Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.
Whiteness
Meditations for Melville
i
Whiteness crossed the continent
a poison fog and where it went
villages were vacant
hearths and ways forsaken
Whiteness with greed and iron
makes the deep seas barren
Great migrations fly daylong
into whiteness and are gone
ii
Whiteness in its righteousness
bleaches creatures colorless
tolerates no
shadow
iii
People walk unseeing unseen
staring at a little screen
where the whiteness plays
an imitation of their days
Plugged in their ears white noise
drowns an ancient voice
murmuring to bless
darkness
Geology of the Northwest Coast
The little towns, the driftwood fires
all down the beaches burning …
It will be dark in that night when
the deep basalt shifts and sighs,
headlands collapse, cliffs fail.
Then
the tumult of the sea returning.
And silence.
The slow drift of stars.
We want it to be a sentence on our sin,
our greed, our thriftless wars,
we claim the fault as warning.
But what to them is any act of ours,
the new shores at the dark night’s end,
the beautiful, remorseless morning?
Hymn to Aphrodite
Venus solis occasus orientisque, Dea pacifica,
foam-borne, implacable, tender:
war and storm serve you, and you wear
the fiery tiara of the volcanoes.
Young salmon swimming downriver
and the old upstream to breed and die
are yours, and the fog-drinking forests.
Yours are the scattered emerald half-circles
of islands, the lost islands. Yours
are the sunken warships of the Emperor
and the slow swirl of pelagic polymers.
The moon is your hand-mirror.
Mother of Time and daughter of Destruction,
your feet are light upon the waters.
Death your dog follows you down the beaches
whining to see the breakers break
into blossom, into immortal
foam-flowers, where you have left
the bright track of your passing.
Pity your fearful, foolish children,
O Aphrodite of Fukushima.
MESSENGERS
Element 80
Shifty, elegant Hermes, guide of the traveler,
god of the stockbroker, dealer in margins,
thief and errand-boy, heel-wing’d, swiftest of messengers,
trusted with truth, yet lord of the liars:
Hermes, holding the snake-wreathed staff of the healer,
beautiful poisonous quicksilver element,
silent Mercury, moving lightly, implacably
ahead of us, showing the way into darkness:
peaceful and clear are your eyes, O kindest of con-men.
The Story
It’s just part of a story, actually quite a lot of stories,
the part where the third son or the stepdaughter
sent on the impossible errand through the uncanny forest
comes across a fox with its paw caught in a trap
or little sparrows fallen from the nest
or some ants in trouble in a puddle of water.
He frees the fox, she puts the fledglings in the nest,
they get the ants safe to their ant-hill.
The little fox will come back later
and lead him to the castle where the princess is imprisoned,
the sparrow will fly before her to where the golden egg is hidden,
the ants will sort out every poppyseed for them
from the heap of sand before the fatal morning,
and I don’t think I can add much to this story.
All my life it’s been telling me
if I’ll only listen who the hero is
and how to live happily ever after.
Arion
Arion, my dark-crowned guide
through the long dream, your name
I knew when I was waking
in the dark today before dawn.
Dreams are and are not what they seem.
All that’s made is in the making:
achieved, completed, gone.
Kind, silent presence at my side,
was our way away, or home?
Am I forsaken or forsaking,
brother, lover, stranger, Arion?
Messages
The Serrano Indians knew that earthquakes in high valleys of the Sierra Nevada caused changes in the level of the pools of the Oasis of Mara, far down in the Joshua Tree Desert.
The waters of these quiet pools are troubled
suddenly, sink away into the ground,
shrink down to mud, and then flood upward, turbid,
disturbed; the desert palms all round
shiver in the hot silent air. A hundred
miles away in hills a mile higher,
a valley shudders with subsonic thunder,
an impulse of the earth’s intrinsic fire
moving through lightless arteries to bear
the message of the abyss, the underplaces,
to those far ranges shining high in air
and desert Mara’s shadowy oasis.
The shadowy springs of thought sink down or flow
obeying impulses as deep and strange
from the body’s inwardness, and shaken, we know
the imminence of mystery and change.
The Dream Stone
Seeking the knowledge I only know I lost,
I take the intangible into my hand
to pay the price of what is past all cost.
It is a grey stone lying on my palm.
Its even substance deepens to a mist
and in it moves a fire, contained and calm,
as in a cloudy opal or a hummingbird’s
rose-turquoise breast. These soft, colored flames
speak in their motion without sound or words,
to tell me what it was I knew and lost.
By this remembrance blest, I understand
that I am free, and have come home at last.
I wake to find that I have paid the cost.
I wake to look into my empty hand.
Hermes Betrayed
hommage à R.M.R.
When a god grieves
the deep stones
at the four corners
of the world tremble.
Of all gods, that one!
Lighter than Iris even,
airy, jaunty—the feathered
flutter at cap and ankle,
the quick eyes, the acumen,
the cool aplomb—equally
at home in mid-air,
Olympus, or the underworld—
fleetest of messengers,
wheelerdealer, thief
when a thief was needed,
persuader, trickster.
His greatest charge
was to meet the mortals
who stood bewildered
on the doorstep of their death,
and, silent, reassuring them
with his quicksilver smile,
gently to guide them
on the only way,
the way down
to the long fields of shadow.
And to this task, this trust,
he was always faithful.
&nb
sp; Holding his slender wand
with the thin playful snakes
curling round it, he led
his flock like any shepherd.
He never missed a soul.
Always he took them all
into the darkness,
on the one path, down.
Once, once only, was his task
allowed to change,
wonderfully reversed.
That once, a girl’s hand
in his hand, he could follow,
not lead; could go up,
not down; up to the light.
And his heart was light.
The burden of his deathlessness
weighed ever less
at every step of that
brightening way with her.
And then the fool,
the poet he followed,
broke the promise, betrayed her,
betrayed him—turned.
The only time
in all his endless being
that he might learn
what being mortal was:
and it was gone,
stolen from him by one
who didn’t even need it.
His hand was empty,
the girl already
gone into shadow.
She knew the way down.
He would not grieve.
He leapt up to the light,
airborne and airy.
But the deep stones shook.
FOUR LINES
The Salt
para Gabriela
The salt in the small bowl looks up at me
with all its little glittering eyes and says:
I am the dry sea.
Your blood tastes of me.
March
What opens day’s eye slowly to the
Spring?
Sun-tiger. Solstice wheel.
Vast holy engines of violet and willow.
The planet in the pale sky.
Harney County Catenaries
Aloof and noble, the great buttes
rear up their rimrock, let
their slopes slide motionlessly down
in the necessary curve from heaven.
Artemisia Tridentata
Some ruthlessness befits old age.
Tender young herbs are generous and pliant,
but in dry solitudes the grey-leaved sage
stands unforthcoming and defiant.
Ecola
I walked by the sea-creek side.
The wind laughed, the gulls cried.
Sweet water lapped on salt sand
between the deep sea and the deep land.
Written in the Dark
The lionesses of the mind are dangerous.
Big sinuous dun bodies range
the plains of sleep. The fangs are sharp.
The fire-yellow eyes fix on my heart.
Song
Untongued I turn to still
forgetting all I will.
Light lies the shadow
on the way I go.
Night Sounds
The bell in Iera
No mercy was in that Tuscan bell.
The hard discordant fist of sound
struck each small hour—paused—struck again
in the stone silence of the mountain town.
The trains in Portland
Greedy of sleep, the city has decreed
the grand, companionable travellers must be dumb,
distance and darkness desolate of those voices
crying at far crossings, I come, I come.
The owls in Forest Park
On the remotest edge of hearing,
like the first star uncertain to the eye,
a small trill trembling in tree-shadows.
The wait. The fainter yet reply.
WORKS
Orders
Andromache if you’d known
of the ragged carrion thing
to be dragged round day
after day the walls of Troy
by order of Achilles and had seen
yourself in shame on some gaunt
Greek island Pyrrhus’ slave
when in the windy sunlight
with you Hector laughing on the battlement
lifted up your little son
soon to be thrown to death
from that high wall by order of Ulysses
and the child frightened
by his father’s helmet cried a little
and you laughed again together
in that moment if you’d known
all as we who read Homer know it
what would you have done differently?
The Games
The crowds that cheered me when I took the Gold,
who were they then? Where are they now?
It’s queer to think about. Do they know how
you look at the hurdles, long before you’re old,
and wonder how you ever ran that race?
I’m not sorry, now all’s said and done,
to lie here by myself with nowhere to run,
in quiet, in this immense dark place.
To Her Task-Master
Let me go out and in the door
of your great hall,
serve in your kitchen, sweep your floor.
Old as I am, let me before
I get too old to work at all,
work for you a little more.
As in the past, by owning me
you set me free.
Command my whole obedience,
use my little strength and sense
to shape the end I do not see,
your mystery, my recompense.
Definition, or, Seeing the Horse
i. Dickens’ Hard Times
“Girl Number Twenty, define a horse.”
But Cissie the circus rider
can’t say what a horse is
to the schoolmaster so blinded by abstractions
he can’t see a horse.
ii. Delacroix’s Drawing
This line of ink isn’t around the horse.
It ropes and bridles a certain
thing seen from a certain angle
on a piece of paper, once.
Something’s caught but nothing’s kept.
iii. Judith’s Fear of Naming
She fears that definition will destroy
the secret thingness of the thing,
as if a dictionary could contain
the rhythmic hooves, the nostril widening,
the great hard-beating heart.
To define’s not to confine,
words can’t reach so far.
Even the poet’s line can only hold
a moment of the uncontainable.
The horse runs free.
Dead Languages
Dreadful, this death, dragging
so many lives and lively minds along
after it into unmeaning,
endless, imbecile silence.
The more ways there are to say Mother
the wiser the world is.
Never are there enough
words for Well done! or Welcome!
A line of verse revives lost Aprils.
In the name for Home lie whole nations.
The unused word may be the useful one.
Old nouns are in no hurry.
Old verbs are very patient.
The water of life is learning.
May elders ever tell the mythic origins
in the almost-lost old language
to children cheated of knowledge
of their own holy inheritance.
May myopic scholars scowl
forever at fragments of inscription,
so that the young may yawn
long over grim grammars, learning
to speak the tongues unspoken
and hear a human music otherwise unheard.
California Landscape Paintings at the Portland Art Museum
This big one is called “Mountain Silence,”
but it’s the one beyond it, “The Sierra
Divide,” that holds silence
the way a grey stone bowl holds water.
Looking into the painting
I think how it is itself
silent. How we move in silence
among these painted skies and mountains.
How the charity of a painting,
its gift I will carry out of the museum,
may be its silence,
full and quiet as a bowl of water,
that I can hold later in my soul’s hands
and look into and see how light falls on granite.
My Job
Since keeping house and raising kids
don’t count as jobs, I only ever had one.
I started out as a prentice
at five years old, and at near eighty-five
in most ways I still am one,
being a slow learner. And the work
is quite demanding.
The boss who drives the shiny yellow car
and those nine sisters up there by the spring
are tough, but fair. There’s times
you can’t get them to listen,
but they’ve always got their eye on you.
They don’t let botched work pass.
Sometimes the pay is terrible.
Sometimes it’s only fairy gold.
Then again sometimes the wages
are beyond imagination and desire.
I am glad to have worked for this company.
TIMES
New Year’s Day
An eagle anger with a broken wing
struggles inside my body and strikes blind
to break the iron bars with iron beak.
Far too late now for cure or soft healing.
To such deep injury no hand is kind.
Within me is the way the bird must take,