The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

as you trouble my silence. I am a shelter of lies

  Should I learn to speak again, or hopeless in

  such sanity will I touch some face I recognize?

  Down the hall the baskets start back. My arms

  fit you like a sleeve, they hold

  catkins of your willows, the wild bee farms

  of your nerves, each muscle and fold

  of your first days. Your old man’s face disarms

  the nurses. But the doctors return to scold

  me. I speak. It is you my silence harms.

  I should have known; I should have told

  them something to write down. My voice alarms

  my throat. ‘Name of father-none.’ I hold

  you and name you bastard in my arms.

  And now that’s that. There is nothing more

  that I can say or lose.

  Others have traded life before

  and could not speak. I tighten to refuse

  your owling eyes, my fragile visitor.

  I touch your cheeks, like flowers. You bruise

  against me. We unlearn. I am a shore

  rocking you off. You break from me. I choose

  your only way, my small inheritor

  and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose.

  Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.

  All My Pretty Ones

  All my pretty ones?

  Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?

  What! all my pretty chickens and their dam

  At one fell swoop?…

  I cannot but remember such things were,

  That were most precious to me.

  –Macbeth

  Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart

  where you followed our mother to her cold slumber,

  a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,

  leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber

  you from the residence you could not afford:

  a gold key, your half of a woollen mill,

  twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,

  the love and legal verbiage of another will,

  boxes of pictures of people I do not know.

  I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

  But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,

  hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

  waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come …

  for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy

  or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.

  Is this your father’s father, this commodore

  in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile

  has made it unimportant who you are looking for.

  I’ll never know what these faces are all about.

  I lock them into their book and throw them out.

  This is the yellow scrapbook that you began

  the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly

  as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran

  the Democrats, wriggling his dry finger at me

  and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went

  down and recent years where you went flush

  on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant

  to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.

  But before you had that second chance, I cried

  on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.

  These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.

  Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;

  here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,

  here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

  here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,

  running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;

  here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;

  and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.

  Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,

  my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

  I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept

  for three years, telling all she does not say

  of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,

  she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day

  with your blood, will I drink down your glass

  of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years

  goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.

  Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.

  Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,

  bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

  Edward Dorn 1929–1999

  From Slinger, Book 1

  The curtain might rise anywhere on a single speaker.

  I met in Mesilla

  The Cautious Gunslinger

  of impeccable personal smoothness

  and slender leather encased hands

  folded casually

  to make his knock.

  He would show you his map.

  There is your domain.

  Is it the domicile it looks to be

  or simply a retinal block

  of seats in,

  he will flip the phrase

  the theater of impatience.

  If it is where you are,

  the footstep in the flat above

  in a foreign land

  or any shimmer the city

  sends you

  the prompt sounds

  of a metropolitan nearness

  he will unroll the map of locations.

  His knock resounds

  inside its own smile, where?

  I ask him is my heart.

  Not this pump he answers

  artificial already and bound

  touching me

  with his leathern finger

  as the Queen of Hearts burns

  from his gauntlet into my eyes.

  Flageolets of fire

  he says there will be.

  This is for your sadly missing heart

  the girl you left

  in Juarez, the blank

  political days press her now

  in the narrow adobe

  confines of the river town

  her dress is torn

  by the misadventure of

  her gothic search

  The mission bells are ringing

  in Kansas.

  Have you left something out:

  Negative, says my Gunslinger,

  no thing is omitted.

  Time is more fundamental than space.

  It is, indeed, the most pervasive

  of all the categories

  in other words

  theres plenty of it.

  And it stretches things themselves

  until they blend into one,

  so if youve seen one thing

  youve seen them all.

  I held the reins of his horse

  while he went into the desert

  to pee. Yes, he reflected

  when he returned, that’s less.

  How long, he asked

  have you been in this territory.

  Years I said. Years.

  Then you will know where we can have

  a cold drink before sunset and then a bed

  will be my desire

  if you can find one for me

  I have no wish to continue

  my debate with men,

  my mare lathers with tedium

  her hooves are dry

  Look they are covered with the alkali

  of the enormous space

  between here and formerly.

  Need I repeat, we have come

  without sleep from Nuevo Laredo.

  And why do you have such a horse

  Gunslinger? I asked. Don’t move

  he replied

  the sun rests deliberately

  on the rim of the sierra.

  And where will you now I asked.

  Five days northeast of here

  dependi
ng of course on whether one’s horse

  is of iron or flesh

  there is a city called Boston

  and in that city there is a hotel

  whose second floor has been let

  to an inscrutable Texan named Hughes

  Howard? I asked

  The very same.

  And what do vou mean by inscrutable,

  oh Gunslinger?

  I mean to say that He

  has not been seen since 1833.

  But when you have found him my Gunslinger

  what will you do, oh what will you do?

  You would not know

  that the souls of old Texans

  are in jeopardy in a way not common

  to other men, my singular friend.

  You would not know

  of the long plains night

  where they carry on

  and arrange their genetic duels

  with men of other states –

  so there is a longhorn bull half mad

  half deity

  who awaits an account from me

  back of the sun you nearly disturbed

  just then.

  Lets have that drink …

  Adrienne Rich 1929–

  Diving into the Wreck

  First having read the book of myths,

  and loaded the camera,

  and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

  I put on

  the body-armor of black rubber

  the absurd flippers

  the grave and awkward mask.

  I am having to do this

  not like Cousteau with his

  assiduous team

  aboard the sun-flooded schooner

  but here alone.

  There is a ladder.

  The ladder is always there

  hanging innocently

  close to the side of the schooner.

  We know what it is for,

  we who have used it.

  Otherwise

  it’s a piece of maritime floss

  some sundry equipment.

  I go down.

  Rung after rung and still

  the oxygen immerses me

  the blue light

  the clear atoms

  of our human air.

  I go down.

  My flippers cripple me,

  I crawl like an insect down the ladder

  and there is no one

  to tell me when the ocean

  will begin.

  First the air is blue and then

  it is bluer and then green and then

  black I am blacking out and yet

  my mask is powerful

  it pumps my blood with power

  the sea is another story

  the sea is not a question of power

  I have to learn alone

  to turn my body without force

  in the deep element.

  And now: it is easy to forget

  what I came for

  among so many who have always

  lived here

  swaying their crenellated fans

  between the reefs

  and besides

  you breathe differently down here.

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  I came to see the damage that was done

  and the treasures that prevail.

  I stroke the beam of my lamp

  slowly along the flank

  of something more permanent

  than fish or weed

  the thing I came for:

  the wreck and not the story of the wreck

  the thing itself and not the myth

  the drowned face always staring

  toward the sun

  the evidence of damage

  worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

  the ribs of the disaster

  curving their assertion

  among the tentative haunters.

  This is the place.

  And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

  streams black, the merman in his armored body

  We circle silently

  about the wreck

  we dive into the hold.

  I am she: I am he

  whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

  whose breasts still bear the stress

  whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

  obscurely inside barrels

  half-wedged and left to rot

  we are the half-destroyed instruments

  that once held to a course

  the water-eaten log

  the fouled compass

  We are, I am, you are

  by cowardice or courage

  the one who find our way

  back to this scene

  carrying a knife, a camera

  a book of myths

  in which

  our names do not appear.

  Rape

  There is a cop who is both prowler and father:

  he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,

  had certain ideals.

  You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,

  on horseback, one hand touching his gun.

  You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:

  he has access to machinery that could kill you.

  He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,

  his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud

  from between his unsmiling lips.

  And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,

  the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,

  your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess

  to him, you are guilty of the crime

  of having been forced.

  And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family

  whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,

  his hand types out the details

  and he wants them all

  but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.

  You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:

  he has taken down your worst moment

  on a machine and filed it in a file.

  He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;

  he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.

  He has access to machinery that could get you put away;

  and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

  and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

  your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,

  will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

  Toward the Solstice

  The thirtieth of November.

  Snow is starting to fall.

  A peculiar silence is spreading

  over the fields, the maple grove.

  It is the thirtieth of May,

  rain pours on ancient bushes, runs

  down the youngest blade of grass.

  I am trying to hold in one steady glance

  all the parts of my life.

  A spring torrent races

  on this old slanting roof,

  the slanted field below

  thickens with winter’s first whiteness.

  Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind

  stand nakedly in the green,

  stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,

  field.

  My brain glows

  more violently, more avidly

  the quieter, the thicker

  the quilt of crystals settles,

  the louder, more relentlessly

  the torrent beats itself out

  on the old boards and shingles.

  It is the thirtieth of May,

  the thirtieth of November,

  a beginning or an end,

  we are moving into the solstice

  and there is so much here


  I still do not understand.

  If I could make sense of how

  my life is still tangled

  with dead weeds, thistles,

  enormous burdocks, burdens

  slowly shifting under

  this first fall of snow,

  beaten by this early, racking rain

  calling all new life to declare itself strong

  or die,

  if I could know

  in what language to address

  the spirits that claim a place

  beneath these low and simple ceilings,

  tenants that neither speak nor stir

  yet dwell in mute insistence

  till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.

  If history is a spider-thread

  spun over and over though brushed away

  it seems I might some twilight

  or dawn in the hushed country light

  discern its greyness stretching

  from molding or doorframe, out

  into the empty dooryard

  and following it climb

  the path into the pinewoods,

  tracing from tree to tree

  in the failing light, in the slowly

  lucidifying day

  its constant, purposive trail,

  till I reach whatever cellar hole

  filling with snowflakes or lichen,

  whatever fallen shack

  or unremembered clearing

  I am meant to have found

  and there, under the first or last

  star, trusting to instinct

  the words would come to mind

  I have failed or forgotten to say

  year after year, winter

  after summer, the right rune

  to ease the hold of the past

  upon the rest of my life

  and ease my hold on the past.

  If some rite of separation

  is still unaccomplished

  between myself and the long-gone

  tenants of this house,

  between myself and my childhood,

  and the childhood of my children,

  it is I who have neglected

  to perform the needed acts,

  set water in corners, light and eucalyptus

  in front of mirrors,

  or merely pause and listen

  to my own pulse vibrating

  lightly as falling snow,

  relentlessly as the rainstorm,

  and hear what it has been saying.

  It seems I am still waiting

  for them to make some clear demand

  some articulate sound or gesture,

  for release to come from anywhere

  but from inside myself.

  A decade of cutting away

  dead flesh, cauterizing

  old scars ripped open over and over

  and still it is not enough.

  A decade of performing

  the loving humdrum acts

  of attention to this house

  transplanting lilac suckers,

  washing panes, scrubbing