born again in the mind of God
ever and ever — His story run
fresh from my hands! Let my paper, paste,
let the piece of chain
that hangs like bird legs from the foil
speak of Your heat, Your heartening.
for my mouth is scalded,
dumb.
* * * * *
THE BATHROOMS ARE A PLACE OF PRAYER
* * * * *
I heard that Mr. Bauer say
when you turn off the water and open the cock
you can hear the veins and throb of earth,
pores seeping in from the ends of the sea,
the breathings of rock.
They say glory —
glory — glory — glory —
When the rushing is great and it rushes forth,
such is the noise that we cannot hear.
Replacing the washer,
listen,
pray:
glory —
glory —
* * * * * *
LOW ARE THE LAVERS OF SOLOMON
DUST IS HIS PRIVATE SEAT
* * * * *
How shall I purge and not be shamed.
And they call these thrones!
Not glory nor sin,
animal into the animal.
Rust and the roaring is measure of man.
And yet all shall be clean.
*
Leave off ye simple ones and live!
Renew! Renew!
The throne on wheels of fire —
destruction a plumb line — a white stone
hard in my belly — a swallowed book —
rock
shall cry out from the dry wall —
out of the tank, of the bursting side —
The beam from the roof shall answer it.
BE NOT AFRAID
These bowls like the temples of Solomon.
Wash and be clean.
A book in my heart.
I cannot speak.
An ensign up from the secret thrones,
up from the roaring of waters
and
we shall be clean, be clean.
*
The nations shall lie down in peace.
All shall be washed away.
*
The cleansing fire
incinerates
all that was soiled and horrible.
The shaft, the fall, the clinkers — if
the bonfires in the sky were trash,
were torment — meant
an angel in the furnace, cut
heart, cut
coal,
diamond.
The stone.
The labour.
Pain.
Evening
The black motes gather in the air.
The blinded swimmers pass,
faces in dusk returning home.
Who helps me climb? Who lends me hands?
Mother is dead in Jerusalem —
by currents tossed, by waters shed,
by oceans born away. . . .
*
When we both were little, when we were young,
she could run, I could toddle after her,
we took our best vacation.
There
between the grey, smooth river
and grey sea, the island, grey with mangrove scrub,
palmetto, marsh, with its white
sands, its white
sea oats, white forest, held
the dunes, I sat below them closed
from sea by whiteness, warmth,
by rustling speech . . . .
Leeward on the river side,
the sailboat like a cradle rocked,
and dolphins over beyond it leaped,
kindly, majestic, again and again,
as if they were hosts or guardians.
Daddy carried me into the shallows where
the warm, thick waters sucked my feet,
and we walked out towards the ocean side
where seiners, gnats on a curtain edge,
specked the horizon. Along the beach
were sea fans, yellow, magenta, orange —
sponges weary as old mop heads —
Walking, walking — I grew so tired
he had to carry me back again.
And there still were the dolphins,
three of them,
leaping and leaping beside the boat.
That night the stars, the creaking sails,
the black wake starry with phosphorus —
it was as if the way towards home
were more our home, were mother’s arms —
as if some One
caressed, loved, nourished,
yearned for us.
We had only to reach to touch.
*
We wait at the windy bus stop where the trash
flutters beside us like wet leaves. The slush
turns lilac. In the park
a mist sits on the branches like a flock
of cloudy beings, fruitfulness
of evening like a music, a perfume —
the cars splash by — it hovers,
waits, a vesper’s flush,
the daily shed —
that makes this dirty city
its bright throne.
*
Yet more than light is asked of us.
The hill still rises, Atlas weight,
each day upon another, brick by brick.
*
A hunched house, colour of faded plums,
dulled yellow sky; my neighbour waits
on her porch steps, shadows of leafless trees
crossing her back like harnesses.
The Retarded Children’s bus returns;
she slides its van door sideways and lifts out
her boy strapped to his travelling chair.
The older boy climbs out behind, dragging
the lunch pails, stands and scuffs
at the muddy snow, picking his nose.
I heard him speak once: an injured tongue,
an excited warble — he clapped his hands.
But the younger one
sags on her breast too tired to see,
his eyes unfocussed. He cannot walk.
Eight, he will only grow heavier.
She carries him. Smiles over his head
at the other one, “Come on, little man,
come on!”
Courage as common, as difficult
as need. The crippled God
leans on us.
Needs.
*
This silence shared is almost warmth.
My world contracts.
In the little park the furrowed elms
strain towards the parching vaults and drain
the earth’s wet passions — life
runs out like water; it dissolves
remembered faces. Far,
far out the harbour wails.
You pare us down.
Give us each day
our daily dead.
Mother from child,
friend from friend.
Where is the light when the light goes out?
That matchstick flame?
“Poor little thing,” she used to say,
winding her daughter’s tendril hair
over her finger.
That deep, warm smile —
she warmed the air. She flared,
a candle near its end, sewed wools
of pulsing trees and flowers —
ever more brilliant colours.
All my plans
I told to her,
my secrets, as one gives
a letter to a traveller, a post
no mail can send.
I clung to her.
She, drowning, clung —
her hands
called out when her throat, too bruised,
prevented speech. They called
the impotent mach
ines, unplugged,
to start, to try again.
A light against the blowing wind.
As bruised snow melts,
as gutters run,
our substance pours into the sea.
The spiritual.
What good to us?
When what we loved was flesh.
Night
Stubborn in love, in disbelief,
my sister, a condensing star
sinks in her burning; light
to me, to You, in darkest night
she serves, she loves
for nothingness.
She is
pure Will, like You creates
a good from nothing.
Holiest
that height of soul.
The crippling of despair
hardens the heart
to red gem fire
stronger, more constant
than I am.
*
For what is Pearl?
A coward tear. A chalky glimmer
in the light, but when abyss
blows at me, I—
flicker, weak—
a shade in shades.
I am poured out like water.
Yet,
as a swimmer is nudged, sometimes, to shore
by an unseen fish—
or as a blind man finds his stair—
I swim, I climb—
You hold me up.
And this abyss
a buried crypt
stuffed with the dirt of centuries
where breathes, beside me in the dark,
the black madonna, her black child—
seed bed.
All this is emblem.
My garage,
puny, dug in the rock-walled hill,
a little cave uphill midnights
I work in, fret and carve—
is bonfire set upon the sea,
a light to the sky whose wanderings
will light beyond my seeing now.
When earth in earth my body lies,
that talent, that white stone
that burns me now
shall shine, shall live.
Egg, for Your Word, be Wing.
*
How did I know? My knowledge grew
from the leafless trees, from the freshened force
of the natural, from the poke-eye of babies, the gold tattoo
of dandelions shredding the muddy banks—
I know.
*
Uphill, still up, the mermaid climbs,
her feet still heavy with midnight’s pain.
I wait for You.
These paper dolls, these tinfoil shapes,
this booth of tinsel whirligigs,
this altar — dwarf at Your carnival,
barker, I hoot Your name.
May Your angel come,
bending his lily beam to me.
The hurt, the mute
in the tarnished streets —
who will speak for them?
Send me.
*
The work grows out of my fingertips,
out of my deepest dreams.
Let the shapes speak out and the visions come!
The Christ who lives in our spending Him,
the shed in our fingers, the foil, the coin —
as long as the bearer labours,
Christ
be ever born.
*
Shadows in shine: the massive laws
stand here like towers of the just.
White chains like pillars hang from them.
Clouds heave like iron in the crevices.
Mica glint, mouse crack, scratching nails,
fly wing, beetle eye — holy and blessed
need of the tiny, the pebble world —
dig be my deed; now dig I round.
*
These shadows are the thrones of God.
As I saw them once. As I see them now
through the darkened labours of my hand,
seat upon seat. And the angels fly
hovering with neither hands nor feet,
but wings grown out of their bodies’ cry,
holding by love untireable
their ceaseless murmurs, their comfortings.
Their warm breath brushes across my cheeks;
the tinfoil reddens; their pulsing veins
are the wounds of earth, of the simple rain. . . .
Glory they say.
GLORY
from
RECKONINGS
Poems 1979-1985
THE SEASONS
Summer
i
Tide’s out. The river’s turned to mud.
The gulls prowl in the bladderwrack.
In the abandoned orchards deer
are sleeping under the apple boughs.
Their horns are like low branches in the grass.
To live as if the moment were a whole
and wholly in the moment,
to sink in grass and midges to the pure
unshaded surfaces of life,
to grow, like lichen, slowly, on the grey
horns of the apple trees
and lose one’s self in summer
as in sleep —
is heart’s desire.
But as a bird supports itself
among the varying currents of the air
in a fine tension, the waking mind
musters its wing against the real.
The voice from the sensuous lassitude
that, like the whitethroat sparrow’s song,
calls “here, come here, here, here” from the apple grove
is natural death. And the acrid spur
of cold wind from the water that
like history shows the hovering mind
time’s costs, time’s cruelties, time’s needs,
is time’s — the world not mending
yet.
Our summer is the sleep of deer;
we strive to sink within it. But machines
dream the destruction of all things,
and from their mortal dreaming we must wake.
ii
Listen: the flicker’s drum, the gnat’s small voice,
the osprey’s high-pitched, grassy squeal,
gull mews, the loon’s recitatif —
all sounds of need, of natural joy.
Last month squid flung their rubber lives
like gloves along the stony beach
and died for love. At Chimney Head,
storm-straddled, burst with fallen trees,
the dark bay glimmers toward the dusk;
and in the chilly water lolls
a seal that watches us, as curious,
as safe, in what it knows of summer, as
my neighbour’s brindled kitten, couched
below my mildewed phlox heads while I work,
as if my hoeing, weeding were for it.
This fragile, eggshell, pippin world,
new with such tender prettiness,
rots at its roots. The rain will fall,
the necessary mercy, toxic rain.
And yet the great southwestern winds
that blew the poisoned cities’ fumes
toward our old, eastern woodlots, will blow on
toward Labrador, toward Iceland,
toward topaz, bird-stained ice floes
sharding like old hunks
left dwindling in a sawdust heap.
And with the wind, the cool air comes,
and evening, and the blessed dark,
blessed, because we sleep in it.
iii
The sea’s in bloom with starlight.
Heaven’s bowl: the quivering water lights,
where stars, innumerable, floating multitudes
echo in buds, nodes, roots, and flowers —
sea stars, pond stars, nenuphars,
cow lilies, ant lilies, pollen strewn,
floc
king the sky like one white flower.
The daisy field
froths at my knees with flight gauze:
plumes, white feathers, and beige brown wings.
The Pleiades sing from the phosphorus
of the rotting logs, from the minnow waves.
Sea lights, boat lights, harbour lights,
the match flame struck for the captain’s pipe —
God’s plenitude, heaped up and overflowing.
The Milky Way like a yeasty dawn
powders the orchard where the pale
unripened apples hang,
and a voice cries out from the wilderness,
or seems to cry.
An owl’s, perhaps, or a lamb’s,
or a frightened child’s.
“Someone is crying,” said Dorothy.
She brought
roses. It was all she had,
poor poet, neither fish nor bread.
And the deep perfume
that falls from the cold, green apple trees
falls on the grass, on the Pleiades.
I bring this poem to You, Lord.
It is all I have.
Fall
i
The sombre, flame-tipped clouds have fled
from under the pines, where the russet fern
blazed, and was ash.
The aspens in the new-burned fields
have shaken themselves to tatters,
and the larch, nude of its citron fur,
is one bare branch.
The glory of the season has gone by.
We saw it from Cap Enragé
where the low, silty waters beat
the slate cliffs, and the groaner cried
each three turns of the lighthouse lamp:
Watch out! Watch out!
There was still one tree
red as a vein.
How brief it is,
the passion of our passing. In one fall
we see our summers wither out of sight.
ii
The rest is ignorance. The heart
like a cold, silly merman, climbs the wharf
to see the shuttered houses by the beach
locked up, the children gone,
frosts grizzling the geraniums. And love,
like an unfaithful tourist, has gone home
to its uniting mirrors of the snow.
Such partings are like knives. It is not fall
we grieve for, but the death of things,
all things. The tide scours out the shore —
the bleached white agonies of logs,
boat chains, a child’s school notebook, one
grey feather — loss.
The groaner only calls us to ourselves.
It’s all bad news. That love should die,
drop from its leafy poetry and fade,
dry as the black, abandoned weeds
that wreath the cobbled beaches.
iii
Divorced, and derelict, stone-armed,
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 14