The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. – Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled! – Rome’s azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here They have departed; thou shouldst now depart! A light is past from the revolving year, And man, and woman; and what still is dear Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. The soft sky smiles, – the low wind whispers near: ’Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither, No more let Life divide what Death can join together. That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Beauty in which all things work and move, That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
I found a ball of grass among the hay And progged it as I passed and went away; And when I looked I fancied something stirred, And turned again and hoped to catch the bird – When out an old mouse bolted in the wheats With all her young ones hanging at her teats; She looked so odd and so grotesque to me, I ran and wondered what the thing could be, And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood; Then the mouse hurried from the craking brood. The young ones squeaked, and as I went away She found her nest again among the hay. The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love – then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind’s masonry. Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he For number or proportion. Mockingly, On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths; A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall, Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate, A tapering turret overtops the work. And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow.
41 I thank all who have loved me in their hearts, With thanks and love from mine. Deep thanks to all Who paused a little near the prison-wall, To hear my music in its louder parts, Ere they went onward, each one to the mart’s Or temple’s occupation, beyond call. But thou, who in my voice’s sink and fall, When the sob took it, thy divinest Art’s Own instrument, didst drop down at thy foot, To hearken what I said between my tears,… Instruct me how to thank thee! Oh, to shoot My soul’s full meaning into future years, That they should lend it utterance, and salute Love that endures! with Life that disappears!
43 How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of everyday’s Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise; I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith; I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints, – I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
44 Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers Plucked in the garden, all the summer through And winter, and it seemed as if they grew In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers. So, in the like name of that love of ours, Take back these thoughts, which here unfolded too, And which on warm and cold days I withdrew From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue, And wait thy weeding: yet here’s eglantine, Here’s ivy! – take them, as I used to do Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine; Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true, And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine.
25 Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.
26 Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the Wise To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies; One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.
27 Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same Door as in I went.
28 With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow, And with my own hand labour’d it to grow: And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d – “I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour’d of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,– Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me – That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads – you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Cold in the earth – and the deep snow piled above thee, Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave?
Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover Over the mountains, on that northern shore, Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover Thy noble heart forever, ever more?
Cold in the earth – and fifteen wild Decembers, From those brown hills, have melted into spring: Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers After such years of change and suffering!
Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee, While the world’s tide is bearing me along; Other desires and other hopes beset me, Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!
No later light has lightened up my heaven, No second morn has ever shone for me; All my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given, All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.
But, when the days of golden dreams had perished, And even Despair was powerless to destroy, Then did I learn how existence could be cherished, Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.
Then did I check the tears of useless passion – Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine; Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten Down to that tomb already more than mine.
And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?
Flood-tide of the river, flow on! I watch you, face to face, Clouds of the west! sun half an hour high! I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross are more curious to me than you suppose, And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, The simple, compact, well-joined scheme – myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme, The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings – on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others – the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore, Others will watch the run of the flood-tide, Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, Others will see the islands large and small, Fifty years hence others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high, A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, Will enjoy the sun-set, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
It avails not, neither time or place – distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, I project myself, also I return – I am with you, and know how it is.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river, and the bright flow, I was refreshed, Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried, Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.
I too many and many a time crossed the river, the sun half an hour high, I watched the December sea-gulls, I saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings oscillating their bodies, I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, I saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south.
I too saw the reflection of the summer-sky in the water. Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams, Looked at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sun-lit water, Looked on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward, Looked on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet, Looked toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships, Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me, Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor, The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars, The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants, The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses, The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels, The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set, The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening, The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks, On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flanked on each side by the barges – the hay-boat, the belated lighter, On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night, Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.
These and all else were to me the same as they are to you, I project myself a moment to tell you – also I return.
I loved well those cities, I loved well the stately and rapid river, The men and women I saw were all near to me, Others the same – others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them, The time will come, though I stop here today and tonight.
What is it, then, between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us? Whatever it is, it avails not – distance avails not, and place avails not.
I too lived, I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it; I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution, I too had received identity by my body, That I was, I knew was of my body, and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw patches down upon me also, The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Would not people laugh at me?
It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil, I am he who knew what it was to be evil, I too knitted the old knot of contrariety, Blabbed, blushed, resented, lied, stole, grudged, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, a solitary committer, a coward, a malignant person, The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me, The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting, Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.
But I was a Manhattanese, free, friendly, and proud! I was called by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing, Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat, Saw many I loved in the street, or ferry-boat, or public assembly, yet never told them a word, Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping, Played the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like, or as small as we like, or both great and small.
Closer yet I approach you, What thought you have of me, I had as much of you – I laid in my stores in advance, I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me? Who knows but I am enjoying this? Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
It is not you alone, nor I alone, Not a few races, not a few generations, not a few centuries, It is that each came, or comes, or shall come, from its due emission, without fail, either now, or then, or henceforth.
Every thing indicates – the smallest does, and the largest does, A necessary film envelops all, and envelops the soul for a proper time.
Now I am curious what sight can ever be more stately and admirable to me than my masthemm’d Manhatta, my river and sun-set, and my scallop-edged waves of flood-tide, the sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter, Curious what gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach, Curious what is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face, Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you.
We understand, then, do we not? What I promised without mentioning it, have you not accepted? What the study could not teach – what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplished, is it not? What the push of reading could not start is started by me personally, is it not?
Flow on, river! Flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide! Frolic on, crested and scallop-edged waves! Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set, drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me! Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers! Stand up, tall masts of Manahatta! – stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn! Bully for you! you proud, friendly, free Manhattanese! Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers! Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution! Blab, blush, lie, steal, you or I or any one after us! Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly! Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name! Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress! Play the old role, the role that is great or small, according as one makes it! Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you! Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current! Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air! Receive the summer-sky, you water! faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you! Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sun-lit water! Come on, ships, from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sailed schooners, sloops, lighters! Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lowered at sun-set! Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at night-fall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses! Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are! You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul! About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas! Thrive, cities! Bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers! Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual! Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting!
We descend upon you and all things, we arrest you all, We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids, Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality, Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb beautiful ministers! you novices! We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward, Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us, We use you, and do not cast you aside – we plant you permanently within us, We fathom you not – we love you – there is perfection in you also, You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Even in the bluest noonday of July, There could not run the smallest breath of wind But all the quarter sounded like a wood; And in the chequered silence and above The hum of city cabs that sought the Bois, Suburban ashes shivered into song. A patter and a chatter and a chirp And a long dying hiss – it was as though Starched old brocaded dames through all the house Had trailed a strident skirt, or the whole sky Even in a wink had over-brimmed in rain. Hark, in these shady parlours, how it talks Of the near Autumn, how the smitten ash Trembles and augurs floods! O not too long In these inconstant latitudes delay, O not too late from the unbeloved north Trim your escape! For soon shall this low roof Resound indeed with rain, soon shall your eyes Search the foul garden, search the darkened rooms, Nor find one jewel but the blazing log.
When I was young the twilight seemed too long,
How often on the western window seat
I leaned my book against the misty pane
And spelled the last enchanting lines again,
The while my mother hummed an ancient song,
Or sighed a little and said: “The hour is sweet!”
When I, rebellious, clamoured for the light.
But now I love the soft approach of night,
And now with folded hands I sit and dream
While all too fleet the hours of twilight seem;
And thus I know that I am growing old.
O granaries of Age! O manifold
And royal harvest of the common years!
There are in all thy treasure-house no ways
But lead by soft descent and gradual slope
To memories more exquisite than Hope.
Thine is the Iris born of olden tears,
And thrice more happy are the happy days
That live divinely in thy lingering rays.
So autumn roses bear a lovelier flower;
So in the emerald after-sunset hour
The orchard wall and trembling aspen trees
Appear an infinite Hesperides.
Ay, as at dusk we sit with folded hands,
Who knows, who cares in what enchanted lands
We wander while the undying memories throng?
When I was young the twilight seemed too long.
Now that I’ve nearly done my days, And grown too stiff to sweep or sew, I sit and think, till I’m amaze, About what lots of things I know: Things as I’ve found out one by one– And when I’m fast down in the clay, My knowing things and how they’re done Will all be lost and thrown away.
There’s things, I know, as won’t be lost, Things as folks write and talk about: The way to keep your roots from frost, And how to get your ink spots out. What medicine’s good for sores and sprains, What way to salt your butter down, What charms will cure your different pains, And what will bright your faded gown.
But more important things than these, They can’t be written in a book: How fast to boil your greens and peas, And how good bacon ought to look; The feel of real good wearing stuff, The kind of apple as will keep, The look of bread that’s rose enough, And how to get a child asleep.
Whether the jam is fit to pot, Whether the milk is going to turn, Whether a hen will lay or not, Is things as some folks never learn. I know the weather by the sky, I know what herbs grow in what lane; And if sick men are going to die, Or if they’ll get about again.
Young wives come in, a-smiling, grave, With secrets that they itch to tell: I know what sort of times they’ll have, And if they’ll have a boy or gell. And if a lad is ill to bind, Or some young maid is hard to lead, I know when you should speak ‘em kind, And when it’s scolding as they need.
I used to know where birds ud set, And likely spots for trout or hare, And God may want me to forget The way to set a line or snare; But not the way to truss a chick, To fry a fish, or baste a roast, Nor how to tell, when folks are sick, What kind of herb will ease them most!
Forgetting seems such silly waste! I know so many little things, And now the Angels will make haste To dust it all away with wings! O God, you made me like to know, You kept the things straight in my head, Please God, if you can make it so, Let me know something when I’m dead.
A mountain’s giddy height I sought, Because I could not find Sufficient vague and mighty thought To fill my mighty mind; And as I wandered ill at ease, There chanced upon my sight A native of Silurian seas, An ancient Trilobite.
So calm, so peacefully he lay, I watched him even with tears: I thought of Monads far away In the forgotten years. How wonderful it seemed and right, The providential plan, That he should be a Trilobite, And I should be a Man!
And then, quite natural and free Out of his rocky bed, That Trilobite he spoke to me And this is what he said: ‘I don’t know how the thing was done, Although I cannot doubt it; But Huxley – he if anyone Can tell you all about it;
‘How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams, How in the silent sea Your ancestors were Monotremes – Whatever these may be; How you evolved your shining lights Of wisdom and perfection From Jelly-Fish and Trilobites By Natural Selection.
‘You’ve Kant to make your brains go round, Hegel you have to clear them, You’ve Mr Browning to confound, And Mr Punch to cheer them! The native of an alien land You call a man and brother, And greet with hymn-book in one hand And pistol in the other!
‘You’ve Politics to make you fight As if you were possessed: You’ve cannon and you’ve dynamite To give the nations rest: The side that makes the loudest din Is surest to be right, And oh, a pretty fix you’re in!’ Remarked the Trilobite.
‘But gentle, stupid, free from woe I lived among my nation, I didn’t care – I didn’t know That I was a Crustacean.* I didn’t grumble, didn’t steal, I never took to rhyme: Salt water was my frugal meal, And carbonate of lime.’
Reluctantly I turned away, No other word he said; An ancient Trilobite, he lay Within his rocky bed. I did not answer him, for that Would have annoyed my pride: I merely bowed, and raised my hat, But in my heart I cried: –
‘I wish our brains were not so good, I wish our skulls were thicker, I wish that Evolution could Have stopped a little quicker; For oh, it was a happy plight, Of liberty and ease, To be a simple Trilobite In the Silurian seas!’
I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire a-flame, But something rustled on the floor, And someone called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
I am Minerva, the village poetess, Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk, And all the more when “Butch” Weldy Captured me after a brutal hunt. He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers; And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up, Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice. Will some one go to the village newspaper, And gather into a book the verses I wrote? – I thirsted so for love I hungered so for life!
Seventeen years ago you said Something that sounded like Good-bye; And everybody thinks that you are dead, But I.
So I, as I grow stiff and cold To this and that say Good-bye too; And everybody sees that I am old But you.
And one fine morning in a sunny lane Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear That nobody can love their way again While over there You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.
Now is the time for the burning of the leaves. They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke Wandering slowly into a weeping mist. Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves! A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.
The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust; All the spices of June are a bitter reek, All the extravagant riches spent and mean. All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost; Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare, Time for the burning of days ended and done, Idle solace of things that have gone before: Rootless hopes and fruitless desire are there; Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind. The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.
They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour, And magical scents to a wondering memory bring; The same glory, to shine upon different eyes. Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours. Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.
I am useless. What I do is nothing, What I think has no savour. There is an almanac between the windows: It is of the year when I was born.
My fellows call to me to join them, They shout for me, Passing the house in a great wind of vermilion banners. They are fresh and fulminant, They are indecent and strut with the thought of it, They laugh, and curse, and brawl, And cheer a holocaust of “ Who comes firsts! “ at the iron fronts of the houses at the two edges of the street. Young men with naked hearts jeering between iron house-fronts, Young men with naked bodies beneath their clothes Passionately conscious of them, Ready to strip off their clothes, Ready to strip off their customs, their usual routine, Clamouring for the rawness of life, In love with appetite, Proclaiming it as a creed, Worshipping youth, Worshipping themselves. They call for women and the women come, They bare the whiteness of their lusts to the dead gaze of the old house-fronts, They roar down the street like flame, They explode upon the dead houses like new, sharp fire.
But I – I arrange three roses in a Chinese vase: A pink one, A red one, A yellow one. I fuss over their arrangement. Then I sit in a South window And sip pale wine with a touch of hemlock in it, And think of Winter nights, And field-mice crossing and re-crossing The spot which will be my grave.
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth. One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep.
One of the earliest surviving laments in world literature, “The Boys of Sumer” remains an outlier of the genre. Few other poems from the Babylonian corpus include so much: aspects of contemporary life, magic, dreams, among the earliest recorded use of colorful insults, and unrequited love. There is also some indication that this poem would have been sung.
Nobody on the road, cuz roads ain’t been invented yet. I feel it in the air, Babylon stinkin like a bitch. Inundated river, empty streets, the sun goes down alone. I'm walkin' by your mud-brick house though you’re probably at the ziggurat.
I can see you your brown skin shinin' in the sun you got your hair combed back, bright like Shamash, baby. And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong after the boys of Sumer have gone.
I never will forget those nights, I wonder if it was a dream, (I should consult a dream interpreter and learn some magic spells to keep dogs from attacking me.) Remember how you made me crazy? Remember how I made you scream? Now I don't understand what happened to our love— oh wait, it was those dipshits from Sumer, but baby I’m gonna get you back.
I can see you, your brown skin shinin' in the sun, I see you walkin' like Ishtar, slow, and you're smilin' at all those artisans and craft specialists who are inventing technology and architecture, and I’m just a poor guy from the marshes. But I can tell you my love for you will still be strong, after the boys of Sumer have gone
Out in the city today, I saw a Marduk sticker on a newly-made wheeled vehicle, a little voice inside my head said, "Nothing associated with Sumer rhymes with ‘vehicle.’" I thought I knew what love caused by magic spells was, what did I know? That magician took my money and my only chicken and you’re still running around with dickhead Sumerians.
I can see you, your brown skin shinin' in the sun, you got your veil pulled down and you're humming some hymns to Enlil, baby, and I can tell you my love for you will still be strong after the boys of Sumer have gone, the fucksticks.
I can see you, your brown skin shinin' in the sun, your anointed hair slicked back singing about Gilgamesh, baby. I can tell you my love for you will still be strong after the boys of Sumer have gone.
As the buck lay dead, tied to the fender of a car coming down from Matagomon way, I saw dried blood on his tongue of a thousand summer dreams and winter cogitations – the scratches on his hooves were signatures of the many pungent sticks and branches. The torn place in his chest was made by a man letting out visceral debris to save weight-giving morsels to many a greedy fox or other wild thing – over the glaze of his half-shut eye hung miseries of superlative moments stuck dumb
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
I wish to God I never saw you, Mag. I wish you never quit your job and came along with me. I wish we never bought a license and a white dress For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister And told him we would love each other and take care of each other Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere. Yes, I’m wishing now you lived somewhere away from here And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away dead broke. I wish the kids had never come And rent and coal and clothes to pay for And a grocery man calling for cash, Every day cash for beans and prunes. I wish to God I never saw you, Mag. I wish to God the kids had never come.
Last evening the moon rose above this rock Impure upon a world unpurged. The man and his companion stopped To rest before the heroic height.
Coldly the wind fell upon them In many majesties of sound: They that had left the flame-freaked sun To seek a sun of fuller fire.
Instead there was this tufted rock Massively rising high and bare Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown Like giant arms among the clouds.
There was neither voice nor crested image, No chorister, nor priest. There was Only the great height of the rock And the two of them standing still to rest.
There was the cold wind and the sound It made, away from the muck of the land That they had left, heroic sound Joyous and jubilant and sure.
Clouds dream and disappear; Waters dream in a rainbow and are gone; Fire-dreams change with the sun Or when a poppy closes; But now is the time of year For the dark earth, one by one, To show her slower dreams. And nothing she has ever done Has given more ease To her perplexities Than the dreaming of dreams like these: Not irises, Not any spear Of lilies nor cup of roses, But these pale, purple images, As if, from willows or from pepper trees, Shadows were glimmering on Buddha’s knees.
In farming country you are sure to find them, Little gray wooden buildings boarded up, Astride a stone wall, or lost in a thicket, With what shut in? – Well, I think if you pried A warped board free and climbed in through a window, You might find much the same thing as I found In the Yellow Shop on my grandfather’s farm:
Darkness at first; pencils of steady sunlight Alive with dust, that slanted in through chinks, And such a smell of cedar you would know, Before your eyes grew wide enough to see, That the place was full of stacks of fragrant shingles. Then, tattered paper hanging from the wall, Crude blue, perhaps, and red – brick-red – and brown, That chocolate-brown the old folks seemed to fancy. That might be all. – Or might not be. For after I had stood there for a while, held by the quiet, A sense of ended things grew up about me. Someone had lived there once, – I think a cobbler; It was a place where men had come and gone, Men of my blood, whose names I did not know; Whose feet had worn the hollow in the threshold That let the light in underneath the door; Whose lives had been blown out, one after one, By the wind of Time, like candles in a row Set up to be extinguished. – Yet this shell, The haunt of dead men, still gave back the sun, And stood up to the hail and sleet of winter. – I gripped the nearest thing my hand could find, A cleat someone had hammered to the wall To help him clamber to the loft above, And looked out through the window toward the wood-lot. The shadow of the Shop ran dark across The field, which but for that lay in the sun Serene and smiling and inscrutable; The air was sweet; blackberry and wild aster Nodded outside the window in the shade,– Perpetual things, that, springing year by year, Are old, by repetition, like the sea; There was a cricket busy in the stubble, And a flutter of wings in bushes round the corner; And in the place, the sense of something ended. I nailed it up and left it there behind me.
And to this day I never pass the Shop, Off in its corner, with its blinded eye, With shingles curling loose and flecks of yellow Still clinging to the silver of the gray, But I grow insolent with glorying In lovely life! – O dancing candle-flame, Not yet blown out by the delaying wind!
It will not hurt me when I am old, A running tide where moonlight burned Will not sting me like silver snakes; The years will make me sad and cold, It is the happy heart that breaks.
The heart asks more than life can give, When that is learned, then all is learned; The waves break fold on jewelled fold, But beauty itself is fugitive, It will not hurt me when I am old.
1 When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.
The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.
2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass.
Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear.
3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well – we shall live very well.
The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, somber-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback.
4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
I am not dead, I have only become inhuman: That is to say, Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities, But not as a man Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete Stripping for the race. The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer Of certain fictions Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain And expand with pleasure; Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope: That’s gone, it is true; (I never miss it; if the universe does, How easily replaced!) But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free. I admired the beauty While I was human, now I am part of the beauty. I wander in the air, Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean; Touch you and Asia At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises And the glow of this grass. I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth For a love-token.
I will rise from my troth with the dead, I will sweeten my cup and my bread with a gift; I will chisel a bowl for the wine, for the white wine and red; I will summon a Satyr to dance, a Centaur, a Nymph and a Faun; I will picture a warrior King, a Giant, a Naiad, a Monster; I will cut round the rim of the crater, some simple familiar thing, vine leaves or the sea-swallow’s wing; I will work at each separate part till my mind is worn out and my heart: in my skull, where the vision had birth, will come wine, would pour song of the hot earth, of the flower and the sweet of the hill, thyme, meadow-plant, grass-blade and sorrel; in my skull, from which vision took flight, will come wine will pour song of the cool night, of the silver and blade of the moon, of the star, of the sun’s kiss at midnoon; I will challenge the reed-pipe and stringed lyre, to sing sweeter, pipe wilder, praise louder the fragrance and sweet of the wine jar, till each lover must summon another, to proffer a rose where all flowers are, in the depths of the exquisite crater; flower will fall upon flower till the red shower inflame all with intimate fervor; till: men who travel afar will look up, sensing grape and hill-slope in the cup; men who sleep by the wood will arise, hearing ripple and fall of the tide, being drawn by the spell of the sea; the bowl will ensnare and enchant men who crouch by the hearth till they want but the riot of stars in the night; those who dwell far inland will seek ships; the deep-sea fisher, plying his nets, will forsake them for wheat-sheaves and loam; men who wander will yearn for their home, men at home will depart.
I will rise from my troth with the dead, I will sweeten my cup and my bread with a gift; I will chisel a bowl for the wine, for the white wine and red.
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun, Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire. Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
There was a time for discoveries – For the headlands looming above in the First light and the surf and the Crying of gulls: for the curve of the Coast north into secrecy.
That time is past. The last lands have been peopled. The oceans are known now.
Señora: once the maps have all been made A man were better dead than find new continents.
A man would better never have been born Than find upon the open ocean flowers Drifted from islands where there are no islands,
Or midnight, out of sight of any land, Smell on the altering air the odor of rosemary.
No fortune passes that misfortune –
To lift along the evening of the sky, Certain as sun and sea, a new-found land Steep from an ocean where no landfall can be.
I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air – I have a rendezvous with Death When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand And lead me into his dark land And close my eyes and quench my breath – It may be I shall pass him still. I have a rendezvous with Death On some scarred slope of battered hill, When Spring comes round again this year And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep Pillowed in silk and scented down, Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep, Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, Where hushed awakenings are dear ... But I've a rendezvous with Death At midnight in some flaming town, When Spring trips north again this year, And I to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Through that window – all else being extinct Except itself and me – I saw the struggle Of darkness against darkness. Within the room It turned and turned, diving downward. Then I saw How order might – if chaos wished – become: And saw the darkness crush upon itself, Contracting powerfully; it was as if It killed itself slowly: and with much pain. Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain. What else, when chaos draws all forces inward To shape a single leaf?…
For the leaf came Alone and shining in the empty room; After a while the twig shot downward from it; And from the twig a bough; and then the trunk, Massive and coarse; and last the one black root. The black root cracked the walls. Boughs burst the window: The great tree took possession.
Tree of trees! Remember (when time comes) how chaos died To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage, Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape. I will be watching then as I watch now. I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.
I see her against the pearl sky of Dublin
Before the turn of the century, a young woman
With all those brothers and sisters, green eyes, hair
She could sit on; for high life, a meandering sermon
(Church of Ireland) each Sunday, window-shopping
In Dawson Street, picnics at Killiney and Howth …
To know so little about the growing of one
Who was angel and maid-of-all-work to my growth!
– Who, her sister dying, took on the four-year
Child, and the chance that now she would never make
A child of her own; who, mothering me, flowered in
The clover-soft authority of the meek.
Who, exiled, gossiping home chat from abroad
In roundhand letters to a drift of relations –
Squires’, Goldsmiths, Overends, Williams’ – sang the songs
Of Zion in a strange land. Hers the patience
Of one who made no claims, but simply loved
Because that was her nature, and loving so
Asked no more than to be repaid in kind.
If she was not a saint, I do not know
What saints are … Buying penny toys at Christmas
(The most a small purse could afford) to send her
Nephews and nieces, she’d never have thought the shop
Could shine for me one day in Bethlehem splendour.
Exiled again after ten years, my father
Remarrying, she faced the bitter test
Of charity – to abdicate in love’s name
From love’s contentful duties. A distressed
Gentle woman housekeeping for strangers;
Later, companion to a droll recluse
Clergyman brother in rough-pastured Wexford,
She lived for all she was worth – to be of use.
She bottled plums, she visited parishioners.
A plain habit of innocence, a faith
Mildly forbearing, made her one of those
Who, we were promised, shall inherit the earth.
… Now, sunk in one small room of a Rathmines
Old people’s home, helpless, beyond speech
Or movement, yearly deeper she declines
To imbecility – my last link with childhood.
The battery’s almost done: yet if I press
The button hard – some private joke in boyhood
I teased her with – there comes upon her face
A glowing of the old, enchanted smile.
So, still alive, she rots. A heart of granite
Would melt at this unmeaning sequel. Lord,
How can this be justified, how can it
Be justified?
To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held Reality down fluttering to a bench; Cut wood to their own purposes; compelled The growth of pattern with the patient shuttle; Drained acres to a trench. Control is theirs. They have ignored the subtle Release of spirit from the jail of shape. They have been concerned with prison, not escape; Pinioned the fact, and let the rest go free, And out of need made inadvertent art. All things designed to play a faithful part Build up their plain particular poetry. Tools have their own integrity; The sneath of scythe curves rightly to the hand, The hammer knows its balance, knife its edge, All tools inevitably planned, Stout friends, with pledge Of service; with their crotchets too That masters understand, And proper character, and separate heart, But always to their chosen temper true. – So language, smithied at the common fire, Grew to its use; as sneath and shank and halt Of well-grained wood, nice instruments of craft, Curve to the simple mould the hands require, Born of the needs of man. The poet like the artisan Works lonely with his tools; picks up each one, Blunt mallet knowing, and the quick thin blade, And plane that travels when the hewing’s done; Rejects, and chooses; scores a fresh faint line; Sharpens, intent upon his chiselling; Bends lower to examine his design, If it be truly made, And brings perfection to so slight a thing. But in the shadows of his working-place, Dust-moted, dim, Among the chips and lumber of his trade, Lifts never his bowed head, a breathing-space To look upon the world beyond the sill, The world framed small, in distance, for to him The world and all its weight are in his will. Yet in the ecstasy of his rapt mood There’s no retreat his spirit cannot fill, No distant leagues, no present, and no past, No essence that his need may not distil, All pressed into his service, but he knows Only the immediate care, if that be good; The little focus that his words enclose; As the poor joiner, working at his wood, Knew not the tree from which the planks were taken, Knew not the glade from which the trunk was brought, Knew not the soil in which the roots were fast, Nor by what centuries of gales the boughs were shaken, But holds them all beneath his hands at last.
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn, Voices of play and pleasure after day, Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. * About this time Town used to swing so gay When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees, And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim, – In the old times, before he threw away his knees. Now he will never feel again how slim Girls’ waists are, or how warm their subtle hands, All of them touch him like some queer disease. * There was an artist silly for his face, For it was younger than his youth, last year. Now, he is old; his back will never brace; He’s lost his colour very far from here, Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry, And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race And leap of purple spurted from his thigh. * One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg, After the matches carried shoulder-high. It was after football, when he’d drunk a peg, He thought he’d better join. He wonders why. Someone had said he’d look a god in kilts. That’s why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg, Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts, He asked to join. He didn’t have to beg; Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years. Germans he scarcely thought of, all their guilt, And Austria’s, did not move him. And no fears Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes; And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears; Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits. And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers. * Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal. Only a solemn man who brought him fruits Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul. * Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes, And do what things the rules consider wise, And take whatever pity they may dole. Tonight he noticed how the women’s eyes Passed from him to the strong men that were whole. How cold and late it is! Why don’t they come And put him into bed? Why don’t they come?
A grove of small trees, branches thick with berries,
and within it, the constant twitter of birds.
The trees of the park this cold windy day
for want of leaves
are hung with paper – strips of dirty paper.
When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went –
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.
I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.
With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh –
Not the mind’s avid substance – still
Passionate beyond the will.
Child, dream of a pomegranate tree
Weighted with ruby, showered with gold,
Dream of a fig tree under the cold
And cloudy sky
Lifting its curved and silver boughs
Like a roofless house
For birds that be
Tardily in November here;
Dream of a spare
And twisted vine –
The grape – and ivy for the hair,
And honeysuckle, stubborn twine;
And of the firm and hidden shape
Of the green orange deep in the tree;
And dreaming, in my garden be.
I have bestowed calendulas
That brighten beside reddening haws,
And rooted out the hoarhound grey,
And pulled the nettle from our way,
And torn my hand on bramble berry.
Then, if a drop, red as a cherry,
Of blood upon my finger show,
It is a seal set to a vow
To ward and to cherish even as now,
Now that you sleep your joy to replenish,
Each branch, each varied lifting bough,
That not a leaf in your garden perish.
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:
O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply –
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.
Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.
A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.
From a friend’s friend I taste friendship,
From a friend’s friend love,
My spirit in confusion,
Long years I strove,
But now I know that never
Nearer I shall move,
Than a friend’s friend to friendship,
To love than a friend’s love.
Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above,
As I fear the friends below.
I
Death, I repent
Of these hands and feet
That for forty years
Have been my own
And I repent
Of flesh and bone,
Of heart and liver,
Of hair and skin –
Rid me, death,
Of face and form,
Of all that I am.
And I repent
Of the forms of thought,
The habit of mind
And heart crippled
By long-spent pain,
The memory-traces
Faded and worn
Of vanished places
And human faces
Not rightly seen
Or understood
Rid me, death,
Of the words I have used.
Not this or that
But all is amiss,
That I have done,
And I have seen
Sin and sorrow
Befoul the world –
Release me, death,
Forgive, remove
From place and time
The trace of all
That I have been.
II
From a place I came
That was never in time,
From the beat of a heart
That was never in pain.
The sun and the moon,
The wind and the world,
The song and the bird
Travelled my thought
Time out of mind.
Shall I know at last
My lost delight?
Tell me, death,
How long must I sorrow
My own sorrow?
While I remain
The world is ending,
Forests are falling,
Suns are fading,
While I am here
Now is ending
And in my arms
The living are dying.
Shall I come at last
To the lost beginning?
This fevers me, this sun on green,
On grass glowing, this young spring.
The secret hallowing is come,
Regenerate sudden incarnation,
Mystery made visible
In growth, yet subtly veiled in all,
Ununderstandable in grass,
In flowers, and in the human heart,
This lyric mortal loveliness,
The earth breathing, and the sun.
The young lambs sport, none udderless.
Rabbits dash beneath the brush.
Crocuses have come; wind flowers
Tremble against quick April.
Violets put on the night’s blue,
Primroses wear the pale dawn,
The gold daffodils have stolen
From the sun. New grass leaps up;
Gorse vellows, starred with day;
The willow is a graceful dancer
Poised; the poplar poises too.
The apple takes the seafoam’s light,
And the evergreen tree is densely bright.
April, April, when will he
Be gaunt, be old, who is so young?
This fevers me, this sun on green,
On grass glowing, this young spring.
The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless,
The circle of white ash widens around it.
I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time
I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller.
Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw;
The moon has come before them, the light
Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees.
It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish,
Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons;
The foetid adder’s tongue lolls by the waterfall.
There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now.
There were sheep here after the farm, and fire
Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch,
The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil
Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat
And plate the surface like scales.
Twenty years ago the spreading gully
Toppled the big oak over onto the house.
Now there is nothing left but the foundations
Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge,
Six lonely, ominous fenceposts;
The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge
Over the deep waterless creek bed;
The hills are covered with wild oats
Dry and white by midsummer.
I walk in the random survivals of the orchard.
In a patch of moonlight a mole
Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein;
Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean;
Leo crouches under the zenith.
There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees.
The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible.
As the wind dies down their fragrance
Clusters around them like thick smoke.
All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight
They are silent and immaculate.
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Next year the grave grass will cover us.
We stand now, and laugh;
Watching the girls go by;
Betting on slow horses; drinking cheap gin.
We have nothing to do; nowhere to go; nobody.
Last year was a year ago; nothing more.
We weren’t younger then; nor older now.
We manage to have the look the young men have;
We feel nothing behind our faces, one way or other.
We shall probably not be quite dead when we die.
We were never anything all the way; not even soldiers.
We are the insulted, brother, the desolate boys.
Sleepwalkers in a dark and terrible land,
Where solitude is a dirty knife at out throats.
Cold stars watch us, chum
Cold stars and the whores.
I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed, by the children’s bedtime, level with the shore.
The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.
Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.
Calm is the landscape when the storm has passed,
Brighter the fields, and fresh with fallen rain.
Where gales beat out new colour from the hills
Rivers fly faster, and upon their banks
Birds preen their wings, and irises revive.
Not so the cities burnt alive with fire
Of man’s destruction: when their smoke is spent,
No phoenix rises from the ruined walls.
I ponder now the grief of many rooms.
Was it a dream, that age, when fingers found
A satisfaction sleeping in dumb stone,
When walls were built responding to the touch
In whose high gables, in the lengthening days,
Martins would nest? Though crops, though lives, would fail,
Though friends dispersed, unchanged the walls would stay,
And still those wings return to build in Spring.
Here, where the earth is green, where heaven is true
Opening the windows, touched with earliest dawn,
In the first frost of cool September days,
Chrysanthemum weather, presaging great birth,
Who in his heart could murmur or complain:
“The light we look for is not in this land”?
That light is present, and that distant time
Is always here, continually redeemed.
There is a city we must build with joy
Exactly where the fallen city sleeps.
There is one road through village, town and field,
On whose robust foundation Chaucer dreamed
A ride could wed the opposites in man.
There proud walls may endure, and low walls feed
The imagination if they have a vine
Or shadowy barn made rich with gathered corn.
Great mansions fear from their surrounding trees
The invasion of a wintry desolation
Filling their rooms with leaves. And cottages
Bring the sky down as flickering candles do,
Leaning on their own shadows. I have seen
Vases and polished brass reflect black windows
And draw the ceiling down to their vibrations,
Thick, deep, and white-washed, like a bank of snow.
To live entwined in pastoral loveliness
May rest the eyes, throw pictures on the mind,
But most we need a metaphor of stone
Such as those painters had whose mountain-cities
Cast long, low shadows on the Umbrian hills.
There, in some courtyard on the cobbled stone,
A fountain plays, and through a cherub’s mouth
Ages are linked by water in the sunlight.
All of good faith that fountain may recall,
Woman, musician, boy, or else a scholar
Reading a Latin book. They seem distinct,
And yet are one, because tranquility
Affirms the Judgment. So, in these Welsh hills,
I marvel, waking from a dream of stone,
That such a peace surrounds me, while the city
For which all long has never yet been built.
So it begins. Adam is in his earth.
Tempted, and fallen, and his doom made sure
Oh, in the very instant of his birth:
Whose deathly nature must all things endure.
The hungers of his flesh, and mind, and heart,
That governed him when he was in the womb,
Those ravenings multiply in every part:
And shall release him only to the tomb.
Meantime he works the earth, and builds up nations,
And trades, and wars, and learns, and worships chance,
And looks to God, and weaves the generations
Which shall his many hungerings advance
When he is sunken dead among the sins.
Adam is in the earth. So it begins.
Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic
very loud and very fast.
I could not answer her –
I could not understand her.
She wore men’s boots
when she wore any.
– I can see her strong foot,
stained with peat,
paddling with the treadle of the spinningwheel
while her right hand drew yarn
marvellously out of the air.
Hers was the only house
where I’ve lain at night
in the absolute darkness
of a box bed, listening to
crickets being friendly.
She was buckets
and water flouncing into them.
She was winds pouring wetly
round house-ends.
She was brown eggs, black skirts
and a keeper of threepennybits
in a teapot.
Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic
very loud and very fast.
By the time I had learned
a little, she lay
silenced in the absolute black
of a sandy grave
at Luskentyre. But I hear her still, welcoming me
with a seagull’s voice
across a hundred yards
of peatscrapes and lazybeds
and getting angry, getting angry
with so many questions
unanswered.
Gone the three ancient ladies Who creaked on the greenhouse ladders, Reaching up white strings To wind, to wind The sweet-pea tendrils, the smilax, Nasturtiums, the climbing Roses, to straighten Carnations, red Chrysanthemums; the stiff Stems, jointed like corn, They tied and tucked, – These nurses of nobody else. Quicker than birds, they dipped Up and sifted the dirt; They sprinkled and shook; They stood astride pipes, Their skirts billowing out wide into tents, Their hands twinkling with wet; Like witches they flew along rows Keeping creation at ease; With a tendril for needle They sewed up the air with a stem; They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, – All the coils, loops, and whorls. They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.
I remember how they picked me up, a spindly kid, Pinching and poking my thin ribs Till I lay in their laps, laughing, Weak as a whiffet; Now, when I’m alone and cold in my bed, They still hover over me, These ancient leathery crones, With their bandannas stiffened with sweat, And their thorn-bitten wrists, And their snuff-laden breath blowing lightly over me in my first sleep.
Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
Irresistible as Rabelais, but most tender for
The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her,–
She is a procession no one can follow after
But be like a little dog following a brass band.
She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend
To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain
Whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all my faith, and all my love to tell her
That she will move from mourning into morning.
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
– Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
often returning into that old dream…
…where the summer rain has made a mist
that drifts over sunlit pavement…
…where the cool milk of lastlight is poured
into the empty bowl of the sky
and children scatter and one returning alone
stands in the dark outside a lighted window
motionless and lost in the jagged geometries
of a sunbright moth…
…where the contours of the winterbone forest
are obscured beneath the white-diamond snow…
…where a face surfacing in a crowded hallway
intensifies, becomes a new constellation…
Consider this man in the field beneath,
Gaitered with mud, lost in his own breath,
Without joy, without sorrow.
Without children, without wife,
Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow,
A vague somnambulist: but hold your tears,
For his name also is written in the Book of Life.
Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers
That rot in your heart’s dust, and what have you to give
To enrich his spirit or the way he lives?
From the standpoint of education or caste or creed
Is there anything to show that your essential need
Is less than his, who has the world for church,
And stands bare-headed in the woods’ wide porch
Morning and evening to hear God’s choir
Scatter their praises? Don’t be taken in
By stinking garments or an aimless grin;
He also is human, and the same small star,
That lights you homeward, has inflamed his mind
With the old hunger, born of his kind.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find
Four great rock maples seemingly aligned,
As if they had been set out in a row
Before some house a century ago,
To edge the property and lend some shade.
I looked to see if ancient wheels had made
Old ruts to which the trees ran parallel,
But there were none, so far as I could tell –
There’d been no roadway. Nor could I find the square
Depression of a cellar anywhere,
And so I tramped on further, to survey
Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray
Or spirals in a pine cone, under trees
Not subject to our stiff geometries.
In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave,
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.
The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram
Slid slowly forth.
Hearing the milkman’s chop,
His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink,
I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,
And walked to the window. The stony street
Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand,
The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience.
The winter sky’s pure capital
Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes.
Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose
Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls,
Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.
A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly
Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,
Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.
The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,
Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet
With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of beginning
Again and again,
while History is unforgiven.
The girl’s far treble, muted to the heat,
calls like a fainting bird across the fields
to where her flock lies panting for her voice,
their black horns buried deep in marigolds.
They climb awake, like drowsy butterflies,
and press their red flanks through the tall branched grass,
and as they go their wandering tongues embrace
the vacant summer mirrored in their eyes.
Led to the limestone shadows of a barn
they snuff their past embalmed in the hay,
while her cool hand, cupped to the udder’s fount,
distils the brimming harvest of their day.
Look what a cloudy cream the earth gives out,
fat juice of buttercups and meadow-rye;
the girl dreams milk within her body’s field
and hears, far off, her muted children cry.
The labor to breathe that younger, rawer air:
St. Mark’s last football game with Groton lost on the ice-crust,
the sunlight gilding the golden polo coats
of boys with country seats on the Upper Hudson.
Why does that stale light stay? First Form hazing,
first day being sent on errands by an oldboy,
Bobby Delano, cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt –
deported soused off the Presidential yacht
baritoning You’re the cream in my coffee…
his football, hockey, baseball letter at 15;
at 15, expelled. He dug my ass with a compass,
forced me to say “My mother is a whore.
My freshman year, he shot himself in Rio,
odious, unknowable, inspired as Ajax.
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
Women reminded him of lilies and roses.
Me they remind rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:
Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,
– All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.
Their distant husbands lean across mahogany
And delicately manipulate the market,
While safe at home, the tender and the gentle
Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,
Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,
Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,
Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,
Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,
Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners
Around the snags of furniture, they straighten
And haul out sheets from under the incontinent
And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,
Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,
Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,
Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,
Contorting wool around their knitting needles,
Creating snug and comfy on their needles.
Their huge hands! their everywhere eyes! their voices
Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,
Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,
Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,
Their wombs that pocket a man upside down!
And when all’s over, off with overalls,
Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,
Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,
And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,
Their essences of lilies and of roses.
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river’s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,
Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheatfields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously – peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
The morning they set out from home
I was not there to comfort them
the dawn was innocent with snow
in mockery – it is not true
the dawn was neutral was immune
their shadows threaded it too soon
they were relieved that it had come
I was not there to comfort them
One told me that my father spent
a day in prison long ago
he did not tell me that he went
what difference does it make now
when he set out when he came home
I was not there to comfort him
and now I have no means to know
of what I was kept ignorant
Both my parents died in camps
I was not there to comfort them
I was not there they were alone
my mind refuses to conceive the life
the death they must have known
I must atone because I live
I could not have saved them from death
the ground is neutral underneath
Every child must leave its home
time gathers life impartially
I could have spared them nothing since
I was too young – it is not true
they might have lived to succour me
and none shall say in my defense
had I been there to comfort them
it would have made no difference.
Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon,
and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a
stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,
I am Essex-born:
Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was
drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees
stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,
the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there.
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower,
Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots
sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,
Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,
in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves,
through its trees the ghost of a great house. In
Ilford High Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the
light of flaring sundown, seven kings
in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings
the place of law
where my birth and marriage are recorded
and the death of my father. Woodford Wells
where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white
statue forlorn in its garden)
saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,
(forgotten? and further away
the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once
but many times?).
All the Ivans dreaming of their villages
all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,
picking up fragments of New World slowly,
not knowing how to put them together nor how to join
image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map
made long before I was born shows ancient
rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire
for the world’s great splendors, a child who traced voyages
indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country
remembers the first river, the first
field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,
that new smell, and remembers
the walls of the garden, the first light.
III Only to have not forgotten the beginning in which she drank cheap sodas in the morgues of Newark, only to have seen her weeping on gray tables in long wards of her universe only to have known the weird ideas of Hitler at the door, the wires in her head, the three big sticks rammed down her back, the voices in the ceiling shrieking out her ugly early lays for 30 years, only to have seen the time-jumps, memory lapse, the crash of wars, the roar and silence of a vast electric shock, only to have seen her painting crude pictures of Elevateds running over the rooftops of the Bronx her brothers dead in Riverside or Russia, her lone in Long Island writing a last letter – and her image in the sunlight at the window ‘The key is in the sunlight at the window in the bars the key is in the sunlight,’ only to have come to that dark night on iron bed by stroke when the sun gone down on Long Island and the vast Atlantic roars outside the great call of Being to its own to come back out of the Nightmare – divided creation – with her head lain on a pillow of the hospital to die – in one last glimpse – all Earth one everlasting Light in the familiar black-out – no tears for this vision – But that the key should be left behind – at the window – the key in the sunlight – to the living – that can take that slice of light in hand – and turn the door – and look back see Creation glistening backwards to the same grave, size of universe, size of the tick of the hospital’s clock on the archway over the white door –
IV O mother what have I left out O mother what have I forgotten O mother farewell with a long black shoe farewell with Communist Party and a broken stocking farewell with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast farewell with your old dress and a long black beard around the vagina farewell with your sagging belly with your fear of Hitler with your mouth of bad short stories with your fingers of rotten mandolins with your arms of fat Paterson porches with your belly of strikes and smokestacks with your chin of Trotsky and the Spanish War with your voice singing for the decaying overbroken workers with your nose of bad lay with your nose of the smell of the pickles of Newark with your eyes with your eyes of Russia with your eyes of no money with your eyes of false China with your eyes of Aunt Elanor with your eyes of starving India with your eyes pissing in the park with your eyes of America taking a fall with your eyes of your failure at the piano with your eyes of your relatives in California with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an aumbulance with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots with your eyes going to painting class at night in the Bronx with your eyes of the killer Grandma you see on the horizon from the Fire-Escape with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance with your eyes strapped down on the operating table with your eyes with the pancreas removed with your eyes of appendix operation with your eyes of abortion with your eyes of ovaries removed with your eyes of shock with your eyes of lobotomy with your eyes of divorce with your eyes of stroke with your eyes alone with your eyes with your eyes with your Death full of Flowers
V Caw caw caw crows shriek in the white sun over grave stones in Long Island Lord Lord Lord Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and my own as hers caw caw my eye be buried in the same Ground where I stand in Angel Lord Lord great Eye that stares on All and moves in a black cloud caw caw strange cry of Beings flung up into sky over the waving trees Lord Lord O Grinder of giant Beyonds my voice in a boundless field in Sheol Caw caw the call of Time rent out of foot and wing an instant in the universe Lord Lord an echo in the sky the wind through ragged leaves the roar of memory caw caw all years my birth a dream caw caw New York the bus the broken shoe the vast highschool caw caw all Visions of the Lord Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord
I walk among the rows of bowed heads –
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to the widows of the suburbs. You can see
already how their backs have thickened,
how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,
leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like
to sit down among them and read slowly
from The Book of Job until the windows
pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea
of industrial scum, her gowns streaming
with light, her foolish words transformed
into song, I would like to arm each one
with a quiver of arrows so that they might
rush like wind there where no battle rages
shouting among the trumpets, Hal Ha!
How dear the gift of laughter in the face
of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings
without coffee and oranges, the long lines
of mothers in old coats waiting silently
where the gates have closed. Ten years ago
I went among these same children, just born,
in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned
down to hear their breaths delivered that day,
burning with joy. There was such wonder
in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes
dosed against autumn, in their damp heads
blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one
turned against me or the light, not one
said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,
not one complained or drifted alone,
unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.
Eleven years from now they will become
the men and women of Flint or Paradise,
the majors of a minor town, and I
will be gone into smoke or memory,
so I bow to them here and whisper
all I know, all I will never know.
I have come here
From Chicago, packing
A sleeping bag, a pan
To melt snow for drinking,
Dried apricots, tea,
A great boiled beef-heart.
Two loggers drove me
As far in as they could get,
Two gunnysack loggers of the Burn,
Owning a truck and a dozer, a few cables
And saws, who drag out
The sound heartwood for money.
They said there’d
Been a prospector here a year ago,
Hunting uranium or gold,
They would run across him,
A little, swaying heap of gear,
With a Geiger counter
Lashed on like an extra heart,
They said they would find him
Mumbling about metal while
Thrashing up some avalanching gravel.
Around January he was ready
To settle for anything at all.
When spring came he vanished.
I set out walking,
Up to my ankles in gravel,
Grappling at roots and rocks.
At last I was climbing up
On my hands and knees
As though I’d come here begging.
From the top of Cedar Butte
The whole compass is visible,
To the west the Pacific
Lying out flat and shiny,
North and east, hill
After hill of white snags.
To the south, white stumps, white logs,
Washing to the valleys, bleeding scarps,
Lopped spurs, empty streambeds.
The land, split and cracked
Under the crisscross of logging roads,
Oozing down its ravines.
It is twenty-five years
Since the first blue-white puff was sighted.
Convicts have planted saplings
By the coast, schoolboys
Have planted by the highway,
So far little catches.
To the north, on the hills
Loggers can’t reach,
Great virgin stands of snags
Burnt clean and bleached
In the distance keeping on
Blurring to look like smoke.
Big, immaculate snowflakes
Have been coming down, melting
On touching. All night,
As I lay trying for sleep,
Listened to Kilchis
River grinding its rocks and boulders.
The ravine is a mass of slash slippery
With rain and snow. Tree
Trunks cross and lock each other
Blocking the water,
Intricately grained
Rims for the little waterfalls.
A mule deer joined me,
Leading like a scout,
When I turned off and climbed
He stopped too, and sadly – I found myself
Sadly thinking – watched my going.
Birds wrangled and chirped.
I was sitting under
The last knoll,
Gnawing the last of the heart,
Looking back at the Burn
As it went out in the twilight,
Its crags broken, its valleys
Soaked in night, another
Plundered breast of the world.
I scrambled to my feet
And climbed, I could hear my heart
Beating in the air around me,
And came over the last summit
Into a dark wind blasting
Out of the blackness.
Behind me snow was still falling.
Before me the Pacific
Fell with long triple crashes on the shore.
It was only steps to the unburnable sea.
It is not so much the image of the man
that’s moving – he pausing from his work
to whet his scythe, trousers tied
below the knee, white shirt lit by
another summer’s sun, another century’s –
as the sight of the grasses beyond
his last laid swathe, so living yet
upon the moment previous to death;
for as the man stooping straightened up
and bent again they died before his blade.
Sweet hay and gone some seventy years ago
and yet they stand before me in the sun,
stems damp still where their neighbours’ fall
uncovered them, succulent and straight,
immediate with moon-daisies.
There were boys at my Prep. School my own age
And three stone heavier, who made fifty pounds
Over the holidays selling kangaroo hides
They’d skinned and pegged out themselves
On their fathers’ stations. Many shaved, several
Slept with the maids – one I remember
Running his hand up the Irish maid’s leg
At breakfast not ten feet away
From the Headmaster’s enormous armature of head.
Then there were those marathon journeys home
In the train for the holidays, without sleepers,
And the carriages full of Glennie and Fairholme
Girls sitting up all night – some crying
In the lavatory, some sipping sweet sherry
From dark label-less bottles passed them in the dark,
Some knowing what to do and spattered
By Queensland Railways’ coal dust trying
To do it on the floor, their black lisle
Stockings changed for wartime rayon. There were
So many ways of losing a troublesome innocence
But so many ways of keeping it too. Being troubled,
I found a sophistication which drove me mad
Sitting out dances, a viewed humiliation,
Walking through waltzes on boracic’d floors,
(Chopped horsehair rising, said to make girls sexy).
The girls were nicer than I needed, the Headmaster
Led the Jolly Miller, the knowing athletes
Waited for the Gypsy Tap, their stories next day
Full of what they’d managed on the dark verandah.
My schooldays when I was so eagerly unhappy
Have me back among them when I sleep
Freely associating with those baffled fears.
The lascivious miler, the confident three-quarter
Are thick men now with kids and problems.
There is no way back into their wormy Eden,
Ripe with girls, esplanaded with sex,
To stuff myself to sickness and forget
(Taking their chances, my old wounds averted)
The boy with something wrong reading a book
While the smut-skeined train goes homeward
Carrying the practised to the sensual city.
I saw the garden where my aunt had died
And her two children and a woman from next door;
It was like a burst pod filled with clay.
A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs
Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses
With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors;
The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground,
Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse
Over the housetop and into the street beyond.
Now the garden lay stripped and stale; the iron shelter
Spread out its separate petals around a smooth clay saucer.
Small, and so tidy it seemed nobody had ever been there.
When I saw it, the house was blown clean by blast and care.
Relations had already torn out the new fireplaces;
My cousin’s pencils lasted me several years.
And in his office notepad that was given me
I found solemn drawings in crayon of blondes without dresses.
In his lifetime I had not known him well.
These were the things I noticed at ten years of age:
Those, and the four hearses outside our house,
The chocolate cakes, and my classmates’ half-shocked envy.
But my grandfather went home from the mortuary
And for five years tried to share the noises in his skull,
Then he walked out and lay under a furze-bush to die.
When my father came back from identifying the daughter
He asked us to remind him of her mouth.
We tried. He said ‘I think it was the one’.
These were marginal people I had met only rarely
And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen;
Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths.
This bloody episode of four whom I could understand better dead
Gave me something I needed to keep a long story moving;
I had no pain of it; can find no scar even now.
But had my belief in the fiction not been thus buoyed up
I might, in the sigh and strike of the next night’s bombs
Have realized a little what they meant, and for the first time been afraid.
I watched the island narrowing the fine
Writing of foam around the precipices, then
The roads as small and casual as twine
Thrown on its mountains; I watched till the plane
Turned to the final north and turned above
The open channel with the grey sea between
The fishermen’s islets until all that I love
Folded in cloud; I watched the shallow green
That broke in places where there would be reef,
The silver glinting on the fuselage, each mile
Dividing us and all fidelity strained
Till space would snap it. Then, after a while
I thought of nothing; nothing, I prayed, would change;
When we set down at Seawell it had rained.
She gives him his eyes, she found them Among some rubble, among some beetles
He gives her her skin He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment
She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her
He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully And sets them in perfect order A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing, incredulous
Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them So that his whole body lights up And he has fashioned her new hips With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it
They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily To test each new thing at each new step
And now she smooths over him the plates of his skull So that the joints are invisible And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach With a single wire
She gives him his teeth, tying their roots to the centrepin of his body
He sets the little circlets on her fingertips
She stitches his body here and there with steely purple silk
He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth
She inlays with deep-cut scrolls the nape of his neck
He sinks into place the inside of her thighs
So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment Like two gods of mud Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.
She gives him his eyes, she found them Among some rubble, among some beetles
He gives her her skin He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment
She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her
He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully And sets them in perfect order A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing, incredulous
Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them So that his whole body lights up And he has fashioned her new hips With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it
They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily To test each new thing at each new step
And now she smooths over him the plates of his skull So that the joints are invisible And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach With a single wire
She gives him his teeth, tying their roots to the centrepin of his body
He sets the little circlets on her fingertips
She stitches his body here and there with steely purple silk
He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth
She inlays with deep-cut scrolls the nape of his neck
He sinks into place the inside of her thighs
So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment Like two gods of mud Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
I married a man from County Roscommon
and I live in the back of beyond
with a field of cows and a yard of hens
and six white geese on the pond.
At my door’s a square of yellow corn
caught up by its corners and shaken,
and the road runs down through the open gate
and freedom’s there for the taking.
I had thought to work on the Abbey stage
or have my name in a book,
to see my thought on the printed page,
or still the crowd with a look.
But I turn to fold the breakfast cloth
and to polish the lustre and brass,
to order and dust the tumbled rooms
and find my face in the glass.
I ought to feel I’m a happy woman
for I lie in the lap of the land,
but I married the man from County Roscommon
and I live at the back of beyond.
When he had made sure there were no survivors in his house
And that all the suitors were dead, heaped in blood and dust
Like fish that fishermen with fine-meshed nets have hauled
Up gasping for salt water, evaporating in the sunshine,
Odysseus, spattered with muck and like a lion dripping blood
From his chest and cheeks after devouring a farmer’s bullock,
Ordered the disloyal housemaids to sponge down the armchairs
And tables, while Telemachos, the oxherd and the swineherd
Scraped the floor with shovels, and then between the portico
And the roundhouse stretched a hawser and hanged the women
So none touched the ground with her toes, like long-winged thrushes
Or doves trapped in a mist-net across the thicket where they roost,
Their heads bobbing in a row, their feet twitching but not for long,
And when they had dragged Melanthios’s corpse into the haggard
And cut off his nose and ears and cock and balls, a dog’s dinner,
Odysseus, seeing the need for whitewash and disinfectant,
Fumigated the house and the outhouses, so that Hermes
Like a clergyman might wave the supernatural baton
With which he resurrects or hypnotises those he chooses,
And waken and round up the suitors’ souls, and the housemaids’,
Like bats gibbering in the nooks of their mysterious cave
When out of the clusters that dangle from the rocky ceiling
One of them drops and squeaks, so their souls were batsqueaks
As they flittered after Hermes, their deliverer, who led them
Along the clammy sheughs, then past the oceanic streams
And the white rock, the sun’s gatepost in that dreamy region,
Until they came to a bog-meadow full of bog-asphodels
Where the residents are ghosts or images of the dead.
The first warm day, and by mid-afternoon the snow is no more than a washing strewn over the yards, the bedding rolled in knots and leaking water, the white shirts lying under the evergreens. Through the heaviest drifts rise autumn’s fallen bicycles, small carnivals of paint and chrome, the Octopus and Tilt-A-Whirl beginning to turn in the sun. Now children, stiffened by winter and dressed, somehow, like old men, mutter and bend to the work of building dams.
But such a spring is brief; by five o’clock the chill of sundown, darkness, the blue TVs flashing like storms in the picture windows, the yards gone gray, the wet dogs barking at nothing. Far off across the cornfields staked for streets and sewers, the body of a farmer missing since fall will show up in his garden tomorrow, as unexpected as a tulip.
When all this is over, said the swineherd,
I mean to retire, where
Nobody will have heard about my special skills
And conversation is mainly about the weather.
I intend to learn how to make coffee, at least as well
As the Portuguese lay-sister in the kitchen
And polish the brass fenders every day.
I want to lie awake at night
Listening to cream crawling to the top of the jug
And the water lying soft in the cistern.
I want to see an orchard where the trees grow in straight lines
And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks,
Where it gets dark early in summer
And the apple-blossom is allowed to wither on the bough.
Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels. – Seferis, Mythistorema
for J. G. Farrell
Even now there are places where a thought might grow –
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,
Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.
They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.
There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong –
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.
A half century, without visitors, in the dark –
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
My mother wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don’t
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.
I don’t love my son
the way I meant to love him.
I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle of grass around
the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.
I must learn
to forgive my mother,
now that I am helpless
to spare my son.
We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland.
No music stored at the doors of hell.
No god to make it.
No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it.
But I remember an evening when the sky
was dark at four.
When ice had seized every part of the city
and we sat talking –
the air making a wreath for our cups of tea.
And you began to speak of our own gods.
Our heartbroken pantheon:
No Attic light for them and no Herodotus
but thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap
of the sharp cliffs
they spent their winters on.
And the pitch-black Atlantic night.
And how the sound
of a bird’s wing in a lost language sounded.
You made the noise for me.
Made it again.
Until I could see the flight of it: suddenly
the silvery, lithe rivers of your southwest
lay down in silence
and the savage acres no one could predict
were all at ease, soothed and quiet and
listening to you, as I was. As if to music, as if to peace.
Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.
By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.
You are my secret coat. You’re never dry. You wear the weight and stink of black canals. Malodorous companion, we know why It’s taken me so long to see we’re pals, To learn why my acquaintance never sniff Or send me notes to say I stink of stiff.
But you don’t talk, historical bespoke. You must be worn, be intimate as skin, And though I never lived what you invoke, At birth I was already buttoned in. Your clammy itch became my atmosphere, An air made half of anger, half of fear.
And what you are is what I tried to shed In libraries with Donne and Henry James. You’re here to bear a message from the dead Whose history’s dishonoured with their names. You mean the North, the poor, and troopers sent To shoot down those who showed their discontent.
No comfort there for comfy meliorists Grown weepy over Jarrow photographs. No comfort when the poor the state enlists Parade before their fathers’ cenotaphs. No comfort when the strikers all go back To see which twenty thousand get the sack.
Be with me when they cauterize the facts. Be with me to the bottom of the page, Insisting on what history exacts. Be memory, be conscience, will and rage, And keep me cold and honest, cousin coat, So if I lie, I’ll know you’re at my throat.
I watch the boy shoot up.
His head woozes back, eyes fluttering lightly
into what land, what dreamy repetition, separateness, deferment,
grainy black and white of this sleep that is not sleep?
He closes his eyes but I still watch. I am a child, I don’t know who he is,
or how he’s wandered back
into the stockroom of this store. I am supposed to be up front
where it is light, helping to sell buttons, pencils, keys.
I am supposed to walk around in the safe glare,
the sharp-edged present tense.
But here in this dim room behind the aisles
the boy crawls toward a wall
that used to be part of the bakery next door – brick ovens three feet deep
with rounded tops like quaint old-fashioned doorways,
crumbling now, and damp, his head swaying like a scattered stalk.
He leans back into the oven-dark and shivers,
scratches his cheek with one hand and then the other;
he smooths his itchy skin, scaly, purplish-red.
What tense is it he drifts in? What tense in which memories rise up
disguised so they won’t stun, mixing with this musty air,
these towers of cardboard boxes held in the eerie sway
of so much want? What tense in which we sit,
the boy and I, and do not speak, the dark like a god
and our small bodies like errors
the god wants to take back again, out of his created world?
And what tense in which the musty dampness holds the ovens
like moldy unrocked cradles, eye-holes, graves,
and street-cries skip and flare above our listening, but they are muffled
from back here, as if they could not touch us, yet still here?
The drawers of the cash registers open again and again
like solved equations, while the boy breathes so softly,
his hands clutched into fists now
as if trying to protect something hidden, keep it safe.
There is the dark of his closed hands, there is the oven-dark,
and then the larger stockroom dark. I think there is no tense for this –
how he rubs his palms into his eyes
then slides his bony shoulders and thin face toward the light
of the narrow doorway, the long aisles
just out of sight, and then turns slowly back.
Land of transactions, of tactics, sirens, cries –
it is what waits outside this dark that doesn’t want to know this dark.
Aisles of clocks, of kitchenware, venetian blinds.
He looks up from the dimness and damp brick, his eyes drifting – where? –
before me, into what abrogation, what refusal
of earthly terror, earthly place?
Various stars. Various kings. Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights. Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers, Much cold, much overbearing darkness.
Various long midwinter Glooms. Various Solitary and Terrible Stars. Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers. Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars.
More than one North Star, more than one South Star. Several billion elliptical galaxies, bubble nebulae, binary systems, Various dust lanes, various routes through varying thicknesses of Dark, Many tunnels into deep space, minds going back and forth.
Many visions, many digitally enhanced heavens, All kinds of glistenings being gathered into telescopes: Fireworks, gasworks, white-streaked works of Dusk, Works of wonder and/or water, snowflakes, stars of frost…
Various dazed astronomers dilating their eyes, Various astronauts setting out into laughterless earthlessness, Various 5,000-year-old moon maps, Various blindmen feeling across the heavens in braille.
Various gods making beautiful works in bronze, Brooches, crowns, triangles, cups and chains, And all sorts of drystone stars put together without mortar. Many Wisemen remarking the irregular weather.
Many exile energies, many low-voiced followers, Watches of wisp of various glowing spindles, Soothsayers, hunters in the High Country of the Zodiac, Seafarers tossing, tied to a star…
Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights. Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall. Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening Blowing the stars towards them, bringing snow.
Tim Miller 