of the satisfactory fall, grid seepage, currents distracted

10to side flow, multiple laterals that at some extreme spill

a shelf, ease back, hit the jolt of the central impulse: the

slow working-down of careful investigation, the run

diffused, swamped into variable action: my ideal’s a cold

clod clam calm, clam contained, nevertheless active in the

15digestion, capable of dietary mirth, the sudden whisk, nearly

rollably spherical: ah, but friends, to be turned

loose on an accurate impulse! how handsome the stanzas are

beginning to look, open to the total acceptance, fracturing into

delight, tugging down the broad sweep, thrashing it into

20particulars (within boundaries): diversity, however—as of

the concrete—is not ever-pleasing: I’ve seen fair mounds

of fine-stone at one end or the other of highway construction

many times and been chiefly interested in the “hill”: but

abstraction is the bogey-boo of those incapable of it, while,

25merrily, every abstractor brings the concrete up fine: one,

anyway, as Emerson says, does well what one settles down to:

it’s impossible anyone should know anything about the concrete

who’s never risen above it, above the myth of concretion

in the first place: pulverize such, unequal to the synthesis,

30the organism by which they move and breathe their particulars:

and the symbol won’t do, either: it differentiates flat

into muffling fact it tried to stabilize beyond: there aren’t

just problems for the mind, the mind’s problematic, residing

here by a scary shading merely: so much so it does seem

35at times to prefer an origin other-worldly, the dreaminess,

the surficial hanging-on, those interior swirls nearly

capable of another invention: astonishingly, the

celestial bodies are round, not square or triangular, not

dodecahedral, and then they are sprinkled in the void’s

40unusual abundance: if it weren’t for light, we wouldn’t think

anything here, that scanty a fabric: that is the way it

was made: worse, that is the way it works out: when the lady

said she accepted the universe, it was a sort of decision:

anyway, granted that the matter appears to be settled, there’s

45plenty around for the mind to dwell on: that’s a comfort,

but, now, a ghastly comfort: that’s the difference:

the first subject I wanted to introduce, because it’s

inanimate but highly active, is my marble garden bench down

by the elm—actually, well under the elm: it’s in three parts:

50the seat slab, four to five inches thick, and the two end slabs,

equally thick but, deeply buried, of undetermined length: I

bought this old place a few years ago, so wasn’t present for the

setting: but as to length the upper slab is, say, four feet:

some cool seeps up the legs from the ground, but I

55doubt there’s much commission between the legs and the upper

slab: cool nights deeply penetrate the bench, so that on

a flash-hot summer morning, the reservoir of dense cooling

will ooze right through to one’s bottom, providing, I must say,

a tendency to equilibrium: the stone never gets as hot as the

60day and never as cool as the night (maybe it’s colder some winter

nights of cold remembrances) so it moderates the environment,

working as a heater or air-conditioner: it has no moving

parts—it’s all moving parts, none visible—and yet is

capable of effect, animation: that such a thing can work for

65us day and night makes us feel, by cracky, that nature is our

servant, though without singular intention: the gift, though,

the abundance! we don’t have to pay for, that requires no

matching social security funds, no fringe benefits: the

unutterable avenue of bliss: in spite of the great many works

70in progress, I feel this is the last poem to the world: every

poet probably feels he is writing the last poem to the world:

man, in motion how avaricious, has by the exaggeration of his

refinement shown what intelligence can commit in the universe:

bleak scald of lakes, underground poisonous tides, air litter

75like a dusk, clouds not like the clouds: can we give our wild

life a brake: must we keep tinkering until a virus swerves

from our interventions into a genesis consummating us: must

we spew out acids till we’re their stew: lead on the highways,

washing into the grass, collecting into lead brooklets bound

80for diffusive destinations: get your musclebound mercury dose

here: come on, guys: we know how to handle the overpopulation

problem: sell folks carloads of improvement marked uncertain:

progress can be the end of us: how neat: in a way, you might

say, how right, how just, poetically just: but come on, I say,

85overrefined exaggeration, if you got us into this, can’t you

get us out: come on, hot-shot fusion: give us plenty with no

bitter aftertaste: paradise lies ahead, where it’s always lain:

but we may reach it, before hell overtakes us: nature, if I may

judge out a law, likes extremes, in some ways depends on them, but

90usually keeps them short or confined: if we are broadly, densely

extreme, can’t we count on the outbreak of dialectical alternatives:

we can count on it: what is a beer party now but a can of cans:

what is wine now but a bottle in a recalcitrant green glow,

empurpling in the sun: nevertheless, the petunias are incarnadine

95by the hedgebrush: nevertheless, the catbird comes to the plastic

boat the goldfish summers in, fools around looking, then takes

a drink: we are aided by much I will discuss and much as

yet unfixed: it’s time I introduced an extreme, but this time

I’m going to pick a moderate one, I think—the gusts before

100thunderstorms: now the gusts before thunderstorms are sometimes

high enough to trim trees: a bough summer has coaxed overweight,

that splitting riddance, serviceable enough, but more anthropo-

centrically, the shaking out of dead branches: when we are

out walking in the woods on a calm day, we don’t want a

105dead limb to just plunge out of a tree by surprise, striking us,

possibly, on the cranium: whatever we normally go to the woods

for, surely we don’t go for that: by high gusts thunderstorms

accomplish the possibility of calm residence: the tree, too,

counts on nodding times, sun-gleanings, free of astonishment,

110and to buy them is willing to give up its dead or

even its living limbs: nature gives much on occasion

but exacts a toll, a sacrifice: that puzzling suggestion,

or autumnal impulse, has accounted for much sacred carnage: I

hate to think of it: I nearly hate to think of it: the Maya

115hearts pulled out still flicking have always seemed to me gruesome

separations, attention-getting, but god-like with revulsion’s awe:

of course, even closer home, high gusts can carry hints to the

hapless by, for example, blowing down a fence obviously too weak

to stand: that should be good news to the farmer whose cows have

120been getting out: and who should not be alarmed by an immediate

problem if the lesson has been well bestowed: nature sometimes

gets all its shit together and lets you have it: but good farmers

make good fences and anybody else gets whatever the traffic will

bear away: I wrote the other day a poem on this subject:

125Ancestors

An elm tree, like a society or

culture, seems to behave out of

many actions toward a total

interest (namely, its own) which means

130that in the clutter and calamity

of days much, locally catastrophic,

can occur that brings no sharp

imbalance to the total register:

for example, dead limbs, white already

135with mold and brackets, can in

a high storm—the heralding windtwists

of thunderstorms, say—snap and, though

decay-light, plunge among the

lower greens, the many little stiff

140fingers entangling, weighing down

the structures of growth: ah, what

an insupportable extravagance by

the dead, held off the ground, leaching

white with slow, dry rot: what

145a duty for the young limbs, already

crowding and heavy with green: well,

I guess the elm is by that much local

waste wasted, but then perhaps its

sacrifice is to sway in some deep rich

150boughs the indifferent, superfluous,

recalcitrant, white, prophesying dead.

circulations are moderations, currents triggered by extremes:

we must at all costs keep the circulations free and clear,

open and unimpeded: otherwise, extremes will become trapped,

155local, locked in themselves, incapable of transaction: some

extremes, though, are circulations, a pity, in that kinds of

staying must then be the counters: for example, when in spring

a gray sandstorm arises over Indiana, circulation becomes

too free and open: hedgerows, even, are important at such times:

160they stall the storm just enough for heavy sand to fall out:

but what of the lengthy problem of small sand and, even worse,

of high-rising fine dust: if the storm hits

Pennsylvania, the woods will drag at its foot, then

tilt and capitulate it: heavy suspensions will lose their

165directions to gravity quickly but even the fine dust slowing will

sift through the equally numerical leaves, be caught by them,

and the air will be breatheable again by Jersey, west Jersey:

water’s carriages act the same way: high narrow valleys, roomless,

propel water along, loosening sometimes substantial boulders: the

170mature valleys, wide-bottomed, slow the flow, and

particulate weight falls out: in the ancient flat valleys,

where meanders have cut off into oxbow lakes or little crescents

of difference, the water goes broad and slow and only the

fine stuff in a colloidal float, a high drift, stays out

175the ride, hanging finally in long curtains in the gulfs and lagoons:

well, I just, for poetic purposes, wanted to point out the parallel:

parallel too in that even Pennsylvania can’t get some of the

high dust, the microscopic grit—settles out with the

floating spiders on Atlantic isles and (too bad for the spiders)

180waves: such circulations are average and quite precious: the

sun’s the motor, the mechanisms greased by millions of years

of propriety and correction: the place produced deliciously

habitable, a place we found we could grow into: how marvelous!

lightning is one of the finest, sharpest tensions, energy

185concentrations: it has to be lean because it leaps far:

how was the separation to be bridged, the charge neutralized,

except by a high-energy construct: gathers the diffuse

energy from clouds and ground and drains it through a

dense crackling: I don’t know how it works: it works:

190the charges rush together and annihilate each other:

or the charge goes one way, to the ground, or to the

clouds: I’ll bet it’s one way and to the ground: the

lofted’s precarious: the ground is nice and sweet and not

at all spectacular: I wonder if I’m really talking about

195the economy of the self, where an extreme can gather up a lot

of stale stuff and mobilize it, immoderate grief,

or racing terror, or a big unification like love chugging

up to the fold: we never talk about anything but ourselves,

objectivity the objective way of talking about ourselves:

200O calligraphers, blue swallows, filigree the world

with figure, bring the reductions, the snakes unwinding,

the loops, tendrils, attachments, turn in necessity’s precision,

give us the highwire of the essential, the slippery concisions

of tense attentions! go to look for the ocean currents and

205though they are always flowing there they are, right in place, if

with seasonal leans and sways: the human body

staying in change, time rushing through, ingestion,

elimination: if change stopped, the mechanisms of

holding would lose their tune: current informs us,

210is the means of our temporary stay: ice water at the northern

circle sinks and in a high wall like a glacier seeps down the

ocean bottom south: but the south’s surface water is going

north, often in spiral carriages of an extreme intensity, nevertheless

moderating, preventing worse extremes: as when snow streaks up the

215summit, up past the timberline where interference is slight, and

having passed the concision of the ridge, blooms out diffusing

over the valley, drifts out into the catchments, fills with

feathery loads the high ravines, the glacier’s compressions forming

underneath, taking direction in the slowest flow of relief, so on

220any number of other occasions, massive collections and dispositions

restore ends to sources: O city, I cry at

the gate, the glacier is your

mother, the currents of the deep father you, you sleep

in the ministry of trees, the boulders are your brothers sustaining

225you: come out, I cry, into the lofty assimilations: women, let

down your hair under the dark leaves of the night grove, enter

the currents with a sage whining, rising into the circular

dance: men, come out and be with the wind, speedy and lean, fall

into the moon-cheered waters, plunge into the ecstasy of rapids:

230children, come out and play in the toys of divinity: glass, brick,

stone, curb, rail are freezing you out of your motions, the

uncluttered circulations: I cry that, but perhaps I am too secular

or pagan: everything, they say, is artificial: nature’s the

artwork of the Lord: but your work, city, is aimed unnaturally

235against time: your artifice confronts the Artifice: beyond

the scheduled consummation, nothing’s to be recalled: there is

memory enough in the rock, unscriptured history in

the wind, sufficient identity in the curve

of the valley: what is your name, city, under your name: who

240are your people under their faces: children of the light,

children of the light: of seasons, moons, apples, berries,

grain: children of flies, worms, stars: come out, I cry, into

your parentage, your established natures: I went out and pulled a

few weeds in the lawn: you probably think I was getting goofy

245or scared: it was just another show: as the mystic said, it’s

all one to me: then I went on over to the University, and there

was Slatoff’s new book, fresh from the publisher’s: and Kaske

had left me a book he’d told me about: Ballad of the Bones

and Other Poems, by Byron Herbert Reece: E.P. Dutton: 1945:

250$2.00: introduced by Jesse Stuart: and praised, on

the back cover, by William Rose Benet, John Hall Wheelock,

John Gould Fletcher, and Alfred Kreymborg: I do believe I’m going

to enjoy the book: the South has Mr. Reece and, probably,

Literature: I bet I pulled a thousand weeds: harkweed’s

255incredible: it puts up a flower (beautiful) to seed but at the

same time sends out runners under the grass that anchor a few

inches or a foot away, and then the leaves of the new plants

press away the grass in a tight fit: I put havoc into those

progressions, believe me: plants take their cue and shape

260from crowding: they will crowd anything, including close

relatives, brethren and sistren: everybody, if I may switch

tracks, is out to get his: that is the energy we must allow

the widest margin to: and let the margins, then, collide into

sensible adjustments: slow moderations are usually massive:

265nature can’t heave a lot fast, air and

oceans reasonably unwieldy: true, they work into lesser

intensities, local: maelstroms, typhoons, fairly rapid highs

or lows, the boiling up of deep, cold water: dimension may be

the sorter, although it didn’t seem so originally with the

270garden bench, small and yet efficiently moderating: if

you built a wall across the Gulf Stream, though, the sundering

would be lengthy: and what would it take to bring about a quick

thermal change in an ocean: a solar burst; at least,

unusual effusion: quantity of mass or number (as of leaves) then

275moderates the local effect: as for cooling an ocean, a lot of

icebergs would have to split off from the caps and plunge before

the change would be measurable: expanded, though, through

sufficient time—a massiveness—the lesser effects could assume

large implications: but, of course, with the icebergs, one

280would have to investigate the mechanisms that were heating up the

general air, causing the splits in the first place, and then one

would have to deal with the probability that the air, massive to

massive, would warm up the oceans which would then be able to

absorb large numbers of icebergs without cooling: I suppose

285my confusion is no more than natural, reflecting

the reticulation of interpenetration in nature, whereby we should

be advised to tamper cautiously with least balances,

lest a considerable number, a series or so, tilt

akimbo: even now, though, we apparently cannot let well enough

290alone: how well it was! how computer-like in billionths the

administration and take of the cure: just think, the best cure

would arise by subtle influence of itself if only we would

disappear: but though we have scalded and oiled the seas and

scabbed the land and smoked the mirror of heaven, we must try

295to stay and keep those who are alive alive: then we

might propose to ourselves that collectively we have one grain

of sense and see what the proposition summons forth: the force of

the drive by which we have survived is hard to counter, even

now that we survive so densely: and it is not certain the plants

300would not lose their shape and vigor if they had to stop

crowding: a very hard reversal and loss of impetus: we may

have time to diminish and cope with our thrust: the little patch

of wildwoods out behind my backhedge is even now squeaky and

chirpy with birds and the day is as clear as a missing windowpane:

305the clouds are few, large, and vastly white: the air has no

smell and the shade of trees is sharp: floods are extreme

by narrowing rain, which can, itself, be quite bountiful:

it’s hard to blame floods—useless—because they’re just

showing how hard they can work to drain the land:

310one way a slow impulse works up into an extremity’s

the earthquake: coastal land, say, drifts with sea currents

north a couple of inches a year, setting up a strain along a

line with the land’s land: at some point, tension gives in

a wrack and wrecks stability, restoring lassitude: or resonance

315of circulation coming into a twist or “beat”: the gathering up,

the event, the dissipation: but that would imply that everything,

massive, slow, or long is moving toward the enunciation of

an extreme: we dwell in peace on the post-tables and

shelves of these remarkable statements: what kind of lurch is

320it, I wonder, when a comet sideswipes us, or swishes by near

enough to switch our magnetic poles: can the atmosphere

be shifted a few hundred miles: the oceans

would pile up and spill: maybe just the magnetic poles would

switch, that sounds all right: but if the comet hit us and

325glanced off or even stuck, its impact would affect

our angular momentum and possibly put some wobble in our motion:

somebody said the purpose of science is to put us in control

of our environment, allaying calamity and catastrophe, though

conceivably also making nice days a little nicer: well, all

330I say (figuratively speaking) is a lot of things are

still in their own control: maybe my point, though, is that

by and large I prefer the other controls to our own, not

forsaking the possibility that still larger controls

by us might bring about a fair, if slightly artificialized,

335paradise someday: from here, it looks like ruin and

destruction either way, more or less: one thing we will never

do is sit around on this planet doing nothing, just soaking

up the honey of solar radiation: if our problems were

solved, we’d go out of business: (stretch that a little

340and it will do): it’s dry: the weeds in the lawn

are being tested to the limit, some having died: I’ve just

put a soakhose by the maple: I’ll let it go slowly that way

for a few hours: the grass in patches is parched tan:

it crackles underfoot: tight spurs of hay:

345I didn’t see the hornet at first when I went to attach the

hose: he was sucking the spigot: people around here don’t

have sprinklers, I can’t understand it: I always used to have

one in South Jersey: maybe water’s expensive or maybe

very dry spells are rare: seems to me I remember a very dry

350one last year: the days are shortening: it’s sundown

now at eight: maybe a little later officially, but the sun’s

down behind the ridge on the other side of the lake by then: any

night could turn sharp cold—read August 21: I’ve been at this

poem or prose-poem or versification or diversification for three

355or four days: I’ll never get all the weeds

out of the grass: I just know after each day that

there are a hell of a lot fewer weeds in the lawn:

it’s evening: seven: I just noticed

a dark cloud coming from the west, so I went out

360and said, please, rain some here: a few pin drops

fell, I think though more because of the dark cloud than the

saying: saying doesn’t do any good but it doesn’t

hurt: aligns the psychic forces with the natural:

that alignment may have some influence: I have found the world

365so marvelous that nothing would surprise me: that may sound

contradictory, the wrong way to reach the matter-of-fact: but

if you can buy comets sizzling around in super-elongated

orbits and a mathematics risen in man that corresponds to the

orbits, why, simple as it is finally, you can move on to glutinous

370molecules sloshing around in the fallen seas for something

to stick to: that there should have been possibilities enough to

include all that has occurred is beyond belief, an extreme the

strictures and disciplines of which prevent loose-flowing

phantasmagoria: last night in the cloud-darkened dusk rain began

375gently, the air so full of moisture it just couldn’t help it,

and continued at least past midnight when I went to bed: this

morning is dark but not raining: recovery’s widespread: rain

comes all over everything: trees, bushes, beans, petunias,

weeds, grass, sandboxes, garages: yesterday I went with the hose

380on the hard crusty ground from one single scorched patch to

another, never able to stay long at one point the other places

were calling so hard: ocean dumping of nuclear garbage requires

technological know-how, precision of intention, grace of

manipulation: devilish competition invades even the dirty work

385of the world, where, though, the aggressive, intelligent young man

can negotiate spectacular levels of promotion: we have spilt

much energy generating concentrations—nerve gas, specific

insecticides, car polish, household cleansers “fatal if swallowed”—

we must depend on land, sea, and air to diffuse into harmlessness:

390but some indestructibles resist all transformation and anyway

our vast moderators are limited: an oil slick covers every inch

of ocean surface: at the poles pilots see in the contrast the

sullied air’s worldwide: because of the circulations, water can

never be picked up for use except from its usages, where what

395has gone in is not measured or determined: extreme calls to

extreme and moderation is losing its quality, its effect: the

artificial has taken on the complication of the natural and where

to take hold, how to let go, perplexes individual action: ruin

and gloom are falling off the shoulders of progress: blue-green

400globe, we have tripped your balance and gone into exaggerated

possession: this seems to me the last poem written to the world

before its freshness capsizes and sinks into the slush: the

rampaging industrialists, the chemical devisers and manipulators

are forging tanks, filling vats of smoky horrors because of

405dollar lust, so as to live in long white houses on the summits

of lengthy slopes, for the pleasures of making others spur and

turn: but common air moves over the slopes, and common rain’s

losing its heavenly clarity: if we move beyond

the natural cautions, we must pay the natural costs, our every

410extreme played out: where we can’t create the room of

playing out, we must avoid the extreme, disallow it: it’s Sunday

morning accounts for such preachments, exhortations, and

solemnities: the cumulative vent of our primal energies is now and

always has been sufficient to blow us up: I have my ventilator

415here, my interminable stanza, my lattice work that lets the world

breeze unobstructed through: we could use more such harmless

devices: sex is a circular closure, permitting spheric

circularity above hemispheric exchange: innocent, non-destructive,

illimitable (don’t you wish it) vent: I want to close (I may

420interminably do it, because a flatness is without beginning,

development, or end) with my chief concern: if contaminated

water forces me to the extreme purification of bottled or distilled

water, the extreme will be costly: bulldozers will have to clear

roads to the springs: trucks will have to muck the air to bring

425the water down: bottles will have to be made from oil-fired

melts: a secondary level of filth created to escape the first:

in an enclosure like earth’s there’s no place to dump stuff off.

1970

Mid-August

Now the ridge

brooks

are

flue-dry, the rocks

5parching hot &

where sluice

used

to clear roots &

break weeds down brambly,

10light finds a luminous

sand-scar,

vertical: it will

go to a hundred

today: even the

15zucchini vine has

rolled over

on its

side.

1970 (1972)

Clearing the Dark Symbiosis

Any entangling however

scandent and weighty

is likely

if it’s lasted some eons

5to show mutuality, fervor

symbiotic, if

in the first trials

unravelingly scary:

for example, the hollyhocks

10strung out tall,

the peaks heavy with

bud-nub and bloom sway,

I started to look out thinking

thunder, thunder-made or making

15wind, would down

those highest blooms, or

rain and wind would: but

the morning glory vines,

taking over like sudden guests,

20built a holding between

all the hollyhock stalks,

a mutual house, an air house:

the storm came, well you know,

but the vines were just

25sufficient to keep the margin of

extremity off: I said

well in the fall (almost)

when the

hollyhock has very little

30to lose, it has still itself

to gain: add, for me,

the morning glory blooms.

1970

Viable

Motion’s the dead give away,

eye catcher, the revealing risk:

the caterpillar sulls on the hot macadam

but then, risking, ripples to the bush:

5the cricket, startled, leaps the

quickest arc: the earthworm, casting,

nudges a grassblade, and the sharp robin

strikes: sound’s the other

announcement: the redbird lands in

10an elm branch and tests the air with

cheeps for an answering, reassuring

cheep, for a motion already cleared:

survival organizes these means down to

tension, to enwrapped, twisting suasions:

15every act or non-act enceinte with risk or

prize: why must the revelations be

sound and motion, the poet, too, moving and

saying through the scary opposites to death.

1970

Precursors

In a little off-water

snaggy with roots

I dibbled

thinking

5what a brand new place this is—

the surprising fauna,

scribblings

scribbling in water, landing

in mud-dust,

10the spectacular green moss

creeping down

stump slopes to waterlevel,

and, look, clouds appear

in the ground

15here, puddles

perfectly representational,

giving day or night

totally back:

it was so new

20I thought I must’ve invented

it, or at least said it

first into the air:

but when I looked around

there were a thousand

25puddles—had been

thousands more—some larger

than mine

in an over-place

called a swamp:

30over-place led on to over-place

to the one place where

invisibility broke

out vacancy’s flawless opacity:

but there, so the story

35end good,

a turn brought me back

to this particular old

dawdling hole,

the wonders greener than they were,

40the mirror clearer,

the fauna (and flora)

diverser, tangled,

the oldest things freshest,

most in need of being told.

1970

Lonesome Valley

This time of year a bumblebee’s

sometimes found off

well away from anywhere

with a ragged wing:

5seems foreign, probably, to him,

once a smooth bullet shot clear over

untroubling shrubs,

the difficulty of giving

grass and tiny, spangling

10clover leaves:

as if from anger, a very high blurred buzz

comes and the bee lofts

three inches off, falls one-sided,

perplexed in a perfect scramble

15of concretion—

immense vines & stalks brushy

interweaving—

frost’s the solution still

distant

20but too much effort in the crippled

condition can

do it too

or being dragged down by ants,

the sucked dryness,

25the glassy wings perfectly remnant

in their raggedness,

the body shell shellacked complete,

the excessive hollowness and lightness.

1970

Delaware Water Gap

Rounding the mountain’s rim-ledge,

we looked out valleyward

onto the summits of lesser hills,

summits bottoms of held air, still lesser

5heights clefts and ravines: oh, I said,

the land’s a slow ocean, the long blue

ridge a reared breakage, these small peaks

dips and rises: we’re floating,

I said, intermediates of stone and air,

10and nothing has slowed altogether

into determination and a new wave

to finish this one is building up somewhere,

a continent crowded loose, upwarping

against its suasions, we, you and I,

15to be drowned, now so sustained and free.

1970 (1971)

Day

On a cold late

September morning,

wider than sky-wide

discs of lit-shale clouds

5skim the hills,

crescents, chords

of sunlight

now and then fracturing

the long peripheries:

10the crow flies

silent,

on course but destinationless,

floating:

hurry, hurry,

15the running light says,

while anything remains.

1970 (1971)

Staking Claim

Look, look where the mind can go

I said to the sanctified

willows

wreathing jittery slow slopes of wind

5look it can go up up to the ultimate

node where

remembering is foretelling

generation, closure

where taking in is giving out

10ascent and descent a common blip

look going like wind over rocks

it can

touch where

completion is cancellation

15all the way to the final vacant core

that brings

things together and turns them away

all the way away

to stirless bliss!

20and the willows,

dream-wraiths song-turned,

bent in troops of unanimity,

never could waken

never could feel the rushing days

25never could feel the cold

wind and rushing days

or thoroughly know

their leaves taking flight:

look I said to the willows

30what the mind

can apprehend,

entire and perfect staying,

and yet face winter’s

face coming over the hill

35look I said to the leaves

breaking into flocks around me taking

my voice away

to the far side of the hill

and way beyond gusting down the long changes

1970

The Eternal City

After the explosion or cataclysm, that big

display that does its work but then fails

out with destructions, one is left with the

pieces: at first, they don’t look very valuable,

5but nothing sizable remnant around for

gathering the senses on, one begins to take

an interest, to sort out, to consider closely

what will do and won’t, matters having become

not only small but critical: bulbs may have been

10uprooted: they should be eaten, if edible, or

got back in the ground: what used to be garages,

even the splinters, should be collected for

fires: some unusually deep holes or cleared

woods may be turned to water supplies or

15sudden fields: ruinage is hardly ever a

pretty sight but it must when splendor goes

accept into itself piece by piece all the old

perfect human visions, all the old perfect loves.

1970 (1971)

The Shoreless Tide

The universe with its

universal principles

was out exact with concision—

but toying, idling—

5again this morning: that

is, the lemon-yellow

lime-veined sugar maple

leaves were as in a

morning tide, full but

10slow with the slowness

of huge presences, nicking

off the branches and

coming down points up, stem-end

first, centered and weighted,

15but spiraling nicely,

a dance perfectly

abundant: I got excited,

the universe concentrated

on the small scope of

20a fall, as if to

expend reserves of

spectacle on the doomed so

we might, I thought, consider

some well beyond all loss.

1970

Grace Abounding

for E.C.

What is the misery in one that turns one with gladness

to the hedge strung lucid with ice: is it that one’s

misery, penetrating there as sight, meets neither

welcome nor reprimand but finds nevertheless a picture

5of itself sympathetic, held as the ice-blurred stems

increased: ah, what an abundance is in the universe

when one can go for gladness to the indifferent ghastly,

feel alliances where none may ever take: find one’s

misery made clear, borne, as if also, by a hedge of ice.

1970 (1972)

Phase

These still days after frost have let down

the maple leaves in a straight compression

to the grass, a slight wobble from circular to

the east, as if sometime, probably at night, the

5wind’s moved that way—surely, nothing else

could have done it, really eliminating the as

if, although the as if can nearly stay since

the wind may have been a big, slow

one, imperceptible, but still angling

10off the perpendicular the leaves’ fall:

anyway, there was the green-ribbed, yellow,

flat-open reduction: I just now bagged it up.

1970

Hibernaculum

1

A cud’s a locus in time, a staying change, moving

but holding through motions timeless relations,

as of center to periphery, core-thought to consideration,

not especially, I’d say, goal-directed, more

5a slime- and sublime-filled coasting, a repeating of

gently repeating motions, blissful slobber-spun webs:

today’s paper says that rain falls on the desert and makes

it fertile: semen slips, jets, swims into wombs

and makes them bulge: therefore, there must be

2

10a big penis above the clouds that spills the rain:

that is, I think, reasonable, which says something for

reason operating in fictions akilter: reason’s no

better off than its ambience, and an ambience can’t

alter frequently from its reason: (somewhere, though,

15along the arm of a backwoods spiral, interchange

and adjustment with the environment are possible but

adjustment likely to be at the surprise of reason,

displeasure included: but then there has to be

3

protection against jolt-change: smashing alterations,

20kind of cottonpicking conniptions, fail of impulse:)

the thunderbolt, another celestial phallus, though

sterile, peels trees, explodes bushes, ravels roots,

melds sand into imitation lightning, spurry and branchy,

deep into the ground: that sort of thing is

25not promising, so represents, as with Zeus, authority:

cussed superegomaniacal threat that gets from the outside

in, doing its dirty work bitterest closest to

4

pleasure’s fundament: the better it feels, the bigger

the bludgeon: O merciful constructions that are so made,

30do have mercy: the stuff is sweet, why crud it up

with crud: for every fructifying heavenly penis, such as

the rain penis, a ghastly one seres sand:

if there were any way to get around the universe, somebody

would’ve by now: history informs despair:

35the lucky young, they don’t know anybody’s screwed

or perished before: just as well, too: although

5

screwing is nearly worth perishing, and, too, the two not

always concomitant: perhaps, co-terminous: but then the

penis is also (like the heavens) splitting and pleasuring:

while it’s in, it is, afterall, commanding and will not,

just because somebody’s edgy, withdraw: it will come

out only when it backs off from a puzzled loss or when

something truly spectacular appears, a shotgun or, more

accurately, roused maiden aunt: rhythms, speeding up,

45build necessity into their programs: I see filigrees of

6

confabulation, curlicues, the salt walking-bush, ah, I see

aggregates of definition, plausible emergences, I see

reticulations of ambience: the days shorten down to a

gap in the night, winter, though gray and vague, not half

50dubious enough: I see a sleet-filled sky’s dry freeze:

I see diggings disheveled, bleak mounds, burnt openings:

what do I see: I see a world made, unmade, and made again

and I hear crying either way: I look to the ground for the

lost, the ground’s lost: I see grime, just grime, grain,

7

55grit, grist: the layers at thousand-year intervals

accumulate, reduce to beginnings: but I see the nightwatchman

at the cave’s mouth, his eyes turned up in stunned amusement

to the constellations: from zero to zero we

pass through magnificence too shatterable: sight, touch,

60inquiring tongue, water spinning into white threads over rocks:

I see the man moving boldly, staking his love on time, time

the slippery, the slick mound stragglers slide into the

everlasting encompassing waters from: not a drop of water

8

hasn’t endured the salt-change of change: how

65have the clouds kept fresh, the soil kept lively, its

milling microbes, how has the air, drawn into numberless

dyings kept clarity, breatheability: I see quiet lakes

and composed hills: I see the seasonal wash of

white and green: I am alarmed with acceptance: nothing

70made right could have been made this way, and nothing

made otherwise could have been made right: nothing can

be made to make it right: we’re given the works to

9

purchase nothing: the hardest training of the eye

against this loveliness, what can we make of holding so

75to what we must give up, as if only in the act of giving

up can we know the magnificence, spent: what are we

here to learn: how to come into our estates before night

disinherits us: dear God (or whatever, if anything, is

merciful) give us our lives, then, the full possession,

80before we give them back: I see the flood-child astir in the

surf, the clouds slowing and breaking into light:

10

what did he buy or sell: what is the meaning of loss

that never lived into gain: the mother, not far off,

flickers in a ditch to the minor winds: how far off

85she is, past all touch and dream, the child huddled

snug into himself, his decomposition: how the dark

mind feeds on darkness, hungry for the inmost core: but

it is only darkness, empty, the hollow, the black, sucking

wind: this everyone knows: everyone turns away: light,

90tendril, moon, water seize our attention, make us turn:

11

I think we are here to give back our possessions before

they are taken away: with deliberate mind to say to

the crushing love, I am aware you are here cloaked in

this moment, you are priceless, eternity is between us,

95we offer ourselves in the sacrifice of time to this

moment become unconditioned and time-evering: I think

we are here to draw the furthest tailing of time round

into the perishing of this purest instant: to make out

the proximity of love to a hundred percent and to zero:

12

100I see the bitterest acquiescence, the calm eye in the

tragic scene, the smile of the howling mind: I keep

forgetting—I am not to be saved: I keep forgetting this

translation from fleshbody to wordbody is leaving my

flesh behind, that I have entered into the wordbody but

105may not enter in, not at last: I need a set of practices,

a mnemonics, my fleshbody can keep close to its going:

of those practices the stepping out into love, motion’s

glimpse, blanches to the highest burn: I can lose myself:

13

I’m not so certain I can lose you, I’m not so certain

110you can lose me: but all the others have succeeded, all

the others have tricked on their legs by graves, all

the others have gotten through all the losses and left

the air clear, the bush aleaf, the ground in scent:

after it takes place, there will be a clearing for us,

115too, we will be in the wind what shape a leaf would take

if a leaf were there: let’s join to the deepest slowing,

turn the deepest dark into touch, gape, pumping, at the

14

dark beyond reach: afterwards, shoveling the driveway,

warming up the coffee, going to the grocery store, opening

120the cookie jar, washing, shaving, vacuuming, looking out

the window at the perilously afflicted, that is, snow-loaded

bent evergreens, watching the pheasants walking across

the yard, plopping up belly-deep in snow, wondering

if one can get the car out or, out, in: the Ceremony of

125Puzzling over the Typewriter, of swishing off the dishes

and getting them in the washer, of taking out the trash

15

and hearing the trash-can lids snap and bang, opened or

squeezed shut: the considerable distance the universe

allows between brushing the teeth and helping John put

130his fort together: these small actions near the center

form the integrations, the gestures and melodies, rises

and falls minutes give over to hours, hours to days, days

to weeks, months, and years: it all adds up to zero only

because each filled day is shut away, vanished: and what

135memory keeps it keeps in a lost paradise: the heroic

16

entangler, benign arachnid, casting threads to catch,

hang and snatch, draw up the filamental clutch, the

clump-core reticulate, to tie energy into verbal knots

so that only with the death of language dies the energy!

140so all the unravellers may feed! the dissipators go with

some grain to their swill: pleasure to my tribe and

sufficient honor! to lean belief the lean word comes,

each scope adjusted to the plausible: to the heart

emptied of, by elimination, the world, comes the small

17

145cry domesticating the night: if the night is to be

habitable, if dawn is to come out of it, if day is ever

to grow brilliant on delivered populations, the word

must have its way by the brook, lie out cold all night

along the snow limb, spell by yearning’s wilted weed till

150the wilted weed rises, know the patience and smallness

of stones: I address the empty place where the god

that has been deposed lived: it is the godhead: the

yearnings that have been addressed to it bear antiquity’s

18

sanction: for the god is ever re-created as

155emptiness, till force and ritual fill up and strangle

his life, and then he must be born empty again: I

accost the emptiness saying let all men turn their

eyes to the emptiness that allows adoration’s life:

that is my whole saying, though I have no intention to

160stop talking: our immediate staying’s the rock but

the staying of the rock’s motion: motion, that spirit!

we could veer into, dimpling, the sun or into the cold

19

orbital lofts, but our motion, our weight, our speed

are organized here like a rock, our spiritual stay:

165the blue spruce’s become ponderous with snow: brief

melt re-froze and knitted ice to needles and ice

to snow so the ridges eight inches high hold: the

branches move back and forth, stiff wailers:

the cloud-misty moonlight fills small fields, plots,

170woodnooks with high light, snow transluminant as

fire: the owl, I’ll bet, looks about little from

20

those branchy margins, his eye cleaned of liking in

the soft waste not a mouse burrows or thrashes through,

liking gone inward and sharp into the agony of imagined

175mouseful lands: one thing poetry could be resembled to is

soup: the high moving into clarity of quintessential

consommé: then broth, the homogeneous cast of substance’s

shadow: then the falling out of diversity into specific

identity, carrot cube, pea, rice grain: then the chunky

180predominance of beef hunk, long bean, in heavy gravy:

21

last night the eaves from roof heat dripped and the

drops in those close-holding freezing laminations

noded the tips of the cedar lobes hammer heavy, such

ice: today, though, some sunshine and in the mid-forties,

185the freeing up has been steady, if slow: the blue

spruce stands isolated out in the yard—nothing drips

on it except the sky—and since mid-morning it has

had a little melt-shower in it, a shower canopy:

from a low-hung dangle the emptied branches have risen

22

190to near horizontal and the snow left looks edged and

drained: I think in the marked up annals of recorded

evolutionary history mind will turn out to have been

nova-like, say; a pressure of chance built up

nature had to take, the slide toward the slow explosion

195of searching risk: some think mind will continue

growing out of nature until possessed of its own self

second-nature it will bespeak its own change, turn with

or against the loam out of which it grew: I’m pessimistic:

23

for my little faith, such as it is, is that mind and

200nature grew out of a common node and so must obey common

motions, so that dickering with second-nature mind

violates the violation: a made mind can live compre-

hendingly only in a made world and artifice, exact and

independent as it looks, can’t, I’ll bet, extend intricacy

205working out through the core of every single atom: I

depend on the brook to look out where it’s going:

I depend on the snow to ornament the woods: I depend

24

on the sun to get up every morning rightfully off-time:

I depend on the sea current to find just which way to

210sway to the thermodynamic necessity: I depend utterly

on my body to produce me, keep me produced, don’t you:

the autonomy of the mind! who could desire it, staying

up all night to keep the liver right, the pancreas calm:

I prefer like the sweet brook to be at ease with my

215findings: I prefer the strictures that release me into

motion: for not even the highest branch is free to wave,

25

it responds as freedom to the wind’s tyranny: what have

I to desire of autonomy except slavery, its ware:

I prefer to be offered up by all the designs and musculatures

220into the liberty of correspondent motions: when the

mind can sustain itself it then may consider sustaining

the universe: meanwhile, I have nothing, nothing to sell:

I write what is left to write after everything’s sold out:

and also I write not very wide, just to the fence or hedge

225around the lot (sometimes from my window I take in the

26

neighboring lady’s scrap of woods—I hope she

doesn’t get word and charge me) but of course I write

straight up and down as far either way as I can reach,

which by sight (but not reach) one way is far but by

230reach the other way, the ground, is near, if so opaque

only imagination, that frail, filters through: still

it’s world enough to take my time, stretch my reason, hinder

and free me: do a section on the garage roof snow and you

will find several strata: I haven’t looked but I know

27

235because I was here when they happened: fluff snow, grit

snow, plain sleet, fluff snow, wet snow, more grit, and

snow (regular): similar sedimentary phenomena might be

expected elsewhere: and I have sat here by the window today

and seen a direct relation between the sunny intervals and

240the rate of eave-melt off the garage: that close a

pull between the sun and my garage snow stuns me,

though I would be the last to insist it do a thing for you:

I really do not want to convince anyone of anything except

28

that conviction is cut loose, adrift and aswim, upon the

245cool (sometimes sweltering) tides of roiling energy:

that’s not to despise conviction, definition, or other

structure but to put them in their place: I hope

you are in the middle income bracket (at least): I

desire to be in the very high upper high outgo bracket:

250to furnish forth energy out of nothing, except reflection,

a few hard years, several procedures of terror and

astonishment, New Hope Elementary School, assorted

29

mothers and fathers (with the one and the one), fifty

acres of ground, half swamp, half hill, Whiteville High

255School, the Pacific Ocean, a small sweep through the arc

of the galaxy, one arm of the spiral in particular,

etc.: I know I can’t give all that back but so what I

haven’t quit trying yet and anyway it’s just giving

nothing to nothing: I’m somewhat shocked by clouds

260of organic compounds in deep space but anticipate

no flagrant reaction: I think it’s going to rain:

30

our young don’t believe in time as future and, so,

suffer every instant’s death: they don’t believe

in the thread, plot, the leading of one thing into

265another, consequence, developed change: without retrospect

or prospect, they seek the quality of experience

a moment’s dimension allows: thrill replaces

goal: threat lessens and fractures time, shortening

the distance to the abyss, immediate, a step away:

270without calm, they can’t see tomorrow unfolding: the mind,

31

too, can’t move beyond the surface event into the

assimilations of higher, restful suasions where arc-like

staying has beginning and end and smooth curvature

reliable: hell is the meaninglessness of stringing out

275events in unrelated, undirected sequences: remove danger

(holocaust, suffocation, poisoning) from the young and

their anxieties will unwind into long reaches of easeful

seeking: not that anyone is, has been, or ever will be

more than a hair away from disaster, and the statistics

32

280on anyone’s living forever are unpromising: still,

we have now a Myth of Disaster, and that’s harder than

some other kinds of myth: with another snow coming, we

drove out past Route 13 on North Hanshaw this afternoon

to the tree farm for a scotch pine: there was half an

285acre of perfectly spaced trees tied up to permanent

stakes: that was enough, some of the stakes deserted:

nevertheless, I bought a full, short, four-dollar tree

which I’ve just put twinkle lights on: now, with

33

the snow still steady, John and Robbie (his little

290friend) are doing their part, hanging balls and

icicles: Christmas is still five days away, but no

matter—anticipation starts to burst out of little boys

early, and a present to raising the tree must be opened:

vent, vent: we need every trigger and valve we can

295invent to achieve restless deflations: invent vents:

my enormous, airy self sputters like a balloon at its

inadequate outlet and shoots off spinning enlarging circles

34

into the galaxy—or at least over the fence and treetops or

halfway over the lake: when it gets too dry around here

300in the summer sometimes, the little creeks nearly creak

with drought, a dribble of a drop dropping off the

dry ledges: well, I could use a little of that spareness

of form and volume: imagine the luxurious lassitude of

taking five minutes to swell into a drop and then let

305go with a lengthy reluctance: the last drop bulbing

from the spent member: but little boys have small

35

emotional bladders and the pressure’s terrific: they’d

rather have a string of little wows every day

than build up to one big blast: I see the gully-wash,

310lineated at the bottom with every stone the flash

could reach and roll into marcation: the honeybee sings

by the hard cactus, wings, spines, works his way up to

the barrel-tip blossom wet, resilient with the roothair

aperture of giving: somewhere in a dry trunk, the grog-rich

315honey cushioning the beeswax: I see the industry of water

36

variously dense and laden, the distributions, the little

pools, saved lockets: the bead in the ant belly,

the thread in a cactus vein, the reservoirs of birds’

eyes: the droplet concentrations: I keep thinking

320I’m saved, a shock of mild hilarity! I keep thinking

I’m a pot eternity is dropping coins in! think,

if you will, of that: or I keep thinking these words

translate me into another body less affected by

the weather and time’s clicking subtractions:

37

325public, I have nothing to say to you, nothing: except,

look at the caterpillar under this clump of grass: it

is fuzzy: look at the sunset: it is colorful: listen:

it’s hard to compete here in winter: snow makes the

broadest impression, an ineradicable eradication: slows

330and muffles: you can hear the snow fall, a fizz: if

I cannot look at you, I can look with you: since there

is something between us, let it be a thing we share:

if there is nothing between us, I’m coming up with this:

38

by the time I got the world cut down small enough that

335I could be the center of it, it wasn’t worth having:

but when I gave up center, I found I was peripherally

no bigger than a bit: now, I have decided the former

was the better: I must re-mount the center and force

the world to subside about me: not easy and not

340promising, but neither is surrender: still, St. Francis

said if you give up everything it’s all yours: giving

up is not easy at all: why is everything so perplexing:

39

I feel in the company of the soul, however, nervous:

I grow arch and curt: I talk nasty: I wink and grunt or

345switch to salacity: I mouth reprovables: I don’t

belong here, I try to announce: I am not worthy: I say

to the soul, you know this is no place for me: I am,

besides impolite, flawed: but the soul absorbs my defense

and turns my pain into a pure form of itself, investing

350my embarrassment with grace: I go out to the hedge bush-vine,

but there is the soul, tangled with curvature: I look at

40

the gaunt maple, but a nest is hung in it: I look

at the points of the picket fence, but there, too, the

snowflakes hold: in between, thinner than sight,

355returns and compliances give and take: can I take this

in, I ask, stand with it, assume it: can I talk of it just

as it stalls against the garage, bends upward and outward

around the eaves, picks up a drift and walks it to the edge:

is there an accepting it so complete it vanishes, my wills

360and motions tidings in a tide: ah, soul, I say,

41

awkwardness is being conscious of you: I will move and

do directly as I like and that way correspond to your

liking: the point is just to get this page full so I can

take it out of the typewriter and write some letters: sour

365cream, yogurt, cottage cheese, chip dip: lizard,

lick-flicking: rancher, ranching: fly, buzzing: tiger,

hassling: cicada, burr-grinding: squirrel, leaping:

chicken, walking: fur, flying: day, breaking: dove,

alighting: fish, gulping: sight, seeing: nose, running:

42

370a poem variable as a dying man, willing to try anything,

or a living man, with the consistency of either direction:

just what the mind offers to itself, bread or stone:

in the swim and genesis of the underlying reality things

assume metes and bounds, survive through the wear

375of free-being against flux, then break down to swim and

genesis again: that’s the main motion but several

interturns have been concocted to confuse it: for example,

the human self risks chaos by breaking down to a flash of

43

single cells in order to plant the full human code early

380in the beginning: and many other continuities of pattern,

as slowed flux, work through the flux durably: adagio

in furioso: a slow bass line to a treble revel: tell

him he is lost, he will turn in there and show you what

lost is, a positive sight: tell him his iciness is perfect,

385he will lower the cold till perfection drifts like sleep

to aimless absoluteness: tell him he is thin, he will

become so thin the spiritual will take charge: he will

44

turn into any failure abruptly as into a detour and find

his way to a highway: tell him he knows beauty,

390he will, going and trying, disclose ugliness: virtue is

waiting anywhere to be by concision of dealing established:

chiefly in the virtueless: huntsman, huntsman, how many

hounds arunning: a lead-hound and a following:

breaking, moving, and filling: people who dress up like

395artists, their art form is dressing up like artists:

the sun came up this morning without clouds before it:

45

what is it, then, that the poem is trying to give us

an image of: the ideal image of the ideal man: invariably:

the realist wants to know ideally the ideal realist: the

400ragged man and the ragged poem aspire to ideal raggedness:

the loose or fragmented or scopy: the mind can’t conceive

any way except into the desired image, the ideal, that’s

the only way it works right: let there be, he said

prayerfully though he was only talking, more mass and less

405direction, so that the propaganda cannot get off the pad

46

and the concision cannot gather to incision and the

over-simplification cannot settle real clear, accumulative

diversity a dreadnought bristling stifled guns: let

there be, he continued, orb-gathered complication, fuzzy,

410bewildering, so that right carries a heavy bilge of wrong

and wrong looks as if it could sump out right: let—

he moved to the rostrum—certainty wallow iceberg-deep in

confusion: let nobody know very much precisely about

anything in—here, puzzled, he dozed: take that lady:

47

415her mind is always lying down pleasing the legions: it is

a bow leant in a corner, gaunt with decommission:

how long did that last last last: it’s snowing now with

the sun shining: squalls with clearings: today is Tues-

day: yesterday there were 9 hrs and 2 minutes of

420daylight, sunup to sundown: that means light is

broadening: right here at the edge of winter-beginning’s

winter-ending: today will probably be 9 hrs and 3 minutes:

tomorrow will be different, maybe 9 hrs and 4 minutes:

48

what is the prevailing tone: are there minutes of the

425last meeting: should articles be padded with dummy

footnotes: are there any concepts to circulate: can

anyone form a motion: if we stall, will we sink:

if we run, will thinness split underfoot: the mind’s

one: it pre-existed, I think: even before it was

430mind it was mind plausible: it was the earth: when

it is fully born, it will be another earth, just like

the earth, but visionary, earth luminous with sight:

49

it will be nearly half dark: contemplation dwells on

one thing at a time: it will have lows and highs,

435basins and high countries, peaks and abysses, naked

seabottoms and naked summits: it will have interior

circulations, crusts in slow flotation: the wind

will blow through it and rock will confront it: it

will be oriented to polar transactions: nothing will

440be left out, nothing, not a thing, and yet it will be

whole: there will be islands, island chains, bays,

50

peninsulas, bottom spreads, inland seas, and mind will

have below its active surface several layers of

sedimentary history, though below that will be the

445melts in high heat and heavy pressure, the mobility

underlying encrustation and phenomenological flux:

there is one mind and one earth: it was all there

before it was first discovered and nothing will have

been added when it is fully elaborated: and yet it is

450completely unknown until made out: then the cosmos:

51

why does he write poems: it’s the only way he can mean

what he says: you mean, say what he means: yes,

but it’s harder for him to mean something than say

something: his sayings are facile, light-headed, and

455discontinuous: he keeps saying in order to hope he will

say something he means: poems help him mean what he says:

poems connect the threads between the tuft of his head

and the true water: that’s important to him, like roots

to a turf: without it, the separation would be awful:

52

460poems deepen his attention till what he is thinking

catches the energy of a deep rhythm: then he becomes

essentially one: one in thought and motion: then, he

means: the recent forward brain is working with the

medulla oblongata: by the time I get to the end of this

465all, I’ll have to have found something to say to the

people: this scratching around in the private self has

to yield something beyond a private waste of time: I

have to say, here is my drop of glue, now, somebody,

53

hold the world together, or just yourself: I have to say,

470here is a saying, binding: I must not when I get up on

the soapbox wash out: here, I will say, is my offering

to the people, these few words right at the center of my

experience of me and you: the complicated, elaborate weaving

of interconnection: I want to do well: I want people to say,

475did you hear that, that sounded good: perhaps I will say,

the cosmos, as I understand it, wants you to have fun:

or I will say, your deepest error may be divine:

54

much have I studied, trashcanology, cheesespreadology,

laboratorydoorology, and become much enlightened and

480dismayed: have, sad to some, come to care as much for

a fluted trashcan as a fluted Roman column: flutes are

flutes and the matter is a mere substance design takes

its shape in: take any subject, everything gathers up

around it: friend of mine is studying barbedwireology

485and he finds you can marshal up much world and history

around the discipline: barbedwire limitations and

55

intellectual definitions produce about the same

securities and disasters: I think a lot about meter and

right away it becomes the mirror in which I see the face

490of the times: oh, but the hierarchy of subjects persists,

sociology way above scabology, philosophy a sight beyond

toothbrushosophy: the aristocracy of learning is so much

will: I’d as soon know one thing as another, what’s the

difference, it all fits and comes out the same: and I

495can tell you, I’d rather see a tempest in a teapot

56

than Shakespeare plain: but Shakespeare was all right:

a nursemaid’s lip meant as much to him as the king’s eye:

but he never got it straight that in talking about the

actual king and the symbolical king he was merely

500engaging a problem in rhetoric: well, I’m glad because

I can’t reconcile the one with the many either—except

in the fuzzy land of radiant talk—and if Shakespeare grossly

surpassing me failed, I don’t have to worry about surpassing

others, my place comfortable in the lowerarchy:

57

505work’s never done: the difficult work of dying

remains, remains, and remains: a brain lobe squdging

against the skull, a soggy kidney, a little vessel

smartly plugged: wrestling with one—or those—until

the far-feared quietus comes bulby, floating, glimmer-wobbling

510to pop: so much more mechanical, physical than

spiritual-seeming grief: than survivors’ nights filled

without touch or word, than any dignity true for a state

of being: I won’t work today: love, be my leisure:

58

there is something dwelling in too correspondent for

515haphazardry: I read Plotinus once, a little, and

saw my mind (increased): currents, polar fads,

flash back and forth through a center apparently staid:

we may just now be getting enough lead into time to note

that nothing at all is moving except into the halfways

520of diversion: what if at the core the final eye’s

design’s fixed, the vision beaming locked, we the motes

crossing about, breaking into and dropping out

59

of light: what if we’re not seeking the light at all,

the transfixion (stare to stare in a bereft learning)

525but worrying the corners of our confined, held

suasions for the exit we could, from the starved light,

choose: why has the dark taken so much if darkness is

not the satisfaction: and how have we found the will

to thrive through the light from sway to sway: O

530Plotinus (Emerson, even) I’m just as scared as comforted

by the continuity, one sun spelling in our sun-made heads:

60

I exist by just so much as I am will-lessly borne

along: I am as given up as the boat-sloped maple leaf

on fast water: not a thing remains, not a motion’s

535curl, of any desire, and none of the things I desired

and gathered are with me: I deserve nothing, not

a glimpse into this world overbearingly rich, this

hungry, hardly-visionable air: just as empty as I am

is the just emptiness, not a leaf between here and

540extinction I have not spent the night in luminous

61

supplication with: by just so much as a tide flows in

and lifts me floating, by just so much I can never

grin the deathgrin at the silver abundance until I must:

where I never came to self, repletion’s an abundant

545wind (I’m picking out the grains, gritty, between me

and that abundance): considerable as any least

burdockflower, I’m alive to the stalk tip: anything

cries salvation big as capturing a waterfall: by just

so much as I have given up, I am sustained till finally

62

550the boat bumps solid, sucks the surface tit, and, bloated, drowns:

today’s the first of the year, icicle, cloud, root

in a slow procedure, every house re-roofed with snow:

the biggest numbers represent the finest differences:

plus or minus two parts of variation in a trillion, as

555in narrowing down on the inconstant readings of a

fundamental constant—the mass of the electron, the

speed of light, or the hyperfine splitting in hydrogen

proton precessions: nature seems firm with casual

63

certainties (one could say a steel spike is a foot

560long) but pressed for certainty breaks out

in bafflings of variability, a thousand close

measurings of the spike averaged out and a thousand

efforts to average out the variables in the instruments

of measure or in the measuring environment

565(room temperature, humidity, the probable frequency

the door to the room is opened): recalcitrance is built

in perfectly, variations thereon perceived as possibility:

64

oh, I’m going to walk right out onto th’elision fields,

eat up gloria in the morning and have it out with her

570in the evening: I’m going to postpone reality (but for

cheeseburgers) and focus yearning, doubly focus it,

bring into view three-dimensional hopes and hokum:

dying here sour with flesh and sweat—the disposition

of nature’s bounty, a bounteous abandonment to sludge,

575desireless, breathless: otherwise, otherwise to the limit!

if all must come down, make a high possibility for the

65

dependable work, space out an extreme differential,

an illusion for the future: the poet entangles: the

critic untangles: the poet, baited by illusion, figures

580that massive tangling will give locus to core-tangles

and core-tangles to the core-tangle that will

fix reality in staid complication, at that central

core’s center the primordial egg of truth: ah, what an

illusion: from the undifferentiated core-serum the mind

585turns back to the definition of its tangles for rescue

66

and then back to the core for clarification, only to

hesitate in quandary’s puzzlement: carefully, the critic

unwinds thread from thread, making out the energy and

translating it into ratiocination: but the untangling

590done, all the untangling done, nothing remains but the

dumb end of the last thread and the opus of statement

that replaces it: illusion! illusion! there are not

two somethings but two nothings: one nothing surrounds,

extends beyond, the fullest entanglement, and the other

67

595nothing is an infinitesimal dot of void at the center of

the primordial egg: inside calls to outside: in between

is the choice, an impoverishment that does away even with

the egg, or an abundance of entanglement very much like

the world but also nothing: for myself, I would rather

600wear beads than have no neck at all: the void is the

birthplace of finches, gyrfalcons, juncos (a specialty),

snowy egrets, woodcocks, hummingbirds, crows, jays,

wood ducks, warblers, titmice, and the end of everything:

68

I dreamed Edna St. Vincent Millay’s female companion

605had just arrived on the beach of Europe and was reciting

a moving poem about why had they come back when their old

friends had resettled or were lying in the sod: it was

a very sad poem and the lady was sad and wrinkled:

I woke up just before crying myself, impressed with

610the power of the poetry and life’s risky changes:

the morning was cloudless, rosy with atmosphere, the sun

already brightened to appear suddenly over the sudden ridge:

69

a little philosophy never hurt anybody: or else, little

philosophy hurts everybody: takes a lot of philosophy to

615make a little philosopher: the bubble swells and bursts,

the leavings cherishable, as being of themselves, not

devoted to an organ of use but, as with balloons, dumbly

elastic, shrunk wrinkled, and, often, highly colorful:

constituting an encounter of thing to thing: the bubble

620bursts and then one participates in the universal energy

of biting an apple, having a tooth filled, turning a

70

corner (the friction and earth-displacement of that) so

that the universe seems available in the

gravity of a ladybug tipped down a blade of grass:

625there’s a difference between division and differentiation:

from the primal energy, much has split away into identity—

toothpicks, yew berries, jungle gyms, pole beans (the

thoughtful differentiations into bell pepper and basil)—

but a little time undercuts these matters into shape (soon

630they will be shapelessly available again) so that division

71

is, at most, temporal—(mind & body) ha! (mind & nature) ha!

(reality & appearance) ha! (dream & fact) ha!—no, no, this

is not an expression of division, of taxonomy, dogma, bouncy

triadic motion, structure, solidification, type, but of

635identity differentiation: one of the strongest thrusts,

you might say, is to perish away from unity the fully

discrete, expressed, captured hollybush—the lust to

individuation we’ve heard so much about: let me, the cry

is, stand like the drop cast back from the breaking

72

640crest apart and regard the other satisfactory expressions

so there may be action, interaction, contrariety, and sum:

but the rise into differentiation is exactly equal

to the fall, a just compact not too friendly to the

appetite ravingly incomplete, or something, the deflections

645into limbo: routes go awry but everything anyhow gets

safely, if reluctantly, back into circulation, the

least differentiae nearest the continuum: it’s true the

splits sometimes look perfect, the divisions ghastly, severe

73

alienation an agreeing merely with temporality: but actually

650while the leaf may not answer one’s questions, it waves, a

nice language, expressive and complete: and if the ladybug,

traveling across the droppy peaks of grass, seems not my friend,

then I have not understood hanging to cool in shade; or

legs nimbly feeling for grass-hair; or any other

655sight-loud talk: if I pick a leaf, it wilts: if I cap a

spring, it swells: if I crush a grass-spear, it stains:

if the quince crowds the hollyhock, the hollyhock

74

bends away, suffering subtle losses of rectitude:

what am I to say: my brotherhood’s immense, and if the gods

660have vanished that were never here I do not miss them:

some universe comes here to my yard every day or so and bursts

into a fly standing, with six little dents, on water: sometimes

when I’m shaving, a real small fly, screen-penetrating, gets

stuck in a bowl-drop of water: but he wiggles and would be all

665right if something could be done with the whole him, floating:

but when I touch a tissue to the drop of water, tension pulls him

75

down, crushing him limp, so he never gets up, no matter how

dry: a killing rescue: some things will not work: one day

I poured brine and salt-ice from the icecream freezer onto

670a strip of ground near the hedge: earthworms walloped up

rampant and thrashing and then went puffy-limp and

white: I have killed I can’t tell how many thousand priceless

moths and flies (even goldfinches and bright-streaked warblers)

sucked up by the grill or radiator grid: all of these lives

675had been acting in accordance with given principles, identical

76

to my own: nothing’s changed, with all the divisions

and terrors: the physical drowns and buoys, divides and comes

together: the bird’s song-air’s in my range, comes on my air:

I wrote the foregoing passage in July last year, which accounts

680for the change of weather and some summery tone: and a

slightly longer line: winter is different, shortening:

if you believe in equivocation as a way then you

must also believe in univocation because that is one

of the possibilities of equivocation: and if you

77

685believe all is fire why then everything is, including

the stones’ dull music, solid, slow, and

cold: and the weatherless moon less is nevertheless

singing blips of meteoric bits, the flash

smirching to glistening moon-tears of solar effusions,

690the wind, the solar wind, that pours out coronal lacings

into a great space: and then the mud by the swamp

ponds with cloud trails of crawdads scurrying is working

with little cellular thrivings: and the cool fire of

78

ferns climbing tree-footings from the deep freshets:

695allow, allow for the cryogenic event even, low down

nearly where the atoms give up relation and drift in slow

falls, incredible, spaceless beads: that is an extreme

form of burning, say, but of the fire: I can’t

help thinking that what we have is right enough, the

700core of the galaxy, for example, a high condition,

ample, but here, though, on the surface at least,

toads, picnic tables, morning glories, firs afire:

79

the world seems to me a show closed down, a circus

left standing: the ropes slack, the loose tent

705bellies and whomps in the wind like a scared gigantic

jellyfish: some stragglers are around but they are

turned inward on their purposelessness: they make up

directions that go nowhere: they turn missing corners:

the clown’s paint has worn off: his rags have become

710rags: his half-bald wig has become his head, his falls

have become his tricks: he now clowns to the universe:

80

now meter is interesting: the prospects are before

us: I feel the need for a realistic approach: we were

promised for today nine hours and six minutes of

715daylight: we were promised no sunlight and received

none: but can you imagine forty degrees: we have it:

the ground is practically asplatter with eavesdropping:

there are pools under the floating mush: they are not

clearly of a depth: one must know the terrain well or

720fill his boots: the garage, the cold garage, and the

81

porch still have six inches of snow but the house across

the way whose second floor is all under a slanting roof

is snow-free: the woods, unhung completely,

have resumed an old darkness, whereas yesterday they were

725still irradiated with snowholdings: the sun,

invisible before, has set into another invisibility and

the consequences are darkening here through the clouds:

oh this little time-drenched world! how it jiggles with

flickering! light as history, as relic, light two

82

730billion years old, moves its ancient telling through

the universe and deposits right here on my grass on a

clear night dim sediment of sizable duration: that

light can be so old and far-traveled, like flint, no

prayerstone that constant, the permanent telling of

735that quickness: lucky that only by the equalizing instant

anything survives, lucky for us, who can thereby kiss

out time to a full reduction and know everything ravished,

burnt out in a lid’s quickness: the total second:

83

sir, I told him, you have so many tones I can’t tell

740which one’s prevailing: the dominant from the

predominant: you have so many, they come in chords,

tonic, subdominant, diminished: I can’t tell the

significant significances from the insignificant

significances: won’t you, I implored, thin out your

745registration or, at least, give discernible direction

to your componency: it would take a battery of tonometers

just to find out about where you’re at: in the

84

contextual sense: have something to say: say it:

need you spray sense and be trusted only in the spray’s

750shape: such enlargements of limitation often

fail into disorientation at the center: boo boo pee

doo: plot a course, Mr. Sulu: let’s split: poetic

action mirrors human action: what preserves the

absurdist through the enactment of absurdity, what but

755the feathery need to touch ideal absurdity: the

ideal’s an imperishable validity: the illumination

85

identity takes thrust toward: it is the proposition

how we are to live our lives: the ideal hero and the

ideal anti-hero have ideality in common: heroes may

760change ways, clothes, directions, moods, but all bear

the pressure of ideality: James, the train robber,

sublime: Appleseed, the life of service, yes:

the vacuum cleaner salesman can, in our time, hardly

give the imagination suction, gather dust into any

765credible bag: rail splitter, spike driver, done, gone:

86

the sum of everything’s nothing: very nice: that

turns the world back in on itself: such as right

when you possess everything, you’d give everything

up for a sickle pear: I hope my philosophy will turn

770out all right and turn out to be a philosophy so as

to free people (any who are trapped, as I have been)

from seeking any image in the absolute or seeking

any absolute whatsoever except nothingness:

nothingness, far from being failure’s puzzlement,

87

775is really the point of lovely liberation, when

gloriously every object in and on earth becomes just

itself, total and marvelous in its exact scope,

able to exist without compromise out to the precise

skin-limit of itself: it allows freedom to fall

780back from the thrust to the absolute into the world

so manifold with things and beings: the hollyhock,

what a marvel, complete in itself: the bee,

how particular, how nothingness lets him buzz

88

around: carless in Gaza, with a rocker arm on a valve

785snapped, I to the gas station made it this morning,

left car, and by taxi so-forthed with son and wife

to University, son and wife going on beyond me to

nursery school: lunch hour nearing, I decided to

hitchhike home and did, first with a lady and baby

790daughter all in a foreign small car, then with two

toughlooking guys from Virginia, leaned front seat

forward and let me in the back: we talked about

89

the snow, local squalls filling the air even though

the sun was shining: the driver said he had to get

795back to Pennsylvania this afternoon: I asked if he had

snowtires and he said, No, and said he’d heard he could

get picked up if he got stuck without snowtires:

whereupon, apprehensively bound to be cheerful and useful,

I said when it’s so cold like today the roads

800stay dry even with the snow because the cars blow the

snow away as if it were feathers and that probably

90

he wouldn’t have any trouble: just then a dog glanced

out onto the road, the driver, pushing back in his

seat, soaked on the brakes, and the car slid hardly at

805all, verifying, as if by a universal complicity, my

faith’s predictions: well, then, as we neared the

Corners, things seemed with me a little brighter, so

I said, that stop sign ahead would be perfect for me:

he would have to stop anyway, and I would know

810immediately, if the other guy didn’t open the door, that

91

I was about to be robbed, killed, or bent out of my will

which seemed about the worst thing: all went well,

ruining the story: I got out, saying thankyous and

wishingwells and walked about the mile down Hanshaw

815home: just turning the curve in sight of home, I saw,

as in a perfect vision, my wife and son pulling up into

the driveway, driven back from nursery school in someone’s

luminous stationwagon: I felt relieved: I said, ah, the

broken and divergent lines of morning are coalescing:

92

820Wilde in some ways contra naturam really was: he loved

Art and set it against Nature, possibly because Art is

overwhelmed by Nature and he identified with being

overwhelmed: somewhat contra mundum, too: since

social nature had a majority against him: well, he did

825rather well, a sort of terrier of the mind: he barked,

if mostly in the regions where opposites are clear, not

reconciled: I admire that: why think nature good if it’s

against you: if it’s against you, then it’s hard to

93

approve even what produced you: not to approve what

830produced you, though, bumfuzzles, since it’s a kind

of suicidal vindication to hate nature in order to

love the self: how twisty things are: nature ought to

bear the blame, then, for fumbling, or society

learn to approve nature even when it fumbles, as being

835also nature: well, I don’t know what to hope in that

way, since society is also contra naturam, a device, a

convention: but if so how could Wilde come to love

94

convention so, I mean, convention as artifice, not the

conventional: Wilde, Art, Society, Convention—and then

840convention damned him: that shuts off most of the roads

and suggests not detours but deadends: when a lioness

whelps a defective cub, she whomps it against the

ground till it’s dead: well, I think we ought to put

ourselves above the beasts and take care to be respectful

845where persons move: provided all persons move with

respect: we should exhaust all our virtues, first:

95

though it’s gooseegg zero, morning sunlight hits the

strip of woods broadside and a squirrel is sitting out

pretty still on a limb taking in the direct radiation:

850enormous jungle-like fronds of ice (and other configurations

like species) have run across possessing the outer windows

but, now, the sun up, thaw like a fungus is making dark

melts in the foliage: the sun’s arc rises a little

daily into the world, marking a slightly longer

855journey along the ridge between rising and setting:

96

yesterday afternoon, right after I had written about

the adventures of the morning, the gas station called and

said my car was ready: I had been thinking how many

days, not how many hours, it would take: so John, that’s

860his name up at Ned’s Corners Station, drove the car on

down here to 606, less than a mile, and I made out a

check for him ($19.39), dropped him back at the station,

and took off for the University, free and mobilized again!

the total parts came to $7.79, 1 push rod ($1.25), 1

97

865rocker arm ($1.35), l rocker retainer ($0.50), l set 2

gaskets @ $2.10 ($4.20), and 1 roll electrical tape ($0.49):

the total labor was $10.50: r & r (remove and repair?)

l. (left?) valve cover, r & r both valve covers, replace

rocker arm, push rod, & retainer on #4 cyl intake valve:

870all in all I thought I got off easy: one thing interesting

is that Ned’s Corners Station is at 909 Hanshaw Road

and I’m 606 Hanshaw Road: that’s configuration:

today is, as I said, bright and cold: but 9 hrs 12 min.:

98

everyday (somedays, twice) I remember who I am and I

875metamorphose away through several distracting transformations

till I get myself out in bidable shape on comfortable

ground, and then the shows, the transactions, carry

traces of such brilliant energy of invention that I am

half willing to admire my new self, thrust into its

880lofty double helices, so winding: well, that’s one way

to get out of the dumps, but they say it’s wiser to

find the brilliants right in the dumps themselves: but on

99

the show side, there’s not only the show itself, bodiless

if arresting, but the honest mechanisms that produced

885the show: those mechanisms are earnest and work to

conserve their energy through transformations with a

greater efficiency than you can find anywhere in the

dumps: I mean, the quantity of structured mass you have

at the end is almost perfectly equal to that at the

890beginning: on the dump, though, fire, efficient,

will achieve nothing but ash, heat, and smoke: excellent

100

change, but poor payload: or take rust, sluggish,

but it operates okay, not that you can do much with

ironic dust: the thing is to derive the jus commune

895from the jus singulare: never must the jus commune

breeze through eradicating the jus singulare: the jus

commune must be merely a fall-out from happenstance:

that way it can find some curvature (if any) with the

actual: otherwise, the jus commune might become clear

900to itself and propose imposition: never: never never:

101

I don’t think I want to be buried here in these rocky

hills: once underground, how could I ever get my arms

free of the silk and steel, how could I ever with those

feet travel through the earth to my sweet home country

905where all the flesh that bore me, back through grandfathers

and grandmothers, lies, and my little

brothers and my little sister I never saw, born before

me and dying small: and where will my living sisters

be put down, not here, and their children who might

102

910visit me sometime to weep: but, a running weed,

I’ve come off up here and started a new offshoot

nucleus of a family and that sort of act perhaps should

be run into the ground: I mean, extended, preserved

into the ground: but this is phantasmagoria: death’s

915indifference will absorb living nostalgias and, anyway,

earth’s a single mother and all who lie in her are brothers

and sisters: jungle cats and mudcats, sleek and slick:

the other night on Hee-Haw somebody said, “slick as

103

a mudcat’s fin”: that’s slick: poetry to the people,

920not that they will ever acknowledge it: well, it’s

night now and still fair, the moon full: the temperature

is dropping and the heater picking up: I put John’s

tent together in the basement this afternoon: 8 rods

of fiberglass, connected with flexible tubes into 4

925lengths, those then run through the sleeves, aluminum

sleeves adding support at the joints, and all brought

together at the top: a zipper door: his little house:

104

I looked up man in the dictionary and he was illustrated

and, as it turned out, chiefly muscle, a red fabric, and

930bone, the whiteness men share: this creature, I

thought, has taken over, I know not whether because of

the freedom of the fingerbones or of the wagging, detachable

jaw, one about as gross and fine as the other: he

depends, ultimately, I thought again, on grass but, my,

935what a transfiguration from the grass: he sees, his

vision air-clear: he tastes and feels: he thinks, ah:

105

he devours: he falls into necessities, or madnesses, only

his body can untangle: he carries in his lobed, zoned

skull earth’s little supernova, the cerebral explosion,

940somewhat in its stems and exfoliations like a mushroom

cloud: in him is ticking the californium 254 he’s

detected in bombs and stars, whether still in its

first or some lesser half-life, unknown: but his little

explosion is growing up to equal celestial models: for

945example, the other night the paper said two nearby

106

galaxies, hidden by our Milky Way, have been found, sight

having made other kinds of sight hunting, eating, loving

had no use for, some high conditions of burning: oh, yes,

we’re in the explosions and we’re going to see them out

950and no other course could be half as interesting: falling

back can’t help us now, returning to nature’s lovely

subtle mechanisms: forward to the finish, of course, the

way it’s always been or to a knowledge how to avoid the

finish: the possibility seen through to its perfect end:

107

955the young are earnest, impatient: the older have learned

the alternatives, to be wrecked or reconciled: oh,

but it’s not that easy: combinations and degrees make

life rough and rugged: yuck, yuck, the muck-sleet sings

pone the midnight windowpane, and the shattery wind

960the shutters shudders: the confessor yanks up a belch

of privacy gone to seed: orangutans aren’t groupy

as gorillas: cello alto solo pronto: if there is to be

no principle of inclusion, then, at least, there ought

108

to be a principle of exclusion, for to go with a maw at

965the world as if to chew it up and spit

it out again as one’s own is to trifle with terrible

affairs: I think I will leave out China, the perturbations

and continuities, transmutations and permutations of

Chinese civilization because, since that is so much,

970giving it up’s an immediate and cordial act of abasement,

betokening readiness to leave the world alone as

currently constituted (but, of course, how could words

109

do otherwise!): but I’m willing also to leave out most,

if not all, of the Amazon basin (all those trees, what

975a whack), millions of islands I’ve never heard of and

some big ones I have, all ocean bottoms, all very high

places (whose spirituality blurs me), nearly all clouds

(which come and go lots before they pass through here), and,

if the population of the earth is four billion people,

980then nearly four billion people: am I safe yet: of

course not: principles of exclusion become inclusive, etc.:

110

hiatuses, non-sequiturs, and indiligences later (nine hours

and forty-three minutes daylight) federal reorganizations

and revenue-sharings, advancings on extremely heavy

985volume, what is everything about or anything for:

procedure’s the only procedure: if things don’t add

up, they must interest at every moment: a

difficulty: yesterday, severe, high-altitude winds

took our lower atmospheres in tow, making highly-compressed

990bottom stirs, thunder at noon, one flash and blam,

111

and an even mixture of snow, rain, and sleet: zero

visibility was visible as near waves and white streams:

today is iron-fist windy and nudging zero: outside the

pheasant have lost all fear: they hunker down by the

995picket fence, inattentive as the enemyless, or knowing

the enemy, too, must bear the cold: the ground is

assuming the curvatures of wind, flat-open places skinned

clean of snow, interruptions by fall-out being built up

to, mounds with sharp precipices, sometimes a mound

112

1000breaking loose into strings of fast snow: I am unnerved

by openness and pure prose: the blue spruce is like

sprinkled with white crowsfeet, the inner intensive stems

branching, holding snow the needles can’t: and into the

huge, round yew bush starlings light and go two-thirds

1005under: they peck the frit of snow the wind leaves

and drink: I’m reading Xenophon’s Oeconomicus “with

considerable pleasure and enlightenment” and with

appreciation that saying so fills this stanza nicely.

1970–1971

Eyesight

It was May before my

attention came

to spring and

my word I said

5to the southern slopes

I’ve

missed it, it

came and went before

I got right to see:

10don’t worry, said the mountain,

try the later northern slopes

or if

you can climb, climb

into spring: but

15said the mountain

it’s not that way

with all things, some

that go are gone

1971

Left

Particularly near sundown

other worlds

(dome on

dome)

5suggest themselves to longing,

tangerine airs,

violets burnt out emeralds,

time’s rush into wind sheet

as the sun nears the ridge,

10a skinny plane slipping

at the last moment through

the thinnest rift and

away

where the sun locks

15as with a melting opening

the exact high center

of another possibility—

the self-justifying delusions

of darkening,

20this inscrutable by clarity

& undifferentiation,

this single-centered single

dome

spent in the mind’s-eye

25gathering of peripheral sight.

1971 (1972)

The Arc Inside and Out

for Harold Bloom

If, whittler and dumper, gross carver

into the shadiest curvings, I took branch

and meat from the stalk of life, threw

away the monies of the treasured,

5treasurable mind, cleaved memory free

of the instant, if I got right down

shucking off periphery after periphery

to the glassy vague gray parabolas

and swoops of unnailable perception,

10would I begin to improve the purity,

would I essentialize out the distilled

form, the glitter-stone that whether

the world comes or goes clicks gleams

and chinks of truth self-making, never

15to be shuttered, the face-brilliant core

stone: or if I, amasser, heap shoveler,

depth pumper, took in all springs and

oceans, paramoecia and moons, massive

buttes and summit slants, rooted trunks

20and leafages, anthologies of wise words,

schemata, all grasses (including the

tidal Spartinas, marginal, salty

broadsweeps) would I finally come on a

suasion, large, fully-informed, restful

25scape, turning back in on itself, its

periphery enclosing our system with

its bright dot and allowing in nonparlant

quantities at the edge void, void, and

void, would I then feel plenitude

30brought to center and extent, a sweet

easing away of all edge, evil, and surprise:

these two ways to dream! dreaming them’s

the bumfuzzlement—the impoverished

diamond, the heterogeneous abundance

35starved into oneness: ultimately, either

way, which is our peace, the little

arc-line appears, inside which is nothing,

outside which is nothing—however big,

nothing beyond: however small, nothing

40within: neither way to go’s to stay, stay

here, the apple an apple with its own hue

or streak, the drink of water, the drink,

the falling into sleep, restfully ever the

falling into sleep, dream, dream, and

45every morning the sun comes, the sun.

1971 (1971)