Like birds’, or the joy of trackless seas,
Columbus’s ships covered with ice,
Palace children dancing among finely worked gold:
III
As I listen, I am a ship, skirting
A thousand harbors, as once, sailing off the coast of Crete,
And turning in, we will find the steep climb from the harbor;
The voyage goes on. The joy of sailing and the open sea!
SOLITUDE LATE AT NIGHT IN THE WOODS
I
The body is like a November birch facing the full moon
And reaching into the cold heavens.
In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves,
Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire!
II
My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn
I must return to the trapped fields,
To the obedient earth.
The trees shall be reaching all the winter.
III
It is a joy to walk in the bare woods.
The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves.
The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth,
Giving off the odor that partridges love.
WATERING THE HORSE
How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse’s mane!
IN A TRAIN
There has been light snow.
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness.
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust.
I have awakened at Missoula, Montana, utterly happy.
SILENCE ON THE ROADS
AFTER WORKING
I
After many strange thoughts,
Thoughts of distant harbors, and new life,
I came in and found the moonlight lying in the room.
II
Outside it covers the trees like pure sound,
The sound of tower bells, or of water moving under the ice,
The sound of the deaf hearing through the bones of their heads.
III
We know the road; as the moonlight
Lifts everything, so in a night like this
The road goes on ahead, it is all clear.
THE CLEAR AIR OF OCTOBER
I can see outside the gold wings without birds
Flying around, and the wells of cold water
Without walls standing eighty feet up in the air,
I can feel the crickets’ singing carrying them into the sky.
I know these cold shadows are falling for hundreds of miles,
Crossing lawns in tiny towns, and the doors of Catholic churches;
I know the horse of darkness is riding fast to the east,
Carrying a thin man with no coat.
And I know the sun is sinking down great stairs,
Like an executioner with a great blade walking into a cellar,
And the gold animals, the lions, and the zebras, and the pheasants,
Are waiting at the head of the stairs with robbers’ eyes.
LAZINESS AND SILENCE
I
On a Saturday afternoon in the football season,
I lie on a bed near the lake,
And dream of moles with golden wings.
While the depth of the water trembles on the ceiling,
Like the tail of an enraged bird,
I watch the dust floating above the bed, content.
I think of ships leaving lonely harbors,
Dolphins playing far at sea,
Fish with the faces of old men come in from a blizzard.
II
A dream of moles with golden wings
Is not so bad; it is like imagining
Waterfalls of stone deep in mountains,
Or a wing flying alone beneath the earth.
I know that far out in the Minnesota lake
Fish are nosing the mouths of cold springs,
Whose water causes ripples in the sleeping sand,
Like a spirit moving in a body.
It is Saturday afternoon. Crowds are gathered,
Warmed by the sun, and the pure air.
After sleeping all night by the lake.
SEPTEMBER NIGHT WITH AN OLD HORSE
I
Tonight I rode through the cornfield in the moonlight!
The dying grass is still, waiting for winter,
And the dark weeds are waiting, as if underwater . . .
II
In Arabia, the horses live in the tents,
Near dark gold, and water, and tombs.
III
How beautiful to walk out at midnight in the moonlight
Dreaming of animals.
NIGHT
I
If I think of a horse wandering about sleeplessly
All night on this short grass covered with moonlight,
I feel a joy, as if I had thought
Of a pirate ship plowing through dark flowers.
II
The box elders around us are full of joy,
Obeying what is beneath them.
The lilacs are sleeping, and the plants are sleeping;
Even the wood made into a casket is asleep.
III
The butterfly is carrying loam on its wings;
The toad is bearing tiny bits of granite in his skin.
The leaves at the crown of the tree are asleep
Like the dark bits of earth at its root.
IV
Alive we are like a sleek black water beetle,
Skating across still water in any direction
We choose, and soon to be swallowed
Suddenly from beneath.
AFTER DRINKING ALL NIGHT WITH A FRIEND, WE GO OUT IN A BOAT AT DAWN TO SEE WHO CAN WRITE THE BEST POEM
These pines, these fall oaks, these rocks,
This water dark and touched by wind—
I am like you, you dark boat,
Drifting over water fed by cool springs.
Beneath the waters, since I was a boy,
I have dreamt of strange and dark treasures,
Not of gold or strange stones, but the true
Gift, beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota.
This morning also, drifting in the dawn wind,
I sense my hands, and my shoes, and this ink—
Drifting, as all of the body drifts,
Above the clouds of the flesh and the stone.
A few friendships, a few dawns, a few glimpses of grass,
A few oars weathered by the snow and the heat,
So we drift toward shore, over cold waters,
No longer caring if we drift or go straight.
OLD BOARDS
I
I love to see boards lying on the ground in early spring:
The ground beneath them is wet, and muddy—
Perhaps covered with chicken tracks—
And they are dry and eternal.
II
This is the wood one sees on the decks of ocean ships,
Wood that carries us far from land,
With a dryness of something used for simple tasks,
Like a horse’s tail.
III
This wood is like a man who has a simple life,
Living through the spring and winter on the ship of his own desire.
He sits on dry wood surrounded by half-melted snow
As the rooster walks away springily over the dampened hay.
LATE AT NIGHT DURING A VISIT OF FRIENDS
I
We spent all day fishing and talking.
At last, late at night, I sit at my desk alone,
And rise and walk out in the summery night.
A dark thing hopped near me in the grass.
II
The trees were breathing, the windmill
slowly pumped.
Overhead the rain clouds that rained on Ortonville
Covered half the stars.
The air was still cool from their rain.
III
It is very late.
I am the only one awake.
Men and women I love are sleeping nearby.
The human face shines as it speaks of things
Near itself, thoughts full of dreams.
The human face shines like a dark sky
As it speaks of those things that oppress the living.
SILENCE
The fall has come, clear as the eyes of chickens.
Strange muffled sounds come from the sea,
Sounds of muffled oarlocks,
And swampings in lonely bays,
Surf crashing on unchristened shores,
And the wash of tiny snail shells in the wandering gravel.
My body also wanders among these doorposts and cars,
Cradling a pen, or walking down a stair
Holding a cup in my hand,
And not breaking into the pastures that lie in the sunlight.
This is the sloth of the man inside the body,
The sloth of the body lost among the wandering stones of kindness.
Something homeless is looking on the long roads—
A dog lost since midnight, a small duck
Among the odorous reeds,
Or a tiny box-elder bug searching for the windowpane.
Even the young sunlight is lost on the windowpane,
Moving at night like a diver among the bare branches silently lying on the floor.
SNOWFALL IN THE AFTERNOON
I
The grass is half-covered with snow.
It was the sort of snowfall that starts in late afternoon,
And now the little houses of the grass are growing dark.
II
If I reached my hands down, near the earth,
I could take handfuls of darkness!
A darkness that was always there, which we never noticed.
III
As the snow grows heavier, the cornstalks fade farther away,
And the barn moves nearer to the house.
The barn moves all alone in the growing storm.
IV
The barn is full of corn, and moving toward us now,
Like a hulk blown toward us in a storm at sea;
All the sailors on deck have been blind for many years.
THE
LIGHT
AROUND
THE
BODY
(1967)
I
THE TWO WORLDS
For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world. . . . Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages.
—Jacob Boehme
THE EXECUTIVE’S DEATH
Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven.
Half the population are like the long grasshoppers
That sleep in the bushes in the cool of the day:
The sound of their wings is heard at noon, muffled, near the earth.
The crane handler dies, the taxi driver dies, slumped over
In his taxi. Meanwhile, high in the air, an executive
Walks on the cool floor, and suddenly falls.
He dreams he is lost in a snowstorm in a mountain,
On which he crashed, carried at night by great machines.
As he lies on the wintery slope, cut off and dying,
A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus.
Commuters arrive in Hartford at dusk like moles
Or hares flying from a fire behind them,
And the dusk in Hartford is full of their sighs;
Their trains come through the air like a dark music,
Like the sound of horns, the sound of thousands of small wings.
THE BUSY MAN SPEAKS
Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of love, nor to the mother of conversation,
Nor to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of tears, nor the mother of the ocean;
Not to the mother of sorrow, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the suffering of death;
Not to the mother of the night full of crickets,
Nor the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.
But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the father
Of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Chase National Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of zeroes;
And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of rocks.
JOHNSON’S CABINET WATCHED BY ANTS
1
It is a clearing deep in a forest: overhanging boughs
Make a low place. Here citizens we know during the day,
The ministers, the department heads,
Appear changed: the stockholders of large steel companies
In small wooden shoes: Here are the generals dressed as gamboling lambs.
2
Tonight they burn the rice supplies; tomorrow
They lecture on Thoreau; tonight they move around the trees,
Tomorrow they pick the twigs from their clothes;
Tonight they throw the firebombs, tomorrow
They read the Declaration of Independence; tomorrow they are in church.
3
Ants are gathered around an old tree.
In a choir they sing, in harsh and gravelly voices,
Old Etruscan songs on tyranny.
Toads nearby clap their small hands, and join
The fiery songs, their five long toes trembling in the soaked earth.
WATCHING TELEVISION
Sounds are heard too high for ears,
From the body cells there is an answering bay;
Soon the inner streets fill with a chorus of barks.
We see the landing craft coming in,
The black car sliding to a stop,
The Puritan killer loosening his guns.
Wild dogs tear off noses and eyes
And run off with them down the street—
The body tears off its own arms and throws them into the air.
The detective draws fifty-five million people into his revolver,
Who sleep restlessly as in an air raid in London;
Their backs become curved in the sloping dark.
The filaments of the soul slowly separate:
The spirit breaks, a puff of dust floats up,
Like a house in Nebraska that suddenly explodes.
SMOTHERED BY THE WORLD
Chrysanthemums crying out on the borders of death,
Lone teeth walking in the icy waters,
Once more the heavy body mourns!
It howls outside the hedges of life,
Pushed out of the enclosure.
Now it must meet the death outside the death.
Living outside the gate is one death,
Cold faces gather along the wall,
A bag of bones warms itself in a tree.
Long and bitter antlers sway in the dark,
The hairy tail howls in the dirt . . .
A DREAM OF SUFFOCATION
Accountants hover over the earth like helicopters,
Dropping bits of paper engraved with Hegel’s name.
Badgers carry the papers on their fur
To their den, where the entire family dies in the night.
A chorus girl stands for hours behind her curtains
Looking out at the street.
In a windo
w of a trucking service
There is a branch painted white.
A stuffed baby alligator grips that branch tightly
To keep away from the dry leaves on the floor.
The honeycomb at night has strange dreams:
Small black trains going round and round—
Old warships drowning in the raindrop.
ROMANS ANGRY ABOUT THE INNER WORLD
What shall the world do with its children?
There are lives the executives
Know nothing of,
A leaping of the body,
The body rolling—and I have felt it—
And we float
Joyfully on the dark places;
But the executioners
Move toward Drusia. They tie her legs
On the iron horse. “Here is a woman
Who has seen our mother
In the other world!” Next they warm
The hooks. The two Romans had put their trust
In the outer world. Irons glowed
Like teeth. They wanted her
To assure them. She refused. Finally they took burning