The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems
Page 2
with disease or murder
that she’ll be rescued by an
agent —
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs —
some doctor’s family, some Elsie —
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us —
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
The Yachts
contend in a sea which the land partly encloses
shielding them from the too-heavy blows
of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses
tortures the biggest hulls, the best man knows
to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly.
Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute
brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails
they glide to the wind tossing green water
from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls
ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing,
making fast as they turn, lean far over and having
caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark.
In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare
as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace
of all that in the mind is fleckless, free and
naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them
is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if feeling
for some slightest flaw but fails completely.
Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts
move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they
are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too
well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas.
Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at the prows.
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside.
It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair
until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind;
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken,
beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.
To Waken an Old Lady
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind —
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested —
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty.
Portrait of a Lady
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady’s
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze — or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
— as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes — below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore —
Which shore? —
the sand clings to my lips —
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.
Between Walls
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
Burning the Christmas Greens
Their time past, pulled down
cracked and flung to the fire
— go up in a roar
All recognition lost, burnt clean
clean in the flame, the green
dispersed, a living red,
flame red, red as blood wakes
on the ash —
and ebbs to a steady burning
the rekindled bed become
a landscape of flame
At the winter’s midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the balsam and
the hemlock for their green
At the thick of the dark
the moment of the cold’s
deepest plunge we brought branches
cut from the green trees
to fill our need, and over
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbons
we stuck the green prongs
in the windows hung
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On the
mantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of small
white deer as if they
were walking there. All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare. We
stuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burnt out
log’s smoldering eye, opening
red and closing under them
and we stood there looking down.
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though we
did not say so) a challenge
above the snow’s
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, where
small birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for them
and knocks down
the unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow — Transformed!
Violence leaped and appeared.
Recreant! roared to life
as the flame rose throug
h and
our eyes recoiled from it.
In the jagged flames green
to red, instant and alive. Green!
those sure abutments . . . Gone!
lost to mind
and quick in the contracting
tunnel of the grate
appeared a world! Black
mountains, black and red — as
yet uncolored — and ash white,
an infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant, lost,
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
Queen-Anne’s-Lace
Her body is not so white as
anemone petals nor so smooth — nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand’s span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over —
or nothing.
The Poem
It’s all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should
be a song — made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian — something
immediate, open
scissors, a lady’s
eyes — waking
centrifugal, centripetal
Pastoral
The little sparrows
hop ingenuously
about the pavement
quarreling
with sharp voices
over those things
that interest them.
But we who are wiser
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil.
Meanwhile,
the old man who goes about
gathering dog lime
walks in the gutter
without looking up
and his tread
is more majestic than
that of the Episcopal minister
approaching the pulpit
of a Sunday.
These things
astonish me beyond words.
The Last Words of My English Grandmother
There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed —
Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,
Gimme something to eat —
They’re starving me —
I’m all right — I won’t go
to the hospital. No, no, no
Give me something to eat!
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well
you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please —
Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher —
Is this what you call
making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear —
Oh you think you’re smart
you young people,
she said, but I’ll tell you
you don’t know anything.
Then we started.
On the way
we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,
What are all those
fuzzy looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.
The Term
A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length
and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the
wind slowly over
and over in
The street as
a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to
the ground. Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling
with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.
The Dance
When the snow falls the flakes
spin upon the long axis
that concerns them most intimately
two and two to make a dance
the mind dances with itself,
taking you by the hand,
your lover follows
there are always two,
yourself and the other,
the point of your shoe setting the pace,
if you break away and run
the dance is over
Breathlessly you will take
another partner
better or worse who will keep
at your side, at your stops
whirls and glides until he too
leaves off
on his way down as if
there were another direction
gayer, more carefree
spinning face to face but always down
with each other secure
only in each other’s arms
But only the dance is sure!
make it your own.
Who can tell
what is to come of it?
in the woods of your
own nature whatever
twig interposes, and bare twigs
have an actuality of their own
this flurry of the storm
that holds us,
plays with us and discards us
dancing, dancing as may be credible.
The Pot of Flowers
Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp’s horn
petals aslant darkened with mauve
red where in whorls
petal lays its glow upon petal
round flamegreen throats
petals radiant with transpiercing light
contending
above
the leaves
reaching up their modest green
from the pot’s rim
and there, wholly dark, the pot
gay with rough moss.
The Descent
The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized
of new kinds —
since their movements
are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned).
No defeat is made up entirely of defeat — since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost,
a world unsuspected,
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness .
With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining —
grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire .
Love without shadows stirs now
beginning to awaken
as night
advances.
The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
which is a reversal
of despair.
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
what we have lost in the anticipation —
a descent follows,
endless and indestructible .
Young Sycamore
I must tell you
this young tree
whose round and firm trunk
between the wet
pavement and the gutter
(where water
is trickling) rises
bodily
into the air with
one undulant
thrust half its height —
and then
dividing and waning
sending out
young branches on
all sides —
hung with cocoons
it thins
till nothing is left of it
but two
eccentric knotted
twigs
bending forward
hornlike at the top
The Poor
By constantly tormenting them
with reminders of the lice in
their children’s hair, the
School Physician first
brought their hatred down on him.
But by this familiarity
they grew used to him, and so,
at last,
took him for their friend and adviser.
The Rose