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IT TAKES PRACTICE NOT TO DIE
Elizabeth Bartlett
It Takes Practice Not to Die was originally published in 1964 by Van Riper and Thompson in Santa Barbara, California. The book is now out-of-print and the publisher no longer exists. The author's literary executor, Steven James Bartlett, has decided to make the book available as an open access publication, freely available to readers through Project Gutenberg under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs license, which allows anyone to distribute this work without changes to its content, provided that both the author and the original URL from which this work was obtained are mentioned, that the contents of this work are not used for commercial purposes or profit, and that this work will not be used without the copyright holder's written permission in derivative works (i.e., you may not alter, transform, or build upon this work without such permission). The full legal statement of this license may be found at:
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IT TAKES PRACTICE NOT TO DIE
BY
ELIZABETH
BARTLETT
VAN RIPER & THOMPSON, INC.
SANTA BARBARA 1964
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these poems appeared in the following anthologies: The American Scene, The Golden Year, New Poems By American Poets II, New Voices 2.
Thanks are also due to the Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea Review, Commentary, The Critic, Dalhousie Review, ETC., Fiddlehead, Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, Literary Review, New Mexico Quarterly, New York Times, Odyssey, Poetry Dial, Queen's Quarterly, Quixote, San Francisco Review, Saturday Review, Tamarack Review, Yale Literary Magazine.
Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 64-22731
Copyright 1964 by Elizabeth Bartlett
First Edition
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form, except for review purposes.
Printed in the United States of America
TO
PAUL AND STEVEN
OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
Poems of Yes and No
Behold This Dreamer
Poetry Concerto
CONTENTS
Existence=multiple conditions2
I tell you it is inside,
a substance no one has yet identified
or described
as something natural to flesh,
a glutinous secretion in the cells
that can harden and melt.
Milky, it clings to the gums
with a stickiness that fastens on the tongue
to be dumb,
or else stretches and winds a band
around the heart so tight, it has to snap
or loosen, springing back.
Fluid, it waxes the bones
to ease their impact and recoil as they bounce
over stones,
except when the latex thickens,
becomes too crude, more fat than resin,
and freezes in the sun.
My head has no affinity with my feet.
When I stand on one heel and lean
on my axis spine, I reel to the floor;
I can not turn on a fixed orbit.
My shadow divides me by day and escapes
me at night, a trait apparently made
to confuse me, since I follow a course
without regularity or recurrence, my cosmos
inclined to alternation at moments
evident to no one, not even myself.
Who is reasonable? A tightrope walker,
perhaps, builders of bridges, sailors,
mountain climbers—those whose direction
is indicated by their opposition
and held in a careful equilibrium
like a golden pendulum, its means,
each according to some counter force.
Lacking such moderation, I look for
wisdom in safety, and safety
in wisdom—and dangle between.
A two-legged creature, whose symmetry
goes paired from ear to foot, I find
duality a natural condition; a Chang
and Eng existence united in fact
but separate in fulfillment. Parted,
we die, and together compromise
our right and left, depending which has
the stronger influence. Made as I am,
the wonder is not that I sway or spin,
but manage to stay inside my skin.
Consider the circle.
It is a miracle
of completion,
end and beginning one.
Reduced to a point or
expanded to a sphere,
its ratio
is unchanged by ego.
Compare it to the line,
that matter of fact sign
of direction
started but never done.
Whichever way it moves,
how far or long, it proves
distance can go
only so high or low.
I think we should rejoice
there is no other choice
than straight or round—
makes life easy, I've found.
And still the arrows fly
in all directions.
No one is safe. The wind
has no armor.
Strength, beauty, valor,
whatever we find
and name perfection
is target to the eye.
Who is immune?
Either we aim—and miss,
or ourselves become
the victims hit.
Even a hermit,
locked inside his room,
remembers St. Francis
sang often out of tune.
We learn to die
from a thousand wounds,
each scarred inside
till the final failure.
Meanwhile we endure
and suffer with some pride
that we can be so human—
enough, if we must, to cry.
The point is inevitable.
Whether heel or head,
who is invulnerable
is already dead.
Be whatever you like,
close your eyes:
on the desert a burnished stone,
in the murky sea a jewel.
Go wherever you wish,
bind your feet:
through the night where a wing has flown,
towards dawn where a leaf drops cool.
Live however you would,
stay your blood:
with the sky over earth as friend,
at peace with the mind and breath.
Speak whenever you will,
seal your lips:
of this life proclaim time an end,
in the next cry Nazareth.
I have walked from river's end to end,
a slow companion to the light seagulls
that circle overhead
and I have stood still above the bend
that separates the foot from distant hulls,
to fill my eyes with flying sails' wings spread.
I have watched them many times repair
the far shore's curve around the sun
and hold it there ensnared
until provoked they drop midair,
instinct with seaward gravitation
and angry claws declared—
their mutiny a gold crazed rout
that tears the cargo from its hold
and scatters it about.
I am not old
and yet, when night brings me to town,
I forget their wings and drown.
That morning, after the storm,
everyone gathered about the tree
and marveled at its fall:
the body leaning gently on one arm,
its mighty head now cushioned by deep
branches, seemingly asleep.
"You wouldn't think a storm," one said,
then broke off, staring at the fruit
that never would be eaten red
and sweetened by the sun, or set
in jars and slowly left to cool,
the ripening years ahead gone, too.
"It was the wind." "The rain." Each spoke
a part of truth out of his own mouth
with words that could not make it whole
because the naked roots showed
how much there was to doubt,
the secret in the darkness crying loud.
Even a tree, she thought, biting her tongue
and bringing her childish thoughts down,
remembering the climbs, the stout swing hung
on rafters soaring to the sun,
a tree built like a tower
so you could visit God and talk for hours.
The men sawed logs and timber all that day
until there was nothing left, not
even a shadow where you could wait
and hide to see if it would wake,
then they buried the hole and forgot
what else they might have covered with the sod.
Dead trees tell no tales, she thought,
nor empty nests, nor little girls who see
how helpless all things are when caught
by storm, no matter how big or
strong or secure, and she walked quietly
into the house to help with the next meal.
Thoughts like an empty cage
receive the morning
through the windowpane
and quietly swing.
No flutter brings my eye
to a meaninged core
for the waking light,
the door transparent.
Held blind by the mirror
and deaf by the bell,
I must search my mind
by taste, smell, and touch.
Bars silhouette a wall
to enclose the noon
where images halt
and the night soon comes.
O bird that set me free
to try my own wings,
how this false spring tree
clings that I perch on!
Breaking the soil of her mind
was an old habit as she plied
the hoe back and forth over the year
to see its design, the cut and stripped
images of reason stacked in rows
of answered arguments. She swore
at the stones, the matted grass
and stubborn clay that held her back
as though to a winter still unprepared
for spring. Was she never to be spared
from questions rooted in the past?
She attacked the clods with wrath
until there were holes in the ground,
then her thoughts crumpled down,
taking her strength with them.
Aching from remembered resentment,
she turned to the struggle within herself,
but moved lightly now and penitent,
trying to ease the rebellious soil
and soften it, to make it pliable
to the new seeds, the new demands
of the changing season, knowing plants
thrive better in kindness than bitterness.
And suddenly the year stood plain, at rest.
Hunger, I have known your pangs,
the gnawing urge, the ceaseless demand
from beginning to end;
inevitable as air and light,
as rain and seed and soil, as tides
and seasons; the perpetual cause
of all that moves and is moved; the force
that flows through stars and men.
We are born hungry. Begins
the appetite with warmth and tit,
with wombskin quivering yet
from cry replying cry, then another sense
commands another hunger fed
to feed the next and the next, each heir
and progenitor of this past,
that future, and the cycle reset.
Hungry pilgrims, we can not rest.
Distance is but another nearness,
as soon met, then shorelines bend
and we must home again
to other journeys, our Eden
faith a continual repetition
of arks and floods from which none
returns invulnerable, the apple bitten.
Creed, color, race, we have all sworn
allegiance, fought bitter wars,
tasted glory and gall
for insatiable gods deified
by our own hungers; with rites and sacrifice
made bread and wine from flesh and blood
that we might have eternal food
here and hereafter, immortal.
We are fed by desire
and consumed like the fire
on our tongues, in our hearts;
a flame forever unappeased
by our words, symbols, deeds
or monuments; the phoenix, man himself,
recreated from his own ashes
out of hungering dreams and parched.
We live with hunger always,
that fearfilling, painpinching cave
wherein we hide like hunted stags,
lips dry, but tasting heroically
of miracles... Who has not seen
visionary lions fall to dust
and, scornful of the world's ambition,
left the hunters truth in rags?
Fish, birds, beasts, all are prey
to the same illusion, all wake
to the hunger that stalks and prowls.
Sands thirst for unquenchable seas,
plains thrust toward implacable peaks,
time moves unfulfilled and blind
from plans unrealized to those surprised.
We die hungry even while hyenas howl.
The day to day commitment to failure
that judgment daily argues against me
condemns me to despair. I am guilty
of more than silence. At times words fail your
wisest men and then, intentionally.
But my silence, like all my secrecies,
has no defense, none conventionally,
my personal idiosyncrasies
no social crimes. When pride is pain and shame
an agony too keen for reason, I
had no other weapon. Who is to blame?
There was no intent to deceive or lie.
My absence is sufficient evidence,
voluntary exile, not providence.
Of vegetable, yes,
but amorphous
by analogy
to stem
leaf
root
not a flower
nor a seed
and no use as fruit.
Of animal, too,
but understood
independently
of cry
growl
purr
not a fish
nor a fowl
and no good as fur.
Of mineral, besides,
but disinclined
organically
to heat
break
pour
not iso-
nor meta-morphic
and no worth as ore.
Now there are great numbers of people
coming and going with the wind,
and the wind seems changed;
its voice is never still
and its eyes are strange.
Once, we remember, it was possible
for the wind to move on two feet
and formulate a philosophy
of life and death by reason
of environment.
Then the wind that blew around us
was a familiar one;
we knew which side of the house was open
and what grew from our hand
each season of the year.
When it was far, we could gaze
beyond mountains, across seas,
over days and miles of distances
to twisted deserts and vast plains,
bridging there with here.
Wind voyageurs, we knew
what a man puts into his mouth
he eats, where he lays his head
is shelter, that the clothing
he wears, covers him.
Then we had no illusions
about customs or differences,
since the wind was the same wind,
whether it came from the north, the south,
the east, or the west.
Time was a place, we remember,
where the wind was able
to look a man in the face
and remain long enough to hear
what he had to say.
Now there are great numbers of people
coming and going with the wind,
and the wind seems changed;
its voice is never still
and its eyes are strange.
I went to the orchard
where the trees were ripe
and found a hard
lemon.
I went to the meadow
when the grain was bright
and heard a crow
sermon.
I went to the valley
which was hidden from wind
and saw a bleached
galleon.
I went to the mountain
whose peak showed no print
and met a lame
stallion.
I went to the desert,
the jungle, the shore,
and always some cursed
omen.
I went to the city
at last for the source,
and there in the streets
were men.
A stranger came one day along that road
and looked out on the field, the barn,
the house set by itself against the woods,
the air as empty in its fence
of silence, as the hour of light.
Alone,
clothes torn, his hands streaked by the cuts
of glass through which he came like hurtling stone
to sudden halt, he searched the bluff
of easy miles for signs of God on wheels,
then limped some more and paused, the bills
in his pocket less a commodity
of exchange for another man's good will,
than a threat of violence that was worse
for being secret.
Car wreck found.
Driver missing. He saw the headline words
small on a page, his name announced
in an obituary column.
Twice
he glanced back over his shoulder
to see whose shadow was following behind,
while at a darkened window, its owner
stood with gun upraised, remembering Job.
A stranger came one day along that road.
After the burning nights and the barren speech,
after the dry wind through stony streets,
we found our little green where lilies were,
and knee-deep oxen stood watching us
triumphant under trees. For this was peace
as nature meant nature's peace to be,
with fruitful soil made ready by its need,
with instincts tamed in gentler ways than fear,
with freedom measured freely as the sky
measures breath. We lay there side by side
breathing kisses, feeling the wet and cool
of bodies grassed in loving, each a groove
within a groove, seeking counterpart,
with close-open-close, with light-in-dark
and waves lapping. We heard the overflow
of lake down buttressed dam and sluiced walls
making music in ditches, singing birth
to seed in spike, to trunk in root, one surge
alike in all. Then, happily, we chose
which way, and barefoot climbed the gold
to tip the rim of that day's widened
cup, before the darkness could descend
to cheat our purpose. Together, all of us swam,
caught in a shower of light that fell on hands
and hoofs, on flesh and hide—the rainbow now
a shore towards which we moved with one accord.
And the sun ceased fire and lowered its arms,
promising new terms for our tomorrow.
This earthship, which we now sail on seas
of time and space, aware of other tides
and stars and winds than move about us here,
is smaller than we dreamed. Once, its high
mountain masts pierced infinity,
as we rode, bow into future, and past
at our stern, a vessel without peer
in the universe, the first, the last!
The sails gave way to engines, the spars to wings,
the continental coasts to cosmic shores,
and still we see no end to journeying.
Although our rocket shrinks, we keep our course.
We watch, we sleep, our dream a toylike thing
that wakes and wonders—-whose will, which force?
1
Through the window of the bus, he combs a field,
close-shaves the bristling oats, straps in a fence line,
pockets adjoining timber, then rides into the morning,
pleased.
Now retired and let out to pasture, he
does not mind the clouds, the rain that fogs the highway—
his eyes are patched with blue.
Hands leathered and roped,
knees astraddle, boots shined, he is seated beside
as neat a filly as any in the herd he used to lope
in season.
With stallion gallantry, with sweets, he holds
the miles to coffee stops and anecdotes ... till memory
spurs his old man's hopes ... and the night stampedes.
2
Separated by long years and the visibility poor,
her mood reflects the weather, darkening within.
Dishes, diapers, sighs, and pills ... roof by roof,
she hears the monotone of wheels recite the gloomy
catechism, and prays for a different kind of virgin
miracle.
Nervously, she rubs her good luck stone,
then wraps her thoughts in cellophane as a heroine
of film and fashion, glad to forget home, school,
and all the lost-girl tales they tell of Hollywood,
She listens, nods, and smokes. She does not mind his boasts,
only too aware how the ashes cling to his coat.
I can accept
the being born
and the dying,
in doubt, alone.
I do not reject
or, seeing, scorn
anyone's crying
about the unknown.
And yet. And yet.
How the being alone
in the living
makes me mourn.
I can not forget
the breathing in stone,
unforgiving
and forsworn.
Together we talk of parting
and are drawn out from the shore
across a running sea
that was not there before.
Cautiously we lay our bridge
in air, island to mainland,
and wonder will it reach
beyond the tide or stand.
Already our eyes are widened
by the miles that split us here
as we turn at the bend
and pause. Dark reefs appear.
Together we mark the distance
between words and waves, the wind
swinging our cables. Chance
moves forward—we, behind.
Your bed
they said
so shall you lie on it
But I found rocks
were kinder than clocks
and did not cry for it
They meant
content
without a sigh in it
But I liked stars
much better than bars
and kept the sky on it
No crown
or down
held me in tie to it
But I dreamed jewels
in the deepest pools
where none could spy on it
They thought
I ought
so I could die in it
But I learned ends
do not make amends
and did not try for it
Some day
I may
know the how and why of it
Like gods competing for the universe,
they shoot the planets between their fingers
with trigger thumbs that scale the speed of light
to intervals of space-colliding time.
Ping! and fiery constellations leap apart,
bright spheres of whirling suns and moons that mark
the checkered squares of sidewalks, heaven's zone,
and hell, the sewer curbs where lost stars roam.
Having lost my terror of the air
and learned, by dropping hard, a pity for
the grass, I grow used to the ways of cats.
It takes practice not to die in the act
of living, whether climbing up a tree,
walking a fence, or coming to a brink,
springing free. The ninth time can't be worse
than the first. Meanwhile, there are birds,
sunshine, roofs, and kind old ladies.
The grass itself is innocent with sleep.
You who would be mathematicians in your living,
remember Einstein
The problem
is not always immediately apparent:
it does not become one
until the response to a given condition
fails to satisfy
the need that a continuance implies.
Whether conscious
in amoeba as well as hippopotamus
or unaware
as in water, earth and air
there is evidence
that each continues to be present.
The process
by which we seem to choose or guess
solutions
based on inference and conclusion
regarding what is
and what is not suggests both as hypotheses.
For the nature
of questions is to question nature
since its design
is reciprocal by reflection of the mind
as the rainbow
to its image or crystals to snow.
Perplexed by reason
reality itself dissolves in the sun
while the question
remains above and beyond all consideration
of doubt and fog
a bubble suspended in the hands of God.
What is it you want? he asked.
Looking at him. As though she thought he had something to say and could find the words to say it. The words no one else had yet found or said.
What is it? he repeated.
Her eyes an open darkness. Leading to a corridor of black mirrors. As though at the end was a locked door and behind it the final secret.
What?
Within that hallway of silence, her breathing, the beating of her heart. As though echoing his questions. Waiting, hoping for the answers.
If you would tell me, he said.
Pinpoints of light straining towards the threshold through a soft warm mist. As though they would help him to see, to slip across barriers of being.
If I knew—
Blind beams behind opaque windows. As though in an act of desperation, a man might hurl a stone. The shuddering tinkle of shattered glass.
Here, he said, you take the stone.
Placing it in her hands so that she could feel it, roll it between her palms, sense it through her fingers. An ineffable, tangible continuum.
I give it to you, it's yours.
The whole, beautiful truth, God helping. Love solidly immured within its mineral heart. Ticking away the centuries, immune to change.
The needle between her fingers
came to a pause as she smoothed
the seams of her life and lingered
over old threads of truth
she had stitched with her own hands
and bitten off her with her own mouth,
noticing how these had blended
with and become part of the cloth,
until her dimmed eyes could not tell
in the fading light which was which.
There was not much of the garment left
to mend, although the remembering hid
what there was and changed the facts
of dark wool to the brighter silk
of summers past, when she had matched
her wardrobe to her hopes and risked
the need for later alterations,
unmindful how both would grow outstyled
and she herself become a pattern
of an age more pitied than admired.
Again the needle swayed and she sighed
at its impatience, as though it cared
that wool wear a rocking-chair pride
with dignity, as though an air
of mutual warmth existed between
her and the winter which would help them
keep what little vanity remained,
and the thread grew taut again,
leaving the stitches along the seam
smooth and even as her last defense.
Joseph had his coat,
a different color
for each brother,
and it was bright.
What happened, we note,
was seventy times seven
their debts were forgiven
till his coat turned white.
Jesus, for his part,
preferred to begin
in the newborn skin
of a lamb, instead.
We know that his heart
devoured all sin
like a lion,
then spilled and bled.
Five. Between each the ages
that separate, yet unite
the pillared span.
The oldest leads and guides
as the short, crooked thumb
of long experience.
The others follow. Up and down
to the last small boy
trailing behind.
Unevenly they stride
through the gray, silent dawn
toward the sea
where the waves still breathe
of sleep, and empty miles
unwind the shoreline.
Five figures probe the wind,
the tide. They pace their length
along the sand
and pause. No light breaks.
The stillness keeps, as though
the current
deserted, had suddenly ceased.
With poles, hooks, bait in hand,
the five move on.
Heavy with clouds, the sky
broods behind a mist,
leans on cliffs
and frightened by its dream
of a dead world's beach,
begins to slip.
Until five fingers rise
on the promontory's tip
and lift their poles.
Upheld, the morning wakes,
pours gold! Fish leap!
The land's alive!
If we could unwind that brain,
discover its world, the response
of sense from A to Z, the place,
time, weather, and human
condition
If we could trace the course
of its myriad streams
to the first rain, the slow
gathering of waters
in pools and springs
If we could collect the whole
evidence grain by grain,
the words, numbers, symbols
that shaped the color and sound
of mountains
If we could record the dreams,
the chain of centuries from dusk
to dawn, those testings of beliefs
that broke the link and shook sparks
from the sun
If we could model its twin
as a lasting monument,
a brain with all our findings,
long after men, their myths,
wonders, gifts
Some birds there are that do not like a cage,
that want the whole world free to come and go
as seasons do, despite drought, heat or snow;
that feel their liberty a heritage
no bars can shut in or no masters assuage
with pretty bribes and warning threats of foe;
the wilder ways of chance they choose to know
with wings against the wind as surest gauge.
Eagle, crow, skylark, jay—no matter what
the size of beak, how sharp the claw or small—
each finds his own nest feathered best for him
alone, on tree, rock, shore or grassy plot;
there he can hear his own answered call,
aware of baits that snare, of shears that trim!
All the breadlong day she moved about the house
and nibbled at its crust, until she saw Carl
walking griefwards with his shadow to the barn,
whereless in his step and heedless of the cows,
and she wondered how he could be so thoughtbound.
What sad, whyful thing could make a man so lost
within his world that he had no fisthold on
it to demand a moreness for his account?
She turned from that window to the hopeside one
where she had reseeded a world of her own,
a garden like the days of her truthhood—green,
and fenced in its innocence, flowering trust,
where flowers became their dreams when they woke up.
Reminded by the sky hanging out the moon,
she hung hers in the doorway, then lit the room
and hurried to her oven's tomorrow crumbs.
He came in quietly and guilt-rubbed his face,
seeing Jen's waiting at the table. "Ev'ning,"
he said and heard her reply creak underneath
as he woodenly walked to the sink and draped
a towel around his neck, unwishing the blame.
If soap and water clean could make a man feel
holy, what use would the devil's mirror be?
He felt no such deception while she said grace.
They ate their silence from faithworn plates and spoons,
swallowing the forgiven coffee used twice
each day and aware of the greater trespass
they shared in this house which was their staybetween.
Cracked like their hands and cups, who knew when its seams
would give? In the fearwhile, the question unasked
kept their lips still, as though words tempted a risk
beyond their strength to mend should the seams be loosed.
The meal done, she freed the table from its chore
and brought him the county's weekly paper, their
footnotes to other people's answers and prayers,
then bent to her needlework, seeking accord.
Lost by, he stared unseeing at the words poured
through his eyes as though, shuttered against exposure,
the negative in his mind could be immured
in its acid and yet bring some meaning forth.
For a hurt away and far as a man might walk
on a friendly day to a neighbor's door, lay
Nielsen's farm, a credit to God had He made
it with His hands, but none to the man whose straw
grew luckside up as though his plow left a spore
of gold in every furrow. It was a trade
so many seasons back, the reasons became
changestricken at this stranger who sat absorbed.
Touched to the slow, Carl paused and tested the bowl
of his pipe, needing a valid doubt to prod.
Had he pawned his soul to find refuge in rocks
and let a waterfall drain in a sinkhole?
Through the smoke, he traced the wry and twisted road
down whenless years that had plunged him here to rot—
and yet, of Nielson he had required no bond
of hate, for this neither one had bought or sold.
Torrent to trickle, not friendship had reversed
the law, but an unnatural love of worm for bird,
of plant for weed, of a sterile man for Merle,
a woman he could not wed and mark as cursed
without destroying the very universe
that had mothered her and which she owed rebirth.
"You take the farm and Merle. I'll make my own world
over." The words had been all too well observed.
He had not known how close hell was to heaven,
not then and not while he lived in it alone,
watching Merle's seed grow beyond his graveyard slope
from buried dreams she never guessed were even
there, living as she did within her children's—
not until another came to share his ghost
and made him see that death was not like a coat
one wore and had mended by a wife named Jen.
All the thought round, he gnawed on the bitter rind,
hungerwhelmed for a taste of Nielsen's larder,
that orchard whose fruitening he had bartered
for peelings, and dry angered at the two mice
who squeaked in their chairs, each resigned
to his own corner of an empty cupboard,
but mostly ashamed because he could not convert
thorns into leaves, grapes from stones, thirst into wine.
He cleaned his parched pipe from its ashes and stood
to wind a watch with broken springs, setting it
for tomorrow when his shadow would be hitched.
"I'm turning in, Jen. You come before you cool."
His footsteps made the attic cling to the roof
as she folded her needlework's piece of silk
in a sewing box made like an infant's crib,
then raised herself and blew its darkness on the room.
Not the mirror ages our reflection
but the other faces that we see
looking at us
Not the calendar changes our season
but the other voices that we hear
speaking to us
Not the memory troubles our silence
but the other sleepers whom we meet
dreaming of us
Not our living suffers the violence
but the other beings whom we feel
dying in us
I raced, I rushed, I ran,
to catch the empty hand of time,
before the wind, the blowing wind—
this breathless gift.
I willed, I worked, I wept,
to melt the frozen face of time,
before the sun, the burning sun—
this frenzied bone.
I drank, I danced, I dared,
to tempt the stony foot of time,
before the rain, the driving rain—
this raptured flame.
I leaped, I laughed, I loved,
to ease the burdened heart of time,
before the dust, the settling dust—
this flesh, this blood.
On the caves of time
again they draw their lines
and circles. Earthmen. Born to prove
that they can reason and compute
a way to survive.
Now primitives in space,
they hunt with atom spears
the bright eye targets of the night,
and cry their mammoth victories
across the cosmic waste.
There they create anew
high mysteries and truths,
with satellites as shrines, and wire
the electronic brain they use
to command the light.
Any day now you can expect
the age to come together
in its own fixed image.
There will be no broken glass.
The jigsaw cracks, painted black,
will make a Roualt mirror.
Then we will truly see ourselves
as the headlines say we are,
creatures of disaster.
The No. 1 Song in the Hit Parade
will be I Hate You, and ugly
the keyword in fashion ads.
Children will hug their witch dolls,
blow atom bubbles in glee
and play the most exciting games.
Punishment will be their only
reward and all the villains
heroes in their goblin tales.
Every man will be Satan
of his own dungeon
and no place like hell.
Machines pretending to be
human will evoke what's left
of our pity and laughter.
Manquakes, nightmares and fallout
will lead to our final triumph.
Only the worst will survive.
To prevent immunity
strict controls will be enforced
against pure food and drink.
Anyone caught sober or happy
will be exiled to the upper air
and banished from darkness.
Mentally accelerated
ones will be confined to wards
in quarantine hospitals.
Our most ardent wishes will be
for illness, failure and misery.
We will wear bad luck charms.
There will be more solutions
than problems in the race
for non-existence.
Traffic will be by tunnel
and invariably fatal
to minimize upkeep.
All-risk benefits will be
socialized on a single
pay-as-you-go tax plan.
To save time and expense
cemeteries will provide
one-room efficiencies.
Everything will be reduced
to simple essentials.
We will need very little.
Books will be easy to read
backwards or upside down
and even without looking.
Music will be produced by noise
in various degrees
and ingenious combinations.
A few zoos and museums
will be allowed to preserve
some relics of art and nature.
As a change from monotony,
schools and churches will be open
on special anniversaries.
We will be too busy dying
the rest of the time to think
or believe in anything else.
We can hardly wait for that day.
It should be coming soon.
The news is getting worse and worse.
Where fireflies are stars
and the evening sky a sea,
there you will find me, far
from the leveling demands
that leveled you and me.
When distant mountains bend
like deep swells toward the shore,
then you will see the ends
for which I built my dikes
against the lowly roar.
Though breath was all I owned
to force my heart to climb,
though words were all the stones
I had to seal my mind,
you will know why, in time.
He who would climb the heights of tone
and scale the peaks beyond the listening ear
must first walk over water
and learn to stand on air, alone.
He who would swim the waves of light
and dive past shores into a sunless glow
must first merge with his shadow
and melt through solid glass, like night.
Where eyes are fins and sound is leap,
the rhythmic force performs its own ballet;
when dreams are fired in clay,
they burn a path through timeless sleep.
Returning miles of space,
can you find the precise hour,
travel through that day,
locate the very moment
ago, there?
The mind goes back and forth,
stops at what time stations,
Monday morning, January 7th,
winter, and ten years
after then.
The trunk arrives, departs:
hotel, depot, airport, pier,
with sticker seals to mark the sights
and tag the route,
remember where?
With tickets, menus, souvenirs,
a life's receipts in black and white
to trace the course of wind and tide,
the way back home
from why and when.
And buses, taxis, subways, cars,
for how-long, how-far conversations,
so much, so many, who and what,
with love, regards and yes, again,
name, place, date, pen.
It was a silent evening, I remember,
through the river's mist it comes to me—
a star pierced the air; white with speed
it leaped across the sky, slipped and fell;
I heard its cry, it echoed in the sea,
the swift wild cry of the scornful ember.
Alone I stood there, never had I need
of fellow rebel more, I, a rebel.
Down the dark beach I ran, I stripped; time
was an eyeless reach across immensity
and I plunged deeply. They blamed it on the tide,
the night; they had not seen infinity
like a vast unchanging vista wide
before me. If you go too far you'll drown,
they said. Ah no, only those grasp the sublime
who challenge the dream, before going down!
Let us admit it is attractive
and represents something we think
we need: to live beautifully
and find goodness in it.
Everything points in that direction:
from beelines to star routes,
our dreams flower in the cells of night,
our days are joined to the sun.
Open or closed, our eyes possess
the world: all that appears
fulfills the desert gardens
and the glitter of gold. Yet,
whether we ever can reach
the source where image and reality
meet, or survive the force
of fire turning to ecstasy—
the immediate need we can not deny
is, simply, to exist...
meanwhile, perfecting the wish
for astral honey and blossoms of light.
The ostrich
like Shakespeare
believes there is nothing
good or bad
but thinking
makes it so.
All problems
he has found
by taking his head
out of the ground
and looking
for them.
The solving
obviously
is a matter of foot
going faster than thought
to avoid
being caught.
Such logic
of conscience
may well be envied—
for who can dispute
what can not be questioned
or proved?
In these long years of war I have seen
drought, and the truth is, Father, that I
am sick to death of it. Can a man
set his house in order just to die?
You speak of hope and honor in our day
and I say hurrah for those not born,
for there won't be enough fig leaves saved
to cover their nakedness, or corn
to stop their cries. There is no water
and no sign of rain, only briar
and thorn, dunghill and dust, while the poor
groan like beasts on a desolate moor.
You should have seen it, Father, the day
they attacked, a day as dark as night,
with clouds of fire both front and rear. They
ran like horses, climbed walls, broke ranks, spied
out of windows, their faces pained, black,
while the earth bled till the moon shone red.
Well, old men have their dreams, and young men
their visions, but that day won't come back
until the mountains fall and the hills
cover us, if those are here still.
I've seen green land turn to salt, and worms
rot under clods, while men talk peace terms.
Sixty seasons I have sowed, man and boy,
and I tell you, Matthew, that a seed
can not grow in the heart. No, one may
as well throw it away or feed
the chickens with it. For a fact, love
is something that only the devil
understands. I'd rather put my trust
in stones and reap a quick crop, for ill
or good. That way, you have no roots and
get what you can in a few short suns.
Or take cactus plants, at least a man
sees the thorns and expects to be stuck,
unless he's a fool—some choke on wool.
As for good ground, Matthew, that's just luck;
I've seen other fellows' orchards full,
year after year, where no one's lifted
a hand or a hoe except to pull
the ripe fruits down. Some men are gifted.
Poet, who are you?
Janus, god of gates and doors
and all beginnings
A weather cock
facing in every direction
A festive singer who can wear
goatskins and bleat
Are you not made like other men?
Twin of their image and echo
fired in one clay
Shadow of young men's mornings
and ghost of old men's nights
Parabola and paranymph
of lovers only
By what signs can a poet he known?
For whom zero is an opening
or a hole to be filled
Who can measure the earth
with a piece of rope
And place the sun on a disc of paper
under a cracked roof
How does a poet live?
As alchemist and archimage
of twenty-six letters
In constant employment
to nature
Free in every sense and word
except for treason
Of what value is such work?
To dip the pen of time
in dew and smoke and blood
To distinguish the creak
of a cradle from a coffin
To demonstrate that life
is the abscissa of eternity
Does a poet have any faith?
Whose only criterion
is self-corroboration
Who can find God
in a barrel of wine
And with the hands of a spider
pilot a path to the stars
1
Windless season without rain,
you bring the sea up from the rocks
across the cliffs, drifting clouds...
Gray weaves the night as day
and everything moves like sleep.
Trees climb a hill, lights swing
upon circles of darkness,
walls bend a road where you trespass.
You are the mover, the essence
of all things seen and unseen.
Windless you go and rainless,
without form, color, or motion—
in you, all time is one.
Fog or shadow of God maybe,
who walks and whispers so close to me?
2
Here on the shore's last link
against the landscape dream
I stand listening.
Intangible as air
and yet like mesh, a web
winds strands about my head.
I can not see or hear
beyond the moment's rim
that holds me to this pier.
Only a sixth sense
of faith or fear, whichever's meant,
sways in the balance.
3
Through the porthole of my mind
memory ships oars and glides
upon the sea outside.
Whose hand was on the tiller,
what buoy marked the shoals or
whether there was another
I do not know. A hazy twilight
lay over the gray water, and I
heard the distant horn of time
blow once or twice in warning,
while seagulls squatted on the beach,
windless without wings.
And I thought, will it be like that
on the coast of my setting, mast
and sun obscured by fact?
4
Beyond the eye's threshold
a light swings in the door,
blurred by the wind and blown
like smoke across the dunes
for ghosts who wander through
in search of missing clues.
Dimly they turn and return,
gathering broken sherds
they reefed against the world,
each sorting out his own
to piece the shells into a whole
and find the echo lode.
5
Blind as a crab in the sand,
waiting for the tide to slack,
I feel through my hands blank,
knowing nothing that they can not reach,
yet groping to believe these
signs of emptiness real.
Ground, sea, sky, all are merged
in the surrounding surf,
where everything's reversed,
where breath is radar to itself,
antennaed to gray silence,
and only I move, nothing else.
6
Along the coast a lone train
tolls the night, slowing its race
to a throttled brake
as a hand plows the mist
to draw a moving bridge
across the mainland's tip.
O magnetic eye that signals
when human daylight fails
and all's invisible,
who guides the current, the flow
of water, air and pole,
what dragon's head node?
His fists smash against the violet air:
the doors of evening must not close,
locking him out! Why, is his youth a beggar,
crippled and blind, or reduced so low
that he should drink spit from the cup
of pity? Snarling, he wipes his feet
on the mocking tongue that carpets the front
of a swank hotel, before the doorman beams
him with a eunuch eye. O.K., beat it!
And he warms his hands with his breath,
then slouches off, his feline hips
rolling smoothly under bluejean pockets.
An expensive whore, desire taunts him
down through the city's bright bazaar,
like the cool white tone of a saxophone
caught in the jewelrich stream of cars.
Shop windows hive the honey on his lips,
the perfume of live mannequins clings,
while towers squat like pyramids
behind a desert moon now green.
Smolders the coal in his chest, burns
the hole in his shoe through the pavement,
as he turns up alleys where rattling cans
overflow their Nile. Thickly, he quickens
his course, begins to run ... till breathless
and unspent, he whirls and twists and crashes
beyond the guarded walls, the harem tents
of night ... a purple fugitive, who gasps.
Tell them who scorn my ways
I lived without their praise
and will until I die.
Let them be cynical,
I have my own faith still
to question and deny.
The proud and stiff of neck,
the small who grub and peck,
both look too low or high,
while I but seek to know
the feel of things that grow
and, by my living, why.
Three a.m. along the river
between the footfall and the snow,
watching the stars leap out and quiver
against the desolate scene below,
the flare of match one's beacon fire,
one's inner tower of warmth and cheer,
to keep night safe from its desire
and blow away the smoke of fear.
I have not always been blind.
My eyes opened to the sun
like any child's, and I ran
and played in my waking hours
like schoolboys everywhere. Night
was my sleep and the dark powers
I knew from childhood on.
I do not speak of the mind's;
the others came later, when
natural fears gave way to man's
and I saw darker things still,
things beyond the wildest flight
of a boy's fancies. Who will
deny there are worse dragons?
But I did not see the sign
of what was to come until
I was blind as Samson. With
one stroke, I lost all desire,
hope, strength—for who needs his sight
when cold age pokes the heart's fire
with only a broken stick?
Now at my feet a dog whines
even in slumber; he sniffs
another's bone as he shifts
in his own darkness, hungry
for gain that requires no fight,
and in his dreams grows angry
at dream's inconsequent wish.
How can I reproach him, I
who am shepherd and watchman,
and as ignorant and dumb?
Both of us strain at a gnat
and swallow camels, the spite
of those who may look at
but not touch the other's ration.
Yet I make no mourn or cry
I have no tears to defend.
By now my shoes understand
how to find the door, the latch
and go without any fright
of stumbling up crooked paths
since all paths lead to the one.
Yes, yes, the words of the wise,
but I do not eat their bread
or cover my lips to swear
by the debts of the guilty,
for I can not see the light
that moves men to take pity
and neither can I forget.
When harvest is past, the ties
with summer are ended.
Even the flies know better
than to sit at a table
where vinegar and gall blight
the sense—their comfort, the chill
presaging winter's opiate.
I ask, who can see God's eye?
Then let him be sure to scour
both inside his cup and out,
for though the temple is lit
like gold and the altar white,
the heart of the hypocrite
shall betray his hands and mouth.
I sleep the sleep of death, ai!
An old man, I have no rod,
no plague to command, no cloud
to conceal my nakedness—
nothing but a toothless bite
as I wander in silence,
a harmless ghost walked by his dog.
The old tree weeps for its blossom,
the blossom for its fruit,
forgetting, when the frosts come,
the seed will weep for its root.
An eye for an eye
a tooth for a tooth—
this you taught me,
this was truth.
Now that I am wise,
you turn my cheek—
and leave me eyes
with which to weep.
Sand and stars are not enough,
there must be proof,
such as stones capable of love
to raise up children.
A test beyond reason,
in order to move
the incredible mountain
and bring down the sun.
Something uncommon, a sign
of God in man,
not just once, but as many times
as the times demand.
Still nothing satisfies,
human or divine:
the hand that stopped Abraham
drove the nail through Christ's.
Light destroyed in minds
only the stars
Strength reduced to hands
only the stones
no other language but signs
no other knowledge but chance
Time returned to fear
only the hurt
Space defined by food
only the hunt
each one yoked from head to foot
each one racked by claw and tooth
Ears inured to hope
only the drum
Eyes condemned to ape
only the dream
With wide eyes open
they walk into a morning
where darkness shines,
their feet descending
a marble stairway in the mountain
flanked by stone lions.
Holding hands, they cross
a sudden bridge, and pause
to view the clouds
below them. Silence
spills from frozen waterfalls
to stay the river's course.
Farther on, they come
to a garden whose golden stem
lifts her and him
in its calyx palm
and bursts the lovesweet dram
from their summer's bloom.
Now winged, they cruise
between glass walls to gaze
inside the zoo
of human cages,
those illusions of space and size
multiplied in mirrors.
Not to be deceived,
they glide down vertical waves
of light, where love,
having slipped time's gyve,
can happily ever after live
in the sea's bright grove.
Voices in the ear
form a separate soundtrack,
images blur
on a shifting screen,
while they uphold their safe dream world
on secret tides of air.
Buzzards in the air
and flies
peasants everywhere
earth size
Jungles by the sea
and sands
at each extremity
bare hands
Volcanos over towns
and hills
traditioned in the browns
the wills
Corn and bean for breath
and bones
remembered after death
the stones
Dark feet on the roads
and wheels
heavy are the loads
the heels
Burros led by whips
and shouts
in answer to the lips
and clouts
Adobes out of earth
and cathedrals
attendant on the birth
of eagles
Even the desert has learned to protect itself,
to keep its inch of rain in stored defense;
against the mountain's strength and pressured air,
it does not stand, but daily creeps, aware.
Upon its needled hands and thorny feet,
it crouches, head bent, with lizard eyes
alert to scorching light and sand, then seeks
the deepened shadows against the coming of night.
Here kangaroo rat and road runner thrive;
the rattler coils his tail in sleepful ease,
while bayonet and dagger guard the hive
left by Indian and Spaniard in retreat.
Shrewdly, the yucca's panicle of white
is thrust above the ground, fully equipped
to meet the world on friendly terms that hide
poisoned stings, barbed walls, fists.
One could do worse than put out cactus leaves:
when harsh winds blow the wrong way and sleep
consumes itself, from inner wells they cool
their fruit and, even after a century, bloom.
The recognition comes as it always does—
slowly. One feels a sense of surprise
to find not all has changed: the blue of miles
above the snow-rimmed clouds of old volcanoes,
the tireless browns still ploughed to greening fields,
the red tiled roofs that accent time between.
The twenty years move slowly into place.
With eye as brush and sun as palette, a full
perspective emerges: as long ago today,
as near to far. The wish reflects a view
almost transparent. Past and distance blaze,
caught in a foreground of light, then shift.
The darkness grays, thickens. One tastes
salt rain on the wind that blows through the mist.
Drop by drop
the earth is born,
a billion years
from dark to dawn
Drop by drop
as rivers flow
past sunless cliffs
no wind has known
Where no grass blows
and no birds sing
there time drips slow
and patient, clings
Drop by drop
till waterfalls
are turned to stone
Here new stars form
and mountains rise
clear of the storms
that twist the sky
Drop by drop
while caverns tall
carve crystal bones
What dream lies walled
within this night,
what shape shall crawl
up to the light
Drop by drop
as silence grows
inside its vault
of carbon snow
When glaciers halt
before no zones,
when both the poles
at last are one
Drop by drop
the dawn shall come,
a billion years
from cave to sun
Dark angel of the night, you come on folded wings
secret and silent, bringing sleep. To you belong
the rosemary and poppy, the final dream
from which the road turned in its lost beginning.
You have seen the frightened eyes of the city glow
upon bridges, along streets, behind roofed windows,
and you know how small a kilowatt burns in each
single, separate room, and how each one reaches
at last a diminishing point beyond which none
can see but you. Night is your hour and with it comes
the inevitable surrender, peaceful or
with clash of arms, with unfulfilled hopes, terrors,
the fingers still clutching at the vanishing day,
the throat strangled by the unuttered word it says,
the ear straining for the unheard response, the thought
immense in the dark. Only you, dark angel, born
of our love and pity, can see night's passing feet
around the earth, on rotating centuries
across the stars, journeying over the ruins
of forgotten time since we first left that home,
where the dream began, where the road turned, and the sun
swung in its orbit, bringing you, dark angel, down.
I need to live
where it is cold enough
to seek the sun
More like that tree
well seasoned to the rough
of snow and ice
That keeps its fire
inside of root and bark
till heat is done
O fugitive
from winter and the dark
see the moon rise
Of memory and hope
I made my rope
and swung
not knowing its length
or how much strength
there hung.
Backward and forward
past into future
I climbed
higher and higher
despair and desire
combined.
Farther and farther
no present to bother
my flight
above now and here
beyond loss and fear
upright.
Ah, this was the way
to trap time and stay
its dread
yes, twisted inside
then knotted and tied
instead!
For being was this
both height and abyss
outflung
the head free of reason
the heart without season
full sprung.
Not creeping by squirm
an inch measured worm
begrimed
with darkening age
to a burnt out rage
consigned.
But swept on an ocean
of tides set in motion
by light
in a brilliance of air
with clear eyes aware
of sight.
Until the strands
between my hands
were red
and I came to a stop
to let time drop
down dead.
I speak of the ruin of that house
as the worst, for in it lived two blind
creatures, blind husband and blind wife,
each trying to lead the other out,
and finding a ditch by the door.
If there were trees, they heard them crash,
when the ground split under their hands
and knees. But it was not of the storm
or quake they thought, or of themselves—
but of the fruit, and how to avoid
both barb and thorn, each terrified
in his heart at his own helplessness
to save the best.
Except in their speech
where they bitterly laid the blame
on one another for the loss and waste,
since neither had fulfilled the need
for a house that was deep and broad,
founded on rock; secure and strong
against fire and flood, rust and moth;
a house uncorrupt by thief or sword,
yet so full of treasure that it gleamed,
with light enough to see, mote and beam,
the hypocrites of their common doom.
I speak in pity of the ruin.
I am afraid of that woman.
I have seen the scorpion tip
of her soft red mood
and felt the feathered grip
beneath the jess, the hood.
I am afraid of that man,
I have smelled the oestrous rut
that enjoys the sting
and heard the gun click shut
at the lift of the wing.
I am afraid, life,
of your poison and passion.
I am afraid, death,
of your sureness and speed.
As children we played "Wolf"
and howled its hot pursuit
along the canyons of our street,
wailing the bushy tail
that followed at our feet,
sidewalk to cellar,
lamp-post to door,
feeling the murderous paws
and ravenous breath
tingling the skin of our necks,
setting hair on end,
and circling each eye.
Wolf, are you ready?
Steady on the first floor,
he's coming up the stairs...
second floor, third floor,
he's stopping for some air...
top floor, roof, and now beware!
Rough coat, claws and jaws and tooth
will catch you and you and you and YOU!
Oh run-run-run from the WOLF!
That was spring...
the taste of first free days outdoors.
Wasting no time,
in haste and thirst
we came to summer,
swinging...
making our own kind of hay
and playing a new kind of game,
with dizzy drinks,
jazzy music,
hazy-crazy
cigarettes and kisses,
and aware of other dangers,
the wolfish ways of
friends turned strangers...
love,
as fierce,
as rapacious,
in spite of all the shoutings
and the warnings of approach,
with no one ready
when the roof blew in.
How we ran!
By autumn, to be sure,
we knew the tricks and character of sticks...
Nursing bruised heads
and burnt fingers,
we shook the straw
from our pockets
and settled down...
to play it safe
this time
we thought,
with a solid house,
genuine antique furniture
furniture
and homogenized children,
finding a good night's rest
harvest enough
for such sound dreams
as conscience feeds on...
not hearing the creaks
beyond our snores,
the furtive glide
outside our doors,
until one rainy day,
what a storm!
Then winter came...
and we knew then, there was no escape.
Not again,
not even with bricks
reinforced by steel
over a concrete shelter,
for our pressure is high,
our metabolism low,
and we can no longer
run...
We have set traps,
posted prizes,
sent out scouting parties,
and armed ourselves...
Waking at night
and trembling,
we cry, "Peter
Peter, please come,
we need you!"
knowing
only his toy gun
can save us.
How the wind comes through...
A spinner in the green years, I trudge the snowdeep woods
to find the Rima trees where I was warm in silk through
those first winters. Then the unwinding thread,
from which I swung by two spare arms and legs,
hung in the air like a gay trapeze, each vine
humming to the brace and pull and reel of child's
spider ways, an upside down dancer with her feet
in the clouds and the heart in her mouth a feast.
A beginner in the green years, my thick wool thumbs push back
the broken twig, the empty nest, the closed gray flaps
to summer's ringling tent. Embarrassed, I lift
a rose still red and moist and soft. Again I twist
its thin stem toward the light and dare the sky
to seize my heels and trick time's crafty eyes
till I repair the web and climb to one last height
before I leap —— —— —— to catch the hands of night.
For the ultimate hoard
I keep my board bare,
no gold or lace
allowed to cover or adorn
that spare purpose.
Stripped of frivolity,
it serves as bench
and table, my words
a daily rite
quenching thirst and hunger.
Whether I gain more
by my frugality
than I here disown,
or lose as debtor,
only you, Lord, know.
But were I compelled
to acquit this ghost,
not as a prisoner
in the heart's dark cell,
but as host at the altar
of the mind's high temple,
I would count my fast
a feast in heaven,
and with one candle
cast the light of seven.
The cocks have been crowing
for two thousand years,
so I understand that part of it
and even expected, was prepared
for what happened. This I swear.
As for tears, yours are mine,
since I am the cause of them,
and if I could, would take the blame
upon myself. I know, you think
in terms of innocence and guilt,
but that decision was long ago
made clear in an episode
of apples, bought in a hoax
for a song. I recognize it still,
one we will always whistle.
And feel I ought to ask
forgiveness for you. A turn of cheek,
if you like. Why not? Back
of every lie and denial
is the thing we all conceal:
the inner hurt that makes our fingers
seek revenge, to brand the other
fellow with our own scar,
as though, by doing so, ours
is eased. Let's admit it does
and, in comparison, sets
a better example, hurts less
than losing an eye. How many deaths
do we need to prove it?
And to begin to learn to live.
Love, you say, and I believe you,
yet there is self-love, too,
the fear of having to lose
not only a garden in the sun
but a chance to bloom anywhere once,
which is more natural,
and why I say all will fail
unless each individual
succeeds, for treason always starts
inside a single heart.
This is the fatal trap
that none of us can step
over or hope to escape,
because no one is safe:
first comes Abel, and then Cain.
So please understand me.
What you now do here
among yourselves to free and heal
yourselves from grief and anger
may yet preserve and defend the world.
Shalom. I pray for this release.
May you be blessed and walk in peace.
In April, when she tried to take him there,
a farm where winter had not heard of spring,
where snow lay banked on rutted roads and winds
went shimmying up and down slick roofs and trees,
he took one look around and said, "God, let's
get out of here!" not seeing anything.
Luckily, night blanketed the backwoods
and they missed the bus, so they went inside
the house and she thought of cows in their stalls
and bread in the oven, of the simple life
collected here within its own crude warmth,
while he stood smirking, repeating, "You would."
The next year it was Washington. They went
by train and all the way she kept checking
tickets, bag, baggage, feeling she had left
something behind, and though he joined "the tour,"
she realized with a start that it was he
missing and lost to everything new.
Everywhere was "like the postcards" and nowhere
"was worth the time and trouble it took to get
back from." In fact, if not for the car
she bought for later trips, they might never
have seen the stars, how they moved together.
"Not all," he said, "not all," and they fell apart.
It was like that all summer, and even
a continent full of moons did not change
the difference between mountains and prairies,
and she wondered how the others managed,
the men and women living there. "Heavens!"
he said, "I've tried! Let's call it a mistake!"
"Let's," she answered, knowing she would stumble
over the same stones, up to the same door,
till she came to the last and final one:
single admission, standing room only—
which was natural, when it came to dying,
but no way to live, unless you had to.
Mortar and pestle made of brass,
these and two solid candlesticks
were heavy fortune, her penance
for being peasant born and mixed
by impure stars to common metal
in a foreign land. But the level
to which she raised her hands in prayer
each Sabbath eve was holy: lips,
eyes, heart purified by the tares
that softly burned, the week eclipsed
of wrongs she placed upon her head
in blameless white, reflecting there
the migrant image of a light
that moved a wilderness of tents,
made rivers part and mountains cry
the voice of God. All this she meant
by keeping Sabbath in her home
and polishing the brass like gold.
When morning breaks
at the edge of night
and the stone mind drops
to its plain of light
it does not help
to think of Newton.
What we really need
is a new invention
a mental jet
faster than the speed
of yawn and stretch
in the life we lead
or a time lift
on spatial pulleys
operated by
the lids of our eyes.
This calendar is one, unduplicate
and unrepetitive, being my own.
What system it may have I leave testate
in the genes of time as my memento
of the events, holidays, and seasons
that made the living so importantly
mine: a personal history of nones,
kalends, and ides, without chronology.
God knows I fought my own battles, made peace
with defeats and victories, wept and cheered.
A soldier without rank, I took my ease
where and when I could find it, having feared
and met the worst, and found the enemy
no braver than myself, as much in need
of saints and miracles, each pharisee
to his own convictions, though we bleed.
What headlines emphasized my days and nights
are filed within the archive of my skull,
a private record of scandals and crimes
no press would care to publish, were it called
to print even a single edition,
for the weather alone would defy all guess,
being unpredictable, rain or sun,
and variable as the heart's unrest.
Such rulings, documents, customs, arts
my life decreed, my life was witness to:
I felt, I thought, I celebrated, start
to finish, the world that entered through
these walls of flesh; and there its evidence
shall wait, in secret tissues of the bone,
until some future historian's pen
can disclose the infiniteness of One.
Being a supposition,
it is based on some ground.
As such, the connection
is important, if not profound,
because, without it,
we would no-doubt flit
as in a vacuum,
like birds,
not needing the support of words,
rising, in-fact, above them.
I protest the conclusion,
despite the evidence
that I am a valid one,
by necessity, if not consequence,
for while I argue and pursue
What I think is true,
in self-defense,
God does not suppose—
He knows—
and that makes the difference.
They would have us believe
that to defy authority
is to punish nature.
I would want to be sure
what they have in mind
and heart and hand, what signs
of body politics they mean,
before I could agree.
Each sense protests the fact:
a bird obedient to cat,
the innocence of thorns,
a night without awe...
And yet I would accept
a world less than perfect,
for the sake of eggs and kittens,
berries, stars, saints, children.
On the library of my heart they have fed,
the worms of my living,
and now, surfeited, they are dead,
leaving their husks on the pages still unread,
dry, harmless little things
that crumble and shred.
Ambition took the harder crust we dread,
the thick skin on the cover,
and gnawed with slow, relentless tread
the marquee lights for which it craved and glittered,
weaving letter by letter
a shroud embittered.
Love chose the softer, tender part, the bread
of my daily giving,
and made each ritual ahead
a carnage of communion as I bled,
praying for the blessing
I offered, instead.
Knowledge went directly to the core, the thread
that bound my life together,
and bored its way up through my head,
loosening by stages the gold and the red,
until every chapter
I had written, fled.
Now that I have finished with maggots and shed
their dust with some misgiving,
I am glad for the words not said,
for being spared the hungers other men have bred,
in my old age needing
but a tranquil bed.
Inventories,
like spring cleaning,
annoy me,
and when it rains, I sleep.
Forgotten things
prove me absent-minded,
although I still keep
goods in storage at times.
Once I did pushups
and kept an earnest face,
collected books, maps, stamps,
and played the sweepstakes.
Now I rehearse dreams
the better to remember them
and navigate by leaves
between green and golden.
How I am or where,
no one knows for sure
except my mother;
she gets letters.
They go about
with curious wonder in their eyes,
like children half surprised
by what they doubt.
The time moves out...
they are more intimately wise
of what they once surmised;
they are devout.
If I ask why
you need not reply
the question is proof
Only my ear
can help me to hear
the rain on the roof
What thoughts I own
are shaped by my bone
and etched on my brain
Nothing more real
than the moods I feel
and what they explain
Warm hands or cold
the world that I hold
is all I can show
The more or less
I measure by guess
is all that I know
All that I see
with my eyes is me
and no other truth
Here with my feet
time walks on the street
in age as in youth
Unless you lie
in asking why
you have the reply
With leaner hands I clutch December's sky
who held the barefist branch through wind and ice
in younger days. The breath of frost is gone,
my eyes no longer sting. Warmed by the sun,
my heart at last has thawed and finds a peace
it never knew before when storms raged free.
Soft the fingering fronds would teach me how
to seed my winter in a tropic ground
and save my years from being cut in two—
they sway before the wind with ease, they bow—
and yet I can not loose my hold, I blink,
I fear to lie in a hammock and swing.
If you had no choice
and there was nothing else to do
the caged intelligence could
If you had no voice
and only silence coming through
the caved subviolence would.
Between the goat
and the scorpion,
between the horn
and the sting,
the dark centaur stands.
He eyes the centuries
that hold him there
to a slow march,
half-man, half-beast,
his arrow still in hand.
The bow is gone,
long since fallen
among the angels,
when love and honor warred,
while Jacob wept.
Hunter and hunted,
marksman and mark,
he travels on
past island suns
where none has stepped.
You can see him
on a clear night
in the southern sky,
when the earth swings
and the ninth sign appears.
And if you listen,
you may also hear
a far-off wind
carry his cry
down the light-years:
"O blessed and damned,
in heaven and hell,
in passion and intellect,
all you who are twinned
even as I!
"Who controls his fate?
Say! Who can escape
being pierced or grazed
by its accident or chance?"
A shooting star replies.
Whereless in a sea of space,
how shall we reckon with the dead
whose graves we marked on a shifting land
and left at a distance travelled by light?
What pilot navigates our course
through a finite but expanding void
no almanac explains or chart defines?
Sun, stars, birds, nothing avails
since Phoenician and Viking passed
with cross-staff, astrolabe and compass
to bring us to shores we have left behind.
We are speeding our unborn young
to harbors no heard voice guides us toward,
no radar yet detects, no octant sights.
Now new dimensions of mind
extend the geometric skull
of Ptolemy and Euclid, of occult
priest and philosopher, to measure time
not by the sun's zenith at noon
or the moon's eclipse, but by spectra
through which we can identify time's white.
Past and present, both are blind
to the future, while the Sphinx waits
for another Oedipus. O waste
of sand and wind, swept by an airborne tide!
Shall we find a snakeless Eden
and with the apples unforbidden
begin our second exodus, from Paradise?
This first edition was completed in May 1964.
The poems were set in 14 pt. Centaur
by Mackenzie & Harris, Inc.
and printed by Bradley Brownell
in the shop of Van Riper & Thompson, Inc.
on Curtis Colophon text.
Bound by the Santa Barbara Bindery
Designed and illustrated by
Wayne Thompson
Van Riper & Thompson, Inc.
703 Anacapa Street
Santa Barbara, California
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