and says, “Another day?”
God goes to work every day
at regular hours.
God is no gentleman for God
puts on overalls and gets
dirty running the universe we know
about and several other universes
nobody knows about but Him.
Hunger and Cold
Hunger long gone holds little heroic
to the hungering.
You don’t eat and you get so you don’t
care to eat nor ever remember eating—
and hearing of people who eat or don’t
eat is all the same to you when you’ve
learned to keep your mind off eating
and eaters.
You become with enough hunger
the same as a tree with sap long gone
or a dry leaf ready to fall.
Cold is cold and too cold is too cold.
The colder you get the more numb you get
and when you get numb enough you begin
to feel snug and cozy with warmth.
When the final numb glow of comfort goes
through you, then comes your slow smooth
slide into being frozen stiff and stark.
Then comes your easy entry at the tall
gates beyond which you are proof against
ice or fire
or tongues of malice
or itch of ambition
or any phase of the peculiar torment known
as unrequited love.
Foxgloves
Your heart was handed over
to the foxgloves one hot summer afternoon.
The snowsilk buds nodded and hung drowsy.
So the stalks believed
As they held those buds above.
In deep wells of white
The dark fox fingers go in these gloves.
In a slow fold of summer
Your heart was handed over in a curve
from bud to bloom.
Harvest
When the corn stands yellow in September,
A red flower ripens and shines among the stalks
And a red silk creeps among the broad ears
And tall tassels lift over all else
and keep a singing
to the prairies
and the wind.
They are the grand lone ones
For they are never saved
along with the corn:
They are cut down
and piled high
and burned.
Their fire
lights the west in November.
Fame If Not Fortune
A half-dollar in the hand of a gypsy
tells me this and more:
You shall go broken on the wheel,
lashed to the bars and fates of steel,
a nickel’s worth of nothing,
a vaudeville gag,
a child’s busted rubber balloon kicked
amid dirty bunting and empty popcorn
bags at a summer park.
Yet cigarmakers shall name choice Havanas and
paste your picture on the box,
Racehorses foaming under scarlet and ochre jockeys
shall wear your name,
And policemen direct strangers to parks and schools
remembered after you.
Impasse
Bring on a pail of smoke.
Bring on a sieve of coffee.
Bring on shovels speaking Javanese.
Open your newest, latest handkerchief
And let down a red-mouthed hankering hippopotamus.
Perform for us these offertories in blue.
Tell us again: Nothing is impossible.
We listen while you tell us.
Is Wisdom a Lot of Language?
Apes, may I speak to you a moment?
Chimpanzees, come hither for words.
Orangoutangs, let’s get into a huddle.
Baboons, lemme whisper in your ears.
Gorillas, do yuh hear me hollerin’ to yuh?
And monkeys! monkeys! get this chatter—
For a long time men have plucked letters
Out of the air and shaped syllables.
And out of the syllables came words
And from the words came phrases, clauses.
Sentences were born—and languages.
(The Tower of Babel didn’t work out—
it came down quicker than it went up.)
Misunderstandings followed the languages,
Arguments, epithets, maledictions, curses,
Gossip, backbiting, the buzz of the bazoo,
Chit chat, blah blah, talk just to be talking,
Monologues of members telling other members
How good they are now and were yesterday,
Conversations missing the point,
Dialogues seldom as beautiful as soliloquies,
Seldom as fine as a man alone, a woman by herself
Telling a clock, “I’m a plain damn fool.”
Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.
Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.
See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
Keepsake Boxes
Now we shall open boxes and look.
In this one a storm was locked up, hoarse
from long howling.
In this one lay fair weather, a blue sky
manuscript.
In this one unfolded a gray monotone of
a fog afternoon.
In each box was a day and its story of
air and wind.
Sometimes one shook with confusions,
processionals of weather.
“One day may be too much to gather, consider,
and look among keepsakes.”
***
***
Impossible Iambics
He saw a fire dancer take two flambeaus
And do red shadows with her shoulders.
And he met two fools looking on and saying
Horsefeathers horsefeathers, and he said
I must bethink myself, I must throw seven
Eleven, O God am I a two-spot or what am
I? a who or a what or a which am I?
And the next day it rained,
the next day was something
else again.
Well, hibiscus, what would you?
The flambeau dancer did it,
she and the red shadows she threw.
Lackawanna Twilight
Twilight and little mountain
towns along the Lehigh, sundown
and grey lavender flush.
Miners with dinner buckets and
headlamps, state constabulary on
horses, guns in holsters, Scranton,
Wilkesbarre, the Lackawanna Trail.
Twilight and the blessed armistice
of late afternoon and early evening.
Twilight and the sport sheets, movies,
chain programs, magazines, comics,
revival meetings.
Twilight and headlights on the new
hard roads, boy friend and girl friend,
dreams, romance, bread, wages, babies,
homes.
If So Hap May Be
Be somber with those in smoke garments.
Laugh with those eating bitter weeds.
Burn your love with bold flame blossoms,
if so hap may be.
Leave him with a soft snowfall memory,
if so hap may be.
***
Never came winter stars more clear
yet the stars lost themselves
midnight came snow-wrought snow-blown.
***
Kisses, Can You Come Back Like Ghosts?
If we ask you to gleam through the tears,
Kisses, can you came back like ghosts?
Today, tomorrow, the gateways take them.
“Always some door eats my shadow.”
Love is a clock and the works wear out.
Love is a violin and the wood rots.
Love is a day with night at the end.
Love is a summer with falltime after.
Love dies always and when it dies it is dead
And when it is dead there is nothing more to it
And when there is nothing more to it then we say
This is the end, it comes always, it came to us.
And now we will bury it and put it away
Beautifully and decently, like a clock or a violin,
Like a summer day near fall time,
Like any lovely thing brought to the expected end.
Yes, let it go at that.
The clock rang and we answered.
The moon swept an old valley.
And we counted all of its rings.
The water-birds flipped in the river
And flicked their wing-points in sunset gold.
To the moon and the river water-birds,
To these we answered as the high calls rang.
And now? Now we take the clock and put it away.
Now we count again the rings of the valley moon
and put them away as keepsakes.
Now we count the river-birds once more and let
them slip loose and slip up the valley curve.
This is the end, there is always an end.
Kisses, can you
come back
like ghosts?
Lake Michigan Morning
Blue and white came out,
Riders of an early fall morning,
The blue by itself, the white by itself.
A young lamb white
crossed on a clear water blue.
Blue rollers talked on a beach white sand.
Water blown from snowwhite mountains
met the blue rise of lowland waters.
This was an early morning of high price.
Blue bowls of white water
Poured themselves into white bowls of blue water.
There was a back-and-forth and a kiss-me kill-me
washing and weaving.
New Weather
Mist came up as a man’s hand.
Fog lifted as a woman’s shawl.
Fair weather rode in with a blue oath.
One large cloud bellied in a white wind.
Two new winds joined for weather.
Splinters of rain broke out of the west.
Blue rains soaked in a lowland loam.
The dahlia leaves are points of red.
Bees roam singing in the buckwheat.
Russet and gold are the wheatstraws.
Forgotten bells fade and change.
Forgetful bells fill the air.
Fog shawls and mist hands come again.
New weather weaves new garments.
Lesson
In early April the trees
end their winter waiting
with a creep of green on branches.
***
***
In early October the trees
listen for a wind crying,
for leaves whirling.
***
***
The face of the river by night
holds a scatter of stars
and the silence of summer blossoms
falling to the moving water.
***
***
Come clean with a child heart.
Laugh as peaches in the summer wind.
Let rain on a house roof be a song.
Let the writing on your face
be a smell of apple orchards in late June.
Metamorphosis
When water turns ice does it remember
one time it was water?
When ice turns back into water does it
remember it was ice?
Love Beyond Keeping
She had a box
with a million red silk bandannas for him.
She gave them to him
one by one or by thousands,
saying then she had not enough for him.
She had languages and landscapes
on her lips and the end of her tongue,
landscapes of sunny hills and changing fogs,
of houses falling and people within falling,
of a left-handed man
who died for a woman who went out of her mind,
of a guitar player
who died with fingers reaching for strings,
of a man whose heart stopped
as his hand went out to put a pawn forward
on the fifth day of one game of chess,
of five gay women
stricken and lost
amid the javelins and chants
of love beyond keeping.
Moods
The same gold of summer was on the winter hills,
the oat straw gold, the gold of slow sun change.
The stubble was chilly and lonesome,
the stub feet clomb up the hills and stood.
The flat cry of one wheeling crow faded and came,
ran on the stub gold flats and faded and came.
Fade-me, find-me, slow lights rang their changes
on the flats of oat straw gold on winter hills.
***
***
Use your skypiece.
Let the works of your noggin run.
Try one way, try another, throw away
and throw away, junk your first,
your second, junk sixty-six.
Keep your skypiece going, your noggin
running, sit with your eyes shut
and your thumbs quiet as two
sleeping mice.
Moon Rondeau
“Love is a door we shall open together.”
So they told each other under the moon
One evening when the smell of leaf mould
And the beginnings of roses and potatoes
Came on a wind.
Late in the hours of that evening
They looked long at the moon and called it
A silver button, a copper coin, a bronze wafer,
A plaque of gold, a vanished diadem,
A brass hat dripping from deep waters.
“People like us,
us two,
We own the moon.”
Little Word, Little White Bird
Love, is it a cat with claws and wild mate screams
in the black night?
Love, is it a bird—a goldfinch with a burnish
on its wingtips or a little gray sparrow
picking crumbs, hunting crumbs?
Love, is it a tug at the heart that comes high and
costs, always costs, as long as you have it?
Love, is it a free glad spender, ready to spend to
the limit, and then go head over heels in debt?
Love, can it hit one without hitting two and leave
the one lost and groping?
Love, can you pick it up like a mouse and put it in
your pocket and take it to your room and bring it
out of your pocket and say,
O here is my love,
my little pretty mousey love?
***
***
Yes—love, this little word you hear about,
is love an elephant and you step out of the way
where the elephant comes trampling, tromping,
traveling with big feet and long flaps of
drooping ears and straight white ivory tusks—
Honey and Salt Page 3