Collected Poems
Page 22
But just. That part
Of you cleaned
My bones more
Than once. But I
Will meet you
In the young hawk
Whom I see
Inside both
You and me.
This young hawk
Guided you
Into the air—
And will guide
You now to
The Lord of Night,
Who will give
You the tenderness
You wanted here.
DREAM OF MYSELF AT TWELVE
At the start of the dream
It was understood you were working
In the grape fields. But
When I walked
Into the barn, I saw
A leg sticking
From the hay. It was you, hiding,
Not working. “How
Long have you
Been here?” Your head
Rose from the hay.
My mother, your calm wife,
Showed up, spoke
For you, said,
“Jacob, you haven’t been
Drinking, have you?”
How often as a child I heard
That and did nothing.
This time I broke
A horse-collar, threw
A gun into
The horse-stall, jabbed
A pitchfork into
Loose hay,
Hit the hired man.
My father said nothing.
My brother said it was clear
I could never be-
Come a man,
Would have to play with toys.
Then I looked
Down at the yellow straw
In the stable, my tongue
Still. As I
Woke, a small boy
Clung to me,
Could not feel safe,
Would not take
His arms
From around my neck.
IN THE FUNERAL HOME
1
I missed the hour of your death.
The coffin lid
Lifted shows some
Fall oak leaves sewn
High above
Your winter face.
I have at last some
Leisure near
Your cream-colored hands.
I write down what you did,
Or did wrong, or did
Not do at all.
The funeral director, a kind
Man, says, “I’ll
Go upstairs now
With my family. You sit as long
As you like.
No one is here.”
2
Your marriage held in-
Visible mountains, touching
And not touching . . .
Too much isolation. I’m not sure
You married at all,
Or whom you married.
For twenty-five years,
An adult, I lived
A half-mile from you.
Why? Perhaps I couldn’t get
Enough, or perhaps
I was your wife.
Weren’t you my husband?
A hurtful man,
Reckless, wrathful, solemn,
Able to break a man or a book,
Gentle, un-
Churched, bold.
We had twenty-four
Anniversaries then,
Before I moved again,
At fifty-three,
No longer needing
To be married to you.
As I wrote that down, your head
Turned slowly
In the coffin, your jaw
Opened, the teeth showed
Themselves; then
Your head rolled back.
3
Did I tell you that I regret
Being so agreeable
To you in childhood?
I left at seventeen,
A mother’s boy,
Dreamy, smart.
I moved back at twenty-
Eight, with a
Wife, a half-
Mile from you. By then
I had found out
What I wanted.
I said it in a poem:
“I want to have
No wife, build
A house with one door,
Be called
Away by wind.”
4
You spoke often of the Prince
Of Wales, whom
You admired.
He too wanted something
More—and
He had to steal it.
An old man said to me:
“Your father was
The only man
In the whole county
Who read books
During the Depression.”
5
What good was all that
Seeing we did,
So as to miss
Pheasant nests as we
Mowed or rocks
As we plowed?
I lay my palm on
Your chest. Your chest
Is thin below
The burial suit,
A chicken’s breast
Below my hand.
Do we have time for
Each other now?
Do you have
Time for me? Seeing
Is good, as Marvell
Said, but eyes
Are also for weeping.
As I stand next
To you in your long
Coffin, I see we
Have more time
Than we can use.
A DREAM OF THE BLACKSMITH’S ROOM
I dreamt last night you
Lived nearby, not
Dead at all, but safe
In a blacksmith’s storage room,
With bolts and nails in bins
From floor to ceiling.
You came and brought me
An ivory jar,
Holding a precious fluid,
Which I took. I knew it meant
The time had come,
But I let you leave.
Later a man pushed open
The door and threw
Your body down, a wizened,
Astonishingly small body—
Rope still tied
Around the neck.
I cried out to my wife,
“He didn’t die
That way!” The man who threw
The body said, “It’s over. You
Don’t have to
Rescue him again.”
III
MEDITATIONS ON THE INSATIABLE SOUL
1
The man who sits up late at night cutting
His nails, the backs of black whales, the tip
Of the mink’s tail, the tongue that slips out of lips, all of these
Testify to a soul used to eating and being eaten.
Urged on by the inner pressure of teeth,
Some force, animal-born, is slippery, edgy,
Impatient, greedy to pray for new heavens,
Unforgiving, resentful, like a fire in dry wood.
2
Greeks sit by the fire cleaning their bright teeth.
Let Portia grieve in her sorrowing house.
Let blackbirds come. The insatiable soul
Begins to eat shellfish, the Caribbean islands,
The rainforests, Amazon. Who wants to eat the meat
Cooked in the Holocaust? Oh, you know.
The traveler asleep in Charlemagne’s cave
Laughs in his murky unshaven dream.
3
Some ill-smelling, libidinous, worm-shouldered
Deep-reaching desirousness rules the countryside.
Let sympathy pass, a stranger, to other shores!
Let the love between men and women be ground up
And fed to the talk shows! Let every female breast
Be photographed! Let the father be hated! Let the son be hated!
Let twelve-year-olds kill the twelve-year-olds!
The Great Lord of Desirousness ruling all.
4
Northern lights illumine the storm-troll’s house.
There men murdered by God promenade.
The buffalo woman plays her bony flute calling
The lonely father trampled by the buffalo god.
The foreskins of angels shelter the naked cradle.
The stew of discontents feeds the loose souls.
And the owl husbands the moors, harries the mouse,
Beforehand, behindhand, with his handsome eyes.
ANGER AGAINST CHILDREN
The vet screams, and throws his crutch at a passerby.
“Hey, lady, you want to meet a child-killer?”
African drums play all night for the women
With their heads down on motel tables.
Parents take their children into the deepest Oregon forests,
And leave them there. When the children
Open the lunchbox, there are stones inside, and a note saying, “Do your own thing.”
And what would the children do if they found their way home in the moonlight?
The planes have already landed on Maui, the parents are on vacation.
Our children live with a fear at school and in the house.
The mother and father do not protect the younger child from the savagery of the others.
What is it like to have stayed this long in civilization—
To have witnessed the grave of Tutankhamun open once more—
What is it like to wear sweatshirts and bluejeans
And wait for hours to see the bracelets of those wasteful death-coddlers,
Who learned to conquer conscious life?
What is it like to have the dynamo, the lightbulb,
the Parliamentary system,
the electrical slaves embedded in
elevator doors,
The body scanners that see sideways, the extravagant and elegant fighters,
And still be unconscious? What is that like?
Well, of course there is rage.
The thirty-four-year-old mother
Wants to reject the child still in the womb,
And she asks Senators to pass laws to prevent that.
The husband dreams of killing his wife, and the wife lays plots.
She imagines that he is an Oppressor,
And that she is an Aztec Princess.
In the night she holds an obsidian knife over her husband’s sleeping body.
He dreams he is a deer being torn apart by female demons.
This is the rage that shouts at children.
This is the rage that cannot be satisfied,
Because each year more ancient Chinese art objects go on display.
So the rage goes inward at last,
It ends in doubt, in self-doubt, dyeing the hair, and love of celebrities.
The rage comes to rest at last in the talk show late at night,
When the celebrities without anger or grief tell us that only the famous are good, only they live well.
There are waifs inside us, broken by the Pauline gospels;
We know them,
And those who step on desire as a horse steps on a chick.
No cry comes out, only silence, and the faint whisper of the collapsing birdskull.
Here the sleepers sleep, here the Rams and the Bears play.
The old woman weeps at night in her room at the Nursing Facility.
There are no bridges over the ocean.
She sees a short dock, and ahead of that darkness, hostile waters, lifting swells,
Fitfully lit, or not lit at all.
Tadpoles drowse in the stagnant holes.
The gecko goes back to his home in the cold rain.
The wife of the Chrysler dealer is in danger of being committed again.
She left the hospital hopeful, she struggles hard,
She reads Laing and Rollo May;
But nothing works, she dreams she is interned in Burma.
Cars go past her house at night, Japanese soldiers at the wheel.
Nothing can be done, the kernel opens, all is swept away;
She is carried out of sight.
The doctor arrives; once more she leaves dry-eyed for the hospital.
I am twenty-eight again. I sleep curled up,
My fingers widen as I sleep, my toes grow immense at night.
Tears flow; I am in some bin apart from him I love.
The ocean king, far at sea, lies alone on his bed.
His interior engine has been catapulted into fragments,
Valves and drive shaft scattered, the engine mount settles to sand.
The saddened king goes about, all night he reaches down,
Picking up bolts from the sand, and piston rings; by morning all is scattered again.
We wake, no dream is remembered, the scenes gone into smoke.
We are in some enormous place, abandoned,
Where Adam Kadmon has been forgotten, the luminous man is dissolved.
The sarcophagus contains the rotted bones of the monks; so many lived in the desert.
None are alive, only the bones lie in the dust.
My friend goes to Philadelphia to claim his father’s body.
It lies in an uncarpeted room in the ghetto, there was no one else to claim the body.
The time of manifest destiny is over, the time of grief has come.
IV
ST. GEORGE, THE DRAGON, AND THE VIRGIN
A SCULPTURE MADE BY BERNT NOTKE IN 1489 FOR STOCKHOLM CATHEDRAL
St. George fights the dragon.
The spiny dragon,
Who lives in the rat-
Filled caves, is losing.
He fights back,
As when a child
Lifts his four
Feet to hold
Off the insane
Parent. The dragon
Hand grasps the wooden
Lance that has
Penetrated his thorny
Chest, but . . .
Too late . . .
And this girlish knight?
Oh I know him.
I read the New
Testament as I lay
Naked on my bed
As a boy.
That solar boy
Rises up radiant
With his forehead-
Eye that sees past
The criminals’ gibbet
To the mindful
Towers of the spirit city.
I hate this boy
Whom I have been
Lifting his lance above
The father. Each of us
Has been this marsh
Dragon on his back.
He is Joseph, Grendel,
What we have forgotten,
The great spirit
The alchemists knew of,
Without whom is nothing.
As children, we knew ours
Was a muddy greatness.
How long it took
To break down that horse
So that he would agree
To abet the solar boy.
This earth-handed, disreputable,
Hoarse-voiced one
Is dying, all
Over the world.
And the Virgin?
She prays
On her knees while
This goes on,
As well she might.
I wrote this to bless
The swamp monster
And the marsh hag
Who bore him.
IVAR OAKESON’S FIDDLE
Let it be, let
It be. Let it be!
Portia awakes
In her sorrowing house;
The Orkney serpent
Lies close beside her,
Curls around her arm.
But the sorrowing fiddle
Has stayn awake all night.
The wooden-walled house
>
Is a resonating box.
The wood gourd that loves
The strings cries out
To those who love to dance.
Lovers and husbands
Whirl round and round.
Men and women
Sweat and shout, kick-
Ing and invit-
Ing their desire.
Oh, let it be.
QUESTION IN THE LOS GATOS HILLS
How often I have
Called to ponderable
Things: these
Eucalyptus-smelling
Sea-fogged
Hills
And chimney-hiding
Gorges;
I have called
Boulders to
Enter my poems,
Black dusty
Earth, rangy
Minnesota grass.
Why do I hesitate
Then to
Call to God?
Years ago I
Sat curled up
Behind a shed,
Saying to myself:
“You are a boy
Who will never
Be heard.”
Forget that idea.
You are no
Longer a boy.
Let the sound come
Out of the mouth.
You hear the sitar
Cry, let the poem
Cry, even from
Behind the shed,
Where we all are.
HOW DAVID DID NOT CARE
What does it mean to live
As those before
Have lived? A field
Of boisterous men
And women who lift,
Shouting, singing,
And dancing a sheaf
Of wheat up to the sun.
When David danced for joy,
We guess he did not care.
When David played
The Song of Degrees
On his lute, when he cried,
“My bones call out