Blessings then on the man who labors
In his tiny room, writing stanzas on the lamb;
Blessings on the woman, who picks the brown
Seeds of solitude in afternoon light
Out of the black seeds of loneliness.
And blessings on the dictionary maker, huddled among
His bearded words, and on the setter of songs
Who sleeps at night inside his violin case.
A SACRIFICE IN THE ORCHARD
The man with the Roman nose sits high
on the roof ridge, longs for it
to be Saturday. And moles
begin crossing the lawn,
thousands of moles,
the grief-stricken parents
come behind in closed cars.
Come with me, we will
sink on this blue raft
down through acres
of continental water. Shaggy
goats bound from the earth.
Over them, men
hang from the branches.
They are all apples. The side
of the apple gleams,
and in that gleam
all the water on the planet
plunges down at once. . . .
MY WIFE’S PAINTING
1
I walk on a gravel path through cut-over
Woods. November’s bare light has arrived.
I come at dusk
Where, sheltered by poplars, a low pond lies.
The sun abandons the sky, speaking through cold leaves.
2
This Tang painting is called “The Six Philosophers.”
Five Chinamen talk in the open-walled house,
Exchanging poems.
Only one is outdoors, looking over
The cliff, being approached from below by rolling mists.
3
A deer comes down the bare slope toward me,
Sees me, turns away, back up the hill
Into the lone trees.
It is a doe out in the cold and air alone.
It is the woman turned away from the philosopher’s house.
4
It’s an old, long story. After Heraclitus dies,
The males sink down to a-pathy,
To not-suffering.
When you shout at them, they don’t reply.
They turn their face toward the crib wall, and die.
5
My wife showed me yesterday her new
Painting. One bird of hers, a lively one,
Had come.
It was a large bird with big feet,
And stubby wings, arrows lightly stuck in the arms.
MY FATHER’S WEDDING
1924
Today, lonely for my father, I saw
a log, or branch,
long, bent, ragged, bark gone.
I felt lonely for my father when I saw it.
It was the log
that lay near my uncle’s old milk wagon.
Some men live with an invisible limp,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Only recently I thought:
Doing what you want . . .
Is that like limping? Tracks of it show in sand.
Have you seen those giant bird-
men of Bhutan?
Men in bird masks, with pig noses, dancing,
teeth like a dog’s, sometimes
dancing on one bad leg!
They do what they want, the dog’s teeth say that!
But I grew up without dogs’ teeth,
showed a whole body,
left only clear tracks in sand.
I learned to walk swiftly, easily,
no trace of a limp.
I even leaped a little. Guess where my defect is!
Then what? If a man, cautious
hides his limp,
somebody has to limp it! Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
On my father’s wedding day,
no one was there
to hold him. Noble loneliness
held him. Since he never asked for pity
his friends thought he
was whole. Walking alone, he could carry it.
He came in limping. It was a simple
wedding, three
or four people. The man in black,
lifting the book, called for order.
And the invisible bride
stepped forward, before his own bride.
He married the invisible bride, not his own.
In her left
breast she carried the three drops
that wound and kill. He already had
made rough especially to repel the sympathy
he longed for, didn’t need, and wouldn’t accept.
They stopped. So
the words are read. The man in black
speaks the sentence. When the service
is over, I hold him
in my arms for the first time and the last.
After that he was alone
and I was alone.
No friends came; he invited none.
His two-story house he turned
into a forest,
where both he and I are the hunters.
FOUR WAYS OF KNOWLEDGE
1
So many things happen
when no one is watching.
Yesterday Peter and I
arrived on the island
to visit Iolani Luahine,
the old holy dancer.
We couldn’t find her.
Later that night, he
dreamt he flew out,
saw her temple ahead,
but grew tired, faltered,
turned back, saw me
standing by the window,
caught the balcony
railing, pulled himself in.
I was not there;
instead a woman with claw
feet and hands met him.
She intended to pull
all that he had
out through his navel.
What to do . . . to stall her.
To fight or to flee—
He didn’t know. He wanted
to fight and to flee.
His feet in tennis shoes
moved back and forth,
rubbing the carpet.
I awoke at four, hearing
the sound of shoe soles
scuffing the soft rug.
Peter was still asleep
and in his bed. When
I called his name,
the sound of shoe soles
stopped. At breakfast
he mentioned his dream.
2
Now I have gone alone
to write by the ocean,
and watch the fish
between rocks.
I feel my eyes
open below the water.
Some power I cannot see
moves these small fish.
The sunlit ocean approaches
and recedes, rolling in
on its black lava base.
So much happens
when no one is watching,
perhaps because
no one is watching.
Pirates bring their ship in
when night has come;
the dancer becomes beautiful
when men see her
no longer; the movie becomes
clear when all
the actors are dead.
Earth is a thicket of thistles
waiting for the Wild Man.
Everything is in motion,
even what is still.
The planet turns, and cows
wait for the grassblades
to come rushing to their mouths.
3
I know there is someone
wh
o tries to teach us.
He has four ways
to do that: First
is Memory, chosen.
I remember that I fell
one Sunday—I was three
or four—from my parents’
car; I saw it leaving
me on the road.
My parents do not recall it.
If we ignore that, he
waits till we are asleep,
opens the images, borrows
faces, turns men into turtles.
I dreamt that I sat
in a chair, and every other
second I disappeared.
That didn’t reach me;
I went on with no change.
Then he moves, inter-
feres with matter, books fall
Two strangers in one day
speak the same sentence.
The funeral is over;
the telephone rings;
or tennis shoes
that have no molecules
wake a sleeper.
If we still learn nothing,
then he turns to accidents,
disease, suffering,
lost letters, torpid sleeps,
disasters, catatonia.
We walk, the glass
mountain opens, we fall
in. I usually ignore
the earlier three,
and learn by falling.
This time we live it,
and only awaken years later.
FIFTY MEN SITTING TOGETHER
1
After a long walk in the woods clear cut for lumber,
Lit up by only a few young pines,
I turn home,
Drawn to water. A band of shadow
Softens half the lake,
Draws the shadow
Down from westward hills.
I see in that massive
Masculine shadow
Fifty men sitting together
In hall or crowded room,
Lifting something indistinct
Up into the resonating night.
2
Near shore, reeds stand about in groups
Unevenly as if they might
Finally ascend
To the sky all together!
Each reed has its own
Thin thread
Of darkness inside so
It is relaxed
And rooted in the mud.
So the son who has lived
Protected by the mother lives protected
By reeds in the joy of the half-darkness.
3
The woman stays in the kitchen, and does not want
To waste fuel by lighting a lamp,
As she waits
For the drunk husband to come home.
Then she serves him
Food in silence.
What does the son do?
He cleaves to her,
Looks down,
Goes outdoors to feed with wild
Things, lives in the reeds,
Pulls away from men,
Reaches upward, looks to the sky, ascends.
4
How far he is from working men when he is forty!
From all men! The men singing
Chant far out
On the water grounded in downward shadow.
He cannot go there because
He still hopes
He will not die. He will
Not throw
Himself into the shadow.
The dark comes down slowly,
The way snow falls,
Or herds pass a cave mouth.
I look up at the other shore; it is night.
CRAZY CARLSON’S MEADOW
Crazy Carlson cleared this meadow alone.
Now three blue
jays live in it.
Crazy Carlson cleared it back to the dark firs.
Feminine poplars have stepped out
in front, now
he is dead,
winding their leaves slowly in the motionless October air,
leaves midway between pale green and yellow,
as if a yellow
scarf were floating
six inches down in the Pacific. Old fir branches
above and below make sober
octopus caves,
inviting as the dark-
lidded eyes of those women on islands who live in bark huts.
A blue sky rises over the trees, pure blue,
too pure and blue.
There is no room
for the dark-lidded boys who longed to be Hercules.
There is no room even for Christ.
He broke off
his journey toward the Father,
and leaned back into the Mother’s fearful tree.
He sank through the bark. The energies the Sadducees
refused him
turned into nails,
and the wine of Cana turned back to vinegar.
Blessings on you, my king, broken
on the poplar tree.
Your shoulders quivered
like an aspen leaf before the storm of Empire.
You fell off then, and the horse galloped away
into the wind without
you and disappeared
into the blue sky. Did you both reach the Father’s house?
But the suffering is over now, all
consequences finished,
the lake closed
again, as before the leaf fell, all forgiven, the path ended.
Now each young man wanders in the sky alone,
ignoring the absent
moon, not knowing
where ground is, longing once more for the learning
of the fierce male who hung for nine days only
on the windy tree.
When he got down,
darkness was there, inside the folds of darkness words hidden.
KNEELING DOWN TO LOOK INTO A CULVERT
I kneel down to peer into a culvert.
The other end seems far away.
One cone of light floats in the shadowed water.
This is how our children will look when we are dead.
I kneel near floating shadowy water.
On my knees, I am half inside the tunnel—
blue sky widens the far end—
darkened by the shadowy insides of the steel.
Are they all born? I walk on farther;
out in the plowing I see a lake newly made.
I have seen this lake before . . . it is a lake
I return to each time my children are grown.
I have fathered so many children and returned
to that lake—grayish flat slate banks,
low arctic bushes. I am a water-serpent, throwing water drops
off my head. My gray loops trail behind me.
How long I stay there alone! For a thousand years
I am alone, with no duties, living as I live.
Then one morning a feathery head pokes from the water.
I fight—it’s time—it’s right—and am torn to pieces fighting.
LOVING
A WOMAN
IN TWO
WORLDS
(1985)
I
THE INDIGO BUNTING
I go to the door often.
Night and summer. Crickets
Lift their cries.
I know you are out.
You are driving
Late through the summer night.
I do not know what will happen.
I have no claim on you.
I am one star
You have as guide; others
Love you, the night
So dark over the Azores.
You have been working outdoors,
Gone all week. I feel you
In this lamp lit
So late. As I reach for it
I feel myself
Driving through the nig
ht.
I love a firmness in you
That disdains the trivial
And regains the difficult.
You become part then
Of the firmness of night,
The granite holding up walls.
There were women in Egypt who
Supported with their firmness the stars
As they revolved,
Hardly aware
Of the passage from night
To day and back to night.
I love you where you go
Through the night, not swerving,
Clear as the indigo
Bunting in her flight,
Passing over two
Thousand miles of ocean.
“OUT OF THE ROLLING OCEAN, THE CROWD . . .”
It is not only the ant that walks on the carpenter’s board alone,
Nor the March turtle on his boulder surrounded by March water . . .
I know there are whitecaps that are born and die alone,
And a rocky pasture, and a new one nearby, with a path between.
There are branchy stalks, dropped to the ground last summer,
And tires, half worn-down, lifted to the gas-station-owner’s rack.
All of them I saw today, and all of them were dear to me,
And the rough-barked young cottonwood alone on the windy shore.
Behind matter there is some kind of heat, around and behind things,
So what we experience is not the turtle nor the night
Only, nor the rising whirlwind, nor the certainty, nor the steady gaze,
Nor the meeting by the altar, nor the rising sun only.
THE WHOLE MOISTY NIGHT
The Viking ship sails into the full harbor.
The body meets its wife far out at sea.
Its lamp remains lit the whole moisty night.
Water pours down, faint flute notes in the sound of the water.
SECRETS
I walk below the over-bending birches,
birches that arch together in the air.