| EUGENE NARRETT | |
| EUGENE NARRETT | |
Prof. Eugene Narrett received his B.A. in Art History, and his B.A. and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, from Columbia University. He has extensive experience as a teacher, administrator and scholar, who has taught a full range of literature courses and other subjects including “Modern Poetry of Spiritual Seeking” “Ideology and Values of the West from Machiavelli to Post-Modernism,” “Romanticism and the Mystique of Terror,” and “Enduring Themes in Great Literature.” His articles on the situation of Israel and the West have been widely published and many are available on his website, www.israelendtimes.com. He has published four books: Israel and the Endtimes: Writings on the Logic and Surface Turbulence of History; WW III: the War on the Jews; Gathered against Jerusalem; andIsrael Awakened: A Chronicle of the Oslo War. The following poems are taken from his collections Truth’s Earthen Face, On the Way to the World to Come and Wanderings of Soul.
from Truth’s Earthen Face
To the silence of an empty room
They hunted me back home:
A cloud that had exhausted rain;
A flower after its completed bounty;
A man past middle age:
Every thing that lost or loses place,
I was.
They’d scented my fact of difference
And marked me down as prey,
For sacred dirt: excised, I made them whole.
I heard the screams of coded condemnation,
Too certain what they meant
To shed the agonies of soul
Whose source I was.
I sit now in a pleasant suburb
Amazed at what I see:
My self, by them defined, an old
Rogue elephant with no place but to die.
Being human, my hero work means
Confronting terror, so I clear my throat
To speak the thing I was.
I see my border guards
As apparitions, from the tower I see
My companies collapsing, and my nation
Shaken like a fine tree in unseasonable storms.
No time for good deliberation,
No time now for soul to know or be
The way I was.
At bay in my garden with restive flowers,
I find harvest’s come too soon.
The swarthy sickle man, -- is that he,
Or she, and what the celebration when one feels
So sad? Forget the learned prayer:
Stretch out your hands and rise
The way I was.
There, on the table left, it broke my heart,
Humbly capacious, round and blue and white
Sugar bowl like a palm resting in love
On a child’s head. Just so it rests on its wheel
Once called a ‘lazy Susan,’ sits quietly
Within itself, and is for me without
Words, like my father’s lamp, to my reproach
Lost because humbly, like him, I acted not...
I acted not in time, inhabiting by force
The timeless realm of contemplation: Is that
It then? My grief in its full forms records
The myriad times my spark to no fire flashed,
Leaving the urn, remorse, too warm and beautiful,
For confession’s public form too fine a jewel.
Massive in their dark blush, red going black,
Mom’s spangled bridge of roses, summer-primed
Cast the white daisies into purple shade.
Blue everywhere, and green transformed the sky’s
Compassion white; the honeyed sun dissolved
Into the roses’ brimming cups, and their dew
Crystal showed true uncompromising red
At its work, very close to me and you.
All but alone on the end time’s teeming mall
With my soul of letters and imaged life,
I’m hounded and frail; more precious, then, the call
Of nature’s fertile forms she glorified.
They live, entreating to be held. Enthralled,
We open after their fashion, to the light.
On the snow, squads facing eagerly east,
Asphodel in late March morning light
Lean expectantly to the promised warmth,
Honey-yellow trumpets, lamps of welcome, feast
On the scene they help illuminate, delight,
Their saffron sails spread petals to the storm.
But from the public way, marching through their heart
Come snow-heaped steps, blank mounds where voice should be.
Sorrow collects me, seeing as it felt to her:
Emptiness rising to the brim of things.
Only her soul brought violets, tan and red
Wash of shadows from files of birch on snow,
Miracles passing us, obliquely. “Spring,”
She wrote, a troupe of wine blooms centered there.
As I watched death unbending come to claim
My father, rumors coming true, ideas
Years from being fully known, I learned to pray.
I fixed my thoughts on forebears, ancient ways
Of hope, the need to teach my son what I
Learned not in time. Failing, of course, brought shame
Out like a signature, its mystery face
Showing nothing unacquainted with disgrace.
Disgrace, shame, death and prayer, abilities
Grouped commonly as fish teem in the heart
Of what was made by blessing: this creation
Where we strive and fail at word games, our cries
Rising, where… to mist and skies, to the dark?
Past prayer, sonnets were my only conversation.
Did I fail in the garden? Did my apple tree
Die? The heavy, unrelenting fat gray damp,
Thunder always on my edges,
Did it prove me cursed? Like plants,
I feed myself and bring the heavy quiet in,
Replacing terrors of night with warm slow peace
That melts into the heart like honeyed knowledge
Tricking the casuist censor with its sign.
My mother died last year, -- I sure know that.
I haven’t prayed for her enough. The bat
That swarmed my pain-filled evening… was it her
Come back? Can such things be? A punishment
Vivid as scripture, Holy Writ in the air
Sweeping me from home with senses burnt.
I tell him who speaks in my voice -- “I’ll do,
I’ll do,” yet He keeps instructing me. I’ll build
My garden broad and deep, pouring life in it
To watch it sicken, bearing indedible good.
The taunting thunder, and the sunless air,
The neighbor’s empty yard, and his dog’s bark
For my discarded and misplaced effort, here
In ashen earth, in cinders, shards and dark…
“You’ll heal,” says my cogent one; “You’re dying,”
Says my heart. The murmur of contempt grows louder,
Pressing me down like seed sown in despair,
Hashed so deep. Faith, -- is there something to it?
They say, there’s a life and future: keep trying.
What I was or am is buried in the root.
Turning in his morning bed, the gardener
Extends his workman’s soul to the facts of light.
Green truth, flower hues, and bird song restore
His trust, shaken by things in the forms of night,
Creatures in revolt, and the buried heart
Flying out homeless and insistent to face
Your face and fix you with a garden’s mask.
Though its terror’s passed, all things bear its trace.
Prosaic things: lawn mowers, mail trucks,
The full fat light of noon; another year
Seeking its zenith banishes the soul’s demands
For sons returning, it haunts; questions to mock
Your few accomplishments. Yet gardening’s dear
To those that crave rebirth by work of hands.
*
Sometimes an entire day and most of night
Must pass, even with rain, before my peace
Emerges from its inner cell, to face me
With its honey bread and eloquence, thoughts
Handed with words, the timeless soul is brought
To the world of shared things, to living light
From its own pure and sightless realm. God’s truce,
Withheld for reasons hard, falls easily…
To stay with me? Justice, gracious and blind
Would she just give herself to me, a soft
And willing heart, a real dream, a king’s gift
That lifts again, by me abiding life,
As it should be… sweet simple things to find
Where I knew they are: hidden in the heart of grief.
*
from On the Way to the World to Come
If it’s past Seeing
This winter sky my dear bequeathed
To me, this winter sky of mine,
The sky of late and timeless winter
Is like surprising things beautifully sent
In blessing to the blind:
The grays in every veiled form,
The silent trees where birds
Have only just begun to reappear
For the first time of mysteries,
The mysteries of necessary kindnesses
Of grace and wonder we had done without…
You gave me many things
With hidden, graceless grace…
Remembering it never ends
No more than a drowning person
After he or she has drowned
Finds rest from rising, slowly flailing
In the reason of the waves, slowly
Sinking and rising to struggle without mind
Again and again until we reach the ocean
And she takes us in…
Remembering this, remembering you
In what I am never ends
But even in the transient shy sunlight sends
Stray games, each patterned to some miracle
Of memory, -- in darkness we had many
Miracles that measure not
But in expectation taste and rejoice
And live again in mansions called for gold
And several sunlit ways we learned in childhood.
*
The Soul’s Delight
The brave forsythia and I
March slow away toward midnight
And still the sun explodes
In arabesques that from my knees
I wrought in honor to the yellow blaze
Of spring brought to the blue, to the blue deep.
What language does it mean, --
The evergreen against the gold
Before the threatened great old tree
Cascading blossoms white and pink?
The soul’s delight, the pattern
In my fathomless devotion, unseeing eyes I see.
The soul’s delight,
The thunder of a lush apotheosis
I read in fires made from fine matte prints
Many years later by lamps of amethyst
As the inner lights go down
And I remember on my way to sleep.
Somewhere the singing of a thrush…
We will acknowledge Him,
We will pay down our account;
Confronting all we found,
All; in the deep
Acknowledged and revealed
We feel the wheel come round.
*
Tower Songs
I was a bird in a tower
Among many other dedicated
Songs and drops of light, fat-hued
And melting notes from heaven fed
Beyond the day’s capacity with rhyme
Yet only sang atonement, time on time,
Building a temple of simpler design
From what they were and what did them devour.
I was a bird in terror
When they questioned me
And let myself be searched, --
They knew me then – pushed
Back and forth along my clammy perch
Crudded with small bits of fear:
They probed in and applied my pain.
There was nothing good to say or gain;
Their questions never ended:
From them I learned what demons are.
And at the last they said,
‘You’re here forever,’ and then they smiled, -- ‘it’s just a test. ‘
I’m a bird in a tower
That never will come down,
Built for my form by ancestors
Who saw and sang differently than I can;
They always taught me to be kind
But what the world is they forgot
And I, poor melody, had never known
This tower would be my prison home.
Five is the letter of sanctity,
The number five from above completes;
The fifth son came from a concubine,
A kind of dark self-sacrifice…
The fifth time that they questioned me
I sang like the haunted crow or dove
That once I was a man,
And so I was, it’s true: I was human once
Before they made me take their choice, --
That’s what freedom is...
Cross questions made the monster thing
That I appear to be,
Cross questions tied me to the tree
Where sadness drops each face and song, --
The shadow tree of the shadow king…
Keep singing, bird, by the brutal tree,
The monsters never will come down
But to my strengthening misery
Will freshly every spring return.
Deliverance is banned for me,
To enemies my sin is known;
Their minions have laid waste my home:
From bitter depths for sun I yearn.
*
Only Then
Only when we know the night’s grown late
And dawn will fashion us a state
Where loves differently hued and less in heat
Spill golden words into jeweled cups
Given heart to lip to soul, an alchemist…
Only when we sit alone as royalty
Grown old in powers that were matured
Deciding what to give away,
Before the silence and great taking make us pure
We turn the key to sharing what we wear.
When the last deed is signed and sealed
And we have prayed, forgetting such words were
As we have owed, and some not paid;
Just then true speech may be released
And only then these fragments be revealed.
*
The World Made Sense
Stars were shining in the days
My dad took me to the old
Abandoned freight yards downtown;
On Sunday mornings in the spring
Or in the fall when the air was mild
And the sky filled with splendor blue, and sun,
And I knew as simple fact that life was good…
He taught me to put my ear
To the wheel-burnished silvery-blue rail
To hear and know the train’s proclaiming hum.
Because the world he taught
Made place for kindliness and trust, --
What more illusion can there be…
A world of men who helped boys learn,
He told me to wave to the engineers
And sure enough, they smiled and waved to me.
We understood it all; the world made sense.
It even was a world where boys
Exploring a freight car on a wayside track,
A car uncoupled, could find, in wordless wonderment,
Sleeping in the straw a man in crumpled clothes;
Of course he wore a white shirt and dark slacks
In those days, an ordinary looking man,
Uncoupled, quiet, a bit embarrassed.
In those days, even more than now
After the gulf has been and heaven shows,
Men kept their sorrows to themselves
And failure, what greater sorrow-maker
For a man can be then failure’s hard uncoupling?
That was one memorable day
That now may simply live forever.
Everyday grace is what he taught me,
And never used the word.
* * *
from Wanderings of Soul
The Scarecrow
“But as for man, in glory he shall not repose; he is likened to the silenced animals.”
Kids were running through the pumpkins
In their ranks, so jauntily displayed, receiving
All this passion of the fallen leaves,
Their glory strewing the ground, skittering
In the wake of small, fast-moving sneakers
And falling in arabesques behind, a trace
Of the joy that stirred them, stirred many things;
It is all a storm of glory, and it was; and
The tawny earth, hard-packed by so many
Happy visitors, each one forgetful of their histories,
And islanded with patches of green –
For some grass thrives beyond its time;
And since the orchard has a petting farm
With rabbits, roosters, hens, and three
Little piggies each with its own
Painted cardboard house, bearing their names,
Like us, of straw or wood or brick, --
Trompe l’oeil, awaiting its fulfillment
In honor of the learned fiction brayed for kids and foolishness...
At any rate and true expense, this evening
I’ll return to my candle and my prayer,
Enriched by darkness on its way to victory;
And somehow my soul hears my angel
Carrying a message from God within the cloud,
God above, reaching my somewhat frightened self,
Fearing in loneliness and glad to be called;
He’s saying, ‘no matter; it will be all right:
Have faith!”
And so I will, and so
My visit to the Orchard on its hills
Glorious with apples as only old New England
Or our God provides, to be in goodness
For a while; so I drive down the forest-guarded
Roads, so wonderfully familiar; -- let them be
Years of pain, still the heart has its home
In the world we know; nature gives herself to us,
Stealing, and gradually we give ourselves back
To nature and her God, or so I’ve learned
And the teaching palliates the pain.
It’s here, in this world I’ve come to know
By what its creatures did to me, I’m graced
With nature’s beauty, sweetness in the air
And glory for my hungry innocent’s eyes:
How strange that He should seek me out
For seeing; how strange that all this grace
Brought creatures into industries of pain…
Some day I will explain.
So I drove through the woods
Shattering quietly to colored glories
While I more silent shattering fulfilled,
And came to the graveled dirt drive
And followed into mystery, and arrived
At the base of the hill upon whose breast
Apple trees ascend in graceful waves
Beyond sight, helping this swimmer of wisdom’s stream;
And they ascend, laden with ruddy glory
Yet simple as the clasp of a mother’s
Or father’s hand as they walk you
Cross the gravel parking lot that crunches
Seasonally perfect, fine tuning the fine miracle;
And we go down the shadowed paths
To the petting farm where they’ve built
A three-tiered skyward ramp for the goats;
That’s love, because they love to climb,
As we in our ways sacrifice ourselves
If only to rise, to rise and find
What hands in love provide, --
The heart of cherubim, God’s paradigm,
Reward for the young scapegrace who climbs
To the top where a leather pulley bears
A tin can, top knocked out
That kids can cram an apple in
And crank up, hand by hand on a wheel,
To the happy goat who understands…
And everywhere I turn are groups
Of picnicking children, and lion-hearted ones
Running through the pumpkins in their ranks,
And happy people entering the farm store;
Are they like me on the mountain’s farther side?
Some enter and are gone; others emerge;
They’re coming out with smiles and fragrant cider-donuts
Raised in cinnamon, and jugs of cider
Thick with taste and health, and sweet,
And apple pies and honey jars and apples
Piled into bags, red and white and green
And crowning at the top abundance,
The fragrance pleasing to the Highest Wisdom:
Royalty of grace…
We’re in the store, my soul and I, cool almost as a vault,
Shelves filled with bags of apples in their class:
Jonagold and Empires, Spartan and Macouns,
Red peppers, beans and late tomatoes
Sheltered from the storm, the cold worm
Coming to drive his necessary spike
Into the loving heart of things
As if to someone we were little more
Than an old tubeless tire wedding its nail;
The abundant heart of things
Too full and good for the current plan
To bear it should beat on.
And so the animals and gems of earth
Adorn our complicated selves with old simplicity,
And the soul’s in place with the senses
And God is utterly silent, so near is He…
And there, by the fence where the path
Passes from the company of kids and pumpkins
That makes a season of all saints,
Standing as a guard or a memorial
To the farm beyond, a scarecrow leans
His smiling head and holds so gently out
One well-sleeved arm from which a hand,
Whether relaxed or tired, but with the grace
Of il Magnifico, Lorenzo Medici, has fallen
Into strands of straw, giving up the game,
Perhaps;
Perhaps we’ll strive to hear him,
Giving him his due and us our own
For he is one, like us, who would be heard.
His smile; at the center of it all, --
The swelling hill crowned with branch-laden glory,
Green and red and gold against the gray and blue infinity,
The children running through the pumpkins,
The old tractor pulling a long wagon filled
With bailed hay, and the kids waiting on the platform
To step aboard and enter timelessness
Where we, too, once were home;
The goats that climb; the busy burrowing pigs;
The roosters crowing and reabbits quivering in their fur;
All the ages and forms of what we are
Circling through the store of fruits and bread…
In all this natural sweetness, by the path and rail
He stands, and it all circles on his smile
Cross-stitched in black on his burlap head
With jollier eyes than many of us and ours
Can summon forth from the soul’s well.
Our aspiration and pure form he is;
Pink circles of pink cloth like health
Adorn his cheeks, and by way of a cravat,
Or beard, straw thrusts and spills
From the collar of his purple flannel shirt,
Black-checked and stuffed with memories,
Memories of the tree in seed, memories
Grass stores of earth when it goes to sun,
Grass that withers before the reaper can fill his arm
Or the binder tie his sheaf, --
So many to be tied; so many withering;
Yet he endures, and smiles a telling
To us,
His overalls light blue and by the knees
Patched as so many of us need to do or be
With green and red and yellow bursts,
Taking up signs of glory…
His socks of hair-straw legs spilling
Out of his black slippers, attention straight
He stands, except he leans his head,
Smiling all the way for he’s sure of what it is –
Smiling as he leans on his left shoulder.
It’s his left arm, the arm of justice and of might,
The quality where men restrain their grief,
That points to the side, toward the rail
Where many stand and lean, and wait,
And arm from which the mitten hand has dropped,
Letting his essence, which is of earth
Well-gathered, spray out in urgency
And say, ‘it’s just the way it is; please look.’
I saw a blue and white pavilion
Sheltering picnickers for whom His open hand
Is more than enough, it’s everything
For now, and for them, now’s forever;
And I see the goat walking to his height
Where an apple two kids, one black, one white,
Have crammed into the can, drops on its way;
But the goat will wait,
The people still come,
They will come when I no longer count them in this way,
The drive delivering car after car of passengers
Whose time is come to timelessness at harvest time;
And the tractor pauses at the loading station
Where young souls get on, well-guided,
Chrysanthemums fill every crafted red clay pot;
And as the years, cycling, bring these words along,
Trees bud and blossom and dress themselves in glory,
Then give it all away, while people
Pass in and out of the store of delights
Forever making choices where every choice is good:
For seeing, He gave me this...
And the scarecrow’s glad for the post that keeps him
Up so straight, true as his smile,
And keeps his body from betraying him, --
As so many of us find --
In all its pure simplicity of earthly gifts,
And keeps his smiling soul foremost in our mind
And sight, -- and so at harvest time we see him...
At the center he stands and smiles and waves us on
As we pursue, accepting remnants of our miracles,
The charity of earth that forms his guise;
For that, he never needs to move or say a word,
But stand there with his head a little to one side,
His poor thin arm alerting us
To the mysteries inside of which we rest
Like swords waiting to be drawn
But not to fight, not any more,
But raised in victory salute, souls at their best.
No greater wonder till our eyes
Will open one last time, accepting his light dress
As ours, and walk in it forever to the great surprise.
*
Kissing My Door Post, I See
When Nachmanides died, they say
His parents’ graves, till then well-resting
Side by side, waiting for the call to rise,
At the juncture where they touched, split wide
And an eight-branched lamp of gold arose,
Its candles burning before our eyes
As if messiah had finally arrived.
I write, ‘finally,’ – it was near eight hundred years ago.
So if for them it seemed at very long last
What say anyone of us, rambling giddy days
This path of rock and mud and crazy gleams
Scattered off the old, rotating universal
We love to worship in our folly’s praise,
Flirting like animals in mad season
Yet we have no issue, -- nearly all goes waste;
And we’re so high few anymore complain
That every step we dance in fact’s descending
To the ultimate morass, the gray swamp
Above the body-shattering adamant…
The soul’s been drugged and gagged;
How she weeps for us, her degraded flesh.
Surely we have made the throne invisible;
Our public metaphors of joy have lost
The guts of joy’s deep source:
Redemption from blindness, from false striving
And cruelty’s scintillating light,
So easy for the cruel to give a different name;
So we dance on, stuck in our lust on monsters of the deep,
Blind as Ahab, the diving devotees of waste,
Blind with cruelty their masters and mistresses;
So much the acts of public worship;
But the lamp’s similitude stands upon my table,
Eight candles waiting to be touched to light
By the true hand, soon, at the true time when I am able
To see it and receive them in the night,
My ewe within our stable...
Of course I found this corner of the path,
For my name contains the secrets of the lamp;
I’m honoring it with letters come a long way
From the fountain where all letters rise.
My predecessor, my forebear in the holy camp
And mysteries of the Name, don’t seem to last
Very well in our day; -- O, God
Of my salvation! In my heart
How many times I let the honor slide
And went unarmored out my gate
And through the shadows ranged:
All that they’ve done to me
In pitiless masterworks that to this day
Shape my limbs and form my dreams,
Undoing everything I was and am,
And still I’d pass my sign, the lamp
Brass signs on bronze, the lettering of His light
Almighty, descending like the dew of life
Strewn from branches rooted on high,
The bridge of those three letters coming down to me;
I’d pass without a kiss into familiar darkness.
Master of change who teaches us in sleep
While certain of our work we seem; --
We dream and He forms us
No matter what they’ve done, the arrogant…
Master of the door that every poor man seeks,
Where every poor man in His image waits
Beneath His power raining from above, His weapon
Singing from the stars, and His hand
Shaping and protecting what is dear to Him
Alike with its tormentors, for His plan;
All of this coming to our little point of light,
The often wandering miracle of self
Bearing in its soul divine the stamp of life –
And so we stray and worship it, and grieve –
And grace and resurrection from the camp
In which we wait, dreaming of victories
All of which take the form of marriage and the lamp
Concealed as disclosed, fertilities.
Or He protects and sends the arrows of the stars
When they sing with us, in the night,
His angels to the lonely man of faith
Who scarcely lies to sleep, so far from health
He wanders in these days, stretching
On study benches his aching limbs,
Meditating on bones sustained on ashen-bread
And ready for the spirit’s gust; --
Everything I am is in His Name,
And nothing that we have or are
Is anything but letters held in candle flame
Where grace solves each unyielding edge
Like metal making precious in the master’s hands,
And the love in which all came to be
And work and move comes quietly
To the table of our world, and with our sorrow sits
Till we re-form its image
As we first were formed as stars,
Pure intellect and love forever growing more complete,
To flicker on the darkening plain, and rush
Together, wedding, while waiting for the Master
Gardener in the Apple Orchard with His turtledove...
Out of the ground, crowned with light
He comes and bears us up the ladder to the sky,
By my three letters, here, and the bridge
Within them, that is in Him
The doorway for the poor man, me,
That I’m so glad to kiss again, awakened;
And when He pulls the curtain back
Upon our healing time, neither day nor night,
Our light is touched by His
And the circle closes, flowing upstream;
And in its midst, the lamp at last unlocked,
Is shining in our eyes.
*
Like the Last Moment
Indian summer
Emerging from long shadows and chill frost;
After noon, the harvest sun suddenly is fat,
Supreme, possessive of our sense;
Time stops, -- if only so it did!
My sense, my life slowed down,
The hum of early fall is gone:
Sharp nights have done the generations in.
In the silence and stopped time
My symbol garden settles to perfection
Of vivid textures, planes and forms:
The water in the tarnished copper pool
Is perfectly still; in its basin, pebbles shimmer
From the depths, and the leaves, lightened, float
On its smooth transparent face;
The trees, the trees reflected looking down.
A perfectly round pumpkin
Makes orange seem gold, the first and real gold.
Nothing more filled with brightness can be seen.
Above it stands my fragile weeping jade,
An apple tree, a spirit quite divine
That this rock garden sways around
Worshipping, in that they dance and sing
The silent music of pure vision
For the conductor, for Victory;
The apples are like berries: soft of skin,
Bright with translucence, brilliantly red
Obscenely keen on charmed seduction
Of the soul, in its long course; red
In the sweep of small-leafed branches
Too few and delicate to keep the sky
From filling it with light as with its seed;
So everything is filled, and to its place
Stillness succeeds…
On a flat gray stone, a green gourd
With golden carbuncles like scar-beads
Ornamenting its bursting rotundity croons;
And there the digitalis, the heart-stopped
Produces two very late and beautiful white blooms
Being true to its name, ‘Ambigua;’
What should it know of mercy or virginity
Ready to be drawn and brewed
To still a heart, as time and place may be –
For all the worlds are in the crown
At the last moment of display --
Beard-tongue is tall, is somber purple,
Weird season’s royalty
Of contrasts, promises and dismay, --
Of death approaching, varied in its beauties,
Like two day lilies long subdued, that decide
The first deep-killing frost – they sensed it well –
Will prompt them, days before, to send
Their last profusion day by day
Before my eyes, rejoicing to the end,
Two lilies gold above the brown rejected leaves
Where we are, soul and me;
And the wild daisies, profuse and undemanding
Stand behind it all, gloriously simple
And undismayed, like old-time heroines;
Snap dragons love the drink of mornings
Whose chill brings nectar from the sun
Every stem of them, dozens, scores
Still budding, ages after they were slain
By drought and heat that drove us from the house,
Still rushing to fulfill some promises
Among the legions of white trumpet calls
To the soul only, hungry for their touch
And desperate to discern:
What dragons innocent I tried to love.
I cannot see and slow to this perfection without praise,
Though I’ve seen the breaking of my dream
Draws near, and it was nothing but a dream.
Yet, dream within a dream I count the days
Till they return me to this time when time delays.
* * * * *
The thick wedge of stone beloved by mystic birds
That perch on its ramped apex before lifting to the pool;
And the white and gray three-tiered ship of rock
Holding back the gorgeous hordes
Of dancing ivy and sweet woodruff, mercy-belled,
The perfectly still face of the water in the well…
It’s all my world, and came like honey from my heart,
A living being: sweet from the strong, and from the dead,
The living;
It was the world I made from nature with my art.
But hardly am I slow enough
To love and live in it, though it abides
With me who saw it and created it:
I put it into place alone.
And many times I died to keep this place
Knowing not till now, at the lip of the very end
Of things the one who set out long ago
Could find a way to wed love to his side;
In pain and hope I put it into place
So it could tell by showing me
How a garden in its last glory
Before the cold and dark stop up the breath
In putting forth its mystery,
Our after thoughts, and second thoughts
And all the forces that by law or reason
Couldn’t speak in their proper season,
In the natural show and touch of things,
But suddenly rise perfect and complete
In hue and form and stillness
On the last afternoon
To say what we meant to be and mean
On stepping through October’s gate to meet.
*
Once More to the Farm (After the Vision)
Long ago it seems, before the dream
Of return was realized
In a weekend of harvest rain
And a day of glory in the garden
For the soul rejoiced and stepping through the gate…
Before the dream’s mortality again was lived,
I traveled to the farm and saw the Scarecrow
Smiling and pointing, his floppy-hatted head aslant,
His shirt stuffed but not with pride
As harvest strength bled dryly from his cuffs;
And saw the pumpkins plump with the year’s feed,
Earth and sky, and secrets
Sensed by children racing in eternity;
And two goats, a billy and his mate,
For apple treats on ramparts mounted to the sky.
I chose my wares, made small talk with the store folk,
And sadly drove away
With harvest tide and loneliness;
Without my seed I saw it all but only from outside,
Passing like a shadow that can talk and seem…
The scarecrow knew what it was,
And we considered one another a long time;
Remember the pink splotches painted on his face,
The game fixed smile and pointing arm
Silent in straw amid the happy noise, I do...
* * * * *
Some weeks passed; the vines withered
And I gathered in their fruits;
The garden’s frailty again exposed
I saw it cold and brown and gray,
A rare place for diseases of the flesh
Whose only comfort is to pass away
And let the spirit be in falling leaves…
We’ve seen the latter day.
All this before the days of vision, festival
And dream’s end, all this accomplished
And the body’s warm, the heart still full
And bent on stepping through the gate
From sunlight into mists of dream
To live the rest of my imaginary days
Some weeks passed, and the last flowers
Shared with me
Their last secrets, and their grace and glory
Hinting of the world made to cherish me
And love such as my heart was given,
Hurt with insight yet always giving…
My store of apples being exhausted, back I went,
Driving myself over the hills
While a red light read, “check engine,”
And trees were in the glory of all souls
Hovering near, waiting their turn to speak
The terrifying gibberish of the real past,
The substance and the soul of which we’re made
Until we’re hauled by better ones into community.
Now it was sunny, in the after times
After the vision of return was realized;
Now it was sunny, but no more children,
Crowds of picnickers or jammed parking lots
With streams of spirits bearing bags of apple gold
And red, and cider jugs, and pies with cinnamon;
Only crowds of spirits in the silent air;
It was cold in the scullery of heaven
Where messiah one day will be born…
That day when everything was dying
Before my eyes and in my heart
Experienced with death as a state of being
Where the face and all vital functions still perform…
That day of seasonal death… I bought my wares
And stepped outside to find a saving sight
Whose music would find the chord in me
Established in the good years, and the days…
But the farm almost was abandoned:
A pair of grandparents with two children
Walked slowly, filling time, time without light
Despite the sun, and watched the pigs
Squabbling for apple cores in the mud
Made by yesterday’s rain: grace for us
And gardens, grace for them in theirs…
It was dark although the sun was out.
A single parent and another child
Walked aimlessly past the caged rabbits
Uselessly huddling in their hutch,
Their mouths at work on shadow carrots
Competing for the shadow satisfactions…
The pumpkins were everywhere in rows
And unkempt ranks, profuse as autumn
When everything raised to die is laid out
In the grand marketplace;
Mad as our own unruly play
Toppling like an over-piled haywain
Sent forward from the good old days
Into this darkness, -- and the sun was out,
The sun was out:
This darkness in the light that’s always late.
Profusion of shining pumpkins,
Profusion and goodness of those united states…
The goats waited on their rampart’s tower
For the treats the children send,
But all those lives were elsewhere,
And the farm was left in its long slow quiet descent
To speaking shadows such as me
Who was, myself, descending the long stair.
My friend and teacher, the smiling scarecrow
And his pointing arm losing its strength of straw,
Was gone, even as it states: ‘the flower will fade,
The grass will wither,’ and ‘as for man,
In glory he will not repose, --
He is likened to the silenced animals.’
That was the echo he had left for me
That day, ‘out of Zion, consummate in beauty,
God appeared,’ that verse of the hymnal;
He knew the root of all memorials
Was the place to which we lift our eyes, -- to the hills,
For strength and a guardian when it’s time to sleep:
And in the season of stillness, it’s time to sleep.
And when it’s time, suddenly the spirit within
My life begins to seek what I have missed, --
Perhaps you’ve found the same –
In the day everything forgotten dreams;
And I walk sheathed in memories, and speak
To the spirit that prophecies through me,
A gifted but distempered trumpet set apart
That one day saw and heard the image of his sound
Walking in the garden, and joined in his heart
One portion of one day the two worlds, life and death,
Where dreamers are more like to drown,
And carried them away like sparks of health
In silent conversation, alone in the rain
Of music, living out its days apart...
There was no image: it was shadow Being.
Everything is filled with first things.
I drink hot tea and slice my garden produce
For drying and freezing, imitating life
For joy to come in the later season;
Yet I remember him, our monument,
And the meaning of the gesture of his arm
That time I went with hope a last time to the farm.
***
On an Exilic Urn…
Crying, -- at death
Tears are slow
At the death of a nation,
A people, a promise, a dream…
A human being dying of grief
Defeated, dreaming still...
Crying, tears are slow
Milking a numbed soul
An old black and white cat
Rises like a lion, like a boxer’s cut
Leaps from a blow
From the spent violets
Green, shadowed and full
On the lens where you bled
And pounced on a small gray bird
Of grief; dazed by its feast
The stunned soul, easily shocked
Above the kotel courtyard
Sees a dragonfly, its brother
Shimmer and hover, passed
By a flapping black moth
Exposing the future;
And a fat jay,
Prussian blue and white and gray
Bathe grossly, casting spray
In the sun while a young cardinal
Newly flush, and a dun thrush consider
Degrees of shade and danger
And are anything but numb
as one in the womb of an urn;
Like a man crying pure as milk and bread
at rest in a blue and white bowl.
The cardinal glories
Against the apple leaves
And the Edenic scent we know…
Consider being already dead
When no one calls or cares
But eating; all the feathered bipeds,
Strange berries and paradise
That could be sweet as textured green,
Furrowed sheaves of a late summer grove,
Thin stretch of grove, shadow thin
With chicken wire between our sorrow’s place
Of shadow face
And my jolly neighbor’s Elysian Fields
And quiver full of kids…
A park of sun forever
While in this gracious shade
The birds are gathering more,
The birds of meditation
As twilight makes its way
To splash, perch, nibble fruits and watch
Me go away with twilight
Wading deftly from the east…
Oh what a part we played
Till the plow turned us over
Like a page
Pretending sanctities in the month of splendor
From the writing that we were
An orchard grows,
Birds in the tree backstage...
Every urn is gracious in itself;
To be a vessel of tears and love lost
How great a destiny for female form
Containing man,
Simple forms of good gathered for the king
And stored for centuries till just
The name remains,
The letters that we were
And memories, the still birth of a mole
And fools without place for words
Cherish grief and bride-tricks
While the numbed, forgotten soul
Drowns in old hopes gone dry
And vivid memories arranged
And finally ranked: currants in the urn.
In the fountain by the urn
My bride, the lair of birds
Tumbles in ashen-bread well-mixed with tears;
We are at play; our veils lift
In the apple orchard’s light:
Birds lift light above an urn of tears…
What do I know of the form of the soul
But study God in poverty?
A shield against pain in an age
Of monstrous beauty that knows no truth
We cry in the shade of an urn.
***
Thoughts for a Gray Ghost
Like a bad guest, a gray bank of evening
Fear settles messily
On my table; it does not care
That my stomach’s empty,
That I have nothing left to say
Except to brother sorrow;
That I have nothing left…
Fear has its charms when fed,
And eloquence of night
When the pain field dissolves
In purity of snowfields, virtual
Winter without the cold:
Enjoy pain then, one may
Without demure refusal;
Pain fields dissolve in time
For the dead to arrive
Attentive to the soul’s insemination
Of the darker body, -- redemption,
Each according to his deeds when alive
And the pain, so they say, absolves...
When I was alive I didn’t know what it was
To have died, to arise from the mind
Like the dead, like snow drops
In a spring one imagines but may not share.
There is justice, there is nothing else
It hurts so much to know
And those who hear soon disappear
Beneath the careworn air...
I Wasn’t One of Those…
I wasn’t one of those writers or athletes
About whom they say, ‘he’s good, and he knows
He’s good,’ and everything they do is done
With joy’s unconscious flair, though I had some
And knew it, but not as quick as I was meant
To run; so I told myself small lies and essayed
More than I could, taking many hard blows:
Complete at last, I learned to be afraid.
A long time like this; finally, a third
Shot that did me and down I went, to find
The meaning and the name of failure; Weird
Sisters I had known choraled me, my face fell
Far and yet farther off the peace that mind
Tracked for its star, -- there’s nothing else to tell.
*
When I Sought the Well
With her I sought the well where sorrow passed
In crowns of charity each other gave,
Charms of a youth and maiden bound in peace;
It might have been a child’s dream, so fast
The spell of those sweet times went to their graves,
The hopes we had believed; but no release
Comes to the strong heart: only kindness saves.
Silent in the midst of love we paused;
Having always done without the laws
In sorrows we ate pomegranate sauce.
My garden grew no knowledge to appease
The candle struggling in my heart; insight leaves
To reign where she my host is crowned with sheaves.
*
Roses for My Rest
And what of her who walks the waves,
The laughing one I crossed the sands to find
And found her passion in the crimson flood
She tramples into charms that blot the mind?
What of her ancient sacrament with me
By which I’ve honored her in grief and dream?
By memories I walked to charm my way
Back, to the frothing roses of her stream…
The future that meant nothing, then; times recalled
That dissipate like foam, like mist
In evenings dressed for heavy-headed sleep,
The only rest now known…
That never lived, whose lips were never kissed
Survive to band themselves uselessly to death
Like the screened door of an abandoned home
When storms force voices from the bitter deep:
By loving her I lived to rue my breath;
And when the floor collapsed, they hissed.
The past is gone like the ghost that we call ‘thought’;
My youth like water passed beneath her steps;
She’ll be a simple girl I’ll turn to now
To dance a bed of roses for my rest.
*
Set to My Lyric
“A lot of little lights gone out…”
No aged wine of song after youth chose
Unguided, madness in the name of song
Severed from honor, lost to folk and self,
To lodge like a puff seed in a sick rose.
A garden of exotics where gray dawns
Complete intemperate evenings, bestowing weakness
To youths by the book inscribed for quests forlorn,
Giving their candles for the killing kiss…
Even the worst gardens die, their seeds fail
Release; but scent’s lodged in souls, transforming
Bodies to its character, penitence; thus bad music
Lives, enforcing every cost its lies entail:
Lust’s honesty is pain; it keeps collecting
The lost, setting them right by their own lyrics.
