Four Springs

by Edwin Honig (1966-1972)

NOTE

In 1966 or so I began writing a poem that very soon went beyond my conception of where or when it would end. To cope with its extensibility and rein it in as it galloped along, I made up a flexible long-and-short line combination, a five alternating with a two stress line. I did not think of it deliberately at the time, but I may have been remembering something of those loose long forms which Louis MacNeice adapted to everyday subjects in Autumn Journal, a poem I loved immediately when I read it at nineteen.

Spring Journal (now Spring One) was published as the third section of a book of poems with that title by Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, Conn., 1968). Spring Two, Spring Three, and Spring Four continue the story to the present date, my fiftieth birthday.

September 3, 1969

Spring I

Suffused by paint-cracking warmth in a steam-heated room,
late winter rain
slushing away through the snow, the traffic, the auto horns
bleating and shaking
their cages outside, I linger behind pulled shades
lost in the dumps
of my own stock presence; with armies caught stark on the edge
of command slowly tearing
their minds awake, I loll half-dozing, attuned to
the rise of a day
embalming the mouth, muting the whistle of play,
the twitch twitch of birds
in the melting boughs of a grimy New England day;
gripped in the bowels
of a gray tabernacular house, I lie photographing
the self — myself,
all selves, bright and to fade, as once Mathew Brady,
in innocent camps
of suffering, snapped the tired grim lounging dying
Blue and Gray.

Gray, executioner’s day — except for the gone-
to-work armies, who
can tell time on such a day? — as when minuteless hours
congeal around
the electric lights’ dimming, a man being put in a chair
to burn heart and brain,
until anyone moving at all feels the waves of the current,
again and again,
shooting straight through his own newly breakfasted body. Something
hangs in the air
which is moveless, omnivorous, sopping up emptiness, loss:
as though humanity’s
power of idleness everywhere pulsed through a huge
neglected machine
whirring and wreathing itself on and on in a noiseless
opaqueness of steam
that declared by its presence the total absence of man.
What lives? Who breathes?

The big city graveyards of motherly-fatherly bones
creep into the suburbs,
and farther, up to, around and way past the airports
where we arrive
faster than sound, breaking the barrier which is
ourselves, the whining
of jets with their canned human loads of pilots and passengers
set up to rise
and fall smiling at death, at the bomb, who light up the panels,
lock themselves in
and drop out, shatter, disintegrate into thin air:
a new way of dying,
just settling down to be filtered into the lungs
of the living below.

The President stands up to hundreds of millions, a dog
among dogs barking
into the bags of their heads (“. . . honor in war . . .”),
lapping their brains;
they listen, they roll on their backs, huffing, surprised,
feel something slip
(“. . . our boys are dying for us . . .”), believing only
something has failed,
like a bad job for too long, or the man who has kept it, vanished,
leaving behind
his family but no other trace, like a dime
dropped in a sewer,
yet this man is also the nation, thrashing, distending
itself until,
no longer a man, it subsides in the dark and becomes
the thing that is gone.

There are ways men think they must be they can never be,
nor even try
to become, which rule them who so agree to be ruled:
by death lure in traffic
each day, by war’s death, causeless, a battle of no
excuse, an end
in abstract defeat, by headline, the deadbox clicked shut
against sight of blood
loss, heart loss, bone hacked into the groove of a vein;
or as when a man
lingers on in a monstrous self-reproduction of cells,
still breathing but blind
to his being; or as when a woman gives birth to death,
her own death and
another’s which never belonged to life, doubly ended —
the ways men think
they must be, run dead on their feet till sleeping and waking
are the same murder.

The fleece of morning still at the window, the juices
of living run over,
pour out of the shrilling sirens: Come to the fire,
crash the old houses,
wash them away, the indwelling unrecognized dead;
with their bone char
blacken your faces and build you new houses, singing:
Great is the flex
of my hand, the leap of my tongue, the sudden cringe
of my sweating brow
alert to the deadening lie, by the cool of my body
nakedness,
knowing itself the start and the finish of goodness,
an only life.

The lessons of time wear out (in time all lessons
wear out) and I
turn back to solicit, incredulous, my own life’s
burnt-out years,
seeing only the blinking of shutters on gutted ruins,
the ruins all me.
I suspect this but swear the pictures are false, the negatives
rigged — not by me.
I’m alive — O motherly-fatherly deeds, what have I
to do with thee?
But the thought keeps recurring, the no one I always see
looks too much like me.
To whom need I tell this, whose favor do I seek,
having always known
in my bones the truth of the lie, the hole from which all
my fine words leak?

I find a man sitting inside myself and leering
pedantically.
I let him. I take on his smirk and voice, pitched low.
It relieves me
to be him — small, ceremonious, hedgy, a stuffy
nonentity.
It is always someone quite distinct, somebody
I can name:
an insolent clerk, ogre lady or punitive person
long forgotten.
Where do they suddenly come from? What dredges them up?
I borrow them
like a dirty old jacket I like to wear because
it’s so worn,
so ugly, ill-fitting, and because it becomes me.
As a child I was told,
Don’t frown — the look will stick to your face forever.
Look mom, I’m frowning.
Look dad, someone I’m not has really become me.
I’m Lon Chaney,
the hunchback of Notre Dame, the Jekyll devouring
odd Mr. Hyde!
The only nice thing about them is that they’re disguises
I can easily drop,
like a secret pride, an attitude I must try out,
then quickly discard
when it gets in the way of — what? my being myself?
That’s piously said,
but what is it? The truth is it rankles, this having
to take on somebody
else’s old smell, ego-fatuous speech and smile.
It punishes me.
They’ve gotten the upper hand and I’m fighting them all —
punitive ogre,
insolent pedant, weird little bogies, swarming through
the unkillable dark.

Have you ever been taken for somebody else and felt
the oddness of being,
even briefly, not yourself? Then think what it’s like,
being faced with the lie,
officially forged, that you are somebody else,
have been for years —
in the files of state officialdom, are nothing
more than a Red,
a rat-nosed hustler who may be expected to sell
secrets to Russia.
Whoever you are with whatever image of self
you’ve taken and shaped
through years of depression, wars and deaths, and living
by whatever view
allows you to practice a fumbling personal faith,
imagine all this
erased by the routine act of a faceless flunky,
and thereafter,
for years and years ( and, who knows, even still),
you are not only
not you, but a dossier grows in the files on someone
it has been decided
(for whatever reason — a name, say, too much like yours
not to be yours)
is actually you, a someone who may or may not
even exist.

10.

Since you cannot even have met him, you’re never aware
of him except
when you’re grilled third-degree in melodramatic hearings:
“Did you ever
walk down the streets of M with a Negro?” “Did you
ever know X
or Y or Z?” (All prominent communists. ) “What
about Q and R?”
(Two rightist extremists! ) “How long have you been writing
to A, B and C?”
(Notorious Spanish Reds!) When you find yourself saying
Never or No,
the routine reply, strange on the lips of the sub-
literate griller,
is cynically, “Don’t bother to lie — we have evidence
to the contrary.”
This happened unstopped in the forties and fifties; the newsreels
and tapes of the hearings
of Famous Fish Caught with Red Herrings are semi-pop items
among the sophisticates
now when grillers grow smoother, wear college ties,
invite you to dinner,
paying your air fare and hotel expenses, maybe,
then bug your phone
when your wife calls — or is it your Red Chinese mistress
with a Bronx accent?
Instead of a hearing a permanent gray siege is laid
on all innerness.

11.

The question Who is involved — a nameless man,
a manless name,
yourself-in-another, another-in-you, enemies,
friends, the same? —
begins a network of fantastic relations to people
(never heard of, mostly)
and to events in the past (fictitious mainly,
or never experienced),
until you become in your own eyes a tale conceived
by an idiot through
the sheerest discourtesy of self-perpetuant bureaus
so certain that real
individuals, issues, ideas no longer exist
they have to invent
artificial ones they can handle — nullities looking
something like you.

12.

Now the unanswerable question is not who are you
but who made you up?
When you try to track down the source of the Frankenstein ape
they say is you,
you are doubly suspected for persisting to question the matter,
on the assumption,
put simply, that the innocent never cry out while the guilty
invariably must,
until, in secret suspecting everyone you’ve known
as malicious informers,
the infection spreads — a word or a phrase you have dropped
to solicit a clue
incriminates you: whom you suspect suspects you.
In time you grow into
the thing you are not, the-fiction-not-even-man,
absorbed by the lies,
collective, abstract, a fear-bitten nation creates
in the guise of men.

13.

In mock-epic meter this poetry hobbles on stilts,
in boots, in prose,
to say what it has to say straight before it falls
on its face as a poem.
In this it takes after the latest revived poetic
fashion (old
as late Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Donne’s London, Edwards’
and Hawthorne’s New England)
of disrobing before disemboweling the conscience in public.
The hara-kirists
are not simply Asian but Puritan Jewish American
Spanish Calvinist
English Greek Russian Irish Catholic Protestant
African Poles.
I, Henny Penny, hurt here, because I swallowed
a piece of the world,
and now I am screaming because in return the world
is swallowing me.
Poet, don’t look to your laurels, they’re always unreal.
The world is far nuttier,
drunker, more drugged, more beautiful, vainer, impatienter,
stupider than you.
Be true to yourself, if you can, the world is never
true or untrue.

14.

In Paterson, Williams’ epic, a line from the Greek
is quoted somewhere,
half defense, half apology: “A deformed verse
for a deformed time.”
This much is certain: the sense and the music together
come clear when sense
has the edge in addressing the thinking ear; otherwise
it’s sonic smear.
Go then, my verse, on hobble-stilt-booted feet:
better than no feet
at all to get around with — remembering
that pathetically jolly
young sergeant having his say in a TV feature
on old Viet Nam,
the happy-go-lucky double amputee thanking
his stars for his loss
because he could teach the rookies a thing or two
they wouldn’t know.
With fight-back American pride he was dancing, this man,
on his own Army-issued
detachable legs. Well, out of that viewing came bounding
this ill-natured poem
called “Mouths,” recalling the other wars when amputees
weren’t so lucky.

15.

Mouths

Hear us, we are young again and about to die.
There is a war again, and we, who were there before,
dream we are being given over to it,
even as our hearts rebound from it,
unspeaking, sickened, with the strength
of all our separate huge unwillingnesses,
our hundred-million-minded backward dread recoilfulness,
carried now, despite ourselves, squarely into it.

Suddenly the ground is cleared,
dug up for a moment and cleared a bit,
so the amputees may dance alone,
each with his own lost limb,
so the full-bodied may open their hungry jaws
to take in the muck, the sweet muck they died in.

Believe us, no one wants to return.
We are only here dreaming to be a while
with our own cut-off limbs, our cut-off lives,
our long unspeaking mouths telling:
We were as you are now,
living, seized, and drifting,
we are as you will be,
resisting, unremembered, dead.

16.

To the fall of the retching stump stump impersonal Anti-
Personnel bombs
instructed, Careful what you hit — nothing personal,
unless it’s enemy,
the Voice of America swings into the jungle village.
It’s the daily news
coming loud and clear over the sleek little shortwave
G.I. radio.
“Recognizing his continual unflagging efforts in the cause
of world harmony,
this group of veterans and soldiers at home have given
the U.S. President
their Special Peace Award.” Applause tums to radio
static forever,
since No Person’s alive in the village, including the No One
who turned it on.

17.

Brute, wise man, ogre, and beauty, cripple and President;
infant, dwarf,
and pygmy; dotard, darling, enemy, friend,
intellectual giant;
ancient Egyptian, Lestrigonian, Socrates, Moses,
Marx and Hitler;
the wife you sleep with, the mother and father you no
longer live with;
the son you know from the cradle, the fool and the bore
you know at a glance;
all wear inside them — who can tell why or how? —
an all-covering “I,”
an all-weather voluminous self that begins with the fetus’s
first flimsy heartbeat
and stretches on out to the last inaudible fall
of the pulsing brain —
everyone that has ever lived, since mankind began,
has worn inside him,
indelibly fixed, an unchangeable picture of exactly
the person he is,
like the silhouette ivory cameo piece grandma wore,
having inside it
the prize tinted portrait of her as she was at sixteen —
and which, whether looked at
or not, each one of us, secretly bearing, regards
as the “real me.”

18.

You can’t give it up and live. You may drive yourself mad
trying to do this.
Today there’s a growing fashion, not yet a rage,
to give it away,
exchange it, or squelch it forever while staying alive:
by LSD,
the bodies that tear off their skins to become all soul,
the howling drive
to break down all barriers standing between the inside
and outside of things;
by speed, by brainwave, through space, preventive wars;
harrowing hell
appeals to the mind that likes to play God for some reason;
Dante and Christ
succeeded, each in his permanent way, but the story
is they came back.

19.

As spring comes back each year with its new work and cares —
a breaking of hardness
never repaired or repairable, season of ooze,
of uneasy lures,
into wild air where streetcries and birdcalls ascend
like darting balloons;
into the lilting of summer robing, disrobing, which
people past thirty
no longer feel as a call in the blood (Do people
past thirty plan
all the wars?), the peeling of skins, mutation of genes,
degeneration
of bones, in the garden weeds rampantly growing, shooting up
even through asphalt —
comes the asking, Who will survive into summer with nothing
itself but the self
palely regarding the natural unself-regarding
fornications of objects
and bodies . . . cries in the air . . . artilleries . . . gouging
of wounds . . . rich blood
caking where dead men no longer lie . . . cattle
peacefully drinking
at home, in Vietnam . . . and, in Teotihuacan,
drawn on a pillar,
“. . . a jaguar singing . . . under his mouth, water; . . . a priest wearing
the robes of a god.”

20.

The natural conservatism of thought in the human animal
must have something
to do with the body’s unthinking lunge toward survival:
in spring we think
of summer’s being, suns’ endlessness, bushy stillness,
and stealthily,
as gold pears pull down their boughs, the sudden long
incoming fall.
And so, to keep this from stopping, to welcome all signs
of something ongoing,
as if to say, in a hushed voice’s prayerful charm wish,
I’ll be alive
wherever there’s living still going on, I wrote quickly
this poem called”All Summer”:

21.

All Summer

Why does the Princess stand looking away toward the brook?
The Prince needs her. “I am your fate,” says a voice from within.
The flowers he tended for her all nod with their flametips.
Neither dares move. “Come closer –” Neither has spoken.
If she spoke — “I cannot believe you would want me –” that’s
Where her voice would falter, not with compassion or loneliness,
But with revulsion; so, not to be misunderstood,
She’d have to swallow her feelings and quickly continue,
” –you’d want me to look at you, crippled and putrid, again.”

She says nothing to him, still gazing toward her and pleading,
Pleading — when will her great green eyes accept him and when
Will her tissue-blue silks move near him, her hand ever touch him?
Though neither has moved and nothing is said between them,
The air trembles — is it her loathing or his desire?
The flowers bend — is it in pity for him, their gardener,
Or in shame for her silently scorning him? Soon they will wilt.

Soon they will die and soon there will be no garden.
The Prince has turned into a statue imploring the air
With hands cut off at the wrists, neither bone nor marble.
Birds roost in his huge curly head and splatter his shoulders.
Having scampered away, the Princess is now somewhere else
Combing her thick auburn hair, the Prince long forgotten —

Or will she remain to turn into (perhaps is already
Becoming, and is this why the Prince importunes her? )
That dry, almost leafless old crone of a tree by the brookside,
Standing apart in the garden, infested with larvae
Swinging great nets of gossamer hair in the breeze,
The breeze that will shortly become a strong wind, a wind
That will topple the Princess, turn all of her up by the roots
That soon as they crumble, the brook carries off to the sea?

22.

High noon. It’s time to get up — jump into my pants,
run out and dance
in the foggy streets of Providence, play God —
maybe bring out the sun!

Spring II

The days are gentler, frosts are paper thin.
In these parts
winter is hard. You spend it bracing, then succumbing
to floating fevers
prone with your own ghost in bed, wrapped around
your viruses
like a wet mat, hating your flesh, all flesh.
Outside, the winners
go eating up the track while you drift off
with a temperature
of one hundred and three, thrown by empty self-
effacing dreams.

In one I see a man sitting way beyond me
at the other end
of the room, smoking or pretending to smoke, in a wing-
backed easy chair,
with the back facing me, and not seeming to care
if he’s seen.
The room is dim and I’m straining to see what he’s at.
He’s very busy,
but the harder I look, the darker the room becomes.
His pace increases:
he’s grim, working quickly, ferociously stuffing an oversized
man-shaped coat
with blankets, filling it out, all black, and making it
into a figure
that if casually looked at would seem like a person sitting
there backwards, smoking,
in a wingbacked chair. It dawns on me then that
what he’s straining to do
is make an escape without being noticed, even
while being observed:
getting away while giving the appearance (the dummy
he’s stuffed) of being
still there. And now he comes moving on all fours,
but too swiftly; just passing
under a nearby table, smoking, the cigarette
stuck to his lips,
the red coal of it burning, and he coming on
shaggy and fast,
an inflated roach, ever nearer (my God!) to me, and aiming
to go — where? Through me!

Pell-mell the world explodes whenever you
get sick — as sick
as the exploded world itself appears when you
get well. And so
you scream it out: “Neither I nor it exists!”
The blasphemy
is sobering. An egg is coddled, you drink
a little soup.
If it isn’t me, you say, wanly smoking,
doing these things
at this time and in this place, then it has
to be my ghost.
Ghost food tastes good. You recover. The bad world
turns good-and-bad.
Then you understand that it has never changed.

Her long slow smile
moves gently in my head again — a smile
odd on an old woman’s
face, therefore special, therefore something to adopt
or be adopted by
(I note quickly in photos of me then). Illiterate,
speaking three languages,
she turned into a literary figure: I called her
(in Auden’s phrase)
“my true ancestor,” and later, dedicating
a book to “My
Spanish Grandmother,” I wrote this guardedly
fond poem to her:

For an Immigrant Grandmother

She sat for an age at the window with glances that threw
Pennies of pity at collarless beggars, and cripples
Who crawled like crabs from gutter to curb rippled
The geese in the bag of her hunched-over flesh. But you
Always could tell by her murmur for heaven to witness
When neighborhood children like sparrows hopped in distress
To catch from the hand of the baker his three-day-old bread.

Yet she danced with a hint of the hips and a lilt of the head,
And the savor of turbans and princes and spices welled
From her smile like a promise of Turkish delights withheld;
For her heart was a mediterranean cradling the earth
With wishes that tumbled like fish and golden sea fairs
Where pirates were drowned and angels were spared by her prayers
Till she slipped unaware on the edge of a sigh to her death.

I need her moving in this time again, and in
her aura, love.
She takes the cups up with her freckled hands,
brown eyes following
like lambs, to the sink, pausing in the swish of faucets.
Without a word
she turns and wonders, surprised she understands.
The bulb-eyed night light
dims. I sleep, and it is warm and safe,
and I am loved.

Memory is (again) a stage where the dead
walk soft, actors
seeming to belong, but briefly, to another’s
words and bidding,
supporting the light that seeks them out, until
we who bear them
shining, frightened, hungry, out of love,
go down the hole.
Who sends us up again? Wraiths, like us?
Enacting one
all-memory (ghosts to grandchildren,
grandchildren to ghosts)
there in another’s mind, at another’s bidding?

The kitchen light
is glittering on just-washed, gold-rimmed dishes.
Among the smells
of meat and bread and soup a next-door neighbor,
through the paper walls,
sends something gurgling, drowning, in the quickly
sloshing toilet
as the family, just having eaten, push back
their chairs to rise,
frayed napkins daubing mouths, all quickly, so as
not to wake
the fevered child, nearer death than life,
to whom each noise
sounds out its special poignant mystery.

He lies there sleepless
in his narrow room, counting up his heartbeats
against the heavy
thing abiding in the corner, stirring
too lively in
the half-light of the kitchen door ajar.
It must be
a snow gust blown up blindly to the iron-heavy
burning between
his slackened shoulders as he dizzies and his
imagined face
gets blacker with dead air caught stoppered in his throat,
like blue gas
swirling in a bottle, till it suddenly pops out —
proving he’s alive!
Unclenching bursting lips he grabs new air
with his drowning mouth.

How was it in childhood almost to have died?
It was to live,
beyond the sickness and the being small,
having touched
the mushy border splashing, plowing through
the hot black aching
sickroom ten days of night unending, then surfacing
(like the picture book seal
coughing itself up on a beach) in blinding daylight
to eat and drink
among the bumbling shapes of life: on the still
sad side table
the torn tan lampshade, leftover breadcrumbs, bedpan,
cloth and soap,
watching the nurse’s curd-white fingers pause,
the one with a gold
wedding band ( saying I belong to someone ),
bracing the fever
chart, and sunlight jerking down the wall.

Through mind’s deep loopings,
small immensities of the world retrieved float back,
as though moving
in the blood’s intricate canals and locks,
returning toward
the radiating brain-lit sunlight of a day like this,
no different from himself,
being self-absorbed inside the seeing eye.
The dark reflection
of his lips and lolling tongue goes swiftly by,
as testing fingernails
etch stars and sun, a whole new sky, across
the rimed March window
his own smoke-huffing breathfuls have designed.

It was to live,
though still a child and parented, beliefless
as a man
and parentless: divorced parents, what have I
to do with thee?
It was to live pretending what one’s parents gave
or wished to give
was still the true umbilicus and only
necessary lifeline,
but absolutely immaterial. Fawned on,
to smile back.
Having wandered by the swamp all day, to come home
late, contrite,
to shouts of castigation, whispering I’m sorry,
but not to mean it.
It was being still a child but no longer someone’s,
belonging to no one
inside one’s own great empty endless self.

The day reels back,
the focus sharpens: he is hunched up on his heels,
alone and watching
the burnt-rubber-smelling marsh gas rise and hover
miles across
the reeking, rich, all-swallowing dumps among
exploded cars
and cans, the smashed toy skeletons and busted
hulks of households,
applauded by a giant billboard swaying broken-backed
on tattooed feet,
the ripped advertisement flapping out its message
to every wing
of passing gulls fixed on scavenging, eating
up the world.

It was lifelong to be his only brother’s death,
as in the poem which read:

sometimes I hear the taste and smell of me
crack like a bag of spontaneous rags
under warm snow

sound like smell strong enough
I can taste it —
it has to be me
that still might be
any child you know must die
who will survive in you —

who knows? — died
survived

a small brother died
mack trucked in the May warm
macadam Brooklyn street
just as the sun winked me past him
just as my shadow slipped me on
to the iron front house door
a schoolboy hung on a handle
hearing one pierced cry
the driver’s glowering curse

afraid if I turned I would see
still in the trickle
spread wet and red
the soon caking blood
caught in the blond hair
stuck to the tread
picked up
head swooped back
over the driver’s elbow

whisked white necked
into a sudden cab
siren fading in smoke

left
forever to whisper
let it be me
so I could hear whispering back not yet
not me

left
all day watching all night
till early
that morning
the nurse floating down
a clean white pigeon

wiping her mouth saying he
the boy is dead

it can’t be
he
maybe it’s me

and I can’t tell
sunk in a bag
and can’t breathe

10.

The proverbialist says, Each man his own best friend —
to prove self-interest;
then adds, his own worst enemy — proving what?
his self-disgust?
The ideas are neither opposite nor the same.
The proverbialist lies.
No man chooses self as he chooses enemy
or friend. He is.
They are, in passing, what he becomes in hoping
they will love him,
or the notions he can’t swallow that swallow him.
So, in a fury,
he accepts the love and hate that take him in.

11.

One’s relatives
are relative to one’s ideas of pretense
and disease.
Let them take the breeze — the whole lot, near and far,
real and foster —
then see for certain whose life it is one leads,
and how come.
Everyone at some time had a girl friend who wanted
to be his sister,
and a sister who wanted to be a girl friend. But
did one ask,
For whose sake? and At a sacrifice of what
to whom or whose?

Read Pirandello’s will: When I am dead,
do not clothe me.
Wrap me naked in a sheet. No flowers on the bed,
no lighted candle.
A pauper’s cart. Let no one accompany me,
relatives or friends.
The cart, the horse, the coachman, e basta. Burn me.

We say it’s hard
to fly alone — forgetting we all do.
Take it from
the birds: The business of flying is so intense
that birds must eat
their weight in food and prey once a day;
the humming bird
would die if it stopped for twenty minutes.

12.

Another spring,
late afternoon and driving back from Boston
just past the woods
where tree frogs were mating and chirping, neither sad nor glad,
a new theory of comedy
flew out of the blue, inaudibly making its way
through a sonic boom
and the routine blare of the car radio’s everyday
box score of doom
(Our boys killed in Viet Nam last week, two hundred
and three, the Reds
lost three times that many, and more unaccounted for.) —
to wit: the babble
of man in knowledgeable skin, whose sublimest expression
(Shakespeare, let’s say)
is only a hair’s breadth removed from gibberish,
is grounded in words
that slide into puns or carelessly melt into
obscenities, or
maliciously push the most heartbreaking sense around
until it helplessly
turns into self-travesty, booming the tune:
All is comedy!

As in a novel where life widens or narrows
beyond all possible
hope or despair, but still goes on happening
(the gifted young man
is broken, as one would expect, grows diseased until
he vanishes into
the abstract sky of the novelist’s own manic depression;
and the young beauty
he missed, sweet as she is, betraying herself,
like Cressida
with some cocksure pick up Jack Diomed, goes down
into the sloughs.
We enjoy seeing them sink; no one that gifted
or sweet should exist
without being dumped), till we find ourselves fingering
the page before
we have finished reading it, ready to slam shut
the book we know
we never really believed in, worn out on the rack
of . . . what can it be,
too many possibilities? Like life that continues
after the jig is up,
after the dearest one dies, goes madly
dissolving, reforming,
with something always happening, but really as though
nothing had happened.
One forgets the novel is pointless. And life? One regrets
the same cannot
be said of life (except by suicides) until
there’s an end, because
no one expects the end is an end, and of course
it’s not. Because
like the novel, good or bad, after it’s over,
life goes on
being written in just the same way by another novelist.

13.

So what have you got,
Jack Diomed asks, but a big bubbly bottle of babble?
And who’d swig on that?
I would, replies a voice in the air (I being
the voice in the air),
if you allow me each time to take the detail,
lovely or punishing,
for mine alone, for what must pertain to me,
because it lights
up me, and respects me, because it is true.

14.

To Israel I went
grieving, after losing my wife of so many years.
(Do you still read me?)
Before going, trying to jot down what it was like,
her dying that spring,
I threw up this raw, unfinishable thing:

The shaggy gray light declares us alive,
hunched in this Connecticut brick house breathing.
Fields bumble with bluejays and finches that yawk
and scream us awake. Can we last out the spring?

Tied down to cancer’s dumb sickroom downstairs,
I watch you, inching away through the night,
unravelled by pain, hands twitching, palms red,
to snatch at the hem of the coverlet.

Agog in the world outdoors, full spring
is having its say: a perpetual gabble
of maniac words to the oblivious births
under bird wings that hammer and tear away.

I cannot take it — stuffing my ears —
I cannot take this riot all day
each day, and still go on with your dying,
disbelieving your death, day after day.

Arrived, in love with mortality, I was flooded
with it everywhere.
In traipsing the warm summer streets at night and eying
the slow-moving crowds
munching hot corn, their expectant, preoccupied mouths
open and chewing;
or some lonely eater behind plate glass in a café
creeping with waiters
fussing over the lazy décor, and the round dark O
of his glistening mouth
as he jams into it a forkful of peas, some meat,
a piece of bread —
these acts grow suddenly awesome with poignancy.

What people do,
whatever they say, their gestures, their smiles, their wrinkles,
their sighs while dabbing
hot sweating faces with handkerchiefs; and all
their unconscious motions,
the movement of limbs, the crawl of the old ones, the jaunty
wide comfortable swing
of the young, of women with bodies in snug dresses
leisurely bending,
the full naked calves of their legs like separate beings
in golden sandals,
open shoes with high heels, small pointed toes in the light;
the arm-in-arm couples
lazing along, and the electric excitement of faces
about to share something —
the frank lovely kisses, sly eyes withdrawing, and passing,
falling into the mass
of all movement, leaves and insects and flowers, the rise
of a shout with an answering
scream; while a confident driver whisks by intently
aiming his car
through the glittering traffic — and all these casual lives
unconscious of death,
of my private death, their death, the deaths of those dear,
and the pain still to come.

This I watch like a man enclosed in a booth seeing all
and unseen, or like
someone behind a duck-hunter’s blind observing
the animals feed
in their pond, unaware of him. Where does one hide?

15.

One wants to tell
how the memory rushes hungrily back to the remembered
life of the dead
beloved, until at a touch, of themselves, the episodes
rush on unreeling,
speed up beyond one’s grasping; imagined again,
retelling themselves,
great hunks of life that plead again to be real!
Lived, how they ask
to be unlived in order to be lived again, right now,
for the first time!

16.

Verse is the faulty hammer I use on the faces
backing up in the dark.
Foul! Deception! A lie! Simply your own
shabby way of pushing
them out of the way or palming off bits of the daily
indigestibles
in a puffed-up language you think turns them magical.

Touché! Hurray!
You’ve hit the weak spot, so now you can tell the whole
thing’s a fraud. Please
stop reading. I cannot charm you, and you, you cannot
disarm me.

Whilst I remember
Her and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself; which was so much,
That heirless it hath made my kingdom, and
Destroy’d the sweet’st companion that e’er man
Bred his hopes out of.

Leontes mourning his wife, dead sixteen years,
not knowing that she,
Hermione, would soon be restored to him through
the pretend-magic
of Paulina (who said, those that think it is
unlawful business
I am about, let them depart — but none did ),
himself exclaimed:

O! she’s warm.
If this be magic let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

(Reader, do you read me? Let’s go on eating.)

17.

What’s the compulsion
to be always wearing my heart on this paper sleeve?
Eat as you read me?
A way to feel tidy, or even a way to feel visible?
A way to add up
what is only vagrantly there, unnamed — or maybe
really unnameable,
so that it would otherwise have to stay muffled and dumb,
like a silenced shriek?

18.

Coming back from New York on the New Haven Line, the day
hovered raw and gray,
oozing in through the window. I floated out with it,
into it, watching,
observed, all the way back to Providence.
Then the poem
that came through seemed written through me as through glass:

Spring Northbound

Leafmold prepares the ground.
A hidden star wakes.
An unknown star discovers night,
moonlight on snow in crevices.
Piles of ermine break the ground.

A lemon haze flares up
among stripped trees,
naming a source there.
Sight returns and twitters.
Light stands among the trees.

Litters of seen things
unknown to one another
meet touching, still,
but in the scratchy light

Spring III

If life is a dream,
then death was always your neighbor’s neighbor’s or friend’s:
a piece of the sky
just landing on somebody’s tail, and she, Henny Penny
(who stands for humanity),
gives out the inaudible They got me! and falls.
Only you heard her
(like Goethe, who was so attuned to the universe
he could take its pulse,
pointing out, Mankind, here’s where the pain is –now mend!)
and put the words down
in a notebook until you could find exactly the poem
to slip ’em into.

And there’s Life Is a Dream!
The stage for the play is always set, the lights
always lit, the actors,
forever the same, ardently speak their lines,
go out and come back,
resuming their roles, repeating their lines, twenty-four
hours a day.
It’s the world’s best unfinished play, ending only to start
all over again
without any break. And the beauty of it — what makes it
all click — is this:
you can take all the roles, sitting back in your mind’s
dark theatre to watch,
no matter when you came in. The bewildered girl,
who greets you at first,
is dressed as a man (and is mistaken as such
until the end
by all but her flunkey, the clown, who dies oddly biting
his martyred tongue) —
poor thing, she’s out for the blood of the playboy duke,
who betrayed her once,
but then mismarries her after all; or the wild
young father-devouring
Prince, who all but digests his meal on the stage
and makes you enjoy it;
or the half-eaten King himself, who’s losing his grip
(the old story)
and pretends it’s the fault of his slavishly loyal psychiatrist-
oracle, who
it’s plain the King was always too bright to believe.
The message, of course
(says the play going on), is Long live the King of Life!
whoever he is.

A woman plays life
like a waterfall outpouring all-in-one,
an endlessness
we feel in music as it is shaped by our hands,
mouths and lungs
agrapple, impounding the all-abundance of being —
all but the source,
then stopping, once emptied of joy, on coming to be,
as in death’s calmness
dissolving, resuming the flesh, to cry out of darkness,
beginning to breathe.

If fire’s the source, it’s there that being arises
in shapeless air,
as in the dreaming of mothers endowing, instilling
their offspring-to-be,
from first heartbeat to the pounding shriek of being
born, unearthed.
When it is, it breathes — the rest is aftermath.
Mated or mismated,
she insists to the end that her honor’s a mixture of passion,
possessed and possessing,
towards the creation that hangs on the words I do,
their vow to the earth,
the deed which only awaits the spread of the seed.

Trial and error,
more trial against error, since incubation in her
is the ageless wild flood
of the cells’ multiplication in search of the singular
simple conformance
that will shape the child against intricate odds or fail.
In her getting
is her begetting, in the pleasuring lock-bodied lust
the mindless matrix
starting up her mindfulness — and from this there follow
all law, all beauty,
all cancer, and beautiful cancered society:
from caves and earthworks,
our borders and walls, our house, roof, and furniture,
excluding all others,
to protect the future rocked in the past, put a face
on the human nest.

Fire comes with winds to drive it anywhere
and momentary rain
to damp it down. The flames impel keepsakes
to explode in air
with fundamentals, discharging into ash
the grimly oiled,
upstanding furniture in livid phase of reprimand.

A litter of poverty
banks up against the bare spare heart, chewed
by deprivation.
And the sturdy house of feeling, arrested in its oldest
style of being,
through a hundred thousand days of interweaving voices,
lapses now
beside its pastel plastic junk-accumulating neighbors
itching in
Pompeian frenzy for the fire’s hand to come
between and break
each rooted knot of being, leaving whatever
melts to melt,
whatever’s flimsy to quickly fallen bone
and char, half-eaten
evaporating faces, and the dwarfed
inconsequential remnant
sustaining on one toe its ludicrously
poignant slouch.

A fire licked and curled until it kicked up
a fine-faced college town.

A fiercely hot north wind
carried heavy smoke along
from Pittsburgh and Martinez.
All night we woke
to smell smoke
and there was a heavy drifting of it
in and out
all next morning.

Someone said the fire had already burned down
a house — but also,
and still unknown to most, one whole block
of friendly houses
lit and burned — the roomy houses of fifty good families.

I went down to Telegraph
and had my hair cut.
When I left the barber shop at two-forty
there was dense smoke across the campus.
People said it came
from ten miles away . . .
but I was frightened.

Fire prying out
of suddenly burst-open museums all hoped-up, hopeless,
hope-redundant
objects, tilting, limp, and swiftly licked at,
to be left forever
with the smoke-infiltered look of man-rejected things.

About three we reached La Loma
and Buena Vista,
the smoke so dense
we couldn’t see the flames
until close up we saw
what looked like your house
one burst of flames.
But it wasnt yours.
It was the Maybeck’s house.

And the fire went on
burning ten blocks of houses, barns, garages,
bird cages, bins,
roaring past well-wrought sedentary things carried burning
to the streets.

Twenty or thirty college men
were helping move the furniture
out of the Mattheson’s
and out of the Lawson concrete house.
They couldn’t stand the heat
of the Maybeck fire in front.

The fire releasing
everything from mirroring its same and seemly,
self-tormented look,
with barely time to die out of its own
unwitting self.

There was absolutely no water,
and no sign of a fireman.
Two boys said the place was doomed
and to carry out the furniture
would be to burn it in the street.
Turning back I saw the Lawson house
and your garage afire.
It was raining burning shingles
and the fire extinguisher only gave
a single gasp
which quenched a faggot on the roof.

Slowly in the shifting wind, house on house
ignited like
uneasy candles blinking in solemn fury
on their own burning.

They pushed down the fences
and chopped down
(or started to chop down)
the burning eucalyptuses
while M. and I got out
all the parlor furniture
except the piano.
M. was singed
and everyone had his clothes
burned by falling embers.
Then we tried going upstairs to the study
but the smoke there was too much for me.
I threw a few books out —
they burned outdoors…
I went down
and the last thing we got out
was the sideboard
which contained most of our silver.
The roof was falling in at three-thirty….
The furniture M. moved up and down the hill
four times, and it is now safely stored.

Fire empties, purges and transforms.
What it touches once
stands crippled in the mind forever, but what
it excavates
sifts free, effaced, consumed into the mote-
enfiltered air.

But others fared much worse.
H. B., for instance, lost
the new house he was ready to move into
and the house that he was living in
and though he got his furniture
into the middle of a burned lot
and covered with wet rugs
all of it was burned
and his books inside the house . . .

Fire is the hand between, turned by winds
that die away,
start up again and die away, turned down
by rains that drown
themselves, start up again, to die. Fire lives
forever in itself.

The P’s and R’s left their houses
at three forty-five
without attempting to take anything away.
They thought a few books or pictures
or pieces of furniture
would only sharpen the sting
of losing everything else.
The Lawson cement house was emptied
and all the windows closed,
but it got so hot
that curtains burned inside the house
though the house itself did not.

Some still stand intact, others do not —
cared for, uncaring,
past caring — blackened debris, smoking lots.

The wind that blew all afternoon
completely dropped at five.
Otherwise I see no limit
to what the fire might have done . . .
We’ve no idea what you lost
stored upstairs in the closet.
It’s terrible to think
of all your books . . .
Last night I couldn’t sleep at all,
reliving that half hour or so
I had inside the house
thinking of the better things
I might have saved.
If I had been home earlier . . .
If I had had a car . . .
But one can’t go on like this.

We hear what goes
going — we see what fades fading, and the thought
put into things
gone out of things. Stillness comes again,
restoring to
familiarity every light and heavy, placid, gross,
and fumbling thing,
each to its special eye-glint, unbroken stance.

The things of yours we salvaged are:
the davenport
the large living-room rug
the small hall rug
the Windsor chair
the Windsor rocker
the desk
the sideboard
the rush rocker
the rush armchair (Chippendale)
the green upholstered mahogany rocker
the oval pedestal-table
the oval gate-leg table
the oblong table with leaves
(under the lamp)
the piano stool
the small square twisted-legged table
(with leaves and stationery drawer)
the picture of a young man
(the wrong choice of course).
None of these are touched by fire . . .
One of the hinges is off.
There are some scratches . . .

The flames are gone.
But fires burn inaudibly, incessantly, and fires
eat quietly,
invisibly away, in their own man-loving,
mind-created time,
in their own man-hating, mind-dissolving time,
edging a hand
between the time we count and time we leave uncounted.

And fires lick
behind the eyes, burning off the living forms
the brain devises
for the spirit’s making, hollowed, burnt out blindly
from behind.

Fire like a waterfall bears sounds of words
in every language,
barely heard beyond the crackling, going down in gibberish,
the drowning of all sense,
the dying of all one thought the mind must use
to keep the armor
of the brain from caving in upon the self.

Only the drowning
hear such sound: tiny titillations in the ear,
before blackout,
that dissolve into a ticking resonance
past hearing,

as though the hearing had reversed itself to be
the body’s blood —
expiring roar, going down into the ear of all-sound,
and sucked in there,
absorbed, until a final crushing sound
of soundlessness
releases a hollow spontaneity, post-mortem clicks:

a hundred clickings
in succession surging, forcing upward,
like bubbles from the deep,
the last dissolving signals of the heard thing hearing
itself sent back.

I spoke and was not heard. The words went out
and disappeared.
I spoke again and heard the words come back,
dead to every ear
but mine, which heard the words go down and disappear.

They died in me,
alive; they were a part of me that died
so the rest could stay
alive, sucking at the sense of words already
perished in their sound.

I remembered, hearing the news of the college-town fire
thirty-four years later,
to write this poem, October l5, 1967.

A woman douses her body in gasoline,
lights a match and turns herself into a torch.
The wind dies down.
The crackling is fierce.
She slumps to the ground.

On each corner in each city a woman arises,
mother of three,
with her heart in her mouth,
stands open-eyed burning —
now her dress, now her body, burning.

And the wind dies down.
The traffic stops.
Children stand by holding hands till they drop.
The sky is glutted with planes
bearing bombs they will drop.

A woman, all women, burning,
bearing death, giving birth to death,
as the gears of the mind break down.
The last wind in the world dies down.
In her flame we are buried and born.

Spring IV

The interminable colors of life flow through me with this
light rain, each downward
stroke a feeling or thought looking slantingly strange,
neither mine nor not mine,
belonging to anyone living or maybe not: maybe
only to those
dead and dying that chance to flash through to me here
while I take things in,
soaking up, thoughtless, everything happening now,
all that’s passing
and coming to be, while the rain goes battering down
the grasses and leaves,
wetting houses and animal faces, slowly changing the faces
of bombarded children
in far jungle villages, pinned down under huts
that fold into flames,
surprised to be drenched as they lie there dying and staring
up in the rain.

By this drenched old house over the Tagus from Lisbon,
an elephant-eared
banana tree is clattering — the rain having sharpened
almost to hail,
the last fruit eaten, the new in its viscous buds
beginning to stir.
A gold bantam rooster has just started over the checkerboard
cobblestone sluices
that take on infinite shadings of God knows what
reflections of light
thrown off by a tense pine forest looking spacious as death
back of the wall.
And these shadings of light before me fall as though brushed
through crisscrossing webs
to glint in the swift and vigorous rain, impending
for days and insisting
the way one insists when thinking he’ll last forever.

Caught or uncaught, everything falls in a lifetime.
Who can keep track?
Though I favor those more who sop it all up than those
so engrossed with themselves,
their next word or thought, they are deaf-dumb-and-blind to the world
staring right at them —
except sopping it up at times may just be too much
to bear and go on.

As when falling lightly, invisibly from a new wind,
it spreads like stuff
that statues intercept to catch for patina,
and we wonder
where and by what hands and eyes this ultra-
finest mesh
of memory was blown and magnified
into such minutely
all-pervading palish pollen. Is it
the dandruff off
the “hair of graves”? or the transcendental “dust
of ages” reseeded
in the eye-stemmed mushroom cloud now settling on
our everyday
bare heads, coarse coats — the fallout overblown
by nations jostling
their super-plussing million-headed death’s head?

So again,
for the millionth time this year, you want in,
you want out,
you want off (in that catchy phrase of the musical)
of this lovely planet,
letting showers of all weights and thoughts pour down on everyone
else but you.
Just give me time to put it all down on paper
before we’re all dust!

The world that ticks in your hand asks Who runs the show?
and Whose heart is bleeding?
Since confessing is never confessing the time is past,
tomorrow is nothing.

It’s like day and night, the bay and the tree you watch
from your window at home.
Night happens. The night just happens and you move into it.
It’s like the day.
The day moves into the night. The waters go by.
There is a bay.
The tree is silent, leaves fallen. Tomorrow happens.
You move into it.

The papers say six chairs around a table
are changing the world.
Whose men are in the chairs? And whose ideas
are in their heads?
They do not look at one another — they look
at nothing; they hear,
they speak, they think of nothing. They are dead.

The world is changing as we think it. Thinking
is a flame burning.
Thinking is in the head where nothing happens.
Thinking happens
inside the flame. The flame will go on burning.
The flame is nothing.

Thinking is like tomorrow. Tomorrow will
have windows. It will
have windows out of which we look, and we look
through windows which
reflect our eyes. In our eyes there are windows,
not made of glass,
not made of windows. Our eyes are the windows
our thoughts burn.

Tomorrow will happen. The flame will burn. Nothingness
will appear.

This thinks like a thought
that is not a thought — and yet it goes on thinking
automatically.
It clicks around, it speaks to us, we listen
automatically.
And this is like the night that speaks and listens
automatically
to the automatic word, and shrivels — and the same word
shrivels the day.

If I know this, how do I know it? Does it
know me as that silence
when I vaguely listen to the word rising faintly out
of my speaking hand?
What is the silence listening out of my hand
that writes this down?

If God is Sherrington he’ll comfort me
in Man on his Nature:

Each cell, we remember is blind; senses it has none. It knows not ‘up from down’; it works in the dark. Yet the nerve-cell, for instance, ‘finds’ even to the fingertips the nerve-cell with which it should touch fingers. It is as if an imminent principle inspired each cell with knowledge for the carrying out of a design.
* * *
Water is the very menstruum and habitat of each and every cell. Water, within and without, allows the cell free scope for action. Water is a wonderful ‘surround’ and the germinal cell seems to appreciate that.
* * *
Nerves seem for their purpose, constructed in view of what will be ‘wanted’ of them. Before ever they function they grow where they will be wanted, they make the ‘right’ connections.

10.

But Sherrington, Why
do we go on living like creeping ants and die
like exploding novas?

11.

Day after Day

I

Remember Pope John took a long time to die
The banner headlines in Lisbon

A small hotel near the Park
Everybody’s old dad

Older than retired millionaires
When made Papa to the multi-millions

A man of the people poor and reluctant
Not wishing the office

Huge overflowing face
With the sad kind eyes of a clown

The Portuguese always in mourning
Go glass-eyed into mourning again

The TV booms in the screamingly clean
Linoleum room

Brown hands rustle and fold
Sunday green rotogravures

A hunched lady in lace lets go
Over her rosary belching

Back after lunch to devour
The flickering life story

Was nobody glad
To see him go?

Don’t grieve ( he said ) I am entering
The consummation of my life

I delved with the rest in his dying
Like a virgin not convinced of her innocence

Call the police
A man’s gone amuck on the Avenue

They’re running him down
The length of Sidonio Pais

Heads jam at the window
One black cassock flies by
It’s Lisbon’s drunk bishop shouting
Take me home Lord

And mimicks the ancient nun’s prayer
For I am sick of Love

Say it at last
O Papa é morto

I will not mourn with the living
But rejoice with the dead

Smother the mouth of my death
With his death

Take me home Lord
For I am sick of Love

12.

I follow my words like an ant on his pile among piles,
and they sing to me —
the music my words make when I read them in print. I smile,
I purr, my eyes’
Pygmalion rubs lover hands over them, and all because . . .
no, not just because . . .
I made them — they’re no longer me, I love them only
momentarily.
The music passes, its loveliness turns sour —
a dying fall,
enough, no more. Is this because it is
no longer me
but spoken memory congealed in Was and, like
the child I was,
looks like me and likes me? Rather, looks
like what I dreamt
I wished that I could be, if words put down,
just so, could make
so firm a thing as Me or Mine, something
I’d never be —
never be but not know it . . . yes, and know it
but still not know it:
in words converting me I’d find what I dreamed
I had to be.
And who’d think of dreaming this dream of me but a Me
lots better than me?

13.

My heart is a love that I like and dislike a bit more,
a bit less, than a friend.
It turns like a world half-known that is huge and cold
as the moon still-a-moon,
And you don’t remember me, it says, because
I’ve always been there.
You bear with me as you would with a parent you care for
more the less
that you see, the longer you live to remember as younger
than you are now.

Oh world, my heart, as you live and sleep, remember me
less and less,
but bear with me to wake to the stars and the moons
always there to land on
in dreams when the earth, grand mother-father of life,
is no longer there.