to protect the not-very-precious manuscript,
tiptoeing barefoot in the tall wet grass
trying to avoid the snakes.
With all this rain
the pond is full.
The ducks are one week old
and already speak their language perfectly –
a soft nasal hiss.
With no instructions they skim bugs from the pond’s
surface and look fearfully at me.
The minister whacks off as does the insurance man,
habitual golfer, sweet lady in her bower,
as do novelists, monks, nuns in nunneries,
maidens in dormitories, stallion against fence post,
goat against puzzled pig who does not cease feeding,
and so do senators, generals, wives during TV
game shows, movie stars and football players, students
to utter distraction, teachers, butchers, world leaders,
everyone except poets who fear the dreaded
growth of hair on the palms, blindness.
They know that even in an empty hotel room
in South Dakota that someone is watching.
With my dog
I watched a single crow
fly across the field.
We are each one.
Thirty feet up in the air
near the top of my novel I want a bird to sing
from the crown of the barn roof.
A hundred feet away there is a grove of trees,
maple and elm and ash,
placed quite accidentally before any of us were born.
Everyone remembers who planted the lilacs
forty years and three wars ago.
In the morning paper
the arsonist
who was also a paranoid schizophrenic,
a homosexual,
retarded,
an alcoholic
who lacerated his body with a penknife
and most significantly for the rest of us,
started fires where none where desired,
on whim.
Spent months regathering dreams lost in the diaspora,
all of the prism’s colors, birds, animals, bodies,
getting them back within the skin
where they’d do no damage.
How difficult catching them armed
only with a butterfly-catcher’s net,
a gun, airplane, an ice pick,
a chalice of rainwater, a green headless
buddha on loan from a veteran of foreign wars.
Saw that third eye in a dream
but couldn’t remember if it looked
from a hole in a wall of ice,
or a hole in a floor of ice,
but it was an eye looking from a hole in ice.
Two white-faced cattle out in the dark-green pasture,
one in the shade of the woodlot,
one out in the hot sunlight,
eating slowly and staring at each other.
So exhausted after my walk from orchestrating
the moves of one billion August grasshoppers
plus fifty thousand butterflies
swimming at the heads
of fifty thousand wildflowers
red blue yellow orange
orange flowers the only things that rhyme with orange
the one rabbit in the pasture
one fly buzzing at the window
a single hot wind through the window
a man sitting at my desk resembling me.
He sneaks up on the temple slowly at noon.
He’s so slow it seems like it’s taking years.
Now his hands are on a pillar, the fingers
encircling it, with only the tips inside the gate.
After all of this long moist dreaming
I perceive how accurate the rooster’s crow
is from down the road.
You can suffer and not even know you’re suffering
because you’ve been suffering so long you can’t remember
another life. You’re actually a dead dog on a country road.
And a man gets used to his rotten foot.
After a while it’s simply a rotten foot,
and his rotten ideas are even easier to get used to
because they don’t hurt as much as a rotten foot.
The road from Belsen to Watergate paved
with perfectly comfortable ideas, ideas to sleep on
like a mattress stuffed with money and death,
an actual waterbed filled with liquid gold.
So our inept tuna cravings and Japan’s (she imitates
our foulest features) cost an annual
250,000 particular dolphin deaths,
certainly as dear as people to themselves
or so the evidence says.
Near my lover’s old frame house with a field
behind it, the grass is a brilliant gold.
Standing on the gravel road before the house
a great flock of blackbirds coming over so close
to my head I see them all individually,
eyes, crests, the feet drawn out in flight.
I owe the dentist nine hundred dollars.
This is more than I made on three
of my books of poems. But then I am gloriously
free. I can let my mouth rot and quit
writing poems. I could let the dentist
write the poems while I walked into the dark
with a tray of golden teeth I’d sculpt
for myself in the forms of shark’s teeth,
lion’s teeth, teeth of grizzly and python.
Watch me open my mouth as I wear these wondrous
teeth. The audience gross is exactly nine hundred!
The house lights dim. My lips part.
There is a glimpse of sun.
Abel always votes.
Cain usually thinks better of it
knowing not very deep in his heart
that no one deserves to be encouraged.
Abel has a good job & is a responsible screw,
but many intelligent women seem drawn
to Crazy Horse, a descendant of Cain,
even if he only gets off his buffalo pony
once a year to throw stones at the moon.
Of course these women marry Abel but at bars and parties
they are the first to turn to the opening door
to see who is coming in.
I was standing near the mow door
in the darkness, a party going on in the château.
She was there with her sister.
We kissed then lay down on fresh straw in a paddock.
An angry stallion jumped over on top of us.
I could see his outline clearly against the sky.
Why did we die so long ago.
How wind, cloud and water
blaspheme symmetry at every instant,
forms that can’t be remembered and stored:
Grand Marais, Cape Ann at Eastern Point,
Lake Manyara from a cliff, Boca Grande’s sharks
giving still water a moving shape – they are there
and there and there – the waterfall next to a girl
so obviously on a white horse, to mud
puddle cat avoids, back to Halibut Point,
Manitou convulsed in storms to thousand-mile
weed line in Sargasso Sea to brown violent confluence
of Orinoco and ocean off Devil’s Gate; mixing wind,
cloud, water, the purest mathematics of their
description studied as glyphs, alchemists
everywhere working with humble gold, somewhere to begin,
having to keep eyes closed to wind, cloud, water.
Saw an ox. A black horse I recognized.
A procession of carts full of flowers
pulled by nothing. Asymmetrical planets.
Fish out of their element of water.
Simple music – a single note an hour.
How are we to hear it, if at all?
No music in statement, the lowest denominator
by which our fragments can’t find each other.
But I can still hear the notes of April,
the strained, fragile notes of March:
convalescent, tentative, a weak drink
taken over and over in immense doses.
It is the body that is the suite entire,
brain firmly fused to the trunk, spine
more actual than mountains, brain moving
as a river, governed precisely by her energies.
Whippoorwill. Mourning dove. Hot morning rain
changing to a violent squall coming SSW out of the lake,
thunder enveloping itself then unfolding
as cloth in wind furls, holds back, furls again;
running nearly naked in shorts to my shed,
thunder rattling windows and walls,
acorns rattling against barn’s tin roof;
the floor shudders, then stillness as squall passes,
as strange as a strong wind at summer twilight
when the air is yellow. Now cool still air.
Mourning dove.
Oriole.
O my darling sister
O she crossed over
she’s crossed over
is planted now near her father
six feet under earth’s skin –
their still point on this whirling earth
now and I think forever.
Now it is as close to you as the clothes you wear.
The clothes are attached to your body
by a cord that runs up your spine, out your neck
and through the earth, back up your spine.
At nineteen I began to degenerate,
slight smell of death in my gestures,
unbelieving, tentative, wailing…
so nineteen years have gone. It doesn’t matter.
It might have taken fifty. Or never.
Now the barriers are dissolving, the stone fences
in shambles. I want to have my life
in cloud shapes, water shapes, wind shapes,
crow call, marsh hawk swooping over grass and weed tips.
Let the scavenger take what he finds.
Let the predator love his prey.
NEW POEMS FROM SELECTED & NEW POEMS
to John and Rebecca
1982
NOT WRITING MY NAME
In the snow, that is. The “J” could have been
three hundred yards into the high pasture
across the road. The same with the “I” which I intended
to dot by sprawling and flopping in a drift. The “M”
naturally would have required something more
than twelve hundred yards of hard walking as we
have two empty-bottomed isosceleses to deal with.
What star-crossed jock ego would churn through those
drifts to write a name invisible except to crows?
And the dog would have confused the crows the way
he first runs ahead, then crisscrosses my path.
It’s too cold anyhow – ten below at noon though the sun
would tell me otherwise. And the wind whips coils
and wisps of snow across the hardened drifts and around
my feet like huge ghost snakes. These other signatures:
Vole tracks so light I have to kneel to trace his
circlings which are his name. Vole. And an unknown bird,
scarcely heavier than the vole, that lacks a left foot. Fox tracks
leading up a drift onto my favorite boulder where he swished
his tail, definitely peed, and left. The dog sniffs
the tracks, also pees but sparingly. He might need it later,
he saves his messages. For a moment mastodons float
through the trees, thunderhead colored, stuffing their maws
with branches. This place used to be Africa. Now it’s so cold
there are blue shadows in my footprints, and a blue-shadow
dog runs next to my own, flat and rippling to the snow, less than
paper thick. I try to invoke a crow for company; none appears.
I have become the place the crow didn’t appear.
FROG
First memory
of swimming underwater:
eggs of frogs hanging in diaphanous clumps
from green lily pad stems;
at night in the tent I heard
the father of it all booming
and croaking in the reeds.
ROOSTER
to Pat Ryan
I have to kill the rooster tomorrow. He’s being an asshole,
having seriously wounded one of our two hens with his insistent banging.
You walk into the barn to feed the horses and pick up an egg
or two for breakfast and he jumps her proclaiming she’s mine she’s mine.
Her wing is torn and the primary feathers won’t grow back.
Chickens have largely been denatured, you know. He has no part
in those delicious fresh eggs. He crows on in a vacuum. He is
utterly pointless. He’s as dumb as a tapeworm and no one cares
if he lives or dies. There. I can kill him
with an easy mind. But I’m still not up to it. Maybe I can hire
a weasel or a barn rat to do the job, or throw him to Justine,
the dog, who would be glad to rend him except the neighbors
have chickens too, she’d get the habit and we would have a beloved shot
dog to bury. So he deserves to die, having no purpose. We’ll
that tasteless supermarket chicken born and bred in a caged
darkness. Everything we eat is dead except an occasional oyster
or clam. Should I hire the neighbor boy to kill him? Will the
hens stop laying out of grief? Isn’t his long wavering crow
magnificent? Isn’t the worthless rooster the poet’s bird brother?
No. He’s just a rooster and the world has no place for him.
Should I wait for a full wintry moon, take him to the top of the
hill after dropping three hits of mescaline and strangle him?
Should I set him free for a fox meal? They’re coming back now
after the mange nearly wiped them out. He’s like a leaking roof
with drops falling on my chest. He’s the Chinese torture in the barn.
He’s lust mad. His crow penetrates walls. His head bobs in lunar
jerks. The hens shudder but are bored with the pain of eggs.
What can I do with him? Nothing isn’t enough. In the morning
we will sit down together and talk it out. I will tell him he
doesn’t matter and he will wag his head, strut, perhaps crow.
EPITHALAMIUM
for Peter and Maria
For the first time the wind
blew straight down from the heavens.
I was wandering around the barnyard
about three AM in full moonlight
when it started, flattening my hair
against my head; my dog cowered
between my knees, and the last leaves
of a cold November shot to the ground.
Then the wind slowed and went back to the north.
This happened last night and already at noon
my faith in it is passing.
A REDOLENCE FOR NIMS
O triple sob – turned forty
at midnight – body at dawn
booze-soddened but hopeful,
knowing that the only thing
to remember is dreams.
Dead clear zero, Sunday afternoon
in an attic of a closed resort
on Lake Michigan with one lone
duck
riding the diminishing
swells of yesterday’s storm
against the snowy cliffs of North Manitou:
Whom are we to love?
How many and what for?
My heart’s gone to sea for years.
This is a prayer, plaint, wish,
howl of void beneath breastbone.
Dreams, soul chasers, bring
back my heart alive.
FOLLOWERS
Driving east on buddha’s birthday,
April 9, 1978, past my own birthplace
Grayling, Michigan, south 300 miles to Toledo,
then east again to New York for no reason –
belled heart swinging in grief for months
until I wanted to take my life in my hands;
three crows from home followed above
the car until the Delaware River where
they turned back: one stood all black
and lordly on a fresh pheasant killed
by a car: all this time
counting the mind, counting crows,
each day’s ingredients
the same, barring rare
bad luck
good luck
dumb luck
all set in marble by the habitual,
locked as the day passes moment by moment:
say on the tracks the train can’t
turn 90 degrees to the right because it’s not
the nature of a train,
but we think a man can dive
in a pond, swim across it,
and climb a tree though few of us do.
MY FIRST DAY AS A PAINTER
Things to paint:
my dog (yellow),
nude women,
dead coyote with gray whiskers,
nude women,
a tree full of crows,
nude women,