She taught me then (and many
years of colors later)
what distinctive manners meant.
Page 24
A Spider
So many lines about the wind I weave.
So many lines, some of them taut
with particular gestures, some of them caught
on the edge of a house, or torn
and flapping in a violent storm.
So many thought-weighted, rock-ripped, time-worn
in the obstacled present.
No two the same, none spun as magnificently
as I aim them to be, most blown away.
All I can do is wind what courses through
my spirit, trembling instrumentold battered frame
on which the elements pour, play on, accrue
(I'd call it a lyre, but that would be too gay)
then send those filaments of soul
into sheer absence, needling the material
with a pronged and strange capacity.
The lines I make begin to shake things free
and yet fold brilliant glimmers of their colors
into a tapestry both false and brave.
At first, I only grasped the threads of others
but soon learned all would break, and none would save.
So many lines about the wind I weave.
Page 25
The Man by the River
The man by the river let no one in.
The man by the river grew pale and thin.
He lived in a house on the edge of the woods
where the marsh wind blows and the dark creeps in.
On days of sun he'd stay inside
and pace, and question himself out loud
why his true love left, why his mother died,
why a vulture circled the wide blue sky
On days the air turned damp and dim
he'd walk from his house and the wind-tossed pines
down his father's hill to the changing strand
where waves of green met grains of sand.
The wind plucked on an instrument
that no one human hand could fit.
He watched the restless sea and land
find lines of truth to move beyond.
He watched the waves sweep twigs and bones
to shore, and sweep them back again
more fragile from the dry, hot sun.
The wind rolled dreams along the sand.
The light passed over his youth one day
And flocks of dark birds lighted down
each year for the seeds on his father's land
and the berries that clung to his father's tree.
Page 26
Banquet
The daffodils are expectant.
On the fringes of Spring
they are waiting.
Be glad. Spread cheer.
Do not let the fabric
of joy disappear
Benevolence
must be like this, appearing
suddenly on the margins
of our lust for change.
It is close. Too close.
We grow used to it
with its colors and bells,
its bright, slippered feet.
Delight, delight,
the soul is right,
say the daffodils. Tonight
may be their last. The meadows
confused with praise
warm mild days
then the crotchety winter
laying his rough hands
on the flower beds.
What is it he wants with them?
Their hopes are not hidden.
They open themselves
completely,
as if they want to be touched,
gold empty cups
for someone to fill.
They are not so innocent.
They would feel and feel.
The liquor they offer
is consciousness.
Even if he drains them,
Page 27
even if he destroys
their silks and stems,
he will have to go home
eventually, he will have to retreat
from the garden alone.
Of this, they're aware.
Page 28
To Night
I don't want to be afraid of you
and yet I am.
You are the tapestry
of my mortality.
You are the arbor of sound
when sound is through with me,
threats and grasses plaited through your hem.
And in the deeper places,
the center I can't thumb,
there are colors, chants,
descriptionless
wild faces.
If you are a woman
you have burdens.
You were never light.
Socrates felt that night
was when we start to see,
when the philosophers
emptied their hands
of common pleasure:
no figs on plates,
or wine,
or wordless measure,
just perfect quiet
as the soul sinks
and wisdom rises
from the lower kingdom
where she holds court
with her noble spirits . . .
She would not abandon
the light of the mind
that had shown
such graces
and Socrates was about to die
when he explained this.
Page 29
On the Nature of Beauty
There are so many edges to things:
this lamp, this wall, this table.
Tonight, even a question
has clean dimensions. Outside, sounds rise
through aisles of grass,
ridges of bark, larva, wings.
There are so many edges to things;
for instance, the tablet of dusk
has been broken into pieces
by darkening trees
or whittled, maybe, by an old artiste
sitting on his porch in the sky.
Who is in love with wholes,
with the blurred manteau
of evening, eternally floating down
over every brittle figure,
turning them into the ground?
Who wouldn't rather create a figure,
regal, discontinuous,
surreal and extraneous,
but as essential to the sky
as the eye is?
On land, there are so many edges,
we have to hold on to them
dearly, they become our anthem,
what we run our tongues over,
what we run our hands over,
the bodies we touch,
the lines we engage,
even the loves we leave behind
to move onto the hard, lonely stage
we are always on the verge of.
We do not really want to be saved
from the shortcomings
of hands. We do not want the whole,
serene, mellifluous, unscaled,
Page 30
though we may strive to get a look at it.
So when we find the beautiful,
whatever it may mean,
however it is changing,
we feel the presence of something
(maybe it is wings)
sprouting, prickling, burning,
giving us the edges again
of our own limited range,
spurring the fenced-in being
when we lay eyes on it,
the beautiful,
the thing that stops our heart,
the act that seems worth a good try,
and it is, even for a minute,
that being ready to fly.
Page 31
Romantic Relief
The trees l
ook like women in beautiful dresses,
the blue sky their background of cloudy excesses.
To be all alone in a difficult world
is not what we're fearing. They dangle their tresses
as if they were women with answers, not guesses.
To be all alone in the world isn't hard.
These plunges of feeling, these lithe, stubborn branches
of brown and bright green, these decorative phrases
that seem like a frivolous dance in the mind . . .
We know how to be with ourselves in the world
say the women. They move to an army of breezes.
Who cares if there's not a whole army of words,
strong soldiers, to take the slim trees in their arms
and lavish their bodies with verbal caresses
until they are calm? Who cares if a world
where the soldiers, the women, the phrases are held,
isn't real? We stay with ourselves and are charmed.
The trees are grown women and innocent guesses
and words in the air and abstractions and bards
of some deeply historical verse in the heart.
The women are laughing. The branches grow firm,
the green leaves transgressive. We all fall apart.
Page 32
Negation
The self does not find itself in the long road.
The self does not find itself in the dimming sky.
The self does not find itself in the couple with the baby
who smile as if they know where, when, and why,
nor in the mountains rising heavily
like the bent backs of monks, indifferent and old,
nor in the ruddy vegetable garden
where a figure works quietly, at the center of the world.
What it is not seems to have no end.
A river of silence is all it contains,
winding and winding through mysterious forests.
Maybe it is better not to see what is missed,
to just float on the surface of billowing dusk
where distinguishing edges are melting like lovers
and the air turns a dense and improbable hue
softening, for a minute, the absence of an 'I' and a 'You.'
Page 33
Landscape
In the neighborhood of sorrow
we move because we grieve.
The houses are low and squat,
the air heavy, the boughs gnarled
with bending toward light.
If you walk along that winding street
shadowed by fate
you might hear music
drifting out of a window, someone playing
not quite well, not quite badly,
a tune that means nothing to you.
In the neighborhood of sorrow
things go about their business:
the birds, bees, etcetera,
almost indivisible
from the monotone sky
except for a small cry
here and there, the casual humming
of eternity. In the underbrush
you'll still find the twining, lush
insistence of a life
these vines, for example,
coiled around what's young
and delicate: birch, ash, Virginia pine
but that's just denial
doing what it can.
At one house, a cat
lays a truth from the forest
on the doorstepa dead infant snake,
raw stomach, smooth new back
Page 34
of yellow gems. The practiced griever
opens the door
to find it, then throws it in the garden,
its 's' shape of despair
landing lightly on the weeds
and sprung impatiens. Knowledge
spreads into the background
and day begins.
Across great distance, the whine
of a saw, someone taking care
of chaos. Elsewhere,
someone isn't.
Page 35
A Wind in Place
after Stevens
The day is green and blown
but her mother was strong
as these trees bending in the wind.
The clouds are full of avowals
but her father had the clarity
of rain-scrubbed altitudes.
There is nothing whim can't change
but the buried, nothing it can't sway
but the ground.
Now their thoughts are thinnest air
above the tangle of intelligence.
Now their touch drifts
blurred and down.
The wall between the self and wind
is just a limited perception, the eye's redress.
In the wide light,
in the blaring continuity of it,
over the dark and scrambled green,
white blooms like sudden freedoms
lift the harsh bark
as possibility raises the eye up
from its body, distinguishes its backdrop
from ordinary scenes
and from the leaves, those same spun leaves
that weigh the branches down.
But in between the wind and eye
is the interrupting wall
and the figure in place behind it
who sees the lashed events
and feels unsafe.
Page 36
Crater
Old moon, old moon,
what do I tell you?
You sit there, scribed with night.
Do you expect invention?
Beauty as its own reign
or arrangement? No praise
then, just this stutter
between stare and star, the imprint
of my heel on relative dark.
Fool moon, fool moon,
what do you know
of me or my crumbled ladders?
You're not a smile, or a grimace,
you're not even a leap,
just some bruiting glow
that hangs from its one
dichotomy. You can't figure
the tunes, the variant
weights on a tongue.
Poor moon, poor moon,
what does your one eye mean?
To have half a sense,
a cruel bright, your whole vision
wandering, or dispersed
into clueless trinkets
you can never collect.
Won't you always be
swivelling? Bold mood, your flood
is the flood of the mind
in its black habit:
Page 37
lighting all, but uplifted by none.
Lantern of the odd soul,
miner of discontent,
don't come out, don't come out.
Stay hidden, in my cold coat
pocket.
Page 38
On a Worm Descending a Thread
This gray light is full of invention,
of the rustling of feathers and hues.
There are voices no language can sing.
The sun dips its face in the dark,
in the alternate substance, the mirror.
It is listening. It listens to water
and it follows that sound to the sea
where the moon waits, the delicate daughter,
earth's eldest, who sprang out of grief
and flew off through the torn, broken trees,
past the ferns, past the sisterly branches,
past the swan's neck, the forest of eyes
and of wounds, and adjusted her grace
to a height. to a distance, where sorrow
can turn from its body, not touch.
Her departure has scattered a shell
in the sea, has inflected the deep
murk of absence with silvery scale
s
that will brush an oiled brethren all night.
Hammered Dulcimer Page 3
