Previously Uncollected Poems from

COLLECTED POEMS 1951–1971 (1972)

To the memory of my mother and father

The Pieces of My Voice

The pieces of my voice have been thrown

away I said turning to the hedgerows

and hidden ditches

Where do the pieces of

5my voice lie scattered

The cedarcone said you have been ground

down into and whirled

Tomorrow I must go look under the clumps of

marshgrass in wet deserts

10and in dry deserts

when the wind falls from the mountain

inquire of the chuckwalla what he saw go by

and what the sidewinder found

risen in the changing sand

15I must run down all the pieces

and build the whole silence back

As I look across the fields the sun

big in my eyes I see the hills

the great black unwasting silence and

20know I must go out beyond the hills and seek

for I am broken over the earth—

so little remains

for the silent offering of my death

1955

Chaos Staggered Up the Hill

Chaos staggered up the hill

and got the daisies dirty

that were pretty along the road:

messy chaos I said

5but then in cooler mind saw

incipient eyes revolving in it

with possibly incipient sorrow

and had to admire how

it got along at all

10in its kind of weather:

passing, it engulfed me

and I couldn’t know dissolving

it had rhizobia with it

to make us green some other place.

1953

Eolith

I give you the wretched sympathy stone

tears there is no end to the common matter

dropped like suds water

down garbage shutes in places

5if you wish

Enlil has whipped your thighs with cane

and the possibility of unloading pity is

not greater than my giving it

there have been days like

10wasting

ziggurats while

your past spoils what is quick like river flies

days like

the sweep of a steppe I have gone out

15like a northwind over the Nile

cavernous

with Florida muddy hellish fountains of me it

is quite terrible

to think of it

20a shortening of days locusts dark west sounds

of oak limbs under pigeons

splitting in the night

roof mounting troubling clay gods river wind

I have sketched pyramids for

25viewing splendid Hamlet

a task waking at night in dark speed

the pelican’s over bays

carrying this eolith

1952

Hymn V

Assure us you side with order: throw

off atomicities, dots, events, endless

successions: reveal an ancient inclination

we can adore and ritualize

5with sapphirine cones and liturgies,

refine through ages of

canonical admissions and rejections; a

consistent, emerging inclination to prefer

the circling continuum, void receptacle,

10and eternal now: spare

us the accidents, controversies, novelties,

constant adaptations, the working truths and

tentative assessments, the upheavals and unrest

of an unquiet past shaken by

15the addition of a modern fact: package

knowledge, square-off questions, let them in

triumphs of finality be categorically

answered and filed: a

constant known yields all time to love: let our

20words grow out of and strengthen the authority

of old rich usage, upholding what upholds.

Spring Song

I picked myself up from the dust again

and went on

phoenix not with another set of wings but with

no other choice

5Oh I said to my soul may a deep

luminosity seize you

and my blanched soul smiled from its need and

dwelt on in the pale country of its bones

A field opened on the right

10and I went in

slipping arms-high through bleaches

of golden broom grass

and whirled with the wind sizzling there

Look said the golden tussocks and I

15looked down at the rising shoots

Where, if spring will not keep you,

will you go

I said to the broom straws

so I cried

20and stooping to scold the shoots fell

in with their green enhancing tips

and nearly died

getting away from the dividing place

At dusk the sun set and it was dark and having

25found no place to leave my loyalty

I slaughtered it by the road and spilled its

blood on sand while the red moon rose

1957 (1958)

Come Prima

I know

there is

perfection in the being

of my being,

5that I am

holy in amness

as stars or

paperclips,

that the universe,

10moving from void to void,

pours in and out

through me:

there is a point,

only itself,

15that fills space,

an emptiness

that is plenitude:

a void that is all being,

a being that is void:

20I am perfect:

the wind is perfect:

ditchwater, running, is perfect:

everything is:

I raise my hand

1957

Terminus

Coming to a rockwall

I looked back

to the winding gulch

and said

5is this as far as you can go:

and the gulch, rubble

frazzled with the windy remains

of speech, said

comers here turn and go back:

10so I sat down, resolved

to try

the problem out, and

every leaf fell

from my bush of bones

15and sand blew down the winding

gulch and

eddying

rounded out a bowl

from the terminal wall:

20I sat in my bones’ fragile shade

and worked the

knuckles of my mind till

the altering earth broke to

mend the fault:

25I rose and went through.

1959 (1971)

Back Country

The sun binds:

the small cold

moon

leading spins you,

5marionette:

the silver ruts of backwoods roads

narrowing

straiten your interests:

you keep moving:

10return is to your vitiations:

ahead, the road,

pure of you;

the pasture hills

fractured with

15hurls

of white rock,

unsurrendered to

your spoiling eyes;

plum blossoms

20uncast at your breath:

you have come

to back country:

hogweed’s hard yellow

heads

25crowd the ruts

apart: there are

wagon tracks

and, splitting the weed,

the hoofprints

30of long-stepping, unshod mules:

the hill people will

not discern

your wound:

you will pitch hay,

35wash your

face in a staved bucket,

soap your arms with

chinaberry leaves,

rinse

40well-water clean:

no: they will know

you:

keep on:

the sun calls:

45the moon has you:

the ruts

diminish you to distance:

a hill puts you out.

Christmas Eve

When cold, I huddle up, foetal, cross

arms:

but in summer, sprawl:

secret is plain old

5surface area,

decreased in winter, retaining: summer no

limbs touching—

radiating:

everything is physical:

10chemistry is physical:

electrical noumenal mind

is:

(I declare!)

put up Christmas tree this afternoon:

15fell

asleep in big chair: woke up at

3:12 and it

was snowing outside, was white!

Christmas Eve tonight: Joseph

20is looking for a place:

Mary smiles but

her blood is singing:

she will have to lie down:

hay is warm:

25some inns keep only

the public room warm: Mary

is thinking, Nice time

to lie down,

good time to be brought down by this necessity:

30I better get busy

and put the lights on—can’t find

extension cord:

Phyllis will be home, will say, The

tree doesn’t have any lights!

35I have tiny winking lights, too:

she will like

them: she went to see her mother:

my mother is dead: she is

deep in the ground, changed: if she

40rises, dust will blow all over the place and

she will stand there shining,

smiling: she will feel good:

she will want

to go home and fix supper: first she

45will hug me:

an actual womb bore Christ,

divinity into the world:

I hope there are births to lie down to

back

50to divinity,

since we all must die away from here:

I better look for the cord:

we’re going to

the Plaza for dinner:

55tonight, a buffet: tomorrow there, we’ll

have a big Christmas

dinner:

before I fell asleep, somebody

phoned, a Mr. Powell: he asked

60if I wanted to

sell my land

in Mays Landing: I don’t know:

I have several pieces, wonder

if he wants them all,

65wonder what I ought to quote:

earth: so many acres of earth:

own:

how we own who are owned! well,

anyway, he won’t care

70about that—said he would

call back Monday: I will

tell him something then:

it’s nearly Christmas, now:

they are all going into the city:

75some have sent ahead for reservations:

the inns are filling up:

Christ was born

in a hay barn among the warm cows and the

donkeys kneeling down: with Him divinity

80swept into the flesh

and made it real.

1960 (1970)

Communication

All day—I’m

surprised—the

orange tree, windy, sunny,

has said nothing:

5nevertheless,

four ripe oranges have

dropped and several

dozen

given up a ghost of green.

1964 (1965)

The Whole Half

In his head

the lost woman,

shriveled,

dry, vestigial,

5cried

distantly

as if from

under leaves

or from roots

10through the mouths

of old stumps—

cry part his

at her loss,

uneasiness

15of something

forgotten

that was nearly pain:

but the man-oak

rising has grown

20occupying

a full place

and finding its whole

dome man

looks outward

25across the

stream

to the calling

siren tree,

whole—woman.

1964

Bay Bank

The redwing blackbird

lighting

dips deep the

windy bayridge

5reed but

sends a song up

reed and wind rise to.

1964

Money

Five years ago I planted a buttonwood slip:

three years ago I had to fit myself

into its shade, a leg or arm

left over in light:

5now I approach casually and

lost in shade more than

twice my height and several times my width

sit down in a chair

and let the sun move through a long doze.

1964

Fall Creek

It’s late September now

and yesterday

finally

after two dry months

5the rain came—so quiet,

a crinkling

on

flagstone and leaf,

but lasting:

10this morning

when I walked the bridge over

the gorge

that had been soundless

water shot out over rock

15and the rain roared

1964 (1972)

Utensil

How does the pot pray:

wash me, so I gleam?

prays, crack my enamel:

let the rust in

1964

The Fall

I’ve come down a lot on the tree of terror:

scorned I used

to risk the thin bending lofts

where shaking with stars

5I fell asleep, rattled, wakened, and wept:

I’ve come down a lot from the skinny

cone-locked lofts

past the grabbers and tearers

past the shooing limbs, past the fang-set

10eyes

and hate-shocked mouths:

I rest on sturdier branches and sometimes

risk a word

that shakes the tree with laughter or reproof—

15am prized for that:

I’ve come down into the

odor and warmth

of others: so much so that I

sometimes hit the ground and go

20off a ways looking, trying out:

if startled, I break for the tree,

shinny up to safety, the eyes and

mouths large and hands working to my concern:

my risks and escapes are occasionally

25spoken of, approved: I’ve come down a lot.

1965 (1972)

April

Midafternoon

I come

home to the apartment

and find the janitor

5looking up and

policeman looking

up (said he’d

go call Bill—has

a ladder)

10and all the old

white-haired women

out looking up

at

the raccoon asleep

15on the chimney top:

went up the ivy

during the night and

dazed still with

winter sleep can’t

20tell whether

to come down

or take

up sleep again—

what a blossom!

1965

Lion::Mouse

Cutting off the

offending parts

plucking out

they were so many I

5tore the woods

up

with my roaring losses

but kept on

dividing, snipping away,

10uprooting and

casting out

till

I scampered

under

15a leaf

and considering

my remnant self

squeaked

a keen squeak of joy

1966

Breaks

From silence to silence:

as a woods stream

over a

rock holding on

5breaks into clusters of sound

multiple and declaring as

leaves, each one,

filling

the continuum between leaves,

10I stand up,

fracturing the equilibrium,

hold on,

my disturbing, skinny speech

declaring

15the cosmos.

1966

Heat

The storm built till

midnight

then full to quietness

broke:

5wind

struck across the surf

hills and

lightning, sheeting

& snapping, cast

10quick shadows, shook

the rain loose:

this morning

the flowers on the steep bank

look bedraggled

15with blessings.

1966

Definitions

The weed bends

down and

becomes a bird:

the bird

5flies white

through winter

storms: I

have got my

interest up in

10leaf

transparencies:

where I am

going, nothing

of me will remain:

15yet, I’ll

drift through the

voices of

coyotes, drip

into florets by

20a mountain rock.

1966 (1971)

Path

Leaves are eyes:

light through

translucences

prints

5visions that

wander:

I go for a walk and my image

is noticed by the protoplasm:

I wonder what visions

10the birch-heart

keeps dark:

I know their cost!

the heart shot

thin that

15pays winter hard:

I am run so seen and thin:

I see and shake

1966 (1972)

Mediation

The grove kept us dry,

subtracting from

the shower much

immediacy:

5but then distracted us

for hours, dropping

snaps faint as the twigs

of someone coming.

1966

Snow Whirl

The snow turning

crosshatches the air

into

tilted squares:

5I sit and think

where to dwell:

surely, somewhere before,

since snow

began to fall,

10the wind has

managed to turn

snow into

squares of emptiness:

dwell there

15or with the flakes

on one side of the motion

squareless,

dropping in an

unreturning slant.

1967

Reward

He climbed hard,

ledge to ledge, rise,

plateau,

caught his breath,

5looked around,

conceived the distances:

climbed on

high, hard: and made the peak

9from which the

major portion of the view was

descent.

1967

Timing

The year’s run out

to the tip

blossom on the snapdragon

stalk.

1967 (1968)

Trouble Making Trouble

The hornet as if

stung twists

in the first cold,

buzzes wings

5that wrench him

across the ground but

take on no

loft or

direction:

10scrapes with feelers

his eyes to find

clearance

in the crazing

dim of things, folds

15to bite his tail (or

sting his

head) to life or

death—hits the

grill of a stormdrain

20and drops.

1967 (1968)

Rome Zoo

Subtract from that shower

each leaf’s take

and the oak’s

shadow is bright dust:

5great

yellow helium

rabbits with bluetipped ears

stick the mist-weight

rain and, from high

10tussling, yield

all the way to the ground:

the rhinoceros’s back darkens.

1967

Alternatives

I can tell you what I need is one of those

poles Archimedes, thrust

into an unparalleled transform of intellect to power,

imagined dangling on the end of which he could

5move the world with: he was as much a dreamer

as I was (sic): I thought, given

a great height, I could do it with words:

still in a sense I have the dream, I have

Archimedes’s dream, that is, it hasn’t been tried yet

10for sure with a pole: with words, I tried it.

1967

Positions

I can tell you what I need is for

somebody to asseverate I’m a poet

and in an embroilment and warfare of onrushing words

heightened by opposing views

5to maintain I lie down to no man in

the character and thrust of my speech

and that everybody who is neglecting me far

though it be, indeed, from his mind

is incurring a guilt complex

10he’ll have to reckon with later on

and suffer over (I am likely to be

recalcitrant with leniency):

what I need I mean is a champion or even

a host of champions,

15a phalanx of enthusiasts, driving a spearhead

or one or two of those big amphibian trucks

through the peopled ocean of my neglect:

I mean I don’t want to sound fancy but

what I could use at the moment is

20a little destruction perpetrated in my favor.

1967

Reassessing

I can tell you what I need, what I need

is a soft counselor laboriously gentle

his warm dry hands moving with a vanishing persistence

to explain to me how I fell into this backwater,

5verse: oh what is the efficacy of

this lowgrade hallucination, this rhythm not even

a scientific sine curve:

I mean I need him to wave it all away,

syllables spilling through the screens of

10his soft joints, erasing

in an enchantment similar to that I would evoke

all this primitive tribal hooting

into some wooden or ratty totemic ear:

boy, I need to hear about the systems analysts,

15futurists, technocrats, and savvy managers

who square off a percentage of reality and name their price.

1967

Renovating

I can tell you what I need is a good periodontist:

my gums are so sensitive, separated and lumpy,

I have to let my cornflakes sit and wilt:

the niacin leaks out before I get it in

5and the ten percent daily requirement of iron

rusts: I’ve got so mashed potatoes best

accommodate my desire: my gums

before them

relax and, as it were, smile: I have bad dreams that

10snap, crackle, and pop (to switch seeds)

have built an invisible wall soggy-resistant: what

I could use with my gum line

is like a new start

or at least a professionally directed reversal or

15arrest of what has become abrupt recession.

1967

Devising

I can tell you what I need is

money and I don’t mean

a few thousand piddling shares of Standard Oil or

Xerox or a chunk

5of some up-and-coming (now over-the-counter) computer or

computer component stock:

what I need is a kind of expansive diversification

with exploding international implications,

pools, banks, and, in a figure, shoals

10of residual and seminal coin: what I need

to do is adopt a couple of ministates

and then enforce upon the populace the duty

of eating walnuts (which I’d ship in or

aid in the local growth of) and then

15the populace would be free

to do anything else it chose before or after or

even while eating walnuts

and then I’d return the fleet (or

else move myself to a ministate)

20to bring the shells back for my fireplace:

I like a nice walnut-shell fire

on a coolish autumn night.

1968

Emplacement

I can tell you what I need is

a stronger assortment of battleboasts:

I mean I need visions of toothy monsters

so old greens rot their sludgy toes

5so that meeting such visions (and, indeed,

apparently they cannot be avoided) I could

fetch myself up

on a blood-lilting flinching flight of battleboasts:

for I perceive the great work to be done is

10too often mismangled in committee, so lacks

all identity, all measuring out into

salient, songster-mongered cherishing:

what I need is for somebody to first of all

point me out a monster and then

15loosen a word-hoard or two jacking

my spine up to the duty for

to tell the truth my imagination’s sometimes

as pale as my spine’s always yellow.

1968

Touching Down

Body keeps talking under the mind

keeps bringing up lesser views

keeps insisting

but coaxingly in pale tones

5that the mind come on back, try

to get some rest,

allow itself to

be consoled

by slighter rather than slackened

10thirst: body keeps with light touch

though darkening

lines sketching

images of its mortality but not

to startle the mind further off

15hums

all right all right

1968

Spring Coming

The caryophyllaceae

like a scroungy

frost are

rising through the lawn:

5many-fingered as leggy

copepods:

a suggestive delicacy,

lacework, like

the scent of wild plum

10thickets:

also the grackles

with their incredible

vertical, horizontal,

reversible

15tails have arrived:

such nice machines.

1968

Ocean City

Island-end here is

elongated as a

porpoise’s nose, all

lawns and houses

5except one spot

where bending property lines have

turned out odd,

giving this plot

the sanctuary of contention—

10bayberry, wild

cherry, plum thicket:

a shore hawk

knows the spot,

knows grackles, sparrows,

15cardinals, even

mockingbirds cluster here:

he drops by &

right here in town

some early mornings wilderness

20meets wilderness

in a perfect stare.

1968 (1968)

Chasm

	Put	your
	self	out
	and	you’re
	not	quite
5	up	to
	it	or
	all	in

1968

Bearing Mercy

I spent with her

a

merciful night of

lubes &

5loblollies,

of goings out

& in &

by & through:

I held her

10in the teeth of my

need:

I turned her round

smartly

like a fumbled

15beachball: in

the morning she

got up

& her tiny hand

touched her

20hair, day’s

first flower.

1968

Tossup

This wall interrupts the wind:

sand falls out:

bushes loft vines

& mockingbird &

5caterpillar have their ways:

is this wall anything more than

an interruption:

nothing outlasts the last things

across the surfaces of Nothing:

10okay I said

I believe in faith,

this soft determination,

this blasted wall.

1968

Plexus

The knot in my gut’s

my good center:

I can trim

off fume & froth,

5glob & dollop,

come in there and

be

hard as indivisible:

or trusting

10the locked twist

float off office

buildings of glassy

mind,

confident if they

15don’t land they’ll

circle back some day.

1968

Three

The floodcrest of afternoon passes:

the blood smooths:

they say a roar’s in the world:

here nothing is loud or incomplete:

5the yellow iris with a fabulous surrender

has flopped triple-open, available:

sheaves of pointed fingers,

clusters of new holly leaves assume

the air: the redwinged blackbird’s

10jeer’s aboriginally whole in the

thicket across the street: if nothing’s

broken, then I’m alone for sure.

1968

Miss

Wonder if

you’re gross

consider the cosmic

particle so scant

5it can splink all

the way through

Cheops

nicking nothing

1968

Celestial

The most beautiful, haunting

dusk scenes around here, clumps of

tidal-marsh reeds on a highway’s edge

with supple dark-green

5cedar and tough bayberry and such

full of widges, mean

and manyful, opaque with invisibility:

nature turns so wide it can afford to

spoil an interweaving of scapes or

10flashing an Icarus by endanger the minds

of several listening millions whose

creation was superb if not special.

1968

Correction

The burdens of the world

on my back

lighten the world

not a whit while

5removing them greatly

decreases my specific

gravity

1968

Mirrorment

Birds are flowers flying

and flowers perched birds.

1968

Coming To

Like a steel drum

cast at sea

my days,

banged and dented

5by a found shore of

ineradicable realities,

sandsunk, finally, gaping,

rustsunk in

compass grass

1968

Even

Complexity o’erwhelms the gist,

engravities the grist and grits up

the anflob of the flubile:

hurts:

5nabs the numbance, fritters the foamost,

fractures the raptors and

rippling rislings:

finding a nut to fit a

bolt is an undertaking.

1968

Windy Trees

You’d be surprised how short the roads

in the air are today:

they twist, drop, burst, and climb:

such roads the sparrows have trouble on:

5in fact the only thing flying around

here today’s the grackle and he

goes over the brush so low looks as if

he’s beating something up from hiding:

it’s just like reality,

10the very day you can’t get out to fly

there’s also no place comfortable to sit.

1968

Photosynthesis

The sun’s wind

blows the fire

green, sails the

chloroplasts,

5lifts banks, bogs,

boughs into flame:

the green ash of

yellow loss.

1968

Making Waves

Some mornings of maximal

frustration—wind,

rain four days old—

your hate waves rise &

5slap around the walls:

I float, smile, above the

unadmitted show:

but soon, bobbing, send a few

waves out myself and

10the two sets

sloshing against each other

agitate the environment

or coming into beat

raise waves so big we both

15get scared and hussle out the

oilslicks of consolation.

1968

Clearing

It’s day again, the fourth day,

still overcast and sprinkling:

but the wind’s stopped:

the trees and bushes in

5profound rest

hold beads:

occasionally a bead drops and a

spur of leaves springs upright:

if the sun breaks out an

10amazing number of things will change.

1968

The Account

The difference, finding the

difference: earth, no heavier

with me here, will be no

lighter when I’m gone: sum or

5subtraction equals zero: no

change—not to the loss of a

single electron’s spin—will

net from my total change:

is that horror or opportunity:

10should I spurn earth now with

mind, toss my own indifference

to indifference, invent some

other scale that assents to

temporary weight, make something

15substanceless as love earth can’t

get to with changeless changing:

will my electrical system noumenally

at the last moment leap free

and, weightless, will it

20have any way to deal—or if

there is some thinnest weight,

what will it join with, how

will it neighbor: something finer

than perception, a difference

25so opposite to ground it will

have no mass, indifferent to mass.

1968

Winter Saint

In the summer I live so

close to my neighbor I

can hear him sweat:

all my forced bushes, leafy

5and birdy, do not

prevent this:

his drawers wrenched

off his sticky butt

clutch my speech white:

10his beery mouth wakes up

under my tongue: his

lawnmower wilts my cereal:

I do not like to hear him

wheeze over difficult weeds:

15I don’t like his squishy toes:

I’m for ice and shutters

and the miles and miles

winter clears between us.

1968

The Imagined Land

I want a squirrel-foil for my martin pole

I want to perturb some laws of balance

I want to create unnatural conditions

I want to eliminate snakes, rats,

5cats, martens from dread

I want above the sloping foil regions of

exceptional deliverance

I want my evening air trimmed bug clear

(pits of bottomless change

10shot through the clarifying ambience)

I want design heightened into

artificial imbalances of calm

I want a squirrel-foil for my martin pole

1968

The King of Ice

Now and then the intolerable crooks

down around my temples

and binds—an ice-vice, you could

say, vice-ice—a crown of ice:

5kings know how to take matters

casually, so I just sit there cold,

intensely inward, brow bowed,

loneliness universal: I wait:

I’m not going anywhere: I

10wait for the thing to slip or for

my attention to fix, somewhere on

the inner glacier, on polar bears

in disconcerting romp: I figure

the intolerable not to be dealt with,

15just set aside: I am going to

wait: look at these interesting

stitches in my robes, I say:

I’ve already settled my affairs of state;

that is, I’ll take the cold when it comes,

20but I will never believe in ice.

1968

Village, Town, City—Highway, Road, Path

Grove, forest, jungle—a thickening motion

accompanied by a sense of loss of control:

swamp: ah, an uncertain or sloppy (hungry) bottom:

flood moccasins lining the bayous, drowning snakes

5rafting down the gulf-wide river: patch, copse,

thicket—a surrounding tameness with a touch of

central wilderness: let a dog belch up worms—

they string from his mouth in a white beard,

his eyes grave, tamed, shamed to affliction:

10but affliction can storm from shame and

tussle the peripheries of order: but take a word,

there are backward suasions: you may have twice

as much of anything as you ask: my yard maple’s

in the open, full of leaf, and single to the wind.

1969

Lonely Splendor

I tell the maple it’s unwise—though

it stands open

and alone—to put too much splendor

of leaf on

5so that rather than stand firm and quiver

to the wind it rolls

raising whole branches on a swell

that plays out into tossing and twisting

at the top:

10but, of course, it is

difficult to tell

the inner thrust it can’t ornament the whole

open universe, such quenchless

putting out and on:

15I tell the maple, if a wind’s taken by

the bounty of your heavy ship,

what may be assumed, what saved:

if I were a maple I’d want neighbors

to keep me skinny and high

20in windbreaking thickets:

but then loneliness can’t be cajoled

to give a leaf up

(or keep one in)

and can’t believe slim thickets

25do any slender speaking worthy note.

1969

The Swan Ritual

Yield to the tantalizing mechanism:

fall, trusting and centered as a

drive, following into the poem:

line by line pile entanglements on,

5arrive willfully in the deepest

fix: then, the thing done, turn

round in the mazy terror and

question, outsmart the mechanism:

find the glide over-reaching or

10dismissing—halter it into

a going concern so the wing

muscles at the neck’s base work

urgency’s compression and

openness breaks out lofting

15you beyond all binds and terminals.

1969

He Said

Speaking to mountains (&

hearing them speak!) assiduously

(though encounteringly)

avoids the personal,

5a curvature whose swerve, however,

can out-range the scary planets

and seriously attenuate

the gravitational

core which wanting the personal

10had to give it up:

being can’t always be as it is:

volcanoes, droughts, quakes,

natural disasters of all kinds,

including (heavy rain &)

15the personal,

mitigate much fixity, the dwelling

of mind in its dwelling:

my immediate sympathetic reaction was

that I understood all that

20well in a way

and said it seemed reasonable that

mountains, though,

should attract such voices and

furnish such replies.

1969

One More Time

I took my likely schizophrenia in hand

and said if

it must be the high places, let’s go to them,

muse how they lie about, see how

5the lessening to immateriality occurs,

how the peaks, chipping off, folding in, loft

free to the danger of floating, endure

the falling away, the unneighboring to high isolation:

the essential reductions to form

10and to rock, the single substance,

gained, we’ll confront puzzling air, from

the strictest consideration to the freest,

and the height made we’ll have the choiceless ease

of the single choice, down, and leisure to come on

15deepening multiplicity,

trifling, discrete abundance,

bottomless diversity, down into the pines,

morning glories and trout streams

(where the lacewing works the evening, marginal air)

20blueberry brush: high-slope cucumber vines abearing.

1969 (1970)

Drought

Bees turn in a fire

of dry-rich honey,

visit the faucet

for the left, crescent

5drop: below the faucet

by the cool cement a

webbed bumblebee spins:

the spider, whilom serene,

attacks to feed

10another filament in: I

can’t understand

for a minute why

the bumblebee

works so hard into the

15straitening maze:

but Lord I know why:

it’s to find if not flight

the far end of the dark.

1969

Image

The indefinable idol’s invisible to the mind:

its visage unmonstrous and unsaintly’s unavailable

to the iconoclast who in the whirling wind learns

something of his whirling subduing, which is

5primary instruction: of course, it breaks down

into griffins, calves, beavers, gargoyles but

re-summed shoulders up again and disappears: because

it disappears, the put-down’s universal and complete:

but then the ignorant and stupid, the unerring

10majority, think something’s died and promote the

precision of the visibly defined: the more partial,

the more certain, until partiality collapses under

its exclusions: that’s another kind of death

that draws human blood: oh, how I wish the notion

15of unity could get around: how I wish the idol could

hold summed his attributes, empty free the mind.

1969

Equinox

I went out to cut a last batch of zinnias this

morning from the back fencerow and got my shanks

chilled for sure: furrowy dark gray clouds with

separating fringes of blue sky-grass: and dew

5beaded up heavier than the left-overs of rain:

in the zinnias, in each of two, a bumblebee

stirring in slow-motion, trying to unwind

the webbed drug of cold, buzzing occasionally but

with a dry rattle: bees die with the burnt honey

10at their mouths, at least: the fact’s established:

it is not summer now and the simmering buzz is out of

heat: the zucchini blossoms falling show squash

overgreen with stunted growth: the snapdragons have

suckered down into a blossom or so: we passed

15into dark last week the even mark of day and night

and what we hoped would stay we yield to change.

1969

Russet Gold

The shoddy furbishings I pick and choose among,

having, as I have, little hope of the foil brights

shimmering, those ghastly ecstatic blankouts

of rosy coordination in complete deliveries: no:

5I take the radiance in, for example, rain, or shiver

to drops beaded up on cellophane: I tell you

when the bark loosens on a soggy stick, I can

get into that space and respire: and have thoughts

otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to assume:

10half the time I’m unable, frankly, from a hurtful

capacity to imagine my own privation: but the other

half, I can wait with a yew drop, whether it will

evaporate or, struck by a rapid augmentation, splish,

presuming that the rain is, as here it often is, light

15if long: when everything’s given up,

amazingly, I think, so much stuff to give up,

and reluctantly, appears: everybody’s seen a cast

feather, the dislocation: that’s something: and when

a zinnia turns all cone, it’s certainly not into

20disorder or waste: I don’t expect to busy

much with or in the sun, ghosts my valid glimmerers.

1969

Essay on Poetics

Take in a lyric information

totally processed, interpenetrated into

wholeness where

a bit is a bit, a string a string, a

5cluster a cluster, everything beefing up

and verging out

for that point in the periphery where

salience bends into curve

and all saliences bend to the same angle of

10curve and curve becomes curve, one curve, the whole curve:

that is information actual

at every point

but taking on itself at every point

the emanation of curvature, of meaning, all

15the way into the high

recognition of wholeness, that synthesis,

feeling, aroused, controlled, and released:

but then find the wholeness

unbelievable because it permits

20another wholeness,

another lyric, the same in structure,

in mechanism of existence, but bearing a different weight,

that is, a different, perhaps contradicting,

bit-nature and assimilation:

25wholeness then is a condition of existence,

a one:many mechanism, internally irrelevant to scope,

but from the outside circumscribed into scope:

I like the order that allows, say, when

a thousand cows are on a thousand acres,

30clusters to flow out in single file down a gully,

encirclings of drinkholes, concentrations in a green

bottom, spread-outs, but identifiable, across

a broad rise or scape: I like that just as I

like tracings converging into major paths,

35untracings of widening out beyond a clump of

trees or small pass:

those configurations, rendered by aerial photography,

would interest me endlessly

in the precision of their topographical relations:

40the interests of cows and the possibilities of

the landscape could be read (not a single actual cow)

there well: and nothing be as a consequence known and

yet everything in a sense known, the widest paths

the controlling symbols, with lesser resemblances of

45motion: after a while I could account for the motions of

the whole herd and make interesting statements:

for example, with experience, I bet I could tell

from the wear under a copse

whether a lot of hot sunny days in a year

50or windy days come: I could tell something obvious already

from the copse whether it constitutes a meaningful

windbreak in a cold wind, sand or snow storm, and then

that, though obvious, would tell about cows:

I’ll bet in warm climates with heavy, maybe daily, rains

55there’d be little wear under trees, for the cows

would enjoy being out in the showers:

anyway, there’s a time when loose speech has to give in,

come up to the corral, run through the planked alleys,

accept the brand, the medication, surrender to the

60identity of age, sex, weight, and bear its relationship

to the market: there’s no market for most speech, specially

good, and none for loose: that’s why I don’t care

how far I wander off;

I wouldn’t care if I found a whole year gone by and myself

65not called for: the way I think is

I think what I see: the designs are there: I use

words to draw them out—also because I can’t

draw at all: I don’t think: I see: and I see

the motions of cowpaths

70over a non-existent, thousand-acre ranch: (times

frequently recur in good scope in which I don’t see):

stop on any word and language gives way:

the blades of reason, unlightened by motion, sink in,

melting through, and reality’s cold murky waters

75accept the failure: for language heightens by dismissing reality,

the sheet of ice a salience controlling, like a symbol,

level of abstraction, that has a hold on reality and suppresses

it, though formed from it and supported by it:

motion and artificiality (the impositional remove from reality)

80sustain language: nevertheless, language must

not violate the bit, event, percept,

fact—the concrete—otherwise the separation that means

the death of language shows: when that happens abandonment

is the only terrible health and a return to bits, re-trials

85of lofty configurations: if the organism of the ranch

alters, weeds will grow in old paths and the new waterhole

exist in a new weaving: means, reaching identity too

soon, exclude: mannerism is more suitable to the lyric

than to larger affairs because both lyric and manneristic style

90are slight completions: dropping back from the completion

to a linear mode can be more engrossing: for example, the

dactyllic hexameter can grind on, entangling, ingesting bits,

threads, strings, lesser saliences into considerable scope: or

iambic pentameter, especially unrhymed, is an infinitely various

95ployable means: one must be ever in search of the rapier that

holds the world on guard: but the sparrow trap traps a sparrow:

(disquisition is sesquipedalian pedestrianism, tidying up

the loose bits, but altogether missing the import of the impetus):

a center’s absolute, if relative: but every point in spacetimematter’s

100a center: reality is abob with centers: indeed, there is

nothing but centers: centers of galaxies, systems, planets, asteroids,

moons, drifts, atoms, electrons: and the center, as of the

earth, where all turns and pressures meet, is inexpressibly light,

still, and empty: the spruce trees at this moment deeply

105sway with snow and snow is falling, the temperature below

freezing: the muffled morning offered no relief: now, though;

just after noon, small gusts twist the branches: not

the heavy lower branches, too long in their holding, and too wide,

to respond: but twist the lighter, higher branches so they drop

110falls of snow and those falls, light, their efficacy increased

by falling, strike the lower, heavier loads, dislodging airy

avalanches, sketchy with event but releasing: it seems to me

a possibility of unceasing magnitude that these structures

permit these eventualities: small winds with small branches can

115loosen heavy postures: a miraculous increase, as if heat could

go uphill: but occurring within a larger frame, at great potential

expense: (but energy displacements, switches, translations are

too considerable for calculation in the smallest sector): still,

though the whole may be running down, spills

120here and there are overspills, radiances: the lyric, then,

has never been found out because at the center it, too, is

empty, still, silent: this is a point of provisional

summation: hence, the thens, stills, and buts:

a point of entangling toward the intertwining of a core, a core

125involving every thread: so far, we have ranch, snowsquall,

avalanche, ice skates, wind, etc.: but the main confluence

is one:many which all this essay is about: I get lost for fun,

because there’s no chance of getting lost: I am seeking the

mechanisms physical, physiological, epistemological, electrical,

130chemical, esthetic, social, religious by which many, kept

discrete as many, expresses itself into the

manageable rafters of salience, lofts to comprehension, breaks

out in hard, highly informed suasions, the “gathering

in the sky” so to speak, the trove of mind, tested

135experience, the only place there is to stay, where the saints

are known to share accord and wine, and magical humor floats

upon the ambient sorrow: much is nearly stable there,

residencies perpetual, more than less, where gold is utterly

superfluous and paves the superfluous streets, where phenomena

140lose their drift to the honey of eternity: the holy bundle of

the elements of civilization, the Sumerians said: the place

where change is mere disguise, where whatever turns turns

in itself: there is no reason for confusion: that is

what this is about: it’s simple and impossibly difficult,

145simple by grandeur, impossible by what all must answer there:

enterprise is our American motif, riding horseback between

the obscure beginning and the unformulated conclusion, thinking

grace that show of riding, the expertise, performance, the intricacy

of dealing: to be about something: history can assign and glean,

150furnish sources and ends, give grades: that is the

enterprise of history, always best when best accomplished: since

the one thing we learn from history is that we do not learn:

enterprise then’s the American salience, rainbow arch,

colossus: but the aristoi are beauty, wealth, birth, genius &

155virtue who should be gouvernors: enterprise somewhat, though

not necessarily, inconsistent with those, we lack governors:

the definition of definition goes two ways, opposing:

one direction cuts away, eliminating from relevance, limits

into true: take the word true: it goes back through ME.

160treue, trewe to AS. treowe, trywe to a kinship with G. treu

and on to IE. derew, meaning tree, in the basic sense of as

firm as a tree: if one could be sure of Indo-European forests

one might add lofty, abundant, straight, strong, majestic:

somewhere then in the essence of tree has been found the

165essence of true, including perhaps the perpendicularity or

verticality of true: but while tree clarifies the

mind with certain boundaries, it also recalls clusters

of tree-images, memories of particular

trees, and a sense of a translation (separation) in the mind which

170is trying to distil tree, a luminous, ideal image-tree, the truest

tree, from the actual clusters of memory: it is necessary

then to turn the essential image of a tree into the truest

rational wordage: truth, then, might be “conformity

with the facts”: but then we know that facts have truth

175when touched, given configuration by transforming,

informing fiction: is this unnecessarily

puzzling: all I mean to suggest is that the reality under

words (and images) is too multiple for rational assessment and

that language moves by sailing over: the

180other way definition has is to accept the multiplicity of

synthesis: of course, synthesis is at work in certain levels of

analysis, but I mean by synthesis the primary intent: look

at it this way: I am experiencing at the moment several

clusters of entanglement: if I took a single thread from a

185single cluster, viewed it, explained it, presented it, would

I not be violating my reality into artificial clarity and my

bundles into artificial linearity: but if I broached, as I seem

to be doing, too many clusters, would I not be violating this

typewriter’s mode into nonsense: hue a middle way, the voice

190replied, which is what I’m doing the best I can,

that is to say, with too many linking verbs: the grandest

clustering of aggregates permits the finest definition: so out

of that bind, I proceed a little way into similarity and

withdraw a bit into differentiae: unfortunately, man cannot

195do better though it might be better done: if I begin with

the picture of a lyre, translate it into a thousand words,

do I have a lyric: what is a lyre-piece: a brief and single

cry: the quickest means to a still point in motion:

three quatrains rhyming alternate lines: let me see if I can

200write a poem to help heave the point:

At Once

Plumage resembles foliage

for camouflage often

and so well at times it’s difficult

205to know whether nature means

resembler or resembled:

obviously among things is

included the preservation of

distinction in a seeming oneness:

210I say it not just

because I often have: maximum

diversity with maximum unity

prevents hollow easiness.

poetry, even in its

215self-rationale aims two ways at once, polar ways sometimes

to heighten the crisis and pleasure of the reconciliation:

getting back to tree and true, though, I was thinking last

June, so multiple and dense is the reality of a tree, that I

ought to do a booklength piece on the elm in the backyard here:

220I wish I had done it now because it could stand for truth, too:

I did do a sketch one day which might suggest the point:

I guess it’s a bit airy to get mixed up with

an elm tree on anything

like a permanent basis: but I’ve had it

225worse before—talking stones and bushes—and may

get it worse again: but in this one

the elm doesn’t talk: it’s just an object, albeit

hard to fix:

unfixed, constantly

230influenced and influencing, still it hardens and enters

the ground at a fairly reliable point:

especially since it’s its

general unalterability that I need to define and stress

I ought to know its longitude and latitude,

235so I could keep checking them out: after all, the ground

drifts:

and rises: and maybe rises slanting—that would be

difficult to keep track of, the angle

could be progressive or swaying or

240seasonal, underground rain

& “floating” a factor: in hilly country

the underground mantle, the

“float” bedrock is in, may be highly variable and variable

in effect:

245I ought to know the altitude, then, from some fixed point:

I assume the fixed point would have to be

the core center of the planet, though I’m perfectly

prepared to admit the core’s involved

in a slow—perhaps universal—slosh that would alter the

250center’s position

in terms of some other set of references I do not

think I will at the moment entertain

since to do so invites an outward, expanding

reticulation

255too much to deal precisely with:

true, I really ought to know where the tree is: but I know

it’s in my backyard:

I’ve never found it anywhere else and am willing to accept

the precision of broadness: with over-precision

260things tend to fade: but since I do need stability and want

to make the tree stand for that (among other things)

it seems to me I ought to be willing to learn enough about

theory and instrument

to take sights for a few days or weeks and see if anything

265roundly agreeable could be winnowed out: that

ought to include altimeters (several of them, to average

instrumental variation), core theory and gravity waves:

but I’m convinced I’m too awkward

and too set in some ways

270to take all that on: if I am to celebrate multiplicity,

unity, and such

I’ll be obliged to free myself by accepting certain

limitations:

I am just going to take it for granted

275that the tree is in the backyard:

it’s necessary to be quiet in the hands of the marvelous:

I am impressed with the gradualism of sway,

of growth’s sway: the bottom limb that John’s

swing’s on and that’s largely horizontal

280has gradually outward toward the tip

demonstrated the widening of the leaves

by

sinking: the rate of sinking, which is the rate of

growth, has been

285within the variations of night and day, rain and shine,

broadly constant

and the branch’s adjustment to that growth

of a similar order: nevertheless, the

wind has lifted, a respiratory floating, the branch

290as if all the leaves had breathed in, many a

time

and let it fall

and rain and dew have often lowered it below its depth—

birds have lighted bringing

295varying degrees of alteration to the figurings, sharp

distortions, for example, to the

twigs, slow dips to secondary branches, perhaps no

noticeable effect at the branch root:

I should go out and measure the diameters of

300the branch, secondary branches, small limbs, and twigs

and their extensions from base

and devise a mathematics

to predict the changes of located average birds: it

would give me plenty to do for weeks

305and save me from the rigors of many heights:

or scoot me to them: conceiving a fact stalls the

imagination to its most threatening dimension:

I think now of growth at the edges of the leaves as the

reverse of the elmworm’s forage:

310the elmworm, I haven’t seen any this year—one spring

there were millions—is as to weight an interesting

speculation:

as he eats the leaf lessens but of course the weight is

added to himself, so on a quick scale the

315transformation is one to one:

but the worm makes waste, the efficiency of his mechanisms

average and wasteful: in the long range, then,

worms lighten trees and let in light: but that’s

another problem: could it be maintained that

320the worm lets in light enough

to increase growth equal to his destruction:

it’s a good point, a true variable, but surely

any sudden defoliation by a plague of worms

would be harmful: a re-entry of winter (though possibly

325with all of winter’s possibility): time and number figure

mysteriously here:

one should be patient and note large results,

reserve some time for broad awareness:

broad awareness is the gift of settled minds: or of

330minds hurt high from painful immediacy: it eliminates

and jettisons

sensory contact with too much accident and event—total

dependencies at the edge: the man

fully aware,

335unable to separate out certain large motions, probably

couldn’t move: it’s better, I think, to be

broadly and emptily aware so as more efficiently

to negotiate the noons of recurrence:

(I have come lately to honor gentleness so:

340it’s because

of my engagement with

tiny sets and systems of energy, nucleations and constructs,

that I’m unnerved with the slight and needful

of consideration: part of consideration’s

345slightness: it approaches and stands off peripherally

quiet and patient should a gesture

be all that’s right

but of course it will on invitation tend:

it never blunts or overwhelms with aid

350or transforms in order to be received):

while shade increases equally with surface area of leaf

the net result’s

a considerable variance:

leaves inter-shade

355but the result on the ground’s non-accumulative:

in May last year, a month before the above sketch, I did another

briefer thing:

elm seed, maple

seed shower

360loose when the wind

stirs, a spring-wind harvesting

(when so many things

have to be picked—take strawberries,

stooped to and crawled

365along before, or the finger-bluing

of blueberries):

everything so

gentle and well

done: I sit down not to flaw

370the ambience:

the elm seed’s winged all round

and exists, a sheathed

swelling, in the center: it

can flutter,

375spin,

or, its axis just right, slice

with a draft or cut through one:

(it doesn’t go very far but it can

get out of the shade):

380then there’s the maple seed’s oar-wing:

it spins too

(simply, on an ordinary day)

but in a gust can glide broadside:

(dandelion seeds in a head are

385noted for their ability to become detached

though attached:

with a tiny splint-break

the wind can have a bluster of them:

the coming fine of an intimation):

390those are facts, one-sided extensions:

since the wind’s indifferent

the seeds take pains to

make a difference:

praise god for the empty and undesigned:

395hampered by being ungreat poetry, incapable of

carrying quick conviction into imagination’s locked clarity,

nevertheless these pieces establish the point

that a book might be written on the interpenetrations of

appearance of an elm tree, especially when the seasons could be

400brought in, the fluff cresting snow limbs, the stars and the

influence of starlight on growth or stunting—I have no

idea how such distance affects leaves—the general surround, as of

wind, rain, air pollution, bird shade, squirrel nest: books

by the hundred have already been written on cytology, the

405study of cells, and in an elm tree there are twelve quintillion cells,

especially in the summer foliage, and more takes place by way

of event, disposition and such in a single cell than any computer

we now have could keep registration of, given the means of deriving

the information: but if I say books could be written about a single

410tree I mean to say only that truth is difficult, even when

noncontradicting; that is, the mere massive pile-up of information

is recalcitrant to higher assimilations without great loss of

concretion, without wide application of averaging: things are

reduced into knowledge: and truth, as some kind of lofty reification,

415is so great a reduction it is vanished through by spirit only, a

parallelogram, square or beam of light, or perhaps a more casual

emanation or glow: when so much intellectual energy seems to be

coming to nothing, the mind searches its culture clutch for meaningful

or recurrent objects, finds say a crown or flag or apple or tree or

420beaver and invests its charge in that concretion, that focus: then

the symbol carries exactly the syrup of many distillations and

hard endurance, soft inquiry and turning: the symbol apple and the

real apple are different apples, though resembled: “no ideas but in

things” can then be read into alternatives—“no things but in ideas,”

425“no ideas but in ideas,” and “no things but in things”: one thing

always to keep in mind is that there are a number of possibilities:

whatever sways forward implies a backward sway and the mind must

either go all the way around and come back or it must be prepared

to fall back and deal with the lost sway, the pressure for dealing

430increasing constantly with forwardness: it’s surprising to me

that my image of the orders of greatness comes in terms of descent:

I would call the lyric high and hard, a rocky loft, the slow,

snowline melt of individual crystalline drops, three or four to

the lyric: requires precision and nerve, is almost always badly

435accomplished, but when not mean, minor: then there is the rush,

rattle, and flash of brooks, pyrotechnics that turn water white:

poetry is magical there, full of verbal surprise and dashed

astonishment: then, farther down, the broad dealing, the smooth

fullness of the slow, wide river: there starts the show of genius,

440in motion, massive beyond the need of disturbing surprise, but, still,

channeled by means—the land’s—other than its own: genius, and

the greatest poetry, is the sea, settled, contained before the first

current stirs but implying in its every motion adjustments

throughout the measure: one recognizes an ocean even from a dune and

445the very first actions of contact with an ocean say ocean over and

over: read a few lines along the periphery of any of the truly

great and the knowledge delineates an open shore:

what is to be gained from the immortal person except the experience

of ocean: take any line as skiff, break the breakers, and go out

450into the landless, orientationless, but perfectly contained, try

the suasions, brief dips and rises, and the general circulations,

the wind, the abundant reductions, stars, and the experience is

obtained: but rivers, brooks, and trickles have their uses and

special joys and achieve, in their identities, difficult absoluteness:

455but will you say, what of the content—why they are all made of water:

but will you, because of the confusion, bring me front center as

a mere mist or vapor: charity is greater than poetry: enter it,

in consideration of my need and weakness: I find I am able to say

only what is in my head: a heady constraint: and to say it only

460as well as I can: inventory my infirmities and substitute

your love for them, and let us hold on to one another and

move right away from petulant despair: to broach a summary, I

would say the problem is scientific—how is reality to be

rendered: how is 4,444 to be made 444 and 44 and 4 and 1: I

465have the shaky feeling I’ve just said something I don’t trust:

poems are arresting in two ways: they attract attention with

glistery astonishment and they hold it: stasis: they gather and

stay: the progression is from sound and motion to silence and

rest: for example, I can sit in this room, close my eyes, and

470reproduce the whole valley landscape, still: I can see the

southern end of Lake Cayuga, I can see Stewart Park, the highways,

the breaking out and squaring up of Ithaca, I can see the hill-ridges

rising from the Lake, trees, outcroppings of rocks, falls, ducks

and gulls, the little zoo, the bridges: I can feel my eyesight

475traveling around a held environment: I am conscious that the

landscape is fixed at the same time that I can move around in it:

a poem is the same way: once it is thoroughly known, it contains

its motion and can be reproduced whole, all its shapeliness intact,

to the mind at the same time the mind can travel around in it and

480know its sound and motion: nothing defined can

be still: the verbal moves, depends there, or sinks into unfocused

irreality: ah, but when the mind is brought to silence, the

non-verbal, and the still, it’s whole again to see how motion goes:

the left nest in the shrub has built up a foothigh cone of snow

485this morning and four sparrows sitting in the quince bush are

the only unaugmented things around: eight more inches are piling

on to ten we had and every evergreen has found the way it would

lean in a burden, split its green periphery and divide: John’s

old tractor on the lawn only shows its steering wheel: the

490snowplow’s been by and blocked the driveway: it’s December 26:

yesterday was Christmas: I got a pair of water-resistant gloves

with a removable woolen lining: I got Phyllis three charms for

the bracelet I bought her in Rome: John got a snowsled, a beautiful

wooden train set, Lincoln logs, toggles, and several things

495operated by non-included batteries: this morning he has no fever:

he’s had tonsillitis this is the fifth day with fevers to 103 and

104: I’ve felt built over a jerking machine, not quite turned on

or off: this morning John put on his new cowboy hat (he’s nearly

four) and I put on his crash helmet, and we searched all the dark

500corners and closets for thieves and robbers: we jailed a couple:

one teddy bear and one stuffed, long-legged leprechaun: everyone

will find here a detail that is a key to a set of memories:

strings of nucleations please me more than representative details:

(not that the detail is representative—only that it is a detail

505of numerical dominance in recurrence):

subatomic particle

atom

molecule

cell

510tissue

organ

organ system

organism

species

515community

living world

or

observation

problem

520hypothesis

experiment

theory

natural law:

the swarm at the

525subatomic level may be so complex and surprising that it puts

quasars, pulsars and other matters to shame: I don’t know:

and “living world” on the other hand may be so scanty in its

information as to be virtually of no account: nevertheless,

a drift is expressed in the progressions up or down—organization,

530the degree of: the control into integration (integrated action)

of the increasingly multiple: the human organism, composed of

billions of cells formed into many specializations and subordinations,

can deliver its total lust to the rarification of sight of the

beloved: for example: and many other high levels of symmetry,

535unification, and concerted thrust: poems, of human make, are

body images, organisms of this human organism: if that isn’t

so I will be terribly disappointed: it sounds as if it ought to

be right: consonants, vowels, idioms, phrases, clauses (tissues),

sentences (organs), verses (organ systems), poems (living worlds):

540I react to such stuff with a burst of assent resembling for all

I can tell valuable feeling: rubbing a girl also, of course,

produces feeling, I would be the last to deny it, but it may be

precisely the organization-principle in girls that one, rubbing,

is pleasured by: if, as I believe, we are not only ourselves—i.e.,

545the history of our organism—but also every process that went into

our making, then, in the light of our present ignorance, we may

safely leave much potentiality to undisclosed possibility: mush,

mush, how friendly: that’s what I think, I’ll tell you in a nut-

shell: and in poems, the insubstantial processes of becoming

550form inscrutable parts of the living thing: and then how the

orders of the poem build up and cooperate into the pure heat of

sight and insight, trembling and terror: it makes me gasp aghast:

no wonder we pedants talk about history, influence, meaning

in poems: that’s peripheral enough to prevent the commission of

555larger error, and safe error is a pedantic preference well-known,

widely footnoted, and amply rewarded: I believe in fun:

“superior amusement” is a little shitty: fun is nice: it’s what

our society is built on: fun in the enterprise: I believe in it:

I have no faith in the scoffers: they are party-poopers who are

560afraid they ought to believe in history or logical positivism and

don’t have any real desire to do so: they are scarcely worth a

haircut: organisms, I can tell you, build up under the thrust to

joy and nothing else can lift them out of the miry circumstance:

and poems are pure joy, however divisionally they sway with grief:

565the way to joy is integration’s delivery of the complete lode:

the flow broken, coinless, I, the third morning of Ithaca’s most

historical snowbind, try to go on, difficult, difficult, the hedges

split open, showing inside the vacancy and naked, bony limbs: snow

up past the garage door handle, new snow still falling, and high

570gusts roaring through the cold: supplies low or gone: and the stores

closed: that last appeals too much in the wrong sort: like any

scholar, I should, at this point to uncripple the condition, quote,

but first, I must, like a scholar, clear the field: I choose Ruskin

to say what thousands have said: “Art is neither to be achieved by

575effort of thinking, nor explained by accuracy of speaking”: well,

still, Ruskin, it cannot be achieved without effort, and one level

of accuracy may be preferred to another: this must be a point of

clustering because I feel a lot of little things jostling

to get in where they can be said: for example, I just walked

580a mile to the store, blowing snow, I was in to my ass practically

getting out to the plowed road: I got hotdogs, bacon, bread (out of

eggs), coffee: and on the way back, the wind in my face and snow

drifted ten feet high along one curve that has an open field behind

it, I passed two straggly young girls laughing, dogs barking after

585them, and one carrying her jacket, big boobs jouncing in her short-

sleeved sweater: I was barking inside myself a little, rosy ideas

in the blinding snowlight: one guy I passed said “beautiful weather”—

the kind of thing one, after four days penned up, is grateful to

say and hear: I quote now to enrich the mix, to improve my stew from

590the refrigerator of timeless ingredients:

“A large number of the inhabitants of a mud flat will

be worms. It is hard to develop enthusiasm for worms, but

it took nature more than a billion years to develop a good

worm—meaning one that has specialized organs for digestion,

595respiration, circulation of the blood and excretion of

wastes. All organisms perform these functions—amoebas,

flagellates, bacteria or even filterable viruses; but the

worms—at least the higher worms—do all these things better.

They also developed segmentation or reduplication of parts,

600permitting increase in size with completely coordinated

function. Contemporary architects call this modular

construction. It is found in man in the spinal column,

in the segmental arrangement of spinal nerves, and in

some other features that are especially prominent during

605embryonic development.”

The Sea by Robert C. Miller. Random House. New York,

1966. p. 165.

“We may sum up. Carbohydrates, fats, proteins, nucleic

acids, and their various derivatives, together with water

610and other inorganic materials, plus numerous additional

compounds found specifically in particular types of living

matter—these are the molecular bricks out of which living

matter is made. To be sure, a mere random pile of such

bricks does not make a living structure, any more than a

615mere pile of real bricks makes a house. First and foremost,

if the whole is to be living, the molecular components must

be organized into a specific variety of larger microscopic

bodies; and these in turn, into actual, appropriately

structured cells.”

620The Science of Botany by Paul B. Weisz and Melvin S. Fuller.

McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1962. p. 48.

poems are verbal

symbols for these organizations: they imprint upon the mind

examples of integration in which the energy flows with maximum

625effect and economy between the high levels of oneness and the

numerous subordinations and divisions of diversity: it is simply

good to have the mind exposed to and reflected by such examples:

it firms the mind, organizes its energy, and lets the controlled

flows occur: that is simple good in itself: I can’t stress that

630enough: it is not good for something else—although of course

it is good for infinite things else: so my point is that the poem

is the symbolical representation of the ideal organization, whether

the cell, the body politic, the business, the religious

group, the university, computer, or whatever: I used to wonder

635why, when they are so little met and understood, poems are taught

in schools: they are taught because they are convenient examples

of the supreme functioning of one and many in an organization of

cooperation and subordination: young minds, if they are to “take

their place in society” need to learn patience—that oneness is

640not useful when easily derived, that manyness is not truthful when

thinly selective—assent, that the part can, while insisting on

its own identity, contribute to the whole, that the whole can

sustain and give meaning to the part: and when these things

are beautifully—that is, well—done, pleasure is a bonus

645truth-functioning allows: that is why art is valuable: it is

extremely valuable: also, in its changing, it pictures how

organizations can change, incorporate innovation, deal with accidence

and surprise, and maintain their purpose—increasing the means and

assuring the probability of survival: the point of change, though,

650brings me to a consideration of the adequacy of the transcendental

vegetative analogy: the analogy is so appealing, so swept with

conviction, that I hardly ever have the strength to question it:

I’ve often said that a poem in becoming generates the laws of its

own becoming: that certainly sounds like a tree, growing up with

655no purpose but to become itself (regardless of the fact that many

are constantly trying to turn it into lumber): but actually, a tree

is a print-out: the tree becomes exactly what the locked genetic

code has pre-ordained—allowing, of course, for variables of weather,

soil, etc.: so that the idea that some organic becoming is

660realizing itself in the vegetative kingdom is only partially

adequate: real change occurs along the chromosomes, a risky business

apparently based on accidence, chance, unforeseeable distortion:

the proportion of harmful to potentially favorable mutations is

something like 50,000 to 1: how marvelous that the possibility of

665favorable change is a flimsy margin in overwhelming, statistically,

destruction and ruin: that is the way nature pours it on: once it

has arrived at a favorable organization—a white oak, for example—

it does not allow haphazard change to riddle it—no, it protects the

species by the death of thousands of its individuals: but lets the

670species buy by the hazard of its individuals the capacity to adjust,

should adjustment be indicated or allowed: that is terrifying and

pleasing: a genetic cull myself, I have the right to both

emotions: along the periphery of integrations, then, is an exposure

to demons, thralls, witcheries, the maelstrom black of

675possibility, costly, chancy, lethal, open: so I am not so much

arguing with the organic school as shifting true organismus from

the already organized to the bleak periphery of possibility,

an area transcendental only by its bottomless entropy: a word on the

art/nature thing: art is the conscious preparation for the unconscious

680event: to the extent that it is possible—a fining up of the attention

and filling out of the means: art is the craft and lore of preparing

the soil for seed: no enmity: complementary: is any yeoman

dumb enough to think that by much cultivation of the fields wheat

will sprout: or that saying words over the barren, the seedless,

will make potatoes: son of a gun’s been keeping a bag of seed-wheat

in the barn all winter, has sorted out good potatoes and knows how

to cut their eyes out: it’s hard to say whether the distinguishers

or the resemblancers are sillier: they work with noumena every

day, but speak of the invisible to them and they laugh with

690silver modernity: well, as I said, we are more certain that we

are about than what we are about: here is something I have always

wanted to quote:

“Around the mouths of rivers, where the fresh waters

of the land meet the salt waters of the sea, live some of

695the world’s densest populations. This food-rich borderland

harbors immense numbers and varieties of living creatures—

protozoans, worms, snails, shrimp, clams, oysters and on up

through the vertebrate fishes. Life in an estuary may be

rich, but it is also almost inconceivably dangerous. The

700temperature of its shallow waters runs the scale from

freezing to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Twice each day

the ebb and flow of the tides drastically alter the conditions

of life, sometimes stranding whole populations to die a

high-and-dry or freezing death. Winds, floods, and tidal

705currents often bury the stationary bottom animals under

suffocating slides of sand or silt. But the greatest

hazard of all is alien water—water that is too fresh or

too salty. Aquatic animals are sensitive to the salt

content of their water environment. A sudden rain-fed

710flood of fresh water from a river mouth can be catastrophic

to populations dwelling in the estuary.”

“The Life of an Estuary” by Robert M. Ingle. Scientific

American, May 1954.

isn’t that beautiful: it has bearing in many

715ways on my argument: it provided me years ago with ideas on

risks and possibilities: well, my essay is finished: I thank it

with all my heart for helping me to get through this snowstorm:

having a project is useful especially during natural suspensions.

1969 (1970)

Plunder

I have appropriated the windy twittering of aspen leaves

into language, stealing something from reality like a

silverness: drop-scapes of ice from peak sheers:

much of the rise in brooks over slow-rolled glacial stones:

5the loop of reeds over the shallow’s edge when birds

feed on the rafts of algae: I have taken right out of the

air the clear streaks of bird music and held them in my

head like shifts of sculpture glint: I have sent language

through the mud roils of a raccoon’s paws like a net,

10netting the roils: made my own uses of a downwind’s

urgency on a downward stream: held with a large scape

of numbness the black distance upstream to the mountains

flashing and bursting: meanwhile, everything else, frog,

fish, bear, gnat has turned in its provinces and made off

15with its uses: my mind’s indicted by all I’ve taken.

1970

Triphammer Bridge

I wonder what to mean by sanctuary, if a real or

apprehended place, as of a bell rung in a gold

surround, or as of silver roads along the beaches

of clouds seas don’t break or black mountains

5overspill; jail: ice here’s shapelier than anything,

on the eaves massive, jawed along gorge ledges, solid

in the plastic blue boat fall left water in: if I

think the bitterest thing I can think of that seems like

reality, slickened back, hard, shocked by rip-high wind:

10sanctuary, sanctuary, I say it over and over and the

word’s sound is the one place to dwell: that’s it, just

the sound, and the imagination of the sound—a place.

1970 (1971)

Lollapalooza: 22 February

Lord, have mercy! what a day: what a merciful day:

went to fifty: I listened all day to garage-music:

old roof snow, heavy-bottomed with melt and freeze,

began at sunrise to drop at the eaves, each drop

5discrete as a plectrum: then the old icicles

loosened at the root and fell into brown chrysanthemum

stalks (and snapdragons, still green!) and then as

morning tided, seeing down the angle of the drops

was like watching a rain section, and then by noon,

10the wind risen, the eaves swung ragged with sound

and glitter: I felt the roof rise as if to relief,

ten weeks turning casually to water: the afternoon

was lovely and constant (except, wingfeathers in a

ground-melt, I shoved the mound aside to find, as if alive,

15a pheasant under snow): at dusk, a patch of white

still centered on the roof, I went out to check and

sure enough the motions had lessened: spicule icicles

lengthened into a lessening overflow, the music cold-skimpy.

1970

Satyr Formalist

As the perpetual laugher about the grounds,

the grouped yews and carved high stones (always

in a diminishment, looking for light),

as the caperer of flat stones, their intervals

5a watery disarray nevertheless along directions, the

light dunker of lilypad leaves (to see the jewels

roll in and stand), as the caresser of whatever

gets too far into the dark, the whickerer at

hints of gross intent, sampler of hues and

10cornices, he touched death for the first time as

the smallest significance of a tremble in the thighs,

the rounding white of the moon in his eyes, stricture

by the thornbush border, and uncomprehending, like

us, uncomprehending, he took to it blank, vacancy

15to vacancy, brittle, fine, dew-bush’s pool drop.

1970

Late Romantic

Change the glacier’s loneliness and the ice melts,

streams going off into sundry identity systems,

bog floats, lakes, clouds, seas, drinking water:

flux heightens us into knots of staid tension:

5we live and go about containing various swirls:

too much swirling improves loneliness poorly:

we take advantage of separateness to unite sensible

differences, the tube in the fineness of its coupling

nearly a merging: well, nothing’s perfect: fall

10away, of course—we have other things to do alone,

go to the bathroom, brush our teeth, reel:

how can we give ourselves away if we’re not separate

enough to be received: and, given away, we know

no desire but the other’s desire: and given each

15to each, we’re both both, indistinguishably, sort of.

1970

Spaceship

It’s amazing all

this motion going

on and

water can lie still

5in glasses and the gas

can in the

garage doesn’t rattle.

1970

Cleavage

Soon as

you stop

having trouble

getting down

5to earth

you start

having trouble

getting off

the ground

1970

Schooling

Out mountainward, I explained I’ve already

yielded to so much, truly, an abundance,

to seas, of course, ranges, glaciers, large

rivers, to the breadth of plains, easily to

5outcroppings of bedrock, specially those

lofted amalgamated magmas, grainy, dense, and

easily to waterfalls double-hands can’t halt:

but now I’m looking to yield to lesser

effects, wind-touch of a birch branch, for

10example, weed-dip, tilting grasses in seed,

the brush of a slipped lap of lakewater

over a shore stone: I think I’m almost

down to shadows, yielding to their masses,

for my self out here, taut against the mere

15suasion of a star, is explaining, dissolving

itself, saying, be with me wind bent at leaf

edges, warp me puddle riffle, show me

the total yielding past shadow and return.

1970

Space Travel

Go down the left

hand side of the yard,

a contrived bankslope,

down to the corner of

5the lot, past the

forsythia bushes now

all green, and look

back up toward the house,

the lawn, the young

10maple, the bushes along

the foundation & you can

practically work up

a prospect: vision adjusts:

feeling roomy is room

15enough and many a

twenty-mile out-west view

thins to staging:

it’s going to be all right

I think, for those

20who wish to live, at least:

there are some who do.

1970

High Surreal

Spit the pit in the pit

I told the cherry eater

and see what crumbling

shoulders, gully washes,

5& several other bardic

dimensions can produce:

possibly a shiny asbestos

tree with cherry

nuts—reversal obvious

10in the formation—but

if you come to impossible

productions on

absent trees, get out the

bulldozer and shove the

15whole thing over smooth.

1970 (1971)

Sharp Lookout

Rain still falls, the wind moves

the maple branches to

gestures and patterns reasonable:

the stream deals with rocks

5and hollows, slowing or dashing,

in ways apparently regular: whole

bushes and even tall trees

light up as usual with song to

the songbird out of sight:

10the clouds that have never taken

shape are shapely: the bulby,

engrossing sun splinters red

through the hedge toward dusk:

though I’ve been expecting

15a wrench or unpraiseworthy re-ordering

to shock loose any moment from

lost curvatures, I’ve not been able

today to form evidence of any

trend countering our prospects

20for a moderate life and a safe death.

1970

Right On

The tamarack can cut rain down to size, mist-little

bead-gauze, hold at needlepoint a plenty

and from the going, blue-sunk storm keep a

shadow, glittery recollection: the heart-leaved

5big hydrangea bends over blossom-nodding, a few

large drops and a general glaze streaking leaves

with surface tension: the maple leaves

gather hail-size drops at the lobes and

sway them ragged loose: spirea, quince, cedar,

10elm, hollyhock, clover (a sharp beader)

permit various styles of memory: then the sun

breaks out and clears the record of what is gone.

1970

Rectitude

Last night’s thunderstorm’s

glancing quick shifts of strong wind and

heavy sheets of tensed up

beating down rain

5have left the snapdragons

velvet-hung in red bead

bedraggled, a

disorientation extreme:

but this morning,

10the clouds clearing, the sun

breaking its one source out,

light is working in the stems’ cells,

drawing up, adjusting, soft alignments

coming true, and pretty soon

15now the prevailing command “attention!”

will seem to have been uttered suddenly.

1970 (1972)

Object

X out the rondure of

the totally satisfying

and all other sizable areas

near the central scope:

5that degree, that circumference,

put aside: the leftovers,

though, pips & squeaks,

think to pick up, shovel

up, if possible: that is what

10is left: stuffing the central

experience into the peripheral

bit overinvests though &

creates aura,

wistfulness and small floating.

1970

Ground Tide

Headed back home from Harold’s, we came down

from some Connecticut hills, crossed the

height-slowed Hudson, mounted into the hills

again, the Catskills, made the divide and then

5picked up a stream that ironed out

in wandering descent as much as possible into

one grade—when we noticed the earth risen,

darkness of lofted hills, every one piled with

woods and possessed to the top, drowning

10us under the dark line of a weighty dominance:

nothing of the sort, of course! just fall-outs

of the ridge we’d already cleared, and so,

amiably, tilted by grade into a floating,

unearned speed, we eased on out into the open

15failing slopes, led by the spiritual, risen stream.

1970 (1971)

Translating

This afternoon the thunderstorms were separate and tall,

the intervals blue with clearing and white with icy

summits moiling upward till height could accept no

more and the vast glides called out evenness: so,

5through the afternoon there were several systems of

shower, the translations of heat vapor lofted to grit-ice,

the falling drafts of grit bounding, gathering into stones, the

further falls through the heavy warmer waters: at first, the drops

in any shower were huge, few, obviously stone water,

10then the narrower rods of slant-thick rain, then even

smaller rain, dense but fine with a half-light following or

a full breaking out of sun: then, it was, the sun come but

the rain not over, I saw under the aural boughs of the elm

the last translation, a fine-weaving gathered by leaves,

15augmented from tip to tip into big, lit, clear, sparse drops.

1970 (1971)

Sorting

There’s not much hill left up from here and after

rains runlets lose head quickly to the least

quiver: height has such poverty of

reservoir, and in a drought poplars will go

5brittle with yearning and take lightly their usual

mass and rock-hold, while at the bottom of the

ridge, the fountains will still be blinking,

the glade weeds rushed green: well, at least, we get

some view up here and sometimes breezes that miss

10the valley cut a high sweep across from ridge to ridge

and then most often the drought will break

in time, the trees come back, a branch or two burnished.

1970 (1971)

The Next Day

Morning glory vine

slight

as it is will

double on itself and

5pile over

a quince bush before

you know it:

so the woodless-stemmed

can

10by slender travel

arrange its leaves and

take away

light from the wooded:

beholding the rampancy

15and the

thin-leaved quince

thereunder, I stripped

off an armload

of vine

20and took it down to

the brushheap

under the pear tree:

the next day

the wilted leaves had

25given up their

moisture to the

vines that here and

there

to diminished glory

30lifted half-opened

morning glory blooms.

1970

Extremes and Moderations

Hurly-burly: taking on whatever is about to get off, up the

slack, ready with prompt-copy for the reiteration, electronic

to inspect the fuzzy-buffoon comeback, picking up the diverse

gravel of mellifluous banality, the world-replacing world

5world-irradiating, lesser than but more outspoken:

constructing the stanza is not in my case exceedingly

difficult, variably invariable, permitting maximum change

within maximum stability, the flow-breaking four-liner, lattice