all night. Ed rubs his neck,
takes down the axe,
walks off.
We hear his axe work in the woods.
The sunlight strengthens.
Jerry wakes.
Jerry: I guess I slept all right.
I feel so clear.
I’ve got a rabbit in my snare.
It isn’t hurt. It just can’t bite the shoelace
from its foot. It will though
if I let it go on long enough.
He watches, on the rabbit’s side.
Jerry: He’s loose!
Self-conscious:
The big game hunter.
But I know how.
I just don’t have to.
I’m too near home.
Pauses.
I’m hearing something.
People. Yes.
He stands, halloos, and waves his arms.
Jerry: Hey! Hey! Halloo!
Elaine runs in, still limping, crying—
hearty hugs. Now Jerry has the calm
of someone always in control,
never in trouble. Was only Elaine
got frantic, got worried, is frightened still.
Elaine: Oh Jerry Oh Jerry are you all right?
She clumsily shoves some food at him:
candy bars, sandwich, a thermos.
He eats greedily, holding her tight
with one hand.
She looks more tired than he does.
Elaine: Your clothes are damp.
You’ll catch a cold.
There was frost last night.
How could you stand it!
Jerry: Oh I’m all right.
I had matches and a knife.
Guess what I had for dinner?
He feels in his pockets, all of them,
for the snake’s rattles. Can’t find them.
Jerry: That’s funny. I put them in my pocket.
Elaine: Put what?
Jerry: I killed a snake, a —
Elaine: It could have bitten you!
I know there aren’t any rattlesnakes up here,
but it gives me the shivers
just thinking about snakes.
I can’t bear snakes.
She urges the coffee on him.
Elaine: Here: I don’t think it’s half warm by now.
Jerry: I caught a rabbit in a snare
I rigged up like the one they had
at that Indian village on P.E.I.
And last night when the moon was full
I saw a big animal come by
right where we are sitting now. A bear,
or a big lynx. I couldn’t see.
But its eyes shone in the dark.
And I heard wolves!
He sighs, nostalgically.
Jerry: I’m still hungry. I do feel good.
I know it’s stupid to get lost
but you can really learn from the experience,
to have to make it on your own
and find you can.
They cuddle on the stone,
warm in the chilly sunlight,
take no notice of old Sam
who saunters in along the trail,
taps on the door, or of old Sarah
who comes out. The old folk greet
each other as calmly as if
they’d already met that morning
or lived there.
They sit on the stoop
and smile at the younger couple
as if at themselves in a mirror.
The young ones don’t look back.
Jerry: You know the Indians used to get lost
on purpose. You had to prove you were a man.
Find your real name.
You’d make a name for yourself out of what happened.
Initiation.
To be a real man depended on that.
It means a lot.
Elaine,
this has been the most meaningful experience
of my whole life.
Elaine, with a private smugness of her own:
Elaine: Mine’s yet to come. You know.
I told you I was sure.
The two get up and wander down the trail,
Jerry very protectively.
Sam: Nice kids.
Sarah: She’s going to have a baby. Her first.
I can tell that by the way she walks,
so carefully!
Sam: Oh, you’d know that. What I don’t know
is if they know what road they’re on.
Sarah: Oh they’re not lost.
They’re on the road they’re going on.
Sam: And we are here. I like it here.
Sarah: I’m settling in. I know it here.
It’s like I’m coming home to it.
Ed Bear comes back.
still carrying his axe.
Ed: Howdee!
Sam: Good morning to you!
and Sarah nods.
Sarah: Do you know what’s the name of this place?
Ed: It’s got no name. It’s my woodlot.
Sam: It’s pretty enough.
Sarah: Sure is. Just look at those ravens circling there
above the trees — the way they move —
so beautiful!
Ed: They do my work for me.
Sarah: Your work?
Ed: They follow me. They change my seasons for me.
He pats his axe.
Ed: That’s for winter now.
Sam: I like it here.
I could fall asleep in the sun like this,
holding your hand, Sarah.
He takes her hand.
Sam: We could sleep like two trees in the soil
growing together.
He leans his head back,
closes his eyes.
Sarah: And there you go asleep Sam.
Me too.
She yawns, leans on his shoulder,
shuts her eyes.
Ed Bear nods shortly and walks off.
And Verne walks on,
up to the couple on the stoop;
he touches them,
then he wipes his forehead, turns away
to the clearing edge,
getting his walkie-talkie out,
makes his report.
from
DIVINATIONS
and Shorter Poems 1973-1978
DIVINATIONS
Book One: NOTHING
The speaker is a high school girl who lives in Sundown, a small unincorporated town near the Catskills, during the fifties.
*
This, the backside of the universe is home,
is where I live. The Sundown road
winds down through here, its east
is smog and highway dirt. The barn,
our house’s shadow, melts
over the blackened bales of hay
saved from the past, our only crop
the grey blind cats that litter here,
failed genes; they curl out from the barn
like smoke. Uncounted, unaccountable,
their blued eyes clotted like soured milk,
they totter, dying, across the road,
unpurposed distillations of lost hope.
*
This is my room: a quilted spread,
a mirror, and out of the window, white
sky, grey fields, the whitening grass,
the barn and the never-used canoe —
A weary walk to the narrow banks
of the ice-clogged creek
where the water runs through the leafless trees,
the leafless, stunted, withered trees
that stretch forever to the west
where the sky and the ground turn the same red-grey
and the grey frost creeps and gathers like a rot.
*
The land out here was Ullman’s once,
moth-riddled orchards, hobbled farms —
still owns the mill and the wreckers’ shack
and the only spring that lasts.
When the river dries,
our wells shrink into the pasty ground
leaving a scum like cider crust
on the sinks and tubs;
we hike our jugs up Ullman’s hill.
Retired as God from his apple trees,
he rocks on his porch, the hollow shell
of his clean house a hollow nut;
the little hole, bright eye, is his.
His locked, stone-cellar holds the spring;
he unbolts it from outside and fills
our boiled-out bleach jugs for us.
We can’t go in. He makes us feel
like feeble, pink-chafed, clammy things —
white legs like apple petals, foam,
or cuckoo spit in his close-scythed grass —
female, ephemeral, trivial,
mere shades of things.
He used to be a traveller in goods,
all kinds. He used to walk
these country roads and knew all names,
but now, grown old, knows no one, makes
what he needs himself, needs nothing.
Now, as on the platform of a train
that moves immovably away
he rocks, as if he moved in stars,
farther and farther from us
on his porch.
*
The village is a single store,
a condensation of our wants:
gas pump, antiques, rat poison, stamps,
cured snakeskins, garnets, drops of blood,
moose-heads, war trophies, rifles, yokes,
dead chicks in paper doilies, stuffed
two-headed calf by the cookie jar,
and, glistening among brown photographs,
the oily foetus in its jug.
From the cold maw of the cellar where
the cider of the valley fumes, Miss Mac
comes up, her velvet bow
pinned over her bald spot.
She wipes the mugs with a red-stained cloth,
sells the eucharist
of Sundown: flecked with pomace, grit,
skin chafings — sour sweet alcohol
of all that falls from apple trees,
crushed, mashed, fermenting fact of things,
organic, authentic, intoxicant —
Oh to be only ignorant!
and sick —
*
There is nothing clean
but water at its source or snow
before it falls and tarnishes —
Your skin peels if you scratch,
like grease, then bleeds. At school
the joke is Iggy with his wrists
criss-crossed. He didn’t cut
bravely enough. They have no guts —
they would not dare that much, our brave,
our “volunteers,” brigade of monsters
at the bell that want to see a screaming child
crisped at the core of a gutted house,
the arsonists — they would not set
afire themselves — coarse laughter, gross,
their names inscribed forever on steel johns,
they breed and die like sick grey cats —
Wanda, the roller skating queen
in pincurls, white as a maggot, blown
into a bloated, soft balloon —
she bobbed at her desk as if tethered there —
this summer was deflated, popped,
is dead.
The wheels rub on —
*
What language is taught in this mindless school?
the mouth that cries “Mommy” and “Daddy” can’t
tell you the truth —
A dry place shook by a violent wind
stinging my cheeks, the playground here —
sand hot to the flesh as burning fire
and under it two inches, ice —
is icy forever, the winter salt
and cinders staining the gritty walk,
drains reddened as if the clay were blood —
the concrete blocks like calluses
that grow across the feelings closing up
young eyes like ice that seals the ditch —
like trash that’s caught, that flutters
in the briars, rags cast against the universe —
just so our minds
wither and flag. This crushing bin
of knowledge stews us to a red
water, this
that dribbles from the tap,
that stains the sink, that marked
the carpet when I cut my leg —
that wells in water like the sap
from a fresh drowned stump —
the brown, stained spring —
always something else to be done —
excuses —
And for what reason? What?
*
I’ve got to get out of here
my god but I don’t know where to go —
You don’t know how it is —
there’s nothing — watch the rain fall down,
have a hot dog, tea —
go read the funnies — They don’t know
what I’m talking about.
I do not find my room enough.
I do not find my mind enough.
I am not sick.
There’s nothing whatever the matter with me.
That’s all there is.
What good am I — nothing to no one,
nothing —
snow
or rain —
and no one is —
nothing is any good to me —
I’ve got to get out.
*
Kindness is not the same as need.
Oh they are kind,
but no one for my company
will seek me out or need
to hear my voice —
what I call friends
are kind, when I come up to them,
leaning against the corridors,
gym lockers — kind,
no one
no one
looks out for me —
*
Here in my room the cold air stinks
of something grey, untouchable;
the sullen waters of the air, the clock
that ticks its empty hours away
its milky cat-face blinded —
By the barn
the tarp flaps over the old canoe,
that lean, black, knife-nosed coffin launched
forever inverted, a flag distressed,
on its split log blocks.
The briars
have covered over the secret path
to the seepage and silt of the darker woods,
the curling expanses of the swamp,
blank draw of the river, its blank dissolve —
some day, some day —
I’ll get out of here —
*
You either go or you get sent.
Wanda got sent for. The Principal
nixed Iggy, took the derby queen.
She sits in that stone office now
turning to snow — her fat, pale hands,
her blue-green scribblers with her own
initials on them again and again,
her tattered excuses and doctor’s slips
melted and streaked with water,
turning to stone —
*
Sleep is the final end of things,
but here it is a kind of rot,
a ferment on the pillowcase, a quilted itch —
the grey wallpaper flowers bend
and shudder in a pasty wind —
unfailing leaves, pale roses, blue-veined
flowers — the toothbrush foams
with cider spit —
the water runs out rusty from the tap.
*
My semi-twin, my cousin, egg —
unblemished, cottage-curd
ed mind
blanker than chalk — she is all things
convention, sport, or parents’ games
would have her. Should life shake
her, would she see, poor thing,
blind bauble for the striking —
That boy struck flint caressing her
with his blind eyes —
he called us holes —
The white cow totters in the stones,
its flabby udder hard
titted, sore —
flesh only
monstrous, sagging
scab —
two walking holes —
to be a stone —
or water
and not feel —
*
I couldn’t care less.
A long cold drive
and the snow falling — over a year ago
we were driving out through the open fields —
stubble and white road planed and sown
with vagueness, cold —
at first we felt
the sudden heat then heard it then we saw
the whole barn blazing — our windshield seethed
and shimmered like heat from an iron stove —
we passed it. Looking back — the trucks
came, yokels slowing for a gaze, more snow,
small cars like leaves or ashes — if
the dull white air had just compressed
to sunspot, fury — if
the whole of nothing tensed to fire
to flare that fine commotion — or
as if to count the falling of one star
were telling of all time there is —
brief candle —
nothing more —
*
Oh once I was almost free of it,
once, August, when the green
small apples raised their heads
with their first blemishes of rouge —
the heat was too much for me, or the sky
too blue, too toppling heavy.
Halfway from Poughkeepsie it seemed the bus
was stifling me, the smell, the dust,
the looming seats — darkness compounded —
I got off — Red Hook,
that was the name of it —
a stagnant welling of green lawns
and sidewalks heaved
above the roads like granite blocks
tipped from cast iron glaciers
red hot — the trees
had leaning leaves, a tunnel of shade,
until I swam, impalpable and shadowless
to the blazing field — to the tree
of trees.
Older, and greener, and more
corrupt, that fruiting, stinking
apple tree massive to heaven, its giant roots
like boughs and its branches roots,
holding the two worlds half apart
and drenching earth with little fires
from the terrible sun it suckered from —
and the face of it like the oldest man,
the oldest man forever —
It was
Ullman
in that apple tree.
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 10