And I sit
waiting
for a quorum
II
Fast ride
his horse collapsed
Now he saddled walked
Borrowed a farmer's
unbroken colt
To Richmond
Richmond How stop—
Arnold's redcoats
there
III
Elk Hill destroyed—
Cornwallis
carried off 30 slaves
Jefferson:
Were it to give them freedom
he'd have done right
IV
Latin and Greek
my tools
to understand
humanity
I rode horse
away from a monarch
to an enchanting
philosophy
V
The South of France
Roman temple
“simple and sublime”
Maria Cosway
harpist
on his mind
white column
and arch
VI
To daughter Patsy: Read—
read Livy
No person full of work
was ever hysterical
Know music, history
dancing
(I calculate 14 to 1
in marriage
she will draw
a blockhead)
Science also
Patsy
VII
Agreed with Adams:
send spermaceti oil to Portugal
for their church candles
(light enough to banish mysteries?:
three are one and one is three
and yet the one not three
and the three not one)
and send salt fish
U.S. salt fish preferred
above all other
VIII
Jefferson of Patrick Henry
backwoods fiddler statesman:
“He spoke as Homer wrote”
Henry eyed our minister at Paris—
the Bill of Rights hassle—
“he remembers…
in splendor and dissipation
he thinks yet of bills of rights”
IX
True, French frills and lace
for Jefferson, sword and belt
but follow the Court to Fontainebleau
he could not—
house rent would have left him
nothing to eat
…
He bowed to everyone he met
and talked with arms folded
He could be trimmed
by a two-month migraine
and yet
stand up
X
Dear Polly:
I said No—no frost
in Virginia—the strawberries
were safe
I'd have heard—I'm in that kind
of correspondence
with a young daughter—
if they were not
Now I must retract
I shrink from it
XI
Political honors
“splendid torments”
“If one could establish
an absolute power
of silence over oneself”
When I set out for Monticello
(my grandchildren
will they know me?)
How are my young
chestnut trees—
XII
Hamilton and the bankers
would make my country Carthage
I am abandoning the rich—
their dinner parties—
I shall eat my simlins
with the class of science
or not at all
Next year the last of labors
among conflicting parties
Then my family
we shall sow our cabbages
together
XIII
Delicious flower
of the acacia
or rather
Mimosa Nilotica
from Mr. Lomax
XIV
Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed
to father and sister in Paris
by way of London—Abigail
embraced her—Adams said
“in all my life I never saw
more charming child”
Death of Polly, 25,
Monticello
XV
My harpsichord
my alabaster vase
and bridle bit
bound for Alexandria
Virginia
The good sea weather
of retirement
The drift and suck
and die-down of life
but there is land
XVI
These were my passions:
Monticello and the villa-temples
I passed on to carpenters
bricklayers what I knew
and to an Italian sculptor
how to turn a volute
on a pillar
You may approach the campus rotunda
from lower to upper terrace
Cicero had levels
XVII
John Adams' eyes
dimming
Tom Jefferson's rheumatism
cantering
XVIII
Ah soon must Monticello be lost
to debts
and Jefferson himself
to death
XIX
Mind leaving, let body leave
Let dome live, spherical dome
and colonnade
Martha (Patsy) stay
“The Committee of Safety
must be warned”
Stay youth—Anne and Ellen
all my books, the bantams
and the seeds of the senega root
The Ballad of Basil
They sank the sea
All land
enemy
He saw his boats stand
and he
off the floor
of that cold jail
(would not fight
their war)
sailed anyway
Villon went along
Chomei
Dante
and the Persian
Firdusi—
rigging
for his own
singing
Wilderness
You are the man
You are my other country
and I find it hard going
You are the prickly pear
You are the sudden violent storm
the torrent to raise the river
to float the wounded doe
Consider
the alliance—
ships and plants
The take-for-granted bloom
of our roadsides
Queen Anne's Lace
Black Eyed Susans
rode the sea
“Specimens graciously passed
between warring fleets”
And when an old boat rots ashore
itself once living plant
it sprouts.
Otherwise
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Dear friend: If the poem
is printed few
will read and fewer scan it
much less understand it
To be sure
the scanning's plain
but who will veer
from the usual stamp and pound
Other work?—I've not yet found
the oak leaves' law…
Nursery Rhyme
As I nurse my pump
The greatest plumber
in all the town
from Montgomery Ward
rode a Cadillac carriage
by marriage
and visited my pump
A sensitive pump
said he
that has at times a proper
balance
of water, air
and poetry
Three Americans
John Adams is our man
but delicate beauty
touched the other one—
an architect
and a woman artist
walked beside Jefferson
Abigail
(Long face horse-name)
cheesemaker
chicken raiser
wrote letters that John
and TJ could savour
POEMS AT THE PORTHOLE
Blue and white
china cups
glacier-adjacent
lost
in the foothills
The soil is poor
water scarce
the people clothed
in wind and cold—
Bolivia
Michelangelo
If matches had been my work
instead of marble poems
—sulphur—
I'd suffer
less
Wallace Stevens
What you say about the early
yellow springtime is also something
worth sticking to
SUBLIMINAL
Sleep's dream
the nerve-flash in the blood
The sense
of what's seen
“I took cold
on my nerves”—my mother
tall, tormented
darkinfested
Waded, watched, warbled
learned to write on slate
with chalk from an ancient sea
If I could float my tentacles
through the deep…
pulsate an invisible glow
Illustrated night clock's
constellations
and the booming
star-ticks
Soon I rise
to give the universe
my flicks
Honest
Solid
The lip
of tipped
lily
A quiet flock
of words
not the hound-
howl
holed
Night
the sag
of day
My mother
all the years
no day
LZ
He walked—loped—the bridge
Saluted Peck Slip
—his friend shipped fish—
My dish
Test
and the short verse
Now he stops for lilacs
—in the sun's fame
he'd say—
Stops?
Even for death
Z
after all that “A”
would dip his wool beret
to carp-fed roots
Peace
Dark road home
from town—
young neighbor as he walked
wound up tiny Swiss works—
a firefly music
Mickey Mouse leaned on a bubble
removed a tear
from the elephant's eye
to a brush so he
could scrubble
Our small boat's motor raced
Great Blue
the heron sailing as in China
not caring
to win
Thomas Jefferson Inside
Winter when no flower
The Congress away from home
Love is the great good use
one person makes of another
(Daughter Polly of the strawberry
letter)
Frogs sing—then of a sudden
all their lights go out
The country moves toward violets
and aconites
Foreclosure
Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws
Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land
May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace
HIS CARPETS FLOWERED
William Morris
I
—how we're carpet-making
by the river
a long dream to unroll
and somehow time to pole
a boat
I designed a carpet today—
dogtooth violets
and spoke to a full hall
now that the gall
of our society's
corruption stains throughout
Dear Janey I am tossed
by many things
If the change would bring
better art
but if it would not?
O to be home to sail the flood
I'm possessed
and do possess
Employer
of labor, true—
to get done
the work of the hand…
I'd be a rich man
had I yielded
on a few points of principle
Item sabots
blouse—
I work in the dye-house
myself
Good sport dyeing
tapestry wool
I like the indigo vats
I'm drawing patterns so fast
Last night
in sleep I drew a sausage—
somehow I had to eat it first
Colorful shores—mouse ear…
horse-mint…The Strawberry Thief
our new chintz
II
Yeats saw the betterment of the workers
by religion—slow in any case
as the drying of the moon
He was not understood—
I rang the bell
for him to sit down
Yeats left the lecture circuit
yet he could say: no one
so well loved
as Morris
III
Entered new waters
Studied Icelandic
At home last minute signs
to post:
Vetch
grows here—Please do not mow
We saw it—Iceland—the end
of the world rising out of the sea-
cliffs, caves like 13th century
illuminations
of hell-mouths
Rain squalls through moonlight
Cold wet
is so damned wet
Iceland's
black sand
Stone buntings'
fly-up-dispersion
Sea-pink and campion a Persian
carpet
DARWIN
I
His holy
slowly
mulled over
matter
not all “delirium
of delight”
as were the forests
of Brazil
“Species are not
(it is like confessing
a murder)
immutable”
He was often becalmed
in this Port Desire by illness
or rested from species
at billiard table
As to Man
“I believe Man…
in the same predicament
with other animals”
II
Cordilleras to climb—Andean
peaks “tossed about
like the crust
of a broken pie”
Icy wind
Higher, harder
Chileans advised eat onions
for shortness of breath
Heavy on him:
Andes miners carried up
great loads—not allowed
to stop for breath
Fossil bones near Santa Fé
Spider-bite-scauld
Fever
Tended by an old woman
“Dear Susan…
I am ravenous
for the sound
of the pianoforte”
III
FitzRoy blinked—
sea-shells on mountain tops!
The laws of change
rode the seas
without the good captain
who could not concede
land could rise from the sea
until—before his eyes
earthquake—
Talcahuana Bay drained out—
all-water wall
up from the ocean
—six seconds—
demolished the town
The will of God?
Let us pray
And now the Galápagos Islands—
hideous black lava
The shore so hot
it burned their feet
through their boots
Reptile life
Melville here later
said the chief sound was a hiss
A thousand turtle monsters
drive together to the water
Blood-bright crabs hunt ticks
on lizards' backs
Flightless cormorants
Cold-sea creatures—
penguins, seals
here in tropical waters
Hell for FitzRoy
but for Darwin Paradise Puzzle
with the jig-saw gists
beginning to fit
IV
Years…balancing
probabilities
I am ill, he said
and books are slow work
Studied pigeons
barnacles, earthworms
Extracted seeds
from bird dung
Brought home Drosera—
saw insects trapped
by its tentacles—the fact
that a plant should secrete
an acid acutely akin
to the digestive fluid
of an animal! Years
till he published
He wrote Lyell: Don't forget
to send me the carcass
of your half-bred African cat
should it die
V
I remember, he said
those tropical nights at sea—
we sat and talked
on the booms
Tierra del Fuego's
shining glaciers translucent
blue clear down
(almost) to the indigo sea
(By the way Carlyle
thought it most ridiculous
that anyone should care
whether a glacier
moved a little quicker
or a little slower
or moved at all)
Darwin
sailed out
of Good Success Bay
to carcass-
conclusions—
the universe
not built by brute force
but designed by laws
The details left
to the working of chance
“Let each man hope
and believe
Collecte Works Page 13