Withdrawn to a third your size, and frowning doubts,
you stare in silence through the afterdinner,
when wine takes our liberty and loosens tongues—
fair-face, ball-eyes, profile of a child,
except your eyelashes are always blacked,
each hair colored and quickened like tying a fly.
If a word amuses you, the room includes your voice,
you are audible; none can catch you out,
your flights are covered by a laughing croak—
a flowered dress lost in the flowered wall.
I am waiting like an angler with practice and courage;
the time to cast is now, and the mouth open,
the huge smile, head and shoulders of the dolphin—
I am swallowed up alive … I am.
Mulch of tired iron, bullet-stitch of straffing planes—
surely the great war of our youth was hollow;
still it had cleanness, now the smelly iron,
the war on reeds, the grand noyades of the rice-fields.
We promised to put back Liberty on her feet …
I can’t go on with this, the measure is gone:
a waterfall, the water white on green,
like the white letters on my olive keyboard—
to stray with you and have you with me straying,
flesh of my body, saved by our severalness—
you will not marry, though disloyal to woman
in your airy seizures of submission,
preferring to have your body broken to being
unbreakable in this breaking life.
The sky should be clearing, but it cannot lighten,
the unstable muck flies through the garden trees,
there’s morning in my heart but not in things.
We’ve almost made a marriage like our parents—
the poise of disaster! Our love means giving the wheel
a shake that scatters spurs of displaced bone
in the heel of the driver’s hand; it means to turn
right angle on ourselves, on our external star.
We might have married as Christ says man must not
in heaven where marriage is not, and giving
in marriage has the curse of God and Blake.
I am in bondage here, and cannot fly;
when marriage is surmounted, what is left?
“Heaven, if such things are,” you gruff into the phone.
Leaf-lace, a simple intricate design—
if you were not inside it, nothing much,
bits of glinting silver on crinkled lace—
you fall perhaps metallic and as good.
Hard to work out the fact that makes you good,
whole spirit wrought from toys and nondescript,
though nothing less than the best woman in the world.
Cold the green shadows, iron the seldom sun,
harvest has worn her swelling shirt to dirt.
Agony says we cannot live in one house,
or under a common name. This was the sentence—
I have lost everything. I feel a strength,
I have walked five miles, and still desire to throw
my feet off, be asleep with you … asleep and young.
This night and the last, I cannot play or sleep,
thinking of Grandfather in his last poor days.
Caroline, he had such naked nights,
and brought his tortures of the damned to breakfast—
when his son died, he made his grandchildren plant trees;
his blood lives, not his name.… We have our child,
our bastard, easily fathered, hard to name …
illegibly bracketed with us. My hand
sleeps in the bosom of your sleeping hands,
firm in the power of your impartial heat.
I’m not mad and hold to you with reason,
you carry our burden to the narrow strait,
this sleepless night that will not move, yet moves
unless by sleeping we think back yesterday.
This isn’t the final calm … as easily,
as naturally, the belly of the breeding
mother lifts to every breath in sleep—
I feel tomorrow like I feel today
in this gold lull of sleep … the muzzled lover
lies open, takes on the world for what it is,
a minute more than a minute … as many a writer
suffers illusions that his phrase might live:
power makes nothing final, words are deeds.
President Lincoln almost found this faith;
once a good ear perhaps could hear the heart
murmur in the square thick hide of Lenin
embalmed, wide-eyed in the lull that gives a mother
courage to be merciful to her child.
We wake too early, the sun’s already up,
the too early chain-twitter of the swallows fatigues,
words of a moment’s menace stay for life:
not that I wish you entirely well, far from it.
That was my green life, even heard through tears.…
We pack, leave Milgate, in a rush as usual
for the London train, leaving five lights burning—
to fool the burglar? Never the same five lights.
Sun never sets without our losing something,
keys, money—not everything. “Dear Caroline,
I have told Harriet that you are having a baby
by her father. She knows she will seldom see him;
the physical presence or absence is the thing.”—
a letter left in a page of a book and lost.
“I despair of letters. You say I wrote H. isn’t
interested in the thing happening to you now.
So what? A fantastic untruth, misprint, something;
I meant the London scene’s no big concern, just you.…
She’s absolutely beautiful, gay, etc.
I’ve a horror of turmoiling her before she flies
to Mexico, alone, brave, half Spanish-speaking.
Children her age don’t sit about talking the thing
about their parents. I do talk about you,
and I have never denied I miss you …
I guess we’ll make Washington this weekend;
it’s a demonstration, like all demonstrations,
repetitious, gratuitous, unfresh … just needed.
I hope nothing is mis-said in this letter.”
Your heavier breathing moves a lighter heart,
the sun glows on past midnight on the meadow,
willing, even in England, to stretch the day.
I stand on my head, the landscape keeps its place,
though heaven has changed. Conscience incurable
convinces me I am not writing my life;
life never assures which part of ourself is life.
Ours was never a book, though sparks of it
spotted the page with superficial burns:
the fiction I colored with first-hand evidence,
letters and talk I marketed as fiction—
but what is true or false tomorrow when surgeons
let out the pus, and crowd the circus to see us
disembowelled for our afterlife?
A sweetish smell of shavings, wax and oil
blows through the redone bedroom newly aged;
the sun in heaven enflames a sanded floor.
Age is our reconciliation with dullness,
my varnish complaining, I will never die.
I still remember more things than I forgo:
once it was the equivalent of everlasting
to stay loyal to my other person loved—
in the fallen apple lurked a breath of spirits,
the uninhabitable granite shone
in Maine, each rock our common gravestone.…
I sit with my staring wife, children … the dour Kent sky
a smudge of mushroom. In temperate years the grass
stays green through New Year—I, my wife, our children.
For weeks, now months, the year in burden goes,
a happiness so slow burning, it is lasting;
our animated nettles are black slash
by August. Today I leaned through lunch on my elbows,
watching my nose bleed red lacquer on the grass;
I see, smell and taste blood in everything—
I almost imagine your experience mine.
This year by miracle, you’ve jumped from 38
to 40, joined your elders who can judge:
woman has never forgiven man her blood.
Sometimes the indictment dies in your forgetting.
You move on crutches into your ninth month,
you break things now almost globular—
love in your fullness of flesh and heart and humor.
I ask doggishly into your face—
dogs live on guesswork, heavens of submission,
but only the future answers all our lies—
has perfect vision. A generation back,
Harriet was this burdensome questionmark—
we had nowhere then to step back and judge the picture.…
I fish up my old words, Dear and Dear Ones;
the dealer repeats his waterfall of cards—
will the lucky number I threw down
come twice? Living is not a numbers game,
a poor game for a father when I am one.…
I eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes up here,
I’ll get my books back when we’ve lived together—
in this room on which all other rocks bear down.
Your midnight ambulances, the first knife-saw
of the child, feet-first, a string of tobacco tied
to your throat that won’t go down, your window heaped
with brown paper bags leaking peaches and avocados,
your meals tasting like Kleenex … too much blood is seeping …
after twelve hours of labor to come out right,
in less than thirty seconds swimming the blood-flood:
Little Gingersnap Man, homoform,
flat and sore and alcoholic red,
only like us in owning to middle-age.
“If you touch him, he’ll burn your fingers.”
“It’s his health, not fever. Why are the other babies so pallid?
His navy-blue eyes tip with his head.… Darling,
we have escaped our death-struggle with our lives.”
This morning the overhanging clouds are piecrust,
milelong Luxor Temples based on rich runny ooze;
my old life settles down into the archives.
It’s strange having a child today, though common,
adding our further complication to
intense fragility.
Clouds go from dull to dazzle all the morning;
we have not grown as our child did in the womb,
met Satan like Milton going blind in London;
it’s enough to wake without old fears,
and watch the needle-fire of the first light
bombarding off your eyelids harmlessly.
By ten the bedroom is sultry. You have double-breathed;
we are many, our bed smells of hay.
So country-alone, and O so very friendly,
our heaviness lifted from us by the night …
we dance out into its diamond suburbia,
and see the hill-crown’s unrestricted lights—
all day these encroaching neighbors are out of sight.
Huge smudge sheep in burden becloud the grass,
they swell on moonlight and weigh two hundred pounds—
hulky as you in your white sheep-coat, as nervous to gallop.…
The Christ-Child’s drifter shepherds have left this field,
gone the shepherd’s breezy too predictable pipe.
Nothing’s out of earshot in this daylong night;
nothing can be human without man.
What is worse than hearing the late-born child crying—
and each morning waking up glad we wake?
This morning in oystery Colchester, a single
skeleton black rose sways on my flour-sack window—
Hokusai’s hairfine assertion of dearth.
It wrings a cry of absence.… My host’s new date,
apparently naked, carrying all her clothes
sways through the dawn in my bedroom to the shower.
Goodmorning. My nose runs, I feel for my blood,
happy you save mine and hand it on,
now death becomes an ingredient of my being—
my Mother and Father dying young and sixty
with the nervous systems of a child of six.…
I lie thinking myself to night internalized;
when I open the window, the black rose-leaves
return to inconstant greenness. A good morning, as often.