Selected Poems
Page 8
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
Paterson: the Falls
What common language to unravel?
The Falls, combed into straight lines
from that rafter of a rock’s
lip. Strike in! the middle of
some trenchant phrase, some
well packed clause. Then …
This is my plan. 4 sections: First,
the archaic persons of the drama.
An eternity of bird and bush,
resolved. An unraveling:
the confused streams aligned, side
by side, speaking! Sound
married to strength, a strength
of falling—from a height! The wild
voice of the shirt-sleeved
Evangelist rivaling, Hear
me! I am the Resurrection
and the Life! echoing
among the bass and pickerel, slim
eels from Barbados, Sargasso
Sea, working up the coast to that
bounty, ponds and wild streams—
Third, the old town: Alexander Hamilton
working up from St. Croix,
from that sea! and a deeper, whence
he came! stopped cold
by that unmoving roar, fastened
there: the rocks silent
but the water, married to the stone,
voluble, though frozen; the water
even when and though frozen
still whispers and moans—
And in the brittle air
a factory bell clangs, at dawn, and
snow whines under their feet. Fourth,
the modern town, a
disembodied roar! the cataract and
its clamor broken apart—and from
all learning, the empty
ear struck from within, roaring …
The Dance
In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.
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 through 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.
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
The Semblables
The red brick monastery in
the suburbs over against the dust-
hung acreage of the unfinished
and all but subterranean
munitions plant: those high
brick walls behind which at Easter
the little orphans and bastards
in white gowns sing their Latin
responses to the hoary ritual
while frankincense and myrrh
round out the dark chapel making
an enclosed sphere of it
of which they are the worm:
that cell outside the city beside
the polluted stream and dump
heap, uncomplaining, and the field
of upended stones with a photo
under glass fastened here and there
to one of them near the deeply
carved name to distinguish it:
that trinity of slate gables
the unembellished windows piling
up, the chapel with its round
window between the dormitories
peaked by the bronze belfry
peaked in turn by the cross,
verdegris—faces all silent
that miracle that has burst sexless
from between the carrot rows.
Leafless white birches, their
empty tendrils swaying in
the all but no breeze guard
behind the spiked monastery fence
the sacred statuary. But ranks
of brilliant car-tops row on row
give back in all his glory the
late November sun and hushed
attend, before that tumbled
ground, those sightless walls
and shovelled entrances where no
one but a lonesome cop swinging
his club gives sign, that agony
within where the wrapt mac
hines
are praying….
The Storm
A perfect rainbow! a wide
arc low in the northern sky
spans the black lake
troubled by little waves
over which the sun
south of the city shines in
coldly from the bare hill
supine to the wind which
cannot waken anything
but drives the smoke from
a few lean chimneys streaming
violently southward
The Forgotten City
When with my mother I was coming down
from the country the day of the hurricane,
trees were across the road and small branches
kept rattling on the roof of the car
There was ten feet or more of water
making the parkways impassible with wind
bringing more rain in sheets. Brown torrents
gushed up through new sluices in the
valley floor so that I had to take what road
I could find bearing to the south and west,
to get back to the city. I passed through
extraordinary places, as vivid as any
I ever saw where the storm had broken
the barrier and let through
a strange commonplace: Long, deserted avenues
with unrecognized names at the corners and
drunken looking people with completely
foreign manners. Monuments, institutions
and in one place a large body of water
startled me with an acre or more of hot
jets spouting up symmetrically over it. Parks.
I had no idea where I was and promised myself
I would some day go back to study this
curious and industrious people who lived
in these apartments, at these sharp
corners and turns of intersecting avenues
with so little apparent communication
with an outside world. How did they get
cut off this way from representation in our
newspapers and other means of publicity
when so near the metropolis, so closely
surrounded by the familiar and the famous?
The Yellow Chimney
There is a plume
of fleshpale
smoke upon the blue
sky. The silver
rings that
strap the yellow
brick stack at
wide intervals shine
in this amber
light—not
of the sun not of
the pale sun but
his born brother
the
declining season
The Bare Tree
The bare cherry tree
higher than the roof
last year produced
abundant fruit. But how
speak of fruit confronted
by that skeleton?
Though live it may be
there is no fruit on it.
Therefore chop it down
and use the wood
against this biting cold.
The Clouds
(1948)
Franklin Square
Instead of
the flower of the hawthorn
the spine:
The tree is in bloom
the flowers
and the leaves together
sheltering
the noisy sparrows
that give
by their intimate
indifference,
the squirrels and pigeons
on the sharp-
edged lawns—the figure
of a park:
A city, a decadence
of bounty—
a tall negress approaching
the bench
pursing her old mouth
for what coin?
Labrador
How clean these shallows
how firm these rocks stand
about which wash
the waters of the world
It is ice to this body
that unclothes its pallors
to thoughts
of an immeasurable sea,
unmarred, that as it lifts
encloses this
straining mind, these
limbs in a single gesture.
A Woman in Front of a Bank
The bank is a matter of columns,
like . convention,
unlike invention; but the pediments
sit there in the sun
to convince the doubting of
investments “solid
as rock”—upon which the world
stands, the world of finance,
the only world: Just there,
talking with another woman while
rocking a baby carriage
back and forth stands a woman in
a pink cotton dress, bare legged
and headed whose legs
are two columns to hold up
her face, like Lenin’s (her loosely
arranged hair profusely blond) or
Darwin’s and there you
have it:
a woman in front of a bank.
The Bitter World of Spring
On a wet pavement the white sky recedes
mottled black by the inverted
pillars of the red elms,
in perspective, that lift the tangled
net of their desires hard into
the falling rain. And brown smoke
is driven down, running like
water over the roof of the bridge-
keeper’s cubicle. And, as usual,
the fight as to the nature of poetry
—Shall the philosophers capture it?—
is on. And, casting an eye
down into the water, there, announced
by the silence of a white
bush in flower, close
under the bridge, the shad ascend,
midway between the surface and the mud,
and you can see their bodies
red-finned in the dark
water headed, unrelenting, upstream.
The Banner Bearer
In the rain, the lonesome
dog idiosyn-
cratically, with each
quadribeat, throws
out the left fore-
foot beyond
the right intent, in
his stride,
on some obscure
insistence—from bridge-
ward going
into new territory.
His Daughter
Her jaw wagging
her left hand pointing
stiff armed
behind her, I noticed:
her youth, her
receding chin and
fair hair;
her legs, bare
The sun was on her
as she came
to the step’s edge,
the fat man,
caught in his stride,
collarless,
turned sweating
toward her.
The Manoeuvre
I saw the two starlings
coming in toward the wires.
But at the last,
just before alighting, they
turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that’s what got me—to
face into the wind’s teeth.
The Horse
The horse moves
independently
without reference
to his load
He has eyes
like a woman and
turns them
about, throws
back his ears
and is generally
conscious of
the world. Yet
he pulls when
he must and
pulls w
ell, blowing
fog from
his nostrils
like fumes from
the twin
exhausts of a car.
Hard Times
Stone steps, a solid
block too tough
to be pried out, from
which the house,
rather, has been
avulsed leaving
a pedestal, on which
a fat boy in
an old overcoat, a
butt between
his thick lips, the
coat pushed back,
stands kidding,
Parking Space! three
steps up from his
less lucky fellows.
The Motor-Barge
The motor-barge is
at the bridge the
air lead
the broken ice
unmoving. A gull,
the eternal
gull, flies as
always, eyes alert
beak pointing
to the life-giving
water. Time
falters but for
the broad river-
craft which
low in the water
moves grad-
ually, edging
between the smeared
bulkheads,
churning a mild
wake, laboring
to push past
the constriction
with its heavy load
The Well Disciplined Bargeman
The shadow does not move. It is the water moves,
running out. A monolith of sand on a passing barge,
riding the swift water, makes that its fellow.
Standing upon the load the well disciplined bargeman
rakes it carefully, smooth on top with nicely squared
edges to conform to the barge outlines—ritually: sand.
All about him the silver water, fish-swift, races
under the Presence. Whatever there is else is moving.
The restless gulls, unlike companionable pigeons,
taking their cue from the ruffled water, dip and circle
avidly into the gale. Only the bargeman raking
upon his barge remains, like the shadow, sleeping
Raindrops on a Briar
I, a writer, at one time hipped on
painting, did not consider
the effects, painting,
for that reason, static, on
the contrary the stillness of
the objects—the flowers, the gloves—
freed them precisely by that
from a necessity merely to move