and brakes, fluttering
in a cloud of snow he pushed aside.
“THIS IS COLD SALT…”
This is cold salt
a pulled tooth
the freshly set bone:
the girl who left my bed this morning,
who smiled last night as her slip
floated to the floor,
my Roselita,
today up on Amsterdam Avenue
I saw her with her Manuelo.
JOHN SEVERIN WALGREN, 1874–1962
Trees die of thirst or cold
or when the limit’s reached;
in the hole in the elm
the wood is soft and punky –
it smells of the water of a vase
after the flowers are dumped.
You were so old we could not weep;
only the blood of the young,
those torn off earth in a night’s sickness,
the daughter lying beside you
who became nothing so long ago –
she moves us to terror.
GARDEN
Standing at the window at night
my shadow is the length of the garden –
I move a huge arm and
cause plants to spring up,
tomatoes to ripen.
My head is as large
as a strawberry bed and I can
cup two bales of straw in one hand.
I take pride in this strength,
fed by light and darkness,
wielded against my father’s garden –
a lord of shadows.
HORSE
A
quarter horse, no rider
canters through the pasture
thistles raise soft purple burrs
her flanks are shiny in the sun
I whistle and she runs
almost sideways toward me
the oats in my hand are sweets to her:
dun mane furling in its breeze,
her neck
corseted with muscle,
wet teeth friendly against my hand –
how can I believe
you ran under a low maple limb
to knock me off?
MALEDICTION
Man’s not a singing animal,
his tongue hangs from a wall –
pinch the stone
to make a moan
from the throat
a single note
breaks the air
so bare and harsh
birds die.
He’s crab-necked from cold,
song splits his voice
like a lake’s ice cracking.
His heart’s a rock,
a metronome, a clock,
a foghorn drone of murder.
God, curse this self-maimed beast,
the least of creatures,
rivet his stone with worms.
WORD DRUNK
I think of the twenty thousand poems of Li Po
and wonder, do words follow me or I them –
a word drunk?
I do not care about fine phrases,
the whoring after honor,
the stipend, the gift, the grant –
but I would feed on an essence
until it yields to me my own dumb form –
the weight raw, void of intent;
to see behind the clarity of my glass
the birth of new creatures
suffused with light.
YOUNG BULL
This bronze ring punctures
the flesh of your nose,
the wound is fresh
and you nuzzle the itch
against a fence post.
Your testicles are fat and heavy
and sway when you shake off flies;
the chickens scratch about your feet
but you do not notice them.
Through lunch I pitied
you from the kitchen window –
but when I came with cold water
and feed, you bellowed and heaved
against the slats wanting to murder me.
PARK AT NIGHT
Unwearied
the coo and choke
of doves
the march of stone
an hour before dawn.
Trees caged to the waist
wet statues
the trickling of water –
in the fountain
floating across the lamp
a leaf
some cellophane.
GOING BACK
How long, stone, did it take
to get that fat?
The rain made the furrow a rut
and then among the mint and nettles
you make your appearance.
Sink again, you might cover bones.
HITCHHIKING
Awake:
the white hand of
my benefactor
drums on the seat
between us.
The world had become orange
in the rearview mirror
of a ’55 Pontiac.
The road was covered with bugs
and mist coiled around
great house-sized rocks
and in the distance buried them.
Village. Passed three limp
gas stations then one
whose windows exploded with fire.
My mouth was filled with plastic cups.
Final item:
breakfast, nurtured
by a miraculous hatred.
SOUND
At dawn I squat on the garage
with snuff under a lip
to sweeten the roofing nails –
my shoes and pant cuffs
are wet with dew.
In the orchard the peach trees
sway with the loud
weight of birds, green fruit, yellow haze.
And my hammer – the cold head taps,
then swings its first full arc;
the sound echoes against the barn,
muffled in the loft,
and out the other side, then lost
in the noise of the birds
as they burst from the trees.
DEAD DEER
Amid pale green milkweed, wild clover,
a rotted deer
curled, shaglike,
after a winter so cold
the trees split open.
I think she couldn’t keep up with
the others (they had no place
to go) and her food,
frozen grass and twigs,
wouldn’t carry her weight.
Now from bony sockets,
she stares out on this
cruel luxuriance.
LI HO
Li Ho of the province of Honan
(not to be confused with the god Li Po
of Kansu or Szechwan
who made twenty thousand verses),
Li Ho, whose mother said,
“My son daily vomits up his heart,”
mounts his horse and rides
to where a temple lies as lace among foliage.
His youth is bargained
for some poems in his saddlebag –
his beard is gray. Leaning
against the flank of his horse he considers
the flight of birds
but his hands are heavy. (Take this cup,
he thinks, fill it, I want to drink again.)
Deep in his throat, but perhaps it is a bird,
he hears a child cry.
COMPLAINT
Song, I am unused to you –
When you come
your voice is behind trees
calling another by my name.
So little of me comes out to you
I bury you in sleep
or pour more wine, or lost in another’s
music, I forget that you ever spoke.
If you come again, come with
Elias! Elias! Elias!
If only once the summons were a roar,
a pillar of light,
I would not betray you.
RETURN
The sun’s warm against the slats of the granary,
a puddle of ice in the shadow of the steps;
a bluetick hound lopes
across the winter wheat –
fresh green, cold green.
The windmill, long out of use,
screeches and twists in the wind.
A spring day too loud for talk
when bones tire of their flesh
and want something better.
LOCATIONS
to Herbert Weisinger
1968
WALKING
Walking back on a chill morning past Kilmer’s Lake
into the first broad gully, down its trough
and over a ridge of poplar, scrub oak, and into
a larger gully, walking into the slow fresh warmth
of midmorning to Spider Lake where I drank
at a small spring remembered from ten years back;
walking northwest two miles where another gully
opened, seeing a stump on a knoll where my father
stood one deer season, and tiring of sleet and cold
burned a pine stump, the snow gathering fire-orange
on a dull day; walking past charred stumps blackened
by the ’81 fire to a great hollow stump near a basswood
swale – I sat within it on a November morning
watching deer browse beyond my young range of shotgun
and slug, chest beating hard for killing –
into the edge of a swale waist-high with ferns,
seeing the quick movement of a blue racer,
and thick curl of the snake against a birch log,
a pale blue with nothing of the sky in it,
a fleshy blue, blue of knotted veins in an arm;
walking to Savage’s Lake where I ate my bread
and cheese, drank cool lake water, and slept for a while,
dreaming of fire, snake and fish and women in white
linen walking, pinkish warm limbs beneath white linen;
then walking, walking homeward toward Well’s Lake,
brain at boil now with heat, afternoon glistening
in yellow heat, dead dun-brown grass, windless,
with all distant things shimmering, grasshoppers, birds
dulled to quietness; walking a log road near a cedar swamp
looking cool with green darkness and whine of mosquitoes,
crow’s caw overhead, Cooper’s hawk floating singly
in mateless haze; walking dumbly, footsore, cutting
into evening through sumac and blackberry brambles,
onto the lake road, feet sliding in the gravel,
whippoorwills, night birds wakening, stumbling to lake
shore, shedding clothes on sweet moss; walking
into syrupy August moonless dark, water cold, pushing
lily pads aside, walking out into the lake with feet
springing on mucky bottom until the water flows overhead;
sinking again to walk on the bottom then buoyed up,
walking on the surface, moving through beds of reeds,
snakes and frogs moving, to the far edge of the lake
then walking upward over the basswood and alders, the field
of sharp stubble and hay bales, toward the woods,
floating over the bushy crests of hardwoods and tips
of pine, barely touching in miles of rolling heavy dark,
coming to the larger water, there walking along the troughs
of waves folding in upon themselves; walking to an island,
small, narrow, sandy, sparsely wooded, in the middle
of the island in a clump of cedars a small spring
which I enter, sliding far down into a deep cool
dark endless weight of water.
SUITE TO FATHERS
for Denise Levertov
I
I think that night’s our balance,
our counterweight – a blind woman
we turn to for nothing but dark.
In Val-Mont I see a slab of parchment,
a black quill pen in stone.
In a sculptor’s garden
there was a head made from stone,
large as a room, the eyes neatly hooded
staring out with a crazed somnolence
fond of walled gardens.
The countesses arch like cats in châteaux.
They wake up as countesses and usually sleep with counts.
Nevertheless he writes them painful letters,
thinking of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Gaspara Stampa.
With Kappus he calls forth the stone in the rose.
In Egypt the dhows sweep the Nile
with ancient sails. I am in Egypt,
he thinks, this Baltic jew – it is hot,
how can I make bricks with no straw?
His own country rich with her food and slaughter,
fit only for sheep and generals.
He thinks of the coffin of the East,
of the tiers of dead in Venice,
those countless singulars.
At lunch, the baked apple too sweet with kirsch
becomes the tongues of convent girls at gossip,
under the drum and shadow of pigeons
the girl at promenade has almond in her hair.
From Duino, beneath the mist,
the green is so dark and green it cannot bear itself.
In the night, from black paper
I cut the silhouette of this exiled god,
finding him as the bones of a fish in stone.
II
In the cemetery the grass is pale,
fake green as if dumped from Easter baskets,
from overturned clay and the deeper marl
which sits in wet gray heaps by the creek.
There are no frogs, death drains there.
Landscape of glass, perhaps Christ
will quarry you after the worms.
The newspaper says caskets float in leaky vaults.
Above me, I feel paper birds.
The sun is a brass bell.
This is not earth I walk across
but the pages of some giant magazine.
Come song,
allow me some eloquence,
good people die.
The June after you died
I dove down into a lake,
the water turned to cold, then colder,
and ached against my ears.
I swam under a sunken log then paused,
letting my back rub against it,
like some huge fish with rib cage
and soft belly open to the bottom.
I saw the light shimmering far above
but did not want to rise.
It was so far up from the dark –
once it was night three days,
after that four, then six and over again.
The nest was torn from the tree,
the tree from the ground,
the ground itself sinking torn.
I envied the dead their sleep of rot.
I was a fable to myself,
a speech to become meat.
III
Once in Nevada I sat on a boulder at twilight –
I had no ride and wanted to avoid the snakes.
I watched the full moon rise a fleshy red
out of the mountains, out of a distant sandstorm.
I thought then if I might travel deep enough
I might embrace the dead as equals,
not in their separate stillness as dead, but in music
one with another’s harmonies.
The moon became paler,
rising, floating upward in her arc
and I with her, intermingled in he
r whiteness,
until at dawn again she bloodied
herself with earth.
In the beginning I trusted in spirits,
slight things, those of the dead in procession,
the household gods in mild delirium
with their sweet round music and modest feasts.
Now I listen only to that hard black core,
a ball harsh as coal, rending for light
far back in my own sour brain.
The tongue knots itself
a cramped fist of music,
the oracle a white-walled room of bone
that darkens now with a greater dark;
and the brain a glacier of blood,
inching forward, sliding, the bottom
silt covered but sweet,
becoming a river now
laving the skull with coolness –
the leaves on her surface
dipping against the bone.
Voyager, the self the voyage –
dark, let me open your lids.
Night stares down with her great bruised eye.
SUITE TO APPLENESS
I
If you love me drink this discolored wine,
tanning at the edge with the sourness of flowers –
their heads, soldiers’, floating as flowers,
heads, necks, owned by gravity now as war
owned them and made them move to law;
and the water is heavier than war, the heads
bobbing freely there with each new wave lap.
And if your arm offends you, cut it off.
Then the leg by walking, tear out the eye,
the trunk, body be eyeless, armless, bodiless.