by Jane Kenyon
to make you stop telling me things.
I was a fist closed around a rock.
For a long time nothing changed.
It was like driving all day through Texas.
But now I’ve stopped
tearing the arm off the waiting-room chair,
and sneaking back at night to fix it.
And the change was like light
moving through a prism, red
turning to yellow, green to blue,
and all by insensible degrees.
From the Back Steps
A bird begins to sing,
hesitates, like a carpenter
pausing to straighten a nail, then
begins again.
The cat lolls in the shade
under the parked car, his head
in the wheel’s path.
I bury the thing I love.
But the cat continues to lie
comfortably, right where he is,
and no one will move the car.
My own violence falls away
like paint peeling from a wall.
I am choosing a new color
to paint my house, though I’m still
not sure what the color will be.
Cages
1
Driving to Winter Park in March,
past Cypress Gardens and the baseball camps,
past the dead beagle in the road, his legs
outstretched, as if he meant to walk
on his side in the next life.
At night, the air
smells like a cup of jasmine tea.
The night-bloomer, white
flowering jasmine,
and groves of orange trees
breathing through their sweet skins.
And cattle in the back
of the truck, staggering
as the driver turns off the highway.
2
By the pool, here at the hotel,
animals in cages to amuse us:
monkeys, peacocks, a pair of black swans,
rabbits, parrots, cockatoos,
flamingoes holding themselves on one leg,
perfectly still, as if they loathed
touching the ground.
The black swan floats
in three inches of foul water,
its bright bill thrust under its wing.
And the monkeys: one of them
reaches through the cage
and grabs for my pen, as if
he had finally decided to write a letter
long overdue.
And one lies in the lap of another.
They look like Mary and Jesus
in the Pieta, one searching for fleas
or lice on the other, for succour
on the body of the other—
some particle of comfort, some
consolation for being in this life.
3
And the body, what about the body?
Sometimes it is my favorite child,
uncivilized as those spider monkeys
loose in the trees overhead.
They leap, and cling with their strong
tails, they steal food
from the cages—little bandits.
If Chaucer could see them,
he would change “lecherous as a sparrow”
to “lecherous as a monkey.”
And sometimes my body disgusts me.
Filling and emptying it disgusts me.
And when I feel that way
I treat it like a goose with its legs
tied together, stuffing it
until the liver is fat enough
to make a tin of pate.
Then I have to agree that the body
is a cloud before the soul’s eye.
This long struggle to be at home
in the body, this difficult friendship.
4
People come here when they are old
for slow walks on the beach
with new companions. Mortuaries
advertise on bus-stop benches.
At night in nearby groves,
unfamiliar constellations
rise in a leafy sky,
and in the parks, mass plantings
of cannas are blooming
their outrageous blooms,
as if speaking final thoughts,
no longer caring what anyone thinks . . .
4
Afternonn at the House
At the Feeder
First the Chickadees take
their share, then fly
to the bittersweet vine,
where they crack open the seeds,
excited, like poets
opening the day’s mail.
And the Evening Grosbeaks—
those large and prosperous
finches—resemble skiers
with the latest equipment, bright
yellow goggles on their faces.
Now the Bluejay comes in
for a landing, like a SAC bomber
returning to Plattsburgh
after a day of patrolling the ozone.
Every teacup in the pantry rattles.
The solid and graceful bodies
of Nuthatches, perpetually
upside down, like Yogis .. .
and Slate-Colored Juncoes, feeding
on the ground, taking only
what falls to them.
The cats watch, one
from the lid of the breadbox,
another from the piano. A third
flexes its claws in sleep, dreaming
perhaps, of a chicken neck,
or of being worshiped as a god
at Bubastis, during
the XXIII dynasty.
The Circle on the Grass
1
Last night the wind came into the yard,
and wrenched the biggest branch
from the box elder, and threw it down
—no, that was not what it wanted—
and kept on going.
This morning a man arrives
with ladders, ropes and saws,
to cut down what is left.
2
Eighty years ago, someone
planted the sapling
midway between porch and fence,
and later that day,
looked down from the bedroom
on the highest branch.
The woman who stood at the window
could only imagine shade,
and the sound of leaves moving overhead,
like so many whispered conversations.
3
I keep busy in the house,
but I hear the high drone
of the saw, and the drop in pitch
as chain cuts into bark.
I clean with the vacuum
so I won’t have to listen.
Finally the man goes for lunch,
leaving the house quiet
as a face paralyzed by strokes.
4
All afternoon I hear the blunt
shudder of limbs striking the ground.
The tree drops its arms
like someone abandoning a conviction:
—perhaps I have been wrong all this time—.
When it’s over, there is nothing left
but a pale circle on the grass,
dark in the center, like an eye.
Falling
March. Rain. Five days now.
Water gathers in flat places,
finds every space between stones.
The river peaks, fish lie
stunned on the muddy bottom.
After the crash in the Swiss
countryside, an arm
dangles from a tree. A
tortoiseshell
comb parts the grass.
The bookmark is still in place.
This month I was five days late,
but now the blood comes in a rush.
Let everything fall where it will.
Someone unpacks a suitcase, thinks
of living without possessions.
Afternoon in the House
It’s quiet here. The cats
sprawl, each
in a favored place.
The geranium leans this way
to see if I’m writing about her:
head all petals, brown
stalks, and those green fans.
So you see,
I am writing about you.
I turn on the radio. Wrong.
Let’s not have any noise
in this room, except
the sound of a voice reading a poem.
The cats request
The Meadow Mouse, by Theodore Roethke.
The house settles down on its haunches
for a doze.
I know you are with me, plants,
and cats—and even so, I’m frightened,
sitting in the middle of perfect
possibility.
Full Moon in Winter
Bare branches rise
and fall overhead.
The barn door bangs loose,
persistent as remorse
after anger and shouting.
Dogs bark across the pond.
The shadow of the house
appears on the crusted snow
like the idea of a house,
and my own shadow
lies down in the cold
at my feet, lunatic,
like someone tired
of living in a body,
needy and full of desire . . .
After an Early Frost
The cat takes her squealing mouse into the bathtub to play. Monopoly? Twenty Questions? I hear bottles and brushes hitting the floor.
Then nothing.
I go to take out the dead mouse.
Not in the tub. Nowhere on the floor. Suddenly the towel moves on the rack. The mouse crouches there, shaking, eyes wide, sides heaving, nose like a peppercorn.
I consider bringing the cat back to finish the job. I consider finishing the job myself.
Instead, I nudge it into a coffee can. I put the can under a bush in the garden and go off to write letters.
Maybe it will be back in the shed by suppertime, making a nest in the rag basket. Or I might find it under a leaf, rigid and shrunken. Who knows. Somebody will carry me out of here too, though not for a while.
Year Day
We are living together on the earth.
The clock’s heart
beats in its wooden chest.
The cats follow the sun through the house.
We lie down together at night.
Today, you work in your office,
and I in my study. Sometimes
we are busy and casual.
Sitting here, I can see
the path we have made on the rug.
The hermit gives up
after thirty years of hiding in the jungle.
The last door to the last room
comes unlatched. Here are the gestures
of my hands. Wear them in your hair.
The Suitor
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.
American Triptych
1 At the Store
Clumps of daffodils along the storefront
bend low this morning, late snow
pushing their bright heads down.
The flag snaps and tugs at the pole
beside the door.
The old freezer, full of Maine blueberries
and breaded scallops, mumbles along.
A box of fresh bananas on the floor,
luminous and exotic... .
I take what I need from the narrow aisles.
Cousins arrive like themes and variations.
Ansel leans on the counter,
remembering other late spring snows,
the blue snow of ’32:
Yes, it was, it was blue.
Forrest comes and goes quickly
with a length of stovepipe, telling
about the neighbors’ chimney fire.
The store is a bandstand. All our voices
sound from it, making the same motley
American music Ives heard;
this piece starting quietly,
with the repeated clink of a flagpole
pulley in the doorway of a country store.
2 Down the Road
Early summer. Sun low over the pond. Down the road the neighbors’ children play baseball in the twilight. I see the ball leave the bat; a moment later the sound reaches me where I sit.
No deaths or separations, no disappointments in love. They are throwing and hitting the ball. Sometimes it arcs higher than the house, sometimes it tunnels into tall grass at the edge of the hayfield.
3 Potluck at the Wilmot Flat Baptist Church
We drive to the Flat on a clear November night. Stars and planets appear in the eastern sky, not yet in the west.
Voices rise from the social hall downstairs, the clink of silverware and plates, the smell of coffee.
As we walk into the room faces turn to us, friendly and curious. We are seated at the speakers’ table, next to the town historian, a retired schoolteacher who is lively and precise.
The table is decorated with red, white, and blue streamers, and framed Time and Newsweek covers of the President, just elected. Someone has tied peanuts to small branches with red, white, and blue yarn, and set the branches upright in lumps of clay at the center of each table.
After the meal everyone clears food from the tables, and tables from the hall. Then we go up to the sanctuary, where my husband reads poems from the pulpit.
One woman looks out the window continually. I notice the altar cloth, tasseled and embroidered in gold thread: Till I Come. There is applause after each poem.
On the way home we pass the white clapboard faces of the library and town hall, luminous in the moonlight, and I remember the first time I ever voted—in a township hall in Michigan
That same wonderful smell of coffee was in the air, and I found myself among people trying to live ordered lives . . . And again I am struck with love for the Republic.
Now That We Live
Fat spider by the door.
Brow of hayfield, blue
eye of pond.
Sky at night like an open well.
Whip-Poor-Will calls
in the tall grass:
I belong to the Queen of Heaven!
The cheerful worm
in the cheerful ground.
Regular shape of meadow and wall
under the blue
imperturbable mountain.