We know only our actions and our sleep
In a country where the children weep
For parents who are dead. To watch we must
Hold a pose, always learn, for we distrust
The weaker stance; we must among the poor
Observe their suffering near ourselves, tour
The galleries of the Louvre, before we stand
Among our buildings with our lives in hand
Impoverishing the present with our ends,
For no one gives; alone the torturer lends.
As is the risk with love, love extends;
When lovers’ needs are one, one love depends,
For quick as burning straw our thoughts succumb
To brief desires the winds in coldness drum
Upon cold trees, and the larger embrace
Becomes the small, and thinking is a place
To go, because the sun will not dry the sea,
And I may love, but you may love to be
In dying gardens where the dying meet,
Though I may be wandering on a street
Where nothing remains but the quick defeat,
Where your eyes darkly seek the stars for heat
In empty mirrors that mark the striking hour
In empty rooms. On highways dogs devour
Pain, stalking hope back to an aimless night
Of buyers and sellers in dancehall light.
We masque with looks of love deceiving,
Our memories grown old, drag the sea weaving
Great shells, amid shrieking gulls, and word
Each object of regret, as screams once heard,
Forgotten in the brass delays. One bird
Separates in a wilderness. A stilled herd
Moves slowly as a hand, and political man,
Unloved, denies, discovers his plan,
Reflects: we are placed as stones, our skin torn
Souls allow the seasons, as man, the first born
Hour in a wasted day, gives love to sell
And works to hide, hides desire where he dwells,
With fears of questions, and the separate room;
Love needs love dying, rejects the tomb.
We live, without a color, as a cold bloom
Breathing, breathing till one blossom and doom
Cast spring upon the ground and open wide
Her thighs from dawn till night, till she can’t hide
The moaning of her breasts and lips, still seas forth-
Splash night across her in her arms, till North
Leaves flowers, and dead children can not weep
Their dead lives, and beauty is just sleep.
Love and all we will never see or be,
Rests on this shore, then softly drifts out to sea.
(Nowhere tending the white graves, the clown,
So high upon a mountain you can’t see up or down.)
Let me begin, if I could begin, now,
If you or conscience would allow the vow,
I could bring you clear water from the sea
And say I bring you not a part of me,
But the beauty I can in a day observe,
Some useless gift on evening’s curve,
These words, all things that disappear in space,
Before tipping the sunlight on your face,
I bring you the things I can’t forget,
Though now we kiss, (perhaps we have not met).
Since days become as sounds within the night,
Whatever gives love permanence is right.
What part of reason is left behind?
Does fear clarify necessity and kind?
We’ve lived in a circle of the missing,
Of physical time, and emotional time, and kissing;
So terror leaves us to calculate,
A segment of our mood, the date,
How history has flung events upon the floor,
What the coroners of time deplore:
Our souls, our labors, the declined roulette
Of buying, selling, murder, and the sign “to let.”
Paris, 1948
The hope of our lives is life to speak;
Oh God and children and all things now unreal,
What does the brightness of the sun conceal?
Beauty lies exhausted and hot skies shriek,
The idiot highways up and down a hill,
Are not so still, as we who live by will.
Our dulled hands must hold roundness to the earth,
And scrape with flat claws at time’s decay;
We create mornings and destroy a day,
And sail fast seas and hide the fields in birth
Among the seasons and a frightened day;
The sun breaks, and the winds blow winds away.
I do not want within my life to look,
Nor mark the prisms of my life with light,
How frightened were your kisses in the night,
How gentle was your yearning that I took,
And when you left there was no tolling bell,
There were no secrets left we could not tell.
A violent star may kill but can’t compel
A star. We sing to thoughts. We cannot see.
We have seen the dark and know the dark must be
Within the shadows where the sunlight fell.
No one sees frozen lakes begin to melt,
We feel and slowly feeling is not felt.
This plain of sighs has known the whole concourse
Of the sun, this second of eternity
Contained here, to unpray a God, arranged
By wisdom, an unlit room to stare within,
And see love scald darling, and work chide death;
What bodies, what commerce of emotions,
Have lain their jaws across this graveless sprawl,
Watering their bones to salt, and their hopes
Pale, paler, till another midnight burns.
Blue sun darkens the sea with frozen leaves
As the fierce dawn storm begins, onto itself
Inflecting its own system and its rage.
And we so weak, see only reflections
Of our lives, seek logical requirement
Of wind worn waves, grasp iron, or rails, or rust,
Unchurch philosophy, whelp after prayer
That it leave us unharmed; we watchman’s fears,
Become belief and temperament. O tides,
I have stood a moment near your roaming
To choose my small disasters and my plans.
How suddenly exhausted, singed and empty as shells broken.
How is where, is nowhere.
Nothing left.
Yet like a fire just out,
We could soar again through forest—
But for a breath of air.
We can get on a train
Leave every face we have known
To go to a hotel register,
Accept the name of the first name in the directory,
Would be called that name. We could be known as anyone,
Shall we do this in a form listening to our words?
How suddenly exhausted, clinging lovers, empty as shells broken.
Peering under rocks and covers, for our lovers;
The atom bomb, the stock exchange and subway shovers,
Kiss them all as you would kiss your darling’s breast,
And the rest. We love what we are most with; we are these,
Our myths, filed away in drawers of Dupont and tanks of Shell.
Tell and tell me darling that you love me like a breeze,
That you will give me yesterday and today all I please,
As you please. That we can sing like Mozart arias, in a cell
Among the trees, and sit looking at one another,
Though the gentle may more gently smother,
From time to time we love no other,
So little is left of time’s thin cover
Or of rhymes.
We are what we believe, though we make believe
And cannot often grin, we are water falling
In laughter at summer falling after.
So in haste we often sin.
Thinking what is right,
What do I want.
What’s on tonight?
We hunt.
Until one day, someplace, anywhere,
As weather,
(Since we care),
We have smoothed a stone,
We live a moment of a poem.
One thought, you and I are cut as if by broken glass!
Wherever I am, I am not.
Only the sun can lie upon the grass,
Nothing is enough, whatever is, is not.
I lie upon my life and stumble home,
As stars we fall alone; if cold nights pass
Simple, we lead our souls in humble riot;
Since once we were now we cannot become.
You are winter, and the sun is like a slum.
Now spring has gone and we are left instead;
Chance neither made us meet nor separate,
Since illogical love must die in bed,
Since night is old the sun is always late.
I will not speak of places out of sight,
Nor ask for things unknown, nor what is dead,
For loving is real, more real than love or state . . .
O, if the wise and courageous hold the light,
Why don’t they lie closer in bed at night?
What frozen, broken, windless, eyeless day,
Has left us to these circles we must solve,
Counting umbrellas in the rain. Now play
No more. Weeds choke the drowners they involve,
And we emerge carelessly as light.
Now to speak of next spring and where it moves,
From season to season though love can’t stay,
I am as loving is, pain is my sight;
Where do you wake this morning, where shall I go tonight?
It is nothingness I carve as wood,
(Who dared to make me this, to speak of this?)
Once left no love is understood;
No love is pure, revenge is touch or kiss,
Unless I say, I give you this. We’re strange,
(How much can we lose, how much can we miss?)
One death and love’s away! I’d love if I could
Though close as laughter I in haste arrange.
I learn to see the sun at night, and change.
Time take me now, I begin with prisons,
Moon’s sleeve of cold dressing me
Death making me naked for play;
Time is escape, I’ll take time to my bed.
One man heavily is confined by his life,
Another jump sharply to break the sky,
Each feels the sun’s body bone by bone,
Eyes the whole sun, thuds into his grave.
Time take me now into your wheelbarrow,
Into your tomb, across the yard, pack me
With flowers, hay, manure, stone,
And wheel me away from the heap.
Does a wild substance remain? Out of time
At any angle or precipice, is time
Diminished? I roll down the sun-high leap
To practice difficult passages.
Wind, ropes and tackles drag me,
I drop the mumbling roots
All things on earth have warmth within,
And love willing make a comfortable bed.
Love passes through us as light through a window,
Though we love first in an unknown country,
Run to each other and forget our voyage,
Forget readers can’t see the future,
That love is not for desperate people,
Who have in their eyes a terrible blackness.
The ships go nowhere holding helpless people
Who leave loves and hates to make the feared voyage
To what they can not find in another country,
Past dirty rivers, and cities of blackness,
Past hall lights left unlit behind a window;
Even readers have lost the future.
Measuring past time is measuring future.
No history will wait for its lost people,
Nor can lovers look from behind a window
At the silent sea of a lover’s voyage,
Where they can find no one in the blackness,
Nothing but themselves in a foreign country.
The cold migrant winds know there is no country,
Where there is more than the past and future.
There is only ourselves in the crowd’s blackness,
Nothing to find but our work and our people,
No one to love on the desperate voyage,
Nothing can be seen from an unseen window.
Who will sleep beside the night in the blackness,
Who can watch nothing but the empty window
Casting its shadow on the frightened people;
Only travelers in a dead country,
Where the past comes twice, but only one future,
And sorrow is the compass for the voyage.
We have never returned from our first voyage,
Never met out of the earliest blackness,
We have long forgot that we want the future,
Though we stand quite still and wait at the window,
Though no one stays who can walk in the country,
No one to walk with among the people.
Among the people who took your cold voyage,
In a foreign country, past distant blackness
Behind your window, you are now the future.
Born where the hill is fertile, on soiled earth,
Past the flesh’s soft valley, we stray from home,
Peer across pale streams, frightened as we rise
On a curve of highway burned with moonlight.
Breathing nothing but sky we stare ahead,
Monotony: where weeds and woods destroy,
Where nothing lives but those who hide from death;
We raise a wooden dish and drink the night.
Railroads are close now emptied of people,
Our wrists, our arms our muscles: without hands;
Clerks without cities, watch ships sail no where,
We are statues left in the marketplace.
At dawn as workmen we wake the coldness,
Explore the salt skeleton of our cells;
Paled, our wills as children are not for sale.
The reefs, the seas, the shores, are laughing now.
Some leopards in the zoo sleep and fold night
Within their eyes, blind the days where suns flow,
Rip the throat of air. In the soft darkness
The impossible sunken soul is god.
Yesterday we kissed the surface of lakes,
To threaten the young peasants and their flocks
Who lie in the cold morning and hot noon
As one. Time became a church though we watched
Its benediction of machines and pain.
Each day, each unknown hour we stray alone;
We race, braid vines and solitude, sing songs
Without names or words, in place of change.
We dare not return. How gently we still kiss,
Exchange our quietest thoughts as gifts. We see
The last day, and love beneath the first sky,
And language is not dead though no one speaks.
VISITING THE EGYPTIAN ROOMS OF THE LOUVRE
Angular Egypt lived for the dead,
its city silent in chains like the Nile,
the monuments stiff, the words eyes;
what could an incestuous pharaoh dream
entering a triangle for eternity?
Was this death round? It fit the human form,
as life went flat and outward, it held the curve.
Despite the hook and whip Osiris arranged
the heavy dead kept shifting into view.
For the dead they broke stone, cut, carved,
—down the ages, baked cake, flayed hides,
burnished mirrors. The fisherman mended his nets,
the sailor stood watch not noticing the sea;
the thumb print in clay became a painted vessel,
and the sarcophagus, the fountain in the square,
till carelessly death the mastercraftsman,
taught his apprentice to finish the work.
A word, I have a life to speak.
From a nearby field a cowbell
is more cathedral than my life real.
The earth’s serpent strikes, time shrieks
not I, not I, a hawk in the sky shrieks,
wings: bad day, good day, good day, bad day.
I find death less holy than birth.
I play it small, but large and inclined to leak
I school myself in what is peace on earth;
largely now for my meter’s sake,
I sound my cowbell along the way,
I chew my cud, tongue a salt lick—
I’m sick of death. The day lives another day.
The winds blow down Jehovah, Christ and all his men.
Good old God, I shall not see His like again.
A SONG AND DANCE FOR AARON AND ANTONIA
Something early in him
Married something late in her,
Something separate in her
Married something joined in him.
Something free in her
Married something imprisoned in him,
Something warm in her
Whirled around something wintry in him.
Something weeping in her
Married something laughing in him,
His joy leapt over her sorrow,
Her sorrow leapt over his joy.
Something ending in him
Whispered to something beginning in her,
Something beginning in him
Whispered to something ending in her.
Something loving in her
Married something loveless in him,
Something loving in him
Married something loveless in her.
Something singing in her
Married something singing in him,
Something dancing in him
Married something dancing in her.
In democratic Boston
Apollo, unchallenged at music,
Plays at the wedding feast
Eros and Dionysus dance in the vineyard.
The Angel of Separation
Walks alone on the Commons.
Peace for this poor earth; this plant, bloom
Of dreaming dogs in swimless swirls of intellect,
Peace in drunken gardens where butterflies swoon
Into a sun, living one day, and dying in puddles
Of that night—wing and blood, a flowered sail wrecked
While God stands for a moment at the window and red bells
Ring. Beside a fountain lovers drink wines
Of the loveless ages formless in each glass, in peace
Praying their lips to kiss, but the future of oceans, times
Of wanton voyages, the sounds of space, their silent sun,
All stale, slain on the beach of no where. O peace
Do not touch my skull, for had I words I’d run
Beneath a sun of fable and fire, romping toward pinwheels
Of things unknown and things beautiful, break
Around the Capes of Good Hope and Horn
While love grows as grapes, naked earth steals
Naked to my arms and the chapels of each morning
Become a harbor where ships of night, dark and Godlike,
float to the playing children on the shore. For death is worn,
And spawning blood sets fire to the wind and trees,
And fishermen lift their nets, hoist death weeping,
Tossing death twinkling as a small coin into the profitless seas.
I wish I had a room with a bed, a flower pot, and a windowsill.
I could rest my head upon the floor and not strong or weak
Conceive a world that unconceived is happier still;
Bailing sun from the day, taking part in no anyway or anywhere,
To speak of happiness, to hear it purr, cough, reek
The breath of hour after hour, lung and blood bare
To sunlight, time, song to song and silences to wit,
Of sorrow: to scold its wail, crack, ruin it, flare
Against its eyes, give it horns, and I not wanting this will hit
Its face with a rail of stars, and twirls upon its brows the moon,
And light darkness with wild fires a cold wind lit.
My mood is animal that cannot roughly sleep in candlelight.
Cold seas to ashes, trees and leaves over this, and moon,
At the end coming closer but in this ending no ruin
Of winter or its sky in winter walls beneath the snow,
No corpse of leaf or paper, now weaving dead sunlight
This hand that never weaved, no snow to lie beneath and know.
Name, place, date, particular,
I’m right here, and you are where you are.
Jump into Ophelia’s grave if you think
Love is confined
to the smallest gesture,
is always faithful,
alone and grateful, will live beyond
our death and dreaming
though death is handsome
when beauty falters.
Love has no children,
no tears, no trophies,
when life is spilling
its death is gentle,
already thinking
as worms and beetles
which stone is gayer?
which root is laughter?
To Edward Field
Under the sun,
the haystacks are yours, you did the work,
you knew how to keep them from the rain,
the timothy, dried grasses, and blue weed.
The roof is mine, my roof of loose nails and wire,
boards that don’t join the sills or floor.
The haystacks are yours, the lightning rod
mine. I don’t know how to direct
lightning into the ground. The cellar is mine,
the drains and gutters. Which pipe leads
to the septic tank, which to the well?
I bow to the screendoors I cannot fix,
the organization of sockets and circuit breakers,
the darkness of closets and crawl space,
and my friend, I bow to your haystacks
that have already lasted two weeks of summer,
and are meant for the deer in winter
when they come down from the mountain.
Now the earth has been still for many days,
Runners are drowned along the roads
Where they sense death
Without understanding.
They open their arms above their heads,
Reach to some mouthless monument,
As though people pass.
In other days, when thought was real,
I saw wildfire’s hiding place.
Wild horses running hard on snow,
And then I took my hand,
And cried under the hand’s face.
Within one heart a roadside,
I remember lying drunk,
Sipping a potion of yellow sky,
Searching the mind, the earth, the land, for adventure,
In the mornings, beautiful mornings
The trees were pale as wheat in the sun,
And the dancers walked alone upon the streets.
In spring a woman can run from love,
Or draw her lover closer to her.
She can lie across the hot mountain of morning,
Make life a gentle ceremony,
Pass her lips into forgetfulness.
And the tree upon which she leans,
A tree can be a winged chime, or a clock,
Iron, and wet marble, or her lover’s hand.
Her children can be born from darkness,
Or some fierce closet
Where pain beats the sky into the sea,
Or she may add children to some rough farm,
While the stiffened men stare away.
Yet always woman remains the creature first refused,
And when one died, I saw another woman
Take a stone onto her breast, as if it were a grave;
Then even the earth was forgotten,
And the church was a great forest.
Lady of turquoise I believe
in the land where men are never wrong,
flowers do not bloom in spring.
I look for strangers, I listen for birdsong.
I need winter, summer, fall and spring.
I believe the right way to grieve
for the dead is to rejoice for the living.
I’ve jumped into the Atlantic and Pacific,
but I do not know how they jumped from hieroglyphic
to consonants and vowels, from polytheistic
to monotheistic. Blinded by sandstorm,
they found their way from cuneiform.
Moses did his trick
with a snake and walking stick.
Long before there was a fishnet,
there was forgiveness and an alphabet.