And bulge, from every salacious thought and deed.
Every good one too.
It is the past, not just what is wrong,
It is the embarrassments we still breast-feed,
That we absentmindedly so long
To shed. A new you,
Oneself an innate second person succeeds.
How do the saints feel when they fall to their knees,
God coming to light?
Less ecstatic than ashamed, I fear,
Of bodies never worthy of being seized.
Encumbered by the weight of a tear,
In hopeless hindsight
They see all that the flesh can never appease,
All that the flesh is obliged to mortify.
Here I am, laid out,
Looking up to where nothing appears,
Hardly wondering why nothing satisfies
And yet saddened that it’s all so clear.
Tulip waterspouts
Trickle. Reservoirs deep underground reply.
from SCENES FROM ANOTHER LIFE
1981
AUBADE
Snowbanks, so heaped by happenstance
A melting glance would misconstrue
Them as eiderdown, blanket the trails
Blazed, day in, night out, at dawn,
In dreams, whose patchwork accidents
Become the frosted dormer through
Brightening panes of which details
That make a world of sense are drawn.
A WINTER WITHOUT SNOW
Even the sky here in Connecticut has it,
That wry look of accomplished conspiracy,
The look of those who’ve gotten away
With a petty but regular white collar crime.
When I pick up my shirts at the laundry,
A black woman, putting down her Daily News,
Wonders why and how much longer our luck
Will hold. “Months now and no kiss of the witch.”
The whole state overcast with such particulars.
For Emerson, a century ago and farther north,
Where the country has an ode’s jagged edges,
It was “frolic architecture.” Frozen blue-
Print of extravagance, shapes of a shared life
Left knee-deep in transcendental drifts:
The isolate forms of snow are its hardest fact.
Down here, the plain tercets of provision do,
Their picket snow-fence peeling, gritty,
Holding nothing back, nothing in, nothing at all.
Down here, we’ve come to prefer the raw material
Of everyday and this year have kept an eye
On it, shriveling but still recognizable—
A sight that disappoints even as it adds
A clearing second guess to winter. It’s
As if, in the third year of a “relocation”
To a promising notch way out on the Sunbelt,
You’ve grown used to the prefab housing,
The quick turnover in neighbors, the constant
Smell of factory smoke—like Plato’s cave,
You sometimes think—and the stumpy trees
That summer slighted and winter just ignores,
And all the snow that never falls is now
Back home and mixed up with other piercing
Memories of childhood days you were kept in
With a Negro schoolmate, of later storms
Through which you drove and drove for hours
Without ever seeing where you were going.
Or as if you’ve cheated on a cold sickly wife.
Not in some overheated turnpike motel room
With an old flame, herself the mother of two,
Who looks steamy in summer-weight slacks
And a parrot-green pullover. Not her.
Not anyone. But every day after lunch
You go off by yourself, deep in a brown study,
Not doing much of anything for an hour or two,
Just staring out the window, or at a patch
On the wall where a picture had hung for ages,
A woman with planets in her hair, the gravity
Of perfection in her features—oh! her hair
The lengthening shadow of the galaxy’s sweep.
As a young man you used to stand outside
On warm nights and watch her through the trees.
You remember how she disappeared in winter,
Obscured by snow that fell blindly on the heart,
On the house, on a world of possibilities.
THE TEARS OF THE PILGRIMS
The gray figure whose back they are watching
Retreat down the stone passage where the river goes
Underground—an old man because he fails
To remember the recent, only the distant past—
Was telling the pilgrims of the grain
That takes for food the light that dies.
Under the roof of my hunger,
And it has fed me.”
•
There was no formal beginning,
No invocation, no lone patrol,
No offshore ceremonies of starting out,
Though each had a version of one,
Rich, contractual, obscure,
But missing the point
Even as it was being made
By insisting no one knew
Where it all would end, least of all
One like himself, a part of the story,
Black penitent, gradual saint.
•
Sunday. Tired of this leg of the journey,
I spent the morning in a field
Shot with broom and blooddrop poppies,
The clenched fists of thistle shaking.
Sat in a plot of clover flattened,
I guessed, by his animals. No company.
The sweet smell of grass on my sleeves.
Toward noon, two airplanes crossed
Over, high and dead ahead.
And once, somewhere near me,
A partridge made a noise
Like a blade being sharpened.
•
As if required by day-to-night necessities,
Or the custom of halting when the road
Led at last through the body’s own fatigue,
We stayed a month in the Walled City,
Cloud banks toppling its outer defenses,
Toffee-brick roofs converting its allegory
Of crooked streets into a single allusion
That kept changing its mind as it was caught.
When the time came to leave, we paused
On the ancient splintered footbridge
For the only view of where we’d been.
Each saw something smaller than his sense
Of having been, having sheltered there.
A whole note held, galactic hive,
Emblematic welt of consequences unforeseen,
A paperweight village snowbound by a whim
Of the wrist, a case of mistaken identity,
An old engraving of Manhattan’s reliquary
Of holy years on my own, when the griefs
Were never the same except in their origin,
Bold in trial, shy in isolation,
Heaped up with too many chances to take
Risks for, the humdrum deliberation
Of evenings and their standby reserves
Of permanence—belief, you called it,
In a future for the self beyond its task,
Its temporary ghosts, its squandered or hasty
Decisions to arrive, depart, to try again.
•
An invisible cloud lids
The moon’s blind eye.
The owl’s opens.
As if in response
To my unasked question,
He beats his wings,
Slowly at first,
Then
faster and faster.
The moon starts up again.
That is more than God
Has ever said.
•
Stopping to admire the stream,
As if holding up its string of purls
To the light of his ability
To appreciate a pure style when he heard one,
He realized how clear the water had become
From wearing itself down on stones.
•
No plough, no wife, no child,
The four directions
Blow warm, blow cold;
The cricket sings to himself,
“Come, live in my house.”
The rains start early,
The harvest comes late,
But I have a lucky guest;
We sit down tonight to lamb,
To garlic, salt, and wine.
The buried seed will sprout,
Will branch, will bear.
The southern hills stretch far
Away from where I search,
Stretch far away from here.
•
On the drive back across the border
After a cheap dinner in Spain,
The startling burst of bonfires—
Some in tenement courtyards,
But most in parking lots
Where anyone’s car and orange crates
Burnt up and up into votive sparks—
Made us simultaneously afraid
And playful, as if (but by that time
Local friends in the backseat
Had explained tonight was St. John’s Eve)
We too could have stopped to circle
Those shooting flames all night long.
•
When it was their turn to descend
The inverse spire of thresholds
And mainstays that closed in
On the cold breath at the bottom,
They waited, listening
To a short-winded cowbell first
Climb down its own hollow
Wooden overtones. Rung by rung
They followed, their feet soon used
To the drilled vermicular
Passage illuminated in a beam
Of lantern light the guide cast.
Filing down through tributaries
It seemed their hearts had divided
Into, summoned to ten springs
Of pain and joy at the summit
Of a cry carried to the very center
Of a gathering universal emptiness,
They grew absorbed by the dark face
That led them on. Missing front tooth,
Red shirt rolled up on writhing tattoos,
Young enough to mask his self-possession,
And old enough to conjure up the myth
Of a boy, a boatman, a bereavement.
Hand over hand, he pulled the launch
Along the river by grips hammered into
The runneling cave at intervals
Between some new contrivance
Of time collapsed in stone—drapery,
Hogshead, needle pavilion, cascade
Accumulated since the muse first sang
In the steadfast informing trill of water
The boy, in his language, called
“Falling angels,” each dropped down
Into this vast freezing echo
Of themselves as they left the air.
•
There was no finding their way
Through the pass that morning or next.
(Years ago this was when it happened.)
The flat valley floor, its scrub brush
And laurel, its dusty copperplated prairie,
Too abruptly gave way—and within sight
Of the other side—to sheer crags
Glowering as they disappeared behind
Overlapping jadeite scrolls of fog
On which was written nothing but
The tingling silence they stood in,
Slept in, woke in with what misgivings,
What intermittent attempts at self-effacement
They couldn’t have understood until now.
•
They can all but see the dimpled smiles
Break up the clear reflecting pool
From the depths of which others reach
Their infant fingers towards them.
Or toward a homelike roof overhead,
The nightsky lit by fate’s maternal fires.
•
The night before they arrived
They took separate rooms
The better to ponder each
His own solitude long after
It was probable, they’d been told,
Either would be alone again.
No more the rigors of endless
Possibility remote from love
Yet closer to an exacting idea
Of some imagined mark—
The weeping flight of cranes,
Or the plash of an oar
Opening petal by petal,
A deliquescent lily floating
On the swell of a response.
Instead, the pair’s ardent plight,
Twinned complexity of pattern
And overcharged resource
Pledged to far-reaching years,
With little opportunity to ask
For more than would find itself
In reach. A constant expectation,
Common table, late hours at rest.
One closed his eyes, thought
Of his dead friends, of rotting
Masterpieces, their hopes,
The whispering shrine of sudden
Death in which they meditated
On its available mode of infinity.
There was no need to go further
With the arbitrary rules.
He opened his eyes, thought
Write the book
in your hearts.
Lose no time.
And the other, bewildered by himself,
Watched out the window,
Cracked through a diamond diagonal
Whose faults kept doubling the stars.
from STARS PRINCIPAL
1986
AT A READING
Anthony Hecht’s
And what if now I told you this, let’s say,
By telephone. Would you imagine me
Talking to myself in an empty room,
Watching myself in the window talking,
My lips moving silently, birdlike,
On the glass, or because superimposed
On it, among the branches of the tree
Inside my head? As if what I had to say
To you were in these miniatures of the day,
When it is last night’s shadow shadows
Have made bright.
Between us at the reading—
You up by that child’s coffin of a podium,
The new poem, your “Transparent Man,” to try,
And my seat halfway back in the dimmed house—
That couple conspicuous in the front row
You must have thought the worst audience:
He talked all the while you read, she hung
On his every word, not one of yours.
The others, rapt fan or narcolept,
Paid their own kind of attention, but not
Those two, calm in disregard, themselves
A commentary running from the point.
Into putdown? you must have wondered,
Your poem turned into an example, the example
Held up, if not to scorn, to a glaring
Spot of misunderstanding, some parody
Of the original idea, its afterlife
Of passageways and the mirrory reaches
Of beatitude where the dead select
Their patience and love discloses itself
Once and for all.
But you kept going.
I saw you never once look down
at them,
As if by speaking through her you might
Save the girl for yourself and lead her back
To your poem, your words to lose herself in,
Who sat there as if at a bedside, watching,
In her shift of loud, clenched roses, her hands
Balled under her chin, the heart in her throat
All given in her gaze to the friend
Beside her. How clearly she stood out
Against everything going on in front of us.
It was then I realized that she was deaf
And the bearded boy, a line behind you,
Translating the poem for her into silence,
Helping it out of its disguise of words,
A story spilled expressionless from the lip
Of his mimed exaggerations, like last words
Unuttered but mouthed in the mind and formed
By what, through the closed eyelid’s archway,
Has been newly seen, those words she saw
And seeing heard—or not heard but let sink in,
Into a darkness past anyone’s telling,
There between us.
What she next said,
The bald childless woman in your fable,
She said, head turned, out the window
Of her hospital room to trees across the way,
The leaflorn beech and the sycamores
That stood like enlargements of the vascular
System of the brain, minds meditating on
The hill, the weather, the storm of leukemia
In the woman’s bloodstream, the whole lot
Of it “a riddle beyond the eye’s solution,”
These systems, anarchies, ends not our own.
The girl had turned her back to you by then,
Her eyes intent on the thickness of particulars,
The wintery emphasis of that woman’s dying,
Like facing a glass-bright, amplified stage,
Too painful not to follow back to a source