is hard.
– Say, rather
it resists
the slow corrosives
and the flight
of time
and yet it takes
the play, the fluency
from light.
– How would you know
the gift you’d give
was the gift
she’d wish to have?
– Gift is giving,
gift is meaning:
first
I’d give
then let her
live with it
to prove
its quality the better and
thus learn
to love
what (to begin with)
she might spurn.
– You’d
moralize a gift?
– I’d have her
understand
the gift I gave her.
– And so she shall
but let her play
her innocence away
emerging
as she does
between
her doom (unknown),
her unmown green.
Up at La Serra
The shadow
ran before it lengthening
and a wave went over.
Distance
did not obscure
the machine of nature:
you could watch it
squander and recompose itself
all day, the shadow-run
the sway of the necessity down there
at the cliff-base
crushing white from blue.
Come in
by the arch
under the campanile parrocchiale
and the exasperation of the water
followed you,
its Soldi, soldi
unpicking the hill-top peace
insistently.
He knew, at twenty
all the deprivations such a place
stored for the man
who had no more to offer
than a sheaf of verse
in the style of Quasimodo.
Came the moment,
he would tell it
in a poem
without rancour, a lucid
testament above his name
Paolo
Bertolani
– Ciao, Paolo!
– Ciao
Giorgino!
He would put them
all in it –
Giorgino going
over the hill
to look for labour;
the grinder
of knives and scissors
waiting to come up, until
someone would hoist his wheel
on to a back, already
hooped to take it,
so you thought
the weight must crack
the curvature. And then:
Beppino and Beppino
friends
who had in common
nothing except their names and friendship;
and the sister of the one
who played the accordion
and under all
the Soldi, soldi,
sacra conversazione
del mare –
della madre.
Sometimes
the men had an air of stupefaction:
La Madre:
it was the women there
won in a truceless enmity.
At home
a sepia-green
Madonna di Foligno
shared the wall
with the October calendar –
Lenin looked out of it,
Mao
blessing the tractors
and you told
the visitors:
We are not communists
although we call ourselves communists
we are what you English
would call… socialists.
He believed
that God was a hypothesis,
that the party would bring in
a synthesis, that he
would edit the local paper for them,
or perhaps
go northward to Milan;
or would he grow
as the others had – son
to the puttana-madonna
in the curse,
chafed by the maternal knot and by
the dream of faithlessness,
uncalloused hands,
lace, white
at the windows of the sailors’ brothels
in the port five miles away?
Soldi –
soldi –
some
worked at the naval yards
and some, like him
were left between
the time the olives turned
from green to black
and the harvest of the grapes,
idle
except for hacking wood.
Those
with an acre of good land
had vines, had wine
and self-respect. Some
carried down crickets
to the garden of the mad Englishwoman
who could
not
tolerate
crickets, and they received
soldi, soldi
for recapturing them…
The construction
continued as heretofore
on the villa of the Milanese dentist
as the evening
came in with news:
– We have won
the election.
– At the café
the red flag is up.
He turned back
quickly beneath the tower.
Giorgino
who wanted to be a waiter
wanted to be commissar
piling sassi
into the dentist’s wall.
Even the harlot’s mother
who had not dared
come forth because her daughter
had erred in giving birth,
appeared by the Trattoria della Pace.
She did not enter
the masculine precinct,
listening there, her shadow
lengthened-out behind her
black as the uniform of age
she wore
on back and head.
This was the Day
which began all reckonings
she heard them say
with a woman’s ears;
she liked
the music from the wireless.
The padre
pulled
at his unheeded angelus
and the Day went down behind
the town in the bay below
where – come the season –
they would be preparing
with striped umbrellas,
for the stranieri and milanesi –
treason so readily compounded
by the promiscuous stir
on the iridescent sliding water.
He had sought
the clear air of the cliff.
– Salve, Giorgino
– Salve
Paolo, have you
heard
that we have won the election?
– I am writing
a poem about it:
it will begin
here, with the cliff and with the sea
following its morning shadow in.
Head Hewn with an Axe
The whittled crystal: fissured
For the invasion of shadows.
The stone book, its
Hacked leaves
Frozen in granite.
The meteorite, anatomized
By the geometer. And to what end?
To the enrichment of the alignment:
Sun against shade against sun:
That daily food, which
Were it not for such importunities
Would go untasted:<
br />
The suave block, desecrated
In six strokes. The light
Is staunching its wounds.
American Scenes and Other Poems (1966)
The Snow Fences
They are fencing the upland against
the drifts this wind, those clouds
would bury it under: brow and bone
know already that levelling zero
as you go, an aching skeleton,
in the breathtaking rareness of winter air.
Walking here, what do you see?
Little more, through wind-teased eyes,
than a black, iron tree
and, there, another, a straggle
of low and broken wall between, grass
sapped of its greenness, day going.
The farms are few: spread
as wide, perhaps, as when
the Saxons who found them, chose
these airy and woodless spaces
and froze here before they fed
the unsuperseded burial ground.
Ahead, the church’s dead-white
limewash will dazzle the mind
as, dazed, you enter to escape:
despite the stillness here, the chill
of wash-light scarcely seems
less penetrant than the hill-top wind.
Between the graves, you find
a beheaded pigeon, the blood and grain
trailed from its bitten crop, as alien to all
the day’s pallor as the raw
wounds of the earth, turned above
a fresh solitary burial.
A plaque of staining metal
distinguishes this grave among
an anonymity whose stones
the frosts have scaled, thrusting under
as if they grudged the ground
its ill-kept memorials.
The bitter darkness drives you
back valleywards, and again you bend
joint and tendon to encounter
the wind’s force and leave behind
the nameless stones, the snow-shrouds
of a waste season: they are fencing
the upland against those years, those clouds.
A Given Grace
Two cups,
a given grace,
afloat and white
on the mahogany pool
of table. They unclench
the mind, filling it
with themselves.
Though common ware,
these rare reflections,
coolness of brown
so strengthens and refines
the burning of their white,
you would not wish
them other than they are –
you, who are challenged
and replenished by
those empty vessels.
Arizona Desert
Eye
drinks the dry orange ground,
the cowskull
bound to it by shade:
sun-warped, the layers
of flaked and broken bone
unclench into petals,
into eyelids of limestone:
Blind glitter
that sees
spaces and steppes expand
of the purgatories possible
to us and
impossible.
Upended trees
in the Hopi’s desert orchard
betoken
unceasing unspoken war,
return
the levelling light,
imageless arbiter.
A dead snake
pulsates again
as, hidden, the beetles’ hunger
mines through the tunnel of its drying skin.
Here, to be,
is to sound
patience deviously
and follow
like the irregular corn
the water underground.
Villages
from mud and stone
parch back
to the dust they humanize
and mean
marriage, a loving lease
on sand, sun, rock and
Hopi
means peace.
Arroyo Seco
A piano, so long untuned
it sounded like a guitar
was playing Für Elise:
the church was locked: graves
on which the only flowers
were the wild ones
except for the everlasting
plastic wreaths and roses,
the bleached dust making
them gaudier than they were
and they were gaudy:
SILVIANO
we loved him
LUCERO
and equal eloquence in
the quotation, twisted and
cut across two pages
in the statuary book:
Ute Mountain
‘When I am gone,’
the old chief said
‘if you need me, call me,’
and down he lay, became stone.
They were giants then
(as you may see),
and we
are not the shadows of such men.
The long splayed Indian hair
spread ravelling out
behind the rocky head
in groins, ravines;
petered across the desert plain
through Colorado,
transmitting force
in a single undulant unbroken line
from toe to hair-tip: there
profiled, inclined away from one
are features, foreshortened, and the high
blade of the cheekbone.
Reading it so, the eye
can take the entire great
straddle of mountain-mass,
passing down elbows, knees and feet.
‘If you need me, call me.’
His singularity dominates the plain
as we call to our aid his image:
thus men make a mountain.
Maine Winter
Ravenous the flock
who with an artist’s
tact, dispose
their crow-blue-black
over the spread of snow –
Trackless, save where
by stalled degrees
a fox flaringly goes
with more of the hunter’s caution than
of the hunter’s ease.
The flock
have sighted him, are his match
and more, with their artist’s eye
and a score of beaks against
a fox, paws clogged, and a single pair of jaws.
And they mass to the red-on-white
conclusion, sweep
down between
a foreground all snow-scene and a distance
all cliff-tearing seascape.
The Well
in a Mexican convent
Leaning on
the parapet stone
Listening down
the long, dark
sheath through which the standing
shaft of water
sends its echoings up
Catching, as it stirs
the steady seethings
that mount and mingle
with surrounding sounds
from the neighbouring
barrack-yard: soldiery
– heirs, no doubt
of the gunnery that gashed
these walls of tattered
frescoes, the bullet-
holes now socketed
deeper by sunlight
and the bright gaps
giving on to the square
and there revealing
strollers in khaki
with their girls Aware
of a well-like
cool throughout
the entire, clear
sunlit ruin,
of the brilliant cupids
above the cistern
t
hat hold up
a baldachin of stone
which is not there
Hearing the tide
of insurrection
subside through time
under the still-
painted slogans
Hemos servido
lealmente
la revolución
On a Mexican Straw Christ
This is not the event. This
Is a man of straw,
The legs straw-thin
The straw-arms shent
And nailed. And yet this dry
Essence of agony must be
Close-grained to the one
They lifted down, when
Consummatum est the event was done.
Below the baroque straw-
Haloed basket-head
And the crown, far more
Like a cap, woven
For a matador than a crown of thorn,
A gap recedes: it makes
A mouth-in-pain, the teeth
Within its sideways-slashed
And gritted grin, are
Verticals of straw, and they
Emerge where the mask’s
Chin ceases and become
Parallels plunging down, their sum
The body of God. Beneath,
Two feet join in one
Cramped culmination, as if
To say: ‘I am the un-
Resurrection and the Death.’
The Oaxaca Bus
Fiat Voluntas Tua:
over the head of the driver
an altar. No end to it,
the beginning seems to be
Our Lady of Solitude
blessing the crowd
out of a double frame –
gilt and green. Dark
mother by light,
her neighbour, the Guadalupe Virgin
is tucked away under the right-
hand edge as if
to make sure
twice over and (left)
are the legs of a protruding
postcard crucifixion
mothered by both. A cosmos
proliferates outwards
from the mystery, starts
with the minute, twin
sombreros dangling there, each
with embroidered brims
and a blood-red cord
circling the crown of each.
The driving mirror
catches their reflection, carries on
the miraculous composition
with two names – serifs
and flourishes –: Maria,
Eugenia: both
inscribed on the glass and
Swimming Chenango Lake Page 3