from Interrupted Praise
I.
To Restore a Dead Child
1
1925
Sometimes while I sleep
I hear the single cry and tire screek
that never end.
My blond and foolish brown-eyed brother
lugging his fretful love
shambles after me
as the cunning Mack truck
lurching out of nowhere
cuts him down.
He’s a long dead almost-three.
I’m a long lived five
just turned sixty-one
still running in a dead heat
with the rolling cab that swooped him up
heading for the vanished hospital.
It’s then on waking
I feel the snot of infant faces
leak into my mouth.
2
Hearing it wake, we feel
the windy calling to each other
of the kindred sleep and death
in the morning opening
of the eyes of country horses,
the odor of earth’s dampness
in the crystal tree light,
and the touch of rough bark
on fingertips.
Seeing it, we feel again
the worn heart welcoming
the slow envelopment of dark,
the falling off of sight
in the old gray house,
when sun’s heat passes
and the first breeze
lifts a faint dust
along the hedges.
Remembering, again we see
the embers crumbling in the grate,
the fire flaring up again,
the pause before the turning shadow
spans the polished floor
and drifts into the open world,
a street that wanders
endless as a silent grief
that will never know itself.
3
We walked out of time
into the woods of pain
and never seemed
the same again.
We tilted with the hope
of finding ourself
in another skin,
and bent on recovering,
turned with open eyes
to find welcome in the arms
of a dead brother —
sleeping his dream of being,
a dream so long unfulfilled
there was no time
even to begin to live it,
till in his own hope
we lived what we believed
may have been
reserved for him.
4
Watching the immense self scattering ocean
ruffle out before us,
our wonder stirred and time became
an intricately formal mating,
night on day on night,
a repeated wave flash
signaling the act and its abating,
and the last long rolling into shore
turned into a fresh aspiring
of newborn creatures
to join the greater mating
sky and ocean,
and the creatures reeling beyond our wonder
mingled with the lifetimes
of our aged parents, each one apart,
our cheerful sister’s pregnant daughter,
also apart,
and this briefly sunlit reawakening
stung alive the still unanswered
black and blueness
we never would be clear of —
though no longer cherishing
the old bruised core,
no longer poised against
the battering disablements,
we simply gazed again
and let our wonder live again,
and die.
5
For everyone the call of light,
seeing figures of the creatures
from the mountain and the sea:
an eagle flying and a snake
whipping past the chicken coop,
a horse neighing in a flash
of meadow, with wayward water there
to slake the thirst a moment.
As light descends,
following the slow shapes
bulking briefly in their place,
it makes as if to stop
and give them way and cause,
as if to stroke
and praise their substance fully
before each creature
passes into its own remove
with rapid smile print
(as on your face and mine appears
held there by heads soon to be
no longer yours or mine)
till it lets the shadow quicken,
overtake the bobbing bulks,
and rise immensely over
like a mercy to devour them.
6
As we would have it,
it would be nothing simple
or profound,
nothing easily attained,
long worked for or perfected.
It would be of a wholeness,
full and large and figured
in its substance.
It would be all engrossing
to itself and others —
like the playing of a mindless tune
between a richer music
and a silence:
a peaked and dribbling sound,
a sound wavering in descent
but kept in measure,
and in that measure
letting all know
how deeply it could love
the silence following.
7
Not to be listening
yet to be heard
in the huge inconsequences
of the heart,
where having conveyed
the full measure of our hate
as a gesture of belief
in something worse than ourself
is barely to have escaped
self murder,
the intended sacrifice
become the bound body of love
in a younger self —
wearing a brother’s features
still scored through
the dead boy’s memory —
forever jammed between
the tonnage of his death
and self hate’s last convulsions,
like the lost deserter
fixed in an ice cake
some intruder yells up
early one spring.
8
As the light descended
the night was pierced a moment
and there was seen
in the vagueness of a shadow
a form more his
than our idea of him,
and the shadow wobbled
into a figure merging
with the hope of his lost being
come to be again,
as we tried swiftly to put on
the dark loose patches
fallen from him in the light —
trying to fill and fill
all that was left
of his living clothes
before his body vanished
9
No longer would he have to run
each time we left him
before our mindless going
struck him
as needing to be answered,
and the need make him
fly to us
and press his body
on us briefly.
For now, if again we left
without a smile or hand wave,
he would no longer need to fret
or wonder how to weight the meaning
since as last reminder
he had left
his body printed on us.
The Abstract Man Encounters the Adjutant
1
Echoing the fierce belief that time
serves only as a part-time adjutant,
he lost each battle he ever deigned to fight,
construing every language
but the adjutant’s outspokenness.
So it came to pass he had
no prospects, no supports,
except for those he chose to think
would be revealed when needed,
as if he’d summoned them.
His secret hope was that the adjutant,
who lived for others and for none,
would one day touch his eyes
so he could read the real language
things were written in.
2
In his ordinary world
past and future did not exist
except if he decided
they should appear
peopled with events,
with casual births and deaths,
minute misfortunes of any kind,
but where his own hopes and desires
played no part.
As long as he directed it,
this play assigned the present
to the adjutant miming his way
through muffed contingencies,
the arch reflector of everything
flowing past his eyes.
And so he stood reflecting
as if to ask, how could one
who chose to focus on
the landscape of the livid moment,
observing life so keenly,
be said to have no heart, or worse,
not to be alive?
3
The isolated house he sometimes visited
had the virtue of facing ocean
from every door and window.
No sign of people anywhere.
A few gulls here and there, and other birds
he had no wish to name.
Occasionally a ship
appeared to fill the sky —
but diminished if he stared,
shrank further if he glanced away,
then vanished utterly.
He discovered that
since things appear
to disappear so swiftly,
they had no need for names.
Suppose he asked, What’s that?
and he replied, Possibly a crab —
it would seem he’d thrown
a loose stocking over it, making
the whole thing wrinkle right away.
Better to answer silence with silence.
Each thing moving apart,
no thing needed his speech.
This gave him a certain satisfaction.
4
In winter when the sun shone,
winds sometimes descended
in a ritual drumming up of clouds,
which in fact filed by,
peered quickly down
and crossed the sky, to be devoured
by whatever lay in wait
past the horizon.
Meanwhile in town
a mother cat had a litter
and out of spite or hunger
ate the kittens one by one
as soon as they emerged
from her mysterious dark hole.
5
There would be large cuttings of flowers
where he walked, left at intervals
in heavy piles, as though the same rough hand
that cut the stems
must soon return to gather everything
in one huge wicker basket
centered in a noiseless cart.
Conveyed into the house beyond
to gaze from cut-glass bowls
and pots of blue majolica,
the flowers would at last appear
expertly propped, consummately transformed.
But the adjutant delayed or never came,
the flowers wilted,
hailstones clattered angrily,
and every door leading to the house
kept banging in the wind.
6
Suddenly out of the hedge
a rabbit leaps clear,
scampers past the bread crumbs
laid out for the mourning dove,
and almost transparently
disappears through an opening
to the rocks below.
The dawn is pondering
how to put out
the sheerest sickle moon
as a flock of geese
makes a quick signature
across the brimming cold waters.
Day with its swift demands
will soon leach light
out of every object
in its defiant shapeliness
and crystal visibility.
It is precisely then
the adjutant begins to tell.
7
The grave thumps
and the upward thought leaps to uncover ground
where the last idea
of the downborne man was sunk.
See how pure the man reborn of inklings
now appears with his new umbilicus
forged link by link
from relatives of happiness
crying Jubilee of jubilees,
I was, therefore I think.
Soldier
I did not die in that war
or in any war quite
though I died in the first
and all the wars since —
at first all at once
then with practice
a bit at a time
While I’m alive
I’m ready to die any day
in a war —
the value of dying
is in daring
to come back
If I die in the next
as I did in the first
you who survive
might understand
it was good for something
though not wanting
necessarily
to applaud me —
and I wouldn’t blame you
much as I’d envy
your being alive
So I’d have to come back
because you’d forget
no matter how many times
you’d read it all in the papers —
he’s so good at dying
he died in the Punics
War II the Crusades
poor bastard can’t stop
he’s at it again
By Sea Stone
1
Blackening ebbtide
sings dumbly by you
whipped by a wind swirl
weed hair drips over
stone bodies huddled
in monkish communion
making low song
of unshaken risings
and dim withdrawals
of long breathing waters
2
These stones if they spoke
could tell what lives —
one doubled flowing
an outgone returning
of timed open sea
conveying a smallness
like breath in the air
drawn out and in
of a hugeness —
ends as a slippage
of stone upon stone
on a packed sea shelf
3
Nothing much left
to stop your breathing,
you still swim out
and the waves topple you
arriving back.
All those green eyes
littering the beach —
the glinting lovers
and their surviving wives,
no longer lovers,
of dead friends —
stare past you at routs
of winter starlings overhead,
disregarding trophies.
Mozart hums the distance
out to sea and back.
Poised and never waiting,
the red sun pricks your eyelids —
take heart
take heart . . .
You love your heart
even when it falls
and is not dead.
4
Can you remember beginning
to shape your solitude?
Was it clarity or fog
that started it?
Maybe the eye caught by a rose
tore on a thorn, and the moon,
peculiarly close, hung bleeding
till you could almost bear it.
To be flesh of the thing that felt
the pangs of its beginning
is only to know you must trace
the end inside of you.
Now and then you hear
a window frozen
in its frame creaking
as if the moon was back.
5
All the nights the house slept through
are dead: at dawn in bed the same
white ship spanning the horizon,
and every word the heart denied
sopped up with the daily bread.
The house still waits where shore lights
winked against the bay suggesting,
like old friends, more than they said.
Night again, and time for stars
to stir the shadows on the roof
but no star is in the sky.
Time for a late birdnote or two
to clear the windowpanes
but none comes through as yet.
Still the house keeps beckoning,
bone white and dry inside:
some body should lie down in it.
6
Conrad saw behind the wheel
the unappeasable horizon
where heroes with maddened eyeballs
mounted the ageless waters
on sinful stumps. Who else
could execute, against his heart,
such livid sentences?
The blooded words they whispered
kept thickening into Justice
until the blindfold lifted
and a gunshot blanked them out.
The shot emptied his feelings,
and the ship he manned sails on.
Teetering
Bark of a tree. Solo. In the rain.
How it is always is.
Changes: outside is seen inside.
Outside changes inside.
Inside looks faster, changing less.
Outside waits till inside goes away.
Outside more slowly always is
only now about to be seen.
In the rain. Solo. Bark of a tree.
II. Poems 1976-1980
Promise
Let me tell you again
where I must go
back to the farm
without you without them
without you or them
I must go without wife
without sons
and live on the farm alone
feed every animal
draw all the milk myself
I must hear myself breathe
so the song will come
of the wheat I grow
and the power to work
and master the ground
To bury the past in darkness
and wake every day
in the smell of the cold
off the hay and the smart
burn of the wood stove fire
Home will be bearing the tale
of the farm I work
without you without them
while sun smashes down
and rain bears away my life
After the Letter
1
If you happen through again, don’t call,
just come by.
The afternoon you do we speak of the trees’
never-returning
leaves, the power of gradual fulfillment
meaning nothing
in nature but almost everything in our
quick lives,
the body’s hard-nosed climb to make it,
and deep down
the consciousness of rot all the while
one pleasures.
We’re on our fifth martini, the day
winking through
the leaves, and we swearing never to let
each other go,
when a blue Mercedes slips up the drive
to claim you.
I lunge, surrounding you against its purr.
Your tongue fishes
in my mouth, your rose-lipped body tightening
into mine:
It’s so easy to love you! On that lie
I let go.
2
You’re drowning in the waves, I’m standing
on a raft
ready for the plunge. Never never will I
rescue you.
Going down, I grapple with a slippery leg,
but already
you’ve reached bottom, wrapped in a coat
of algae.
My heart sniffs out where you sank,
a boulder
rippling in the sand a century or more.
Still as slime I watch your smile say
I know you
love me. I crawl on all fours to feel
around you,
then float over like a dirty handkerchief.
Love, love me!
Quiet as an eye I hear the cry before
the cry began.
To become stone I stop my lungs, I close
my ears,
my pores, my mind. And now to lift you!
Listen
Tonight I hear it all spoken,
see it spelled out again
from the window-seat cushion
where the children
you never saw
turned up today
this old V-letter
adorned with your name.
It’s the War
speaking through me
writing you,
my apple-cheeked young wife
(dead these six years past):
I’ll be home soon again, dear
— my brain half pickled hope,
half jealous fury.
Look how torn up
I manage to be
with words spilling
over the folds
as I sit writing madly
in Paris, in London,
in whory Antwerp,
three, four letters a day,
while hornily plotting
the women I can slip into
and leave curled up behind
until I come on You darling!
Faithless evening
hardens round you,
snows your absence
into light.
Being Somebody
He had need of a way
to be himself
without being himself.
He had so little need
of those who said
they had need of him,
He wanted never to see
any of them again,
though he wouldn’t say so.
For once in his life
he was satisfied
simply to be.
To be nobody,
nobody but himself,
himself without himself.
He felt empty and full —
not one or the other
but both at once.
He felt chafed like a child
full of flouting wishes,
floating elations.
But drained of hankerings
like a glass of water
a thirsty man just drank.
He considered someone odd
though familiar may have come
to live inside of him.
Maybe it meant
he was sheltering someone
who needed a home.
He himself had no home,
flitting from friend
to cousin to stranger,
As the occasion demanded,
or urged by the heart,
which he often misread.
He lived everywhere
but at home, where sometimes
he stayed overnight.
Anywhere he slept
he was at home,
if he didn’t overstay.
The city he wished most
to live in was nearby
but quite far away.
Near enough to visit
or be visited by
old friends and children,
Far enough off
to forget them all
in a week or a year.
He wanted to live alone
in a den-like apartment,
working nights on his thoughts,
Or in a big rambling house
without tenants and close
to the hub of the city.
He would like also not
to live there but still
to call it his home
Where he could drop in,
surprising himself hard
at work in his study
Or, having been called away,
finding the place
shrieking his absence.
He’d like to live there
and in the country as well,
unknown except for
The gas-meter reader
who’d fade in and
fade out bimonthly.
He once wrote a letter he thought
he’d only half written himself
which ended limply,
“How many empties like me
are there left to pick up
before I die?”
Now he believed the letter
was written completely
by somebody else.
Of course he was wrong —
but what if he was
completely somebody else?
Letter from New Hampshire
now
it would be then
that walking down a snowy road
in the afternoon
under a gray sky
in winter
after it had snowed and would snow
but not yet
when the fir trees by the roadside
with week-old snow clumps
lying iced and heavy
down along the branches
and the twigs of bright green needles
clipped by passing plows
detached and crazy
littering
the too smoothed icy ground
it would be then
just coming into view of
a cottage bouncing up and down
but soon set straight
against the powdered mountain
banked up
on a dense horizon
it would be then
my dear
when thinking started up
to tell me how I missed you
now
that suddenly
the sky ran thin
with speckled afterlight
almost promising
it would not snow today
tonight
it would be then
at first starting of my thinking
of you
that there should negligently
fall into my head
the thought of this grave
heavy handsome
useless world
not needing me
for needing you
for needing me
in boots that leave
their stippled prints in snow
and eyes that take
this crystal quiet in
so quick and slow
and all this
with me or without
should not mean a thing
not anything at all
and when I thought this
then
the sky took back its worried look
grew solid gray
no different than before
except that now
that then
the first few flakes
stirred light
along my sleeve
like afterthoughts of easy living
easy dying
that would later be a heavy fall
it was then my dear
I missed you most
it was then that now
seemed lost the most
it was forever
then
An Art of Summer
1
Saying a thing is, often makes it — so
the Bible says Jehovah spoke the world.
If I would leap, the mind says,
I would follow! shouts the faithful body.
Word-sperming something into being
works as spirit splitting stone —
or metaphor beclouds till all evaporates.
What time of morning is it? Six o’clock.
And morning’s a semaphore of clock hands
locked in a ring of digits.
Entering by chance, the day
becomes you writing in this room as ant
and fly crawl by outside the window squares
against the big leaf-heavy summer trees.
A music you hear accompanying your breathing,
Schubert’s last sonata,
sifts through this time placing you on earth
with the fellow-feeling body Schubert knew,
not knowing, writing it at thirty,
he’d die next year, in 1828.
This will-lessness preceding knowing
is what we share receiving
body from body, body into body:
each preformed shape performs its give and take.
Goodbye, Schubert, dead-alive since then,
vale this morning of the crawling ant,
the newly dying birdsong you hear closing
this line — the longest day of 1974.
2
The first leaf shriveling shrivels all belief.
Climbing a giant mossy oak, rose vines
like a passion curling higher
twine belly, arms and spine
till interflowing red and green reverse
the eye as in a dream.
Another tree grows roots like jugular veins
snaking through boulders that impact the trunk.
A sword of lightning smashing the aspen stand
that blocked out sunlight lets in crawling fungi
that chew up most the roots.
One branch escapes, grows new, a crazy crooked
nearly leafless arm upthrust in sunlight, the rest
choking in a tangle of devoured wood.
Torn-off leaves that cry adorn adorn
are still unconscious of their separateness.
Adornment is the form severed things take on
in their bewilderment —
the doom awaiting those that lie apart.
Parting the meadows, gardens gone astray —
the red and palpitating coquelicots,
claws of yellow honeysuckle, pistils
shivering, the wolfly lycopods and couch grass,
sweet mignonettes, the green and gray plebians,
stonecrop fleshy, corymbs of pungent yarrow,
wild chervil’s umbellets,
rose-colored commack and the milk-white crosswort —
grow dreaming someone calls them each by name.
The first leaf shriveling shrivels all belief.
3
Waking next day you walk, half sleeping, out,
as cawings, squeaks and casual chirps turn off,
to see through glued-up flowers an eagle,
landed from nowhere, at the crossroad facing you,
gigantic as the truth of feeling, a cause
more than a feeling, an eagle so big
it must portend something startling.
You stand with the day curved around you
and only the eagle to answer the questions
what brought him? what keeps him?
inferred by his ambling toward you, then off,
as though giving you time to escape.
Was it laid out for eagle and man to meet?
Was it intended because one was human
one might go on doing this and that,
meet so and so, go around there again
only to miss meeting such and such,
maybe cave in to end in a place
where only one could now end up?
With your first head-turn he ruffles his feathers
from talons to beak, and trundling out
to a wider clearing takes off
in a slow air-banging cyclone,
leaving you pinned to the tip of his vortex,
his rising surrounding the sky.
Was it a sleep or was it to end in a sleep —
so someone, no doubt related, might now awaken
to see enough, not wanting or actually knowing
enough, to pick up the thread?
Was the eagle at last a sign of it all
or witness — summoned or summoner?
And now as he floats, a speck in the eye of the sky,
are there words to waken the sleeping dreamer asking
and answering himself in the eagle?
— Eagle, what is it you do
descending to the norm
then climbing beyond my eyes?
–In the mothering of matter
learning to survive
the fathering of form.
Starting the Hostilities
We’ve cleared the wires where
the hostages hung all night.
Feeling is up,
horses kick at the barn doors,
youngsters in town
round up the old pistols,
some test improvised bombs,
wives quietly clean rifles.
This is no child’s tourney,
there’ll be other casualties.
The veterans are growling
We’ll tear out their hearts . . .
Passionflower
We grew the miraculous flower:
five corpse-white spokes
sunk in pubic hair
with that radial penumbra
just hovering over the flimsy purple core —
and sat there gloating, ah,
the triumph after such care!
How long did it last?
till a painter sat down
and put it all into a sketch
before it could wilt from view.
Then from his painting
came so many feasts
for we can’t count
how many eyes.
But no trace at all
of our passionate growth.
A bush of dark mint,
too vigorous, bunches up there,
assailing the air,
and now in that corner
where two fences met
flaps the painter’s folding chair.
Opening
gray lips
this hour’s
hourless light
turns
not yet rising
opening
gray lips
morning
labors
wet mouthed
on pig iron gates
a woman
who cannot
rise
there lies
impaled
I Need You
What the two windows want:
the bridge and the cycle
and the tree cut down.
What the whitewash wants:
the cold milky ground,
the tombstone missing a name.
What the cracked roof wants:
the lovers in bed long dead
unmaking the child
already grown to a man
groping past loving, past light,
roped to the end of his life.
After the Separation
Back to your room
after my weekend visit,
you play underseas war
using the closet &windowseat bay
for submarine lairs,
your mouth devising
flesh &gun disintegrations
coughing fast-flashing sallies up
out of mind
I see your dark pupils
figure the damage —
Is it worth shoveling up
just to get on with now?
There’s a blind man under the bed
wanting to show you where to hide
when the homework stacked
like tank-flattened GIs
gets punishingly high.
“Daddy, I’m frightened —
or maybe just bored,”
you want to cry
as my car miles off
turns screeching back.
I pound & pound
on the big front door.
The House
The house killed by your word
withstood much deeper wounds
before it let go.
Those were years we lived
wrangling inside
without daring to ask
should we patch it or part.
Those absentee summers
neighbors by moonlight
were statues
climbing the trees,
training their mirrors of air
at the windows,
were we dead or merely asleep?
Night snowfalls in winter
imprisoned bulls
charged beeches and pines
hunched in the driveway
till eased off
by ploughs next morning,
the bright air a diamond.
Those were years the lawn
thickened and spread,
having no care
as the weathers ran wild,
small vandal gangs
assaulting and dying,
child by child.
Dogging all-night refusals
day-calms and word-gusts
pretended relief.
At breakfast some mornings
we sat like vacationers
facing the bay
already polluted.
Now a goldfisted flagpole
thrust from the lawn
against vengeance
and vandals
that crept up regardless
stands flagless,
detached from the house.
Last summer new lights
riddled the waters,
night planes hurtling
through air
cleared the heat of neighbors
still churring
and scorching the grasses.
Exclude, exclude, echoes the house.
Dead rattan rockers nod
in a desert of sunlight
as we leave, separate,
and the new owner’s eyes
smilingly rise
from the lawn.
Monster Talk
The sight of me finished and lost
till another one comes but not yet
and who knows how soon
The sight of me gone and done for
over the fence and nothing
but tracks in the woods
The sight of me never again
to crack open an eye and murder
your sleep at two a. m.
The sight of me landing all over
with kisses I gave you holes
in the belly and thighs
The sight of me lurking at table
drymouthed with it without it
in sunlight in fog
The sight of me slipping away
sliding off all the mirrors
down all the drains
You can wake now without me
the nightmare of me is over
try breathing again
and dream up the day when
the big advertised monster
out of your mind
gropes at the windows and doors
to crawl over you the shadow
wished home tonight
Dialogue in the Sleeping House
The lacquered brown wall reddens
like our own wishes
we are carved out of air
touched by the afternoon sun
the part of us feeding a wish empowers
then lives past it
warming and worming its way
while the wish exists it lives
apart from the empowering part
deep through the windows
because to exist a wish needs
detachment from what feeds it
as if to engrave its light
the possibility to continue detached
is probably almost infinite
in the sleeping house forever
Without Love
Without love
the gift grows real —
a pebble slipped
from an unclenched palm
dazzles the broken ground.
Passes for Nicanor Parra
Think of an oId friend who died
Now turn in your chair and he’s there
filling the doorway smiling
Rise and he walks straight towards you
Leave the room and he sits in your chair
waiting for you to enter smiling
*
Almost at ease with your wife and children
you sail out to an island together
At the helm you know the boat is sinking
You tell them They try bailing out Too late
You leap overboard Gasping you turn
The boat sails by and they are cheering
*
Evidence piles up day by day
we do not live
where we are living
We refurbish Add a wing
Rearrange the bed And
houses eat us as we sleep
*
Who sits so close when you try to rise
If only he’d move or stand up by himself
you’d spring to your feet in a flash
You make a last effort but it’s no use
You turn at him to glare
He is weeping inconsolably
Partita
Somewhere I am,
low-lying,
I cannot come to rest —
on the mountain
the river
underneath me
almost sleeping.
Somewhere I was,
tide rising,
l heard a gliding
up the beach
of heavy wings
near me and I
just waking.
Somewhere I’ll be,
riding home,
lights let me
round an old darkness
to the children
sleeping in the house
my coming rouses.
The Painter in the Mountain
(for Lorna)
“Can I love if I have such pain inside?
The piano playing in the mountain
tells me where I am,
filling sound with color.
This summer afternoon could be
an open desert where two lovers meet:
Melissa leans into the grand piano
making music, making love.
Arthur singing what he wants her playing
stands behind; listening,
she drops her fingers.
Outside trees pour sunlight
and the mountain hurls it back again.
In the air trying to fill a space,
my hard pain asks the mountain:
love my paper, touch my brushes,
press color into them,
until my painting fills what is
no longer missing.”
For His Mother Flying Into Her Seventy-Seventh
If there were ploughs in heaven
you’d break ground with one —
not for casting seed
but to open new earth there
as if to say See, it can
be done and done by me alone.
If there were a place to burn
in deeper suffering you’d ride
a razor wind there, outsped
only by special grace
of your falling body’s thinking it
the first to feed that fire.
May pardon come for your forever
nursing a grousing mother
into her final silence
there in that house
so you alone might come alive
to make her bed and lie in it.
Stumbling out of the Prado
time lives
through eyes
and faces
bulging to see
who we are
the sweet music
hardening
parades of victims
stammering
storm troopers
and Goya
deaf to questions
burning in his own
man-eaten
freedom
Rilke’s White Horse
I remember a day in spring, at evening, in Russia.
A white horse, his hobbled fetlock wrenching his stride,
gallops down the village lane, his black mane
whipping his neck until he bursts into the empty
moonlit meadow, rearing to a standstill.
The night he whinnies at a moment is ponderously still,
heedless of his blood beating a music that becomes,
louder than his heavy breathing, his whole being,
his heart waiting to be heard and understood.
Now may this fable be his song forever.
Another March
Climbing the scrawny women,
the plastic virgins,
I came on a field
laid out for planting,
bones in piles
along the wire fences
and a spindly scarecrow
overlooking it.
In the salt marsh
a mile away
the neighbor’s chimney
was barely smoking,
and the sky
overcast as usual
hinted of the bitter cold
that was on its way.
The field glittered
in remembered sunlight.
A wind knifed through me,
turning the scarecrow
this way and that.
As I began to dance
the women hunched behind me
laughed and laughed.
Come
Beyond her in the red house
glow the crystal flowers,
the green lake furled for winter,
and the idea
of fruitfulness next year.
For she is aware of the seed
who runs the furrowed earth,
and in her head
are all the generations
waiting in the ground.
ln her the seed will bear
the whole of summer
next and after next,
already giving off the flavor
of ripening and decay.
Now all around her waits
the grave red house
with knives and dishes set,
till at the door
the fainting fathers come.
Night Island
The boat lights pass, the window smarts,
wakening to the night the dim island
floating like a string of whales,
the sky a sunken eye the sea devours.
It comes to this: the leached-out world
has masked the hidden boulders
like an oyster in a broken shell.
What cries for light in the sucking shore?
Sweeping the Room
We give birth to ourselves
on the brink of dying.
Others stand there
sorrowing, pitying,
not yet born,
shudder and ogle
this negligible dying.
How do we tell them
they too will burst with
last eyesight breaking,
sweeping the room
of the husks of children
not knowing who dies
is coming alive
to them yet unborn?
Last Song
You are asleep at my center,
a recently emptied volcano,
with ashes still sifting through air,
and I, remembering the old heat
in it, remember you as I
almost land without touching
the innocent hills and valleys,
till nowhere becomes a drifting,
a new withdrawing and build-up
of all my wasted forces.
G.W.M.
My neighbor is dead.
His hands are held by a weight
no longer his own.
They have shut down his stare
and we steer
through the close of his eyes.
Don’t say his death
is your death is my death.
He died alone.
We who have lived as he lived
this dog of a life
part on that note.
Now each to his bone.
Pablo Neruda
Under reason and steel grows the final poem of your death
in the city where you were the house of your breath,
smoked out, ransacked, squandered in shreds,
as under the stones precise on the heights
you guessed they had buried the rags of slaves.
As under the seal of wax there clacked
in the general’s beak the white-tongued admiral,
giving the acid word of steel in the guts
to your guarded brightness, life, with its shadow
invisibly wearing away the heaviest stone.
In your light blatant or hidden forever
under the everyday sky exposed
like a maundering madman mocked into meaning —
because no one can bear the darkness alone,
because no one can go on shielded alone,
Your name went up in the half light that day,
like smoke lolling up from the cannon’s mouth,
from house after house and cell after cell,
to show where the flowering multiple death
had departed your body, your country, its ghettos.
As your life’s first day is destroyed in the last,
as the mouth of the serpent swallows its tail,
as the spirit’s skyscraper’s consumed in a rose,
let all darkness be broken like bread among brothers,
all being more and less than a metaphor.
Three Moments for George Sullivan
1 Burial in Providence
Your sleeping eye
turned inward now
in death
is looking squarely
at me
I have none to know you
and only yours
to see me
wanting for my own
to follow
Do not wait long
for earth to come
settling in with you
for the loose stones
to shift towards you
Help me remind
the heavy quiet
you have come to lie in
with the mother
that bore you
to the new sleep
stretched straight
with no need
nuzzling you to be
growing over earth
or in the sea floating
or turning in air
to the cities
of the mind’s
altering necessities
Give me with you
sinking slowly under
my feet turning
this next moment
in your vanishing eye
2 Waiting in Washington
In the bruised sky
racing
my scanning eye
and the withered tree
measuring
a low fury of wind
I catch trills
whistling
the ends of days
A time that was
will come
in the couplings
of underground fur
feeding asleep
root and worm
beast and mind
to meet overground
In the warm hide’s
last days and hours
still smoking with breath
the panes of the eyes
snow mountains
stone slides
clear to the end
Time moves down forests
past toy cities fallen
through heads cracked
with flashings
whisked into brains
like mine
Last week died
with my friend
tucked in his box
and my stare
gave him pause
a wet second on earth
in the sky’s face
in the wind’s eye closing
In the airport
I sit under rain
waiting to fly
3 Walking in Sweet Briar
On the path
the thawing rivulets
of icebound mud
run an ooze my shoes
cannot resist
I plod upward
towards the first
lit window of a house
soon to pass
in twilight
when from nowhere
comes a shattering
as of all things
fallen in
their emptiness
a breaking
of the clots
and clogs of days
as I arch
through rain
too slight
to threaten
reminding how once
in skyfuls
it cracked down
and I ran
as though all life
were funneling
off beneath
my shoes
Lives tunnel
in their safeties
making room
beyond me
as I move unheard
back into my life
of nowhere’s
other silence
other time
awaiting
the first word to be
before words
were heard
singing the way
this ooze runs
under me
before me
moving past the house
it will take
after me