New Collected Poems
Page 3
or believable sham.
I paid him to remain strange
to my threshold and table,
to permit me to forget him—
knowing I won’t. He’s the guest
of my knowing, though not asked.
THE THIEF
I think of us lying asleep,
eyes and hands filled with the dark,
when the arm of the night
entered, reaching into the pockets
of our empty clothes. We slept
in the element of that power,
innocent of it, preserved from it
not even by our wish.
As though not born, we were carried
beyond an imminence we did not
waken to, as passively as stars
are carried beyond their spent
shining—our eyes granted to the light
again, by what chance or price
we do not even know.
THE BROKEN GROUND
The opening out and out,
body yielding body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow
on the piling up
darkened broken old
husks of itself:
bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed—
taken
from what was, from
what could have been.
What is left
is what is.
FINDINGS
(1969)
THE DESIGN OF THE HOUSE:
IDEAL AND HARD TIME
1.
Except in idea, perfection is as wild
as light; there is no hand laid on it.
But the house is a shambles
unless the vision of its perfection
upholds it like stone.
More probable: the ideal
of its destruction:
cloud of fire prefiguring
its disappearance.
What value there is
is assumed;
like a god, the house elects its omens;
because it is, I desire it should be
—white, its life intact in it,
among trees.
Love has conceived a house,
and out of its labor
brought forth its likeness
—the emblem of desire, continuing
though the flesh falls away.
2.
We’ve come round again
to short days and long nights;
time goes;
the clocks barely keep up;
a spare dream of summer
is kept
alive in the house:
the Queen Anne’s lace
—gobletted,
green beginning to bloom,
tufted, upfurling—
unfolding
whiteness:
in this winter’s memory
more clear than ever in summer,
cold paring away excess:
the single blooming random
in the summer’s abundance
of its kind, in high relief
above the clover and grass
of the field, unstill
an instant,
the day having come upon it,
green and white
in as much light as ever was.
Opened, white, at the solstice
of its becoming, then the flower
forgets its growing;
is still;
dirt is its paradigm—
and this memory’s seeing,
a cold wind keening the outline.
3.
Winter nights the house sleeps,
a dry seedhead in the snow
falling and fallen, the white
and dark and depth of it, continuing
slow impact of silence.
The dark
rooms hold our heads on pillows, waiting
day, through the snow falling and fallen
in the darkness between inconsecutive
dreams. The brain burrows in its earth
and sleeps,
trusting dawn, though the sun’s
light is a light without precedent, never
proved ahead of its coming, waited for
by the law that hope has made it.
4.
What do you intend?
Drink blood
and speak, old ghosts. I don’t
hear you. What has it amounted to
—the unnegotiable accumulation
of your tears? Your expenditure
has purchased no reprieve. Your
failed wisdom shards among the
down-going atoms of the moment.
History goes blind and in darkness;
neither sees nor is seen, nor is
known except as a carrion
marked with unintelligible wounds:
dragging its dead body, living,
yet to be born, it moves heavily
to its glories. It tramples
the little towns, forgets their names.
5.
If reason was all, reason
would not exist—the will
to reason accounts for it;
it’s not reason that chooses
to live; the seed doesn’t swell
in its husk by reason, but loves
itself, obeys light which is
its own thought and argues the leaf
in secret; love articulates
the choice of life in fact; life
chooses life because it is
alive; what lives didn’t begin dead,
nor sun’s fire commence in ember.
Love foresees a jointure
composing a house, a marriage
of contraries, compendium
of opposites in equilibrium.
This morning the sun
came up before the moon set;
shadows were stripped from the house
like burnt rags, the sky turning
blue behind the clear moon,
day and night moving to day.
Let severances be as dividing
budleaves around the flower
—woman and child enfolded, chosen.
It’s a dying begun, not lightly,
the taking up of this love
whose legacy is its death.
6.
This is a love poem for you, Tanya—
among wars, among the brutal forfeitures
of time, in this house, among its latent fires,
among all that honesty must see, I accept
your dying, and love you: nothing mitigates
—and for our Mary, chosen by the blind
hungering of our blood, precious and periled
in her happy mornings; whose tears are mine.
7.
There’s still a degree of sleep
recalls
the vast empty dream I slept in
as a child
sometimes contained a chaos, tangled
like fishline snarled in hooks—
sometimes a hook, whetted, severe,
drawing
the barbed darkness to a point;
sometimes I seemed merely to be falling.
The house, also, has taken shape in it.
8.
And I have dreamed
of the morning coming in
like a bird through the window
not burdened by a thought,
the light a singing
as I hoped.
It comes in and sings
on the corner of the white washstand,
among coleus stems and roots
in a clear green bottle
on the black tabletop
beneath the window,
under the purple coleus leaves,
among
spearing
green philodendron leaves,
on the white washstand:
a small yellow bird with black wings,
darting in and out.
9.
To imagine the thoughtlessness
of a thoughtless thing
is useless.
The mind must sing
of itself to keep awake.
Love has visualized a house,
and out of its expenditure
fleshed the design
at this cross ways
of consciousness and time:
its form is growth
come to light in it;
croplands, gardens,
are of its architecture,
labor its realization;
solstice is the height
of its consciousness,
thicket a figuration
of its waking;
plants and stars are made convergent
in its windows;
cities we have gone to and come back
are the prospect of its doorways.
And there’s a city it dreams of:
salt-white beside the water.
10.
Waking comes into sleep like a dream:
violet dawn over the snow, the black trees.
Snow and the house’s white make a white
the black swifts may come back to.
THE HANDING DOWN
1. The light
The mind is the continuity
of its objects, and the coherence
of its objects—the
understanding of each
one thing by the
intelligence of an assemblage.
It is the effort of design
to triumph over the imperfections
of the parts—
the old man’s gathering of memories
toward this morning’s windows
and pipe and talk, the road
and housefronts all his years
have come by, the squash blooms
of this summer’s garden.
The mind falsifies its objects
by inattention. Indirection
is its debasement of what it loves.
It is not given proof
that it is true. It is blind
at the beginning and at the end.
It is the illumination of a passage,
no more.
2. The conversation
Speaker and hearer, words
making a passage between them,
begin a community.
Two minds
in succession, grandfather
and grandson, they sit and talk
on the enclosed porch,
looking out at the town, which
recalls itself in their talk
and is carried forward.
Their conversation has
no pattern of its own,
but alludes casually
to a shaped knowledge
in the minds of the two men
who love each other.
The quietness of knowing in common
is half of it. Silences come into it
easily, and break it
while the old man thinks
or concentrates on his pipe
and the strong smoke
climbs over the brim of his hat.
He has lived a long time.
He has seen the changes of times
and grown used to the world
again. Having been wakeful so long,
the loser of so many years,
his mind moves back and forth,
sorting and counting,
among all he knows.
His memory has become huge,
and surrounds him,
and fills his silences.
He lifts his head
and speaks of an old day
that amuses him or grieves him
or both.
Under the windows opposite them
there’s a long table loaded
with potted plants, the foliage
staining and shadowing the daylight
as it comes in.
3. The old man is older in history than in time
“I’ve lived in two countries
in my life
and never moved.”
He has spoken of the steamboats
of his boyhood, the whistles
still clear to him
in the upriver bends,
coming down to the landings
now disappeared, their names
less spoken every year.
He has remembered the open days
of that first country
—“It was free here
when I was a boy”—and the old
brutalities and sorrows.
And now they talk of power
and politics and war, agonies
now, and to come,
deaths never imagined
by the old man’s generation.
The mistakes of the old
become the terrors of the young.
In the face of his grandson he sees
something of himself, going on.
Moved by the near suffering
of other men, he has taken them
into the body of his thought.
“If I died now, I wouldn’t lose
much. It’s you young ones
I worry about.”
4. He looks out the window at the town
Beyond the windows, past the fern
and the pot rims and the patterned
vine leaves, and the trees
in the yard, are the white housefronts
and storefronts of the little town,
facing the road. There are only
the two directions: coming in
and going out. And all
who take one take both.
The town, “port of entry
and departure for the bodies
as well as the souls of men,”
aspires to the greatness of the greatest
city of the mind—with its dead
for baggage. It suffers its dead beside it
under the particular grass, the summary stone.
Their hill keeps a silence into which
the live town speaks a little.
They are the town’s shut record, all
their complexity perished—victims
of epidemics, meanness, foolishness,
heredity, war, recklessness, chance,
pride, time. None ever escaped.
That is the history of the place.
The town, its white walls
gleaming among black
shadows and green leaves,
stands on the surface of the eye.
And the town’s history is the eye’s
depth and recognition—is the mind’s
discovery of itself in its place
in a new morning.
5. He has lived through another night
He begins the knowledge
of the sun’s absence.
He’s likely to wake up
any hour of the night
out of his light sleep
to know—with clarity like
the touch of hands in the dark—
the stillness of the room.
The silence
stretches over the town
like a black tent, whose hem
the headstones weight.
Into it come, now
and again, hard footsteps
on the road, remote
sudden voices, and then
a car coming in, or
going out, the headlights
levering the window’s
image around the walls.
And he considers the size
of his life, lying in it there,
looking up out of it
into the darkness,
the transparence of all
his old yea
rs between him
and the darkness.
Before it’s light
the birds waken, and begin
singing in the dark trees
around the house, among the leaves
over the dampened roofs
of the still town
and in the country thickets
for miles. Their voices
reach to the end of the dark.
6. The new house
At the foot of his long shadow
he walked across the town
early in the morning
to watch the carpenters at work
on a new house. The saws released
the warm pine-smell into the air
—the scent of time to come, freshly
opened. He was comforted by that,
and by the new unblemished wood.
That time goes, making
the jointures of households, for better
or worse, is no comfort.
That, for the men and women
still to be born, time is coming
is a comfort of sorts.
That there’s a little of the good
left over from a few lives
is a comfort of sorts.
He has grown eager
in his love for the good dead
and all the unborn.
That failed hope
doesn’t prove the failure of hope
is a comfort of sorts.
Grown old and wise, he takes
what comfort he can get, as gladly as once
he’d have taken the comfort he wished for.
For a man knowing evil—how surely
it grows up in any ground and makes seed—
the building of a house is a craft indeed.
7. The heaviness of his wisdom
The incredible happens, he knows.
The worst possibilities are real.
The terrible justifies
his dread of it. He knows winter
despondences, the mind inundated
by its excrement, hope gone
and not remembered.
And he knows vernal transfigurations,
the sentence in the stems of trees
noisy with old memory made new,
troubled with the seed
of the being of what has not been.
He trusts the changes of the sun and air:
dung and carrion made earth,
richness that forgets what it was.
He knows, if he can hold out
long enough, the good
is given its chance.