The Witch of the Inner Wood
Page 15
a figure sits by the copter’s slab
by the automatic warning light.
Offshore the rocks, the whirlpool, a white shark —
a tiny iridescent trail
of oil from some small injury —
and in the sky the army
wages practice wars. What use?
Margaret, we must be true.
But mourner, most autumnal child,
what to?
iv
Some things remain:
the truth: Orion, its bare-knuckled stance
studding the sky where the first snow
flickers against the street light’s gloom;
the pallid, dim Auroras that we dream;
the tinsel Christ child in its crib,
we dig out from the cupboard
and set up with lichen,
vivid mosses from the woods,
and one wild, seedling spruce tree wired
like bonsai to eccentric shape —
toy art.
For we are children still,
self-centered, lonely, babyish.
Our playthings fall to pieces and we weep.
What our dreams, the stars, our toys
may stand for, we don’t know —
except we think we see it in the dark
as through a frosted window — some strange thing
fluttering — a flame? a bird? a withered leaf —
like a desperate fluttering poetry
we did not write.
Winter
i
The sooty landscape glares
harsh in the narrow sunlight; dog scabs,
rock-salt ulcers, trash, the lawns
like dirty rags and diapers for a wash —
Unclean, uncared for, every act,
each long inaction, sours and spoils
my heart, my self, my other selves
out there in crabby boxes, cramped
with greed, stupidities, and
lonely, because they cannot love.
This window is my mirror. Out of doors
the dry trees splinter in the cold.
May the weather break!
May the stone skies fall and scour my heart
and sting me into numbness till I lie
placid as glass, like a white lake
no rock tossed from its crystal rim,
no tattered leaf, can break.
ii
The skies flow softly west to east
filling the dulling air with white.
The town is gone.
From under my window I scarcely hear
the church bells sobbing or the whine
of snow tires on their steep route home.
This white space at the turning of the day
is like the turning on a stair,
narrow and steep, where the “coffin rest”
becomes a sort of dormer shelf.
I use it for a turning in my mind.
The bearers are dead. They will bury the dead.
Open the window. The flowing skies
fill up the empty household, seal the stairs,
white-sheet the attic nursery.
All is forgiven. All forgot. All covered up
with snow.
iii
A little light, so quickly out.
The match girl shivering in the cold
lit one, and then another one,
flaring the brilliant world we know.
She held us in her small, blue hands,
a universe.
As if a dew might vanish on a leaf,
a constellation quiver, so her flame,
St. Lucy’s light, that shows us where we are,
pinched in a matchstick’s halo, will go dark.
Where is the light when Lucy’s out?
Not in the wind, not on the moors
in a diurnal crepitude, numb and congealed.
Towards an eternal present the lost child
turns her dissolving footprints.
Still, the starlight falls like rain.
The riddle love like broken glass lies
jigsawed on the ice queen’s floor
repeating our unlearned histories
as if it were the dead that spoke,
and midnight roars above us, and the sky
folds and unfolds its blanketing
auroras, and the small, dumb
creatures huddle in their beds.
We watch as if on us this night
all things were lost.
Held in the match girl’s inner eye
we flare, aspire. The night’s white bird
enters her towering candle like a moth,
beats on its glistening arches and blows out —
as if the white, fantastic hall
of the ice queen’s winter palace “FEAR”
dissolved, dissolves, when the bird blows out,
returns to that which lies within
all winds, all darknesses, all colds,
dormant and blind: the silences
between all wandering Lucy’s lights,
all stars, all pulsing frailties
contracted to a mustard seed.
Our universe, like the lost child’s life,
quivers, smokes, goes out.
Spring
i
In the pale hours before the sun
the birds pour out the mysteries
as if the day were kettle on the stove.
Worms rise and twine in the shallow walks,
seized in their inner privacies.
Everything yet to be done, and all
undone by heaven’s unfastenings.
How can the trees carry on as they do,
wagging their mad heads, semaphores
of spring’s destructive awakenings?
Seed time, and meal time, and time
for births, and deaths, and funerals —
too busy to think, too busy to pray,
Martha ignores the mysteries.
Is listening only the better part?
Without her, who gets fed?
ii
Upstairs an adolescent shouts,
red-faced, improbable as spring.
What grows from pure commotion, from
a huge, devouring, empty head
like a bright flower?
The trash blows in from all the world —
newspapers, dry leaves, black spot spores,
the addresses of prisoners, the lists
of deaths, tree boughs
taped with electric rings
of wormseed, news that is never news,
the child that still needs love.
iii
The broad noon spreads its table.
In the barn the chilly sheep are lambing.
And yet the birds keep up their cry
like bell buoys in the harbour.
I plough among the furrows, my white sheets
puffed out and hardening in the sun.
Icarus, troughed in the trawler’s wake,
will be dug in
among the mackerel-seeded corn
with the Morse code messages of earth.
And in our winter-knotted scars
gashed green, the bees’ first fumblings find
their Eucharist.
iv
I hear the wild geese rippling home,
spreading above me their lengthened V.
Love, said the red queen, Passion, Lust,
the simplest nourishment is chore,
is plain housekeeping.
Where was she when history spoke,
her work undone
which is never done, being all doing?
v
Empty the husk and broom it out,
whistle it white to the seething wind,
and let the weathers boil it in their dull
and unassuming tantrums.
It is all need, all drain.
All of this work to
do over again,
the rain, wherever the rain comes from,
its bud, its bloom, its golden seed —
nagging, the fierce birds cry at me.
vi
Time flows like water. The shadows lean
across the glimmering prairies of my chores,
the street lights prick the darknesses,
and now the violent, reeling stars.
Too busy to think, too busy to pray.
All to be done that is yet undone,
or done, and yet done wrong.
SIX POEMS LOOKING AT A SCULPTURE BY ŰLKER ŐZERDEM (“AN ARCH IN RUINS CONTEMPLATING COMPLETION”)
1. Her Thought Lies on It
A tree root like a sinew
or a pierced bone scoured by the sculptor’s knife
or like an arch in ruins
stands on its own reflection.
The mirror holds the light,
a torch held in her steady hands,
refiner’s fire, which turned the tendons
licked them dry.
Her thought lies on this tree root,
bends it down
to a bowed back, a pubis, Yggdrasil
completed
in a looking glass.
She nailed it down.
2. A Long-thighed Woman in the Sea
This tree root is
a long-thighed woman in the sea.
Her shadow shows her inner world
as if her belly were the O,
the hole through which the dark worlds drain.
But she is blind, reflects herself
in ruins in her looking glass.
Her shadow cracks her uterus.
She bears herself.
3. Dead World to Which My Hands Are Nailed
This tree root is a sculpture of my hands.
The arch: a crone with atlas stoop:
she carries on her back a child
who gathers weight upon her as she wades.
Ugly with pain, with carrying
a stone child which will not be born,
which threads my womb with needles —
womb
that seals itself, fills up with ice —
I am a tree root stripped by pain,
nailed to an instant where I see
that which I am:
a half thing nude in glass.
The word will not complete itself.
The stream will not be crossed.
These hands
have lost the scent of living things.
Light drips on them like winter,
is nailed down.
4. The Word Is Zero
Light echoes its original
in this, this zero swimming in the light.
The stripped O thins,
an ink stroke on pure water.
Eye dissolves, poor poetry—
defeated in its essences!
The light shifts shadows like a stream
whose shores move while the water is
still constant: sea, light, the
initial phantom.
This root, this scarred omega is
a dead word stripped of leaves, of bark.
The light
that hides us in its mirror is
a window turning on itself.
I, thinned to zero, swim in it
lost in what fills me,
seals my mouth.
My hands shrink, wither,
drop like leaves. My eyes —
are glass.
5. Sisters
We took a rambling forest trail
diverged from its grey ending in the stumps,
and climbed the boulder at the top
of our logged hill.
Summit of sorts, an upthrust from the rock,
keystone to a blue view of peaks,
of snow-capped arch on arch beyond
of cumulus.
Past Lion’s Head and Venus Mount
the thin bark peeling of a moon
against the hummock of the sky
where stars like lichen or like snow
may fall at times, a dandruff on our heads,
or sand, in our glass “snow globe.”
Though our tiny world
may shake and cloud us for a while,
it clears. Its basic shape
is arch, clasped hands, a pelvis:
full of strength.
6. As If a Made Thing Could Have Life
It seems to move
a little, in this light,
as if a made thing could have life.
Nothing is sure. A poem speaks
but with a mouth of weather.
Nothing’s clear.
Nor is this carved shape static.
Where it turns
it turns again.
Its mirror is a window,
a white bridge —
like water lying under land —
an uncompleted sentence. Words
can turn upon themselves.
Where they might fit
the tree root broke the looking glass.
This sentence cracks.
The weather turns upon us, word
upon a plinth of light
imagining completion: its
nailed down.
Its tunes are fixed.
Is made of:
wood, glass, light.
THE WITCH OF THE INNER WOOD
Dedicated to Weller, pure critic
i
I made them out of playdough,
my first forms,
(In the beginning …)
with cooky cutters
shaped like men.
Like small men
with round fingered paws
they pitty-patted round the rim
of the cooky plate
and then fell in.
I stuck them up with flour glue
like shingles:
all those paper-dolls
of bread,
good ginger, cinnamon —
spiced spouses
cooked —
oh, they were cooked —
my first, weak,
crumbling
men.
ii
Each morning when the pallid sun
streaks its alluvial pastimes to the wan
half-glazed reflections of my mind,
I answer it
more strongly
(if more local)
from my den.
iii
This is the fire that paints the mind,
the back wall of my cooky cave
with all that icy frosting:
shapes:
dancers, deer, and huntsmen,
hand silhouettes inked round with smoke,
the crumbs
of feasts imagined,
not partook —
all those dumb pots,
those fallen birds,
those foes,
leaves,
felons,
friends. . . .
iv
I am
witch of this place.
I’ve
(and Her associates …)
two husbands:
My cat,
Yoohoo,
Hey you (he comes) makes love
divinely.
And there’s you,
my granite footing,
rock.
v
Fork over the compost, shredded souls,
half-selves, and paper-partied leaves,
last winter’s dry, diseased cuisine,
the fusty insulation
that my cave
exhales as if an open mouth.
I toss the bedding out of doors
to leach in rainfall,
sunlight,
wind —
I spread it, hay, along the rocks.
I am the yeast that bubbles it;
my spirit
that ferments.
vi
Rampant destruction: gardening
by each sheer footfall violent —
I hew in mud
deep canyons with my pick.
The wet earth clings around me like a child,
a gooey, vital nothingness
cold as the mountain’s
thumb of rock
that pierced the hillside where I stand,
leans towards my valley:
tower
constant,
beacon —
polar point.
I dig my garden round it, all this bush,
this black, wire-tangled, curling scrub
that bristles now with dew-shine —
I will hack
these paths my
roundabouts,
my where.
vii
This lank, knot-armed, close-knuckled tree
stands like a marker in the rain,
like some old map.
I read it in the nodes and scars.
I read it in the crawling birds,
the black tarpaper shanties of its worms:
that which endures its little while,
supports, blooms, and maintains.
I clear its lower branches with my axe.
viii
The nuthatch trickles down its tree
headfirst
like some slow drip
of honey
from my thatch —
No,
like the sap
that springtime oozes from these trees
as if they were much wounded . . . .
Where they bleed
the bright flies gather, eagles at
the glory of, a field,
a brown, abraded cloth,
a tenement —
ix
The neat cat seated on that prong,
dry-shod in white unblemished fur
denotes, pure critic,
where I end,
and I begin:
same place.
x
I am the witch of the inner wood.
I own this. I create it.
(until it lives …)
It is mine —
until it lives,
takes off from me,
flies from my hand —
a fat seed in its bill to perch
beyond me in the cedar,
striped head cocked,
still gawky —
then it flits.
I see it dodging through the trees.
It will come back
for another seed,
perhaps.
The rowan berries gleam.
There are lots of good wild berries here.
Will you come back?
xi
A hundred crows in the sky,
and all saying nothing
much:
the odd caw,
very odd caw.