the self in the mirror,
nude women,
a favorite cloud,
nude women,
a worn-out scalpel,
nude women,
dead friends,
nude women ages 14–80 (12–82),
call me wherever you are at noon
in the glory of noon light,
bring your dogs and birds,
everybody is welcome:
nude women spinning in godlike whirls
creating each other in endless
streams of human eggs!
WAITING
There are no calls from the outside.
Miracles are the perversity of literature.
We should know that by now.
Only that these never-revealed connections of things
lead us oddly on. Caesar’s legions
entering Greenland’s ice, the scout far in front
wanting to do battle where there are
no enemies,
never were any enemies.
NOON
Spring: despondency,
fall: despair,
onset of winter
a light rain in the heart
the pony tethered to the telephone
pole day after day until he’s eaten
the circle, moved to another pole,
another circle: winter never deepens
but falls dead upon the ground,
body of the sky whirled
in gray gusts:
from Manitoba stretched brains
of north; heat for heart, head,
in smallest things – dry socks,
strange breasts, an ounce of sun
glittering above the blue shadows
of the barn.
BIRTHDAY
The masques of dream – monk in his
lineage – what does he wear to shield
himself? First shield made of a cloud,
second – a tree, third – a shadow; and
leading to the stretched coils of light
(how they want to gather us up
with our permission), three men.
Two dead tho’ dead is supernumerary.
The cause is the effect.
He laughed like a lake would
but only once, never twice into the same
mystery. Not ever to stop but only
to drop the baggage, to shed the
thirty-ninth skin.
CLEAR WATER 3
Ah, yes. Fame never got anyone
off the hook, it seems. Some poignant
evidence to be offered here in McGuane.
There’s a cutoff beyond which a certain
number of people know you exist for various
reasons, good or bad or with a notorious
indifference. Said Spicer:
My vocabulary did this to me. Meaning
what he was, near death in an alcoholic ward.
Crane or Cavafy. Alcohol as biography
more surely than serial poems. I doubt it.
We are drawn to where we end like water
for reasons of character, volume, gravity,
the sound we make in passing/not all the sounds
we made in passing in one place – a book.
Each day’s momentum of voice carrying
backward and forward to the limits, beginning
and end. We drink to enchant our voices,
to heal them, to soothe with laughter, to glide
awhile. My words kill, killed, me, my lord. Yes.
DŌGEN’S DREAM
What happens when the god of spring
meets spring? He thinks for a moment
of great whales traveling from the bottom
to the top of the earth, the day the voyage
began seven million years ago
when spring last changed its season.
He enters himself, emptiness
desiring emptiness. He sleeps
and his sleep is the dance of all the birds
WEEPING
for Dave Kelly from long ago
Six days of clouds since
I returned from Montana,
a state of mind out West.
A bleak afternoon in the granary killing flies and wasps.
Sitting on a zafu watching flies.
Two days ago a sandhill crane flew over
so low I could see an eyeball clearly cocked
toward my singular own.
As I drink I miss more flies.
I am searching out the ecstatic life
with flyswatter and wineglass in hand,
the sky above an inverted steel sink.
I am looking for weeping
which is a superior form of rest.
Can’t there be dry weeping? Nope.
Dry weeping is like dry fucking
which most of us remember as unsatisfying.
Wet fucking is another story
but not the object here, though decidedly
more interesting than weeping.
I would frankly like to throw
myself around and have some real passion.
Some wet passion! to be sure.
At nineteen in 1957 on Grove Street in NY
I could weep about art, Hart Crane, my empty
stomach, homesickness for pheasants and goldenrod,
Yesenin’s suicide, a red-haired girl with an improbable
butt, my dad planting the garden alone.
It was a year in which I wrung out pillowcases at dawn.
But this is the flip side of the record, a log
of the search for weeping. I’ve been dry
for a decade and it isn’t panning out.
Like a Hollywood producer I sit by a pool
and hatch inane plots against the weeping imagination,
spinning wheels, treading water,
beating the mental bishop,
flogging the mental clam,
pulling the mental wire
like a cub scout in a lonely pup tent.
I’m told I laugh too much.
I laugh deeply at Johnny Carson monologues,
at my poetry, at health food & politics,
at the tragic poetry of others, at the weedy garden,
at my dog hitting the electric fence,
at women freeing themselves when I am in bondage,
at the thought of my death.
In fact I’m tickled pink with life.
I actually have a trick to weep but it’s cheating.
I used it once when I was very drunk.
I thought of the deaths of my wife and daughters.
I threw myself to the floor weeping.
I wept horribly and shook, gnashed my teeth.
I must die before them.
THE CHATHAM GHAZAL
It is the lamp on the kitchen table
well after midnight saying nothing but light.
Here are a list of ten million measurements.
You may keep them. Or throw them away.
A strange warm day when November has forgotten
to be November. Birds form shrill clouds.
Phototropiques. We emerge upward from liquid.
See the invisible husks we’ve left behind called memories.
The press wonders how we drink so much poison and stay
alive. The antidote is chance, mobility, sleeplessness.
They’ve killed another cow. With the mountain of guts
I also bury all of the skins of thirty-seven years.
MARRIAGE GHAZAL
for Peter & Beck
Hammering & drifting. Sea wrack. Cast upon & cast out.
Who’s here but shore? Where we stop is where shore is.
I saw the light beyond mountains turned umber by morning.
I walked by memory as if I had no legs. Or head.
In a bed of reeds I found my body and entered it,
taking my life u
pon myself, the soul made comfortable.
So the body’s a nest for the soul and we set out inland,
the figure of a walker who only recognized the sea and moon.
And coming to the first town the body became a chorus –
O my god this is a place or thing and I’ll stay awhile.
The body met a human with fur and the moon mounted her head
in an arc when she sat & they built a boat together.
MARCH WALK
I was walking because I wasn’t upstairs sitting.
I could have been looking for pre-1900 gold coins
in the woods all afternoon. What a way to make a living!
The same mastodon was there only three hundred years from
where I last saw him. I felt the sabers on the saber tooth,
the hot wet breath on the back of my hand. Three deer
and a number of crows, how many will remain undisclosed:
It wasn’t six and it wasn’t thirty. There were four girls
ranging back to 1957. The one before that just arrived
upstairs. There was that long morose trip into the world
hanging onto my skin for a quarter of a mile, shed with some
difficulty. There was one dog, my own, and one grouse
not my own. A strong wind flowed over and through us like
dry water. I kissed a scar on a hip. I found a rotting
crab apple and a distant relative to quartz. You could spend
a lifetime and still not walk to an island. I met none of the
dead today having released them yesterday at three o’clock.
If you’re going to make love to a woman you have to give
her some of your heart. Else don’t. If I had found a gold coin
I might have left it there with my intermittent interest in
money. The dead snipe wasn’t in the same place but the rocks
were. The apple tree was a good place to stand. Every late fall
the deer come there for dessert. They will stand for days
waiting for a single apple to tumble from the upmost limb.
THE WOMAN FROM SPIRITWOOD
Sleeping from Mandan to Jamestown,
waking near Spiritwood in the van,
shrinking in fever with the van
buffeted by wind so that it shudders,
the wind maybe fifty knots straight N by NW
out of Saskatchewan. Stopping for gas we see men
at the picnic tables cleaning the geese they’ve shot:
October first with the feathers carried off by the wind
into fields where buffalo once roamed, also
the Ogalala & Miniconjou Sioux roamed in search
of buffalo and Crazy Horse on a horse that outlived him.
She comes out of the station, smiling, leaning into the wind.
She is so beautiful than an invisible hand reaches
into your rib cage and twists your heart one notch
counterclockwise. There is nowhere to go.
I’ve been everywhere and there’s nowhere to go.
The talk is halting, slow until it becomes
the end of another part of the future.
I scratch gravel toward and from this wound,
seeing within the shadow that this shadow casts
how freedom must be there
before there can be freedom.
GATHERING APRIL
for Simic
Stuffing a crow call in one ear
and an unknown bird’s in the other,
lying on the warm cellar door out of
the cool wind which I take small sparing
bites of with three toes still wet from the pond’s
edge: April is so violent up here you hide
in corners or, when in the woods, in swales
and behind beech trees. Twenty years ago
this April I offered my stupid heart up to
this bloody voyage. It was near a marsh
on a long walk. You can’t get rid of those
thousand pointless bottles of whiskey
that you brought along. Last night after
the poker game I read Obata’s Li Po.
He was no less a fool but adding those
twenty thousand poems you come up
with a god. There are patents on all
the forms of cancer but still we praise
god from whom or which all blessings flow:
that an April exists, that a body lays itself
down on a warm cellar door and remembers, drinks
in birds and wind, whiskey, frog songs
from the marsh, the little dooms hiding
in the shadow of each fence post.
WALTER OF BATTERSEA
for Anjelica
I shall commit suicide or die
trying, Walter thought beside
the Thames – at low tide and very
feminine.
Picture him: a cold November day,
the world through a long lens; he’s
in new blue pants and races the river
for thirty-three steps.
Walter won. Hands down. Then lost
again. Better to die trying! The sky
so bleak. God blows his nose above
the Chelsea Flour Mills.
What is he at forty, Nov. 9, 1978, so far
from home: grist for his own mill; all
things have become black-and-white
without hormonal surge.
And religious. He’s forgiven god
for the one hundred ladies who turned him
down and took him up. O that song –
I asked her for water and she gave
me kerosene.
No visions of Albion, no visions at all,
in fact, the still point of the present winding
about itself, graceful, unsnarled. I am
here today and gone tomorrow.
How much is he here? Not quite with
all his heart and soul. Step lightly
or the earth revolves into a berserk
spin. Fall off or dance.
And choosing dance not god, at least
for the time being. Things aren’t what
they seem but what they are – infinitely
inconsolable.
He knows it’s irony that’s least
valuable in this long deathwatch.
Irony scratching its tired ass. No trade-offs
with time and fortune.
It’s indelicate to say things twice except
in prayer. The drunk repeats to keep
his grasp, a sort of prayer: the hysteria
of the mad, a verbless prayer.
Walter recrossed the bridge which was
only a bridge. He heard his footsteps
just barely behind him. The river is not
where it starts and ends.
AFTER READING TAKAHASHI
for Lucien, Peter, and Whalen
Nothing is the same to anyone.
Moscow is east of Nairobi
but thinks of herself as perpetually west.
The bird sees the top of my head,
an even trade for her feathered belly.
Our eyes staring through the nose bridge
never to see each other.
She is not I, I not her.
So what, you think, having little
notion of my concerns. O that dank
basement of “so what” known by all
though never quite the same way.
All of us drinking through a cold afternoon,
our eyes are on the mirror behind
the bottles, on the snow out the window
which the wind chases fruitlessly,
each in his separateness drinking,
talk noises coming out of our mouths.
In the corner a pretty girl plays pinball.
I have no language to talk to her.
I
have come to the point in life when
I could be her father. This was never true before.
The bear hunter talked about the mountains.
We looked at them together out of the
tavern window in Emigrant, Montana.
He spent fifty years in the Absaroka Mountains
hunting grizzly bears and, at one time, wolves.
We will never see the same mountains.
He knows them like his hands, his wife’s
breasts and legs, his old dog sitting outside
in the pickup. I only see beautiful mountains
and say “beautiful mountains” to which he nods
graciously but they are a photo of China to me.
And all lessons are fatal: the great snowy owl
that flew in front of me so that
I ducked in the car; it will never happen again.
I’ve been warned by a snowy night, an owl,
the infinite black above and below me to look
at all creatures and things with a billion eyes,
not struggling with the single heartbeat
that is my life.
THE THEORY & PRACTICE OF RIVERS & NEW POEMS
In Memoriam
GLORIA ELLEN HARRISON
1964–1979
1985, 1989
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RIVERS
The rivers of my life:
moving looms of light,
anchored beneath the log
at night I can see the moon
up through the water
as shattered milk, the nudge
of fishes, belly and back
in turn grating against log
and bottom; and letting go, the current
lifts me up and out
into the dark, gathering motion,
drifting into an eddy