I remember the way she looked as she stood there,
that look on her face.
—27 March 1985
—Such a hustle of blue skies from the west,
the pre-Columbian clouds
Brooding and looking straight down,
The white plumes of the crab-apple tree
Plunging and streaming in their invisible headgear.
April plugs in the rosebud
and its Tiffany limbs.
This earth is a plenitude, but it all twists into the dark,
The not no image can cut
Or color replenish.
Not red, not yellow, not blue.
—9 April 1985
—Draining the Great Valley of Southwest Virginia
and Upper East Tennessee,
The Holston River cuts through the water gaps and the wind gaps
In the Stone Mountains and Iron Mountains
Northeast-southwest,
a trellis pattern of feeder streams
Like a grid from Saltville in the north
To Morristown and Jefferson City in the south
Overlaying the uplifts and folds
and crystalline highlands
That define and channel the main valley,
Clinch Mountain forming a western wall,
The Great Smokies and the Unakas dominant in the south.
In 1779 it took John Donelson from December till March
To go from Kingsport to Knoxville on it
By flatboat, a distance nowadays of two hours by car.
All of my childhood was spent on rivers,
The Tennessee and Hiwassee, the Little Pigeon,
The Watauga and Holston.
There’s something about a river
No ocean can answer to:
Leonardo da Vinci,
in one of his notebooks,
Says that the water you touch is the last of what has passed by
And the first of what’s to come.
The Cherokee called it Hogoheegee,
the Holston,
From its source in Virginia down to the mouth of the French
Broad.
Donelson’s flotilla to Middle Tennessee
From Fort Patrick Henry
—one of the singular achievements
In opening the West—
Began from the Long Island of the Holston, across
The river and upwind of the fort.
It took them four months, down the Holston and Tennessee,
Up the Ohio and Cumberland,
to reach Nashville,
The Big Salt Lick, and the log cabins of settlement.
Intended by God’s Permission, his journal said,
Through Indian ambush, death by drowning, death by fire,
Privation and frostbite,
their clothes much cut by bullets,
Over the thirty miles of Muscle Shoals,
Loss of the pox-carrying boat and its twenty-eight people
Which followed behind in quarantine and was cut off,
Intercepted, and all its occupants
butchered or taken prisoner
Their cries distinctly heard by those boats in the rear,
Passage beyond the Whirl,
the suckpool by Cumberland Mountain,
Slaughter of swans, slaughter of buffalo,
Intended by God’s Permission …
Imagine them standing there
in full headdress and harness
Having to give it all up,
another agreement in blackface,
This one the Long Island of the Holston Peace Treaty,
Ending, the first time, the Cherokee Nation.
Imagine them standing very still,
Protecting their families, hoping to hang on to their one life.
Imagine the way they must have felt
agreeing to give away
What wasn’t assignable,
The ground that everyone walked on,
all the magic of water,
Wind in the trees, sunlight, all the magic of water.
—16 April 1985
—April, and mirror-slide of the fatal quiet,
Butterflies in a dark confusion over the flower’s clenched cheeks,
The smell of chlorophyll
climbing like desperation across my skin:
The maple is flocked, and the sky is choked with cloud tufts
That print a black alphabet
along the hillsides and short lawns,
Block gutturals and half thoughts
Against the oily valves opening and closing in the leaves,
Edgy, autumnal morning,
April, stretched out at ease above the garden,
that rises and bows
To whatever it fancies:
Precious stones, the wind’s cloth, Prester John or the boy-king of
Babylon,
April,
dank, unseasonable winter of the dead.
—27 April 1985
—Visiting Emily Dickinson
We stood in the cupola for a while,
JT, Joe Langland and I,
And then they left and I sat
Where she’d sat, and looked through the oak tree toward the hat
factory
And down to the river, the railroad
Still there, the streets where the caissons growled
with their blue meat
Still there, and Austin and Sue’s still there
Next door on the other side.
And the train station at the top of the hill.
And I sat there and I sat there
A decade or so ago
One afternoon toward the end of winter, the oak tree
Floating its ganglia like a dark cloud
outside the window.
Or like a medusa hung up to dry.
And nothing came up through my feet like electric fire.
And no one appeared in a white dress
with white flowers
Clutched in her white, tiny hands:
No voice from nowhere said anything
about living and dying in 1862.
But I liked it there. I liked
The way sunlight lay like a shirtwaist over the window seat.
I liked the view down to the garden.
I liked the boxwood and evergreens
And the wren-like, sherry-eyed figure
I kept thinking I saw there
as the skies started to blossom
And a noiseless noise began to come from the orchard—
And I sat very still, and listened hard
And thought I heard it again.
And then there was nothing, nothing at all,
The slick bodice of sunlight
smoothed out on the floorboards,
The crystal I’d turned inside of
Dissembling to shine and a glaze somewhere near the window
panes,
Voices starting to drift up from downstairs,
somebody calling my name …
—6 May 1985
—Ficino tells us the Absolute
Wakens the drowsy, lights the obscure,
revives the dead,
Gives form to the formless and finishes the incomplete.
What better good can be spoken of?
—9 May 1985
—In the first inch of afternoon, under the peach trees,
The constellations of sunlight
Sifting along their courses among the posed limbs,
It’s hard to imagine the north wind
wishing us ill,
Revealing nothing at all and wishing us ill
In God’s third face.
The world is an ampersand,
And I lie in sweet clover,
bees like golden earrings
Dangling and locked fast to its white heads,
Watching the clouds move and the constellations of light move
Through the trees, as they both will
When the wind weathers them on their way,
When the wind weathers them to that point
where all things meet.
—15 May 1985
—For two months I’ve wanted to write about Edgar Allan Poe
Who lived for a year where I live now
In 1826,
the year that Mr. Jefferson died.
He lived, appropriately enough, at 13 West Range:
One room with a fireplace and bed,
one table and candlestick,
A small trunk and a washstand.
There’s a top hat and a black hat box on the trunk lid.
There’s a gray cape on the clothes rack
and a bowl of mold-haired fruit
On the washstand.
There’s a mirror and cane-back chair.
Over the door, in Latin, are bronze words
About the Magni Poetae which I don’t believe
Any more now than I used to before I lived here.
Still, there’s something about the place
that draws me
A couple of times a week
To peer through the slab-glass door,
To knock twice with my left hand on the left doorjamb
Each time I go there,
hoping to call the spirits up
Or just to say hello.
He died in fear and away from home.
I went to his grave once in Baltimore,
a young lieutenant
Intent on intensity.
I can’t remember what I thought it meant to me then,
But can remember going back to the BOQ
To sit up most of the night
drinking red wine and reading a book of poems.
Here in Virginia when I visit his room and knock
Twice on the doorjamb, and look at the rump-sprung mattress,
The spirits come and my skin sings.
I still don’t know why
but I think it’s all right, and I like it.
—23 May 1985
—Horn music starts up and stutters uncertainly
out of the brown house
Across the street: a solo,
A duet, then three of them all at once, then silence,
Then up and back down the scale.
Sunday, the ninth of June, the morning
Still dull-eyed in its green kimono,
the loose, blown sleeves
Moving complacently in the wind.
Now there are two, then all three again
weaving a blurred, harmonic line
Through the oak trees and the dogwood
As the wind blows and the sheer nightgown of daylight glints.
Where was it I heard before
Those same runs and half-riffs
turned through a summer morning,
Come from one of the pastel buildings
Outside the window I sat in front of looking down
As I tried to practice my own scales
of invisible music
I thought I heard for hours on a yellow legal pad?
Verona, I think, the stiff French horn
Each weekend echoing my own false notes
and scrambled lines
I tried to use as decoys to coax the real things down
Out of the air they hid in and out of the pencils they hid in …
Silence again. For good, now,
I suspect, until next week,
arduous harmony,
Unalterable music our lives are measured by.
What will become of us, the Italian French hom player,
These players, me, all of us
trying to imitate
What we can’t see and what we can’t hear?
Nothing spectacular, I would guess, a life
Scored more or less by others,
smorzando here, andante there:
Only the music will stay untouched,
Moving as certainly as the wind moves,
invisible in the trees.
—12 June 1985
—North wind flows from the mountain like water,
a clear constancy
Runneling through the grapevines,
Slipping and eddying over the furrows the grasses make
Between the heaves and slackening of the vine rows,
Easing and lengthening over the trees,
then smooth, flat
And without sound onto the plain below.
It parts the lizard-colored beech leaves,
Nudges and slithers around
the winter-killed cypress
Which stand like odd animals,
Brown-furred and hung from the sky,
backwashes against the hillsides
And nibbles my cheeks and hands
Where I stand on the balcony letting it scour me.
Lamentation of finches,
harangue of the sparrow,
Nothing else moves but wind in the dog-sleep of late afternoon …
Inside the self is another self like a black hole
Constantly dying, pulling parts of our lives
Always into its fluttery light,
anxious as Augustine
For redemption and explanation:
No birds hang in its painted and polished skies, no trees
Mark and exclaim its hill lines,
no grass moves, no water:
Like souls looking for bodies after some Last Judgment,
Forgotten incidents rise
from under the stone slabs
Into its waxed air;
Grief sits like a toad with its cheeks puffed,
Immovable, motionless, its tongue like a trick whip
Picking our sorrows off, our days and our happiness;
Despair, with its three mouths full,
Dangles our good occasions, such as they are, in its gray hands,
Feeding them in,
medieval and naked in their ecstasy;
And Death, a tiny o of blackness,
Waits like an eye for us to fall through its retina,
A minor irritation,
so it can blink us back.
Nothing’s so beautiful as the memory of it
Gathering light as glass does,
As glass does when the sundown is on it
and darkness is still a thousand miles away.
Last night, in the second yard, salmon-smoke in the west
Back-vaulting the bats
who plunged and swooped like wrong angels
Hooking their slipped souls in the twilight,
The quattrocento landscape
turning to air beneath my feet,
I sat on the stone wall as the white shirts of my son and friend
Moved through the upper yard like candles
Among the fruit trees,
and the high voices of children
Sifted like mist from the road below
In a game I’d never played,
and knew that everything was a shining,
That whatever I could see was filled with the drained light
Lapping away from me quietly,
Disappearing between the vine rows,
creeping back through the hills,
That anything I could feel,
anything I could put my hand on—
The damasked mimosa leaf,
The stone ball on the gate post, the snail shell in its still turning—
Would burst into brilliance at my touch.
But I sat still, and I touched nothing,
afraid that something might change
And change me beyond my knowing,
That everything I had hoped for, all I had ever wanted,
Might actually happen.
So I sat still and touched nothing.
6:30, summer evening, the swallow’s hour
Over the vine rows:
arrowing down the valley, banking back
And sliding against the wind, they feint
&
nbsp; And rise, invisible sustenance disappearing
Out of the air:
in the long, dark beams of the farmhouse,
The termites and rhinocerous beetles bore in their slow lines
Under another sky:
everything eats or is eaten.
I find myself in my own image, and am neither and both.
I come and go in myself
as though from room to room,
As though the smooth incarnation of some medieval spirit
Escaping my own mouth and reswallowed at leisure,
Dissembling and at my ease.
The dove drones on the hillside,
hidden inside the dead pine tree.
The wasp drills through the air.
I am neither, I am both.
Inside the turtle dove is the turtle dove,
a serious moan.
Inside the wasp we don’t know, and a single drop of poison.
—This part of the farmhouse was built in the fourteenth century.
Huge chains hold the central beam
and the wall together.
It creaks like a ship when the walls shift in the afternoon wind.
Who is it here in the night garden,
gown a transparent rose
Down to his ankles, great sleeves
Spreading the darkness around him wherever he steps,
Laurel corona encircling his red transparent headcap,
Pointing toward the Madonna?
Who else could it be,
voice like a slow rip through silk cloth
In disapproval? Brother, he says, pointing insistently,
A sound of voices starting to turn in the wind and then disappear
as though
Orbiting us, Brother, remember the way it was
In my time: nothing has changed:
Penitents terrace the mountainside, the stars hang in their bright
courses
And darkness is still the dark:
concentrate, listen hard,
Look to the nature of all things,
And vanished into the oncoming disappearing
Zone Journals Page 4
