CORSONS INLET (1965)
for Family, for Friends
It is not far to my place:
you can come smallboat,
pausing under shade in the eddies
or going ashore
5to rest, regard the leaves
or talk with birds and
shore weeds: hire a full grown man not
late in years to oar you
and choose a canoe-like thin ship:
10(a dumb man is better and no
costlier; he will attract
the reflections and silences under leaves:)
travel light: a single book, some twine:
the river is muscled at rapids with trout
15and a birch limb
will make a suitable spit: if you
leave in the forenoon, you will arrive
with plenty of light
the afternoon of the third day: I will
20come down to the landing
(tell your man to look for it,
the dumb have clear sight and are free of
visions) to greet you with some made
wine and a special verse:
25or you can come by shore:
choose the right: there the rocks
cascade less frequently, the grade more gradual:
treat yourself gently: the ascent thins both
mind and blood and you must
30keep still a dense reserve
of silence we can poise against
conversation: there is little news:
I found last month a root with shape and
have heard a new sound among
35the insects: come.
1961 (1962)
He turned and
stood
in the moment’s
height,
5exhilaration
sucking him up,
shuddering and
lifting
him
10jaw and bone
and he said
what
destruction am I
blessed by?
1963 (1963)
There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:
except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,
5in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch
quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.
1963 (1964)
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
5rounded a naked headland
and returned
along the inlet shore:
it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
10some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit
continuous overcast:
the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
15straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:
I allow myself eddies of meaning:
20yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
you can find
in my sayings
25swerves of action
like the inlet’s cutting edge:
there are dunes of motion,
organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance
in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:
30but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting
beyond the account:
in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of
primrose
35more or less dispersed;
disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows
of dunes,
irregular swamps of reeds,
though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all . . .
40predominantly reeds:
I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines:
45as
manifold events of sand
change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape
tomorrow,
so I am willing to go along, to accept
50the becoming
thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish
no walls:
by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek
to undercreek: but there are no lines, though
55change in that transition is clear
as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out,
allowed to occur over a wider range
than mental lines can keep:
the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:
60black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk
of air
and, earlier, of sun,
waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,
caught always in the event of change:
65a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals
and ate
to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,
picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy
turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:
70risk is full: every living thing in
siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small
white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears
the shallows, darts to shore
to stab—what? I couldn’t
75see against the black mudflats—a frightened
fiddler crab?
the news to my left over the dunes and
reeds and bayberry clumps was
fall: thousands of tree swallows
80gathering for flight:
an order held
in constant change: a congregation
rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable
as one event,
85not chaos: preparations for
flight from winter,
cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,
beaks
at the bayberries:
90a perception full of wind, flight, curve,
sound:
the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:
the “field” of action
with moving, incalculable center:
95in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
snail shell:
pulsations of order
in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
100broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together
and against, of millions of events: this,
so that I make
105no form of
formlessness:
orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override
or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain
the top of a dune,
110the swallows
could take flight—some other fields of bayberry
could enter fall
berryless) and there is serenity:
no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
115or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:
terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes:
120I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work:
I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
125scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
1962 (1963)
Taking root in windy sand
is not an easy
way
to go about
5finding a place to stay.
A ditchbank or wood’s-edge
has firmer ground.
In a loose world though
something can be started—
10a root touch water,
a tip break sand—
Mounds from that can rise
on held mounds,
a gesture of building, keeping,
15a trapping
into shape.
Firm ground is not available ground.
1963 (1963)
Like an
eddying willow leaf
I stand
on the street
5and turn:
people,
both ways coming
and going
around me, swirl:
10probably I
am no stiller—
detached; but
gold is
coming
15into my veins.
1963 (1964)
Lines flying in, out: logarithmic
curves coiling
toward an infinitely inward center: lines
weaving in, threads lost in clustral scrawl,
5weaving out into loose ends,
wandering beyond the border of gray background,
going out of vision,
not returning;
or, returning, breaking across the boundary
10as new lines, discontinuous,
come into sight:
fiddleheads of ferns, croziers of violins,
convoluted spherical masses, breaking through
ditchbanks where briar
15stem-dull will
leave and bloom:
haunch line, sickle-like, turning down, bulging, nuzzling
under, closing into
the hidden, sweet, dark meeting of lips:
20the spiraling out
or in
of galaxies:
the free-running wavy line, swirling
configuration, halting into a knot
25of curve and density: the broken,
irreparable filament: tree-winding vines, branching,
falling off or back, free,
the adventitious preparation for possibility, from
branch to branch, ash to gum:
30the breaker
hurling into reach for shape, crashing
out of order, the inner hollow sizzling flat:
the longnecked, uteral gourd, bass line
continuous in curve,
35melodic line filling and thinning:
concentrations,
whirling masses,
thin leaders, disordered ends and risks:
explosions of clusters, expansions from the
40full radial sphere; return’s longest chance:
lines exploring, intersecting, paralleling, twisting,
noding: deranging, clustering.
1960 (1963)
I got one good look
in the raccoon’s eyes
when he fell from the tree
came to his feet
5and perfectly still
seized the baying hounds
in his dull fierce stare,
in that recognition all
decision lost,
10choice irrelevant, before the
battle fell
and the unwinding
of his little knot of time began:
Dostoevsky would think
15it important if the coon
could choose to
be back up the tree:
or if he could choose to be
wagging by a swamp pond,
20dabbling at scuttling
crawdads: the coon may have
dreamed in fact of curling
into the holed-out gall
of a fallen oak some squirrel
25had once brought
high into the air
clean leaves to: but
reality can go to hell
is what the coon’s eyes said to me:
30and said how simple
the solution to my
problem is: it needs only
not to be: I thought the raccoon
felt no anger,
35saw none; cared nothing for cowardice,
bravery; was in fact
bored at
knowing what would ensue:
the unwinding, the whirling growls,
40exposed tenders,
the wet teeth—a problem to be
solved, the taut-coiled vigor
of the hunt
ready to snap loose:
45you want to know what happened,
you want to hear me describe it,
to placate the hound’s-mouth
slobbering in your own heart:
I will not tell you: actually the coon
50possessing secret knowledge
pawed dust on the dogs
and they disappeared, yapping into
nothingness, and the coon went
down to the pond
55and washed his face and hands and beheld
the world: maybe he didn’t:
I am no slave that I
should entertain you, say what you want
to hear, let you wallow in
60your silt: one two three four five:
one two three four five six seven eight nine ten:
(all this time I’ve been
counting spaces
while you were thinking of something else)
65mess in your own sloppy silt:
the hounds disappeared
yelping (the way you would at extinction)
into—the order
breaks up here—immortality:
70I know that’s where you think the brave
little victims should go:
I do not care what
you think: I do not care what you think:
I do not care what you
75think: one two three four five
six seven eight nine ten: here we go
round the here-we-go-round, the
here-we-go-round, the here-we-
go-round: coon will end in disorder at the
80teeth of hounds: the situation
will get him:
spheres roll, cubes stay put: now there
one two three four five
are two philosophies:
85here we go round the mouth-wet of hounds:
what I choose
is youse:
baby
1959 (1963)
Dry-leaf life
curls up on
lobe toes
and like a lost
5or haunted crab
skitters
across the street,
fretting at
the wind,
10or curled forward
tumbles down or
even up a
rise, gay and
light as a
15spring catkin,
or boatlike strikes
a stream or, wet,
flattens
out stream-bottom
20in windless
black: come,
wind, away from
water and let
song spring &
25leap with this
paper-life’s
lively show.
1963 (1964)
One morning Beebe
found on a bank of the Amazon
an owl and snake
dead in a coiled embrace:
5the vine prints its coil too deep into the tree
and leaved fire shoots greens of tender flame
rising among the branches,
drawing behind a hardening, wooden clasp:
the tree does not
10generally escape
though it may live thralled for years,
succumbing finally rather than at once,
in the vine’s victory
the casting of its eventual death,
15though it may live years
on the skeletal trunk,
termites rising, the rain softening,
a limb in storm
falling, the vine air-free at last, structureless as death:
20the owl,
Beebe says, underestimated
the anaconda’s size: hunger had deformed
sight or caution, or
anaconda, come out in moonlight on the river bank,
25had left half his length in shade: (you
sometimes tackle
more than just what the light shows):
the owl struck talons
back of the anaconda’s head
30but weight grounded him in surprise: the anaconda
coiled, embracing heaving wings
and cry, and the talons, squeezed in, sank
killing snake and owl in tightened pain:
errors of vision, errors of self-defense!
35errors of wisdom, errors of desire!
the vulture dives, unlocks four eyes.
1961 (1963)
Sorrow how high it is
that no wall holds it
back: deep
it is that no dam undermines
5it: wide that it
comes on as up a strand
multiple and relentless:
the young that are
beautiful must die; the
10old, departing,
can confer
nothing.
1963 (1964)
Beautiful nature,
say
the neuter lovers
escaping
5man/woman nature,
man
fierce competitive,
woman
taunting
10treacherous:
regenerative nature,
they say
fingering the cool
red-dotted lichen
15on an old
water-holding
stump:
sweet neutrality,
a calm love where
20man and woman
are fang & fury.
(1964)
He said
I am mud
in a universe of stone and fire,
neither hard
5enough to last
nor expressed
in one
of those imperishable fires.
Be something
10the grassblade said
rising whitegreen
from common swamp.
I am he
said
15nothing &
feel better that
way.
The grassblade
said
20be like us
grass stone
and fire and
pass.
Mud is
25nothing
and eternal.
1963 (1963)
Honor the maggot,
supreme catalyst:
he spurs the rate of change:
(all scavengers are honorable: I love them
5all,
will scribble hard as I can for them)
he accelerates change
in the changeless continuum;
where the body falls completed, he sets to work:
10where the spirit attains
indifference
he makes his residence:
in the egg on wing from mound
to mound he travels,
15feeds, finds his wings,
after the wet-sweet of decay,
after the ant-sucked earth has drunk
the honey-fluids,
after
20the veins
lie dried to streaks of tendon
inside the meat-free, illuminated skull,
lofts, saws the air, copulates in a hung
rapture
25of riding, holds the sweet-clear
connection
through dual flights, male and female,
soil’s victory:
(dead cell dross transfigured
30into gloss,
iridescence of compound eyes,
duck-neck purple of hairy abdomen)
O worm supreme,
transformer of bloated, breaking flesh
35into colorless netted wings,
into the wills of sex and song, leaving
ash on odorless ground, the scent
of pinestraw
rising dominant from the striking sun!
1960 (1963)
When the sun
falls behind the sumac
thicket the
wild
5yellow daisies
in diffuse evening shade
lose their
rigorous attention
and
10half-wild with loss
turn
any way the wind does
and lift their
petals up
15to float
off their stems
and go
1964 (1964)
Breakers at high tide shoot
spray over the jetty boulders
that collects in shallow chips, depressions,
evening the surface to run-off level:
5of these possible worlds of held water,
most can’t outlast the interim tideless
drought, so are clear, sterile, encased with
salt: one in particular, though, a hole,
providing depth with little surface,
10keeps water through the hottest day:
a slime of green algae extends into that
tiny sea, and animals tiny enough to be in a
world there breed and dart and breathe and
die: so we are here in this plant-created oxygen,
15drinking this sweet rain, consuming this green.
1963 (1964)
The butterfly that
named the weed
drank there, Monarch,
scrolled, medallioned—
5his wings lifted close
in pale underwing salute
occasionally would
with tense evenness
open down
10hinged coffers
lawned against the sun:
anchored in
dream, I could hardly
fall when earth
15dropped and looped away.
1963 (1964)
1
when November stripped
the shrub,
what stood
out
5in revealed space was
a nest
hung
in essential limbs
2
how harmless truth
10is
in cold weather
to an empty nest
3
dry
leaves
15in
the
bowl,
like wings
4
summer turned light
20into darkness
and inside the shadeful
shrub
the secret
worked
25itself into life:
icicles and waterpanes:
recognitions:
at the bottom, knowledges
and desertions
5
30speech comes out,
a bleached form,
nestlike:
after the events of silence
the flying away
35of silence
into speech—
6
the nest is held
off-earth
by sticks;
40so, intelligence
stays
out of the ground
erect on a
brittle walk of bones:
45otherwise
the sea,
empty of separations
7
leaves
like wings
50in the Nov
ember nest:
wonder where the birds are now that were here:
wonder if the hawks missed them:
wonder if
55dry wings
lie abandoned,
bodiless
this
November:
60leaves—out of so many
a nestful missed the ground
8
I am a bush
I am a nest
I am a bird
65I am a wind
I am a negg
I is a bush, nest, bird, wind, negg
I is a leaf
if I fall what falls:
70the leaves fell and the birds flew away and winter came and
9
when
I
ambringing
singingthosehome
75,two again
summerbirds
comes
back
10
so what if
80lots of
unfathomable stuff
remains,
inconceivable distances,
closed and open infinities:
85so what if
all that, if
thunderstorms spill the eggs,
loosen the nest, strew it across
galaxies of grass and weeds:
90who cares what remains when
only the interior
immaterial
configuration—
shape—
95mattered, matters, immaterial, unremaining
11
there is some relationship between
proximity
to the earth and permanence:
a shrub puts itself into and out of
100the earth at once,
earth and air united by a stem’s
polar meshes of roots and branches:
earth
shrub
105nest
leaf
bird
the bird is somewhere south, unoriented
to these roots:
110the leaves
though they may not have wandered so far
are random:
earth
shrub
115nest
goodbye, nest, if wind lifts you loose
goodbye, shrub, if ice breaks you down
goodbye,
goodbye
12
120the shrub is nothing
except part of my song:
the bird I never saw is part of my song and
nothing else:
(the leaves are a great many little notes I lost
125when I was trying to make the song
that became my silence)
13
the cockbird longs for the henbird
which longs for the nest
which longs for the shrub which
130longs for the earth
which longs for the sun which longs for
14
inside there the woodmeat is saying
please, please
let me put on my leaves
135let me let the sap go
but the zero bark is saying
hush, hush
the time is not right
it’s not the right time
140the woodmeat is always right
but bark is knowing
1963
The song
sparrow puts all his
saying
into one
5repeated song:
what
variations, subtleties
he manages,
to encompass denser
10meanings, I’m
too coarse
to catch: it’s
one song, an over-reach
from which
15all possibilities,
like filaments,
depend:
killing,
nesting, dying,
20sun or cloud,
figure up
and become
song—simple, hard:
removed.
1963 (1964)
Dew was
heavy
last night:
sun-up broke
5beads
into running
water: under
over
and
10against,
the mockingbird
fluffing
amorously
bathes
15in leaves
1963
At the oracle
I found the
god
though active
5recalcitrant
unliteral as air:
the priestess
writhed
and moaned
10caught
in the anguish
of some
perishable
event:
15birds flew by:
the urns
hummed: the
columns
glazed with
20sun; on the
inside lit wet with
fire: another, not
capable
of the inner
25speech,
read the priestess
and said,
“The
god wants honor,
30desires in you
honor’s attitude:
honor him and
your
venture will
35go well”:
cannot, I said,
the god be
more
specific? will
40I honor
him? come again
safe to this
grove?
the reader said,
45“The
descent of the
god is
awkward,
narrowing and
50difficult; first
he is
loose in the
air,
then captured,
55held, by
holy fire: the
circle of columns
binds
him and from
60the columns
the priestess
gathers him,
seized
by her struggling
65mouth into
a speech of
forms: it is
speech
few can read,
70the god
violent to
over-reach the
definite:
why should
75he, who is
all, commit
himself to the
particular?
say himself
80into less
than all? pressed
too far, he
leaves
wounds that are
85invisible: it
is only as
she becomes
him
that the priestess
90cannot be hurt
or can be hurt:
should she
break
her human hold
95and go too far
with him,
who could bring
her
back, her eyes
100lost to the
visible? step
by step into the
actual,
truth descending
105breaks,
reaches us as
fragmentation
hardened
into words”:
110but, I said, isn’t
it convenient
the priestess is
general
and inexact, merely
115turning and wailing?
if the god fails
me, whom shall I
blame?
her? you who may
120have read her wrong?
and if all goes
well, whom shall I
thank?
the god
125with honor,
you with the
actual coin?
“Night
falls,” the reader said,
130“the priestess lies
god-torn, limp: the
freed god
flies
again blameless as
135air: go
to your fate:
if you succeed, praise the
god:
if you fail,
140discover your flaw.”
1960 (1964)
Song is a violence
of icicles and
windy trees:
rising it catches up
5indifferent
cellophane, loose
leaves, all mobiles
into an organized whirl
relating scrap
10to scrap in a round
fury: violence
brocades
the rocks with hard silver
of sea water and
15makes the tree
show the power of its
holding on: a
violence to make
that can destroy.
1963 (1964)
The yucca clump
is blooming,
tall sturdy spears
spangling into bells of light,
5green
in the white blooms
faint as
a memory of mint:
I raid
10a bloom,
spread the hung petals out,
and, surprised he is not
a bloom-part, find
a moth inside, the exact color,
15the bloom his daylight port or cove:
though time comes
and goes and troubles
are unlessened,
the yucca is lifting temples
20of bloom: from the night
of our dark flights, can
we go in to heal, live
out in white-green shade
the radiant, white, hanging day?
1962 (1964)
The sparrowhawk
flies hard to
stand in the
air: something
5about direction
lets us loose
into ease
and slow grace.
1963 (1964)
Four Motions for the Pea Vines
1.
the rhythm is
diffusion and concentration:
in and out:
expansion and
5contraction: the unfolding,
furling:
the forces
that propel the rhythm,
the lines of winding-up,
10loosening, depositing,
dissolving:
the vehicles!
light, the vehicle of itself, light
surrounding
15we are made and fed by:
water, the solvent, vehicle
of molecules and grains,
the dissolver and depositor,
the maker of films
20and residues,
the all-absorbing vessel uncontained!
the rhythm is
out and
in,
25diffusion and concentration:
the dry pea from the
ground
expands to vines and leaves,
harvests sun and water
30into
baby-white new peas:
the forms that exist
in this rhythm! the whirling
forms!
35grief and glory of
this rhythm:
the rhythm is
2.
for the expansions (and concentrations) here
is the five-acre
40Todd Field:
seeding, too, is gathering,
preparation to collect
mineral, rain, and light, and
between the corn-rows,
45the broadcast field peas
fall into soft, laying-by soil:
dry beads of concentration
covered by the moist
general ground:
50and the general moisture, the rain’s
held shadow, softens, breaks
down, swells
and frees
the hard incipience that
55generalizes outward toward extension;
the root reaching with gravity,
the stalk opposing
crazing through the black land upward to the light
3.
fat and sassy
60the raucous crows
along the wood’s edge
trouble the tops of
yellowing pines
with points of dipping black;
65cluster into groups
from summer,
the younglings in their wings
poised,
careful,
70precise,
the dazed awkwardness of heavy nest birds
hardened lean into grace;
assemble along the edge of the field and
begin winter talk,
75remembrances of summer and separations,
agree
or disagree
on a roost,
the old birds more often silent,
80calmer and more tolerant in their memory,
wiser of dangers
experienced or conceived,
less inclined to play,
irritable,
85but at times
exultant in pitched flight,
as if catching for a moment
youth’s inexperienced gladness, or as if
feeling
90over time and danger
a triumph greater than innocent joy:
to turn aside and live with them
would not seem
much different—
95each of us going into winter with gains and losses,
dry, light peas of concentration nearby
(for a winter’s gleaning)
to expand warmth through us
4.
slow as the pale low-arcing sun, the women move
100down windy rows of the autumn field:
the peavines are dead:
cornstalks and peapods rattle in the dry bleach
of cold:
the women glean remnant peas
105(too old to snap or shell) that
got past being green; shatter from skeletal vines
handfuls of peapods, tan, light:
bent the slow women drag towsacks huge
with peas, bulk but little
110weight: a boy carries a sack on his
shoulders to the end of the rows:
he stoops: the sack goes over his head
to the ground: he flails it with a tobacco stick,
opens the sack, removes the husks, and
115from sack to tub winnows
dry hard crackling peas: rhythms reaching through
seasons, motions weaving in and out!
1962 (1964)
So when the year had come full round
I rose
and went out to the naked mountain
to see
5the single peachflower on the sprout
blooming through a side of ribs
possibly a colt’s
and I endured each petal separately
and moved in orisons with the sepals
10I lay
said the sprouting stump
in the path of Liberty
Tyranny though I said is very terrible
and sat down leeward of the blossom
15to be blessed
and was startled by
a lost circling bee
The large sun setting red I went
down to the stream
20and wading in
let your cold water run over my feet
1954 (1958)
In the hour of extreme
importance
when clots thicken
in outlying limbs and
5warmth retreats
to mourn
the thinning garrison of pulse
keep my tongue loose
to sing possible
10changes
that might redeem
might in iron phrases
clang the skies
bells and my jangling eyes
15ringing you in
to claim me
shriven celebrant
your love’s new-reasoned singer
home
20dead on arrival
(1958)
Exuberance: joy to the last
pained loss
and hunger of air:
life open, not decided on,
5though decided in death:
the mind cannot be
rid
while it works
of remembered genitals
10beautiful, dank, pliant,
of canyons, brush hills, pastures, streets,
unities and divisions,
meetings,
exact remembrance of liquid buttocks,
15navel, ellipse of hand,
magnified territories of going down
and rising,
the thin tracing saliva line,
joy’s configurations:
20serendipity: the unexpected,
the
possible, the unembodied,
unevented:
the sun will burst: death
25is certain: the future limited
nevertheless is
limitless: the white knotted
groin,
the finger describing
30entrances!
the dark, warm with glowing awareness, the
hot dis-
missals of desire
until the last last tear of pain:
35until the end nothing ends, lust
forward, rushing;
pillars of ice wet-bright in melt,
warm
with always-yielding joy: yes
40yes
yes, the loose mouths hiss in the mornings of death.
1960 (1963)
Like a single drop of rain,
the wasp strikes
the windowpane; buzzes rapidly
away, disguising
5error in urgent business:
such is the
invisible, hard as glass,
unrenderable by the senses,
not known until stricken by:
10some talk that
there is safety in the visible,
the definite, the heard and felt,
pre-stressing the rational and
calling out with
15joy, like people far from death:
how puzzled they will be when
going headlong secure in “things”
they strike the
intangible and break, lost,
20unaccustomed to transparency, to
being without body, energy
without image:
how they will be dealt
hard realizations, opaque as death.
1959 (1960)
After the shifts and dis-
continuities, after the congregations of orders,
black masses floating through
mind’s boreal clarity, icebergs in fog,
5flotillas of wintering ducks weathering the night,
chains of orders, multifilamentous chains
knobbed with possibility, disoriented
chains, winding back on themselves, unwinding,
intervolving, spinning, breaking off
10(nomads clustering at dusk into tents of sleep,
disorganizing, widening out again with morning)
after the mental
blaze and gleam,
the mind in both motions building and tearing down,
15running to link effective chains,
establish molecules of meaning,
frameworks, to
perfect modes of structuring
(so days can bend to trellising
20and pruned take shape,
bloom into necessary event)
after these motions, these vectors,
orders moving in and out of orders, collisions
of orders, dispersions, the grasp weakens,
25the mind whirls, short of the unifying
reach, short of the heat
to carry that forging:
after the visions of these losses, the spent
seer, delivered to wastage, risen
30into ribs, consigns knowledge to
approximation, order to the vehicle
of change, and fumbles blind in blunt innocence
toward divine, terrible love.
1959 (1964)
The word is
not the thing:
is
a construction of,
5a tag for,
the thing: the
word in
no way
resembles
10the thing, except
as sound
resembles,
as in whirr,
sound:
15the relation
between what this
as words
is
and what is
20is tenuous: we
agree upon
this as the net to
cast on what
is: the finger
25to
point with: the
method of
distinguishing,
defining, limiting:
30poems
are fingers, methods,
nets,
not what is or
was:
35but the music
in poems
is different,
points to nothing,
traps no
40realities, takes
no game, but
by the motion of
its motion
resembles
45what, moving, is—
the wind
underleaf white against
the tree.
1962 (1964)
The unassimilable fact leads us on:
round the edges
where broken shapes make poor masonry
the synthesis
5fails (and succeeds) into limitation
or extending itself too far
becomes a different synthesis:
law applies
consistently to the molecule,
10not to the ocean, unoriented, unprocessed,
it floats in, that floats in it:
we are led on
to the boundaries
where relations loosen into chaos
15or where the nucleus fails to control,
fragments in odd shapes
expressing more and more the interstitial sea:
we are led on
to peripheries, to the raw blocks of material,
20where mortar and trowel can convert
diversity into enlarging unity:
not the million oriented facts
but the one or two facts,
out of place,
25recalcitrant, the one observed fact
that tears us into questioning:
what has not
joined dies into order to redeem, with
loss of singleness extends the form,
30or, unassimilable, leads us on.
1961
When the sun went down and the night came on
coming over the fields and up the driveway
to the rose arbor and the backporch posts
I gathered myself together from dispersing dark
5and went up into the mountains
and sitting down on the round rock beyond the trees
kindled my thoughts
blowing the coals of my day’s bright conscious
and said
10all across the plains my voice going silently and down
among the stumps where the swamp cuts through
and in between among the villages of hill country
Now close your eyes
Sleep
15Shut out the world from the dark sweet freshening
of your quiet hearts
Lie loose in the deep waters
Do not be afraid to
give yourselves up to drowning in undefended rest
20If a dust storm blows up out of the West I will run
down the mountain and go through all the homes
and wake you up
If a new fire appears in the sky I will let you know
in time
25so you can know it should it claim you
I will have all your beings in mind burning like a watchfire
and when the night has grown thin and weak
and the full coyotes have given up their calls
I will move up close to the eternal and
30saying nine praises
commend you to it and to the coming sun
1956 (1957)
I have been throughout the world sleuthing,
drawing back goatheads
and from the writhing throats bloodletting,
watching the harassed religious eyes
5whirl and freeze.
Earth drinks
the blood of fawns: jasmines
bloom in lions’ eyes.
Breath and heat I have returned O Earth to your freedoms.
10Now keep me virile and long at love:
let submission kiss off
the asking words from my lips.
1951 (1964)
Having split up the chaparral
blasting my sight
the wind said
You know I’m
5the result of
forces beyond my control
I don’t hold it against you
I said
It’s all right I understand
10Those pressure bowls and cones
the wind said
are giants in their continental gaits
I know I said I know
they’re blind giants
15Actually the wind said I’m
if anything beneficial
resolving extremes
filling up lows with highs
No I said you don’t have
20to explain
It’s just the way things are
Blind in the wide land I
turned and risked my feet
to loose stones and sudden
25alterations of height
1957 (1958)
Winter over, ice-bound
mind better not
rush to a spring-meet fast;
might trip, stiff thoughts,
5shatter:
better not warm up too
close to sun;
might melt, run, gullies
caking off the good
10firm country of the brain.
Better go slow,
bend with the gradual movement,
let sap flow but
keep an eye on any
15thermal swell rising at
glassy mind.
If it gets loose wind
will take it
riddling through the underbrush,
20but if it stays
solid brilliant ice
tulip root
warm in coming
will splinter it.
1958 (1959)
I Ezra the dying
portage of these deathless thoughts
stood on a hill in
the presence of the mountain
5and said wisdom is
too wise for man it
is for gods and gods have little
use for it so I do not know what
to do with it
10and animals use it only when
their teeth start to fall and it
is too late to do anything
else but be wise and stay
out of the way
15The eternal will not lie
down on any temporal hill
The frozen mountain rose and broke
its tireless lecture of repose
and said death does
20not take away it
ends giving halts bounty and
Bounty I said thinking of ships
that I might take and helm right
out through space
25dwarfing these safe harbors and
their values
taking the Way in whose timeless reach
cool thought unpunishable
by bones eternally glides
1955 (1956)
At a bend in the rocks there hung
inexplicably a rope
and musing I said
When I die don’t bury me
5under no weeping willer tree
It’s I thought a hangman’s loop
provided by my warmer ghoul to
raise me out of care
or god’s own private fishing hook
10for glaring people
who sit wasted in the sun
on rocks
But put me up in a high dry place
unavailable to the coyote’s face
15It’s what I said old mountain
climbers left
dangling
The wind rides blade on mesa tops
Oh when I die don’t bury me
20under no weeping willer tree
and there being besides old bush
and distance nothing but a rope
I engaged myself with it but
it broke
25and all through the heaving night
making day I faced
piecemeal the sordid
reacceptance of my world
1957 (1958)
In the desert midnight I said
taking out my notebook I
am astonished
though widely traveled having
5seen Empire State and Palestine, Texas
and San Miguel de Allende
to mention extremes
and sharpened my pencil on the sole
of my shoe
10The mountains running skidded
over the icy mirages of the moon
and fell down tumbling
laughing for breath
on the cool dunes
15The stone mosaics of the flattest
places (parting lake-gifts) grouped
in colors and
played games at imagery: a green
tiger with orange eyes, an Orpheus
20with moving fingers
Fontal the shrubs flooded
everything with cool
water
I sat down against a brimming smoketree
25to watch and morning found the
desert reserved
trembling at its hot and rainless task
Driving through
you would never suspect
30the midnight rite or seeing my lonely house
guess it will someday hold
laurel and a friend
1955 (1956)
At a bend in the stream by willows
I paused to be with the cattails
their long flat leaves
and tall stems
5bleached by wind and winter light
and winter had kept them
edged down into the quiet eddy of the bend
tight with ice
O willows I said how you return
10gold to the nakedness of your limbs
coming again out of that country
into the longer sun
and Oh I said turning to the fluffy cattails
loosened to the approaching winds of spring
15what a winter you leave in the pale stems
of your becoming
1957 (1959)
I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
5of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
10as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:
the swamp’s slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
stone-held algal
15hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:
holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars’ gothic-clustered
spires could make
20green religion in winter bones:
so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass
jail seals each thing in its entity:
no use to make any philosophies here:
I see no
25god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
30hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
1958 (1960)