And here the vacancy in which are met
The vague contingencies of your regret.
Here is the will’s disease. And otherwise
Here is no reparation in surmise.
Here is the white light that touches your white hair.
Replaces you in darkness and despair.
And here where age constricts you, death is dear,
And essences of anguish stay you here.
The Burning
In the numb, numberless days
There were disasters in the distance,
Strange upheavals. No one understood them.
At night the sky was scored with light,
For the far planes of the planet buckled and burned.
In the dawns were intervals of darkness
On the scorched sky, clusters of clouds and eclipse,
And cinders descending.
Nearer in the noons
The air lay low and ominous and inert.
And eventually at evening, or morning, or midday,
At the sheer wall of the wood,
Were shapes in the shadows approaching,
Always, and always alien and alike.
And in the foreground the fields were fixed in fire,
And the flames flowered in our flesh.
The Wound
The wound gaped open;
It was remarkably like the wedge of an orange
When it is split, spurting.
He wanted to close the wound with a kiss,
To graft his mouth to the warm, wet tissue.
He kept about the wound, waiting
And deeply disturbed,
His fascination
Like the inside of the wound itself,
Deep, as deep almost as the life principle,
The irresistible force of being.
The force lay there in the rupture of the flesh,
There in the center of the wound.
Had he been God,
He should Himself have inflicted the wound;
And he should have taken the wound gently,
Gently in his hands, and placed it
Among the most brilliant wildflowers
In the meadows of the mountains.
Forms of the Earth at Abiquiu
For Georgia O’Keeffe
I imagine the time of our meeting
There among the forms of the earth at Abiquiu,
And other times that followed from the one—
An easy contrivance of stories,
And late luncheons of wine and cheese.
All around there were beautiful objects,
Clean and precise in their beauty, like bone.
Indeed, bone: a snake in the filaments of bone,
The skulls of cows and sheep;
And the many smooth stones in the window,
In the flat winter light, were beautiful.
I wanted to feel the sun in the stones—
The ashen, far-flung winter sun—
But this I did not tell you, I believe,
But I believe that after all you knew.
And then, in those days, too
I made you the gift of a small, brown stone,
And you described it with the tips of your fingers
And knew at once that it was beautiful—
At once, accordingly you knew,
As you knew the forms of the earth at Abiquiu:
That time involves them and they bear away,
Beautiful, various, remote,
In failing light, and the coming of cold.
The Gift
For Bobby Jack Nelson
Older, more generous,
We give each other hope.
The gift is ominous:
Enough praise, enough rope.
In the Presence of the Sun, 1992
The Gourd Dancer
Mammedaty, 1880–1932
1. THE OMEN
Another season centers on this place.
Like memory the blood congeals in it;
Like memory the sun recedes in time
Into the hazy, southern distances.
A vagrant heat hangs on the dark river,
And shadows turn like smoke. And owl ascends
Among the branches, clattering, remote
Within its motion, intricate with age.
2. THE DREAM
Mammedaty saw to the building of this house. Just
there, by the arbor, he made a camp in the old way.
and in the evening when the hammers had fallen silent
and there were frogs and crickets in the black grass—
and a low hectic wind upon the pale, slanting plane
of the moon’s light—he settled deep down in his
mind dream. He dreamed of dreaming, and of the
summer breaking upon his spirit, as drums break upon
the intervals of the dance, and of the gleaming gourds.
3. THE DANCE
He dreams, he dreams—
The long wind glances, moves
Forever as a music to the mind;
The gourds are flashes of the sun.
He takes the inward, mincing steps
That conjure old processions and returns.
Dancing,
His moccasins,
His sash and bandolier
Contain him in insignia;
His fan is powerful, concise
According to his agile hand,
And holds upon the deep, ancestral air.
4. THE GIVEAWAY
Someone spoke his name, Mammedaty, in which
his essence was and is. It was a serious matter that his
name should be spoken there in the circle, among the
many people, and he was thoughtful, full of wonder,
and aware of himself and of his name. He walked
slowly to the summons, looking into the eyes of the man
who summoned him. For a moment they held each
other in close regard and all about them there was
excitement and suspense.
Then a boy came suddenly into the circle, leading
a black horse. The boy ran, and the horse after him.
He brought the horse up short in front of Mammedaty,
and the horse wheeled and threw its head and cut
its eyes in the wild way. And it blew hard and quivered
in its hide so that light ran, rippling, upon its shoulders
and its flanks—and then it stood still and was calm.
Its mane and tail were fixed in braids and feathers, and
a bright red chief’s blanket was draped in a roll over
its withers. The boy placed the reins in Mammedaty’s
hands. And all of this was for Mammedaty, in his honor,
as even now it is in the telling, and will be, as long as
there are those who imagine him in his name.
The Stalker
Sampt’e drew the string back and back until he
Felt the bow wobble in his hand, and he let the
Arrow go. It shot across the long light of the
Morning and struck the black face of stone in the
Meadow; it glanced then away towards the west,
Limping along in the air; and then it settled down
In the grass and lay still. Sampt’e approached; he
Looked at it with wonder and was wary; honestly he
Believed that the arrow might take flight again;
So much of his life did he give into it.
Long Shadows at Dulce
1.
September is a long
Illusion of itself;
The elders bide their time.
2.
The sheep camps are lively
With children. The slim girls,
The limber girls, recline.
3.
November is the flesh
And the blood of the black bear,
&n
bsp; Dusk its bone and marrow.
4.
In the huddled horses
That know of perfect cold
There is calm, like sorrow.
Crows in a Winter Composition
This morning the snow,
The soft distances
Beyond the trees
In which nothing appeared—
Nothing appeared.
The several silences,
Imposed one upon another,
Were unintelligible.
I was therefore ill at ease
When the crows came down,
Whirling down and calling,
Into the yard below
And stood in a mindless manner
On the gray, luminous crust,
Altogether definite, composed,
In the bright enmity of my regard,
In the hard nature of crows.
Planned Parenthood
If coupling should but make us whole
And of the selfsame mind and soul,
Then couple let’s in celebration;
We have contained the population.
The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive
Insinuate the sun through fog
upon Pacific Heights, upon the man on horseback,
upon the herd ascending. There is color and clamor.
And there he waves them down,
those great, humpbacked animals,
until their wild grace gone
they lumber and lunge
and blood blisters at their teeth,
and their hooves score the street—
and among boulders they settle on the sea.
He looks after them, twisted round upon his sorrow,
the drape of his flag now full and formal,
ceremonial.
One bull, animal representation of the sun,
he dreams back from the brink
to the green refuge of his hunter’s heart.
It grazes near a canyon wall,
along a ribbon of light, among redbud trees,
eventually into shadow.
Then the hold of his eyes is broken:
on the farther rim the grasses flicker and blur,
a hawk brushes rain across the dusk,
meadows recede into mountains, and here and there
are moons like salmonberries
upon the glacial face of the sky.
Nous avons vu la mer
We have been lovers,
you and I.
We have been alive
in the clear mornings of Genesis;
in the afternoons,
among the prisms of the air,
our hands have shaped perfect silences.
We have seen the sea;
wonder is well known to us.
Wreckage
Had my bones, like the sun,
been splintered on this canyon wall
and burned among these buckled plates,
this bright debris; had it been so,
I should not have lingered so long
among my losses. I should have come
loudly, like a warrior, to my time.
Old Guerre
For Janet
Bertrande: Is he not aged?
Catherine: Yes, Mistress. Greatly aged.
Bertrande: Resentment burdens the heart.
Catherine: And the body keeps time with the heart.
Against his will old Guerre thinks of his son;
You gall me, and I am grown old. You never were.
But, yes, you were. Maybe you are, among soldiers and thieves,
Monks and whores, men of public trust, actors and clowns.
I must not think of you, whom God and I have damned—
It is enough my cloak remarks my daughter’s hand.
She bears the contagion of your abandonment
As if it were a season on the fields, sunlight and dust,
Cloudbursts and cold, those things that do permit at last
Of harvests. Bertrande, the same shame encloses us.
I shall go now across the way. In the valley
In the long reach of the snow, I shall lift up my head.
May you and Sanxi find me, small in the country,
And sign me back farewell. And I too shall disappear.
The Hotel 1829
For a painter
Dusk—and the shimmer of the sea
Has quickened and gone still. The large,
Lithe hurricane birds soar in circles
Beyond the bay, and filmy flamboyants
Stand on the green embankment wavering.
A goat saunters in the street. Its eyes
Gleam in the headlamps like amber
Held up to the moon. Curious,
Seeming not to see, they remain
In after images. She finds them
In the wine, the bright crystal
At her place.
The glitter on the fog is rain;
And in rainy reach, the long beach curves
Out on the glosses, the vault of lights.
She sees oysters shining in their shells.
Her hand on the hard linen, in candlelight,
Expresses her.
In a reflected arc the goat’s eyes,
In the goat’s eyes a random will—and
The late, faint shimmer on the sea.
Great white ships roll in the harbor, illumined
And gracious to the night, their ornaments
Burn on the blur beyond the Hotel 1829.
Concession
Believe the sullen sense that sickness made,
And broke you in its hands.
Believe that death inhabits the mere shade
Intimacy demands.
I drink, my love, to your profound disease;
Its was the better suit.
I could not have provided you this ease,
Nor this peace, absolute.
Woman Waiting on a Porch
Hot and slovenly,
You imagine moving
Towards a bleaker light,
An emptiness.
Go. The soft red morning
Touches strife to your blood.
You imagine
Quiet and ice,
Enough to close
Accounts too lately here,
A dipping of the moon
To the black, jagged range.
Four Charms
1.
My child,
Can you reach those berries,
The red and blue and purple berries?
They are delicious perhaps.
2.
The bear is coming.
There are pitiful cries.
There are knives for mourning.
The bear is coming.
There are bones all about.
There are entrails on the ground.
The bear is coming.
Someone very old has said so.
3.
At the very sight of my horse,
At the very sight of my trappings,
At the very sight of my shield,
You are afraid, aren’t you?
4.
The wind is cold,
Isn’t it?
The moon is dark,
Isn’t it?
The plain is wide,
Isn’t it?
Death dances at the base of that hill.
Rings of Bone
There were rings of bone
On the bandoliers of old men dancing.
Then, in the afternoon stippled with leaves
And the shadows of leaves,
The leaves glistened
And their shine shaped the air.
Now the leaves are dead.
Cold comes upon the leaves
And they are crisped upon the stony ground.
Webs of rime, like leaves, fasten on the mould,
And the wind divides and devours the leaves.
Again the leaves have more or less
to do
With time. Music pervades the death of leaves.
The leaves clatter like the rings of bone
On the bandoliers of old men dancing.
If It Could Ascend
I behold there
The far, faint motion of leaves.
The leaves shine,
And they will shiver down to death.
Something like a leaf lies here within me;
It wavers almost not at all,
And there is no light to see it by—
That it withers upon a black field.
If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth,
I would make a word of it at last,
And I would speak it into the silence of the sun.
My Words Do Not Hold
For my father
My words do not hold,
For I am dead.
Nothing remains of me now—
Nothing now.
I am not there in the range of time,
And my fine hands
Do not make the signs
That meant my love,
That drew respect, that struck fear.
Do you hear?—
My breath ravels on the spool of winter.
Listen:
My words do not hold.
My face darkens in the awful turning,
And,
Listening to the winds that wheel away,
You ask after me
And hear only the winds wheeling.
Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919
This afternoon is older
Than the giving of gifts
And the rhythmic scraping of the red earth.
My father’s father’s name is called,
And the gift horse stutters out, whole,
The whole horizon in its eyes.
In the giveaway is beaded
The blood memories of the fathers and sons.
Oh, there is nothing like this afternoon
In all the miles and years around,
And I am not here,
But, grandfather, father, I am here.
Lawrence Ranch
Lawrence named it Kiowa.
The Lawrence Tree,
Twisted density of black,
Fronts the dawn,
Stakes the silence
Coyotes crack
As they stitch the field.