in the november
air, in the world, that was getting colder
as we stood there in the woodyard talking
pleasantly, of the green wood and the dry.
1956
Vaquero
The cowboy stands beneath
a brick-orange moon. The top
of his oblong head is blue, the sheath
of his hips
is too.
In the dark brown night
your delicate cowboy stands quite still.
His plain hands are crossed.
His wrists are embossed white.
In the background night is a house,
has a blue chimney top,
Yi Yi, the cowboy’s eyes
are blue. The top of the sky
is too.
The Hide of My Mother
1
My mother, who has a hide
on several occasions remarked what
a nice rug or robe
my young kids would make,
Would we send them to her?
When we had them butchered?
It was certainly a hoo ha ha
from me
and a ho ho
from my wife: and I would amusedly say
to conceal the fist in my heart
which one? the black?
or the grey
& white?
And she would smile, exposing the carnival
in her head
What’s the difference, after they’re dead?
Can you imagine asking a poet that?
Perhaps I should tell her about my pet rat.
2
My mother remarked
that in Illinois
little boys sell holly
from door to door,
and here, she would say
they grow all over the mountains
4
what if I took a holly tree back there? would it grow? No. I said.
3
Once my mother
was making dinner
and my cats were on the floor.
Why do they whine like that?
she asked,
why don’t we throw them all out the door?
why don’t you feed them I ventured?
She said she wasn’t indentured.
Can you imagine telling a poet that?
Later she fed them my pet rat.
4
One day my son
found a parakeet in the bush
brought it to the house
carrying the little blue thing by the tail.
My mother said why, isn’t it pretty,
I wonder if it would make the trip home
to Illinois. Oh, I said, we’ll have to find its owner
you don’t want to pull a boner
like that.
5
Tho winter’s at term
it still gets cold
in the evening.
My pets are warm
because I have set a fire.
My mother is arranging some ferns
and young trees, a little too big
she found in the mountains.
A jig, of a sort must be going
on in her head. It is raining
outside. Do you think I can get the copper legs
of that stool in the box
pretty rocks I saw on the beach, would you,
she was saying to my little boy,
like to go home to Illinois with grandmother?
He was saying from inside the box enclosure,
he wasn’t sure he
wanted to leave his mother.
6
For a point of etiquette,
when I observed she was digging
the neighbor’s English Privet,
I said, it grows in abundance here.
As a matter of fact, she had it,
I thought I saw a rabbit,
that’s why I came over here.
I said, a plant like that might grow anywhere.
Well now, I suppose you are right
back home our elms have the blight
but the land is flat there
so many mountains hereabouts
Yes, I allowed, it must help the sprouts . . .
Well now, there’s more rain here
than we have in Illinois in an entire year
wouldn’t you think tho it would grow there?
I said, what about a Privet hedge from . . .
You remember the peonies on grandfather’s grave
well someone took them they were gone
the last Memorial Day I was there.
... From Hudson’s Bay to the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Do you think it would stay?
Oh I love plants but where I am the weather
drives the birds away.
7
As for the hides of other people,
My wife told her
of how the junkman’s
woman had been so good to us
a truss as it were, had kept the children
when it was a hardship
the condition had been foul, sleet,
masses of air, a raw affair,
dumped out of the Yukon upon
us, roving bands of weather
sliding across British Columbia
a kind of dementia
of the days, frozen water pipes
and the wringer on the washing machine
busted, no coal.
Our house split in two like Pakistan.
The graciousness
of the woman of the junkman
she said. Now what do you think
we should do? forget it? some doughnuts?
a cake?
“Why, I don’t know what I would do”—
my mother was alluding
to a possible misfortune of her own.
8
As for the thick of it,
really, my mother
never knew about the world.
I mean even that there was one,
or more.
Whorled, like a univalve shell
into herself,
early to bed, nothing
in her head, here and there
Michigan one time, Ohio
another. Led a life
like a novel, who hasn’t?
As for Sociology:
garbage cans were what she dumped
the remains of supper in,
dirty newspapers, if blowing
in the street, somebody probably
dropped them there.
Nobody told her about the damned
or martyrdom. She’s 47
so that, at least, isn’t an emergency.
Had a chance to go to Arizona once
and weighed the ins and outs
to the nearest ounce:
didn’t go. She was always slow.
Incidently, for her the air
tail end of a dust storm
somehow battered up from Kansas.
1957
Are They Dancing
There is a sad carnival up the valley
The willows flow it seems on trellises of music
Everyone is there today, everyone I love.
There is a mad mad fiesta along the river
Thrilling ladies sing in my ear, where
Are your friends, lost? They were to come
And banjoes were to accompany us all
And our feet were to go continually
The sound of laughter was to flow over the water
What was to have been, is something else
I am afraid. Only a letter from New Mexico
And another from a mountain by Pocatello.
I wonder, what instruments are playing
And whose eyes are straying over the mountain
Over the desert
And are they dancin
g: or gazing at the earth.
The Air of June Sings
Quietly and while at rest on the trim grass I have gazed,
admonished myself for having never been here
at the grave-side and read the names of my Time Wanderers.
And now, the light noise of the children at play on the inscribed
stone
jars my ear and they whisper and laugh covering their mouths.
“My Darling”
my daughter reads, some of the markers
reflect such lightness to her reading eyes, yea, as I rove
among these polished and lime blocks I am moved to tears and
I hear
the depth in “Darling, we love thee,” and as in “Safe in Heaven.”
I am going off to heaven and I won’t see you anymore. I am
going back into the country and I won’t be here anymore. I am
going to die in 1937. But where did you die my Wanderer?
You, under the grave-grass, with the tin standard whereat
I look, and try to read the blurred ink. I cannot believe
you were slighted knowing what I do of cost and evil
yet tin is less than granite. Those who buried you should have
known
a 6 inch square of sandstone, flush with the earth
is more proper for the gone than blurred and faded flags.
Than the blurred and faded flags I am walking with in the
graveyard.
Across the road in the strawberry field two children are stealing
their supper fruit, abreast in the rows, in the fields of the overlord,
Miller his authentic name, and I see that name represented here,
there is that social side of burial too, long residence,
and the weight of the established local dead. My eyes avoid
the largest stone, larger than the common large, Goodpole
Matthews,
Pioneer, and that pioneer sticks in me like a wormed black cherry
in my throat, No Date, nothing but that zeal, that trekking
and Business, that presumption in a sacred place, where children
are buried, and where peace, as it is in the fields and the country
should reign. A wagon wheel is buried there. Lead me away
to the small quiet stones of the unpreposterous dead and leave
me my tears for Darling we love thee, for Budded on earth and
blossomed
in heaven, where the fieldbirds sing in the fence rows,
and there is possibility, where there are not the loneliest of all.
Oh, the stones not yet cut.
1958
FROM THE NEWLY FALLEN
Geranium
I know that peace is soon coming, and love of common object,
and of woman and all the natural things I groom, in my mind, of
faint rememberable patterns, the great geography of my lunacy.
I go on my way frowning at novelty, wishing I were closer to home
than I am. And this is the last bus stop before Burlington,
that pea-center, which is my home, but not the home of my mind.
That asylum I carry in my insane squint, where beyond
the window a curious woman in the station door
has a red bandana on her head, and tinkling things hand themselves
to the wind that gathers about her skirts. Oh in the rich manner
of her kind
she waits for the bus to stop. Lo, a handsome woman.
Now, my sense decays, she is the flat regularity, the brick
of the station wall, is the red Geranium of my last Washington stop.
Is my object no shoes brought from india
can make exotic, nor hardly be made antic would she astride
a motorcycle, (forsake materials and we shall survive together)
nor be purchased by the lust of schedule.
No,
on her feet therefore, are the silences of nothing. And leather
leggings adorn her limbs, on her arms are the garlands of ferns
come from a raining raining forest and dripping lapidarys dust.
She is a common thief of fauna and locale (in her eyes
are the small sticks of slender land-bridges) oh a porter
standing near would carry her bundle, which is scarlet too,
as a geranium and cherishable common that I worship and that I sing
ploddingly, and out of tune as she, were she less the lapwing
as she my pale sojourner, is.
Sousa
Great brass bell of austerity
and the ghosts of old picnickers
ambling under the box-elder when the sobriety
was the drunkenness. John,
you child, you drumhead, there is no silence
you can’t decapitate
and on forgotten places (the octagonal
stand, Windsor, Illinois, the only May Day
of my mind) the fresh breeze
and the summer dresses of girls once blew
but do not now. They blow instead at the backs
of our ears John,
under the piñon,
that foreign plant with arrogant southern smell.
I yearn for the box-elder and its beautiful
bug, the red striped and black-plated—
your specific insect, in the Sunday after noon.
Oh restore my northern madness
which no one values anymore and shun,
its uses, give them back their darkened instinct
(which I value no more) we are
dedicated to madness that’s why I love you
Sousa, you semper fidelis maniac.
And the sweep
of your american arms
bring a single banging street in Nebraska
home, and your shock
when a trillion broads smile at you
their shocking laughter can be heard long after
the picnickers have gone home.
March us home through the spring rain
the belief, the relief
of occasion.
Your soft high flute and brass
remind me of a lost celebration I can’t
quite remember,
in which I volunteered as conqueror:
the silence now stretches me
into sadness.
Come back into the street bells
and tin soldiers.
But there are no drums
no drums, loudness,
no poinsette shirts,
there is no warning, you won’t recognize anyone.
Children and men in every way
milling, gathering daily, (those vacant eyes)
the bread lines of the deprived are here
Los Alamos, 1960, not Salinas
not Stockton.
Thus when mouths are opened,
waves of poison rain will fall, butterflies
do not fly up from any mouth in that area.
Let me go away,
shouting alone, laughing
to the air, Sousa be here
when the leaves wear
a blank radio green, for honoring without trim
or place.
To dwell again in the hinterland
and take your phone,
play to the lovely eyed people in the field
on the hillside.
Hopeful, and kind
merrily and possible
(as my friend said, “Why can’t it be
like this all the time?”
her arms spread out before her).
John Sousa you can’t now
amuse a nation with colored drums