When I think of where I’ve come from
or even try to measure as any kind of
distance those places, all the various
people, and all the ways in which I
remember them, so that even the skin I
touched or was myself fact of, inside,
could see through like a hole in the wall
or listen to, it must have been, to what
was going on in there, even if I was still
too dumb to know anything—When I think
of the miles and miles of roads, of meals,
of telephone wires even, or even of water
poured out in endless streams down streaks
of black sky or the dirt roads washed clean,
or myriad, salty tears and suddenly it’s spring
again, or it was—Even when I think again of
all those I treated so poorly, names, places,
their waiting uselessly for me in the rain and
I never came, was never really there at all,
was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven
like a car along some empty highway passing,
passing other cars—When I try to think of
things, of what’s happened, of what a life is
and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant,
the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths,
all the painful, belligerent news, and the dog still
waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices,
presences, of children, of our own grown children,
the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now,
each physical moment, passing, passing, it’s what
it always is or ever was, just then, just there.
To think oneself again
into a tiny hole of self
and pull the covers round
and close the mouth—
shut down the eyes and hands,
keep still the feet,
and think of nothing if one can
not think of it—
a space in whose embrace
such substance is,
a place of emptiness
the heart’s regret.
World’s mind is after all
an afterthought
of what was there before
and is there still.
I’m feeling ok still in some small way.
I’ve come too far to just go away.
I wish I could stay here some way.
So that what now comes wouldn’t only be more
of what’s to be lost. What’s left would still leave more
to come if one didn’t rush to get there.
What’s still to say? Your eyes, your hair, your smile,
your body sweet as fresh air, your voice in the clear morning
after another night, another night, we lay together, sleeping?
If that has to go, it was never here.
If I know still you’re here, then I’m here too
and love you, and love you.
The sounds
of his particular
music keep echoing,
stay in the soft
air months after
all’s gone to
grass, to lengthening
shadows, to slanting
sun on shifting water,
to the late light’s edges
through tall trees—
despite the mind’s
still useless,
ponderous thought.
Remember sweet Ed
who despite being dead
embedded
all he said
with lead
could make you dead
too if that’s it
for you,
oh dummy
of text,
be it western or mex?
He had grace like a swallow’s,
nothing unfallow,
“Elizabethan” at root
with sideburns to boot,
quick on trigger,
also with jigger,
kept an apt time,
walked with a rhyme.
I loved his style
and his guile,
no friend to the loser,
vapid day cruiser,
elsewise bamboozler.
My Ed was quondam god
from human sod
who spoke not loud
but always clear and proud,
his pledge
to keep the faith
stays constant to this day.
I’ll never forgive myself for the
violence propelled me at sad Paul
Blackburn, pushed in turn by both
our hopeless wives who were spitting
venom at one another in the heaven
we’d got ourselves to, Mallorca, mid-fifties,
where one could live for peanuts while
writing great works and looking at the
constant blue sea, etc. Why did I fight such
surrogate battles of existence with such
a specific friend as he was for sure?
Our first meeting NYC 1950 we talked two
and a half days straight without leaving the
apartment. He knew Auden and Yeats
by heart and had begun on Pound’s lead
translating the Provençal poets, and was
studying with Moses Hadas at NYU. How
sweet this thoughtful beleaguered vulnerable
person whose childhood was full of New
England abusive confusion, his mother the too
often absent poet, Frances Frost! I wish
he were here now, we could go on talking,
I’d have company of my own age in this
drab burned out trashed dump we call the
phenomenal world where he once walked
the wondrous earth and knew its pleasures.
This same inexhaustible sea with impenetrable
Same blue look I stepped into when so young I
Had no reason for a life more than to hold on to
The one I had, wife, daughter, and two sons, older,
If seven and five, just, can be measure of more than
A vulnerable innocence. The back wheel of bike,
When brake failed, caught elder son’s heel and used
It to stop, stripping the skin off almost to the bone.
I packed the place with ointment and bandaged it, not
Wanting to see how bad it might be, and for days son
Went on hop and hand holds spider fashion until,
Blessedly, it was well again. Oh life, oh miracle of
Day to day existence, sun, food and others! Would
Those who lived with me then believe how much
I loved them? Know how dumbly, persistently, I cared?
The cranky low decked freighter with orange stickup
stern cabin we could see from the open window of
this place each day out there on proverbial ocean has
moved away, shifting the focus of that blue to an
implacable distance now going out to a shaded, faded
edge of sky beyond all recalled dreams or places. One
so wanted it to be the old time story of them waiting till
dark at last came and then, with muffled oars, they’d row
into the hidden cove, climb up the adjoining cliff, and
into my waiting heart. How many times so long ago I’d
see the fisherman at nightfall row out into the darkened
sea with their long awkward boats, oars in unison, to what
determined fate, and if there were a world at edge of this
one, there at last they might pull ashore. Now the sea’s slurring,
recurring sound, its battering, white capped, upon the
rocks, forces both free and unknown to me, have no work
but this tedious recurrence, dreams repeated, insistent, useless.
Blur of world is red smear on white page,
metaphors useless, thoughts impotent,
even the sense of days is lost
in the raging militance.
No life other than political,
the fact of family and friends
subjorned to the general
conduct of this bitter abstract.
I look in the mirror
to see old man looking back,
eyes creased, squinting,
finds nothing left.
a scratch in the dust, an odor
of some faint fruit, some flower
whose name he’d lost.
Why would they hate him
who fight now insistently
to kill one another
—why not.
I was trying to think of when rightly
to enter the conversation with all
the others talking thoughtfully,
comfortably. There was no occasion
to say that thirty years in the army was
a long time or that very probably the
world is flatter than one thinks. A star
is as far as one’s eye can see? My shirt
had broken buttons I had hid with
my tie. Otherwise I was clean and
reasonably dressed. Yet, impatient to
join in, I could hear my voice landing
suddenly on the edge of another’s
comment, me saying I can’t now remember
what, just their saying, “What? What?”
Faded in face of apparent reality—
As it comes, I see it still goes on and on,
and even now still sitting at this table
is the smiling man who nobody seems to know.
Older, the walls apparently get higher.
No one seemingly gets to look over
to see the people pointing at the sky
where the old planes used to fly over.
I packed my own reality in a bag
and pushed it under the table,
thinking to retrieve it when able
some time bye and bye.
Glass roses or something else hardly expected—an
Abundance of good will, a kind hand in usual troubles.
Do you hear voices all around you, a sort of whispering,
Echoing silence as if someone had left a window open?
Reading those several times with John, we were first
In a great hall, the Y uptown, where he said he’d heard Auden
Read, and now we did—the great velvet curtains, the useful
Sense of a company in the same place where we now stood, echoing.
Then at Bard, first time I’d met Tom Meyer still a student, and
We, John, Bobbie and me, had driven up from New York together,
In bleak aftermath of Olson’s telling John he was going off with Panna,
On the phone in the Chelsea, the blasted heath we were leaving behind.
Sweet, you might say, impeccable gentleman, like Claude Rains, his
Boston accent held each word a particular obligation and value.
I see his face as still a young man, in San Francisco, hearing him
Talking with Joanne, hearing him talk with Joe Dunn, with friends.
When you are a poet as he was, you have no confusions, you write
The words you are given to, you are possessed or protected by a vision.
We are not going anywhere, we are somewhere, here where John is,
Where he’s brought us much as he might himself this evening, to listen.
I think of all the impossible loves of my life, all the edges of feeling,
All the helpless reach to others one tried so bitterly to effect, to reach
As one might a hilltop, an edge of sea where the waves can break at last
On the shore. I think of just jumping into darkness, into deep water,
Into nothing one can ever point to as a place out there, just its shadow, a
Beckoning echo of something, a premonition, which does not warn but ‹invites.
There is music in pain but not because of it, love in each persistent ‹breath.
His was the Light of the World, a lit match or the whole city, burning.
We’d set off into the woods
and would climb trees there
and throw things, shouting
at one another, great shrieking
cries I remember—or would, if
I dreamt—in dreams. In dreams,
the poet wrote, begin responsibilities.
I thought that was like going to
some wondrous place and all was
waiting there just for you to come
and do what had to be done.
Help’s easy enough
If it comes in time.
Nothing’s that hard
If you want to rhyme.
It’s when they shoot you
It can hurt,
When the bombs blast off
And you’re gone with a squirt.
Sitting in a bunker,
Feeling blue?
Don’t be a loser,
It wasn’t you—
Wasn’t you wanted
To go kill people,
Wasn’t you caused
All this trouble.
I can’t say, Run!
And I can’t say, Hide!
But I still feel
What I feel inside.
It’s wrong to kill people
Just to make them pay.
Wrong to blast cities
To make them go away.
You can’t take everything
Away from fathers,
Mothers, babies,
Sisters and brothers.
Wipe your feet!
Take a look around—
Ain’t it neat
To come home at night
And have a home,
Be able to sit down
Even all alone?
You think that anyone
Ought to get pushed,
Shoved around
for some old Bush?
Use your head,
Don’t get scared,
Stand up straight,
Show what you’re made of.
America’s heaven,
Let’s keep it that way
Which means not killing,
Not running scared,
Not being a creep,
Not wanting to get “them.”
Take a chance
And see what they want then.
Maybe just to be safe,
Maybe just to go home,
Maybe just to live
Not scared to the bone,
They won’t let you into,
Not forgotten by all
The ones who did it to you.
Sing together!
Make sure it’s loud!
One’s always one,
But the world’s a crowd
Of people, people,
All familiar.
Take a look!
At least it won’t kill you.
FOR GRAHAM DEAN
. . . We will all survive, addressed to such glimmering
shimmering transience with its insistent
invitation of other.
So close, so warm, so full.
I
At the edge of the evening then, at
the edge of the river, this edge
of being, as one says, one’s own
given body, inexorable me, whatever then
can enter, what other stays there, initial,
wave of that changing weather, wind
lifting off sea, cloud fading northward,
even one’s own hands’ testament, clenched
ME . . . The person inside the mirror
was hiding, came forward only
as you did, was too far inside you, too
much yourself doubling, twinned,
spun in image as you were, a patient
reality to provoke simple witness,
precluded, occluded, still cloudy.
I am going now
and you can’t come with me . . .
There is no one here but you.
But who are you, who is it
one takes as life, as so-called reality,
like the mirror’s shimmering light
as the sun strikes it, cobwebbed with dust,
layered with its own substance?
Oneself is instance, an echo
mirrored, doubled. Oneself is twin.
II
Looking in, you saw
a faint head there
at some end of what seemed
a mass of things, a layered
density of reflection, which was substance,
someone. Someone looking back.
All echo? Semblance?
No self to come home to,
no one to say, be yourself— to say, it’s you?
There is no looking back
or way of being separate.
One can only stand there, here, apart
and see another I still, wherever, inside oneself.
I’ve come to the old echoes again,
know it’s where I’ve been before,
see the same old sun.
But backwards, from all the yesterdays,
it’s still the same way,
who gets and who pays.
I was younger then,
walking along still open,
young and having fun.
But now it’s just a sad walk
to an empty park,
to sit down and wait, wait to get out.
So much of my childhood seems
to have been spent in rooms—
at least in memory, the shades
pulled down to make it darker, the
shaft of sunlight at the window’s edge.
I could hear the bees then gathering
outside in the lilacs, the birds chirping
as the sun, still high, began to drop.
It was summer, in heaven of small town,
hayfields adjacent, creak and croak
of timbers, of house, of trees, dogs,
elders talking, the lone car turning some
distant corner on Elm Street
way off across the broad lawn.
We dug caves or else found them,
down the field in the woods. We had
shacks we built after battering
at trees, to get branches, made tepee-
like enclosures, leafy, dense and in-
substantial. Memory is the cave
one finally lives in, crawls on
hands and knees to get into.
If Mother says, don’t draw
on the book pages, don’t color
that small person in the picture, then
you don’t unless compulsion, distraction
dictate and you’re floating off
on wings of fancy, of persistent seeing
of what’s been seen here too, right here,
on this abstracting page. Can I use the green,
when you’re done? What’s that supposed to be,
says someone. All the kids crowd closer
in what had been an empty room
where one was trying at least
to take a nap, stay quiet, to think
of nothing but oneself.
.
Back into the cave, folks,
and this time we’ll get it right?
Or, uncollectively perhaps, it was
a dark and stormy night he
slipped away from the group, got
his mojo working and before
you know it had that there
bison fast on the wall of the outcrop.
I like to think they thought,
though they seemingly didn’t, at least
of something, like, where did X put the bones,
what’s going to happen next, did she, he or it
really love me? Maybe that’s what dogs are for,
but there’s no material surviving
pointing to dogs as anyone’s best friend, alas.
Still here we are no matter, still hacking away,
slaughtering what we can find to, leaving
far bigger footprints than any old mastodon.
You think it’s funny? To have prospect
of being last creature on earth or at best a
company of rats and cockroaches?
You must have a good sense of humor!
Anyhow, have you noticed how everything’s
retro these days? Like, something’s been here before—
or at least that’s the story. I think one picture is worth
a thousand words and I know one cave fits all sizes.
.
Much like a fading off airplane’s
motor or the sound of the freeway
at a distance, it was all here clearly enough
and no one goes lightly into a cave,
even to hide. But to make such things
on the wall, against such obvious
limits, to work in intermittent dark,
flickering light not even held steadily,
all those insistent difficulties.
They weren’t paid to, not that we know of,
and no one seems to have forced them.
There’s a company there, tracks
of all kinds of people, old folks
and kids included. Were they having
a picnic? But so far in it’s hardly
a casual occasion, flat on back with
the tools of the trade necessarily
close at hand. Try lying in the dark
on the floor of your bedroom and roll
so as you go under the bed and
ask someone to turn off the light.
Then stay there, until someone else comes.
Or paint up under on the mattress the last
thing you remember, dog’s snarling visage
as it almost got you, or just what you do
think of as the minutes pass.
.
Hauling oneself through invidious
strictures of passage, the height
of the entrance, the long twisting
cramped passage, mind flickers, a lamp
lit flickers, lets image project
what it can, what it will, see there
war as wanting, see life as a river,
see trees as forest, family as
others, see a moment’s respite,
hear the hidden bird’s song, goes
along, goes along constricted, self-
hating, imploded, drags forward
in imagination of more, has no
time, has hatred, terror, power.
No light at the end of the tunnel.
.
The guide speaks of music, the
stalactites, stalagmites making a
possible xylophone, and some
Saturday night-like hoedown
businesses, what, every three
to four thousand years? One
looks and looks and time
is the variable, the determined
as ever river, lost on the way,
drifted on, laps and continues.
The residuum is finally silence,
internal, one’s own mind constricted
to focus like any old camera
fixed in its function.
Like all good questions,
this one seems without answer,
leaves the so-called human
behind. It makes its own way
and takes what it’s found
as its own and moves on.
.
It’s time to go to bed
again, shut the light off,
settle down, straighten
the pillow and try to sleep.
Tomorrow’s another day
and that was all thousands
and thousands of years ago,
myriad generations, even
the stones must seem changed.
The gaps in time,
the times one can’t account for,
the practice it all took
even to make such images,
the meanings still unclear
though one recognizes
the subject, something has
to be missed, overlooked.
No one simply turns on a light.
Oneself becomes image.
The echo’s got in front,
begins again what’s over
just at the moment it was done.
No one can catch up, find
some place he’s never been to
with friends he never had.
This is where it connects,
not meaning anything one
can know. This is where
one goes in and that’s what’s to find
beyond any thought or habit,
an arched, dark space, the rock,
and what survives of what’s left.
Sun on the edges of leaves,
patterns of absent pleasure,
all that it meant
now gathered together.
Days all was away
and the clouds were far off
and the sky was heaven itself,
one wanted to stay
alone forever perhaps
where no one was,
and here again it is
still where it was.
Room for one and all
around the gathering ball,
to hold the sacred thread,
to hold and wind and pull.
Sit in the common term.
All hands now move as one.
The work continues on.
The task is never done.
Which one are you
and who would know.
Which way
would you have come this way.
And what’s behind,
beside, before.
If there are more,
why are there more.
One’s here
and there is still elsewhere
along some road to hell
where all is well—
or heaven
even
where all the saints still wait
and guard the golden gate.
If, as one says, one says
something to another,
does it go on and on then
without apparent end?
Or does it only become talk,
balked by occasion, stopped
because it never got started,
was said to no one?
What one thinks to hold
Is what one thinks to know,
So comes of simple hope
And leads one on.
The others there the same
With no one then to blame
These flowered circles handed.
So each in turn was bonded.
There the yellow bees will buzz,
And eyes and ears appear
As listening, witnessing hearts
Of each who enters here.
Yet eyes were closed—
As if the inside world one chose
To live in only as one knows.
No thing comes otherwise.
Walk on, on crippled leg,
Because one stumped with cane,
Turned in and upside down
As with all else, bore useless weight.
The way from here is there
And back again, from birth to death,
From egg to echo, flesh to eyeless skull.
One only sleeps to breathe.
The hook, the heart, the body
Deep within its dress, the folds of feelings,
Face to face to face, no bandaged simple place,
No wonder more than this, none less.
Insoluble.
Neither one nor the other.
A wall.
An undulating water.
A weather.
A point in space.
Waste of time.
Something missed.
The faces.
Trees.
The unicorn
with its horn.
Able
as ready.
Fixed on heart
on head’s prerogative.
Which way to go
up down
backward
forward.
In the sky
stars flash by.
Boats
head for heaven.
the pole
thrusts up
into the diamond.
Found, fills
its echo.
A baby.
Sound.
Age knows little other than its own complaints.
Times past are not to be recovered ever.
The old man and woman are left to themselves.
When I was young, there seemed little time.
I hurried from day to day as if pursued.
Each thing I discovered, another came to possess me.
Love I could ask no questions of, it was nothing
I ever anticipated, ever thought would be mine.
Even now I wonder if it will escape me.
What I did, I did finally because I had to,
whether from need of my own or that of others.
It is finally impossible to live and work only for pay.
I do not know where I’ve come from or where I am going.
Life is like a river, a river without beginning or end.
It’s been my company all my life, its wetness, its insistent movement.
The only wisdom I have is what someone must have told me,
neither to take nor to give more than can be simply managed.
A full cup carried from the well.
FROM THE DIARY OF FRANCIS KILVERT
One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough.
So they beat the bell to hell, Max,
with an axe, show it who’s boss,
boss. Me, I dreamt I dwelt in
some place one could relax
but I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
You got a song, man, sing it.
You got a bell, man, ring it.
Crusoe again, confounded, confounding purposes,
cruising, looking around for edges of the familiar,
the places he was in back then,
wherever, all the old sand and water.
How much he thought to be there he can’t remember.
Shipwreck wasn’t thinkable at least until
after it happened, and then he began at the edge,
the beach, going forward, backward, until he found place again.
Even years slipped past in the background.
The water, waves, sand, backdrop of the houses,
all changed now by the locals, the tourists,
whoever got there first and what they could make of it.
But his story is real too, the footprint, the displacement
when for the first time another is there, not just imagined,
and won’t necessarily agree with anything, won’t go away.
The waves keep at it,
Arnold’s Aegean Sophocles heard,
the swell and ebb,
the cresting and the falling under,
each one particular and the same—
Each day a reminder, each sun in its world, each face,
each word something one hears
or someone once heard.
Walking, the way it used to be,
talking, thinking—being in,
on the way—days after anything
went or came, with no one,
someone, having or not having a way.
What’s a life if you look at it,
what’s a hat if it doesn’t fit.
I am
transformed into a clam.
I will
be very, very still.
So natural be,
and never ‘me’
a stone
would end it all
but for this tall
enduring tree,
the sea,
the sky
and I.
Up a hill and down again.
Around and in—
Out was what it was all about
but now it’s done.
At the end was the beginning,
just like it said or someone did.
Keep looking, keep looking,
keep looking.
PEN’S
VALENTINE
To My
Little
Dear
Yo
Wh
Fr
Do better
To
Where
From
Dear (begin again)
Yo(u)
W(ere my)
Fr(iend)
To My
Little To
My
Love
Wherefrom, whereto
the thought to do—
Wherewith, whereby
the means themselves now lie—
Wherefor, wherein
such hopes of reconciling heaven—
Even the way is changed
without you, even the day.