droop at your fear.
Mother I no more am,
but woman, and nightmare.
HER WAKING
Tonight I jerk astart in a dark
hourless as Hiroshima,
almost hearing you breathe
in a cot three doors away.
You still breathe, yes—
and my dream with its gift of knives,
its murderous hider and seeker,
ebbs away, recoils
back into the egg of dreams,
the vanishing point of mind.
All gone.
But you and I—
swaddled in a dumb dark
old as sickheartedness,
modern as pure annihilation—
we drift in ignorance.
If I could hear you now
mutter some gentle animal sound!
If milk flowed from my breast again….
1964
THE STRANGER
Fond credos, plaster ecstasies!
We arrange a prison-temple
for the weak-legged little god
who might stamp the world to bits
or pull the sky in like a muslin curtain.
We hang his shrine with bells,
aeolian harps, paper windmills,
line it with biscuits and swansdown.
His lack of culture we expected,
scarcely his disdain however—
that wild hauteur, as if
it were we who blundered.
Wildness we fret to avenge!
Eye that hasn’t yet blinked
on the unblinking gold archways
of its trance—that we know
must be trained away:
that aloof, selective stare.
Otherness that affronts us
as cats and dogs do not—
once this was original sin
beaten away with staves of holy writ.
Old simplemindedness. But the primal fault
of the little god still baffles.
All other strangers are forgiven
Their strangeness, but he—
how save the eggshell world from his
reaching hands, how shield
ourselves from the disintegrating
blaze of his wide pure eye?
1964
AFTER DARK
I.
You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you
old tree of life
old man whose death I wanted
I can’t stir you up now.
Faintly a phonograph needle
Whirs round in the last groove
eating my heart to dust.
That terrible record! how it played
down years, wherever I was
in foreign languages even
over and over, I know you better
than you know yourselfI know
you better than you know
yourselfI know
youuntil, self-maimed,
I limped off, torn at the roots,
stopped singing a whole year,
got a new body, new breath,
got children, croaked for words,
forgot to listen
or read your mene tekel fading on the wall,
woke up one morning
and knew myself your daughter.
Blood is a sacred poison.
Now, unasked, you give ground.
We only want to stifle
what’s stifling us already.
Alive now, root to crown, I’d give
—oh,—something—not to know
our struggles now are ended.
I seem to hold you, cupped
in my hands, and disappearing.
When your memory fails—
no more to scourge my inconsistencies—
the sashcords of the world fly loose.
A window crashes
suddenly down. I go to the woodbox
and take a stick of kindling
to prop the sash again.
I grow protective toward the world.
II.
Now let’s away from prison—
Underground seizures!
I used to huddle in the grave
I’d dug for you and bite
my tongue for fear it would babble
—Darling—
I thought they’d find me there
someday, sitting upright, shrunken,
my hair like roots and in my lap
a mess of broken pottery—
wasted libation—
and you embalmed beside me.
No, let’s away. Even now
there’s a walk between doomed elms
(whose like we shall not see much longer)
and something—grass and water—
an old dream-photograph.
I’ll sit with you there and tease you
for wisdom, if you like,
waiting till the blunt barge
bumps along the shore.
Poppies burn in the twilight
like smudge pots.
I think you hardly see me
but—this is the dream now—
your fears blow out,
off, over the water.
At the last, your hand feels steady.
1964
MOURNING PICTURE
The picture is by Edwin Romanzo Elmer, 1850–1923.
They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker
out under the lilac bush,
and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.
Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,
my doll lies in her wicker pram
gazing at western Massachusetts.
This was our world.
I could remake each shaft of grass
feeling its rasp on my fingers,
draw out the map of every lilac leaf
or the net of veins on my father’s
grief-tranced hand.
Out of my head, half-bursting,
still filling, the dream condenses—
shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew.
Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light
carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,
under high early-summer clouds,
I am Effie, visible and invisible,
remembering and remembered.
They will move from the house,
give the toys and the pets away.
Mute and rigid with loss my mother
will ride the train to Baptist Corner,
the silk-spool will run bare.
I tell you, the thread that bound us lies
faint as a web in the dew.
Should I make you, world, again,
could I give back the leaf its skeleton, the air
its early-summer cloud, the house
its noonday presence, shadowless,
and leave this out? I am Effie, you were my dream.
1965
“I AM IN DANGER—SIR—”
“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living,
afterward famous in garbled versions,
your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield,
now your old snood
mothballed at Harvard
and you in your variorum monument
equivocal to the end—
who are you?
Gardening the day-lily,
wiping the wine-glass stems,
your thought pulsed on behind
a forehead battered paper-thin,
you, woman, masculine
in single-mindedness,
for whom the word was more
than a symptom—
a condition of being.
Till the air buzzing with spoiled language
sang in your ears
of Perjury
and in your half-cracked way you chose
silence for entertainment,
cho
se to have it out at last
on your own premises.
1964
HALFWAY
In Memory: M.G.J.
In the field the air writhes, a heat-pocket.
Masses of birds revolve, blades
of a harvester.
The sky is getting milkily white,
a sac of light is ready to burst open.
Time of hailstones and rainbow.
My life flows North. At last I understand.
A young girl, thought sleeping, is certified dead.
A tray of expensive waxen fruit,
she lies arranged on the spare-room coverlid.
To sit by the fire is to become another woman,
red hair charring to grey,
green eyes grappling with the printed page,
voice flailing, flailing, the uncomprehending.
My days lie open, listening, grandmother.
1965
AUTUMN SEQUENCE
1.
An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,
and dreams of the subtly tyrannical.
Thirst in the morning; waking into the blue
drought of another October
to read the familiar message nailed
to some burning bush or maple.
Breakfast under the pines, late yellow-
jackets fumbling for manna on the rim
of the stone crock of marmalade,
and shed pine-needles drifting
in the half-empty cup.
Generosity is drying out,
it’s an act of will to remember
May’s sticky-mouthed buds
on the provoked magnolias.
2.
Still, a sweetness hardly earned
by virtue or craft, belonging
by no desperate right to me
(as the marmalade to the wasp
who risked all in a last euphoria
of hunger)
washes the horizon. A quiet
after weeping, salt still on the tongue
is like this, when the autumn planet
looks me straight in the eye
and straight into the mind
plunges its impersonal spear:
Fill and flow over, think
till you weep, then sleep
to drink again.
3.
Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb
flayed stiff in the wind,
half-mast on the day of victory,
anarchist prince of evening marshes!
Your eye blurs in a wet smoke,
the stubble freezes under your heel,
the cornsilk Mädchen all hags now,
their gold teeth drawn,
the milkweeds gutted and rifled,
but not by you, foundering hero!
The future reconnoiters in dirty boots
along the cranberry-dark horizon.
Stars swim like grease-flecks
in that sky, night pulls a long knife.
Your empire drops to its knees in the dark.
4.
Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.
Charcoal slabs pitted with gold.
The reason for cities comes clear.
There must be a place, there has come a time—
where so many nerves are fusing—
for a purely moral loneliness.
Behind bloodsoaked lights of the avenues,
in the crystal grit of flying snow,
in this water-drop bulging at the taphead,
forced by dynamos three hundred miles
from the wild duck’s landing and the otter’s dive,
for three seconds of quivering identity.
There must be a place. But the eyeball stiffens
as night tightens and my hero passes out
with a film of stale gossip coating his tongue.
1964
NOON
Light pulses through underground chambers.
I have to tell myself: my eyes are not blue.
Two dark holes
Feed at the sky.
It swirls through them, raging
in azure spirals.
Nothing changes them:
two black tubes, draining off
a lake of iris.
Cleave open my skull:
The gouts of blue
Leap from the black grotto.
1965
NOT LIKE THAT
It’s so pure in the cemetery.
The children love to play up here.
It’s a little town, a game of blocks,
a village packed in a box,
a pre-war German toy.
The turf is a bedroom carpet:
heal-all, strawberry flower
and hillocks of moss.
To come and sit here forever,
a cup of tea on one’s lap
and one’s eyes closed lightly, lightly,
perfectly still
in a nineteenth-century sleep!
Nobody sleeps here, children.
The little beds of white wrought iron
and the tall, kind, faceless nurse
are somewhere else, in a hospital
or the dreams of prisoners of war.
The drawers of this trunk are empty,
not even a snapshot
curls in a corner.
In Pullmans of childhood we lay
enthralled behind dark-green curtains,
and a little lamp burned blue
all night, for us. The day
was a dream too, even the oatmeal
under its silver lid, dream-cereal
spooned out in forests of spruce
skirting the green-black gorges,
thick woods of sleep, half prickle,
half lakes of fern.
To stay here forever
is not like that, nor even
simply to lie quite still,
the warm trickle of dream
staining the thick quiet.
The drawers of this trunk are empty.
They are all out of sleep up here.
1965
THE KNOT
In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood.
For years I never saw it,
years of metallic vision,
spears glancing off a bright eyeball,
suns off a Swiss lake.
A foaming meadow; the Milky Way;
and there, all along, the tiny dark-red spider
sitting in the whiteness of the bridal web,
waiting to plunge his crimson knifepoint
into the white apparencies.
Little wonder the eye, healing, sees
for a long time through a mist of blood.
1965
ANY HUSBAND TO ANY WIFE
“Might I die last and show thee!”
I know: you are glycerine,
old quills, rose velvet,
tearstains in Middlemarch,
a style of getting into cabs, of eating fruit,
a drawer of stones, chains, seeds, shells, little mirrors:
Darling, you will outlive yourself, and me.
Sometimes the sea backs up against a lashed pier,
grinding and twisting,
a turmoil of wrecked stuff
alive and dead. And the pier stands groaning
as if the land depended on it.
We say it is the moon that draws these tides,
then glazes in aftercalm
the black, blurred face to something we can love.
1965
SIDE BY SIDE
Ho! in the dawn
how light we lie
stirring faintly as laundry
left all night on the lines.
You, a lemon-gold pyjama,
I, a trousseau-sheet, fine
linen worn paper-thin in places,
worked with the maiden monogram.
Lassitude drapes our folds.
We’re slowly bleaching
with the days, the hours, and the years.
We are getting finer than ever,
time is wearing us to silk,
to sheer spiderweb.
The eye of the sun, rising, looks in
to ascertain how we are coming on.
1965
SPRING THUNDER
1.
Thunder is all it is, and yet
my street becomes a crack in the western hemisphere,
my house a fragile nest of grasses.
The radiotelescope flings its nets
at random; a child is crying,
not from hunger, not from pain,
more likely impotence. The generals are sweltering
in the room with a thousand eyes.
Red-hot lights flash off and on
inside air-conditioned skulls.
Underfoot, a land-mass
puffed-up with bad faith and fatigue
goes lumbering onward,
old raft in the swollen waters,
unreformed Huck and Jim
watching the tangled yellow shores
rush by.
2.
Whatever you are that weeps
over the blistered riverbeds