A constellation. The swift stag from
Under ground bears up his branching head.
Too soon. Other animals must come before.
A change of address, from Arden to Paradise.
White-gold moonset, seraph of infinite
Compassion comes closest to me now:
At perigee, in white-gold May time, Taurus
Prevailing. At birth, the transparent
Scorpion feeds upon its mother.
The entire earth darkens to conceal
The terror. And still the seraph moon,
Though weary of me, weary of desert
Mountains that return no color, lingers
A sweet while. Swete whilom. Sweet William.
Stinking Billy, I heard the sound
Of a baseball falling into outstretched
Little hands. Here comes an animal.
Here comes the atomic bomb to old New York.
The day of my mother’s funeral
The limousines were wild spiders
Trapped on a hillside, and we were inside
Them, waiting, waiting, only forsythia
Starry for hopeful, root and branch. Somehow the church,
In beautiful disrepair, appeared
Out of nowhere. I had chosen the wrong
Hymns, yet the sweet-faced Jamaican
Second-generation New Yorker
Priest officiating smiled and sang.
Outside, strangers filled the spiders
With yellow flowers. What is the use
Of cities, dead or alive? Simply,
That flowers are never out of place,
Never wrong. I have changed the address.
Redress. The priest deserves a better parish.
The bitter parish, Bemerton. And too,
The moon has seen enough. Of gullies,
Of loose dogs and walking bicycles,
Enough. Let everything fly. Let all
Angels become the angels of themselves.
Choosing the wrong hymns, choosing the right ones,
All on the color wheel for birthdays, one through five.
Geminiani selected five. With brides invisible, innumerable
In their bright ranks, the seraph of the evening sky
Welcomes my disrepair. Embarrassed by
The knowing smile of a sweet Jamaican,
I tell at last for the mean time my
Heart’s truth. Eden is innumerable to me.
My eyes have been empty since childhood.
Care to try? Say that you were blind
And broke-necked, a city on the outskirts
With pears, with traffic, coffee regular sweet
Spittle on the pillow beside and underneath.
The pears are stranded, red and green. In Eden,
It was a yellow pear, with little windows
Cut into the flesh, too soon, too soon,
Flesh so bitter the wounds could not weep,
And so became windows. If I could turn
My head, I would see the heavy mourners
Holding coffee, stranded on the median,
In traffic. Lost to me now. Care to try?
One Chinese daughter. One imaginary boyfriend.
In the unfinished story, they live
Above a toy shop, one consummate lovely smile.
Of Satan and his dark materials,
Pandemonium of the colors, I
Can only say the human eye. Again,
As if I could lie beside my mother in the ground,
I say God made her eyes and mine to be
Travellers. We have garments. We have time.
And to every animal I now confide
An array of hours, a splendid vestment
Of hours, Alpha and Omega woven together.
You cannot tear me from my mother.
The stag bore up his branching head to travel
The universe, which is all forest, all earth,
All green with my mother’s eyes. Where once
Constellations prowled menace and futurity,
Twin scorpions, I see a groundswell
Of time in the new birth, belling happiness.
You taught the book of life my name. Come, walk.
In the snow, it is 1978, on
Hertel Avenue, Buffalo, waiting
For you. Come. In the sunshine, earlier,
Pocket Shakespeare, Fort Tryon Park, New York,
On to the tree, onto the Trie Cloister.
Grandchild throws herself from the window
Only a little way to fall, rolling
Most of the way through the tall grass and down
Into Jewish flowers. I was reading.
I waited. It was Eden’s reality
Proved unendurable. Flee, or be expelled.
The apple, Gemini, dreams likewise a Jew,
Before and after. Childhood is health,
Nature the white fiction we told ourselves.
Hurry so many animals. I must ask, while
The mornings are capable, while the grass
Is not ablaze or turned to black tailings.
Why is the chapel red? Why are the con-
Stellations, God’s balloonists in the void,
Down to three? The color wheel, when
Did it become the destroyer of cities,
Mine especially, New York of the passengers?
Little enough to ride for free, little
Enough to ride your knee. Mother. Ruth
Amidst the alien pornography.
20 John 13—They have taken away
My Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.
Racist, greed-sick stalks of putrefaction,
They. My Pocket Shakespeare concedes the election.
I am the bird of the least morsel
Of your best memory. Speak to me,
Speak on behalf of me and to no one else.
I am the stag in the ruins. The great cities
Were dreams, red chapels of aberration
And the heartfelt error. The stag before,
The stag after, lifts up his branching head.
Creation considered of starlight long before,
When God had not yet made the world. As of today,
God has not yet made the world. Countless colors,
Countless colors, all of them eyes and eyebeams
Just now in your mouth at the point of sleep,
Catch fire. They have considered of starlight.
I see the lark not yet alighted upon
The animal, the soul before mine. Love.
III
I have drunk, and seen the spider.
—The Winter’s Tale
To Shakespeare
He made a statue of the east wind
Reconciled never too late, in
Silhouette, never too late as these
First days of March turn backwards,
Facing the full of winter in
Enduring love, full jollity
Of winter’s face to reconcilement,
In silhouette.
He did not forget
Who lost his life to remember it.
Step down. Do not be proud.
There is a double heart behind
The breastbone. Bare it. Beat it.
Begin to eat it in full view,
Who loves you every inch of the wind.
First days of March, lords of jollity.
Debris
Antiquity shivers in the unbuilt tree.
She laments (antiquity is a widow, braided
Into the rained-upon color of desert trees
After a windstorm) her perfected dead.
The sound is keen, as though it were somehow calling
The windstorm back into its own debris.
Just so, it reaches me this Sunday morning,
Second of May, a day with no future but driving
Farther into the desert, into no mind
For anything but driving to the end
Of present days. The future is all fences,
Stray cats, and heroes walking backwards.
Antiquity shivers at the sight of me.
The Library
The library walks over fallen olives,
The tall library. Even as their shadows
Move, still leaves remain still. The passage
Of time is indescribable. Beloved
Songbirds are never far, but I forget them.
Stones stained by olives become white overnight.
Hearts stained by forgetfulness become white overnight.
Howling seven days in succession, the wind
Cannot stir a leaf. I believe in Heaven
Simply because there must be someone at one
O’clock in the morning who answers the phone.
The iron leaf of origin answers me.
They Are Not Making Anything. They Are Working.
(Homage to Pierre Michon)
French for hatred, English for anger,
Black pony blinded, slender,
My secret Chaucer,
As for 60 years I’ve managed a lost river,
Water-jets over the lawns
In the last cool of a summer morning:
Cressid animal aube my daughter.
A cloud of thorns, acacia,
All that stands between us and bad Asia
Poised to kill with summer heat
Is the language, hatred and anger,
Blind caul of the vocables, lost river
To rhyme Daughter, Slender, Loire.
My secret Chaucer is a fatal mud, her new basilica.
Pitty-Pat
Oleander to the death of horses
Odilon Redon was mother’s martyr
Ruined no mounted with true love but askew
How it is these sounds reach back in time
A first beloved smelling of milk and tar
In time to find first poets grassy
Churning the ice cream blossoming
Philosopher it makes sense it screams
Joy beloved joy and bees in the bedrooms
These sounds reach back in time I feel like an Indian
Like cut grass blown against the base of a mountain
I cannot share a dream we die alone
Born into such beautiful company
Foals find grass earth’s countless eyes
Mountain’s Edge
Misted sunlight, a scorpion
Fallen out of the sun
Covers the ground, all of it.
There is a rhythm to things,
But no help. So
Says the ruined poisoner.
We are here, here.
Sunlight answers to the call, and so too,
But tenderly, does Mr. Hart Crane.
Wasp-waisted scorpion
Fallen out of the sun
Must be grass, or otherwise
Be insane, building such a nest
In autumn, making God cruel.
France
France so small and awnings weeping
Carousel of crows my dear son
No suicide it is not church
It is home a happy brother
I had no brother until you
We found a pistol in the cornfield
You lifted it I lifted it
The sky became a tumult sky
God’s broken eye I nearly said
Because it was weeping old souls
There are blue trains that go to France
When first I saw a yellow house
I lived in it begot a son
With nothing to sell I sold him
After Clare
Ball or balloon, beetle having torn
The wings from a fallen moth and called
Her kinsmen to the feast, so much
To be said is said in childhood, like
A pet name never to be heard again.
She left suddenly, with no explanation,
Never to be seen again.
I was away. I shall not forget,
But I shall surely be forgotten.
Love may come in its many disguises—
Son and daughter, dog and Beloved—
All the lost childhood without its tender name.
Ask me at Sunday School, as she did, about life,
And I will tell you again there is no such thing.
Borodin
When the world was loveliness I was
A composer, Borodin, my left eye
Level with the floor beside toy men.
Wild work and havoc they made
Being glad. I could draw a line
Would run straight through the minds of men
Being a sociable angel,
Music before and after, blushing.
Heaven is a nonsense entirely sensible.
I was a child on the floor beside you,
Making music, becoming small in the rosy
Embrace of God’s best messenger.
I loved your havoc and your hair.
New Colors
The tree alive with invisible birds in no leaves
Is the soul of winter and says with Yeats
We wither into the truth whose truth is simply
That we die yet behind us the sky deepens
Into the deepest blue I mean to say that I
Could reach my hand forever into it
My hand would be covered with leaves and then
The birds would come in colors new colors
To robe archangels ruined back to life
We wither so to bear the weight of the invisible
Tell me shall I sing another cold day
Or is this merely the ruin before ruin
The shallow breath before no breath at all
Tell me is the sky behind me still
Tantivy
The late empurpl’d and dog’s nostalgia
Ancient of days, only yesterday I had a
New sister. Kneel to crib, to chapel, a trip
To the moon. Sic semper my very first. Osip
Is older than he was. He died. He lay
Very close to a heap of goldfinches. Today
You spoke of my sister twice. Too far to go
Toys, reaching the bedroom toys like alto,
Almost, rhapsody of Brahms: never
Newly again in the late flowers, note of air.
Things breathe where I kneel. No matter whether
It rains or the chapel vanishes, they breathe.
Violets are the anniversary of something
Youthful covers the next hill hurrying.
Graves Variations
In Eden’s garment, farthest heat and mistake,
We have reached the end of pastime, for always.
Single-minded midnight and noon agree:
No second chances. An epochal sun sees
Mountain ranges, and the mountains melt away.
In dreams, I return to mother’s trellises and sex.
No flowers to be found, nor any angels
Barring the narrow path. Gladdest is
The garden that never was. Genesis
Makes nonsense of our Christmases.
Gladys is. Doris was. Leggy girls look up.
The mountains melt into a loving cup.
This morning, red racer or rattler
I cannot say, a beautiful serpent
Died where I wasn’t looking, in the yellow
Doorway. Had it followed me? Hunted me?
These questions, bird, are not rhetorical.
It was crushed below the heart and died slowly.
Yellowhammer, you saw it all and kept
The flicker of your dull song aloft.
Serpent Beethoven. Yellowhammer late quartet.
I would add “etcetera,” but this is not
Rhetorical. It reeks pure mystery, the only
One of its kind, poor beast of next and nil.
Look forward, truant, to your second childhood.
Meanwhile,
left behind, I am left to sell
A ragtag legend of Creation to the remnant.
Try the door handle. Try it. If it opens at all,
There is only smoke and the apparition
Of mother or of Anticlea or boys
Nodding off into the sleep which hates sleep.
Cain slew Abel with a Christmas tree.
Odysseus died en route. As for me,
A serpent is my bicycle and mother.
Factor into Paradise the nil
Of kisses. It opens briefly, if it opens at all.
I have a calling to marry children, myself
Among them. And why set miracles apart?
Attentions, as if with sweets and cutlasses,
Climb the sky. Out of their little houses
Clamber the green kids. Fleeting brushstroke
Heads, fleeting brushstroke arms and legs,
They climb the sky. Not enchanted but faithful
To a tree that God forbade and planted in them,
They marry in the leaves. They marry in thunderheads
And in pinpricks of starlight. The painter
Finds them heaped in one body, his and mine.
The very next Cadillac is candy red.
Clothed in Eden’s garments, I find candy
Easy to come by. Immortality
Without flowers is a better sleep
Than madcap syllables, than the kissing bijou.
God, at last, has taken me at my word.
He has taken the green jewels out of my eyes,
And they are eyes once more. He has bound my mind
Onto a wheel—wheeeeeee! Ixion or Gladys
Gladdest is. To die with a forlorn hope,
But soon to be raised, reeks pure mystery
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