prudently ring out until the morning?
the threshold of the horizon shifts—
and think with the thinkers of this earth:
“Life is thus”—then am I crazed
because my heart encloses what it held?
Morning has broken and the sea
is wide, I go back home to sleep.
Path, dune, trees and sheep
are rosy from the east, a rosy gull
flies up under the rash sky.
What’s silent speaks aloud buried in sleep.
POEMS
(1962–1965)
TO JUDITH, TAKING LEAVE
For J.H.
Dull-headed, with dull fingers
I patch once more
the pale brown envelope
still showing under ink scratches
the letterhead of Mind.
A chorus of old postmarks
echoes across its face.
It looks so frail
to send so far
and I should tear it across
mindlessly
and find another.
But I’m tired, can’t endure
a single new motion
or room or object,
so I cling to this too
as if your tallness moving
against the rainlight
in an Amsterdam flat
might be held awhile
by a handwritten label
or a battered envelope
from your desk.
Once somewhere else
I shan’t talk of you
as a singular event
or a beautiful thing I saw
though both are true.
I shan’t falsify you
through praising and describing
as I shall other
things I have loved
almost as much.
There in Amsterdam
you’ll be living as I
have seen you live
and as I’ve never seen you.
And I can trust
no plane to bring you
my life out there
in turbid America—
my own life, lived against
facts I keep there.
It wasn’t literacy—
the right to read Mind—
or suffrage—to vote
for the lesser of two
evils—that were
the great gains, I see now,
when I think of all those women
who suffered ridicule
for us.
But this little piece of ground,
Judith! that two women
in love to the nerves’ limit
with two men—
shared out in pieces
to men, children, memories
so different and so draining—
should think it possible
now for the first time
perhaps, to love each other
neither as fellow-victims
nor as a temporary
shadow of something better.
Still shared-out as we are,
lovers, poets, warmers
of men and children
against our flesh, not knowing
from day to day
what we’ll fling out on the water
or what pick up
there at the tide’s lip,
often tired, as I’m tired now
from sheer distances of soul
we have in one day to cover—
still to get here
to this little spur or headland
and feel now free enough
to leave our weapons somewhere
else—such are the secret
outcomes of revolution!
that two women can meet
no longer as cramped sharers
of a bitter mutual secret
but as two eyes in one brow
receiving at one moment
the rainbow of the world.
1962
ROOTS
For M.L.
Evenings seem endless, now
dark tugs at our sky
harder and earlier
and milkweeds swell to bursting …
you stand on your terrace
a scarf on your head and in your hands
dead stalks of golden-glow
and now it’s for you,
not myself, I shiver
hearing glass doors rattle
at your back, the rustling cough
of a dry clematis vine
your love and toil trained up the walls
of a rented house.
All those roots, Margo!
Didn’t you start each slip between your breasts,
each dry seed, carrying some
across frontiers, knotted
into your handkerchief,
haven’t you seen your tears
glisten in narrow trenches
where rooted cuttings grope for life?
You, frailer than you look,
long back, long stride, blond hair
coiled up over straight shoulders—
I hear in your ear the wind
lashing in wet from the North Sea
slamming the dahlias flat.
All your work violated
every autumn, every turn of the wrist
guiding the trowel: mocked.
Sleet on brown fibers,
black wilt eating your harvest,
a clean sweep, and you the loser …
or is this after all
the liberation your hands fend off
and your eyes implore
when you dream of sudden death
or of beginning anew,
a girl of seventeen, the war just over,
and all the gardens
to dig again?
1963
THE PARTING: II
White morning flows into the mirror.
Her eye, still old with sleep,
meets itself like a sister.
How they slept last night,
the dream that caged them back to back,
was nothing new.
Last words, tears, most often
come wrapped as the everyday
familiar failure.
Now, pulling the comb slowly
through her loosened hair
she tries to find the parting;
it must come out after all:
hidden in all that tangle
there is a way.
1963
WINTER
Dead, dead, dead, dead.
A beast of the Middle Ages
stupefied in its den.
The hairs on its body—a woman’s—
cold as hairs on a bulb or tuber.
Nothing so bleakly leaden, you tell me,
as the hyacinth’s dull cone
before it bulks into blueness.
Ah, but I’d chosen to be
a woman, not a beast or a tuber!
No one knows where the storks went,
everyone knows they have disappeared.
Something—that woman—seems to have
migrated also; if she lives, she lives
sea-zones away, and the meaning grows colder.
1965
LEAFLETS
(1969)
For Rose Marie and Hayden Carruth
I
Night Watch
ORION
Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you’re young
my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won’t give over
though it weighs you down as you stride
and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it;
as I throw back my head to take you in
an old transfusion happens again:
divine astronomy is nothing to it.
Indoors I bruise and blunder,
break faith, leave ill enough
alone, a dead child born in the dark.
Night cracks up over the chimney,
pieces of time, frozen geodes
come showering down in the grate.
A man reaches behind my eyes
and finds them empty
a woman’s head turns away
from my head in the mirror
children are dying my death
and eating crumbs of my life.
Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,
my speechless pirate!
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back
it’s with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can do least damage.
Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.
1965
HOLDING OUT
The hunters’ shack will do,
abandoned, untended, unmended
in its cul-de-sac of alders.
Inside, who knows what
hovel-keeping essentials—
a grey saucepan, a broom, a clock
stopped at last autumn’s last hour—
all or any, what matter.
The point is, it’s a shelter,
a place more in- than outside.
From that we could begin.
And the wind is surely rising,
snow is in the alders.
Maybe the stovepipe is sound,
maybe the smoke will do us in
at first—no matter.
Late afternoons the ice
squeaks underfoot like mica,
and when the sun drops red and moon-
faced back of the gun-colored firs,
the best intentions are none too good.
Then we have to make a go of it
in the smoke with the dark outside
and our love in our boots at first—
no matter.
1965
FLESH AND BLOOD
For C.
A cracked walk in the garden,
white violets choking in the ivy,
then O then …
Everyone else I’ve had to tell how it was,
only not you.
Nerve-white, the cloud came walking
over the crests of tallest trees.
Doors slammed. We
fell asleep, hot Sundays, in our slips,
two mad little goldfish
fluttering in a drying pond.
Nobody’s seen the trouble I’ve seen
but you.
Our jokes are funnier for that
you’d say
and, Lord, it’s true.
1965
IN THE EVENING
Three hours chain-smoking words
and you move on. We stand in the porch,
two archaic figures: a woman and a man.
The old masters, the old sources,
haven’t a clue what we’re about,
shivering here in the half-dark ’sixties.
Our minds hover in a famous impasse
and cling together. Your hand
grips mine like a railing on an icy night.
The wall of the house is bleeding. Firethorn!
The moon, cracked every which-way,
pushes steadily on.
1966
MISSING THE POINT
There it was, all along,
twisted up in that green vine-thread,
in the skeins of marble,
on the table behind them—those two!
white-faced and undeterred—
everything doubled: forks,
brown glass tumblers, echoing plates,
two crumbled portions of bread.
That was the point that was missed
when they left the room with its wavy light
and pale curtains blowing
and guessed the banquet was over, the picnic
under the leaves was over,
when haggling faces pushed in for a look
and the gingerbread village shrieked outside:
Who’s in the wrong? Who’s in the wrong?
1966
CITY
From the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg.
Maybe you spoke to someone
and on that hour your face
printed itself for good.
Where is that man? I need
to find him before he dies
and see you drift across his retina.
You have played with children.
They will run up to me
whenever you
come home free in their dreams.
Houses, realized by you,
slumber in that web.
Streets suppose you
in other streets, and call:
Evening papers …
Strawberries …
The city has changed hands;
the plan you gave it, fallen through.
1962
DWINGELO
From the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg.
In the never, still arriving, I find you
again: blue absence keeps knowledge alive,
makes of October an adjusted lens.
The days have almost no clouds left.
Cassiopeia, the Great Bear
let their signals burst by night
to rip into impossibility.
The Pleiades rage silently about.
To wait is the password; and to listen.
In Dwingelo you can hear it whisper,
the void in the radiotelescope.
There too the singing of your nerves is gathered,
becoming graphic on a sheet of paper
not unlike this one here.
1962
THE DEMON LOVER
Fatigue, regrets. The lights
go out in the parking lot
two by two. Snow blindness
settles over the suburb.
Desire. Desire. The nebula
opens in space, unseen,
your heart utters its great beats
in solitude. A new
era is coming in.
Gauche as we are, it seems
we have to play our part.
A plaid dress, silk scarf,
and eyes that go on stinging.
Woman, stand off. The air
glistens like silk.
She’s gone. In her place stands
a schoolgirl, morning light,
the half-grown bones
of innocence. Is she
your daughter or your muse,
this tree of blondness
grown up in a field of thorns?
Something piercing and marred.
Take note. Look back. When quick
the whole northeast went black
and prisoners howled and children
ran through the night with candles,
who stood off motionless
side by side while the moon swam up
over the drowned houses?
Who neither touched nor spoke?
whose nape, whose finger-ends
nervelessly lied the hours away?
A voice presses at me.
If I give in it won’t
be like the girl the bull rode,
all Rubens flesh and happy moans.
But to be wrestled like a boy
with tongue, hips, knees, nerves, brain …
with language
?
He doesn’t know. He’s watching
breasts under a striped blouse,
his bull’s head down.
The old wine pours again through my veins.
Goodnight, then. ’Night. Again
we turn our backs and weary
weary we let down.
Things take us hard, no question.
How do you make it, all the way
from here to morning? I touch
you, made of such nerve
and flare and pride and swallowed tears.
Go home. Come to bed. The skies
look in at us, stern.
And this is an old story.
I dreamed about the war.
We were all sitting at table
in a kitchen in Chicago.
The radio had just screamed
that Illinois was the target.
No one felt like leaving,
we sat by the open window
and talked in the sunset.
I’ll tell you that joke tomorrow,
you said with your saddest smile,
if I can remember.
The end is just a straw,
a feather furling slowly down,
floating to light by chance, a breath
on the long-loaded scales.
Posterity trembles like a leaf
and we go on making heirs and heirlooms.
The world, we have to make it,
my coexistent friend said, leaning
back in his cell.
Siberia vastly hulks
behind him, which he did not make.
Oh futile tenderness
of touch in a world like this!
how much longer, dear child,
do you think sex will matter?
There might have been a wedding
that never was:
two creatures sprung free
from castiron covenants.
Instead our hands and minds
erotically waver …