|
|
|
|
|
|
PART I: MADISON, WISCONSIN, 1948-1961
DO DOLLS HAVE LIFE?
Little doll, I wonder If you each day. Have your hour of work And your hour of play What do you do, When the night is still? Do it in front of me, Do what you will! I want you to do it, you see.
1948 (?)
*
THE FORGOTTEN WORLD
I, the wind, the cold cold wind, I blow over the prairie, around dead volcanos, I sing of a world, A forgotten world, A world long strayed beyond the sight of men.
I, the prairie, The cold, stone prairie Dotted with dead volcanos, Earthquakes have carved crators, Great, rocky crators, Out of my surface I that remain of a forgotten world, A world long strayed beyond the sight of men.
We, the volcanos, The old, dead volcanos, We that remain of a forgotten world, A world long strayed beyond the sight of men.
We are that world, That forgotten world, That world long strayed beyond the sight of men.
1952(?)
*
VENUS
The stars are little campfires In the evening sky Many of these there are, but you Are first to burn, and first to die.
I sit by my own campfire And watch you from afar -- O Venus, lovely Venus, O silver Evening Star!
1952
*
THE DEDICATION
There hangs my star of hope, still bright Against the twilight sky. A year ago I saw that light -- How fast the days went by!
I see the child that I have been And am less every day Brush past me in the evening wind To join the faraway,
Dead past that slips from memory, Do what I will to hold it; The formless future calls to me, And I must go and mold it.
1956
*
I shall cast my heart to the sea, I shall fling my heart to the wind, I shall hurl my heart to the fire, Rather than to my kind.
For my kind have knowing looks, And keen, divining minds, And they learn too quick to despise -- But the rages of Earth are blind.
1957 *
Despair, apathy, Hope, despair -- Is it a circle Leading nowhere,
Stamped in the mind By thoughts without ruth, Or the long, long spiral Down to truth?
1957
*
SUSPENDED MOMENT
I care not what may come; it is enough That day is done, and I am going home. Though birds are whirled by Autumn to the south, Though evening reddens hill and roof and dome, Though time's thin roof, as the next day impends, Shuts out the future now but cannot last, I shall believe this moment will not end; The future seems as distant as the past. The wind is cool with night; a red sun sets, Carrying in its fall another day In my life, and though Earth does not regret, One minute of her span has ticked away. But in this brief peace Earth and I alike Stand still, nor strain to hear the hour strike.
1957
*
LAST RADIANCE
No longer will the sun need all this light, She pours it here between the autumn hills. See, at our feet dark water flashes bright As the great, brilliant tide its basin fills. Light almost dims the brown and gold and red, Even by profusion veiling from our eyes The thick, stiff brush, its leaves already shed, The valley floor, the pale and dazzled skies.
The world lies in a tired sun's dusty beam, Whose light deceives not those who know the fall. This glory is the last; the sun, it seems, Renouncing now light's brilliance, sheds it all. The day almost estranges soul and breath. We wander by these banks and talk of death.
1958
A TREE
Gnarled he will stay until the last, Strong now but warped when he was young; To stagger under snow and blast Was he at Nature's order wrung.
Thick is his bent trunk now, and black; Now it is spring and he must bear On that inflexible, tired back The weight of blossoms far too fair.
Stoic beneath the mad caress Of her who bent him long ago, He can but shoulder loveliness And bear it as he bore the snow.
1958
*
A spring storm rising in the west Takes to lean upon hits breast A tree with last year's leaves, still bright. A woman runs to grasp and fight Clothes flapping in the storm-fresh air That takes her breath and sweeps her hair Into the sun. Some strands are white.
1961
*
He and the moon looked coldly at each other, and he said, "Put the shade down." And they did. Now just beneath the frayed edge of his lid, casting a glare between him and the others,
burned the night-lamp. Into its flame he poured, like some rare oil, the hoarded power of sight; and the light used it all, and there was no more light. And then his eyes closed of their own accord.
1961
*
HIPPODAMEIA
In presence of the bestial race Apart from passions all, her face Has no expression but its own Beauty, inviolate as stone, And Time, to all indifference friend, Justified her in the end: The Centaur and his lust are gone.
Whole, restored, she stands alone. Upon her breast -- would she then deign To see -- two bestial hands remain.
1961
*
YOU AND I
As you and I sat face to face A wedge of ice came down. I watched it come. It was colorless and quite transparent: Through it I saw you speak. Widening it prie our chairs apart, Pushed away my freezing cheek, Tore from the planks a splitting screech, Then it was gone. The air in the room was enormous, And we faced each other From opposite walls, flat portraits Pressed behind panes of glass.
1961 *
JUMP ROPE RHYME
In the curve of the cove bluebells cockleshells Little shells seaweed thing little waves come running in now and then a bigger one eevy ivy over
One by one all in line bluebells cockleshells swinging rope took them in swung and swung and made one turn over each your turn your turn eevy ivy over
Hesitate now no wait bluebells cockleshells the empty line swings endlessly run in run in the children cry but gulls are watching from the sky but there is no one here but I
1961
*
LINES WRITTEN IN A GERMAN DICTIONARY
Listen, guest: the hours are dumb, the cuckoo's flown away from his black house. Here seconds pulse with none to take their sum. Listen, guest: the sluice is raised for unreturning waves.
1961
*
THE EXPECTED GUEST
All morning long she walked about the town, pausing awhile in shop doors, entering consciously, with lashes half cast down, hand upon shoulder-bag; or lingering seconds where panes to sideward glance divulged her image, half reflected, half surmised -- upon her cheek the air was heavy with spring and with vague thoughts a moment long indulged.
She bought a bunch of daffodils, sniffed a flask of perfume, with some hesitation chose a candle (yellow), searched her mind to ask what she'd forgotten; but the air opposed a March-drowsed weight to any clarity: on the crowds hurrying through the vernal gloom the vision of her room was superimposed with someone there, too near for eyes to see.
1966
*
WITH BITTER WORDS
Why did you leave with bitter words? Come back, though love be gone, And speak to me one gentle thing Before you travel on.
Oh, in this town are many roads For to wander to and fro, And one road leads to my true love's door, And that way I may not go.
And through this town the people pass, I pass them night and day, And any of them would speak to me, But you would turn away.
Love is like the falcon That flies away at night, And love is like the darkened sky That cradles him in flight.
Why did you leave with bitter words? Come back, though love be gone, And speak to me one gentle thing Before you travel on.
1966
*
I thought that I had got a harvest in: So rich my store with fruits of air and earth I feared not even your going, feared no dearth, And wake to find all empty, barn and bin, And wander forth to pluck the acrid Now, Harsh fruit, unripened on the wayside bough.
1966
*
Yet I have heard the sea sing in your ear with the voice of a singer of other times: then the sea on the other side was grayer and colder and the last of those that were taking ship stood in the mist on the foreshore and dreamed himself alone.
1966
*
WATERCOLOR
Concealed by archways, awnings, eaves, we watch the unsuspected space revealed in silver faint striations of the air above the square. Later on a pigeon will descend and mate with his reflection in the wet and the mottling of pavements shine like pebbles by the sea. And we shall be able to watch our muddy footprints melt on the new-washed gray. Later they will stay.
1966
*
DEAD SISTERS
Last night they came to me, six of them, in a delegation. A gleam had divided the darkness into black skirts, dark eyes, submissive partings of dark hair over the dead- white foreheads of the dead. They stood in a hesitant wedge at my bedside. The foremost bent her eyes on me --hands wrapped in apron -- and behind her a ghost of gossip stirred. So young, they said.
1966
*
THE GIFT
I would enter your door like a ray of light falling on something already in your possession.
late 1966 (from memory)
*
THE COMPLAINT
Without love there is only time.
Love, the pale saxifrage prizing past and future apart.
Without love, a sky crushes the flowers like a huge gray rock.
Without love the words come out thin like flowers pressed between stone.
1967
*
Angel, on the neutral asteroid of our meeting we touch and our long journeys tremble behind us like wings.
1967
*
when angels shall reseam these rags warp of truth and weft of lies then not until i will confess that earth was less than motley skies
if god will swear the dog of time shall not dig up the bones of love then will i from vigil turn move where crowds and rivers move
where perjury keeps its promise not to pawn old kindness out to whores there i will bid love abdicate and for his consort take divorce
and i will kiss the stone stairs of this consequent universe
1967
*
THE BERKELEY LANDLORD
for Sylvia Plath, whom I first read in that house
Behind his back I call him, my landlord, Herr Tod. His eyes have a blear keenness, his skin looks musty. He wears a broadbrimmed hat. He lives in the rear of the house with back issues of magazines, a plaster Venus, a bed of soiled quilts. You should have seen my room when I moved in.
Once, to startle me, he winked and addressed me in German.
His voice is harsh because he's a bit deaf. Sometimes he gets friendly, telling me about his grandchildren -- my age. I changed the subject. Then he offered me a pot of honey, which I accepted but did not eat, being no fool. I know he keeps bees in the back yard, black bees I've never seen and don't want to see.
The time I came asking could I see the room, he corrected: The question is not whether you can, but whether you may.
1967
*
TALISMAN
for Don Cameron, 14
You were born in winter before Advent, in gray quiet November days. Stars of the archer moved over the fine dryness of woods, frost cracked crystals in the veins of the branches. You were the youngest in the year.
That is why you were always so grayly pale-brown, your eyes the color of winter bark, that is why you can walk through the woods and not look over your shoulder. A shy patience is yours.
You were born at night in November. I and your brother huddled apart in the dark house listening. For your birth among patient stars.
1967
*
ARTEFACT
Silence. The moving facets of the stream contemplated for irony.
I would not have it said I spun this, grey on silver, out of mere self. Rather
a hermisphere, open, a bowl or cup, with twig and leaf, twin and tendril – some fraction of the dissolving forest.
1967 (?) *
The house of the head settles: a crack between mind and evidence.
Cliffs without footbridge, banks without water, the ghost-boat ferries projections,
the railroad tracks rear up, in a landscape Euclidean, without perspective. 1967
*
APHELION
Ein Wort: du weisst: eine Leiche.
Paul Celan
1. Then shut her eyes, batten them down and make for her earrings out of these dead sun-stones.
Her hands are rigid. Here are two seashells: clasps for abandoned shoulders.
Channel like stone the flutings of draped whiteness over the limbs you arrange as you will,
but turn her head sideways, and her mouth: leave it ajar for the stone birds to build in.
2. They found on the threshold that day a mouth opened dumb and on the tongue was laid the flat stone of a voiceless word.
Voices in hollow sky-corridors, noiseless changing of empty hinges, wind --
3. -- dry winds, sanding a time into unsighted eyes:
what suns still turn in the stone, what seas still summon the winds?
(The lips crack opening; now fall fragile, like snakeshells from the dust- uttering mouth: words
moons, waters move in the stone
4. a time when creations's furrow lies still unsealed: strange, mineral grasses sprout there. The planets go dark in a forest of dense and lightless crystals.
You must have been inside the stone the dark moon and all we thought had no entrances.
We are walking now in the zone of broken glass. Underfoot it is lenses, figurines, mirrors, drinking-vessels. We did not know they were broken, we drink from them still. One shadow, one eyeless signpost: over there, the words fuse in black-cold, space-curve, night-obsidian.
1967-8
*
THE MAIDEN
The hours are swept, dust and sounds settle, the world enters a dark still crystal. Now, shade of my sign, you approach, your feet do not disturb the even dust. There is cold as if I had drunk, o virgo, your form's ether.
In my fingertips freezes a polar wind. You had me neither the crown nor the ears of grain. Once I drank the eternal guilt; now it empties my veins. I am dark and transparent: through me shine, I cannot see them, a few single stars.
1967-8
*
A woman, sitting at her window, writes. No longer to her lover; that is lost; now that November counts the garden plants she stares at panes opaque with growths of frost.
Before her, on the paper, the words stand like stubborn messengers: they have turned back at that same wall she cannot see beyond. They stare to say no man can make them talk.
She thinks: a long, thin sounds, like tearing paper. Words that fall, shuffled, a random snow. A silence starts to grow, echoing itself forever. Another leaf gets etched on the window.
1967-8
*
ARTIFACT
Silence. The moving facets of the stream contemplated for irony.
I would not have it said I spun this, gray on silver, out of mere self. Rather
a hemisphere, open, a bowl or cup, with twig and leaf, twine and tendril -- some fraction of the dissolving forest.
1968
*
BALLAD OF A FISHERMAN'S WIFE
Paths meet in the distance, rocks bow down in the spray, and as we sat speaking our thoughts went walking away, Like leaves from under the tree, Like rain we passed to the sea --
Two griefs, and a single cure!
The sky was gray, a dimmed pearl, And our boat seaweed-brown, Midships the sun was couched And gave pale shine, And hard under our keel The flounder sang --
Two griefs, and a single cure!
Wind is cold and soft, Soft and cold the rain, Sea-kine rise and drift Over a gray plain, And the pale sisters drive them down To the sea again --
Two griefs, and never a cure!
1968
*
GARDEN
She called him a beast and, when he protested, said she might not like him so well if he weren't one. He was the beast. His arms went round her like a sturdy fence, but it was himself he enclosed.
Within that wide stockade she was water, forage, was the stake he was tethered to, and the slender, floral figure of the maiden in the background. But what most impressed her
was the troubled widening of his eyes, what they saw -- not her, certainly, it was beyond that fence but there was nothing out there. Until one morning he did not come when she called -- or at all.
It struck her then he must have found the white chiaroscuro form sleeping narrowly and tried to think about her then. Painfully she wondered why he had not wakened her; if they could ever have left that magical unhappy garden together.
1968
*
THE INVADED
They've got those suits now (Oh darling I'm so frightened) that fit you from neck to toenails thick asbestos-filled and very tight. A blow through one of those doesn't leave marks; they take you out, dead and perfect as a bad girl in the gangster movies.
Last night a car passed the border. They took the lids off the suitcases the sides off the car they scraped the passengers down to the tendons and sent them on still with suspicious side-looks for the red on their bones
In a dream I came and sat next to you you did not look at me I took your hand it closed on mine then died was it one of them
the people we cut out of magazines
They walk around there are more than I remembered they are lifesize flat and very brightly colored You must try to tell me if you see one of them I will try to tell you if I see one of them
the last movie was thirty hours long
ARE YOU ALL RIGHT CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW I WANT YOU TO LISTEN VERY CAREFULLY THIS IS IMPORTANT
1968
*
A battle, always repeated because fought on the wrong battlefield
Each night the victorious hero retires to his tent to weep while the opponent slinks back to his black furnace under the horizon
Next morning the hero rises and goes forth to the field which is green and untrampled while the sun a flame-colored circle rises
and the words come stealing to the scene disguising themselves as trees fences ponds so as to watch the combat and appear uninvolved
Pretty soon the sun is standing at the top of the sky shedding down yellow on the ground green trees with their brown stems on the sky-blue ponds with their silver ripples on the backs of birds and on the two fighting in a vermilion mirage
1968
*
black cannon in the field over the hill
In the first winter I found the minute cathedrals under the leaves I touched their spiny spires, wondering, and used them for the mystery plays with small figures
The next year mushrooms appeared in clumps where the little churches had melted I had no idea which ones were not poisonous you could hardly have advised me
without remembering, open your hands where you stand in the shuttered house over the garden
the soil yields rusted metals I want a fragment of your glass heart like a clear lens to look through
there were no leaves this year
1968
*
A HYMN TO THE ANCESTORS
I. Isolde held the falcon's fire
mother grandmother great-grandmother golden-haired paysanne blonde de Touraine lacemaker whitehand weaving the lace trying I am trying to finish this birdclaws tangled breaking greatgrandmother grandmother mother fading rosary chain of images break you I am trying to break you fire opal cold in my opalescent fire mother childhood o cunning green fairytale in the arbor interstice of eternal burning O ladies who wore the Rose of the Fire on your cool green breasts O vanished heirloom rose whose sharp thorn pin sticks me now O igneous demons you whom the green stem of life at last set free -
LET ME FLAME AND FLY AWAY let me go back to a green stem a single place under der linden
II. Green trellis of the Fire I arraign my witchtrials lifted high on a hot draft over San Francisco. Evidence! Evidence! Forty demons press lava faces against my body!
I am not like you. I am the family damnation. Love made conscious, its limbs lashed naked fast with its own twisted deceit --
what say you innocent Isolde?
I will not worship the Fire not chant the words that are sweet in the Jaws I will not give my pain in the lightning of the knife I will burn the flame of hatred in the flame of words Burn the flame of words in the flame of desire BURN DESIRE IN HATRED AND WORDS AND DESIRE AND HATRED
o lords o ladies fair dance now in this fair fire a courtly dance
III. and once more I am home beside the white garage long sold steps crunch on the misty glitter of white gravel the black tracery of the past goes up a tangle of burning brush wires in orange flames 118 Linden Street Ridgewood grandmother fixed in the faded stuffed chair played solitaire played Crazy Eights with us -- vast, rapacious --
I ran away fearing the folding white arms like floured bread dough
the fire the fire
it breaks out everywhere slow between the roses of curling wallpaper faster the cancer smoldering in my grandmother's uterus
she died painfully
my mother who choked as she told me walking the trees red over the white ghost water of autumn
this day almost estranges soul and breath we wander by these banks and talk of death
what was it choked you mother was it tears pity love grief Or burning ashes?!
burn burn I too will burn If fifteen year old fettered fury know it O FLASH FURY O BURST METAPHORS OF WHITE HELLFIRE HIDING
This
that we shall burn the fat dripping off our nerve-ends and pain ravish every brain-center, all love concept faith word all self
cry shame shame
IV. then said that lady standing there go and find my jester's skull and tell in youth I did love did love
1968
*
POET, 23, IS BACK FROM VIETNAM
for Michael
You had been half in love with easeful death for some time
Brown ghosts hovered singing over clipped lawns
You used to speak almost fondly of the face that was a gray spot in the crowd of the ashlight from invisible t.v. live on stoned faces
Well I suppose it was a surgical revelation those jungle viridians the shell-torn clay the different reds soaking the retina Now you are back behind your dark glasses looking at us fitted with the ultimate X ray vision can you see anything
. . .
Where O death is your waxed moustache your umber fantasies of dead fish talking in an undersea room your anger your gray dracula cloak
ripped away like a billboard and i projected into the landscape's green violent NOW
red flowers of love and hate devour one another and spleen heart entrails thrive nakedly --
the cloak the t.v. screen the mirror Time and your face
. . .
What does the woman standing in robes of dark-green patina at the mouth of the western harbor hold
(A jug mouth round and softly darkened)
What does she hold in it for the soldier
(Midwestern street midsummer night the elm leaves' electric shadows down the street a dark snow to walk through
forgetfulness unto red sands keep on spreading across a green desert
no they're singing again 1968
*
MENDOCINO
for John and Maria
Miles following the coastroad gray staves ran, the music of fences
A swallowtail weightless over the yellow weed A hawk pinned to the sun
The blue table down there, the rocks, the white spume-statute standing pointing outward
1968
*
ANGEL
(on a painting by Lucas van Leyden)
"New-lighted"
Not that he has to rise, slowly, pulling himself upright on remembered ladders of muscles,
only the feet are heavy and drag the ground like a puppet's, the puppeteer unpracticed,
and some flesh, stretching under the eyes, learns gravity. Observe
the wings: two great evenings of darkening azure surmount him limned with feathers: so many as a man, all his sleep, can count of dreams.
1968
*
FOEHN
Why is the wind ransacking the bay of trees, torturing them with his senseless questions? They turn up their leaves to him, dead fishbellies, little shimmerless mirrors backed by a sullen summer.
The sky wants no part of this. Its underside is whitish, like leaves, the sun, caught in albumin, coated, like the tongues that begin uttering and uttering
that speechlessness where a thought walks, turning and turning the images not here, not this one, not that one, as a wind, changed in the night, drives other clouds over the bowed forests.
Munich, 1968
*
AUTUMN WALK ALONG THE ILLINOIS CENTRAL TRACKS
for Jim
Stalks shrink and rattle as the sky expands, emptied by birds, scoured by cirrus. Darkness adulterates the potions of the sun, in the field the breathing of the seasons has stopped.
Double blade welded of rust and black azure curving itself round the horizon's shoulder, the railroad tracks, each autumn, draw us out. The family shoulders winter coats, gets going.
I and my brother run ahead. Our parents' faces, at wind's level, erase in memory: I am ten, he seven. We climb the embankments, looking for milkweed to stuff in paper bags.
There the burst pods, lined with brown satin, like inside rooms in ravaged French chateaux, there the green pods' unfledged stickiness -- but these just ripe, a crack
and the stuff swells out. Sap's whiteness returned ready for flight, it cannot be woven. We will find a use for it. We will make milkweed pillows, I sill spin it somehow -- already we know it is to be wasted.
The sunlight mixed with darkness is draining away, they turn, and we, like balloons on a string, must follow them to a room where lamps beat back the nightfall, the winter sky sucking emptiness like a lung.
1968 *
SCENE FROM FAUST
A space -- heart-contracted. Guilt comes true. A stone rolls from forever. You watch it roll right to your feet. It's for you. The tone is the pain which is not real.
It is a minute remembered -- transistorized, its voice still on, quite soft. There's a flash. Your head hopes for a judgment, the whole world's power off,
light to be restored, if at all, on a sugar-=frosted plain, the people, pegs, impossibly white, small, equivalent, clean --
You give it up. You begin bending toward the stone which is hard matter for you alone, the faint unstanchable whimpering -- at your back a broken window. The sun.
1968 *
PFAUENINSEL
Peacocks, mounted on cedar branches, sometimes launched themselves like blue ungainly meteors down to the grass.
You and I -- a faun dreaming of tundras and lumberjack boots, a nymph swinging a camera -- populated the perspectives
(when no one was looking yours the grin dodging from beard to eye-corners). Koenigin Luise, the dairymaid,
did not come out, but behind the Gothic stonefront closing a flight of dust- and mauve-colored willows a door stood wide,
the farmwife gave us news. The English were practicing -- at the water air filled with shell-poppings -- shoreward
over our path, an oak, Beethovenian, maintained its massive cloud- counterpoint.
1969
something vast and imperceptible
out of the space between sill and lintel of the horizon
that is where you came from
1969
*
HOUSE OF SOLSTICE
i.
Whether alone or far from water, stick your key in the masonry put your question.
ii.
Noises of demolition subside: move in to a space structured by absence
there where the shelf was take down some book, read
outside the roses still tangle, the creepers' silencing hands, shadows move upward
then sleep or wake, in the suspended solitudes
warmed by that hearth's scattered ashes
or the fires deep in the earth
iii.
under the leaning weeds at the yard's end, they said, your birthflower
aster
shorn rays, the colors solitudes of descending sun on old planets
iv.
sitting-room red sun under frost crystals
colors come out of things darkness draws into them
the window a wound's edge
v.
No fathers of mine came from your country none of yours dwelt on my land it's said we look alike
if you should ask me I would arrive one morning carrying only the few, mythical flowers of a native valley I have not seen
the rest already in your keeping
vi.
Over all mirrors let fall the third eyelid
now is what moves in there glaciers saurian thickness a forest petrifies leaving bones down in the hole of an open eye
vii.
so things shiver in themselves as in mirrors and i a space between dissatisfactions
a statement to be multiplied infinitely
viii.
i it is one and falls apart
ix.
bituminous illuminations i arrive subterranean stone swept dustless, the scattered rags, clockworks and what make i here i artificer of afternoons
o light slow to travel across a green dial a dream of surface
x.
A star, which I twisted of plantain bark, now figures in your name.
xi.
wachst auch du zu dieser stunde auf denkst wie wir uns auf der treppe dort begegneten wie du fluechtig mir den arm beruehrt hast wie kalt sind diese laken
xii.
each day the light's retraction makes of us islands the days like ice-floes driven
beside us the others eyes gaped open in readiness for the resumption of sight
in a cup at the hearth the final elixir extinguished o breathing bent survival of an enclosed wing
xiii.
A young man with a smooth forehead beneath which the eyes hide like small animals under rocks out in the country.
xiv.
Facade: where the wind stood stone-encurled, like soft gray buds in stone the pigeon bodies stirred.
The pigeon voices' winter chisels chipped a gradual light, the abandoned quiet shone.
xv.
eilth', eilthe chelidon:
it will come again that spring with the swallow flying in and out of the mirrors
and outside the children singing "the swallow, the swallow is here"
xvi.
an ache words cannot raise
sky and the earth its template joined steeled with still violence then
those frail levers of weightless horizons
xvii.
on the thruway alone
road line of sight draws to the horizon silicate mists with brown dendritic inclusions distances dead fields under yonder
half granular wall vague gape yesterdays concrete choked footpressure stone flung to past alive in regression forward inside the shock of speed silent
xviii.
love incline your ear
impose the infinite untouched texture of your listening between utterance and silence
1969
*
CARMINA BUFFALONIANA
Do our words mean when we do not mean them?
Your silence, frames you, feminine, like your grandmother's photograph. Your hands are still, your lips poised above speech like the lifted shaft of a machine stopped in midgesture. Your eyes move like the eyes of my third doll, Annabel, who is queen of the past now. What is that dead glow around your chest? Has someone torn out the heart that said, "Mama"?
No, the half-raised arm which can hold nothing commands me to dream again. Very well. I dreamed of a space that had no such place as here. There was war in all three dimensions but no battlefields. And so on all sides the soldiers ticked to death.
The dreams come out on the teletype of the night and are written down. Or they are found like dead birds in the gutters, they fill the air like invisible billboards. The cars gasp their way along paretic Main Street, scant shadows hurry along under them. Other shadows move behind milk glass doors. A dull red streak in gray linoleum -- blood on crisscross horizons.
Everywhere the inaudible lullaby. Now and then a joint. Something approaches glaring like a speeding car through the wind-tunnel in front of the eyes. No, it's McKinley's hearse. Slow, now. A painting -- "The Triumph of Entropy" -- hangs in the town hall . . .
1969
*
THE CAGE OUTSIDE MARRIAGE
Tonight your picture wanted someone to be in it so I swam against the drifting junk of the streets and played "which bone which beast" in the old shale corridors. At kerbstones, at kitchen windows I calibrated your changes, from the cage outside marriage: Here's looking at you. The contact sticks like wax to the skin of burnt fingers. Miscellaneous recall discs still spin and now and then strobe to recognition. Sometimes it's you I'm running backwards to hold, sometimes a nymph of myself, sightless and shy of knowledge. I knew you halfway, at some amputated distance -- a better catcher would have admitted being drunk.
1969
*
GIVE ME YOUR WORD
Give me your word it will be so: Your birds will find the crumbs I fling them. Their wings are on the wind, like snow -- Give me your word it will be so. Tell me their markings, let me know Which way to greet the winds that bring them. Give me your word. It will be so. Your birds will find the crumbs I fling them.
1970
*
LINES WRITTEN IN THE BASEMENT OF CROSBY HALL
Stormwinds, insatiate, insinuated with sirens, among the sheetmetal carapaces of instruction. Dark knots, congregations of penguin voices, talk of striking.
Against winter? Too cold to stand here. The snow, white as helmets, brings up its reinforcements, wind keeps shoving us along. Let's have coffee.
This white office cubicle . . . Strife of voices and the silent agreements: there will be metal twisted, glass broken, a car turned to a smudgepot, maybe a few broken heads repossessed by the cold:
The leafless trees are skeptics.
1970
*
NIGHT FLIGHT
Voice in the wings of the thorax, voice in the wings of the clenched cerebrum, prisoner within the wings, voice of my voice --
Tendon of pain, limbs scattering out of that one direction --
It overturns all synonyms like a wind among walls that have died standing up I give it your name to play with it flings the name away and goes loudly searching for it in the trees made from its calling
my name it has taken and denies this
yet it has promised me battle and I live by this:
All the ungiven glances like darts in a box all the points of silence sharpened towards the day when I fall vanishing and they fall past me flaring at equinox over the dark sowing-time of an alien earth.
1970
*
at evening shadows link arms, dance away from the sun:
goodbye my straight treetrunks my broad housefronts my polished windows glinting in answer
goodbye my children I have never seen 1970
*
O and to answer one absence I would have dragged all things down by the long hair of their shadows at sunset.
1970
*
RAINIER PARK. RUTHIE
Dogtooth violets, spitting saffron out of a whiteness thumbed back by a concupiscent sun.
We danced on the spreading page of the snowslope like blinded letters. Then spots with sight, and a brown earth glistening, and the pasqueflowers in fisted shoots like tiny towheaded children butting upwards.
In your green shift, old shoes, you ran toward me beside the glacier: sun-poppet, infant priestess, your limbs turned in a dazzle of spruce.
1970
*
Mother, where did you bury the cat? You wouldn't take her to a pet cemetery, you've too much class for that.
Nor would you plant on the grave catnip and morning-glory; I hear you say, "They're only animals -- we mustn't grieve --"
You take a shovel down to the yard's end, pat it level, careful not to stare in.
1970
*
CURSE
A darkness, the most silent of waters, in the jug whose mouth is open expressionless.
The eyes in this head: black holes where the world went through.
Why I am sad, daylight, is none of your business.
Cruelly that bird sharpens his song before dawn, in November.
Now over its own autumns the blood crouches.
Black hands of the east, hold back the sun's head behind the mountains.
Hollow I come, from the hole in the hollow wind.
Buffalo, 1971
I strove with my steps towards one who overtook me. My child was in the world before me.
1971
IMPRIMATUR
"If all may buy, then some may read, sighed the Fly.
Spider smirked, "Indeed, no reason why the flies shouldn't read.
1971
*
EARTHWAKE
in memory of Paul Celan
1.
All winter the scholars kept their houses, went out rarely, discussed "the death of literature." Ash of predictions kept sifting into the bread; trees, turned to stone, stood in a stone-eating sky.
No yeasty poems poured through the open doors of libraries that cancelled equinox, though midnights babbled of a tongue torn out like a telephone cord before all metronomes ended.
Then there was July: along streets with their new constructions, glass and concrete -- matter itself gone grey and blank with pain like the face of a clubbed peasant telephotoed from Asia.
2. (Shore Rocks at Corea)
Pegmatites. Over this edge: ice-cataracts, then as now unheard.
Under our feet, exposed, the granules, the quartzes, the feldspars, grown to eye-size, stopped against sight. Sea urchins' bequeathed fragilities, gull-strewn, blanched from their patterns. The tide-pools: green algae glares to the cloud.
Tidings, O tiny far-traveled tsunami, here curl to simile, die in the unrecorded surf-gardens: a mind, stranded and stemmed against absence, beats in itself.
Cross-currents, there, the times race through each other, kanntet ihr mich --
3. VAE V--
I rock a grief far older than my heart, like a pale relic in the mortal shrine: many are they who pause here, kneel and depart, to view this pride, which I cannot call mine. I would not have suspected how your name fits every grief, rings in each evening note, this reach of dusk is quiet with your fame, the clocks of autumn have your runes by rote --
What poultice now, of plaster or concrete, could ever stanch that singing wound of song? Ah, on all stages where poor slaves repeat the lying, barbarous words, the ancient wrongs, over the scene your cyphers now appear: in these signs the cries shall be made clear.
4.
"Beyond humankind --" Have you a smooth sheet of white paper wide as the galaxy, a pen of stars to write with? Can you see this miniature earth, like the paperweight on Montale's desk, with its distant dark-red flicker of inferno? No need now to hear the cries: we are burning -- even the tears you gave could not quench our greed.
5.
This be thy journey's lore, after all, whom praise cannot restore nor grief recall: we mourn one, when we mourn for all. Mourning one, we mourn for all, in mourning we recall and in recalling, praise, and praise shall all restore after all: these be our works and days.
6.
Friends, if you wander among stones again, cast not the dice, lift not your hands for rain, carve clearer runes upon the gates of hell: Earth, hold this kindly, for one loved you well.
1970-71
*
|
