even with cymbals, their ears
have lifted the chalice of explosion
a glass of straight malice, and
we wander in Random in the alleys
of their longfaced towns taking
from their sickly mandibles handbills
summoning our joint spirits.
I sing Sousa.
The desire to disintegrate the Earth
is eccentric,
And away from centre
nothing more nor sizeable
nor science
nor ennobling
no purity, no endeavor
toward human grace.
We were
on a prominence though
so lovely to the eye eyes
of birds only caught
all the differences
of each house filled hill.
And from the window a spire
of poplar, windows
and brown pater earth buildings.
My eye on the circling bird
my mind lost in the rainy hemlocks of Washington
the body displaced, let it
wander all the way to Random and dwell
in those damp groves
where stand the friends
I love and left: behind me
slumbering under the dark morning sky
are my few friends.
Oh, please
cut wood to warm them
and stalk never appearing animals
to warm them,
I hope they are warm tonight—
bring salmonberries
even pumpkinseed.
Sousa,
it can never be
as my friend said
“Why can’t it be like this all the time?”
Her arms spread out before her
gauging the alarm,
(with that entablature)
and the triumph of a march
in which no one
is injured.
Like a Message on Sunday
Sits
the forlorn plumber
by the river
with his daughter
staring at the water
then, at her
his daughter closely.
Once World, he came
to our house to fix the stove
and couldn’t
oh, we were arrogant and talked
about him in the next room, doesn’t
a man know what he is doing?
Can’t it be done right,
World of iron thorns.
Now they sit by the meagre river
by the water . . . stare
into that plumber
so that I can see a daughter in the water
she thin and silent,
he, wearing a baseball cap
in a celebrating town this summer season
may they live on
on, may their failure be kindly, and come
in small pieces.
Prayers for the People of the World
They were an exercise the ages go through
smiling in the church one time
banging and blowing in the street another
where brother is a state very often of glue
coming apart in the heat
of British Guiana where
the drainage and open canals
make difficult the protection of the lower classes
who have lands and moneys, food and shelter
in the great escrow called Never.
Though black cuban beards and armored cars shout contrary.
Did America say give me your poor?
Yes for poor is the vitamin not stored
it goes out in the urine of all endeavor.
So Poor came in long black flea coats
and bulgarian hats
spies and bombers
and she made five rich while flies covered the rest
who were suppressed or murdered
or out-bred their own demise.
If it should ever come
And we are all there together
time will wave as willows do
and adios will be truly, yes,
laughing at what is forgotten
and talking of what’s new
admiring the roses you brought.
How sad.
You didn’t know you were at the end
thought it was your bright pear
the earth, yes
another affair to have been kept
and gazed back on
when you had slept
to have been stored
as a squirrel will a nut, and half
forgotten,
there were so many, many
from the newly fallen.
FROM HANDS UP
Home on the Range, February, 1962
Flutes, and the harp on the plain
Is a distance, of pain, and waving reeds
The scale of far off trees, notes not of course
Upon a real harp but chords in the thick clouds
And the wind reaching its arms toward west yellowstone.
Moving to the east, the grass was high once, and before
White wagons moved
the hawk, proctor of the hills still is
Oh god did the chunky westerner think to remake this in his own
image
Oh god did the pioneer society sanctify the responsible citizen
To do that
face like a plot of ground
Was it iron locomotives and shovels were hand tools
And barbed wire motives for each man’s
Fenced off little promised land
or the mind of bent
Or of carson, oh earp
These sherpas of responsible destruction
Posses led by a promising girl wielding a baton upon the street
A Sacagawea wearing a baseball cap, eating a Clark bar.
And flutes and the harp are on the plain to
Bring the last leading edge of stillness
Brought no water, brought dead roots
Like an allotment of tool handles to their premises—and they cry
In pain over daily income—a hundred years of planned greed
Loving the welfare state of new barns and bean drills
Hot passion for the freedom of the dentist!
Their plots were america’s first subdivisions called homesteads
Lean american—gothic quarter sections gaunt look
Managing to send their empty headed son who is a ninny
To nebraska to do it, all over again, to the ground, a prairie
Dog hole,
And always they smirk at starvation
And consider it dirty . . . a joke their daughters learn
From their new husbands.
On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck
Summer was dry, dry the garden
our beating hearts, on that farm, dry
with the rows of corn the grasshoppers
came happily to strip, in hordes, the first
thing I knew about locust was they came
dry under the foot like the breaking of
a mechanical bare heart which collapses
from an unkind an incessant word whispered
in the house of the major farmer
and the catalogue company,
from no fault of anyone
my father coming home tired
and grinning down the road, turning in
is the tank full? thinking of the horse
and my lazy arms thinking of the water
so far below the well platform.
On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck
we brooded, she in the house, a little heavy
from too much corn meal, she
a little melancholy from the dust of the fields
in her eye, the only title she ever had to lands—
and man’s ways winged their way to he
r through the mail
saying so much per month
so many months, this is yours, take it
take it, take it, take it
and in the corncrib, like her lives in that house
the mouse nibbled away at the cob’s yellow grain
until six o’clock when her sorrows grew less
and my father came home
On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck?
I have nothing to say, it gave me clothes to
wear to school,
and my mother brooded
in the rooms of the house, the kitchen, waiting
for the men she knew, her husband, her son
from work, from school, from the air of locusts
and dust masking the hedges of fields she knew
in her eye as a vague land where she lived,
boundries, whose tractors chugged pulling harrows
pulling discs, pulling great yields from the earth
pulse for the armies in two hemispheres, 1943
and she was part of that stay at home army to keep
things going, owing that debt.
Los Mineros
Now it is winter and the fallen snow
has made its stand on the mountains, making dunes
of white on the hills, drifting over
the flat valley floors, and the cold cover
has got us out to look for fuel.
Has got us first to Madrid which is 4 miles beyond Cerillos
close to the Golden Mountains
a place whose business once throve like the clamor in Heorot Hall;
but this was not sporting business, The Mine Explosion of 1911.
And on the wall in the mine office
there in Madrid
are two pictures of those blackbirds, but a time later;
the thirties, and the bite of the depression is no bleaker
on their faces than is the coming morning of the day they were took.
These men whom we will never know are ranged 14 in number
in one of those pictures that are very long, you’ve seen them.
And the wonder is five are smiling Mexicanos, the rest
could be English or German, blown to New Mexico on another
winter’s snow. Hard to imagine Spanish as miners, their
sense is good-naturedly above ground (and their cruelty).
In a silly way they know their pictures are being taken,
and know it isn’t necessary honor standing in line with their hands
hiding
in their pockets. I was looking to see if they are short
as Orwell says miners must be, but they aren’t save two
little Mexican boys. What caught my eye at first was the way
they were so finely dressed in old double-breasted suit coats, ready
for work.
Then I looked into their faces and the races separated.
The English or Germans wear a look which is mystic in its expectancy;
able men underground,
but the Spanish face carries no emergency
and one of the little boys, standing behind a post
looks right out of the picture faintly smiling: even today. Martinez
whom I had gone with was waiting for the weight slip.
When we got over to the giant black chute the man above waved
as from the deck of a troubled ship and said no carbon
amigos, and then climbed down the ladder.
Madrid is a gaunt town now. Its houses stand unused
along the entering road, and they are all green and white,
every window has been abused with the rocks of departing children.
In My Youth I Was a Tireless Dancer
But now I pass
graveyards in a car.
The, dead lie,
unsuperstitiously,
with their feet toward me—
please forgive me for
saying the tombstones would not
fancy their faces turned from the highway.
Oh perish the thought
I was thinking in that moment
Newman Illinois
the Saturday night dance—
what a life! Would I like it again?
No. Once I returned late summer
from California thin from journeying
and the girls were not the same.
You’ll say that’s natural
they had been dancing all the time.
Hemlocks
Red house. Green tree in mist.
How many fir long hours.
How that split wood
warmed us. How continuous.
Red house. Green tree I miss.
The first snow came in October.
Always. For three years.
And sat on our shoulders.
That clean grey sky.
That fine curtain of rain
like nice lace held our faces
up, in it, a kerchief for the nose
of softest rain. Red house.
Those green mists rolling
down the hill. Held our heads
when we went walking on the hills
to the side, with pleasure.
But sad. That’s sad. That tall grass.
Toggenburg goat stood in, looking, chewing.
Time was its cud. Oh
Red barn mist of our green trees of Him
who locks our nature in His deep nature
how continuous do we die to come down
as rain; that land’s refrain
no we never go there anymore.
From Gloucester Out
It has all
come back today.
That memory for me is nothing
there ever was,
That man
when stretched out
and so bold
on his ground
and so much
lonely anywhere.
But never to forget
that moment
when we came out of the tavern
and wandered through the carnival.
They were playing
the washington post march
but I mistook it for manhattan beach
for all around were the colored lights
of delirium
to the left the boats
of Italians
and ahead of us, past the shoulders
of St. Peter the magician of those fishermen
the bay
stood, and immediately in it the silent
inclined pole where tomorrow the young men
of this colony
so dangerous on the street
will fall harmlessly
into the water.
They are not the solid
but are the solidly built
citizens, and they are about us
as we walk across
the square
with their black provocative
women
slender, like whips of
sex in the sousa filled night.
Where edged
by that man in the music
of a transplanted time and
enough of drunkenness
to make you senseless of all
but virtue
(there is never
no, there is never a small complaint)
(that all things shit poverty,
and Life, one wars on with
many embraces) oh it was a time that was perfect
but for my own hesitating
to know all I had not known.
Pure existence, even in the crowds
I love
will never be possible for me
even with the men I love
This is
the guilt
that kills me
My adulterated presence
but please believe with all men
I love to be
&n
bsp; That memory
of how he lay out
on the floor in his great length
and when morning came,
late,
we lingered
in the vastest of all cities
in this hemisphere
and all other movement
stopped, nowhere
else was there a stirring known to us
yet that morning I stood
by the window up 3 levels
and watched a game
of stick ball, thinking of going away,
and wondering what would befall that man
when he returned to his territory.
The street as you could guess
was thick with their running
and cars,
themselves, paid that activity
such respect I thought a ritual
in the truest sense,
where all time and all motion
part around the space of men
in that act
as does a river flow past
the large rock.
And he slept.
in the next room, waiting
in an outward slumber
for the time
we climbed into the car, accepting all things
from love, the currency of which is
parting, and glancing.
Then went
out of that city to jersey