As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,
and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,
and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.
Rabbi Moshe (of Kobiyn) taught: It is written: “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth.” That “he” is every man. Every man must know: I am clay, I am one of countless shards of clay, but “the top of it reached to heaven”—my soul reaches to heaven; “and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it”— even the ascent and descent of the angels depend on my deeds.
Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters by Martin Buber.
i
To stand on common ground
here and there gritty with pebbles
yet elsewhere ‘fine and mellow—
uncommon fine for ploughing’
there to labor
planting the vegetable words
diversely in their order
that they come to virtue!
To reach those shining pebbles,
that soil where uncommon men
have labored in their virtue
and left a store
of seeds for planting!
To crunch on words
grown in grit or fine
crumbling earth, sweet
to eat and sweet
to be given, to be eaten
in common, by laborer
and hungry wanderer…
ii
In time of blossoming,
of red
buds, of red
margins upon
white petals among the
new green, of coppery
leaf-buds still weakly
folded, fuzzed
with silver hairs—
or elephant-hide rocks, the lunch hour
expands, the girls
laugh at the sun, men
in business suits awkwardly
recline, the petals
float and fall into
crumpled wax-paper, cartons
of hot coffee—
to speak as the sun’s
deep tone of May gold speaks
or die spring chill in the rock’s shadow,
a piercing minor scale running across the flesh
aslant—or petals
that dream their way
(speaking by being white
by being
curved, green-centered, falling
already while their tree
is half-red with buds) into
human lives! Poems stirred
into paper coffee-cups, eaten
with petals on rye in the
sun—the cold shadows in back,
and the traffic grinding the
borders of spring—entering
human lives forever,
unobserved, a spring element…
iii
Not ‘common speech’
a dead level
but the uncommon speech of paradise,
tongue in which oracles
speak to beggars and pilgrims:
not illusion but what Whitman called
‘the path
between reality and the soul,’
a language
excelling itself to be itself,
speech akin to the light
with which at day’s end and day’s
renewal, mountains
sing to each other across the cold valleys.
i
On the kitchen wall a flash
of shadow:
Swift pilgrimage
of pigeons, a spiral
celebration of air, of sky-deserts.
And on tenement windows
a blaze
of lustered watermelon:
stain of the sun
westering somewhere back of Hoboken.
ii
The goatherd upstairs! Music
from his sweet flute
roves from summer to summer
in the dusty air of airshafts
and among the flakes
of soot that float
in a daze from chimney
to chimney—notes
remote, cool, speaking of slender
shadows under olive-leaves. A silence.
Groans, sighs, in profusion,
with coughing, muttering, orchestrate
solitary grief; the crash of glass, a low voice
repeating over and over, ‘No.
No. I want my key. No you did not.
No.’—a commonplace.
And in counterpoint, from other windows,
the effort to be merry—ay, maracas!
—sibilant, intricate—the voices wailing pleasure,
arriving perhaps at joy, late, after sets
have been switched off, and silences
are dark windows?
In some special way every person completes the universe. If he does not play his part, he injures the pattern of all existence….
Babbi Judah Loeto
Homer da Vinci
with freckles on your nose
don’t hang there
by the heels.
Sad everyman, I mean
let go, or jerk
upright.
They say gooseflesh
is the body’s shudder when someone
walks over its grave-to-be,
but my hair rises
to see your living life
tamped down.
Blue mysteries
of the veronica florets
entertain
your modest attention:
there, where you live,
live:
start over,
everyman, with
the algae of your dreams.
in sweat, but no one said
in daily death. Don’t eat
those nice green dollars your wife
gives you for breakfast.
i
A changing skyline.
A slice of window filled in
by a middle-distance oblong
topped by little
moving figures.
You are speaking
flatly, as one drinks a glass of
milk’ (for calcium).
Suddenly the milk
spills, a torrent of black milk hurtles
through the room, bubbling and
seething into the corners.
ii
‘But then I was another person!’
The building veiled
in scaffolding. When the builders leave,
tenants will move in, pervading
cubic space with breath and dreams.
Odor of newmade memories
will loiter in the hallways,
noticed by helpless dogs and young children.
That will be other, another
building.
iii
I had meant to say
only. ‘The skyline’s changing,
The window’s allowance of sky is
smaller
but more
intensely designed, sprinkled
with human gestures.’
Ah, if you’ve not seen it
it’s not enough.
Alright.
It’s true.
Nothing
is ever enough. Images
split the truth
in fractions. And milk
of speech is black lava. The sky
is sliced into worthless
glass diamonds.
iv
Again: middle of a night.
Silences lifting
bright eyes that brim with
smiles and painful
stone tears.
Will you believe it,
in this very room
cloud-cuckoos unfledged themselves,
shedding feathers and down,
showed themselves small,
monstrous,
paltry in death?
In the dark
when the past lays its hand on your heart,
can’t you recall that hour of
death and new daylight?
But how irrelevantly
the absurd angel of happiness walks in,
a box of matches in one hand,
in the other a book of dream-jokes.
I wake up laughing, tell you:
‘I was writing an
ad for gold—gold cups,
gold porridge-bowls—Gold,
beautiful, durable—While I mused
for a third adjective, you were
preparing to leave for
three weeks—Here’s the check. And
perhaps in a week or so
I’ll be able to send you a
pound of tomatoes.’ Then
you laugh too, and we clasp
in naked laughter, trembling
with tenderness and relief.
Meanwhile the angel,
dressed for laughs as a plasterer,
puts a match to whatever’s
lying in the grate: broken scaffolds,
empty cocoons, the paraphernalia
of unseen change.
Our eyes smart from the smoke but
we laugh and
warm ourselves.
An old man whose black face
shines golden-brown as wet pebbles
under the streetlamp, is walking
two mongrel dogs of disproportionate size, in the rain,
in the relaxed early-evening avenue.
The small sleek one wants to stop,
docile to the imploring soul of the trashbasket,
but the young tall curly one
wants to walk on; the glistening sidewalk
entices him to arcane happenings.
Increasing rain. The old bareheaded man
smiles and grumbles to himself.
The lights change: the avenue’s
endless nave echoes notes of
liturgical red. He drifts
between his dogs’ desires.
The three of them are enveloped—
turning now to go crosstown—in their
sense of each other, of pleasure,
of weather, of comers,
of leisurely tensions between them
and private silence.
A doll’s hair concealing
an eggshell skull delicately
throbbing, within which
maggots in voluptuous unrest
jostle and shrug. Oh, Eileen, my
big doll, your gold hair was
not more sunny than this
human fur, but
your head was
radiant in its emptiness,
a small clean room.
Her warm and rosy mouth
is telling lies—she would
believe them if she could believe;
her pretty eyes
search out corruption. Oh, Eileen,
how kindly your silence was, and
what virtue
shone in the opening and shutting of your
ingenious blindness.
The screendoor whines, clacks
shut. My thoughts crackle
with seaweed-seething diminishing
flickers of phosphorus. Gulp
of a frog, plash
of herring leaping;
interval;
squawk of a gull disturbed, a splashing;
pause
while silence poises for the breaking
bark of a seal: but silence.
Then
only your breathing. I’ll
be quiet too. Out
stove, out lamp, let
night cut the question with profound
unanswer, sustained
echo of our unknowing.
While we sleep
mudflats will gleam
in moonwane, and mirror
earliest wan daybreak
in pockets and musselshell hillocks, before
a stuttering, through dreams, of
lobsterboats going out, a half-
awakening, a reliving
of ebbing dreams as morning ocean
returns to us, a turning
from light towards more dreams, intelligence of
what pulls at our depths for
design.
I hear
the tide turning. Last
eager wave over
taken and pulled back
by first wave of the ebb. The pull back
by moon-ache. The great knots
of moon-awake energy
far out.
When the white fog burns off,
the abyss of everlasting light
is revealed. The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world’s hearth.
Cold of the sea is counterpart
to this great fire. Plunging
out of the burning cold of ocean
we enter an ocean of intense
noon. Sacred salt
sparkles on our bodies.
After mist has wrapped us again
in fine wool, may the taste of salt
recall to us the great depths about us.
i
We have been shown
how Basket drank—
and old man Volpe the cobbler
made up what words he didn’t know
so that his own son, even
laughed at him: but with respect.
ii
Two flutes! How close
to each other they move
in mazing figures,
never touching, never
breaking the measure,
as gnats dance in
summer haze all afternoon, over
shallow water sprinkled
with mottled blades of willow—
two flutes!
iii
Shlup, shlup, the dog
as it laps up
water
makes intelligent
music, resting
now and then to
take breath in irregular
measure.
When I can’t
strike one spark from you,
when you don’t
look me in the eye,
when your answers
come
slowly, dragging
their feet, and furrows
change your face,
when the sky is a cellar
with dirty windows,
when furniture
obstructs the body, and bodies
are heavy furniture coated
with dust—time
for a lagging leaden pace,
a short sullen line,
measure
of heavy heart and
cold eye.
v
The quick of the sun that gilds
broken pebbles in sidewalk cement
and the iridescent
spit, that defiles and adorns!
Cold light in blind love does not distinguish
one surface from another, the savor
is the same to its tongue, the fluted
cylinder of a new ashcan a dazzling silver,
the smooth flesh of screaming children a quietness, it is all
a jubilance, the light catches up
the disordered street in its apron,
broken fruitrinds shine in the gutter.
Lap up the vowels
of sorrow,
transparent, cold
water-darkness welling
up from the white sand.
Hone the blade
of a scythe to cut swathes
of light sound in the mind.
Through the hollow globe, a ring
of frayed rusty scrapiron,
is it the sea that shines?
Is it a road at the “world’s edge?
Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon,
and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a
stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,
I am Essex-born:
Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was
drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees
stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,
the spirit ot merciful Phillipa glimmered there.
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-alte-Bower,
Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots
sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,
Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,
in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves,
through its trees the ghost of a great house. In
Ilford High Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the
light of flaring sundown, seven kings
in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings
the place of law
where my birth and marriage are recorded
and the death of my father. Woodford Wells
where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white
statue forlorn in its garden)
saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,
(forgotten? and further away
the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once
but many times?).
All the Ivans dreaming of their villages
all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,
picking up fragments of New World slowly,
not knowing how to put them together nor how to join
image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map
made long before I was born shows ancient
rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire
for the world’s great splendors, a child who traced voyages
indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country
remembers the first river, the first
field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,
that new smell, and remembers
the walls of the garden, the first light.
Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn’t
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.
What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.
In the autumn brilliance
feathers tingle at fingertips.
This tingling brilliance
burns under cover of gray air and
brown lazily
unfalling leaves,
it eats into stillness zestfully
with sound of plucked strings,
steel and brass strings of the zither,
copper and silver wire
played with a gold ring,
a plucking of crinkled afternoons and
evenings of energy, thorns under the pot.
In the autumn brilliance
a drawing apart of curtains
a fall of veils
a flying open of doors, convergence
of magic objects into
feathered hands and crested heads, a prospect
of winter verve, a buildup to abundance.
My black sun, my
Odessa sunflower,
spurs of Tartar gold
ring at your ankles,
you stand taller before me than the ten
towers of Jerusalem.
Your tongue has found
my tongue, peonies
turn their profusion towards
the lamp, it is you that burn there,
the Black Sea sings you awake.
Wake the violoncellos of Lebanon,
rub the bows with cedar resin,
wake the Tundra horsemen
to hunt tigers.
Your skin
tastes of the salt of Marmora,
the hair of your body casts
its net over me.
To my closed eyes
appears a curved
horizon where darkness
dazzles in your light. Your arms
hold me from falling.
Among a hundred windows shining
dully in the vast side
of greater-than-palace number such-and-such
one burns
these several years, each night
as if the room within were aflame.
Some fault in the glass
combines with the precise distance and
my faulty eyes to produce
this illusion; I know it—
yet still I’m ready to believe perhaps
some lives
tremble and flare up there, four blocks away
across the sooty roofs and
the dusk,
with more intensity than what’s lived
behind the other windows,
and the glowing of those brands of life
shows as seraphic or demonic flames
visible only to weak and distant eyes.
All that blesses the step of the antelope
all the grace a giraffe lifts to the highest leaves
all steadfastness and pleasant gazing, alien to ennui,
dwell secretly behind man’s misery.
Animal face, when the lines
of human fear, knots of a net, become transparent
and your brilliant eyes and velvet muzzle
are revealed, who shall say you are not the face of a man?
In the dense light of wakened flesh
animal man is a prince. As from alabaster
a lucency animates him from heel to forehead.
Then his shadows are deep and not gray.
i The Weave
The cowdung-colored mud
baked and raised up in random
walls, bears the silken
lips and lashes of erotic
flowers towards a sky of
noble clouds. Accepted
sacramental excrement
supports the ecstatic half-sleep
of butterflies, the slow
opening and closing of brilliant
dusty wings. Bite down
on the bitter stem of your nectared
rose, you know
the dreamy stench of death and fling
magenta shawls delicately
about your brown shoulders laughing.
ii Corazón
When in bushy hollows between
moonround and moonround of hill, white clouds
loiter arm-in-arm, out of curl,
and sheep in the ravines
vaguely congregate, the heart
of Mexico sits in the rain
not caring to seek shelter,
a blanket of geranium pink drawn up
over his silent mouth.
(for B.L.)
In the green Alameda, near the fountains,
an old man, hands
clasped behind his shabby back
shuffles from rose to rose, stopping
to ponder and inhale, and I
follow him at a distance, discovering
the golden rose, color of bees’ fur, odor of honey,
red rose, contralto, roses
of dawn-cloud-color, of snow-in-moonlight,
of colors only roses know,
but no rose
like the rose I saw in your garden.
iv Canticle
Flies, acolytes
of the death-in-life temple
buzz their prayers
and from the altar
of excrement arises
an incense
of orange and purple
petals. Drink,
campesino,
stain with ferment
the blinding white that clothes
your dark body.
Golden the high ridge of thy back, bull-mountain,
and coffee-black thy full sides.
The sky decks thy horns with violet,
with cascades of cloud. The brown hills
are thy cows. Shadows
of zopilotes cross and slowly
cross again
thy flanks, lord of herds.
the only object is
a man, carved
out of himself, so wrought he
fills his given space, makes
traceries sufficient to
others’ needs
(here is
social action, for the poet,
anyway, his
politics, his
news)
Charles Olson
Breathe deep of the
freshly gray morning air, mild
spring of
the day.
Let the night’s dream-planting
bear leaves
and light
up the death-mirrors with
shining petals.
Stand fast in thy
place:
remember, Caedmon
turning from song was met
in his cow-barn by
One who set him
to sing the beginning.
Live
in thy fingertips and in
thy
hair’s rising; hunger
be thine, food
be thine and what
wine
will not shrivel thee.
Breathe deep of
evening, be with
the
rivers of tumult, sharpen
thy wits to know power and
be
humble.
ii
The task of the poet is to make clear to himself, and thereby to others, the temporal and eternal questions.
Ibsen
Barbarians
throng the straight roads of
my empire, converging
on blade Rome.
There is darkness in me.
Silver sunrays
sternly, in tenuous joy
cut through its folds:
mountains
arise from cloud.
Who was it yelled, cracking
the glass of delight?
Who sent the child
sobbing to bed, and woke it
later to comfort it?
I, I, I, I.
I multitude, I tyrant,
I angel, I you, you
world, battlefield, stirring
with unheard litanies, sounds of piercing
green half-smothered by
strewn bones.
iii
And virtue? Virtue lies in the heroic response to the creative wonder, the utmost response.
D. H. Lawrence
Death in the grassblade
a dull
substance, heading blindly
for the bone
virtue,
svireet grapes sour to the children’s children.
We breathe an ill wind,
nevertheless our kind
in mushroom multitudes
jostles for elbow-room
moonwards
an equalization of
hazards
bringing the poet
back to song
as before
to sing of death
as before
and life, while he
has it, energy
being in him a singing,
a beating of gongs, efficacious
to drive away devils,
response to
the wonder that
as before
shows a double face,
to be
what he is
being his virtue
filling his whole space
so no devil
may enter.
i
The day before he died, a burnt moth
come to town perhaps on a load of greens,
took me a half-hour out of my way, or what
I’d thought was my way. It lay bemused
on the third step down of the subway entrance.
I took it up—it scarcely fluttered. Where
should I take it for safety,
away from hasty feet and rough hands?
We went through the hot streets together,
it lay trustingly in my hand,
awkwardly I shielded it from the dusty
wind, a glitter of brine
hovered about the cement vistas.
At last I found
a scrap of green garden
to hide the stranger, and silently took leave.
Not his soul—
I knew that dwelled always on Russian earth
—yet it was spoken in me
that the dark, narrow-winged, richly
crimson-signed being, an
apparition at the steps to the underworld,
whose need took me upwards again and further than
I had thought to walk, was a word,
an emanation from him, fulfilling
what he had written—’I feel
that we shall be friends.’
Seen through what seem
his eyes (his gift) the gray barn
and the road into the forest,
the snipe’s dead young I am burying among
wild-strawberry leaves, all
lifts itself, poises itself to speak:
and the deaf soul
struggles, strains forward, to lip-read what it needs:
and something is said, quickly,
in words of cloud-shadows moving and
the unmoving turn of the road, something
not quite caught, but filtered
through some outpost of dreaming sense
the gist, the drift. I remember
a dream two nights ago: the voice,
’the artist must
create himself or be bom again.’
(after Jules Superoiette)
That sound, everywhere about us, of the sea—
the tree among its tresses has always heard it,
and the horse dips his black body in the sound
stretching his neck as if towards drinking water,
as if he were longing to leave the dunes and become
a mythic horse in the remotest distance,
joining the flock of foam-sheep—
fleeces made for vision alone—
to be indeed the son of these salt waters
and browse on algae in the deep fields.
But he must leam to wait, wait on the shore,
promising himself someday to the waves of the open sea,
putting his hope in certain death, lowering
his head again to the grass.
(after Jules Supervielle)
A poplar tree under the stars,
what can it do.
And the bird in the poplar tree
dreaming, his head
tucked into
far-and-near exile under his wing—
what can either of them
in their confused alliance of
leaves and feathers
do to avert destiny?
Silence and the
ring of forgetting
protect them until the moment when
the sun rises
and memory with it.
Then the bird
breaks with his beak the thread
of dream within him,
and the tree unrolls
the shadow that will guard it
throughout the day.
The head Byzantine or from
Fayyum, the shoulders naked,
a little of the
dark-haired breast visible
above the sheet,
from deep in the dark head
his smile glowing
outward into the
room’s severe twilight,
he lies, a dark-shadowed
mellow gold against
the flattened white pillow,
a gentle man—
strength and despair
quiet there in the bed,
the line of his limbs
half-shown, as under stone
or bronze folds.
The stairway is not
a thing of gleaming strands
a radiant evanescence
for angels’ feet that only glance in their tread, and need not
touch the stone.
It is of stone.
A rosy stone that takes
a glowing tone of softness
only because behind it the sky is a doubtful, a doubting
night gray.
A stairway of sharp
angles, solidly built.
One sees that the angels must spring
down from one step to the next, giving a little
lift of the wings:
and a man climbing
must scrape his knees, and bring
the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone
consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him.
The poem ascends.
The Muse
in her dark habit,
trim-waisted,
wades into deep water.
The spring where she
will fill her pitcher to the brim
wells out
below the lake’s surface, among
papyrus, where a stream
enters the lake and is crossed
by the bridge on which I stand.
She stoops
to gently dip and deep enough.
Her face resembles
the face of the young actress who played
Miss Annie Sullivan, she who
spelled the word ‘water’ into the palm
of Helen Keller, opening
the doors of the world.
In the baroque park,
transformed as I neared the water
to Valentines, a place of origin,
I stand on a bridge of one span
and see this calm act, this gathering up
of life, of spring water
and the Muse gliding then
in her barge without sails, without
oars or motor, across
the dark lake, and I know
no interpretation of these mysteries
although I know she is the Muse
and that the humble
tributary of Roding is
one with Alpheus, the god who as a river
flowed through the salt sea to his love’s well
so that my heart leaps
in wonder.
Cold, fresh, deep, I feel the word ‘water’
spelled in my left palm.
Months after the Muse
had come and gone across the lake of vision,
arose out of childhood the long-familiar
briefly forgotten presaging of her image—
'The Light of Truth’—frontispiece
to ‘Parables from Nature,’ 1894—a picture
intending another meaning than that which it gave
(for I never read the story until now)
intending to represent Folly
sinking into a black bog, but for me having meant
a mystery, of darkness, of beauty, of serious
dreaming pause and intensity
where not a will-o’-the-wisp but
a star come to earth burned before the
closed all-seeing eyes
of that figure later seen as the Muse.
By which I learn to affirm
Truth’s light at strangle turns of the mind’s road,
wrong turns that lead
over the border into wonder,
mistaken directions, forgotten signs
all bringing the soul’s travels to a place
of origin, a well
under the lake where the Muse moves.
i
Osip Mandelstam
With a glass of
boiled water
not yet cold
by a small stove
not giving out
much heat
he was sitting
and saying over
those green words
Laura and laurel
written in Avignon
when out of the somber
winter day entered
Death in green clothing
having traveled
by train and on foot
ten thousand kilometers to
this end,
and moving aside to give him
a place at the fire, the poet
made him welcome, asking
for news of home.
César Vallejo
Darling Death
shouted in his ear,
his ear made to record
the least, the most finespun
of worm-cries and
dragonfly-jubilations,
and with that courtesy he accorded
all clumsy living things
that stumble in broken boots
he bowed and
not flinching from her black breath
gave her his arm and
walked back with her the
way she had come and
turned the comer.
Melody
moving
downstream
a string of barges
just
lit
against blue evening, the fog
giving each light
a halo
moving with
the river but not
adrift, a little
faster perhaps
or is it
slower?—a
singing
sung if it is sung
quietly
within the scored
crashing and the
almost inaudible hum impinging
upon the river’s
seawardness
Zaddik, you showed me
the Stations of the Cross
and I saw
not what the almost abstract
tiles held—world upon world—
but at least
a shadow of what
might be seen there if mind and heart
gave themselves to meditation,
deeper
and deeper into Imagination’s
holy forest, as travelers
followed the Zohar’s dusty
shimmering roads, talking
with prophets and
hidden angels.
From the bus, Zaddik,
going home to New York,
I saw a new world
for a while—it was
the gold light on a rocky slope,
the road-constructors talking to each other,
bear-brown of winter woods, and later
lights of New Jersey factories and the vast
December moon. I saw
without words within me, saw
as if my eyes
had grown bigger and knew
how to look without
being told what it was they saw.
The clouds as I see them, rising
urgently, roseate in the
mounting of somber power
surging in evening haste over
roofs and hermetic
grim walls—
Last night
as if death had lit a pale light
in your flesh, your flesh
was cold to my touch, or not cold
but cool, cooling, as if the last traces
of warmth were still fading in you.
My thigh burned in cold fear where
yours touched it.
But I forced to mind my vision of a sky
close and enclosed, unlike the space in which these clouds move—
a sky of gray mist it appeared—
and how looking intently at it we saw
its gray was not gray but a milky white
in which radiant traces of opal greens,
fiery blues, gleamed, faded, gleamed again,
and how only then, seeing the color in the gray,
a field sprang into sight, extending
between where we stood and the horizon,
a field of freshest deep spiring grass
starred with dandelions,
green and gold
gold and green alternating in closewoven
chords, madrigal field.
Is death’s chill that visited our bed
other than what it seemed, is it
a gray to be watched keenly?
Wiping my glasses and leaning westward,
clearing my mind of the day’s mist and leaning
into myself to see
the colors of truth
I watch the clouds as I see them
in pomp advancing, pursuing
the fallen sun.
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me—a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.
This wild night, gathering the washing as if it were flowers
animal vines twisting over the line and
slapping my face lightly, soundless merriment
in the gesticulations of shirtsleeves,
I recall out of my joy a night of misery
walking in the dark and the wind over broken earth,
halfmade foundations and unfinished
drainage trenches and the spaced-out
circles of glaring light
marking streets that were to be,
walking with you but so far from you,
and now alone in October’s
first decision towards winter, so close to you—
my arms full of playful rebellious linen, a freighter
going down-river two blocks away, outward bound,
the green wolf-eyes of the Harborside Terminal
glittering on the Jersey shore,
and a train somewhere underground bringing you towards me
to our new living-place from which we can see
a river and its traffic (the Hudson and the
hidden river, who can say which it is we see, we see
something of both. Or who can say
the crippled broom-vendor yesterday, who passed
just as we needed a new broom, was not
one of the Hidden Ones?)
across the street on the cobbles,
and a brazier flaring
to warm the men and burn trash. He wished us
luck when we bought the broom. But not luck
brought us here. By design
clear air and cold wind polish
the river lights, by design
we are to live now in a new place.
To the house on the grassy hill
where rams rub their horns against the porch
and your bare feet on the floors of silence
speak in rhymed stanzas to the furniture,
solemn chests of drawers and heavy chairs
blinking in the sun you have let in!
Before I enter the rooms of your solitude
in my living form, trailing my shadow,
I shall have come unseen. Upstairs and down with you
and out across road and rocks to the river
to drink the cold spray. You will believe
a bird flew by the window, a wandering bee
buzzed in the hallway, a wind
rippled the bronze grasses. Or will you
know who it is?
To go by the asters
and breathe
the sweetness that hovers
in August about the tall milkweeds,
without a direct look, seeing
only obliquely what we know
is there—that
sets the heart beating fast!
And through
the field of goldenrod,
the lazily-humming waves of
standing hay, not to look up
at the sea-green bloom on the mountain—
the lips part, a sense
of languor and strength begins
to mount in us. The path leads
to the river pool, cold and
flashing with young trout. The sun
on my whiteness and your
tawny gold. Without looking
I see through my lashes the iridescence
on black curls of sexual hair.
Red tulips
living into their death
flushed with a wild blue
tulips
becoming wings
ears of the wind
jackrabbits rolling their eyes
west wind
shaking the loose pane
some petals fall
with that sound one
listens for
In Sabbath quiet, a street
of closed warehouses and wholesale silence,
Adam Misery, while the cop frisks him
lifts with both hands his lip and
drooping mustache to reveal
horse-teeth for inspection.
Nothing
is new to him and he is not afraid.
This is a world. As the artist
extends his world with
one gratuitous flourish—a stroke of white or
a run on the clarinet above the
bass tones of the orchestra—so he
ornaments his with
fresh contempt.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched—but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.
From love one takes
petal to rock and blesséd
away towards
descend,
one took thought
for frail tint and spectral
glisten, trusted
from way back that stillness,
one knew
that heart of fire, rose
at the core of gold glow,
could go down undiminished,
for love and
or if in fear knowing
the risk, knowing
what one is touching, one does it,
each part
of speech a spark
awaiting redemption, each
a virtue, a power
in abeyance unless we
give it care
our need designs in us. Then
all we have led away returns to us.
i
The authentic! Shadows of it
sweep past in dreams, one could say imprecisely,
evoking the almost-silent
ripping apart of giant
sheets of cellophane. No.
It thrusts up close. Exactly in dreams
it has you off-guard, you
recognize it before you have time.
For a second before waking
the alarm bell is a red conical hat, it
takes form.
ii
The authentic! I said
rising from the toilet seat.
The radiator in rhythmic knockings
spoke of the rising steam.
The authentic, I said
breaking the handle of my hairbrush as I
brushed my hair in
rhythmic strokes: That’s it,
that’s joy, it’s always
a recognition, the known
appearing fully itself, and
more itself than one knew.
iii
The new day rises
as heat rises.
with rhythms it seizes for its own
to speak of its invention—
the real, the new-laid
egg whose speckled shell
the poet fondles and must break
if he will be nourished.
iv
A shadow painted where
yes, a shadow must fall.
The cow’s breath
not forgotten in the mist, in the
words. Yes,
verisimilitude draws up
heat in us, zest
to follow through,
follow through,
follow
transformations of day
in its turning, in its becoming.
v
Stir the holy grains, set
the bowls on the table and
call the child to eat.
While we eat we think,
as we think an undercurrent
of dream runs through us
faster than thought
towards recognition.
send him off, his mouth
tasting of toothpaste, to go down
into the ground, into a roaring train
and to school.
His cheeks are pink
his black eyes hold his dreams, he has left
forgetting his glasses.
Follow down the stairs at a clatter
to give them to him and save
his clear sight.
Cold air
comes in at the street door.
vi
The authentic! It rolls
just out of reach, beyond
running feet and
stretching fingers, down
the green slope and into
the black waves of the sea.
Speak to me, little horse, beloved,
tell me
how to follow the iron ball,
how to follow through to the country
beneath the waves
to the place where I must kill you and you step out
of your bones and flystrewn meat
tall, smiling, renewed,
formed in your own likeness
Marvelous Truth, confront us
at every turn,
in every guise, iron ball,
egg, dark horse, shadow,
cloud
of breath on the air,
dwell
in our crowded hearts
our steaming bathrooms, kitchens full of
things to be done, the
ordinary streets.
Thrust close your smile
that we know you, terrible joy.
i When We Look Up
When we look up
each from his being
Robert Duncan
He had not looked,
pitiful man whom none
pity, whom all
must pity if they look
into their own face (given
only by glass, steel, water
barely known) all
who look up
to see—how many
faces? How many
seen in a lifetime? (Not those
that flash by, but those
into which the gaze wanders
and is lost
and returns to tell
Here is a mystery,
a person, an
other, an I?
Count them.
Who are five million?)
’I was used from the nursery
to obedience
Corpselike
obedience/ Yellow
calmed him later—
’a charming picture’
yellow of autumn leaves in
Wienerwald, a little
railroad station
nineteen-o-eight, Lemburg,
yellow sun
on the stepmother’s teatable
Franz Joseph’s beard
blessing his little ones.
It was the yellow
of the stars too,
stars that marked
those in whose faces
you had not
looked. They were cast out
as if they were
some animals, some beasts.’
’And what would disobedience
have brought me? And
whom would it have served?’
‘I did not let my thoughts
seen it and that was
enough.’ (The words
‘slur into a harsh babble’)
‘A spring of blood
gushed from the earth.’
Miracle
unsung. I see
a spring of blood gush from the earth—
Earth cannot swallow
so much at once
a fountain
rushes towards the sky
unrecognized
a sign—.
Pity this man who saw it
whose obedience continued—
he, you. I, which shall I say?
He stands
isolate in a bulletproof
witness-stand of glass,
a cage, where we may view
ourselves, an apparition
telling us something he
does not know: we are members
one of another.
The Danube orchards
are full of fruit
but in the city one tree
haunts a boy’s dreams
a tree in a villa garden
the Devil’s garden
a peach tree
and of its fruit one peach
calls to him
he sees it yellow and ripe
the vivid blood
bright in its round cheek
Next day he knows
he cannot withstand desire
it is no common fruit
it holds some secret
it speaks to the yellow star within him
he scales the wall
enters the garden of death
takes the peach
and death pounces
mister death who rushes out
from his villa
mister death who loves yellow
who wanted that yellow peach
for himself
mister death who signs papers
then eats
then eats
mister death who orders
more transports
then eats
he would have enjoyed
the sweetest of all the peaches on his tree
with sour-cream
with brandy
Son of David
’s blood, vivid red
and trampled juice
yellow and sweet
flow together beneath the tree
there is more blood than
sweet juice
always more blood—mister
death goes indoors
exhausted
From blacked-out streets
(wide avenues swept by curfew,
alleyways, veins
of dark within dark)
from houses whose walls
had for a long time known
the tense stretch of skin over bone
as their brick or stone listened—
The scream!
The awaited scream rises,
the shattering
of glass and the cracking
of bone
a polar tumult as when
black ice booms, knives
of ice and glass
splitting and splintering the silence into
innumerable screaming needles of
yes, now it is upon us, the jackboots
are running in spurts of
sudden blood-light through the
broken temples
the veils
are rent in twain
every scream
of fear is a white needle freezing the eyes
the floodlights of their trucks throw
jets of white, their shouts
cleave the wholeness of darkness into
sectors of transparent white-clouded pantomime
where all that was awaited
is happening, it is Crystal Night
it is Crystal Night
these spikes which are not
pitched in the range of common hearing
whistle through time
smashing the windows of sleep and dream
smashing the windows of history
a whiteness scattering
in hailstones
each a mirror
for man’s eyes.
Note: This poem is based on the earliest mention, during the trial, of this incident. In a later statement it was said that the fruit was cherries, that the boy was already in the garden, doing forced labor, when he was accused of taking the fruit, and that Eichmann killed him in a tool shed, not beneath the tree. The poem therefore is not to be taken as a report of what happened but of what I envisioned.
A blind man. I can stare at him
ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it?
No, he is in a great solitude.
O, strange joy,
to gaze my fill at a stranger’s face.
No, my thirst is greater than before.
In his world he is speaking
almost aloud. His lips move.
Anxiety plays about them. And now joy
of some sort trembles into a smile.
A breeze I can’t feel
crosses that face as if it crossed water.
The train moves uptown, pulls in and
pulls out of the local stops. Within its loud
jarring movement a quiet,
the quiet of people not speaking,
some of them eyeing the blind man,
only a moment though, not thirsty like me,
and within that quiet his
different quiet, not quiet at all, a tumult
of images, but what are his images,
he is blind? He doesn’t care
that he looks strange, showing
his thoughts on his face like designs of light
flickering on water, for he doesn’t know
what look is.
I see he has never seen.
And now he rises, he stands at the door ready,
knowing his station is next. Was he counting?
No, that was not his need.
When he gets out I get out.
‘Can I help you towards the exit?’
‘Oh, alright.’ An indifference.
But instantly, even as he speaks,
even as I hear indifference, his hand
goes out, waiting for me to take it.
and now we hold hands like children.
His hand is warm and not sweaty,
the grip firm, it feels good.
And when we have passed through the turnstile,
he going first, his hand at once
waits for mine again.
’Here are the steps. And here we turn
to the right. More stairs now.’ We go
up into sunlight. He feels that.
the soft air. ‘A nice day,
isn’t it?’ says the blind man. Solitude
walks with me, walks
beside me, he is not with me, he continues
his thoughts alone. But his hand and mine
know one another,
it’s as if my hand were gone forth
on its own journey. I see him
across the street, the blind man.
and now he says he can find his way. He knows
where he is going, it is nowhere, it is filled
with presences. He says, I am.