burns down or there leaps higher

but always in the shape of fire,

always the method of fire, casting

automatically, these shadows.

5.

Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,

a great wall: no temporary shelter.

Did you tell yourself these beams would melt,

these fiery blocs dissolve?

Did you choose to build this thing?

Have you stepped back to see what it is?

It is immense; it has porches, catacombs.

It is provisioned like the Pyramids, for eternity.

Its buttresses beat back the air with iron tendons.

It is the first flying cathedral,

eating its parishes by the light of the moon.

It is the refinery of pure abstraction,

a total logic, rising

obscurely between one man

and the old, affective clouds.

1965

MOTH HOUR

Space mildews at our touch.

The leaves of the poplar, slowly moving—

aren’t they moth-white, there in the moonbeams?

A million insects die every twilight,

no one even finds their corpses.

Death, slowly moving among the bleached clouds,

knows us better than we know ourselves.

I am gliding backward away from those who knew me

as the moon grows thinner and finally shuts its lantern.

I can be replaced a thousand times,

a box containing death.

When you put out your hand to touch me

you are already reaching toward an empty space.

1965

FOCUS

FOR BERT DREYFUS.

Obscurity has its tale to tell.

Like the figure on the studio-bed in the corner,

out of range, smoking, watching and waiting.

Sun pours through the skylight onto the worktable

making of a jar of pencils, a typewriter keyboard

more than they were. Veridical light . . .

Earth budges. Now an empty coffee-cup,

a whetstone, a handkerchief, take on

their sacramental clarity, fixed by the wand

of light as the thinker thinks to fix them in the mind.

O secret in the core of the whetstone, in the five

pencils splayed out like fingers of a hand!

The mind’s passion is all for singling out.

Obscurity has another tale to tell.

1965

FACE TO FACE

Never to be lonely like that—

the Early American figure on the beach

in black coat and knee-breeches

scanning the didactic storm in privacy,

never to hear the prairie wolves

in their lunar hilarity

circling one’s little all, one’s claim

to be Law and Prophets

for all that lawlessness,

never to whet the appetite

weeks early, for a face, a hand

longed-for and dreaded—

How people used to meet!

starved, intense, the old

Christmas gifts saved up till spring,

and the old plain words,

and each with his God-given secret,

spelled out through months of snow and silence,

burning under the bleached scalp; behind dry lips

a loaded gun.

1965

II

TRANSLATIONS

FROM THE DUTCH

These translations are from a group commissioned by the Bollingen Foundation. For criticism and linguistic advice my thanks go to Judith Herzberg, Marjan DeWolff, and Leo Vroman; the final responsibility is of course my own.

MARTINUS NIJHOFF

THE SONG OF THE FOOLISH BEES

A smell of further honey

embittered nearer flowers,

a smell of further honey

sirened us from our meadow.

That smell and a soft humming

crystallized in the azure,

that smell and a soft humming,

a wordless repetition,

called upon us, the reckless,

to leave our usual gardens,

called upon us, the reckless,

to seek mysterious roses.

Far from our folk and kindred

joyous we went careering,

far from our folk and kindred

exhuberantly driven.

No one can by nature

break off the course of passion,

no one can by nature

endure death in his body.

Always more fiercely yielding,

more lucently transfigured,

always more fiercely yielding

to that elusive token,

we rose and staggered upward,

kidnapped, disembodied,

we rose and vanished upward,

dissolving into glitter.

It’s snowing; we are dying,

homeward, downward whirled.

It’s snowing; we are dying;

it snows among the hives.

HENDRIK DE VRIES

MY BROTHER

My brother, nobody knows

the end you suffered.

Often you lie beside me, dim, and I

grow confused, grope, and startle.

You walked along that path through the elms.

Birds cried late. Something wrong

was following us both. But you

wanted to go alone through the waste.

Last night we slept again together.

Your heart jerked next to me. I spoke your name

and asked where you were going.

Your answer came:

“The horror! . . . there’s no telling . . .

See: the grass

lies dense again, the elms

press round.”

HENDRIK DE VRIES

FEVER

Listen! It’s never sung like that! Listen!

The wallpaper stirred,

and the hairs of the heavy-fringed eye.

What flew

through the rooms?

Tomorrow it will be

as if all night the whips hadn’t lashed so.—

See, through the blinds,

the spirits in their cold ships!

Boughs graze the frame

of the window. Far off, a whistle

sounds, always clearly, along the fields.

The beasts on the walls

fade away. The light goes out.

GERRIT ACHTERBERG

EBEN HAËZER

(Hebrew for “Stone of Help”; a common old name

for farmhouses in Holland.)

Sabbath evening privacy at home.

Mist-footsteps, prowling past the shed.

At that hour, not another soul abroad;

the blue farmhouse a closed hermitage.

There we lived together, man and mouse.

Through cowstall windows an eternal fire

fell ridged from gold lamps on the threshing-floor,

stillness of linseed cakes and hay in house.

There my father celebrated mass:

serving the cows, priestlike at their heads.

Their tongues curled along his hands like fish.

A shadow, diagonal to the rafters.

Worship hung heavy from the loftbeams.

His arteries begin to calcify.

GERRIT ACHTERBERG

ACCOUNTABILITY

Old oblivion-book, that I lay open.

White eye-corner rounding the page.

Gold lace slips out under the evening,

Green animals creep backwards.

Lifelessness of the experimental station.

Added-up, subtracted sum.

Black night. Over the starlight skims

God’s index finger, turning the page.

Death comes walking on all fours

past the room, a crystal egg,

with the lamp, the books, the bread,

where you are living and life-size.

GERRIT ACHTERBERG

STATUE

A body, blind with sleep,

stands up in my arms.

Its heaviness weighs on me.

Death-doll.

I’m an eternity too late.

And where’s your heartbeat?

The thick night glues us together,

makes us compact with each other.

“For God’s sake go on holding me—

my knees are broken,”

you mumble against my heart.

It’s as if I held up the earth.

And slowly, moss is creeping

all over our two figures.

LEO VROMAN

OUR FAMILY

My father, who since his death

no longer speaks audibly

lies sometimes, a great walrus

from nightfall to daybreak

his muzzle in my lap

in the street from his chin down.

The light of morning feeds

through his hide, thinned to parchment,

and his slackened features dwindle

to a line creeping off among the chairs;

if I rise to peer at him

he winces away to a dot

In the daytime there’s nothing to see

but an emphatically vanished

absence where moments ago

the sun too was just shining.

Where my father has stood

it now just quivers,

rippling by handfuls through

my little daughter’s light hair

while on the sunny grass

she slowly scampers forward.

Her little snoot is so open

you could easily spread it out

with a teaspoon or your finger

on a slice of fresh white bread

or, if need be,

you could mold it into a pudding.

Her little voice itches like a fleece;

it wriggles gaily into my ear

and can’t get out when it laughs;

with plopping fishfins

it folds itself struggling up

into my head. Where it spends the night.

And here, this taller child

is Tineke, my wife.

She hums a nursery rhyme

to the hair on her third breast,

which whimpers, being a baby,

and a thirsty baby at that.

I have such a gentle family,

it kisses, goes on eight legs,

but it has no moustache:

my father has vanished,

and they too are all going to die:

too soft, if they turn into air,

to swing a weathercock;

if turned into water, too slight

to fill a gutter; if into light

to make one live cock crow.

CHR. J. VAN GEEL

HOMECOMING

The sea, a body of mysterious calls

is almost motionless.

I know a beach, a tree stands there

in which women are singing,

voluptuous, languid.

In harbors ships are steaming

full of honey from the sea. Drizzle hangs

like eyelashes over the landscape.

Behind the seadlike, breathing invisibly

in the mist, sleep the cows.

The hobble of a horse drags along the fence,

holding still where I stand with sweet words.

Listen, the sea calls,

claps her hands.

The ships running out in the wet

come like children—one drags

a sled into the garden.

CHR. J. VAN GEEL

SLEEPWALKING

(next to death.)

Sleep, horns of a snail

Out of the black and white bed, floors of red glaze,

mornings in the careful garden

on paths suitable rubbish slowly buried

and without urgency overgrown with grass

with ivy and sometimes a flower

just as we dream

to see unseen, to listen unattended.

The twigs of the moon

in indifferent white,

horns upright, wood with-

out leaf and seeking bees

sadness down to the ground.

Like silence always and from afar

lisps the water

never, by no one possessed.

Dead trees in green leaf.

What to do but among bushes,

what to see but underbrush.

On this sun time sharpens itself

to brilliance.

A stone of untouchable fire

on which time breaks its tooth.

Time caught no hour: loafing next to

a blaze.

In the darkened town the old groped

with their sticks.

The rays of the sun are tired,

the beetles rot in the wood,

only the sea. . . .

In the earth of the dead

earth covers leaf, leaf covers leaf.

Heartbeat of the wild creeper,

hammer between wing-lashes,

butterflies hammer at the sun.

Now you must get to the institution

with a mask on, your little feet

tarred, an iron crown on your head.

You awake there a python,

a boa constrictor,

after seven-and-twenty years,

after six-and-twenty years,

fair sleep, fair sleepers.

You strike the prince twice

a youth wasted with waiting

for your serpent eyes and

you unfold your scaly tail.

Now you must get to the institution

with a mask on, your little feet

tarred, an iron crown on your head.

Night blows away from the sun,

sky in fresh wind,

the sea kicks off its surf.

The moon scorches, a cloud of steam.

Driving water torn to shreds,

sunny twilight, fruitless field.

Tamed sea, muscular

to the temples, stoop where no coast

is, under the familiar blows,

stand where you cannot stand,

night is embraced on the sun.

A scared hind in a wood of one tree.

Whether the dead live, how they rest or

decay, leaves me cold, for cold for good and all

is death.

Poor is the frontier of life, to die blossoms

away over the graves.

Every existence competes in every

lost chance of life for death.

Of always fewer chances, one moved

and drove over her, naked standing by her child

death.

Residing in a thunderstorm,

sky hoists sun, night cuts light.

The wind’s wings are at home.

Whistle now out of the nights

sparks of burnt paper.

Whisper fire in the days

dried by the sun, your desires

are lightened, curled to ash.

Flowers for hunger,

the darkest, the blue,

of ash, of grey granite,

black ice,

room without window,

abacus without beads,

room without a person,

the eaten past

gnaws,

the teeth out of the comb,

the funeral wreath emptily devoured,

a stone.

Whatever I may contrive—

and I contrive it—death’s

private roads are the coldest night.

That I shall not be with her—

not with her—

that nothing shall glimmer

except danger.

Trees of ash, trees of ice,

the light frozen.

Summer and winter are

constructed of one emptiness.

The boughs of the wind are dead.

Must I dejected and contemplating death

now that above the sea a cloudless night

empties the sky, let treason and false laughter

prudently ring out until the morning?

the threshold of the horizon shifts—

and think with the thinkers of this earth:

“Life is thus”—then am I crazed

because my heart encloses what it held?

Morning has broken and the sea

is wide, I go back home to sleep.

Path, dune, trees and sheep

are rosy from the east, a rosy gull

flies up under the rash sky.

What’s silent speaks aloud buried in sleep.

POEMS

(1962–1965)

TO JUDITH, TAKING LEAVE

FOR J.H.

Dull-headed, with dull fingers

I patch once more

the pale brown envelope

still showing under ink scratches

the letterhead of Mind.

A chorus of old postmarks

echoes across its face.

It looks so frail

to send so far

and I should tear it across

mindlessly

and find another.

But I’m tired, can’t endure

a single new motion

or room or object,

so I cling to this too

as if your tallness moving

against the rainlight

in an Amsterdam flat

might be held awhile

by a handwritten label

or a battered envelope

from your desk.

Once somewhere else

I shan’t talk of you

as a singular event

or a beautiful thing I saw

though both are true.

I shan’t falsify you

through praising and describing

as I shall other

things I have loved

almost as much.

There in Amsterdam

you’ll be living as I

have seen you live

and as I’ve never seen you.

And I can trust

no plane to bring you

my life out there

in turbid America—

my own life, lived against

facts I keep there.

It wasn’t literacy—

the right to read Mind—

or suffrage—to vote

for the lesser of two

evils—that were

the great gains, I see now,

when I think of all those women

who suffered ridicule

for us.

But this little piece of ground,

Judith! that two women

in love to the nerves’ limit

with two men—

shared out in pieces

to men, children, memories

so different and so draining—

should think it possible

now for the first time

perhaps, to love each other

neither as fellow-victims

nor as a temporary

shadow of something better.

Still shared-out as we are,

lovers, poets, warmers

of men and children

against our flesh, not knowing

from day to day

what we’ll fling out on the water

or what pick up

there at the tide’s lip,

often tired, as I’m tired now

from sheer distances of soul

we have in one day to cover—

still to get here

to this little spur or headland

and feel now free enough

to leave our weapons somewhere

else—such are the secret

outcomes of revolution!

that two women can meet

no longer as cramped sharers

of a bitter mutual secret

but as two eyes in one brow

receiving at one moment

the rainbow of the world.

1962

ROOTS

FOR M.L.

Evenings seem endless, now

dark tugs at our sky

harder and earlier

and milkweeds swell to bursting . . .

now in my transatlantic eye

you stand on your terrace

a scarf on your head and in your hands

dead stalks of golden-glow

and now it’s for you,

not myself, I shiver

hearing glass doors rattle

at your back, the rustling cough

of a dry clematis vine

your love and toil trained up the walls

of a rented house.

All those roots, Margo!

Didn’t you start each slip between your breasts,

each dry seed, carrying some

across frontiers, knotted

into your handkerchief,

haven’t you seen your tears

glisten in narrow trenches

where rooted cuttings grope for life?

You, frailer than you look,

long back, long stride, blond hair

coiled up over straight shoulders—

I hear in your ear the wind

lashing in wet from the North Sea

slamming the dahlias flat.

All your work violated

every autumn, every turn of the wrist

guiding the trowel: mocked.

Sleet on brown fibers,

black wilt eating your harvest,

a clean sweep, and you the loser . . .

or is this after all

the liberation your hands fend off

and your eyes implore

when you dream of sudden death

or of beginning anew,

a girl of seventeen, the war just over,

and all the gardens

to dig again?

1963

THE PARTING: II

White morning flows into the mirror.

Her eye, still old with sleep,

meets itself like a sister.

How they slept last night,

the dream that caged them back to back,

was nothing new.

Last words, tears, most often

come wrapped as the everyday

familiar failure.

Now, pulling the comb slowly

through her loosened hair

she tries to find the parting;

it must come out after all:

hidden in all that tangle

there is a way.

1963

WHITE NIGHT

From the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky.

White night, my painful joy,

your light is brighter than the dawn.

A white ship is sailing from East Broadway

where I see no sail by day.

A quiet star hands me a ticket

open for all the seas.

I put on my time-worn jacket

and entrust myself to the night.

Where are you taking me, ship?

Who charted us on this course?

The hieroglyphs of the map escape me,

and the arrows of your compass.

I am the one who sees and does not see.

I go along on your deck of secrets,

squeeze shut my baggage on the wreath of sorrows

from all my plucked-out homes.

—Pack in all my blackened pots,

their split lids, the chipped crockeries,

pack in my chaos with its gold-encrusted buttons

since chaos will always be in fashion.

—Pack the letters stamped Unknown at This Address—

vanished addresses that sear my eyes,

postmarked with more than years and days;

sucked into my bones and marrow.

—Pack up my shadow that weighs more than my body,

that comes along with its endless exhortations.

Weekdays or holidays, time of flowers or withering,

my shadow is with me, muttering its troubles.

Find me a place of honey cakes and sweetness

where angels and children picnic together

(this is the dream I love best of all),

where the sacred wine fizzes in bottles.

Let me have one sip, here on East Broadway,

for the sake of those old Jews crying in the dark.

I cry my heretic’s tears with them,

their sobbing is my sobbing.

I’m a difficult passenger, my ship

is packed with the heavy horns, the shofars of grief.

Tighten the sails of night as far as you can,

for the daylight cannot carry me.

Take me somewhere to a place of rest,

of goats in belled hats playing on trombones—

to the Almighty’s fresh white sheets

where the hunter’s shadow cannot fall.

Take me . . .Yes, take me . . . But you know best

where the sea calmly opens its blue road.

I’m wearier than your oldest tower;

somewhere I’ve left my heart aside.

1968

WINTER

Dead, dead, dead, dead.

A beast of the Middle Ages

stupefied in its den.

The hairs on its body—a woman’s—

cold as hairs on a bulb or tuber.

Nothing so bleakly leaden, you tell me,

as the hyacinth’s dull cone

before it bulks into blueness.

Ah, but I’d chosen to be

a woman, not a beast or a tuber!

No one knows where the storks went,

everyone knows they have disappeared.

Something—that woman—seems to have

migrated also; if she lives, she lives

sea-zones away, and the meaning grows colder.

1965

LEAFLETS

(1969)

For Rose Marie and Hayden Carruth

I

NIGHT WATCH

ORION

Far back when I went zig-zagging

through tamarack pastures

you were my genius, you

my cast-iron Viking, my helmed

lion-heart king in prison.

Years later now you’re young

my fierce half-brother, staring

down from that simplified west

your breast open, your belt dragged down

by an oldfashioned thing, a sword

the last bravado you won’t give over

though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are dim

and maybe have stopped burning.

But you burn, and I know it;

as I throw back my head to take you in

an old transfusion happens again:

divine astronomy is nothing to it.

Indoors I bruise and blunder,

break faith, leave ill enough

alone, a dead child born in the dark.

Night cracks up over the chimney,

pieces of time, frozen geodes

come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes

and finds them empty

a woman’s head turns away

from my head in the mirror

children are dying my death

and eating crumbs of my life.

Pity is not your forte.

Calmly you ache up there

pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,

my speechless pirate!

You take it all for granted

and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye

shooting its cold and egotistical spear

where it can do least damage.

Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon

out here in the cold with you

you with your back to the wall.

1965

HOLDING OUT

The hunters’ shack will do,

abandoned, untended, unmended

in its cul-de-sac of alders.

Inside, who knows what

hovel-keeping essentials—

a grey saucepan, a broom, a clock

stopped at last autumn’s last hour—

all or any, what matter.

The point is, it’s a shelter,

a place more in- than outside.

From that we could begin.

And the wind is surely rising,

snow is in the alders.

Maybe the stovepipe is sound,

maybe the smoke will do us in

at first—no matter.

Late afternoons the ice

squeaks underfoot like mica,

and when the sun drops red and moon-

faced back of the gun-colored firs,

the best intentions are none too good.

Then we have to make a go of it

in the smoke with the dark outside

and our love in our boots at first—

no matter.

1965

FLESH AND BLOOD

FOR C.

A cracked walk in the garden,

white violets choking in the ivy,

then, O then . . .

Everyone else I’ve had to tell how it was,

only not you.

Nerve-white, the cloud came walking

over the crests of tallest trees.

Doors slammed. We

fell asleep, hot Sundays, in our slips,

two mad little goldfish

fluttering in a drying pond.

Nobody’s seen the trouble I’ve seen

but you.

Our jokes are funnier for that

you’d say

and, Lord, it’s true.

1965

IN THE EVENING

Three hours chain-smoking words

and you move on. We stand in the porch,

two archaic figures: a woman and a man.

The old masters, the old sources,

haven’t a clue what we’re about,

shivering here in the half-dark ’sixties.

Our minds hover in a famous impasse

and cling together. Your hand

grips mine like a railing on an icy night.

The wall of the house is bleeding. Firethorn!

The moon, cracked every which-way,

pushes steadily on.

1966

MISSING THE POINT

There it was, all along,

twisted up in that green vine-thread,

in the skeins of marble,

on the table behind them—those two!

white-faced and undeterred—

everything doubled: forks,

brown glass tumblers, echoing plates,

two crumbled portions of bread.

That was the point that was missed

when they left the room with its wavy light

and pale curtains blowing

and guessed the banquet was over, the picnic

under the leaves was over,

when haggling faces pushed in for a look

and the gingerbread village shrieked outside:

Who’s in the wrong? Who’s in the wrong?

1966

CITY

From the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg.

Maybe you spoke to someone

and on that hour your face

printed itself for good.

Where is that man? I need

to find him before he dies

and see you drift across his retina.

You have played with children.

They will run up to me

whenever you

come home free in their dreams.

Houses, realized by you,

slumber in that web.

Streets suppose you

in other streets, and call:

Evening papers . . .

Strawberries . . .

The city has changed hands;

the plan you gave it, fallen through.

1962

DWINGELO

From the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg.

In the never, still arriving, I find you

again: blue absence keeps knowledge alive,

makes of October an adjusted lens.

The days have almost no clouds left.

Cassiopeia, the Great Bear

let their signals burst by night

to rip into impossibility.

The Pleiades rage silently about.

To wait is the password; and to listen.

In Dwingelo you can hear it whisper,

the void in the radiotelescope.

There too the singing of your nerves is gathered,

becoming graphic on a sheet of paper

not unlike this one here.

1962

THE DEMON LOVER

Fatigue, regrets. The lights

go out in the parking lot

two by two. Snow blindness

settles over the suburb.

Desire. Desire. The nebula

opens in space, unseen,

your heart utters its great beats

in solitude. A new

era is coming in.

Gauche as we are, it seems

we have to play our part.

A plaid dress, silk scarf,

and eyes that go on stinging.

Woman, stand off. The air

glistens like silk.

She’s gone. In her place stands

a schoolgirl, morning light,

the half-grown bones

of innocence. Is she

your daughter or your muse,

this tree of blondness

grown up in a field of thorns?

Something piercing and marred.

Take note. Look back. When quick

the whole northeast went black

and prisoners howled and children

ran through the night with candles,

who stood off motionless

side by side while the moon swam up

over the drowned houses?

Who neither touched nor spoke?

whose nape, whose finger-ends

nervelessly lied the hours away?

A voice presses at me.

If I give in it won’t

be like the girl the bull rode,

all Rubens flesh and happy moans.

But to be wrestled like a boy

with tongue, hips, knees, nerves, brain . . .

with language?

He doesn’t know. He’s watching

breasts under a striped blouse,

his bull’s head down.

The old wine pours again through my veins.

Goodnight, then. ’Night. Again

we turn our backs and weary

weary we let down.

Things take us hard, no question.

How do you make it, all the way

from here to morning? I touch

you, made of such nerve

and flare and pride and swallowed tears.

Go home. Come to bed. The skies

look in at us, stern.

And this is an old story.

I dreamed about the war.

We were all sitting at table

in a kitchen in Chicago.

The radio had just screamed

that Illinois was the target.

No one felt like leaving,

we sat by the open window

and talked in the sunset.

I’ll tell you that joke tomorrow,

you said with your saddest smile,

if I can remember.

The end is just a straw,

a feather furling slowly down,

floating to light by chance, a breath

on the long-loaded scales.

Posterity trembles like a leaf

and we go on making heirs and heirlooms.

The world, we have to make it,

my coexistent friend said, leaning

back in his cell.

Siberia vastly hulks

behind him, which he did not make.

Oh futile tenderness

of touch in a world like this!

how much longer, dear child,

do you think sex will matter?

There might have been a wedding

that never was:

two creatures sprung free

from castiron covenants.

Instead our hands and minds

erotically waver . . .

Lightness is unavailing.

Catalpas wave and spill

their dull strings across this murk of spring.

I ache, brilliantly.

Only where there is language is there world.

In the harp of my hair, compose me

a song. Death’s in the air,

we all know that. Still, for an hour,

I’d like to be gay. How could a gay song go?

Why that’s your secret, and it shall be mine.

We are our words, and black and bruised and blue.

Under our skins, we’re laughing.

In triste veritas?

Take hold, sweet hands, come on . . .

Broken!

When you falter, all eludes.

This is a seasick way,

this almost/never touching, this

drawing-off, this to-and-fro.

Subtlety stalks in your eyes,

your tongue knows what it knows.

I want your secrets— I will have them out.

Seasick, I drop into the sea.

1966

JERUSALEM

In my dream, children

are stoning other children

with blackened carob-pods

I dream my son is riding

on an old grey mare

to a half-dead war

on a dead-grey road

through the cactus and thistles

and dried brook-beds.

In my dream, children

are swaddled in smoke

and their uncut hair smolders

even here, here

where trees have no shade

and rocks have no shadow

trees have no memories

only the stones and

the hairs of the head.

I dream his hair is growing

and has never been shorn

from slender temples hanging

like curls of barbed wire

and his first beard is growing

smoldering like fire

his beard is smoke and fire

and I dream him riding

patiently to the war.

What I dream of the city

is how hard it is to leave

and how useless to walk

outside the blasted walls

picking up the shells

from a half-dead war

and I wake up in tears

and hear the sirens screaming

and the carob-tree is bare.

Balfour Street, July 1966

CHARLESTON IN THE 1860’s

Derived from the diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut.

He seized me by the waist and kissed my throat . . .

Your eyes, dear, are they grey or blue,

eyes of an angel?

The carts have passed already with their heaped

night-soil, we breathe again . . .

Is this what war is? Nitrate . . .

But smell the pear,

the jasmine, the violets.

Why does this landscape always sadden you?

Now the freshet is up on every side,

the river comes to our doors,

limbs of primeval trees dip in the swamp.

So we fool on into the black

cloud ahead of us.

Everything human glitters fever-bright—

the thrill of waking up

out of a stagnant life?

There seems a spell upon

your lovers, —all dead of wounds

or blown to pieces . . . Nitrate!

I’m writing, blind with tears of rage.

In vain. Years, death, depopulation, fears,

bondage—these shall all be borne.

No imagination to forestall woe.

1966

NIGHT WATCH

And now, outside, the walls

of black flint, eyeless.

How pale in sleep you lie.

Love: my love is just a breath

blown on the pane and dissolved.

Everything, even you,

cries silently for help, the web

of the spider is ripped with rain,

the geese fly on into the black cloud.

What can I do for you?

what can I do for you?

Can the touch of a finger mend

what a finger’s touch has broken?

Blue-eyed now, yellow-haired,

I stand in my old nightmare

beside the track, while you,

and over and over and always you

plod into the deathcars.

Sometimes you smile at me

and I—I smile back at you.

How sweet the odor of the station-master’s roses!

How pure, how poster-like the colors of this dream.

1967

THERE ARE SUCH SPRINGLIKE NIGHTS

From the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky.

There are such springlike nights here,

when a blade of grass pushes up through the soil

and the fresh dawn is a green pillow

under the skeleton of a dead horse.

And all the limbs of a woman plead for the ache of birth.

And women come to lie down like sick sheep

by the wells—to heal their bodies,

their faces blackened with yearlong thirst for a child’s cry.

There are such springlike nights here

when lightning pierces the black soil with silver knives

and pregnant women approach the white tables of the hospital

with quiet steps

and smile at the unborn child

and perhaps at death.

There are such springlike nights here

when a blade of grass pushes up through the soil.

1968

FOR A RUSSIAN POET

1. The Winter Dream

Everywhere, snow is falling. Your bandaged foot

drags across huge cobblestones, bells

hammer in distant squares.

Everything we stood against has conquered

and now we’re part

of it all. Life’s the main thing, I hear you say,

but a fog is spreading between this landmass

and the one your voice

mapped so long for me. All that’s visible

is walls, endlessly yellow-grey, where

so many risks were taken, the shredded skies

slowly littering both our continents with

the only justice left, burying

footprints, bells and voices with all deliberate speed.

1967

2. Summer in the Country

Now, again, every year for years: the life-and-death talk,

late August, forebodings

under the birches, along the water’s edge

and between the typed lines

and evenings, tracing a pattern of absurd hopes

in broken nutshells

but this year we both

sit after dark with the radio

unable to read, unable to write

trying the blurred edges of broadcasts

for a little truth, taking a walk before bed

wondering what a man can do, asking that

at the verge of tears in a lightning-flash of loneliness.

3. The Demonstration

Natalya Gorbanevskaya

13/3 Novopeschanaya Street

Apartment 34

At noon we sit down quietly on the parapet

and unfurl our banners

almost immediately

the sound of police whistles

from all corners of Red Square

we sit

quietly and offer no resistance

Is this your little boy

we will relive this over and over

the banners torn from our hands

blood flowing

a great jagged torn place

in the silence of complicity

that much at least

we did here

In your flat, drinking tea

waiting for the police

your children asleep while you write

quickly, the letters you want to get off

before tomorrow

I’m a ghost at your table

touching poems in a script I can’t read

we’ll meet each other later

August 1968

NIGHT IN THE KITCHEN

The refrigerator falls silent.

Then other things are audible:

this dull, sheet-metal mind rattling like stage thunder.

The thickness budging forward in these veins

is surely something other

than blood:

say, molten lava.

You will become a black lace cliff fronting a deadpan sea;

nerves, friable as lightning

ending in burnt pine forests.

You are begun, beginning, your black heart drumming

slowly, triumphantly

inside its pacific cave.

1967

5:30 A. M.

Birds and periodic blood.

Old recapitulations.

The fox, panting, fire-eyed,

gone to earth in my chest.

How beautiful we are,

he and I, with our auburn

pelts, our trails of blood,

our miracle escapes,

our whiplash panic flogging us on

to new miracles!

They’ve supplied us with pills

for bleeding, pills for panic.

Wash them down the sink.

This is truth, then:

dull needle groping in the spinal fluid,

weak acid in the bottom of the cup,

foreboding, foreboding.

No one tells the truth about truth,

that it’s what the fox

sees from his scuffled burrow:

dull-jawed, onrushing

killer, being that

inanely single-minded

will have our skins at last.

1967

THE BREAK

All month eating the heart out,

smothering in a fierce insomnia . . .

First the long, spongy summer, drying

out by fits and starts, till a morning

torn off another calendar

when the wind stiffens, chairs

and tables rouse themselves

in a new, unplanned light

and a word flies like a dry leaf down the hall

at the bang of a door.

Then break, October, speak,

non-existent and damning clarity.

Stare me down, thrust

your tongue against mine, break

day, let me stand up

like a table or a chair

in a cold room with the sun beating in

full on the dusty panes.

1967

TWO POEMS

Adapted from Anna Akhmatova.

1.

There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses:

neither the lover nor the expert sensualist

passes it, though mouths press silently together

and the heart is bursting.

And friends—they too are helpless there,

and so with years of fire and joy,

whole histories of freedom

unburdened by sensual languor.

The crazy ones push on to that frontier

while those who have found it are sick with grief . . .

And now you know

why my heart doesn’t beat beneath your hand.

2.

On the terrace, violins played

the most heartbreaking songs.

A sharp, fresh smell of the sea

came from oysters on a dish of ice

He said, I’m a faithful friend,

touching my dress.

How far from a caress,

the touch of that hand!

The way you stroke a cat, a bird,

the look you give a shapely bareback rider.

In his calm eyes, only laughter

under the light-gold lashes.

And the violins mourn on

behind drifting smoke:

Thank your stars, you’re at last alone

with the man you love.

1966

THE KEY

Through a drain grating, something

glitters and falters,

glitters again. A scrap of foil,

a coin, a signal, a message

from the indistinct

piercing my indistinctness?

How long I have gone round

and round, spiritless with foreknown defeat,

in search of that glitter?

Hours, years maybe. The cry of metal

on asphalt, on iron, the sudden

ching of a precious loss,

the clear statement

of something missing. Over and over

it stops me in my tracks

like a falling star, only

this is not the universe’s loss

it is mine. If I were only colder,

nearer death, nearer birth, I might let go

whatever’s so bent on staying lost.

Why not leave the house

locked, to collapse inward among its weeds,

the letters to darken and flake

in the drawer, the car

to grow skeletal, aflame with rust

in the moonlit lot, and walk

ever after?

O God I am not spiritless,

but a spirit can be stunned,

a battery felt going dead

before the light flickers,

and I’ve covered this ground too often

with this yellow disc

within whose beam all’s commonplace

and whose limits are described

by the whole night.

1967

PICNIC

Sunday in Inwood Park

the picnic eaten

the chicken bones scattered

for the fox we’ll never see

the children playing in the caves

My death is folded in my pocket

like a nylon raincoat

What kind of sunlight is it

that leaves the rocks so cold?

1967

POSTCARD

Rodin’s Orpheus, floodlit, hacked,

clawing I don’t know what

with the huge toes of an animal,

gripping the air

above the mitered floors

of the Musée . . .

This comes in the mail and I wonder

what it is to be cast in bronze

like the sender;

who wouldn’t live, thirsty, drifting,

obscure, freaked-out

but with a future

still lapping at the door

and a dream of language

unlived behind the clouds?

Orpheus hurts all over

but his throat hurts worst of all.

You can see it: the two knobs

of bronze pain in his neck,

the paralysis of his floodlit lips.

1967

THE BOOK

FOR RICHARD HOWARD.

You, hiding there in your words

like a disgrace

the cast-off son of a family

whose face is written in theirs

who must not be mentioned

who calls collect three times a year

from obscure towns out-of-state

and whose calls are never accepted

You who had to leave alone

and forgot your shadow hanging under the stairs

let me tell you: I have been in the house

I have spoken to all of them

they will not pronounce your name

they only allude to you

rising and sitting, going or coming,

falling asleep and waking,

giving away in marriage or calling for water

on their deathbeds

their faces look into each other and see

you

when they write at night in their diaries they are writing

to you

1968

ABNEGATION

The red fox, the vixen

dancing in the half-light among the junipers,

wise-looking in a sexy way,

Egyptian-supple in her sharpness—

what does she want

with the dreams of dead vixens,

the apotheosis of Reynard,

the literature of fox-hunting?

Only in her nerves the past

sings, a thrill of self-preservation.

I go along down the road

to a house nailed together by Scottish

Covenanters, instinct mortified

in a virgin forest,

and she springs toward her den

every hair on her pelt alive

with tidings of the immaculate present.

They left me a westernness,

a birthright, a redstained, ravelled

afghan of sky.

She has no archives,

no heirlooms, no future

except death

and I could be more

her sister than theirs

who chopped their way across these hills

—a chosen people.

1968

II

LEAFLETS

WOMEN

FOR C.R.G.

My three sisters are sitting

on rocks of black obsidian.

For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.

My first sister is sewing her costume for the procession.

She is going as the Transparent Lady

and all her nerves will be visible.

My second sister is also sewing,

at the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely.

At last, she hopes, this tightness in her chest will ease.

My third sister is gazing

at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea.

Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful.

1968

IMPLOSIONS

The world’s

not wanton

only wild and wavering

I wanted to choose words that even you

would have to be changed by

Take the word

of my pulse, loving and ordinary

Send out your signals, hoist

your dark scribbled flags

but take

my hand

All wars are useless to the dead

My hands are knotted in the rope

and I cannot sound the bell

My hands are frozen to the switch

and I cannot throw it

The foot is in the wheel

When it’s finished and we’re lying

in a stubble of blistered flowers

eyes gaping, mouths staring

dusted with crushed arterial blues

I’ll have done nothing

even for you?

1968

TO FRANTZ FANON

Born Martinique, 1925; dead Washington D.C.,

1961.

I don’t see your head

sunk, listening     to the throats

of the torturers and the tortured

I don’t see your eyes

deep in the blackness     of your skull

they look off from me     into the eyes

of rats and haunted policemen.

What I see best is the length

of your fingers

pressing the pencil

into the barred page

of the French child’s copybook

with its Cartesian squares     its grilled

trap of holy geometry

where your night-sweats streamed out

in language

and your death

a black streak on a white bed

in L’Enfant’s city where

the fever-bush sweats off

its thick

petals     year after year

on the mass grave

of revolt

1968

CONTINUUM

Waking thickheaded by crow’s light

I see the suitcase packed

for your early plane; nothing to do

but follow the wristwatch hands

round to the hour. Life is like money

—you said, finishing the brandy from the cracked

plastic bathroom cup last night—

no use except for what you can get with it.

Yet something wants us delivered up

alive, whatever it is,

that causes me to edge the slatted blind

soundlessly up, leaving you

ten minutes’ more sleep, while I look

shivering, lucidifying, down

at that street where the poor are already getting started

and that poster streaking the opposite wall

with the blurred face of a singer whose songs

money can’t buy nor air contain

someone yet unloved, whose voice

I may never hear, but go on hoping

to hear, tonight, tomorrow, someday,

as I go on hoping to feel

tears of mercy in the of course impersonal rain.

1968

ON EDGES

When the ice starts to shiver

all across the reflecting basin

or water-lily leaves

dissect a simple surface

the word ‘drowning’ flows through me.

You built a glassy floor

that held me

as I leaned to fish for old

hooks and toothed tin cans,

stems lashing out like ties of

silk dressing-gowns

archangels of lake-light

gripped in mud.

Now you hand me a torn letter.

On my knees, in the ashes, I could never

fit these ripped-up flakes together.

In the taxi I am still piecing

what syllables I can

translating at top speed like a thinking machine

that types out ‘useless’ as ‘monster’

and ‘history’ as ‘lampshade’.

Crossing the bridge I need all my nerve

to trust to the man-made cables.

The blades on that machine

could cut you to ribbons

but its function is humane.

Is this all I can say of these

delicate hooks, scythe-curved intentions

you and I handle? I’d rather

taste blood, yours or mine, flowing

from a sudden slash, than cut all day

with blunt scissors on dotted lines

like the teacher told.

1968

VIOLENCE

No one knows yet

what he is capable of. Thus: if you

(still drawing me, mouth to mouth

toward the door) had pushed

a gun into my hand

would my fingers have burned, or not,

to dry ice on that metal?

if you’d said, leaving

in a pre-dawn thunderstorm

use this when the time comes

would I have blurted my first no that night

or, back without you, bundled

the cold bulk into a drawer

in a cocoon of nightgowns

printed with knots of honeysuckle . . .

Still following you as if your body

were a lantern, an angel of radar,

along the untrustworthy park

or down that block where the cops shoot to kill—

could I have dreamed a violence

like that of finding

your burnt-out cigarettes

planted at random, charred

fuses in a blown-up field?

1968

THE OBSERVER

Completely protected on all sides

by volcanoes

a woman, darkhaired, in stained jeans

sleeps in central Africa.

In her dreams, her notebooks, still

private as maiden diaries,

the mountain gorillas move through their life term;

their gentleness survives

observation. Six bands of them

inhabit, with her, the wooded highland.

When I lay me down to sleep

unsheltered by any natural guardians

from the panicky life-cycle of my tribe

I wake in the old cellblock

observing the daily executions,

rehearsing the laws

I cannot subscribe to,

envying the pale gorilla-scented dawn

she wakes into, the stream where she washes her hair,

the camera-flash of her quiet

eye.

1968

NIGHTBREAK

Something broken     Something

I need     By someone

I love     Next year

will I remember what

This anger     unreal

yet

has to be gone through

The sun to set

on this anger

I go on

head down     into it

The mountain pulsing

Into the oildrum     drops

the ball of fire.

Time is quiet     doesn’t break things

or even wound     Things are in danger

from people     The frail clay lamps

of Mesopotamia

row on row under glass

in the ethnological section

little hollows for dried-

up oil     The refugees

with their identical

tales of escape     I don’t

collect what I can’t use     I need

what can be broken.

In the bed the pieces fly together

and the rifts fill     or else

my body is a list     of wounds

symmetrically placed

a village

blown open     by planes

that did not     finish the job

The enemy has     withdrawn

between raids     become invisible

there are

no agencies

of relief

the darkness becomes utter

Sleep     cracked and flaking

sifts over the shaken     target.

What breaks     is night

not day     The white

scar     splitting

over the east

The crack weeping

Time for the pieces

to move

dumbly back

toward each other.

1968

GABRIEL

There are no angels        yet

here comes an angel        one

with a man’s face        young

shut-off        the dark

side of the moon        turning to me

and saying:        I am the plumed

serpent        the beast

with fangs of fire   and a gentle

heart

But he doesn’t say that        His message

drenches his body

he’d want to kill me

for using words to name him

I sit in the bare apartment

reading

words stream past me        poetry

twentieth-century rivers

disturbed surfaces        reflecting clouds

reflecting wrinkled neon

but clogged        and mostly

nothing alive left

in their depths

The angel is barely

speaking        to me

Once in a horn of light

he stood        or someone like him

salutations in gold-leaf

ribboning from his lips

Today again        the hair streams

to his shoulders

the eyes reflect        something

like a lost country        or so I think

but the ribbon has reeled itself

up

he isn’t giving

or taking any shit

We glance miserably

across the room        at each other

It’s true        there are moments

closer and closer together

when words stick        in my throat

‘the art of love’

‘the art of words’

I get your message Gabriel

just        will you stay looking

straight at me

awhile longer

1968

LEAFLETS

1.

The big star, and that other

lonely on black glass

overgrown with frozen

lesions, endless night

the Coal Sack gaping

black veins of ice on the pane

spelling a word:

Insomnia

not manic but ordinary

to start out of sleep

turning off and on

this seasick neon

vision, this

division

the head clears of sweet smoke

and poison gas

life without caution

the only worth living

love for a man

love for a woman

love for the facts

protectless

that self-defense be not

the arm’s first motion

memory not only

cards of identity

that I can live half a year

as I have never lived up to this time —

Chekhov coughing up blood almost daily

the steamer edging in toward the penal colony

chained men dozing on deck

five forest fires lighting the island

lifelong that glare, waiting.

2.

Your face

stretched like a mask

begins to tear

as you speak of Che Guevara

Bolivia, Nanterre

I’m too young to be your mother

you’re too young to be my brother

your tears are not political

they are real water, burning

as the tears of Telemachus

burned

Over Spanish Harlem the moon

swells up, a fire balloon

fire gnawing the edge

of this crushed-up newspaper

now

the bodies come whirling

coal-black, ash-white

out of torn windows

and the death columns blacken

whispering

Who’d choose this life?

We’re fighting for a slash of recognition,

a piercing to the pierced heart.

Tell me what you are going through —

but the attention flickers

and will flicker

a matchflame in poison air

a thread, a hair of light

sum of all answer

to the Know that I exist! of all existing things.

3.

If, says the Dahomeyan devil,

someone has courage to enter the fire

the young man will be restored to life.

If, the girl whispers,

I do not go into the fire

I will not be able to live with my soul.

(Her face calm and dark as amber

under the dyed butterfly turban

her back scarified in ostrich-skin patterns.)

4.

Crusaders’ wind glinting

off linked scales of sea

ripping the ghostflags

galloping at the fortress

Acre, bloodcaked, lionhearted

raw vomit curdling in the sun

gray walkers walking

straying with a curbed intentness

in and out the inclosures

the gallows, the photographs

of dead Jewish terrorists, aged 15

their fading faces wide-eyed

and out in the crusading sunlight

gray strayers still straying

dusty paths

the mad who live in the dried-up moat

of the War Museum

what are we coming to

what wants these things of us

who wants them

5.

The strain of being born

over and over has torn your smile into pieces

Often I have seen it broken

and then re-membered

and wondered how a beauty

so anarch, so ungelded

will be cared for in this world.

I want to hand you this

leaflet streaming with rain or tears

but the words coming clear

something you might find crushed into your hand

after passing a barricade

and stuff in your raincoat pocket.

I want this to reach you

who told me once that poetry is nothing sacred

no more sacred that is

than other things in your life—

to answer yes, if life is uncorrupted

no better poetry is wanted.

I want this to be yours

in the sense that if you find and read it

it will be there in you already

and the leaflet then merely something

to leave behind, a little leaf

in the drawer of a sublet room.

What else does it come down to

but handing on scraps of paper

little figurines or phials

no stronger than the dry clay they are baked in

yet more than dry clay or paper

because the imagination crouches in them.

If we needed fire to remind us

that all true images

were scooped out of the mud

where our bodies curse and flounder

then perhaps that fire is coming

to sponge away the scribes and time-servers

and much that you would have loved will be lost as well

before you could handle it and know it

just as we almost miss each other

in the ill cloud of mistrust, who might have touched

hands quickly, shared food or given blood

for each other. I am thinking how we can use what we have

to invent what we need.

Winter-Spring 1968

THE RAFTS

FOR DAVID, MICHAEL AND DAVID.

Down the river, on rafts you came

floating. The three of you

and others I can’t remember.

Stuck to your sleeves, twists of

blurred red rag, old bandages, ribbons

of honor.     Your hands dragged me

aboard.

Then I sprawled

full length on the lashed poles

laughing, drenched, in rags.

The river’s rising!

they yelled on shore

thru megaphones.

Can’t you see

that water’s mad, those rafts

are children’s toys, that crowd

is heading nowhere?

My lips

tasted your lips and foreheads

salty with sweat,

then we were laughing, holding off

the scourge of dead branches

overhanging from shore as your

homemade inventions

danced

along

1968

III

GHAZALS (HOMAGE

TO GHALIB)

7/12/68

FOR SHEILA ROTNER.

The clouds are electric in this university.

The lovers astride the tractor burn fissures through the hay.

When I look at that wall I shall think of you

and of what you did not paint there.

Only the truth makes the pain of lifting a hand worthwhile:

the prism staggering under the blows of the raga.

The vanishing-point is the point where he appears.

Two parallel tracks converge, yet there has been no wreck.

To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable

is to throw away the search for the one necessary word.

When you read these lines, think of me

and of what I have not written here.

7/13/68

The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit,

saw differently from us, who breathed thin air and kept walking.

Sleeping back-to-back, man and woman, we were more conscious

than either of us awake and alone in the world.

These words are vapor-trails of a plane that has vanished;

by the time I write them out, they are whispering something else.

Do we still have to feel jealous of our creations?

Once they might have outlived us; in this world, we’ll die together.

Don’t look for me in the room I have left;

the photograph shows just a white rocking-chair, still rocking.

7/14/68: I

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

How many times a day, in this city, are those words spoken?

The tears of the universe aren’t all stars, Danton;

some are satellites of brushed aluminum and stainless steel.

He, who was temporary, has joined eternity;

he has deserted us, gone over to the other side.

In the Theatre of the Dust no actor becomes famous.

In the last scene they all are blown away like dust.

“It may be if I had known them I would have loved them.”

You were American, Whitman, and those words are yours.

7/14/68: II

Did you think I was talking about my life?

I was trying to drive a tradition up against the wall.

The field they burned over is greener than all the rest.

You have to watch it, he said, the sparks can travel the roots.

Shot back into this earth’s atmosphere

our children’s children may photograph these stones.

In the red wash of the darkroom, I see myself clearly;

when the print is developed and handed about, the face is

nothing to me.

For us the work undoes itself over and over:

the grass grows back, the dust collects, the scar breaks open.

7/16/68: I

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

five green hours and forty violet minutes.

A cold spring slowed our lilacs, till a surf broke

violet/white, tender and sensual, misread it if you dare.

I tell you, truth is, at the moment, here

burning outward through our skins.

Eternity streams through my body:

touch it with your hand and see.

Till the walls of the tunnel cave in

and the black river walks on our faces.

7/16/68: II

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

as if by snow, or fire, or physical desire.

First snow. Death of the city. Ghosts in the air.

Your shade among the shadows, interviewing the mist.

The mail came every day, but letters were missing;

by this I knew things were not what they ought to be.

The trees in the long park blurring back

into Olmsted’s original dream-work.

The impartial scholar writes me from under house arrest.

I hope you are rotting in hell, Montaigne you bastard.

7/17/68

Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon.

Flower cast in metal, Picasso-woman, sister.

Two hesitant Luna moths regard each other

with the spots on their wings: fascinated.

To resign yourself—what an act of betrayal!

—to throw a runaway spirit back to the dogs.

When the ebb-tide pulls hard enough, we are all starfish.

The moon has her way with us, my companion in crime.

At the Aquarium that day, between the white whale’s loneliness

and the groupers’ mass promiscuities, only ourselves.

7/23/68

When your sperm enters me, it is altered;

when my thought absorbs yours, a world begins.

If the mind of the teacher is not in love with the mind of the student,

he is simply practicing rape, and deserves at best our pity.

To live outside the law! Or, barely within it,

a twig on boiling waters, enclosed inside a bubble

Our words are jammed in an electronic jungle;

sometimes, though, they rise and wheel croaking above the treetops

An open window; thick summer night; electric fences trilling.

What are you doing here at the edge of the death-camps, Vivaldi?

7/24/68: I

The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature.

In the woods I have a vision of asphalt, blindly lingering.

I hardly know the names of the weeds I love.

I have forgotten the names of so many flowers.

I can’t live at the hems of that tradition—

will I last to try the beginning of the next?

Killing is different now: no fingers round the throat.

No one feels the wetness of the blood on his hands.

When we fuck, there too are we remoter

than the fucking bodies of lovers used to be?

How many men have touched me with their eyes

more hotly than they later touched me with their lips.

7/24/68: II

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.

The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.

At the drive-in movie, above the PanaVision,

beyond the projector beams, you project yourself, great Star.

The eye that used to watch us is dead, but open.

Sometimes I still have a sense of being followed.

How long will we be waiting for the police?

How long must I wonder which of my friends would hide me?

Driving at night I feel the Milky Way

streaming above me like the graph of a cry.

7/26/68: I

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

Today you needn’t write; the wall has tumbled down.

We were taught to respect the appearance behind the reality.

Our senses were out on parole, under surveillance.

A pair of eyes imprisoned for years inside my skull

is burning its way outward, the headaches are terrible.

I’m walking through a rubble of broken sculpture, stumbling

here on the spine of a friend, there on the hand of a brother.

All those joinings! and yet we fought so hard to be unique.

Neither alone, nor in anyone’s arms, will we end up sleeping.

7/26/68: II

A dead mosquito, flattened against a door;

his image could survive our comings and our goings.

LeRoi! Eldridge! listen to us, we are ghosts

condemned to haunt the cities where you want to be at home.

The white children turn black on the negative.

The summer clouds blacken inside the camera-skull.

Every mistake that can be made, we are prepared to make;

anything less would fall short of the reality we’re dreaming.

Someone has always been desperate, now it’s our turn—

we who were free to weep for Othello and laugh at Caliban.

I have learned to smell a conservateur a mile away:

they carry illustrated catalogues of all that there is to lose.

7/26/68: III

So many minds in search of bodies

groping their way among artificial limbs.

Of late they write me how they are getting on:

desertion, desertion, is the story of those pages.

A chewed-up nail, the past, splitting yet growing,

the same and not the same; a nervous habit never shaken.

Those stays of tooled whalebone in the Salem museum—

erotic scrimshaw, practical even in lust.

Whoever thought of inserting a ship in a bottle?

Long weeks without women do this to a man.

8/1/68

The order of the small town on the riverbank,

forever at war with the order of the dark and starlit soul.

Were you free then all along, Jim, free at last,

of everything but the white boy’s fantasies?

We pleaded guilty till we saw what rectitude was like:

its washed hands, and dead nerve, and sclerotic eye.

I long ago stopped dreaming of pure justice, your honor—

my crime was to believe we could make cruelty obsolete.

The body has been exhumed from the burnt-out bunker;

the teeth counted, the contents of the stomach told over.

And you, Custer the Squaw-killer, hero of primitive schoolrooms—

where are you buried, what is the condition of your bones?

8/4/68

FOR AIJAZ AHMAD.

If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

If scribblings on a wall, they must tangle with all the others.

Fuck reds     Black Power Angel     loves Rosita

—and a transistor radio answers in Spanish: Night must fall.

Prisoners, soldiers, crouching as always, writing,

explaining the unforgivable to a wife, a mother, a lover.

Those faces are blurred and some have turned away

to which I used to address myself so hotly.

How is it, Ghalib, that your grief, resurrected in pieces,

has found its way to this room from your dark house in Delhi?

When they read this poem of mine, they are translators.

Every existence speaks a language of its own.

8/8/68: I

From here on, all of us will be living

like Galileo turning his first tube at the stars.

Obey the little laws and break the great ones

is the preamble to their constitution.

Even to hope is to leap into the unknown,

under the mocking eyes of the way things are.

There’s a war on earth, and in the skull, and in the glassy spaces,

between the existing and the non-existing.

I need to live each day through, have them and know them all,

though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.

8/8/68: II

FOR A.H.C.

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

some weaving figured as magic against oppression.

I’m speaking to you as a woman to a man:

when your blood flows I want to hold you in my arms.

How did we get caught up fighting this forest fire,

we, who were only looking for a still place in the woods?

How frail we are, and yet, dispersed, always returning,

the barnacles they keep scraping from the warship’s hull.

The hairs on your breast curl so lightly as you lie there,

while the strong heart goes on pounding in its sleep.

THE WILL

TO CHANGE

(1971)

For David, Pablo and Jacob

What does not change / is the will to change

—Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers”

NOVEMBER 1968

Stripped

you’re beginning to float free

up through the smoke of brushfires

and incinerators

the unleafed branches won’t hold you

nor the radar aerials

You’re what the autumn knew would happen

after the last collapse

of primary color

once the last absolutes were torn to pieces

you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you

until this moment

I know nothing about it

my ignorance of you amazes me

now that I watch you

starting to give yourself away

to the wind

1968

STUDY OF HISTORY

Out there.     The mind of the river

as it might be you.

Lights     blotted by unseen hulls

repetitive shapes passing

dull foam crusting the margin

barges sunk below the water-line with silence.

The scow, drudging on.

Lying in the dark, to think of you

and your harsh traffic

gulls pecking your rubbish     natural historians

mourning your lost purity

pleasure cruisers

witlessly careening you

but this

after all

is the narrows and after

all we have never entirely

known what was done to you upstream

what powers trepanned

which of your channels diverted

what rockface leaned to stare

in your upturned

defenseless

face.

1968

PLANETARIUM

Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750–1848, astronomer,

sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

a woman    ‘in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments

or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us

levitating into the night sky

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness

ribs chilled

in those spaces   of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’

from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core

as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last

‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet   I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslateable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep   so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15

years to travel through me   And has

taken    I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images   for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.

1968

THE BURNING OF PAPER INSTEAD OF

CHILDREN

I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.

—Fr. Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore

1.

My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics text-book in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. “The burning of a book,” he says, “arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book.”

Back there: the library, walled

with green Britannicas

Looking again

in Dürer’s Complete Works

for MELENCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus

the Book of the Dead

the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue

I think, It is her color

and they take the book away

because I dream of her too often

love and fear in a house

knowledge of the oppressor

I know it hurts to burn

2.

To imagine a time of silence

or few words

a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks

traced by my hand

or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue the   slab of limestone

or reinforced concrete

fanatics and traders

dumped on this coast   wildgreen   clayred

that breathed once

in signals of smoke

sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor

this is the oppressor’s language

yet I need it to talk to you

3.

“People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.”

(the fracture of order

the repair of speech

to overcome this suffering)

4.

We lie under the sheet

after making love, speaking

of loneliness

relieved in a book

relived in a book

so on that page

the clot and fissure

of it appears

words of a man

in pain

a naked word

entering the clot

a hand grasping

through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us

has happened for centuries

we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy

outflung hand

beating bed

dryness of mouth

after panting

there are books that describe all this

and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house

there in that country

you find a temple

built eighteen hundred years ago

you enter without knowing

what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen

though the books tell everything

burn the texts    said Artaud

5.

I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.

1968

I DREAM I’M THE

DEATH OF ORPHEUS

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown

under an arcade.

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers

and those powers severely limited

by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

I am a woman in the prime of life

driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce

through a landscape of twilight and thorns.

A woman with a certain mission

which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.

A woman with the nerves of a panther

a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels

a woman feeling the fullness of her powers

at the precise moment when she must not use them

a woman sworn to lucidity

who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires

of these underground streets

her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind

on the wrong side of the mirror

1968

THE BLUE GHAZALS

9/21/68

Violently asleep in the old house.

A clock stays awake all night ticking.

Turning, turning their bruised leaves

the trees stay awake all night in the wood.

Talk to me with your body through my dreams.

Tell me what we are going through.

The walls of the room are muttering,

old trees, old utopians, arguing with the wind.

To float like a dead man in a sea of dreams

and half those dreams being dreamed by someone else.

Fifteen years of sleepwalking with you,

wading against the tide, and with the tide.

9/23/68

One day of equinoctial light after another,

moving ourselves through gauzes and fissures of that light.

Early and late I come and set myself against you,

your phallic fist knocking blindly at my door.

The dew is beaded like mercury on the coarsened grass,

the web of the spider is heavy as if with sweat.

Everything is yielding toward a foregone conclusion,

only we are rash enough to go on changing our lives.

An Ashanti woman tilts the flattened basin on her head

to let the water slide downward:   I am that woman and that water.

9/26/68: I

A man, a woman, a city.

The city as object of love.

Anger and filth in the basement.

The furnace stoked and blazing.

A sexual heat on the pavements.

Trees erected like statues.

Eyes at the ends of avenues.

Yellow for hesitation.

I’m tired of walking your streets

he says, unable to leave her.

Air of dust and rising sparks,

the city burning her letters.

9/28/68: II

FOR WALLACE STEVENS.

Ideas of order . . . Sinner of the Florida keys,

you were our poet of revolution all along.

A man isn’t what he seems but what he desires:

gaieties of anarchy drumming at the base of the skull.

Would this have left you cold, our scene, its wild parades,

the costumes, banners, incense, flowers, the immense marches?

Disorder is natural, these leaves absently blowing

in the drinking-fountain, filling the statue’s crevice.

The use of force in public architecture:

nothing, not even the honeycomb, manifests such control.

9/29/68

FOR LEROI JONES.

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

half-sleepy, half-alert in that thicket of bitter roots.

Who doesn’t speak to me, who speaks to me more and more,

but from a face turned off, turned away, a light shut out.

Most of the old lecturers are inaudible or dead.

Prince of the night there are explosions in the hall.

The blackboard scribbled over with dead languages

is falling and killing our children.

Terribly far away I saw your mouth in the wild light:

it seemed to me you were shouting instructions to us all.

12/13/68

They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,

the edge of dark from the edge of dawn, your love is a lie.

If I thought of my words as changing minds,

hadn’t my mind also to suffer changes?

They measure fever, swab the blisters of the throat,

but the cells of thought go rioting on ignored.

It’s the inner ghost that suffers, little spirit

looking out wildly from the clouded pupils.

When will we lie clearheaded in our flesh again

with the cold edge of the night driving us close together?

12/20/68: I

There are days when I seem to have nothing

but these frayed packets, done up with rotting thread.

The shortest day of the year, let it be ours.

Let me give you something: a token for the subway.

(Refuse even

the most beloved old solutions.

That dead man wrote, grief ought to reach the lips.

You must believe I know before you can tell me.

A black run through the tunnelled winter, he and she,

together, touching, yet not side by side.

12/20/68: II

Frost, burning. The city’s ill.

We gather like viruses.

The doctors are all on their yachts

watching the beautiful skin-divers.

The peasant mind of the Christian

transfixed on food at the year’s turning.

Thinking of marzipan

forget that revolutionary child.

Thought grown senile with sweetness.

You too may visit the Virgins.

In the clear air, hijacked planes

touch down at the forbidden island.

5/4/69

Pain made her conservative.

Where the matches touched her flesh, she wears a scar.

The police arrive at dawn

like death and childbirth.

City of accidents, your true map

is the tangling of all our lifelines.

The moment when a feeling enters the body

is political. This touch is political.

Sometimes I dream we are floating on water

hand-in-hand; and sinking without terror.

PIERROT LE FOU

1.

Suppose you stood facing

a wall

of photographs

from your unlived life

as you stand looking at these

stills from the unseen film?

Yourself against a wall

curiously stuccoed

Yourself in the doorway

of a kind of watchman’s hut

Yourself at a window

signaling to people

you haven’t met yet

Yourself in unfamiliar clothes

with the same eyes

2.

On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.

I speak the French language like a schoolgirl of the ’forties.

Those roads remind me of Beauce and the motorcycle.

We rode from Paris to Chartres in the March wind.

He said we should go to Spain but the wind defeated me.

France of the superhighways, I never knew you.

How much the body took in those days, and could take!

A naked lightbulb still simmers in my eyeballs.

In every hotel, I lived on the top floor.

3.

Suppose we had time

and no money

living by our wits

telling stories

which stories would you tell?

I would tell the story

of Pierrot Le Fou

who trusted

not a woman

but love itself

till his head blew off

not quite intentionally

I would tell all the stories I knew

in which people went wrong

but the nervous system

was right all along

4.

The island blistered our feet.

At first we mispronounced each others’ names.

All the leaves of the tree were scribbled with words.

There was a language there but no-one to speak it.

Sometimes each of us was alone.

At noon on the beach our shadows left us.

The net we twisted from memory kept on breaking.

The damaged canoe lay on the beach like a dead animal.

You started keeping a journal on a coconut shell.

5.

When I close my eyes

other films

have been there all along

a market shot:

bins of turnips, feet

of dead chickens

close-up: a black old woman

buying voodoo medicines

a figure of terrible faith

and I know her needs

Another film:

an empty room stacked with old films

I am kneeling on the floor

it is getting dark

they want to close the building

and I still haven’t found you

Scanning reel after reel

tundras in negative,

the Bowery

all those scenes

but the light is failing

and you are missing

from the footage of the march

the railway disaster

the snowbound village

even the shots of the island

miss you

yet you were there

6.

To record

in order to see

if you know how the story ends

why tell it

To record

in order to forget

the surface is always lucid

my shadows are under the skin

To record

in order to control

the eye of the camera

doesn’t weep tears of blood

To record

for that is what one does

climbing your stairs, over and over

I memorized the bare walls

This is my way of coming back

1969

LETTERS: MARCH 1969

1.

Foreknown. The victor

sees the disaster through and through.

His soles grind rocksalt

from roads of the resistance.

He shoulders through rows

of armored faces

he might have loved and lived among.

The victory carried like a corpse

from town to town

begins to crawl in the casket.

The summer swindled on

from town to town, our train

stopping and broiling on the rails

long enough to let on who we were.

The disaster sat up with us all night

drinking bottled water, eating fruit,

talking of the conditions that prevailed.

Outside along the railroad cut

they were singing for our death.

2.

Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

How little it takes

to restore composure.

White napkins, a tray

of napoleons and cherry tarts

compliments of the airline

which has flown us out of danger.

They are torturing the journalist we drank with

last night in the lounge

but we can’t be sure of that

here overlooking the runway

three hours and twenty minutes into another life.

If this is done for us

(and this is done for us)

if we are well men wearing bandages

for disguise

if we can choose our scene

stay out of earshot

break the roll and pour

from the clean carafe

if we can desert like soldiers

abjure like thieves

we may well purchase new virtues at the gate

of the other world.

3.

“I am up at sunrise

collecting data.

The reservoir burns green.

Darling, the knives they have on this block alone

would amaze you.

When they ask my profession I say

I’m a student of weapons systems.

The notes I’m putting together are purely

of sentimental value

my briefcase is I swear useless

to foreign powers, to the police

I am not given I say

to revealing my sources

to handing round copies

of my dossier for perusal.

The vulnerable go unarmed.

I myself walk the floor

a ruinously expensive Swiss hunter’s knife

exposed in my brain

eight blades, each one for a distinct purpose,

laid open as on the desk

of an importer or a fence.”

4.

Six months back

send carbons you said

but this winter’s dashed off in pencil

torn off the pad too fast

for those skills. In the dawn taxi

in the kitchen

burning the succotash

the more I love my life the more

I love you. In a time

of fear. In a city

of fears. In a life

without vacations the paisley fades

winter and summer in the sun

but the best time is now.

My sick friend writes: what’s love?

This life is nothing, Adrienne!

Her hands bled onto the sill.

She had that trick of reaching outward,

the pane was smashed but only

the calvinist northwind

spat in from the sea.

She’s a shot hero. A dying poet.

Even now, if we went for her—

but they’ve gone with rags and putty to fix the pane.

She stays in with her mirrors and anger.

I tear up answers

I once gave, postcards

from riot and famine go up on the walls

valentines stuck in the mirror

flame and curl, loyalties dwindle

the bleak light dries our tears

without relief. I keep coming back to you

in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and

I have no carbons. Prince of pity,

what eats out of your hand?

the rodent pain, electric

with exhaustion, mazed and shaken?

I’d have sucked the wound in your hand to sleep

but my lips were trembling.

Tell me how to bear myself,

how it’s done, the light kiss falling

accurately

on the cracked palm.

1969

PIECES

1. Breakpoint

The music of words

received as fact

The steps that wouldn’t hold us both

splintering in air

The self withheld in an urn

like ashes

To have loved you better than you loved yourself

—whoever you were, to have loved you—

And still to love but simply

as one of those faces on the street

2. Relevance

That erudition

how to confront it

The critics wrote answers

the questions were ours

A breast, a shoulder

chilled at waking

The cup of yoghurt

eaten at noon

and no explanations

The books we borrowed

trying to read each other’s minds

Paperbacks piling

on both sides of the fireplace

and piled beside the bed

What difference could it make

that those books came

out of unintelligible pain

as daylight out of the hours

when that light burned

atop the insurance tower

all night like the moon

3. Memory

Plugged-in to her body

he came the whole way

but it makes no difference

If not this then what

would fuse a connection

(All that burning intelligence about love

what can it matter

Falling in love on words

and ending in silence

with its double-meanings

Always falling and ending

because this world gives no room

to be what we dreamt of being

Are we, as he said

of the generation that forgets

the lightning-flash, the air-raid

and each other

4. Time and Place

Liquid mist burning off

along the highway

Slap of water

Light on shack boards

Hauling of garbage

early in the wet street

Always the same, wherever waking,

the old positions

assumed by the mind

and the new day forms

like a china cup

hard, cream-colored, unbreakable

even in our travels

5. Revelation

This morning: read Simone Weil

on the loss of grace

drank a glass of water

remembered the dream that woke me:

some one, some more than one

battering into my room

intent to kill me

I crying your name

its two syllables

ringing through sleep

knowing it vain

knowing

you slept unhearing

crying your name

like a spell

like signs executed

by the superstitious

who are the faithful of this world

1969

OUR WHOLE LIFE

Our whole life a translation

the permissible fibs

and now a knot of lies

eating at itself to get undone

Words bitten thru words

meanings burnt-off like paint

under the blowtorch

All those dead letters

rendered into the oppressor’s language

Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts

like the Algerian

who has walked from his village, burning

his whole body a cloud of pain

and there are no words for this

except himself

1969

YOUR LETTER

blinds me

like the light of that surf

you thrust your body in

for punishment

or the river of fiery fenders

and windshields

you pour yourself into

driving north to S.F.

on that coast of chrome and oil

I watch for any signal

the tremor of courage

in the seismograph

a flash

where I thought the glare

was steady, smogged & tame

1969

STAND UP

Stand up in my nightgown at the window

almost naked behind black glass

Off from the line of trees the road

beaten, bare, we walked

in the light of the bare, beaten moon.

Almost, you spoke to me. The road

swings past swampground

the soft spots of the earth

you might sink through into location

where their cameras are set up

the underground film-makers waiting to make their film

waiting for you

their cameras pivot toward your head and the film burns

but you’re not talking

If I am there you have forgotten my name

you think perhaps ‘a woman’

and you drift on, drifter, through the frames

of the movie they are making of this time.

A whole soundtrack of your silence

a whole film

of dark nights and darker rooms

and blank sheets of paper, bare . . .

1969

THE STELAE

FOR ARNOLD RICH

Last night I met you in my sister’s house

risen from the dead

showing me your collection

You are almost at the point of giving things away

It’s the stelae on the walls I want

that I never saw before

You offer other objects

I have seen time and time again

I think you think you are giving me

something precious

The stelae are so unlike you

swart, indifferent, incised with signs

you have never deciphered

I never knew you had them

I wonder if you are giving them away

1969

SNOW

when it comes down turning

itself in clusters before the flat

light of the shortest day

you see how all turns away

from us how we turn

into our shadows you can see

how we are tested

the individual crystal on the

black skirt of the maxi-coat

under the lens

was it a whole day or just a lifetime

spent studying crystals

on the fire escape while the ’Sixties

were running out

could you see

how the black ladder spun away from us

into whiteness

how over and over

a star became a tear

if no two are alike

then what are we doing

with these diagrams of loss

1969

THE WILL TO CHANGE

1.

FOR L.D., DEAD 11/69.

That Chinese restaurant was a joke

with its repeating fountains

& chopsticks in tissue paper

The vodka was too sweet

the beancurd too hot

You came with your Egyptian hieroglyph

your angel’s smile

Almost the next day

as surely as if shot

you were thin air

At the risk of appearing ridiculous—

we take back this halfworld for you

and all whose murders accrue

past your death

2.

FOR SANDRA LEVINSON.

Knocked down in the canefield

by a clumsily swung machete

she is helped to her feet

by Fidel

and snapped by photographers

the blonde Yanqui in jeans

We’re living through a time

that needs to be lived through us

(and in the morning papers

Bobby Seale, chalked

by the courtroom artist

defaced by the gag)

3.

FOR D.J.L.

Beardless again, phoning

from a storefront in Yorkville

... we need a typewriter, a crib

& Michael’s number . . .

I swim to you thru dead

latitudes of fever

. . . accepting the discipline . . .

You mean your old freedom

to disappear—you miss that?

. . . but I can dig having lost it . . .

David, I could dig losing everything.

Knowing what you mean, to make that leap

bite into the fear, over & over

& survive. Hoarding my ‘liberty’

like a compulsive—more

than I can use up in a lifetime—

two dozen oranges in the refrigerator

for one American weekend

4.

FOR A.H.C.

At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes

from the Feast of San Gennaro

gaze thru the dark

All night the A-train forages

under our bedroom

All night I dream of a man

black, gagged, shackled, coffined

in a courtroom where I am

passive, white & silent

though my mouth is free

All night I see his eyes

iridescent under torture

and hear the shuddering of the earth

as the trains tear us apart

5.

The cabdriver from the Bronx

screaming: ‘This city’s GOTTA die!’

dynamiting it hourly from his soul

as surely as any terrorist

Burning the bodies of the scum on welfare

ejaculating into the flames

(and, said Freud,

who welcomed it when it was done?)

the professors of the fact

that someone has suffered

seeking truth in a mist of librium

the artists talking of freedom

in their chains

1969–1970

THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE UNMADE BED

Cruelty is rarely conscious

One slip of the tongue

one exposure

among so many

a thrust in the dark

to see if there’s pain there

I never asked you to explain

that act of violence

what dazed me was our ignorance

of our will to hurt each other

. . . . . . . . . .

In a flash I understand

how poems are unlike photographs

(the one saying     This could be

the other     This was

The image

isn’t responsible

for our uses of it

It is intentionless

A long strand of dark hair

in the washbasin

is innocent and yet

such things have done harm

. . . . . . . . . .

These snapshots taken by ghetto children

given for Christmas

Objects blurring into perceptions

No ‘art,’ only the faults

of the film, the faults of the time

Did mere indifference blister

these panes, eat these walls,

shrivel and scrub these trees—

mere indifference? I tell you

cruelty is rarely conscious

the done and the undone blur

into one photograph of failure

. . . . . . . . . .

This crust of bread we try to share

this name traced on a window

this word I paste together

like a child fumbling

with paste and scissors

this writing in the sky with smoke

this silence

this lettering chalked on the ruins

this alphabet of the dumb

this feather held to lips

that still breathe and are warm

1969

IMAGES FOR GODARD

1.

Language as city:: Wittgenstein

Driving to the limits

of the city of words

the superhighway streams

like a comic strip

to newer suburbs

casements of shockproof glass

where no one yet looks out

or toward the coast where even now

the squatters in their shacks

await eviction

When all conversation

becomes an interview

under duress

when we come to the limits

of the city

my face must have a meaning

2.

To know the extremes of light

I sit in this darkness

To see the present flashing

in a rearview mirror

blued in a plateglass pane

reddened in the reflection

of the red Triomphe

parked at the edge of the sea

the sea glittering in the sun

the swirls of nebula

in the espresso cup

raindrops, neon spectra

on a vinyl raincoat

3.

To love, to move perpetually

as the body changes

a dozen times a day

the temperature of the skin

the feeling of rise & fall

deadweight & buoyancy

the eye sunk inward

the eye bleeding with speech

(‘for that moment at least

I wás you—’)

To be stopped, to shoot the same scene

over & over

4.

At the end of Alphaville

she says I love you

and the film begins

that you’ve said you’d never make

because it’s impossible

‘things as difficult to show

as horror & war & sickness are’

meaning:    love,

to speak in the mouth

to touch the breast

for a woman

to know the sex of a man

That film begins here

yet you don’t show it

we leave the theatre

suffering from that

5.

Interior monologue of the poet:

the notes for the poem are the only poem

the mind collecting, devouring

all these destructibles

the unmade studio couch the air

shifting the abalone shells

the mind of the poet is the only poem

the poet is at the movies

dreaming the film-maker’s dream but differently

free in the dark as if asleep

free in the dusty beam of the projector

the mind of the poet is changing

the moment of change is the only poem

1970

A VALEDICTION

FORBIDDING MOURNING

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.

The grammar turned and attacked me.

Themes, written under duress.

Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:

the experience of repetition as death

the failure of criticism to locate the pain

the poster in the bus that said:

my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.

These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.

When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

I could say: those mountains have a meaning

but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

1970

SHOOTING SCRIPT

PART I: 11/69-2/70

1.

We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

Inside this shell, a tide waiting for someone to enter.

A monologue waiting for you to interrupt it.

A man wading into the surf. The dialogue of the rock with the

breaker.

The wave changed instantly by the rock; the rock changed by the

wave returning over and over.

The dialogue that lasts all night or a whole lifetime.

A conversation of sounds melting constantly into rhythms.

A shell waiting for you to listen.

A tide that ebbs and flows against a deserted continent.

A cycle whose rhythm begins to change the meanings of words.

A wheel of blinding waves of light, the spokes pulsing out from

where we hang together in the turning of an endless

conversation.

The meaning that searches for its word like a hermit crab.

A monologue that waits for one listener.

An ear filled with one sound only.

A shell penetrated by meaning.

2. Ghazal V

Adapted from Mirza Ghalib.

Even when I thought I prayed, I was talking to myself; when I

found the door shut, I simply walked away.

We all accept Your claim to be unique; the stone lips, the

carved limbs, were never your true portrait.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that

refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

Now tell me your story till the blood drips from your lashes. Any

other version belongs to your folklore, or ours.

To see the Tigris in a water-drop . . . Either you were playing

games with me, or you never cared to learn the structure of my

language.

3.

The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up.

Where we lay and breakfasted. The stains of tea. The squares

of winter light projected on the wool.

You, sleeping with closed windows. I, sleeping in the silver

nitrate burn of zero air.

Where it can snow, I’m at home; the crystals accumulating spell

out my story.

The cold encrustation thickening on the ledge.

The arrow-headed facts, accumulating, till a whole city is

taken over.

Midwinter and the loss of love, going comes before gone, over

and over the point is missed and still the blind will turns for

its target.

4.

In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning.

In rafts they came over the sea; on the island they put up those

stones by methods we can only guess at.

If the vegetation grows as thick as this, how can we see what they

were seeing?

It is all being made clear, with bulldozers, at Angkor Wat.

The verdure was a false mystery; the baring of the stones is no

solution for us now.

Defoliation progresses; concrete is poured, sheets of glass hauled

overland in huge trucks and at great cost.

Here we never travailed, never took off our shoes to walk the

final mile.

Come and look into this cellar-hole; this is the foundling of the

woods.

Humans lived here once; it became sacred only when they went

away.

5.

Of simple choice they are the villagers; their clothes come with

them like red clay roads they have been walking.

The sole of the foot is a map, the palm of the hand a letter,

learned by heart and worn close to the body.

They seemed strange to me, till I began to recall their dialect.

Poking the spade into the dry loam, listening for the tick of

broken pottery, hoarding the brown and black bits in a dented

can.

Evenings, at the table, turning the findings out, pushing them

around with a finger, beginning to dream of fitting them together.

Hiding all this work from them, although they might have helped

me.

Going up at night, hiding the tin can in a closet, where the

linoleum lies in shatters on a back shelf.

Sleeping to dream of the unformed, the veil of water pouring over the

wet clay, the rhythms of choice, the lost methods.

6.

You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and

keep moving through the bad light.

At this time of year when faces turn aside, it is amazing that your

eyes are to be met.

A bad light is one like this, that flickers and diffuses itself along

the edge of a frontier.

No, I don’t invest you with anything; I am counting on your

weakness as much as on your strength.

This light eats away at the clarities I had fixed on; it moves up

like a rodent at the edge of the raked paths.

Your clarities may not reach me; but your attention will.

It is to know that I too have no mythic powers; it is to see the

liability of all my treasures.

You will have to see all this for a long time alone.

You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and

keep trying to move through the bad light.

7.

Picking the wax to crumbs in the iron lip of the candelabrum.

Fingering down the thread of the maze where the green strand cuts

across the violet strand.

Picking apart the strands of pain; a warp of wool dipped in burning

wax.

When the flame shrinks to a blue bead, there is danger; the change

of light in a flickering situation.

Stretched on the loom the light expands; the smell of a smell of

burning.

When the change leaves you dark, when the wax cools in the socket,

when I thought I prayed, when I was talking to myself under the

cover of my darkness.

Someone who never said, “What do you feel?” someone who sat

across from me, taking the crumbs of wax as I picked them apart and handed them over.

and handed them over.

PART II: 3-7/70

8.

FOR HUGH SEIDMAN.

A woman waking behind grimed blinds slatted across a courtyard

she never looks into.

Thinking of the force of a waterfall, the slash of cold air from the

thickest water of the falls, slicing the green and ochre afternoon in

which he turns his head and walks away.

Thinking of that place as an existence.

A woman reaching for the glass of water left all night on the bureau,

the half-done poem, the immediate relief.

Entering the poem as a method of leaving the room.

Entering the paper airplane of the poem, which somewhere before

its destination starts curling into ash and comes apart.

The woman is too heavy for the poem, she is a swollenness, a foot,

an arm, gone asleep, grown absurd and out of bounds.

Rooted to memory like a wedge in a block of wood; she takes the

pressure of her thought but cannot resist it.

You call this a poetry of false problems, the shotgun wedding of the

mind, the subversion of choice by language.

Instead of the alternative: to pull the sooty strings to set the

window bare to purge the room with light to feel the sun breaking

in on the courtyard and the steamheat smothering in the shut-off

pipes.

To feel existence as this time, this place, the pathos and force

of the lumps of snow gritted and melting in the unloved corners of

the courtyard.

9. (Newsreel)

This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is

heavier, there were no hills of that size there.

But I find it impossible not to look for actual persons known

to me and not seen since; impossible not to look for myself.

The scenery angers me, I know there is something wrong, the sun

is too high, the grass too trampled, the peasants’ faces too broad,

and the main square of the capital had no arcades like those.

Yet the dead look right, and the roofs of the huts, and the crashed

fuselage burning among the ferns.

But this is not the war I came to see, buying my ticket, stumbling

through the darkness, finding my place among the sleepers and

masturbators in the dark.

I thought of seeing the General who cursed us, whose name they

gave to an expressway; I wanted to see the faces of the dead when

they were living.

Once I know they filmed us, back at the camp behind the lines,

taking showers under the trees and showing pictures of our girls.

Somewhere there is a film of the war we fought in, and it must

contain the flares, the souvenirs, the shadows of the netted brush

the standing in line of the innocent, the hills that were not of

this size.

Somewhere my body goes taut under the deluge, somewhere I am

naked behind the lines, washing my body in the water of that war.

Someone has that war stored up in metal canisters, a memory he

cannot use, somewhere my innocence is proven with my guilt, but

this would not be the war I fought in.

10.

FOR VALERIE GLAUBER.

They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

They come and drop their mementoes at the foot of your bed; their

feathers, ferns, fans, grasses from the western mountains.

They wait for you to unfold for them like a paper flower, a secret

springing open in a glass of water.

They believe your future has a history and that it is themselves.

They have family trees to plant for you, photographs of dead

children, old bracelets and rings they want to fasten onto you.

And, in spite of this, you live alone.

Your secret hangs in the open like Poe’s purloined letter; their

longing and their methods will never let them find it.

Your secret cries out in the dark and hushes; when they start out

of sleep they think you are innocent.

You hang among them like the icon in a Russian play; living your

own intenser life behind the lamp they light in front of you.

You are spilt here like mercury on a marble counter, liquefying

into many globes, each silvered like a planet caught in a lens.

You are a mirror lost in a brook, an eye reflecting a torrent of

reflections.

You are a letter written, folded, burnt to ash, and mailed in

an envelope to another continent.

11.

The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.

When you pull the embedded bones up from the soil, the flies

collect again.

The pelvis, the open archway, staring at me like an eye.

In the desert these bones would be burnt white; a green bloom grows

on them in the woods.

Did she break her leg or die of poison?

What was it like when the scavengers came?

So many questions unanswered, yet the statement is here and clear.

With what joy you handled the skull, set back the teeth spilt in the

grass, hinged back the jaw on the jaw.

With what joy we left the woods, swinging our sticks, miming the

speech of noble savages, of the fathers of our country, bursting

into the full sun of the uncut field.

12.

I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.

We walked in the wholesale district: closed warehouses, windows,

steeped in sun.

I said: those cloths are very old. You said: they have lain in

that window a long time.

When the skeletons of the projects shut off the sunset, when the

sense of the Hudson leaves us, when only by loss of light in the east

do I know that I am living in the west.

When I give up being paraphrased, when I let go, when the

beautiful solutions in their crystal flasks have dried up in the sun,

when the lightbulb bursts on lighting, when the dead bulb rattles

like a seed-pod.

Those cloths are very old, they are mummies’ cloths, they have lain

in graves, they were not intended to be sold, the tragedy of this

mistake will soon be clear.

Vacillant needles of Manhattan, describing hour & weather; buying

these descriptions at the cost of missing every other point.

13.

We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to

me to put out in a boat, not on a night like this.

Still, it was an instrument, and I had pledged myself to try any

instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction

of incompetence.

A long time I was simply learning to handle the skiff; I had no

special training and my own training was against me.

I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.

In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.

I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each

one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old days.

14.

Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats;

ashes spilled on white formica.

The death-col viewed through power-glasses; the cube of ice

melting on stainless steel.

Whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you

came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.

Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the

web of cracks filtering across the plaster.

To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the

initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.

To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the

lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.

To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the

glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is.

To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map

of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages.

To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in

your old neighborhood.

POEMS

(1969)

THE DAYS: SPRING

He writes: Let us bear

our illusions together . . .

I persist in thinking:

every fantasy I have

comes true; who am I

to bear illusions?

He writes: But who can be

a saint?—The woman in #9

is locked in the bathroom.

She screams for five hours,

pounds the walls, hears voices

retreating in the hall.

The lock is broken.

The lovers pass and go out to lunch,

boredom sets in by 2 o’clock.

Emptiness of the mirror, and

the failure of the classics.

A look at the ceiling

in pauses of lovemaking:

that immense, scarred domain.

He writes: The depth of pain

grows all the time.

We marched and sat down in the street,

she offered her torn newspaper.

Who will survive Amerika?

they sang on Lenox Avenue.

This early summer weekend.

The chance of beginning again.

From always fewer chances

the future plots itself.

I walk Third Avenue,

bare-armed with flowing hair.

Later the stars come out like facts,

my constellation streams at my head,

a woman’s body nailed with stars.

1969

TEAR GAS

October 12, 1969: reports of the tear-gassing of demonstrators protesting the treatment of G.I. prisoners in the stockade at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

This is how it feels to do something you are afraid of.

That they are afraid of.

(Would it have been different at Fort Dix, beginning

to feel the full volume of tears in you, the measure

of all you have in you to shed, all you have held

back from false pride, false indifference, false

courage

beginning to weep as you weep peeling onions, but

endlessly, for the rest of time, tears of chemistry,

tears of catalyst, tears of rage, tears for yourself,

tears for the tortured men in the stockade and for

their torturers

tears of fear, of the child stepping into the adult

field of force, the woman stepping into the male field

of violence, tears of relief, that your body was here,

you had done it, every last refusal was over)

Here in this house my tears are running wild

in this Vermont of india-madras-colored leaves, of cesspool-

stricken brooks, of violence licking at old people and

children

and I am afraid

of the language in my head

I am alone, alone with language

and without meaning

coming back to something written years ago:

our words misunderstand us

wanting a word that will shed itself like a tear

onto the page

leaving its stain

Trying every key in the bunch to get the door even ajar

not knowing whether it’s locked or simply jammed from long disuse

trying the keys over and over then throwing the bunch away

staring around for an axe

wondering if the world can be changed like this

if a life can be changed like this

It wasn’t completeness I wanted

(the old ideas of a revolution that could be foretold, and once

arrived at would give us ourselves and each other)

I stopped listening long ago to their descriptions

of the good society

The will to change begins in the body not in the mind

My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every

act of resistance and each of my failures

Locked in the closet at 4 years old I beat the wall with my body

that act is in me still

No, not completeness:

but I needed a way of saying

(this is what they are afraid of)

that could deal with these fragments

I needed to touch you

with a hand, a body

but also with words

I need a language to hear myself with

to see myself in

a language like pigment released on the board

blood-black, sexual green, reds

veined with contradictions

bursting under pressure from the tube

staining the old grain of the wood

like sperm or tears

but this is not what I mean

these images are not what I mean

(I am afraid.)

I mean that I want you to answer me

when I speak badly

that I love you, that we are in danger

that she wants to have your child, that I want us to have mercy

on each other

that I want to take her hand

that I see you changing

that it was change I loved in you

when I thought I loved completeness

that things I have said which in a few years will be forgotten

matter more to me than this or any poem

and I want you to listen

when I speak badly

not in poems but in tears

not my best but my worst

that these repetitions are beating their way

toward a place where we can no longer be together

where my body no longer will demonstrate outside your stockade

and wheeling through its blind tears will make for the open air

of another kind of action

(I am afraid.)

It’s not the worst way to live.

1969

NOTES

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS

The Tourist and the Town. The pronouns in the third section were originally masculine. But the tourist was a woman—myself—and I never saw her as anything else. In 1953, when the poem was written, a notion of male experience as universal prevailed which made the feminine pronoun suspect or merely “personal.” In this poem, as in “Afterward,” I later altered the pronouns because they alter, for me, the dimensions of the poem.

Villa Adriana. The summer palace built by the Emperor Hadrian for his favorite boy lover, Antinoüs. In “Antinoüs: The Diaries” (Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law) I let the young man speak for me.

The Snow Queen. Hans Christian Andersen’s tale was the point of departure.

The Diamond Cutters. Thirty years later I have trouble with the informing metaphor of this poem. I was trying, in my twenties, to write about the craft of poetry. But I was drawing, quite ignorantly, on the long tradition of domination, according to which the precious resource is yielded up into the hands of the dominator as if by a natural event. The enforced and exploited labor of actual Africans in actual diamond mines was invisible to me and, therefore, invisible in the poem, which does not take responsibility for its own metaphor. I note this here because this kind of metaphor is still widely accepted, and I still have to struggle against it in my work. (1984)

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN LAW

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 4. “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, ed. T. H. Johnson, 1960, p. 369.

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 7. “To have in this uncertain world some stay,” from Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, London, 1787.

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 8. “Vous mourez toutes a quinze ans,” from Diderot’s Lettres a Sophie Volland, quoted by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxieme Sexe, vol. II, pp. 123–4.

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 10. Cf. Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. II, p. 574: “. . . elle arrive du fond des ages, de Thèbes, de Minos, de Chichen Itza; et elle est aussi le totem plantè au coeur de la brousse africaine; c’est un helicoptère et c’est un oiseau; et voilà la plus grande merveille: sous ses cheveux peints le bruissement des feuillages devient une pensée et des paroles s’échappent de ses seins.”

Artificial Intelligence. See Herbert Simon, The New Science of Management Decision, p. 26. “A General Problem-Solving Program: Computer programs have been written that enable computers to discover proofs for theorems in logic or geometry, to play chess, to design motors ... to compose music. . . . From almost all of them, whether intended as simulations [of human processes] or not, we learn something about human problem solving, thinking, and learning. The first thing we learn ... is that we can explain these human processes without postulating mechanisms at subconscious levels that are different from those that are partly conscious and partly verbalized. . . . The secret of problem solving is that there is no secret.”

Always the Same. The last line is quoted from D. H. Lawrence, letter to Henry Savage, in The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, vol. I, p. 258.

NECESSITIES OF LIFE

In the Woods. The first line is borrowed and translated from the Dutch poet J. C. Bloem.

“I Am in Danger—Sir—.” See Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. II, p. 409.

POEMS 1962–1965

White Night. This poem and “There Are Such Springlike Nights” were adapted from the Yiddish with the aid of transliterated versions and prose translations provided by Eliezer Greenberg and Irving Howe, in whose anthology, A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), these first appeared.

LEAFLETS

Orion. One or two phrases suggested by Gottfried Benn’s essay “Artists and Old Age,” in Primal Vision: Selected Writings, ed. E. B. Ashton (New York: New Directions, 1960).

Dwingelo. The site of an astronomical observatory in Holland.

Charleston in the 1860’s. See Ben Ames Williams, ed., A Diary from Dixie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963).

For a Russian Poet, 3. This poem is based on an account by the poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya of a protest action against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Gorbanevskaya was later held, and bore a child, in a “penal mental institution” for her political activities.

Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova). Based on literal prose versions in Dimitri Obolensky, ed., The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (London: Penguin, 1962).

To Frantz Fanon. Revolutionary philosopher; studied medicine at the Sorbonne; worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the Franco-Algerian war; died of cancer at thirty-six. Author of The Wretched of the Earth; Toward the African Revolution; Black Skin, White Masks; A Dying Colonialism.

The Observer. Suggested by a brief newspaper account of the fieldwork of Diane Fossey. She more recently wrote of her observations in Gorillas in the Mist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983).

Leaflets, 2. “The love of a fellow-creature in all its fullness consists simply in the ability to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ ” (Simone Weil, Waiting for God).

Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib). This poem began to be written after I read Aijaz Ahmed’s literal English versions of the Urdu poetry of Mirza Ghalib (1797—1869). While the structure and metrics of the classical ghazal form used by Ghalib are much stricter than mine, I adhered to his use of a minimum five couplets to a ghazal, each couplet being autonomous and independent of the others. The continuity and unity flow from the associations and images playing back and forth among the couplets in any single ghazal. The poems are dated as I wrote them, during a month in the summer of 1968. Although I was a contributor to Ahmad’s The Ghazals of Ghalib (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), the ghazals here are not translations, but original poems.

My ghazals are personal and public, American and twentieth-century; but they owe much to the presence of Ghalib in my mind: a poet self-educated and profoundly learned, who owned no property and borrowed his books, writing in an age of political and cultural break-up.

INDEX

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

Abnegation, 313

A body, blind with sleep, 257

Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame, The, 141

Accountability, 256

Achterberg, Gerrit, 255, 256, 257, 289, 290

A cracked walk in the garden, 286

A dead mosquito, flattened against a door, 350

After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge, ” 144

After Dark, 227

After the sunlight and the fiery vision, 27

Afterwake, The, 167

Afterward, 23

A good man, 189

Ailanthus, goldenrod, scrapiron, what makes you flower?, 218

Air without Incense, 15

Akhmatova, Anna, 306

A knight rides into the noon, 138

All changed now through neglect. The steps dismantled, 59

All in the day that I was born, 129

All month eating the heart out, 305

Along the coastal waters, signals run, 20

Always the Same, 191

A man, a woman, a city, 369

A milk-glass bowl hanging by three chains, 209

And now, outside, the walls, 298

And when was dust a thing so rash?, 49

An interval: the view across the fields, 125

Annotation for an Epitaph, 68

An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city, 50

An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin, 234

Antinoüs: The Diaries, 154

Any Husband to Any Wife, 241

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design, 355

Apology, 93

Apology, 177

Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon, 345

Artificial Intelligence, 168

As for me, I distrust the commonplace, 5

A smell of further honey, 251

A soldier is here, an ancient figure, 244

As solid-seeming as antiquity, 170

At a Bach Concert, 30

At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand, 21

At Hertford House, 77

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters, 146

At Majority, 135

Attention, 173

At the end of Alphaville, 398

At the Jewish New Year, 197

At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes, 392

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, 4

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen, 4

Autumn Equinox, 95

Autumn Sequence, 234

Autumn torture. The old signs, 154

A woman in the shape of a monster, 361

A woman waking behind grimed blinds slatted across a courtyard, 408

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink, 145

Beardless again, phoning, 391

Bears, 73

Beast and bird must bow aside, 81

Beside the Mare Crisium, that sea, 85

Beside this door a January tree, 11

Birds and periodic blood, 304

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—, 343

Blue Ghazals, The, 368

Book, The, 312

Boundary, 25

Break, The, 305

Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York, 216

Breakpoint, 381

Burning of Paper Instead of Children, The, 363

By No Means Native, 13

Can history show us nothing, 163

Can I easily say, 178

Capital, The, 127

Celebration in the Plaza, The, 70

Chagall’s sweet lovers mounting into blue, 123

Change of World, A, 39

Charleston in the 1860’s, 297

Child with a chip of mirror in his eye, 111

City, 289

Classmate, The, 181

Clock in the Square, A, 17

Colophon, 115

Coming by evening through the wintry city, 30

Completely protected on all sides, 325

Concord River, 91

Confrontation, The, 161

Consanguinity, 163

Continuum, 321

Corpse-Plant, The, 209

Covenant, The, 165

Crib, The, 223

Cruelty is rarely conscious, 394

Crusaders’ wind glinting, 332

Curtis and I sit drinking auburn sherry, 26

Days: Spring, The, 417

Dead, dead, dead, dead, 277

Dead winter doesn’t die, 215

Death’s taxi crackles through the mist. The cheeks, 166

Demon Lover, The, 291

Demonstration, The, 301

Design in Living Colors, 41

de Vries, Hendrik, 253, 254

Diamond Cutters, The, 131

Did you think I was talking about my life?, 342

“Difficult ordinary happiness,” 207

Double Monologue, 157

Down the river, on rafts you came, 335

Down this old well, 185

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens, 146

Dull-headed, with dull fingers, 269

Dwingelo, 290

Eastport to Block Island, 20

Eben Haëzer, 255

Either you will, 188

Embroidered in a tapestry of green, 41

Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood, 57

End of an Era, 174

Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell, 81

Euryclea’s Tale, 142

Evenings seem endless, now, 272

Even when I thought I prayed, I was talking to myself . . . , 402

Everywhere, snow is falling. Your bandaged foot, 300

Evil Eye, The, 161

Explorers, The, 85

Face, 187

Face to Face, 248

Far back when I went zig-zagging, 283

Fashions are changing in the sphere, 39

Fatigue, regrets. The lights, 291

Fever, 254

Finality broods upon the things that pass, 116

First Things, 172

Five O’clock, Beacon Hill, 26

5:30 A.M., 304

Flesh and Blood, 286

Focus, 247

Fond credos, plaster ecstasies!, 225

For a Russian Poet, 300

Foreknown. The victor, 377

For more than five thousand years, 197

For the Conjunction of Two Planets, 54

For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard, 16

From a Chapter on Literature, 27

From commissars of daylight, 120

From here on, all of us will be living, 354

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg, 136

From the archaic ships the green and red, 29

Frost, burning. The city’s ill, 371

Gabriel, 328

Ghalib, Mirza, 402

Ghazal V, 402

Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib, 339

Ghost of a Chance, 184

Going home by lamplight across Boston Common, 36

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow, 32

“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living, 232

Halfway, 233

He had come nearly half a thousand miles, 100

Here among tables lit with bottled tapers, 8

Here from the corridor of an English train, 78

“He Remembereth That We Are Dust, ” 49

Her Waking, 223

He seized me by the waist and kissed my throat . . . , 297

He writes: Let us bear, 417

Ho! in the dawn, 242

Holding Out, 285

Holiday, 126

Homecoming, 260

Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe, 377

House at the Cascades, The, 59

However legendary, 131

I am composing on the typewriter late at night . . . , 366

“l Am in Danger—Sir—, ” 232

“I am up at sunrise, 378

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark . . . , 367

I bid you cast out pity, 21

I can’t name love now, 172

I could look at you a long time, 187

Ideal Landscape, 69

Ideas of order . . . Sinner of the Florida keys, 369

I don’t see your head, 319

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus, 367

If, antique hateful bird, 151

If, says the Dahomeyan devil, 332

If these are letters, they will have to be misread, 353

I have seen the mob of late, 24

I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting, 142

I Heard a Hermit Speak, 114

I kissed you, bride and lost, and went, 139

I know: you are glycerine, 241

Images for Godard, 396

Implosions, 318

In a gigantic pot de chambre, scrolled, 176

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice, 341

In my dream, children, 295

In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning, 404

Innocents, The, 47

Insomniacs, The, 109

Insusceptibles, The, 74

Interior monologue of the poet, 398

In that dark year an angry rain came down, 31

In the Evening, 287

In the field the air writhes, a heat-pocket, 233

In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood, 240

In the never, still arriving, I find you, 290

In the North, 179

In the Woods, 207

In this long room, upon each western pane, 115

In Time of Carnival, 118

I recall, 162

Is it in hopes, 164

Itinerary, 35

It’s so pure in the cemetery, 238

It was amusing on that antique grass, 76

I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever, 177

I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations, 412

I write you this out of another province, 89

Jerusalem, 295

Juvenilia, 156

Key, The, 308

Knight, The, 138

Knocked down in the canefield, 390

Knot, The, 240

Knowing themselves too well in one another, 146

Kursaal at Interlaken, The, 8

Lag, The, 190

Landscape of the Star, 87

Language as city:: Wittgenstein, 396

Lashes of white light, 192

last night I met you in my sister’s house, 388

Last night we sat with the stereopticon, 161

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry, 349

Last Song, 129

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood, 370

Leaflets, 330

Let me take you by the hair, 152

Letter from the Land of Sinners, 89

Letters: March 1969 377

Life and Letters, so Light pulses through underground chambers, 237

Like divers, we ourselves must make the jump, 38

Likeness, 189

Like This Together, 213

Liquid mist burning off, 383

Listen! It’s never sung like that! Listen!, 254

Living in Sin, 94

Long ago I found a seed, 121

Loser, The, 139

Love in the Museum, 113

Lovers Are Like Children, 123

Lucifer in the Train, 75

Luigi Pirandello, 161

Mariner unpracticed, 40

Marriage in the ’Sixties, A, 170

Marriage Portion, The, 120

Mathilde in Normandy, 29

Maybe you spoke to someone, 289

Memorabilia, 162

Memory, 382

Merely the landscape of a vanished whim, 67

Merely to Know, 152

Middle-Aged, The, 119

Mirror, The, 164

Missing the Point, 288

Molodowsky, Kadia, 275, 299

Moth Hour, 246

Mourning Picture, 230

Moving in Winter, 199

Mulish, unregenerate, 179

My Brother, 253

My brother, nobody knows, 253

My father, who since his death, 258

My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, . . . , 363

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips, 400

My three sisters are sitting, 317

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, 301

Necessities of Life, 205

Never to be lonely like that—, 248

(Newsreel), 409

New Year Morning, 117

Night, 58

Nightbreak, 326

Night in the Kitchen, 303

Night-Pieces: For a Child, 223

Night Watch, 298

Nijhoff, Martinus, 251

Noon, 237

No one knows yet, 324

No: this, my love, is neither you nor I, 19

Not Like That, 238

Not that it is done well, but, 148

Novella, 186

November 1968, 359

Now, again, every year for years: the life-and-death talk, 300

Now let’s away from prison—, 228

Now, not a tear begun, 159

Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand, 23

Now we remember all: the wild pear-tree, 64

Now will you stand for me, in this cool light, 113

Nursing your nerves, 167

Obscurity has its tale to tell, 247

Observer, The, 325

Of simple choice they are the villagers; their clothes . . . , 405

Old oblivion-book, that I lay open, 256

On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles, 373

One day of equinoctial light after another, 368

On Edges, 322

One year, you gave us, 181

Only to have a grief, 183

On the terrace, violins played, 306

Open-Air Museum, 218

“Organized knowledge in story and picture,” 136

Orient Wheat, 65

Orion, 283

Our Family, 258

Our fathers in their books and speech, 65

Our Whole Life, 385

Our whole life a translation, 385

Our words misunderstand us, 214

Out there. The mind of the river, 360

Over him, over you, a great roof is rising, 245

Over the chessboard now, 168

Over the half-finished houses, 193

Pain made her conservative, 372

Parting, The, 222

Parting: II, The, 274

Passing On, 150

Peace, 192

Peeling Onions, 183

“People suffer highly in poverty . . . , 364

Perennial Answer, The, 103

Perfection now is tended and observed, 77

Photograph of the Unmade Bed, The, 394

Picking the wax to crumbs in the iron lip of the candelabrum, 407

Picnic, 310

Pictures by Vuillard, 64

Piece by piece I seem, 205

Pieces, 381

Pierrot le Fou, 373

Planetarium, 361

Platform, The, 128

Plugged-in to her body, 382

Postcard, 311

Prisoners, The, 57

Prospect, The, 79

Prospective Immigrants Please Note, 188

Purely Local, 11

Rafts, The, 335

Rain of Blood, The, 31

Raven, The, 151

Readings of History, 161

Recorders in Italy, 76

Relevance, 381

Reliquary, 10

Return of the Evening Grosbeaks, The, 37

Revelation, 383

Revivalist in Boston, A, 36

Riding the black express from heaven to hell, 75

Roadway, The, 63

Rodin’s Orpheus, floodlit, hacked, 311

Roofwalker, The, 193

Roots, 272

Rural Reflections, 137

Rustication, 176

Sabbath evening privacy at home, 255

Say a master of the track, 124

September 21, 143

Sex, as they harshly call it, 220

She had thought the studio would keep itself, 94

She who has power to call her man, 28

Shooting Script, 401

Side by Side, 242

Sisters, 178

Six months back, 379

Skin of wet leaves on asphalt, 236

Sleep, horns of a snail, 261

Sleepwalking, 261

Slowly, Prometheus, 191

Smudged eyeballs, 216

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 145

Snow, 389

Snow Queen, The, 111

So many minds in search of bodies, 351

Something broken Something, 326

Song of the Foolish Bees, The, 251

Space mildews at our touch, 246

Spirit like water, 153

Springboard, The, 38

Spring Thunder, 243

Stand Up, 387

Stand up in my nightgown at the window, 387

Statue, 257

Stelae, The, 388

Stepping Backward, 32

Still, a sweetness hardly earned, 234

Storm Warnings, 3

Stranger, The, 225

Strayed Village, The, 100

Stripped, 359

Study of History, 360

Summer in the Country, 300

Summer was another country, where the birds, 126

Sunday Evening, 45

Sunday in Inwood Park, 310

Suppose we had time, 374

Suppose you stood facing, 373

Tear Gas, 419

That Chinese restaurant was a joke, 390

That erudition, 381

That “old last act”!, 221

The bells have quit their clanging; here beneath, 117

The big star, and that other, 330

The birds about the house pretend to be, 37

The bones of saints are praised above their flesh, 10

The cabdriver from the Bronx, 392

The clouds are electric in this university, 339

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death, 348

The glass has been falling all the afternoon, 3

The guidebooks play deception; oceans are, 35

The hunters’ shack will do, 285

The ice age is here, 173

Their faces, safe as an interior, 119

Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards, 199

The island blistered our feet, 374

The landlord’s hammer in the yard, 150

The leaves that shifted overhead all summer, 95

The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life, 411

The month’s eye blurs, 144

The motes that still disturbed her lidded calm, 58

The music of words, 381

The mystic finishes in time, 109

Then the long sunlight lying on the sea, 74

The ocean twanging away there, 222

The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up, 403

The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit, 340

The order of the small town on the riverbank, 352

The power of the dinosaur, 244

The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze, 165

The railway stations of our daily plight, 128

There are days when I seem to have nothing, 371

There are no angels yet, 328

There Are Such Springlike Nights, 299

There are such springlike nights here, 299

The red fox, the vixen, 313

The refrigerator falls silent, 303

There it was, all along, 288

There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses, 306

The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature, 347

The sea, a body of mysterious calls, 260

These are the sins for which they cast out angels, 68

The sentimentalist sends his mauve balloon, 70

The silence of the year. This hour the streets, 87

The strain of being born, 333

The trees inside are moving out into the forest, 211

The turtles on the ledges of July, 91

The way the world came swinging round my ears, 103

The world’s, 318

They come to you with their descriptions of your soul, 410

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker, 230

They’re tearing down, tearing up, 213

They said to us, or tried to say, and failed, 47

They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket, 370

They say the ground precisely swept, 16

This Beast, This Angel, 19

This handless clock stares blindly from its tower, 17

This is how it feels to do something you are afraid of, 419

This is the grass your feet are planted on, 137

This morning, flakes of sun, 174

This morning: read Simone Weil, 383

This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is, 409

Thoreau, lank ghost, comes back to visit Concord, 43

Those clarities detached us, gave us form, 71

Those lights, that plaza—I should know them all, 118

Three hours chain-smoking words, 287

Through a drain grating, something, 308

Thunder is all it is, and yet, 243

Time and Place, 383

To Frantz Fanon, 319

“To have in this uncertain world some stay, 147

To imagine a time of silence, 364

To Judith, Taking Leave, 269

To know the extremes of light, 396

To live illusionless, in the abandoned mine-, 157

To love, to move perpetually, 397

Tonight I jerk astart in a dark, 223

To record, 376

To the Airport, 166

Tourist and the Town, The, 71

Tree, The, 121

Trees, The, 211

Two people in a room, speaking harshly, 186

Two Poems, 306

Two Songs, 220

Ultimate Act, The, 6

Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room, The, 24

Under that summer asphalt, under vistas, 127

Under the green umbrellas, 12

Unsaid Word, An, 28

Unsounded, 40

Upon the mountain of the young, 114

Valediction Forbidding Mourning, A, 400

van Geel, Chr. J., 260, 261

Versailles, 67

Vertigo, 5

View of Merton College, A, 125

View of the Terrace, A, 12

Villa Adriana, 83

Violence, 324

Violently asleep in the old house, 368

Vroman, Leo, 258

Waking thickheaded by crow’s light, 321

Walden 1950, 43

Walk by the Charles, A, 116

We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred . . . , 413

We are two acquaintances on a train, 45

Wear the weight of equinoctial evening, 143

Wedged in by earthworks, 152

We eat this body and remain ourselves, 15

We had to take the world as it was given, 69

We have, as they say, 214

We lie under the sheet, 365

Well, 149

Well, The, 185

Well, you are tougher than I thought, 139

We smile at astrological hopes, 54

We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation, 401

What do you look for down there, 141

Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats, 414

Whatever you are that weeps, 243

What Ghosts Can Say, 7

What has happened here will do, 25

What if the world’s corruption nears, 6

When Harry Wylie saw his father’s ghost, 7

When I close my eyes, 375

when it comes down turning, 389

When the colossus of the will’s dominion, 83

When the footbridge washes away, 63

When the ice starts to shiver, 322

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed, 344

When This Clangor in the Brain, 124

When to her lute Corinna sings, 147

When you are old and beautiful, 135

When your sperm enters me, it is altered, 346

White morning flows into the mirror, White Night, 275

White night, my painful joy, 275

Why Else But to Forestall This Hour, 18

Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed, 18

Wild Sky, The, 78

Will to Change, The, 390

Wind rocks the car, 213

Winter, 277

Winter Dream, The, 300

With you it is still the middle of the night, 190

Woman Mourned by Daughters, A, 159

Women, 317

Wonderful bears that walked my room all night, 73

“Yonder,” they told him, “things are not the same,” 13

“You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot, 147

You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and, 406

You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you, 227

You, hiding there in your words, 312

You, invincibly yourself, 93

You, once a belle in Shreveport, 145

You promise me when certain things are done, 79

Your face, 331

Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb, 235

Your Ibsen volumes, violet-spined, 156

Your Letter, 386

Your letter blinds me, 386

You see a man, 184

You sleeping I bend to cover, 223

Also by Adrienne Rich

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010

A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 1997–2008

Poetry & Commitment: An Essay

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2000

Fox: Poems 1998–2000

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

Collected Early Poems 1950–1970

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985

Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems

Sources

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977

Twenty-one Love Poems

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972

The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970

Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968

Necessities of Life

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954–1962

The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems

A Change of World

ADRIENNE RICH (1929-2012) was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. The author of more than thirty books, she brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. She was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the National Book Award, the Bollinger Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Copyright © 1993 by Adrienne Rich

Copyright © 1967, 1963, 1962, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1958, 1957, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1953, 1952, 1951 by Adrienne Rich

Copyright © 1984, 1975, 1971, 1969, 1966 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

First published as a Norton paperback 1995

Book design by Antonina Krass

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

{Poems. Selections}

Collected early poems, 1950–1970 / Adrienne Rich.

p. cm.

Includes index.

I. Title.

PS3535.1233A6         1993

811′.54—dc20             92-13150

ISBN 0-393-31385-9

ISBN 978-0-39331-385-7

ISBN 978-0-39334-805-7 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

www.wwnorton.com

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Contents

Foreword

A Change of World (1951)

Storm Warnings

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

Vertigo

The Ultimate Act

What Ghosts Can Say

The Kursaal at Interlaken

Reliquary

Purely Local

A View of the Terrace

By No Means Native

Air without Incense

For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard

A Clock in the Square

Why Else But to Forestall This Hour

This Beast, This Angel

Eastport to Block Island

At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand

Afterward

The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room

Boundary

Five O’Clock, Beacon Hill

From a Chapter on Literature

An Unsaid Word

Mathilde in Normandy

At a Bach Concert

The Rain of Blood

Stepping Backward

Itinerary

A Revivalist in Boston

The Return of the Evening Grosbeaks

The Springboard

A Change of World

Unsounded

Design in Living Colors

Walden 1950

Sunday Evening

The Innocents

“He Remembereth That We Are Dust”

Life and Letters

For the Conjunction of Two Planets

Poems (1950–1951)

The Prisoners

Night

The House at the Cascades

The Diamond Cutters (1955)

The Roadway

Pictures by Vuillard

Orient Wheat

Versailles

Annotation for an Epitaph

Ideal Landscape

The Celebration in the Plaza

The Tourist and the Town

Bears

The Insusceptibles

Lucifer in the Train

Recorders in Italy

At Hertford House

The Wild Sky

The Prospect

Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell

Villa Adriana

The Explorers

Landscape of the Star

Letter from the Land of Sinners

Concord River

Apology

Living in Sin

Autumn Equinox

The Strayed Village

The Perennial Answer

The Insomniacs

The Snow Queen

Love in the Museum

I Heard a Hermit Speak

Colophon

A Walk by the Charles

New Year Morning

In Time of Carnival

The Middle-Aged

The Marriage Portion

The Tree

Lovers Are Like Children

When This Clangor in the Brain

A View of Merton College

Holiday

The Capital

The Platform

Last Song

The Diamond Cutters

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law (1963)

At Majority

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

Rural Reflections

The Knight

The Loser

I. I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

II. Well, you are tougher than I thought.

The Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame

Euryclea’s Tale

September 21

After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge”

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

1. You, once a belle in Shreveport,

2. Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

3. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

4. Knowing themselves too well in one another:

5. Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

6. When to her lute Corinna sings

7. “To have in this uncertain world some stay

8. “You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

9. Not that it is done well, but

10. Well,

Passing On

The Raven

Merely to Know

I. Wedged in by earthworks

II. Let me take you by the hair

III. Spirit like water

Antinoüs: The Diaries

Juvenilia

Double Monologue

A Woman Mourned by Daughters

Readings of History

I. The Evil Eye

II. The Confrontation

III. Memorabilia

IV. Consanguinity

V. The Mirror

VI. The Covenant

To the Airport

The Afterwake

Artificial Intelligence

A Marriage in the ’Sixties

First Things

Attention

End of an Era

Rustication

Apology

Sisters

In the North

The Classmate

Peeling Onions

Ghost of a Chance

The Well

Novella

Face

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Likeness

The Lag

Always the Same

Peace

The Roofwalker

Poems (1953–1957)

At the Jewish New Year

Moving in Winter

Necessities of Life (1966)

Part One: Poems 1962–1965

Necessities of Life

In the Woods

The Corpse-Plant

The Trees

Like This Together

1. Wind rocks the car.

2. They’re tearing down, tearing up

3. We have, as they say,

4. Our words misunderstand us.

5. Dead winter doesn’t die,

Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York

Open-Air Museum

Two Songs

1. Sex, as they harshly call it,

2. That “old last act”!

The Parting

Night-Pieces: For a Child

The Crib

Her Waking

The Stranger

After Dark

I. You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you

II. Now let’s away from prison—

Mourning Picture

“I Am in Danger—Sir—”

Halfway

Autumn Sequence

1. An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,

2. Still, a sweetness hardly earned

3. Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb

4. Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

Noon

Not Like That

The Knot

Any Husband to Any Wife

Side by Side

Spring Thunder

1. Thunder is all it is, and yet

2. Whatever you are that weeps

3. The power of the dinosaur

4. A soldier is here, an ancient figure,

5. Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,

Moth Hour

Focus

Face to Face

Part Two: Translations from the Dutch

Martinus Nijhoff, The Song of the Foolish Bees

Hendrik de Vries, My Brother

Hendrik de Vries, Fever

Gerrit Achterberg, Eben Haezer

Gerrit Achterberg, Accountability

Gerrit Achterberg, Statue

Leo Vroman, Our Family

Chr.J. van Geel, Homecoming

Chr.J. van Geel, Sleepwalking

Poems (1962–1963)

To Judith, Taking Leave

Roots

The Parting: II

White Night (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky)

Winter

Leaflets (1969)

Part One: Night Watch

Orion

Holding Out

Flesh and Blood

In the Evening

Missing the Point

City (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

Dwingelo (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

The Demon Lover

Jerusalem

Charleston in the 1860’s

Night Watch

There Are Such Springlike Nights (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molo-dowsky)

For a Russian Poet

1. The Winter Dream

2. Summer in the Country

3. The Demonstration

Night in the Kitchen

5:30 A.M.

The Break

Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova)

1. There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses:

2. On the terrace, violins played

The Key

Picnic

Postcard

The Book

Abnegation

Part Two: Leaflets

Women

Implosions

To Frantz Fanon

Continuum

On Edges

Violence

The Observer

Nightbreak

Gabriel

Leaflets

1. The big star, and that other

2. Your face

3. If, says the Dahomeyan devil,

4. Crusaders’ wind glinting

5. The strain of being born

The Rafts

Part Three: Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)

The clouds are electric in this university

The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit,

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

Did you think I was talking about my life?

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon.

When your sperm enters me, it is altered;

The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature.

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

A dead mosquito, flattened against a door;

So many minds in search of bodies

The order of the small town on the riverbank,

If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

From here on, all of us will be living

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

The Will to Change (1971)

November 1968

Study of History

Planetarium

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, . . .

2. To imagine a time of silence

3. “People suffer highly in poverty . . .

4. We lie under the sheet

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, . . .

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

The Blue Ghazals

Violently asleep in the old house.

One day of equinoctial light after another,

A man, a woman, a city.

Ideas of order . . . Sinner of the Florida keys,

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,

There are days when I seem to have nothing

Frost, burning. The city’s ill.

Pain made her conservative.

Pierrot Le Fou

1. Suppose you stood facing

2. On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.

3. Suppose we had time

4. The island blistered our feet.

5. When I close my eyes

6. To record

Letters: March 1969

1. Foreknown. The victor

2. Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

3. “I am up at sunrise

4. Six months back

Pieces

1. Breakpoint

2. Relevance

3. Memory

4. Time and Place

5. Revelation

Our Whole Life

Your Letter

Stand Up

The Stelae

Snow

The Will to Change

1. That Chinese restaurant was a joke

2. Knocked down in the canefield

3. Beardless again, phoning

4. At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes

5. The cabdriver from the Bronx

The Photograph of the Unmade Bed

Images for Godard

1. Language as city:: Wittgenstein

2. To know the extremes of light

3. To love, to move perpetually

4. At the end of Alphaville

5. Interior monologue of the poet:

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Shooting Script

Part I: 11/69-2/70

1. We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

2. Ghazal V (adapted from Mirza Ghalib)

3. The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up.

4. In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning.

5. Of simple choice they are the villagers; . . .

6. You are beside me like a wall; . . .

7. Picking the wax to crumbs . . .

Part II: 3-7/70

8. A woman waking behind grimed blinds . . .

9. (Newsreel)

10. They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

11. The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.

12. I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.

13. We are driven to odd attempts; ...

14. Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier ...

Poems (1969)

The Days: Spring

Tear Gas

Notes

Index of Titles and First Lines

Also by Adrienne Rich

About the Author

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