1
I find it now, the schoolhouse by the tree,
And through the broken door, in brown light,
I see the benches in rows, the floor he
Paced across, the windows where the fruit
Took the shapes of hearts, and the leaves windled
In the fall, and winter snowed on his head.
In this wreck of a house we were taught
Everything we thought a man could know,
All action, all passion, all ancient thought,
What Socrates had got from Diotima,
How Troilus laughed, in tears, in paradise,
That crowns leapfrog through blood: casts of the dice.
The door hangs from one hinge. Maybe the last
Schoolboy simply forgot to lift the latch
When he rushed out that spring, in his haste—
Or maybe that same boy, now fat and rich,
Snow-haired in his turn, and plagued by thought,
Bulled his way back in, looking for the dead light.
2
A man of letters once asked the local tramps
To tea. No one came, and he read from Otway
And Chatterton to the walls, and lived for months
On the crumpets. They padlocked the gate when he died.
Snow, sleet, rain, piss of tramps, until one year
The lock snapped, the hinges rasped like roosters.
And now when the tramps, waking sheeted in frost,
Know it is time, they come here and sprawl
At the foot of the statue they think is of their host,
Which they call “His Better Self,” which he had called
“Knowledge,” sometimes “Death,” whose one gesture
Seems to beckon and yet remains obscure,
And boil their tea on the floor and pick fruit
In the garden where he used to walk
Thinking of Eden and the fallen state,
And dust an apple as he had a book—
“Hey now Porky, gie’s the core,” one hollers;
“Wise up,” says Pork, “they ain’t gonna be a core.”
3
I hear modern schoolchildren shine their pants
In buttock-soothing seats in steamy schools
Soaking up civics and vacant events
From innocents who sponge periodicals
And clop-clop the stuff out again in chalky gray
Across the blackboards of the modern day;
Yet they can guess why we fled our benches
Afternoons when we ourselves were just nice
Schoolkids too, who peered out through the branches
For one homely share of the centuries,
Fighting in Latin the wars of the Greeks,
Our green days, the apple we picked and picked
And that was never ours; though they would
Rake their skulls if they found out we returned
By free choice to this house of the dead,
And stand wondering what he could have learned,
His eyes great pupils and his fishhook teeth
Sunk in the apple of knowledge or death.
4
I recall a recitation in that house:
“We are the school of Hellas was the claim.
Maybe it was so. Anyway Hellas
Thought it wasn’t, and put the school to flame.
They came back, though, and scavenged the ruins.”
I think the first inkling of the lesson
Was when we watched him from the apple wrest
Something that put the notion in his brain
The earth was coming to its beautifulest
And would be like paradise again
The day he died from it. The flames went out
In their blue mantles; he waved us to the night—
And we are here, under the starlight. I
Remember he taught us the stars disperse
In wild flight, though constellated to the eye.
Now I can almost see the night in its course,
The slow sky uncoiling in exploding forms,
The stars that flee it riding free in its arms.
1
Jack the Blindman, whose violin
Through the harsh weathers of the street
Lifted a scraping bright and sweet,
Joked the gloomier bars of every tune;
But hardly a dime ever dropped there
And he cupped faith in the clankless air.
Connelly, one-eyed, half blind,
Finding the world blind, in full view
Like wind blew ropes and fences through.
Ticketless at the stiles of the mind
We ask his hope: down, and out,
To swear, “If scum swims to the top of the sauerkraut . . .”
They didn’t sign up at the desk
Or queue at the bed, though they clapped
The night you bumped and shook and slapped
And ground for free your smart burlesque,
Peaches. We call it mercy when
You give and get nothing and give again.
Tossing in dreams young David Boyle
Could not evade the call of the Lord
For the meek life. He woke and poured
Over his heart the scalding oil
Of temperance. Now in his sleep
He yells aloud to God to let him sleep.
Justice made James Lynch Fitzstephen
Hang from a tree his guilty son;
His heart, twice guilty then,
Hanged itself in his skeleton.
Even Cicero would have known
The unjust who are just are just mad bone.
Natasha, who billowed like silk
On a pole of fire, and weeping went
To one who scrapes the burning tent
While he puffs Luckies and sips milk,
And came home like an empty cage
To find home yet emptier, tried courage.
Sir Henry, seeing that the dew
Gets burned each morning into mist,
Decided fire brings out the best
In things, and that anyone who
Cooks his eyes at the sunrise
Of the beautiful, and renders himself blind, is wise.
2
In darkness I climbed Ben Nevis, far from
Your lives. But the seven streams I came on
Were well foreknown. One sang like strings, one crashed
Through gated rocks, one vibrated, others
Went skipping like unbucketed oil across
Hot stones, or clattered like bones, or like milk
Spilled and billowed in streamers of bright silk:
Irises glimmering a visionary course,
Me grimping the dark, sniffing for the source;
And there I found it windless, lying still,
Dark, high-nested in the mountain, a pool
Whose shined waters on the blackened mountain
Held the black skies; and I rode out on the water
And the waves ringing through the dark were rings
Around the eye itself of the world, which,
Drawing down heaven like its black lid, was there
Where merely to be still was temperate,
Where to move was brave, where justice was a glide,
Knowledge the dissolving of the head-hung eyes;
And there my faith lay burning, there my hope
Was burning on the water, there charity
Burned like a sun. Oh give, O pool of heaven,
The locus of grace to seven who are whirled
Down the eddies and gutters of the world;
And Connelly and Jack and Peaches, Dave,
Lynch, Natalie, and Hank—seven who have
Bit on your hearts, and spat the gravels of
Tooth and heart, and bit again; who have wiped
The burst jellies of eyes on a sleeve
(The visions that could have been wrung from that cloth)
And sprouted sight like mushrooms—O seven
Streams of nothing backgazing after heaven,
In the heart’s hell you have it, it is called God’s Love.
1
Nailed by our axes to the snow
We belayed. One by one we climbed.
Had somebody in the valley
Been looking up, it must have seemed
A crazed earthworm headed for paradise,
Or else, if he happened to rub his eyes
While we unroped, and to look back
When we had scattered in the race
For the crest, an ascension of crows.
I took the crest as the day broke,
Sure I was first. But Jan must have leapt
The crevasse for a shortcut: he lay there,
Blue lips apart, on the blue snow,
Sprawled on the shellbursts of his heart.
“It’s time it went,” he gasped. Four years
He had fought in the guerrilla wars.
Then he whispered, “Look—the sunrise!”
The same color and nearly the same size,
But behind his back, the sun
Was rising. When the moon he was
Staring at set in the mountains
He died. On the way back the ice
Had turned so perilous under the sun
There was no choice: we watched while he went down.
2
In Seekonk Woods, on Indian Hill,
It used to seem the branches made
A small green sky that gave off shade.
Once while I lay buried like a quail
In the grass and shadows, a shotgun
Banged, leaves burst, I blinked into the sunshine—
Two crows blown out from either hand
Went clattering away; a third
Thumped through the branches to the ground.
I scooped it up, splashed across the ford,
And lit out—I must have run half a day
Before I reached Holy Spring. (Anyway,
I thought it was holy. No one
Had told me heaven is overhead.
I only knew people look down
When they pray.) I held the dying bird
As though, should its heartbeat falter,
There wouldn’t be any heartbeat anywhere.
After a while I touched the plumes
To the water. In the desert
By the tracks I dug a headstart
Taller than myself. I told him,
“Have a good journey. It can’t be far.
It’ll be well this side of China, for sure.”
3
And had I faced Jan to the sun
Might not the sun have held him here?
Or did he know the day came on
Behind, not glancing back for fear
The full moon already was dragging from his bones
The blood as dear to them, and as alien,
As clothes to a scarecrow
Or flesh to a cross? Down snow,
Following streambeds through the trees,
We sledded him. To his valleys
Rivers have washed this adept of the sun
The moon pestled into earth again.
Heaven is in light, overhead,
I have it by heart. Yet the dead
Silting the darkness do not ask
For burials elsewhere than the dusk.
They lie where nothing but the moon can rise,
And make no claims, though they had promises.
Milkweed that grow beside the tombs
Climb from the dead as if in flight,
But a foot high they stop and bloom
In drab shapes, that neither give light
Nor bring up the true darkness of the dead;
Strange, homing lamps, that go out seed by seed.
4
I looked for Indian Hill at Easter.
It was bulldozed. A TV cross
Gleamed from the rooftop of a house
Like sticks of a scarecrow. Once more
I turned and ran: I stumbled on
Fields lying dark and savage and the sun
Reaping its own fire from the trees,
Whirling the faint panic of birds
Up turbulent light. Two white-haired
Crows cried under the wheeling rays;
And loosed as by a scythe, into the sky
A flight of jackdaws rose, earth-birds suddenly
Seized by some thaumaturgic thirst,
Shrill wings flung up the crow-clawed, burned,
Unappeasable air. And then one turned,
Dodged through the flock again, and burst
Eastward alone, sinking across the trees
On the world-curve of its wings. So it is,
Mirrored in duskfloods, the fisherbird
Stands in a desolate sky
Feeding at its own heart. In the cry
Eloi! Eloi! flesh was made word:
We hear it in wind catching in the branches.
In lost blood breaking a night through the bones.
1
The snow revives in the apple trees;
The winter sun seeps from jonquils
Bright as goldmills on the slopes;
Le chemin montant dans les hautes herbes
Curves for the Alps and vanishes.
2
Pierre le Boiteux
—Yellow teeth
Gnashed into gum-level
Stumps, yellow
Eyes beaconing about,
A blackhead the size
Of a huckleberry
Making a cheek sag,
A leg gypsies
Cut the tendon of
So he could beg better as a child
Pumping under him,
Twelve goats at heel—
Mounts the track,
Limping through the wild
Grasses—toward where?
3
The track vanishes in a heap of stones
Mortared by weeds and wildflowers—
The fallen church. Nearby stand stones
Of the parish graves, dates worn away,
A handful of carved words visible:
Jacques et Geneviève, priez pour eux—
Véronique DuPrès, regrets éternels—
Sown here even to their fingertips.
Who was it wore the track through the grass?
Surely their mourners are dead, and theirs, and theirs.
Perhaps Pierre limps up every day
Training the goats where to come when it is time,
Foreseeing a terrible loneliness.
No one is lonely here: take Véronique—Jacques,
Husband of another, indifferently dissolves into her.
A skull or two, a couple of pelvises or knees.
4
My hand on the sky
Cannot shut the sky out
Any more than any March
Branch can. In the Boston Store
Once, I tried new shoes:
The shoeman put my feet
Into a machine, saying Kid
Wrig yer toes. I
Wrigged and peered:
Inside green shoes green
Twigs were wrigging by themselves
Green as the grasses
I drew from her
Hair in the springtime
While she laughed, unfoliaged
By sunlight, a little
Spray of bones I loved.
5
From villages lost in the valleys—
Moncharvet, St. Bon, La Jaura—
Thin braids of smoke waver upward
Through the clear air. A few lights
Come on, visible from the untracked snow
On the stairway to the Alps. Venus
Shines from the grave of the sun, like
The white gem churched again in its valley.
Once driving from Morristown at night,
We came over a crest: the Fish-Island
Breached shining under the strung-out stars
Of the Galaxy—a long way from Jacques
And Geneviève and Véronique in her prairie.
We stood there not thinking that for them
This would be a strange continent to be dying in,
This starry island under the continent of the stars—
Job’s Coffin and the Scorpion; Jacques
And Geneviève side by side in the field of light;
Capricorn, Ophiocus; the Serpent embracing
The unhinged knees, St. Bon heaped
In its molted skin; Le Fourmier the arms
Of Hercules; the Swan sailing toward Planay;
Moncharvet, La Jaura by the singing Lyre;
Véronique rocked on the Balances; Champ Béranger—
Fields into which the Herdsman limps
Leading his flock up the trackless night, toward
A writhing of lights. Are they Notre Dame des Neiges
Where men ask their God for the daily bread—
Or the March-climbing Virgin carrying wheat?
Where the track vanishes the first land begins.
It goes out everywhere obliterating the horizons.
We may have been walking through it all our lives.
1
We came to visit the cow
Dying of fever,
Towle said it was already
Shoveled under, in a secret
Burial-place in the woods.
We prowled through the woods
Weeks, we never
Found where. Other
Children other summers
Must have found the place
And asked, Why is it
Green here? The rich
Guess a grave, maybe,
The poor think a pit
For dung, like the one
We shoveled in in the fall,
That came up a brighter green
The next year, that
Could as well have been
The grave of a cow
Or something, for all that shows.
2
We found a cowskull once; we thought it was
From one of the asses in the Bible, for the sun
Shone into the holes through which it had seen
Earth as an endless belt carrying gravel, had heard
Its truculence cursed, had learned how human sweat
Stinks, and had brayed—shone into the holes
With solemn and majestic light, as if some
Skull somewhere could be Baalbek or the Parthenon.
That night passing Towle’s Barn
We saw lights. Towle had lassoed a calf
By its hind legs, and he tugged against the grip
Of the darkness. The cow stood by, chewing millet.
Derry and I took hold, too, and hauled.
It was sopping with darkness when it came free.
It was a bullcalf. The cow mopped it awhile,
And we walked around it with a lantern,
And it was sunburned, somehow, and beautiful.
It took a teat as the first business
And sneezed and drank at the milk of light.
When we got it balanced on its legs, it went wobbling
Toward the night. Walking home in darkness
We saw the July moon looking on Freedom, New Hampshire,
We smelled the fall in the air, it was the summer,
We thought, Oh this is but the summer!
3
Once I saw the moon
Drift into the sky like a bright
Pregnancy pared
From a goddess who had to
Keep slender to remain beautiful—
Cut loose, and drifting up there
To happen by itself—
And waning, in lost labor;
As we lost our labor
Too—afternoons
When we sat on the gate
By the pasture, under the Ledge,
Buzzing and skirling on toilet-
papered combs tunes
To the rumble-seated cars
Taking the Ossipee Road
On Sundays; for
Though dusk would come upon us
Where we sat, and though we had
Skirled out our hearts in the music,
Yet the not-yet dandruffed
Harps we skirled it on
Had done not much better than
Flies, which buzzed, when quick
We trapped them in our hands,
Which went silent when we
Crushed them, which we bore
Downhill to the meadowlark’s
Nest full of throats, which
Derry charmed and combed
With an Arabian air, while I
Chucked crushed flies into
Innards I could not see,
For the night had fallen
And the crickets shrilled on all sides
In waves, as if the grassleaves
Shrieked by hillsides
As they grew, and the stars
Made small flashes in the sky,
Like mica flashing in rocks
On the chokecherried Ledge
Where bees I stepped on once
Hit us from behind like a shotgun,
And where we could see
Windowpanes in Freedom flash
And Loon Lake and Winnipesaukee
Flash in the sun
And the blue world flashing.
4
The fingerprints of our eyeballs would zigzag
On the sky; the clouds that came drifting up
Our fingernails would drift into the thin air;
In bed at night there was music if you listened,
Of an old surf breaking far away in the blood.
Children who come by chance on grass green for a man
Can guess cow, dung, man, anything they want,
To them it is the same. To us who knew him as he was
After the beginning and before the end, it is green
For a name called out of the confusions of the earth—
Winnipesaukee coined like a moon, a bullcalf
Dragged from the darkness where it breaks up again,
Larks which long since have crashed for good in the grass
To which we fed the flies, buzzing ourselves like flies,
While the crickets shrilled beyond us, in July.
The mind may sort it out and give it names—
When a man dies he dies trying to say without slurring
The abruptly decaying sounds. It is true
That only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop
For men, cows, dung, for all dead things; and it is good, yes—
But an incarnation is in particular flesh
And the dust that is swirled into a shape
And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape
That was this man. When he is dead the grass
Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead,
And the few who loved him know this until they die.
For my brother, 1925–1957
1
The desert moves out on half the horizon
Rimming the illusory water which, among islands,
Bears up the sky. The sea scumbles in
From its own inviolate border under the sky.
A dragon-fly floating on six legs on the sand
Lifts its green-yellow tail, declines its wings
A little, flutters them a little, and lays
On dazzled sand the shadow of its wings. Near shore
A bather wades through his shadow in the water.
He tramples and kicks it; it recomposes.
2
Outside the open door
Of the whitewashed house,
Framed in the doorway, a chair,
Vacant, waits in the sunshine.
A jug of fresh water stands
Inside the door. In the sunshine
The chair waits, less and less vacant.
The host’s plan is to offer water, then stand aside.
3
They eat chicken, drink rosé. The chicken head
Has been tucked under the shelter of the wing.
Under the table a red-backed, passionate dog
Cracks chicken bones on the blood and gravel floor.
No one else but the dog and the blind
Cat watching it knows who is that bearded
Wild man guzzling overhead, the wreck of passion
Emptying his eyes, who has not yet smiled,
Who stares at the company, where he is company,
Turns them to sacks of appalled, grinning skin,
Forks the fowl-eye out from under
The large, makeshift, cooked lid, evaporates the wine,
Jellies the sunlit table and spoons, floats
The deluxe grub down the intestines of the Styx,
Devours all but the cat, to whom he slips scraps, and the dog,
The red-backed accomplice busy grinding gristle.
4
When the bones of the host
Crack in the hound’s jaw
The wild man rises. Opening
His palms he announces:
I came not to astonish
But to destroy you. Your
Jug of cool water? Your
Hanker after wings? Your
Lech for transcendence?
I came to prove you are
Intricate and simple things
As you are, created
In the image of nothing,
Taught of the creator
By your images in dirt—
As mine, for which you set
A chair in the sunshine,
Mocking me with water!
As pictures of wings,
Not even iridescent,
That clasp the sand
And that cannot perish, you swear,
Having once been evoked!
5
The witnesses back off; the scene begins to float in water.
Far out in that mirage the Savior sits whispering to the world,
Becoming a mirage. The dog turns into a smear on the sand.
The cat grows taller and taller as it flees into space.
From the hot shine where he sits his whispering drifts:
You struggle from flesh into wings; the change exists.
But the wings that live gripping the contours of the dirt
Are all at once nothing, flesh and light lifted away.
You are the flesh; I am the resurrection, because I am the light.
I cut to your measure the creeping piece of darkness
That haunts you everywhere under the sun. Step into light—
I make you over. I breed the shape of your grave in the dirt.