Yellow Bird
Where, oh where, has my yellow bird gone?
Has he gone to the ocean? Has he gone to the town?
He has stitched up the steeple with hardly a sound
and the bells haven't rung, haven't rung.
Where, oh where, has my yellow bird gone?
Does he sing in the orchard? Does he sleep by the pond?
He has plucked a black spider and swallowed it down
and he leaves its torn web on the ground.
Where, oh where, has my yellow bird gone?
Have his feathers been scattered, like leaves in the wind?
He has flown to the well where his shadow falls in
as he lands on the stones of its rim.
Where, oh where, has my little life gone?
Have I nothing to guide me, and cold days to come?
I have seen his bright body approaching the sun
and his feathers have turned into flame.
Page 12
What the Wind Said to the Girl Who Was Afraid
When he comes for you, that dark gentleman, fear,
tell him you already know him,
that you're not the foolish bride that he thinks,
that even in the crevices and chinks
of your own mind, things get carried away.
That you gaze into the arms
of trees, into a vacant night
where desire tears every dream apart.
That you walk on a path and hope it will stray.
That each twist from what's safe breaks a wish
like a curious seed
where the weeds of the wilderness mesh.
He can have the run of your house.
He can have the ruin of your grace.
He and the sadness that keeps circling nearer,
like a song you were born with and slowly remember,
like a song you were humming, and later divine.
That fine-limbed and bold as the delicate deer
on the gold hill at morning, whose legs turn to stone
at a sound, but who doesn't stop chewing the leaf
on its tongue while its body stands frozen, aware,
you believe in the constant infringement of pleasure.
You believe in the hill of your pleasure, not fear.
You too will not run. Your life will be moving
its teeth when he comes. He'll be bitten in half
while the wind in your spirit whips over the grass.
Oh how pure is that wind! It runs harder and faster
than death. It runs like a silvery fox,
like a flourish of foxes who don't have a doubt.
And you will push fear, that dark gentleman, out.
Page 13
The Fall
For Milton's Satan
heaven was a chill place,
too much already realized.
He had nothing to taste.
What he hadn't yet seen
seemed to him like real paradise.
Sometimes, beauty means
an ecstatic indifference
that freezes the heart.
It is cold. It is cold.
And it stays on its throne.
But you have to begin,
as a woman begins
when she turns from observing
the face of her youth
in a glass or a mirror-
the face she had once.
It's that turn to existence
when you stop thinking Am I?
or Should I? or When?
but instead, I'm outside
the cold dreaming of heaven.
I have fallen at last,
and you enter the world.
Page 14
The Tenderness
for Neil
A strong doe running with her young
is an unfathomable thing. In this late light
the trees form a craggy embrace
for her searching, and nothing's at rest.
Not the hill, not the fawn she defends,
not the pasture of clover and grass
but pursuance of movement itself
is her meaningthe absence of stone.
that running must be her existence.
Sometimes she is splintered. Sometimes
her own child and its tenderness catches
on the adamant surface of flight
We are lucky to come upon this
as we barrel headlong through the world
in our hard, narrow armor of self,
to come upon some kind of tenderness
turned, for a moment, to us.
Even if we stand defenseless
and certain to lose what we want,
we are lucky to notice her stop
in the grey morning mist, the sharp upward
incline to the heart of our forest,
this fleeting but palpable guest.
Page 15
The Hammered Dulcimer
The novice can't use her hands well.
Their frailty reminds her of twigs
but she tries to make sounds. First she holds,
very lightly, between timid fingers,
the foreign, cool weight of a hammer
(so small) made of maple or spruce
and nervously taps several strings.
Her next notes aren't crystalline bells
but splintered, exploding, with trouble,
the questions discordance inspires.
Is this me? Will the painful get better?
The girl sits alone in a room,
or else she's surrounded by faces.
No matter. She's lost in the order
her flapping hands make: tiny errors
eked out of her into the air
that crash on her body like water.
But the fine strings lie under each hammer.
Over those, her bent body casts shadow,
a flat but imperious shadow
more sprawling, more dark, than the dulcimer's
wood. Oh the intimate shadow!
A raven hunched down in late sun
in her yard closes wings not in prayer
but downward, to heed small dark thoughts.
This raven, which seems nihilistic,
shifts and flickers: green, indigo, violet,
as if some new garden were opened
in darkness to please the great sun
who sits on her throne of blue weather.
Page 16
More slowly, an insect discovers
rough orange wings, bright green feet, whatever
its form needs to burst into song.
And the raven believes it is best.
And the insect has found its own rhythm,
a low parchment hum, as the dulcimer
responds to her troublesome fingers
(or responds to the small wooden hammers,
for through those, she must reach the fine strings).
The girl's back stays turned on the shadow
which hulks in the wings of her music
while the people in mind or around her,
growing bored now, begin to complain:
"This novice's noises make trouble.
We want more than all her harsh fumbling.
We want her to play a real song."
But she finds this new failure exciting,
as if minor spaces broke open
in the sounds she thought major, complete.
So she tries to ignore the pale sounds
of the people who murmur in protest;
it's essential her effort be focused
not on song, but on what guides her heart
through resemblances plucked on the strings . . .
The flat shadow waits. It expects
her to straighten. She's turned to the dulcimer
though the people are drifting away,
drifting far from th
e fields discord brings,
and the raven, the intricate insect,
are nestled in burgeoning trees.
"We know what we like," think the people.
You're playing it wrong, cries the dulcimer.
A chord hovers over the strain.
Page 17
Complaint
There is no mother in this night,
only the trees, with their strong backs,
their proud chests curved over the creek.
There is no mother. Why did we think
if we walked into darkness we would find her?
Why did I think
if I asked you for nothing, you would find me?
Walking into darkness is like
walking into an absence of questions:
there's a kind of peace settling down,
an inestimable reference,
a lack of desperation.
The wind goes on its way.
The eyes move through the grass.
Description takes its place
piece by piece, loss by loss.
There is no mother in this night
which pours its warm limbs over us
like a lover without motive,
without hidden interests,
like a lover that simply is.
It is good, how the self exists
and would be centered, strong, and proud
in its own right.
Page 18
Eve, after Eating
It had nothing to do with God,
what had made her
plunge her teeth into fate,
and nothing to do with hunger.
The shape of her lust
was not one of those globed fruits.
Nor was the pleasure
of pulp on her tongue
as simple as Truth
spilling seeds in the mind.
The snake wasn't so clever,
"Empress" this, "Goddess" that.
She saw through his compliments.
It was simply a choice,
to open an error,
to pluck from the branch
of knowledge and abundance
as it had been defined.
Her mouth filled with juice.
Her blood filled with song.
The plant at the center,
the growth in the heart,
the self and its lover,
are joined in this art . . .
A strange afternoon.
Afterwards,
she lay on the ground
listening to the wind
as it paused in the orchards,
hoping they wouldn't come yet
death, god, the man.
She needed to think for a while,
and to learn.
Page 19
Man Walking
In the evening when walking
he looks on the scene
with an eye full of time.
See, say the trees standing tall.
Us, say the clouds floating high.
Aim, say the stalks in a row.
And he wants to drift up
where the first twigs erupt
in the bright, in the cold,
where their cracklings delineate
finer and finer
small strokes of intent
like an orderly art.
In the evening when walking
he looks on the scene
with its blue simple light
and would like to be bold.
Here, says the burgeoning mud.
You, say the houses of wood.
Move, says the moon to its kind
through the branches that cover the mind
and it goes when he goes,
and it stops when he stops,
like a rhyme.
Page 20
Black Horses
Black horses on a yellow hill
against a clouded sky.
How can desire go unfulfilled
or run from you and I
Not run, but simply wander past
as if it had the wish
to find a greener circumstance
beyond our small request.
Black horses on a yellow hill
so stalwart, so serene.
What the heart may want today
does not a lifetime mean.
Longing, like those bodies dark
and curved with skin and bone,
may find a hill, may find a dale,
but not a solid home.
Black horses on a yellow hill
against a clouded sky
Not any creature, good or ill,
can calculate the eye.
Page 21
The Growth
I heard a weed cry in a dream
let me in, let me in.
It grew on a hill outside my window,
was gnawed by cicadas, taunted by crows,
but still had five leaves
large as tortoises, and near the earth
a stem rotted brown. How the roots thrived
I couldn't guess, but in my dream
the weed bent its stem and slid
down to the luminescent pane
next to my bed, where I lay thinking
about pain. I saw its fringed head
nod. I saw the liquid drum
through its huge green vein.
It looked and looked at my infant life
until I felt my heart crack,
disintegrate, and swell up in my throat
like a brilliant adventure
that hadn't yet occurred.
And I woke up and whispered
(for the dark seemed fruitless)
Oh rancid, blooming mystery,
how long before your messenger
will come for me?
Page 22
Manners, 1977
My grandmother took me for a ride
in her brand new turquoise glide
of a car, with doors for fins.
We sank in the fabulous plush,
soft leather like family skin,
the windows opening at will.
Wish had become mechanical.
My grandmother steered the way
through complicated streets,
through the old, Southern sights.
We moved in clouds of blue:
hot blue, Amazon River blue.
We were partners in luxury.
The sidewalks jumped, then disappeared.
Birds sprang in various directions.
We were calm. We didn't care.
There were tiny, tree-lined roads,
and streets of rowdy schoolchildren.
We passed the hospital, the pharmacy,
the house behind the highest fence,
another house we'd lived in once,
its same old willow weeping.
My grandmother had silver hair
that dazzled anyone who noticed.
She'd worked for years at duty.
The Lincoln suited her slow beauty.
We passed, serenely,
our favorite, blooming neighborhoods,
vast mansions we would never enter
that is, would never see together.
Page 23
The sun was certain; the sky one view.
No news of what lay just ahead.
Or was it miles and miles of pleasure
as we stretched our azure limbs?
Only my dazzling grandmother
could make the whole town take us in.