From the depths,” then we know
He did not care.
For not to care is this:
To love the orphans
And the fatherless,
To dance as we sink
Into the badger’s grief,
To let the resonating
Box of the body sound,
Not to ask to be loved.
HOW THE SAINT DID NOT CARE
When we start westward
In Spain, we wander
Through vast expanses;
Among harsh gulleys
We find Roman leg-
Bones, Carthaginian
Spearheads, the bitter
Cross that betrayed so many.
When men and women lifted
The saint’s body onto
A wagon, it was a lilac
Bush moving through
The French fields, so that
The reapers paused:
The fragrance shows how much
He did not care.
Who is it that can break
The hold the Cross has on us—
No not the Cross, the wolf
That eats up our desire.
Those who do not care
Retrieve one instant of time.
They dive as the cormorant
Dives after living fish.
HOW JONAH DID NOT CARE
When have we had enough?
When we can turn our head,
Say no to the dog-headed,
Furry-nosed, anus-
Eyed beast of duty,
Give payback to God.
Friends, remember no one
Can see his own ears.
When Jonah sat
Shaded by the spindly
Leaves of a gourd,
Hot in the desert
Sand, he didn’t care, nor
Did the worm who that night
Chewed the stalk
So that the gourd fell.
For not to care is this:
To love the sunlight,
As it falls on the table,
To leap out of misery
Once or twice
Like a great fish
Before falling
Back into the ocean.
THE DARK EGG
A man bends over the gunwales,
Gazes into the sea
Hour after hour, sees
A lion rising upward.
If he looks to the sky, he sees
A dark egg perfectly
Visible in the Crow’s
Stickly nest.
When the Terrible Nurse
Took Vincentine by the
Waist, and threw her
Into the ocean, a whale
Poured her into
His copious throat,
And there she lived
Without husband or children.
What does it matter,
Suffering or not! Bad
Parents, or good
Parents, luck or none—
Let us agree to climb
The trunk of the Crow’s tree,
And steal the Black
Egg from his nest!
HOW MIRABAI DID NOT CARE
My mother gave me body,
My father a black
Overcoat for the soul.
Now it is time to
Love the third power,
On bones and leaves
From beneath the earth.
Mirabai, night after night,
Let herself down castle
Walls on saris to visit
Her low-born teacher.
When she washed his old
Feet and drank the water,
Any idiot would know
She did not care.
Glimpsing the grave ahead,
The body leaps up,
Cries, “What if death
Comes, what if it all ends!”
Let it end—let the sand
And the ocean part,
Let it be, let
Heaven and earth go their ways.
TIME RUNS BACKWARD AFTER DEATH
1
Samson, grinding bread for widows and orphans,
Forgets he is wronged, and the answers
The Philistines wrangled out of him go back
Into the lion. The bitter and the sweet marry.
He himself wronged the lion. Now the wheat
Caresses the wind with its wifely tail; the donkey
Runs in the long grass; and having glimpsed heaven,
The fox’s body saunters the tawny earth.
2
After death the soul returns to drinking milk
And honey in its sparse home. Broken lintels
Rejoin the sunrise gates, and bees sing
In the sour meat. Once more in the cradle his
Hair grows long and golden; Delilah’s scissors
Turn back into two tiny and playful swords.
Samson, no longer haunted by sunset and shadows,
Sinks down in the Eastern ocean and is born.
MORNING
POEMS
(1997)
I
EARLY MORNING IN YOUR ROOM
It’s morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasplike
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water—
It seems you’ve traveled years to get here.
Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least.
Or maybe it was confusion. But that’s over.
Now you have a room. Those light-hearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka’s Letter
To His Father, are all here. You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling
With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That’s what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home.
THE SHOCKS WE PUT OUR PITCHFORKS INTO
The shocks said that winter
Was coming. Each stood there,
Said, “I’ve given myself away.
Take me. It’s over.”
And we did. With the shiny tips
Of our forks, their handles so
Healthy and elegant,
We slipped each bundle free,
Gave it to the load.
Each bundle was like
A soul, tucked back
Into the cloud of souls.
That’s how it will be
After death—such an abundance
Of souls, all together—
None tired, in the heavy wagon.
WHY WE DON’T DIE
In late September many voices
Tell you you will die.
That leaf says it. That coolness.
All of them are right.
Our many souls—what
Can they do about it?
Nothing. They’re already
Part of the invisible.
Our souls have been
Longing to go home
Anyway. “It’s late,” they say.
“Lock the door, let’s go.”
The body doesn’t agree. It says,
“We buried a little iron
Let’s go get it.”
HAWTHORNE AND THE ELEPHANT
Hawthorne’s walking stick—very short—lay
Under glass at the Customs House. On the wharf,
A crab shell, emptied by a gull, lies alone.
His walking sticks lie near . . . but the crab is gone,
Like Hawthorne. Bedrooms were low;
You were taxed for high ceilings in those days.
Ships brought licorice and peppers. Hawthorne’s father
Died of a f
ever off the coast of Sumatra,
Guides say, and America, his ship, brought
The first elephant here in 1794.
Water got short on the way; to save the elephant
They gave her thirty bottles of beer a day.
She—Bette—died in Maine, an alcoholic.
How alert we were at the House of Seven Gables!
Clifford’s room is the little one up the secret stairs.
THE OLD WOMAN FRYING PERCH
For Donald Hall
Have you heard about the boy who walked by
The black water? I won’t say much more.
Let’s wait a few years. It wanted to be entered.
Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand
Reaches out and pulls him in.
There was no
Malice, exactly. The pond was lonely, or needed
Calcium. Bones would do. What happened then?
It was a little like the night wind, which is soft,
And moves slowly, sighing like an old woman
In her kitchen late at night, moving pans
About, lighting a fire, frying some perch for the cat.
CONVERSATION WITH THE SOUL
The soul said, “Give me something to look at.”
So I gave her a farm. She said,
“It’s too large.” So I gave her a field.
The two of us sat down.
Sometimes I would fall in love with a lake
Or a pinecone. But I liked her
Most. She knew it.
“Keep writing,” she said.
So I did. Each time the new snow fell,
We would be married again.
The holy dead sat down by our bed.
This went on for years.
“This field is getting too small,” she said.
“Don’t you know anyone else
To fall in love with?”
What would you have said to Her?
HE WANTED TO LIVE HIS LIFE OVER
What? You want to live your life over again?
“Well, I suppose, yes . . . That time in Grand Rapids . . .
My life—as I lived it—was a series of shynesses.”
Being bolder—what good would that do?
“I’d open my door again. I’ve felt abashed,
You see. Now I’d go out and say, ‘All right,
I’ll go with you to Alaska.’ Just opening the door
From inside would have altered me—a little.
I’m too shy . . .” And so, a bolder life
Is what you want? “We could begin now.
Just walk with me—down to the river.
I’ll pretend this boat is my life . . . I’ll climb in.”
THE GLIMPSE OF SOMETHING IN THE OVEN
Childhood is like a kitchen. It is dangerous
To the mice, but the husband gets fed; he’s
An old giant, grumbling and smelling children.
The kitchen is a place where you get smaller
And smaller, or you lose track. In general
You become preoccupied with this old lady
In the kitchen. . . . She putters about, opens oven doors.
The thing is the old woman won’t discuss anything.
The giant will. He’s always been a fan of Aristotle,
Knew him at school. It is no surprise to him
That the Trojan War lasted ten years, or how it
Ended. He knows something you don’t.
Your sister says, “Say, what’s that in the oven?”
BAD PEOPLE
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks—what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams—that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god—who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.
THINGS TO THINK
Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
TWO WAYS TO WRITE POEMS
“I am who I am.” I wonder what one has to pay
To say that. I couldn’t do it. For years
I thought, “You are who you are.” But maybe
You weren’t. Maybe you were someone else.
Sam’s friend, who loved poetry, played football
In school even though he didn’t want to.
He got hit. Later he said to me, “I write poems.
I am who I am . . . but my neck hurts.”
How many times I have begun a poem
Before I knew what the main sounds
Would be. We find out. Toward the end
The poem is just beginning to be who it is.
That’s all right, but there’s another way as well.
One picks the rhyme words, and so the main
Sounds, before one begins. I wonder what
Yeats had to pay in order to do that.
THE BARN AT ELABUGA
What is it like to “get killed”? Getting killed
Happens during a war a lot to horses and people.
This time there’s no long struggle in the bedroom,
No hoarse cries and confessions after which the clock
Stops, and the priest needs some coffee in the kitchen.
Just being killed leaves you small and unattached.
The boy aiming the mortar makes a mistake
And horses crazed by the noise kill your father
While he is feeding geese. Those times our family
Died that way hasn’t left any mark on us.
But I could ask why my thumb keeps moving
Around my forefinger when I read, or why that line
Comes down from my mouth. We do know that people
At the end of a war tend to hang themselves
In the nearest barn, without telling anyone.
THE RUSSIAN
“The Russians had few doctors on the front line.
My father’s job was this: after the battle
Was over, he’d walk among the men hit,
Sit down and ask: ‘Would you like to die on your
Own in a few hours, or should I finish it?’
Most said, ‘Don’t leave me.’ The two would have
A cigarette. He’d take out his small notebook—
We had no dogtags, you know—and write the man’s
Name down, his wife’s, his children, his address, and what
He wanted to say. When the cigarette was done,
The soldier would turn his head to the side. My father
Finished off four hundred men that way during the war.
He never went crazy. They were his people.
He came to Toronto. My father in the summers
Would stand on the lawn with a hose, watering
The grass that way. It took a long time. He’d talk
To the moon, to the wind. ‘I can hear you growing’—
He’d say to the grass. ‘We come and go.
We’re no different from each other. We are all
Part of something. We have a home.’ When I was thirteen,
I said, ‘Dad, do you know they’ve invented sprinklers
Now?’ He went on watering the grass.
‘This is my life. Just shut up if you don’t understand it.’”
II
SOME MEN FIND IT HARD TO FINISH SENTENCES
Sometimes a man can’t say
What he . . . A wind comes
And his doors don’t rattle. Rain
Comes and his hair is dry.
“There’s a lot to keep inside
And a lot to . . .” “Sometimes shame
Means we . . .” Children are cruel.
“He’s six and his hands . . .”
Even Hamlet kept passing
The King praying
And the King said,
“There was something . . .”