Selected Poems
Page 10
The canary, I said, comes and sits
on our table in the morning
at breakfast, I mean walks about
on the table with us there
and pecks at the table-cloth
He must
be a smart little bird
Good-bye!
The Desert Music and Other Poems
(1954)
To Bill and Paul
To Daphne and Virginia
The smell of the heat is boxwood
when rousing us
a movement of the air
stirs our thoughts
that had no life in them
to a life, a life in which
two women agonize:
to live and to breathe is no less.
Two young women.
The box odor
is the odor of that of which
partaking separately,
each to herself
I partake also
. . separately.
Be patient that I address you in a poem,
there is no other
fit medium.
The mind
lives there. It is uncertain,
can trick us and leave us
agonized. But for resources
what can equal it?
There is nothing. We
should be lost
without its wings to
fly off upon.
The mind is the cause of our distresses
but of it we can build anew.
Oh something more than
it flies off to:
a woman’s world,
of crossed sticks, stopping
thought. A new world
is only a new mind.
And the mind and the poem
are all apiece.
Two young women
to be snared,
odor of box,
to bind and hold them
for the mind’s labors.
All women are fated similarly
facing men
and there is always
another, such as I,
who loves them,
loves all women, but
finds himself, touching them,
like other men,
often confused.
I have two sons,
the husbands of these women,
who live also
in a world of love,
apart.
Shall this odor of box in
the heat
not also touch them
fronting a world of women
from which they are
debarred
by the very scents which draw them on
against easy access?
In our family we stammer unless,
half mad,
we come to speech at last
And I am not
a young man.
My love encumbers me.
It is a love
less than
a young man’s love but,
like this box odor
more penetrant, infinitely
more penetrant,
in that sense not to be resisted.
There is, in the hard
give and take
of a man’s life with
a woman
a thing which is not the stress itself
but beyond
and above
that,
something that wants to rise
and shake itself
free. We are not chickadees
on a bare limb
with a worm in the mouth.
The worm is in our brains
and concerns them
and not food for our
offspring, wants to disrupt
our thought
and throw it
to the newspapers
or anywhere.
There is, in short,
a counter stress,
born of the sexual shock,
which survives it
consonant with the moon,
to keep its own mind.
There is, of course,
more.
Women
are not alone
in that. At least
while this healing odor is abroad
one can write a poem.
Staying here in the country
on an old farm
we eat our breakfasts
on a balcony under an elm.
The shrubs below us
are neglected. And
there, penned in,
or he would eat the garden,
lives a pet goose who
tilts his head
sidewise
and looks up at us,
a very quiet old fellow
who writes no poems.
Fine mornings we sit there
while birds
come and go.
A pair of robins
is building a nest
for the second time
this season. Men
against their reason
speak of love, sometimes,
when they are old. It is
all they can do .
or watch a heavy goose
who waddles, slopping
noisily in the mud of
his pool.
The Orchestra
The precise counterpart
of a cacophony of bird calls
lifting the sun almighty
into his sphere: wood-winds
clarinet and violins
sound a prolonged A!
Ah! the sun, the sun! is about to rise
and shed his beams
as he has always done
upon us all,
drudges and those
who live at ease,
women and men,
upon the old,
upon children and the sick
who are about to die and are indeed
dead in their beds,
to whom his light
is forever lost. The cello
raises his bass note
manfully in the treble din:
Ah, ah and ah!
together, unattuned
seeking a common tone.
Love is that common tone
shall raise his fiery head
and sound his note.
The purpose of an orchestra
is to organize those sounds
and hold them
to an assembled order
in spite of the
“wrong note.” Well, shall we
think or listen? Is there a sound addressed
not wholly to the ear?
We half close
our eyes. We do not
hear it through our eyes.
It is not
a flute note either, it is the relation
of a flute note
to a drum. I am wide
awake. The mind
is listening. The ear
is alerted. But the ear
in a half-reluctant mood
stretches
. . and yawns.
And so the banked violins
in three tiers
enliven the scene,
pizzicato. For a short
memory or to
make the listener listen
the theme is repeated
stressing a variant:
it is a principle of music
to repeat the theme. Repeat
and repeat again,
as the pace mounts. The
theme is difficult
but no more difficult
than the facts to be
resolved. Repeat
and repeat the theme
and all it develops to be
until thought is dissolved
in tears.
Our dreams
have been assaulted
by a memory that will not
sleep. The
French hornsr />
interpose
. . their voices:
I love you. My heart
is innocent. And this
the first day of the world!
Say to them:
“Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant
to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize
them, he must either change them or perish.”
Now is the time
in spite of the “wrong note”
I love you. My heart is
innocent.
And this the first
(and last) day of the world
The birds twitter now anew
but a design
surmounts their twittering.
It is a design of a man
that makes them twitter.
It is a design.
The Host
According to their need,
this tall Negro evangelist
(at a table separate from the
rest of his party);
these two young Irish nuns
(to be described subsequently);
and this white-haired Anglican
have come witlessly
to partake of the host
laid for them (and for me)
by the tired waitresses.
It is all
(since eat we must)
made sacred by our common need.
The evangelist’s assistants
are most open in their praise
though covert
as would be seemly
in such a public
place. The nuns
are all black, a side view.
The cleric,
his head bowed to reveal
his unruly poll
dines alone.
My eyes are restless.
The evangelists eat well,
fried oysters and what not
at this railway restaurant. The Sisters
are soon satisfied. One
on leaving,
looking straight before her under steadfast brows,
reveals
blue eyes. I myself
have brown eyes
and a milder mouth.
There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but of the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact. And by that force
it becomes real,
bitterly
to the poor animals
who suffer and die
that we may live.
The well-fed evangels,
the narrow-lipped and bright-eyed nuns,
the tall,
white-haired Anglican,
proclaim it by their appetites
as do I also,
chomping with my worn-out teeth:
the Lord is my shepherd
I shall not want.
No matter how well they are fed,
how daintily
they put the food to their lips,
it is all
according to the imagination!
Only the imagination
is real! They have imagined it,
therefore it is so:
of the evangels,
with the long legs characteristic of the race—
only the docile women
of the party smiled at me
when, with my eyes
I accosted them.
The nuns—but after all
I saw only a face, a young face
cut off at the brows.
It was a simple story.
The cleric, plainly
from a good school,
interested me more,
a man with whom I might
carry on a conversation.
No one was there
save only for
the food. Which I alone,
being a poet,
could have given them.
But I
had only my eyes
with which to speak.
Journey to Love
(1955)
For My Wife
The lvy Crown
The whole process is a lie,
unless,
crowned by excess,
it break forcefully,
one way or another,
from its confinement—
or find a deeper well.
Antony and Cleopatra
were right;
they have shown
the way. I love you
or I do not live
at all.
Daffodil time
is past. This is
summer, summer!
the heart says,
and not even the full of it.
No doubts
are permitted—
though they will come
and may
before our time
overwhelm us.
We are only mortal
but being mortal
can defy our fate.
We may
by an outside chance
even win! We do not
look to see
jonquils and violets
come again
but there are,
still,
the roses!
Romance has no part in it.
The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together.
It has its seasons,
for and against,
whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
to assert
toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
is to tear flesh,
I have proceeded
through them.
Keep
the briars out,
they say.
You cannot live
and keep free of
briars.
Children pick flowers.
Let them.
Though having them
in hand
they have no further use for them
but leave them crumpled
at the curb’s edge.
At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.
The Sparrow
(To My Father)
This sparrow
who comes to sit at my window
is a poetic truth
more than a natural one.
His voice,
his movements,
his habits—
how he loves to
flutter his wings
in the dust—
all attest it;
granted, he does it
to rid himself of lice
but the relief he feels
makes him
cry out lustily—
which is a trait
more related to music
than otherwise.
Wherever he finds himself
in early spring,
on back streets
or beside palaces,
he carries on
unaffectedly
his amours.
It begins in the egg,
/> his sex genders it:
What is more pretentiously
useless
or about which
we more pride ourselves?
It leads as often as not
to our undoing.
The cockerel, the crow
with their challenging voices
cannot surpass
the insistence
of his cheep!
Once
at El Paso
toward evening,
I saw—and heard!—
ten thousand sparrows
who had come in from
the desert
to roost. They filled the trees
of a small park. Men fled
(with ears ringing!)
from their droppings,
leaving the premises
to the alligators
who inhabit
the fountain. His image
is familiar
as that of the aristocratic
unicorn, a pity
there are not more oats eaten
nowadays
to make living easier
for him.
At that,
his small size,
keen eyes,
serviceable beak
and general truculence
assure his survival—
to say nothing
of his innumerable
brood.
Even the Japanese
know him
and have painted him
sympathetically,
with profound insight
into his minor
characteristics.
Nothing even remotely
subtle
about his lovemaking.
He crouches
before the female,
drags his wings,
waltzing,
throws back his head
and simply—
yells! The din
is terrific.
The way he swipes his bill
across a plank
to clean it,
is decisive.
So with everything
he does. His coppery
eyebrows
give him the air
of being always
a winner—and yet
I saw once,
the female of his species
clinging determinedly
to the edge of
a water pipe,
catch him
by his crown-feathers
to hold him
silent,
subdued,
hanging above the city streets
until
she was through with him.
What was the use
of that?
She hung there
herself,
puzzled at her success.
I laughed heartily.
Practical to the end,
it is the poem
of his existence
that triumphed
finally;
a wisp of feathers
flattened to the pavement,
wings spread symmetrically
as if in flight,
the head gone,
the black escutcheon of the breast
undecipherable,
an effigy of a sparrow,
a dried wafer only,
left to say
and it says it
without offense,