mirrors grey with reflecting them,
bureaus coffining from the cold
things that can shuffle in a drawer,
carpets rolled up around those echoes
which, shaken out, take wing and breed
new altercations, the old silences.
1957
NECESSITIES
OF LIFE
(1966)
I
Poems
1962–1965
Changeray-je pas pour vous cette belle
contexture des choses? C’est la condition
de vostre creation, c’est une partie de
vous que la mort: vous vous fuyez vous-mesmes.
—Montaigne
NECESSITIES OF LIFE
Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world: I first began
a small, fixed dot, still see
that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack
pushed into the scene,
a hard little head protruding
from the pointillist’s buzz and bloom.
After a time the dot
begins to ooze. Certain heats
melt it.
Now I was hurriedly
blurring into ranges
of burnt red, burning green,
whole biographies swam up and
swallowed me like Jonah.
Jonah! I was Wittgenstein,
Mary Wollstonecraft, the soul
of Louis Jouvet, dead
in a blown-up photograph.
Till, wolfed almost to shreds,
I learned to make myself
unappetizing. Scaly as a dry bulb
thrown into a cellar
I used myself, let nothing use me.
Like being on a private dole,
sometimes more like kneading bricks in Egypt.
What life was there, was mine,
now and again to lay
one hand on a warm brick
and touch the sun’s ghost
with economical joy,
now and again to name
over the bare necessities.
So much for those days. Soon
practice may make me middling-perfect, I’ll
dare inhabit the world
trenchant in motion as an eel, solid
as a cabbage-head. I have invitations:
a curl of mist steams upward
from a field, visible as my breath,
houses along a road stand waiting
like old women knitting, breathless
to tell their tales.
1962
IN THE WOODS
“Difficult ordinary happiness,”
no one nowadays believes in you.
I shift, full-length on the blanket,
to fix the sun precisely
behind the pine-tree’s crest
so light spreads through the needles
alive as water just
where a snake has surfaced,
unreal as water in green crystal.
Bad news is always arriving.
“We’re hiders, hiding from something bad,”
sings the little boy.
Writing these words in the woods,
I feel like a traitor to my friends,
even to my enemies.
The common lot’s to die
a stranger’s death and lie
rouged in the coffin, in a dress
chosen by the funeral director.
Perhaps that’s why we never
see clocks on public buildings any more.
A fact no architect will mention.
We’re hiders, hiding from something bad
most of the time.
Yet, and outrageously, something good
finds us, found me this morning
lying on a dusty blanket
among the burnt-out Indian pipes
and bursting-open lady’s-slippers.
My soul, my helicopter, whirred
distantly, by habit, over
the old pond with the half-drowned boat
toward which it always veers
for consolation: ego’s Arcady:
leaving the body stuck
like a leaf against a screen.—
Happiness! how many times
I’ve stranded on that word,
at the edge of that pond; seen
as if through tears, the dragon-fly—
only to find it all
going differently for once
this time: my soul wheeled back
and burst into my body.
Found! ready or not.
If I move now, the sun
naked between the trees
will melt me as I lie.
1963
THE CORPSE-PLANT
How dare a sick man, or an obedient man, write poems?
—Whitman
A milk-glass bowl hanging by three chains
from the discolored ceiling
is beautiful tonight. On the floor, leaves, crayons,
innocent dust foregather.
Neither obedient nor sick, I turn my head,
feeling the weight of a thick gold ring
in either lobe. I see the corpse-plants
clustered in a hobnailed tumbler
at my elbow, white as death, I’d say,
if I’d ever seen death;
whiter than life
next to my summer-stained hand.
Is it in the sun that truth begins?
Lying under that battering light
the first few hours of summer
I felt scraped clean, washed down
to ignorance. The gold in my ears,
souvenir of a shrewd old city,
might have been wearing thin as wires
found in the bones of a woman’s head
miraculously kept in its essentials
in some hot cradle-tomb of time.
I felt my body slipping through
the fingers of its mind.
Later, I slid on wet rocks,
threw my shoes across a brook,
waded on algae-furred stones
to join them. That day I found
the corpse-plants, growing like
shadows on a negative
in the chill of fern and lichen-rust.
That day for the first time
I gave them their deathly names—
or did they name themselves?—
not “Indian pipes” as once
we children knew them.
Tonight, I think of winter,
winters of mind, of flesh,
sickness of the rot-smell of leaves
turned silt-black, heavy as tarpaulin,
obedience of the elevator cage
lowering itself, crank by crank
into the mine-pit,
forced labor forcibly renewed—
but the horror is dimmed:
like the negative of one
intolerable photograph
it barely sorts itself out
under the radiance of the milk-glass shade.
Only death’s insect whiteness
crooks its neck in a tumbler
where I placed its sign by choice.
1963
THE TREES
The trees inside are moving out into the forest,
the forest that was empty all these days
where no bird could sit
no insect hide
no sun bury its feet in shadow
the forest that was empty all these nights
will be full of trees by morning.
All night the roots work
to disengage themselves from the cracks
in the veranda floor.
The leaves strain toward the glass
small twigs stiff with exertion
long-cramped boughs shuffling under the roof
like newly discharged patients
half-dazed, moving
to the clinic doors.
I sit inside, doors open to the veranda
writing long letters
in which I scarcely mention the departure
of the forest from the house.
The night is fresh, the whole moon shines
in a sky still open
the smell of leaves and lichen
still reaches like a voice into the rooms.
My head is full of whispers
which tomorrow will be silent.
Listen. The glass is breaking.
The trees are stumbling forward
into the night. Winds rush to meet them.
The moon is broken like a mirror,
its pieces flash now in the crown
of the tallest oak.
1963
LIKE THIS TOGETHER
For A.H.C.
1.
Wind rocks the car.
We sit parked by the river,
silence between our teeth.
Birds scatter across islands
of broken ice. Another time
I’d have said “Canada geese,”
knowing you love them.
A year, ten years from now
I’ll remember this—
this sitting like drugged birds
in a glass case—
not why, only that we
were here like this together.
2.
They’re tearing down, tearing up
this city, block by block.
Rooms cut in half
hang like flayed carcasses,
their old roses in rags,
famous streets have forgotten
where they were going. Only
a fact could be so dreamlike.
They’re tearing down the houses
we met and lived in,
soon our two bodies will be all
left standing from that era.
3.
We have, as they say,
certain things in common.
I mean: a view
from a bathroom window
over slate to stiff pigeons
huddled every morning; the way
water tastes from our tap,
which you marvel at, letting
it splash into the glass.
Because of you I notice
the taste of water,
a luxury I might
otherwise have missed.
4.
Our words misunderstand us.
Sometimes at night
you are my mother:
old detailed griefs
twitch at my dreams, and I
crawl against you, fighting
for shelter, making you
my cave. Sometimes
you’re the wave of birth
that drowns me in my first
nightmare. I suck the air.
Miscarried knowledge twists us
like hot sheets thrown askew.
5.
Dead winter doesn’t die,
it wears away, a piece of carrion
picked clean at last,
rained away or burnt dry.
Our desiring does this,
make no mistake, I’m speaking
of fact: through mere indifference
we could prevent it.
Only our fierce attention
gets hyacinths out of those
hard cerebral lumps,
unwraps the wet buds down
the whole length of a stem.
1963
BREAKFAST IN A
BOWLING ALLEY IN
UTICA, NEW YORK
Smudged eyeballs,
mouth stale as air,
I’m newly dead, a corpse
so fresh the grave unnerves me.
Nobody here but me
and Hermes behind the counter
defrosting sandwich steaks.
Paeans of vox humana
sob from the walls. THIS LAND
IS MY LAND.… It sounds
mummified. Has no sex,
no liquor license.
I chew meat and bread
thinking of wheatfields—
a gold-beige ceinture—
and cattle like ghosts
of the buffalo, running
across plains, nearing
the abbatoir. Houses
dream old-fashionedly
in backwoods townships
while the land glitters
with temporary life
stuck fast by choice:
trailers put out taproots
of sewage pipe, suckers
of TV aerial—
but in one of them,
perhaps, a man
alone with his girl
for the first time.
1963
OPEN-AIR MUSEUM
Ailanthus, goldenrod, scrapiron, what makes you flower?
What burns in the dump today?
Thick flames in a grey field, tended
by two men: one derelict ghost,
one clearly apter at nursing destruction,
two priests in a grey field, tending the flames
of stripped-off rockwool, split
mattresses, a caved-in chickenhouse,
seen from a train, stopped
as by design, to bring us
face to face with the flag of our true country:
violet-yellow, black-violet,
its heart sucked by slow fire
O my America
this then was your desire?
but you cannot burn fast enough:
in the photograph the white
skirts of the Harlem bride
are lashed by blown scraps, tabloid sheets,
and her beauty a scrap of flickering light
licked by a greater darkness
This then was your desire!
those trucked-off bad dreams
outside the city limits
crawl back in search of you, eyes
missing, skins missing, intenser in decay
the carriage that wheeled the defective baby
rolls up on three wheels
and the baby is still inside,
you cannot burn fast enough
Blue sparks of the chicory flower
flash from embers of the dump
inside the rose-rust carcass of a slaughtered Chevrolet
crouches the young ailanthus
and the two guardians go raking the sacred field, raking
slowly, to what endless end
Cry of truth among so many lies
at your heart burns on
a languid fire
1964
TWO SONGS
1.
Sex, as they harshly call it,
I fell into this morning
at ten o’clock, a drizzling hour
of traffic and wet newspapers.
I thought of him who yesterday
clearly didn’t
turn me to a hot field
ready for plowing,
and longing for that young man
piercéd me to the roots
bathing every vein, etc.
All day he appears to me
touchingly desirable,
a prize one could wreck one’s peace for.
I’d call it love if love
didn’t take so many years
but lust too is a jewel
a sweet flower and what
pure happiness to know
all our high-toned questions
breed in a lively animal.
2.
That “old last act”!
And yet sometimes
all seems post coitum triste
and I a mere bystander.
Somebody else is going off,
getting shot to the moon.
Or, a moon-race!
Split seconds after my opposite number
lands
I make it
—
we lie fainting together
at a crater-edge
heavy as mercury in our moonsuits
till he speaks—
in a different language
yet one I’ve picked up
through cultural exchanges …
we murmur the first moonwords:
Spasibo. Thanks. O.K.
1964
THE PARTING
The ocean twanging away there
and the islands like scattered laundry—
You can feel so free, so free,
standing on the headland
where the wild rose never stands still,
the petals blown off
before they fall
and the chicory nodding
blue, blue, in the all-day wind.
Barbed wire, dead at your feet,
is a kind of dune-vine,
the only one without movement.
Every knot is a knife
where two strands tangle to rust.
1963
NIGHT-PIECES: FOR A CHILD
THE CRIB
You sleeping I bend to cover.
Your eyelids work. I see
your dream, cloudy as a negative,
swimming underneath.
You blurt a cry. Your eyes
spring open, still filmed in dream.
Wider, they fix me—
—death’s head, sphinx, medusa?
You scream.
Tears lick my cheeks, my knees