by May Sarton
There is no grief; too much was taken and given,
More than administrators can discover.
And so you go your ways, and I go mine,
Yours into the world at last, and mine away—
To some adventure on another planet.
Whatever failed or you still hoped to do
Will grow to harvest in some other way,
Not against the stream of a college, but
Toward an ordering of the spirit in pure air
Where no one is bound by custom, or so engined
Toward immediate goals, and trapped by time:
Your poems will happen when no one is there.
And when the angel comes, you will remember
Our fierce encounter, beyond devious ways,
Not at the end of some blank corridor—
Outside all walls, the daring spirit’s wrench
To open up a simple world of praise!
Girl With ’Cello
There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow
To bring into this house her glowing ’cello
As if some silent, magic animal.
She sat, head bent, her long hair all a-spill
Over the breathing wood, and drew the bow.
There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow.
And she drew out that sound so like a wail,
A rich dark suffering joy, as if to show
All that a wrist holds and that fingers know
When they caress a magic animal.
There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow.
An Intruder
The other day a witch came to call.
She brought a basket full of woe and gall
And left it there for me in my front hall.
But it was empty when I found it there
And she herself had gone back to her lair
Leaving the bats of rage to fly my air.
Out of ambivalence this witch was born;
All that she gives is subtly smeared and torn
Or slightly withered by her love and scorn.
The furies sit and watch me as I write;
The bats fly silently about all night
And a black mist obscures the kindest light.
But I shall find the magic note to play,
Or, like a donkey, learn the wild flat bray
That sends all furies howling on their way.
The note is laughter. No witch could withstand
The frightful joke all witches understand
When they are given all that they demand.
The word can neither bless nor curse, of course.
It must bewitch a witch and leave her worse.
Perhaps I’ll call her just a failed old nurse.
Love cannot exorcize the gifts of hate.
Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight,
But laughter we can never over-rate.
The Muse As Medusa
I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone.
I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold.
I was not punished, was not turned to stone—
How to believe the legends I am told?
I came as naked as any little fish,
Prepared to be hooked, gutted, caught;
But I saw you, Medusa, made my wish,
And when I left you I was clothed in thought…
Being allowed, perhaps, to swim my way
Through the great deep and on the rising tide,
Flashing wild streams, as free and rich as they,
Though you had power marshalled on your side.
The fish escaped to many a magic reef;
The fish explored many a dangerous sea—
The fish, Medusa, did not come to grief,
But swims still in a fluid mystery.
Forget the image: your silence is my ocean,
And even now it teems with life. You chose
To abdicate by total lack of motion,
But did it work, for nothing really froze?
It is all fluid still, that world of feeling
Where thoughts, those fishes, silent, feed and rove;
And, fluid, it is also full of healing,
For love is healing, even rootless love.
I turn your face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore—
Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for.
For Rosalind
On Her Seventy-fifth Birthday
Tonight we come to praise
Her splendor, not her years,
Pure form and what it burns—
Who teaches this or learns?—
Intrinsic, beyond tears,
Splendor that has no age.
Take your new-fangled beauties off the stage!
The high poise of the throat
That dazzled every heart—
Who was not young and awed
By beauty so unflawed
It seemed not life, but art?—
Terrible as a swan
Young children, deeply moved, might look upon.
The blazing sapphire eyes—
They looked out from a queen.
Yet there was wildness near;
She glimmered like a deer
No hunter could bring down.
So warm, so wild, so proud,
She moved among us like a light-brimmed cloud.
The way her dresses flowed!
So once in Greece, so once…
Passion and its control.
She drew many a soul
To join her in the dance.
Give homage fierce as rage.
Take your new-fangled beauties off the stage!
The Great Transparencies
Lately I have been thinking much of those,
The open ones, the great transparencies,
Through whom life—is it wind or water?—flows
Unstinted, who have learned the sovereign ease.
They are not young; they are not ever young.
Youth is too vulnerable to bear the tide,
And let it rise, and never hold it back,
Then let it ebb, not suffering from pride,
Nor thinking it must ebb from private lack.
The elders yield because they are so strong—
Seized by the great wind like a ripening field,
All rippled over in a sensuous sweep,
Wave after wave, lifted and glad to yield,
But whether wind or water, never keep
The tide from flowing or hold it back for long.
Lately I have been thinking much of these,
The unafraid although still vulnerable,
Through whom life flows, the great transparencies,
The old and open, brave and beautiful…
They are not young; they are not ever young.
Friendship: The Storms
How much you have endured of storm
Among sweet summer flowers!
The black hail falls so hard to do us harm
In my dark hours.
Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff;
The edge of our awareness is so keen
A word is enough.
Clouds rise up from the blue
And darken the sky,
And we are tossed about from false to true
Not knowing why.
After this violence is over
I turn my life, my art,
Round and around to discover
The fault in my heart—
What breeds this cruel weather,
Why tensions grow;
And when we have achieved so much together,
What breaks the flow.
God help us, friendship is aware
> That where we fail we learn;
Tossed on a temperament, I meet you there
At every turn.
In this kaleidoscope
Of work and complex living,
For years you buttressed and enlivened hope,
Laid balm on grieving.
After the angry cloud has broken
I know what you are—
How love renews itself, spoken, unspoken,
Cool as the morning star.
Evening Walk In France
When twilight comes, before it gets too late,
We swing behind us the heavy iron gate,
And as it clangs shut, stand a moment there
To taste the world, the larger open air,
And walk among the grandeur of the vines,
Those long rows written in imperfect lines,
Low massive trunks that bear the delicate
Insignia of leaves where grapes are set;
And here the sky is a great roofless room
Where late bees and late people wander home,
And here we walk on slowly through the dusk
And watch the long waves of the dark that mask
Black cypresses far off, and gently take
The sumptuous clouds and roofs within their wake,
Until the solid nearer haystacks seem
Like shadows looming ghostly out of dream,
And the stone farm becomes an ancient lair,
Dissolving into dusk—and is not there.
A dog barks, and a single lamp is lit.
We are two silent shadows crossing it.
Under the lamp a woman stands at rest,
Cutting a loaf of bread across her breast.
Dutch Interior
Pieter de Hooch (1629-1682)
I recognize the quiet and the charm,
This safe enclosed room where a woman sews
And life is tempered, orderly, and calm.
Through the Dutch door, half open, sunlight streams
And throws a pale square down on the red tiles.
The cosy black dog suns himself and dreams.
Even the bed is sheltered, it encloses,
A cupboard to keep people safe from harm,
Where copper glows with the warm flush of roses.
The atmosphere is all domestic, human,
Chaos subdued by the sheer power of need.
This is a room where I have lived as woman,
Lived too what the Dutch painter does not tell—
The wild skies overhead, dissolving, breaking,
And how that broken light is never still,
And how the roar of waves is always near,
What bitter tumult, treacherous and cold,
Attacks the solemn charm year after year!
It must be felt as peace won and maintained
Against those terrible antagonists—
How many from this quiet room have drowned?
How many left to go, drunk on the wind,
And take their ships into heartbreaking seas;
How many whom no woman’s peace could bind?
Bent to her sewing, she looks drenched in calm.
Raw grief is disciplined to the fine thread.
But in her heart this woman is the storm;
Alive, deep in herself, holds wind and rain,
Remaking chaos into an intimate order
Where sometimes light flows through a windowpane.
A Vision of Holland
The marriage of this horizontal land
Lying so low, so open and exposed,
Flat as an open palm, and never closed
To restless storm and the relentless wind,
This marriage of low land and towering air—
It took my breath away. I am still crazed
Here a month later, in my uplands, dazed
By so much light, so close to despair.
Infinite vertical! Who climbs to Heaven?
Who can assault the cloud’s shimmering peak?
Here the intangible is the mystique,
No rock to conquer and no magic mountain,
Only the horizontal infinite
Stretched there below to polarize
The rush of height itself, where this land lies
Immense and still, covered by changing light.
Those troubling clouds pour through the mind.
An earthquake of pure atmosphere
Cracks open every elemental fear.
The light is passionate, but not defined.
So we are racked as by a psychic fault,
Stormed and illuminated. “Oh sky, sky,
Earth, earth, and nothing else,” we cry,
Knowing once more how absolutes exalt.
Slowly the eye comes back again to rest
There on a house, canal, cows in a field.
The visionary moment has to yield,
But the defining eye is newly blest.
Come back from that cracked-open psychic place,
It is alive to wonders freshly seen:
After the earthquake, gentle pastures green,
And that great miracle, a human face.
Bears and Waterfalls
Kind kinderpark
For bear buffoons
And fluid graces—
Who dreamed this lark
Of spouts, lagoons,
And huge fur faces?
For bears designed
Small nooks, great crags,
And Gothic mountains?
For bears refined
Delightful snags,
Waterfalls, fountains?
Who had the wit to root
A forked tree where a sack
Of honey plumps on end,
A rich-bottomed fruit
To rouse a hearty whack
From passing friend?
Who ever did imagine
A waterspout as stool,
Or was black bear the wiser
Who sat down on this engine
To keep a vast rump cool,
Then, cooled, set free a geyser?
Who dreamed a great brown queen
Sleeked down in her rough silk
Flirting with her huge lord,
Breast-high in her tureen?—
“Splash me, delightful hulk!”
So happy and absurd.
Bear upside-down, white splendor,
All creamy, foaming fur,
And childhood’s rug come true,
All nonchalance and candor,
Black pads your signature—
Who, above all, dreamed you?
When natural and formal
Are seen to mate so well,
Where bears and fountains play,
Who would return to normal?
Go back to human Hell?
Not I. I mean to stay,
To hold this happy chance
Forever in the mind,
To be where waters fall
And archetypes still dance,
As they were once designed
In Eden for us all.
A Parrot
My parrot is emerald green,
His tail feathers, marine.
He bears an orange half-moon
Over his ivory beak.
He must be believed to be seen,
This bird from a Rousseau wood.
When the urge is on him to speak,
He becomes too true to be good.
He uses his beak like a hook
To lift himself up with or break
Open a sunflower seed,
And his eye, in a bold white ring,
Has a lapidary look.
What a most astonishing bird,
Whose voice when he chooses to sing
Must be believed to be heard.
That stuttered staccato scream
Must be believed not to seem
The shriek of a witch in the room.
But he murmurs some muffled words
(Lik
e someone who talks through a dream)
When he sits in the window and sees
The to-and-fro wings of wild birds
In the leafless improbable trees.
Frogs and Photographers
The temperamental frog,
A loving expert says,
Exhibits stimulation
By rolling of bright eyes
(This is true frog-elation);
But in a different mood
Withdraws under a leaf
Or simulated bog
(This is frog’s sign of grief),
Closes his eyes to brood.
Frogs do not weep, they hide.
The camera makes him cross.
Eyes glaze or tightly close;
His whole expression’s changed.
He will not take a pose,
He has become estranged
Who was so bright and gay—
“Hysterical,” they say,
As subject, total loss—
Burrows himself away,
Will not rise to a fly:
The frog is camera-shy.
A form of lunacy?
But whose face does not freeze,
Eyes shut or wildly blink?
Who does not sometimes sneeze
Just at the camera’s wink?
Withdraw to worlds inside?
Invent himself a bog?
And more neurotic we
Than the spontaneous frog,
Sometimes cannot decide
Whether to weep or hide.
Eine Kleine Snailmusik
“THE SNAIL WATCHERS ARE interested in snails from all angles… At the moment they are investigating the snail’s reaction to music. ‘We have played to them on the harp in the garden and in the country on the pipe,’ said Mr. Heaton, ‘and we have taken them into the house and played to them on the piano.’ ”
—The London Star
What soothes the angry snail?
What’s music to his horn?
For the “Sonata Appassionata,”
He shows scorn,
And Handel
Makes the frail snail
Quail,
While Prokofieff
Gets no laugh,
And Tchaikovsky, I fear,
No tear.
Piano, pipe, and harp,
Dulcet or shrill,
Flat or sharp,
Indoors or in the garden,
Are willy-nilly
Silly
To the reserved, slow,
Sensitive
Snail,
Who prefers to live
Glissandissimo,
Pianissimo.
The Fig
