There will be laughter in my heart
The Holy Ones will look out for me
Visitation at Amherst
She must have mused for centuries.
Celestial buttons at her eyes,
Until no mould could crust her soul,
Whirling in the wind of words.
Fire
Here now
the smoldering minds of men
who tell the stories of themselves
whose imagination flares in the void
They wage the silent wars
burning in conflagrations of thought
and the cinders of the soul
Here now
the thrust and parry of words
in the chronic quarrel with God
the words like sparks
notions like tinder
and reason the whipping of the wind
First Poem
Light edging spears of grass,
Water running through time.
The moon in mist,
Words bleeding.
Meditation on Wilderness
In the evening’s orange and umber light,
There come vagrant ducks skidding on the pond.
Together they veer inward to the reeds.
The forest—aspen, oak, and pine—recedes,
And the sky is smudged on the ridge beyond.
There is more in my soul than in my sight.
I would move to the other side of sound;
I would be among the bears, keeping still,
Not watching, waiting instead. I would dream,
And in that old bewilderment would seem
Whole in a beyond of dreams, primal will
Drawn to the center of this dark surround.
The sacred here emerges and abides.
The day burns down, the hours dissolve in time;
The bears parade the deeper continent
As silences pervade the firmament,
And wind wavers on the radiant rime.
Here is the house where wilderness resides.
Olga
She was a woman of exceptional intelligence and grace. In her native Russia she had earned a most enviable reputation as a linguist and lexicographer. As a girl in the Russian Revolution she suffered severe hardship, and yet she saw to the survival of two young siblings. She had stories to tell. By sheer will she rose to a high position in the Moscow State University. There we met in 1974, behind the Iron Curtain and in the heat of the Cold War. We became fast friends almost at once. She was several decades older than I, but she had kept two remarkable things throughout her life, in spite of the hard times she had endured, a keen sense of humor and a childlike delight in the world. She loved to have people around her, and she seemed to find every one of them interesting. Once we attended a luncheon at which there were a number of high-ranking officials and traditional bureaucrats. There were toasts and preliminary speeches, all of which took a long time. Then the main speaker was introduced, and I whispered to my companion in a sympathetic tone, “I suppose he will speak at great length.” Her eyes sparkled and she replied, “Oh, I hope so!?”
The Galleries
Do you sense them there, the ones
Who invented art, who saw
That we might see? They linger
Now within these galleries,
Mute, marginal in their minds,
And surpassing in their touch.
What masterpieces they wrought,
Images that leapt through time,
Engulfed in the perfect night
Of millennia and cold,
Skeletal stillness, pending,
Closer than the walls around.
How did they reckon future,
Indeed immortality?
The primal forms they imaged
Yet proceed from some beyond.
They remain, undivided
From the dead and vital hand.
Remembering Milosz and “Esse”
She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.
—CZESLAW MILOSZ, “ESSE”
A season of breeze-borne light,
And, in your phrase, “the immensity of existing things,”
Enclosed us there.
Among listeners you read almost in confidence,
Almost in the apology of creation,
And the chord of conscience.
What was it that “Esse” meant to you?
Your voice was grave, in the timbre of loss.
You recited in the measure of the heart’s broken pulse.
I wanted to know you, to have known you
For many years
In the immensity of existing things.
Afterwards you returned to yourself;
You were definitively Milosz, gracious and at ease,
An old man of an old Europe, a gentleman
Of languages. You attempted to name the world,
And in precise syllables you succeeded.
Outside, among the elder trees
And beside the grassy banks of a slow, transparent stream,
You seemed to contemplate an unforgiving history,
and the difference between clouds and their reflection.
Death Song
In the crescent formed
They are fearful in their stance,
Their sashes impaled,
The sun and the moon
Will live forever, but we
Kaitsenko die.
And each soldier holds his place
And the field is won
Or given up to the dead.
Away in the camps
There is bright water running
Between banks of reeds
And prairie turnips. The drone
Of bees a music
On sagebrush and bluebonnets,
Women and children
Frolic among butterflies,
And hawks in the sky
Circle and sail on the wind.
On the trail of time
It is a good day to die.
Dichos
Neither do I believe in time. Time is the red rock and the blue cloud floating above Oljeto.
My horse knows the meeting place of the earth and sky. Rain darkens his flanks. A snake, and the whites of his eyes.
The long arc of the red mesa; it has to be seen at sunrise, when fire informs it from within.
So, the Pedernal is yours. The Valle Grande is mine. We must trade, back and forth, in good relation to each other.
There was malice in the eyes of the eagle, wasn’t there?
Only in the time of roasting is the chili darker than pine needles, and turquoise deeper than the sky.
I dreamed that all the prisms of the air converged on the plaza at Abiquiu.
The patio gate is old. In my memory the woman is old, discerning, not quite humble, almost arrogant, certainly no one but herself. She is a great artist. I am honored.
A Witness to Creation
If you could have that one day back, the one that you have kept a secret in your soul, what day would it be?
What? One among the many? Well, let me make you this offering:
It would be the day on which I stood on the rim of Monument Valley and beheld those ineffable monoliths for the first time. I was young, you see, like a fledgling who leaves the nest and flies out over the earth. I saw beyond time, into timelessness. It was the first and holiest of all days. On such a day—on that original day—did the First Man behold the First World. It filled him with wonder and humility. Then and there, looking for one enchanted moment into eternity, I was the First Man. I was present at Creation.
Sobremesa
Did you chip the calf, Alfredo?
Sí, I chipped the calf, Jose.
Did you ride with your knees, A
lfredo?
With my knees and heart, Jose.
Did your horse sling his head, Alfredo?
Sí, his head was slung low, Jose.
Did he see into the calf’s eyes, Alfredo?
Sí, he saw into the eyes, Jose.
What did he see there Alfredo?
Nada. There was nothing to see, Jose.
You have a fine cutting horse, Alfredo.
Sí, mine is a fine cutting horse, Jose.
Por favor, have one more, Alfredo.
Sí, gracias, one more for the ride, Jose.
Appearances
1
I know
Of certain things:
An advancing glacier.
A stallion on the skyline
At dusk, a snake skin
On a long golden dune.
2
Below
A canyon rim
I saw two horsemen
Singing a riding song.
They knew who they were.
I knew only their knowing.
3
There where
The mountains rise
In the north and the reeds
Bend eastward, I have seen
The edge of a sacred world.
There are the fringes of rain.
4
At dawn
Beyond the buttes
And through fringes of rain,
The sun appears, low in brilliance,
Ranging from the beginning to the end
Of time. There is only prayer to be said.
Arrest
All day under
flailing snow and
there the membrane
of the sky
curdled and gray
beyond a web of limbs
in the cracks of cold
a blackbird holds still
in the center of sight
and I cannot
look away
An Oasis There of Many Colors
It is different now
But in my early childhood
The mouth of Canyon de Chelly—
An oasis there of many colors
And the sounds of dine bizaad
And the sizzle of fry bread—
Must have been among
The four or five best places on earth
Afterimage
Then I passed the open door,
And then the afterimage
Of a presence in the room:
In the instant it regarded me,
And I had been memorized,
Burdened forever by something
In whose sight or sightlessness
I should remain beside myself,
My deepest self without my reach.
Ahead the cold of the corridor
And the afterimage adhering.
The Listener
To one who listens in the cold
Among the black branches
Of trees braced upon the sky,
There are the long voices of wolves
Rising to the tooth of the moon.
Night describes the summits
Until the northern dawn descends,
And in its polar fringes the voices
Of wolves ring into the void.
To one who listens there is dread,
For the darkness of time extends
Beyond light, beyond the call of wolves.
The First Day
The fading moon
and the vanguard of the sun
Alchemy
The immensity of mountains
rising black from the underworld
I behold Creation
In this mindless moment I am intensely alive
There is again the birth of my soul
I am who never was
It is the first day
Revision of the Plains
1.
In the evening there are partings
In the steadfast grass, whipped by rain.
The sky furrows on the dusk.
Cattle cluster in the distance
And sound the drone of hollow land,
Drift spinning in the wake of wind.
There is no anguish in the heart,
Only the nature to abide
And heed the farther darkening,
The heat rising on the currents
Of air. A mere periphery
Of loss describes the will to be.
The random rifts will not assuage.
The crooked rivulets will run
And run out. Other storms will come.
2.
The moon dissolves in bands of smoke
And there is havoc in the trees.
The old storm spirit is about.
We speak brave words to stay its ire.
“Oh Man-ka-ih, pass over me!
We are a people of the sun!”
3.
The river rises in tumult.
The banks, the color of dried blood,
Run down with mud. Dark debris boils
In eddies. Flashes strike among
The crumpled surfaces of foam
And the night cracks and breaks open.
4.
The earth is bathed in violence.
Then stars appear and disappear,
And there emerges a clear dawn.
An isolated animal,
A bull of the Criollo strain,
Saunters to a wallow and drinks.
Blithely it swings its horns and wades
And kneels into the rainwater,
Gazing the far edge of landscape.
A shadow darts across the way,
Succinct, incisive, and remote:
There is revision of the Plains.
Seasons will not absent the soil
But grind it into pottery—
And monuments the russet bluffs.
No storm can sunder this expanse,
For ever will the calm become
Again the genesis of time.
And ever will the sailing sun,
Strike to the center of the eye,
And singe the stillness and the stone.
A Blooming of Appearances
Around a nucleus of reality
There is the vacancy of clouds.
Nearly opaque the massive forms,
But they are vagrant and beyond.
There is no substance, only show,
A blooming of appearances.
Rain falls in the troughs of oceans,
And light, as through a prism,
Imposes arcs of color
On the unreality of clouds.
One sees them, and they sail
In sterile, steady winds. And there,
In the vague dimension of illusion,
They cast empty shadows on the earth.
Sweetgrass
I give you sweetgrass
That you may burn it
That smoke may touch you
That smoke may linger about you
The writhing smoke your dancing
The fragrant smoke your spirit
That the medicine smoke of sweetgrass
May welcome me to you
Rustic Dream
We speak of loss
And rue the gain
And think across
The loss again.
Please ponder this,
This dream of mine:
An edifice
Of ancient pine
In which you lie
On eiderdown,
And snowflakes fly
Above the town,
And on the stove
A potion brews.
The senses rove,
The mind construes.
Severance
One hears the river run,
An occasional rise of wind.
Nothing of the setting sun
Illuminates the wounded mind.
A coalescence of the dead
Will simulate a marching band
And stit
ch the way with lurid thread
And echo silence out of hand.
In faith one is compelled to be
Complicit in apostasy.
Seasonal
Large in grandeur, ripening,
the days went burnished down.
Dusk seared the edge of evening
with cold upon the lawn.
Summer had gathered in the trees
and darkness feathered there
on huddled wings and vagrant leaves,
a season broken bare.
A wind flared in the fields
and random rain became
the silver on the air that yields
to bone and porcelain.
The birds took leave across the hills,
no shadow left behind.
A crescive silence falls and fills
the hollows of the mind.
Rough Rider
The horses went round and round,
And there was a music to their going.
Slowly they leaped and
Slowly they floated down.
Counterclockwise,
One followed upon another.
I rode one of the horses years ago,
A black stallion named Johnnycake.
Annie Oakley dead-eyed a roll-your-own from my lips,
And old Bill himself rallied round the canebrake
And shot a buffalo. I held on to the brass pole
And performed a trick or two. Sitting Bull cheered.
Almost Love
You answer the door laughing;
It is the laughter of welcome.
You take my hand and lead me
As if my hand were a gift.
You make me think I know you,
That I have known you in childhood
And in the winters of war, that
I have lain with you on silver sands
And braided sweetgrass in your hair.
I imagine moonlight on your breasts