The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.
The color of redhaws when the last driving rain of October sprays their gypsy crimson against the khaki brown of the blown leaves, the ankle-deep leaves—
If I should be sent to jail I would write of these things, lover of mine.
If I live to a majestic old age becoming the owner of a farm I shall sit under apple trees in the summer and on a pad of paper with a large yellow lead pencil, I shall write of these things, lover of mine.
The Gong of Time
Time says hush.
By the gong of time you live.
Listen and you hear time saying you were silent
long before you came to life and you will
again be silent long after you leave it,
why not be a little silent now?
Hush yourself, noisy little man.
Time hushes all.
The gong of time rang for you to come out of a
hush and you were born.
The gong of time will ring for you to go back to
the same hush you came from.
Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those
who say little and try to say it well, and
those who babble and prattle their lives away,
Time hushes all.
Prairie Woodland
Yellow leaves speak early November’s heart on the river.
Winding in prairie woodland the curves of the water course are a young woman’s breasts.
Flutter and flutter go the spear shapes—it is a rust and a saffron always dropping hour on hour.
Sunny and winey the filtering shine of air passes the drivers, cornhuskers, farmers, children in the fields.
Red jags of sumach and slashes of shag-bark hickory are a crimson and gray cramming pictures on the river glass.
Out of their tubes of May and June they squeeze great changing dabs of earth love, wind passion.
Now it is a sorrel horse neck, now a slow fire of Warsaw, anything you wish for—here in the moving leaves and slow waters.
Five o’clock and a lemon sky—long tubes spread lemon miles and miles—submarines, dreadnaughts, coal-boats, flotillas of destroyers cross the lemon sea bringing darkness, night.
Shadows Fall Blue on the Mountains
Shadows fall blue on the mountains.
Mountains fall gray to the rivers.
Rivers fall winding to the sea.
Oldest of all the blue creep,
the gray crawl of the sea
And only shadows falling older than the sea.
***
***
Can you begin to own
both yourself and your shadow?
Can you measure
moments in the sun
when your shadow lays down your shape?
Does your shadow speak to you
or is it you telling your shadow
what to be telling you?
Can a man listen to his shadow
hoping it tells him where to go,
what to do when he gets there?
Has ever been a man praying,
“Make me into a thin
goblet of glass, oh Lord.
I fear what my shadow tells me”?
What has happened
when you forget and the sun forgets
to lay down your old companion,
your lifelong shadow?
***
***
Now the shadow of Shakespeare—
what did he say to it?
what did he leave unsaid?
and how well did he know he left
millions of shadow soliloquies unspoken?
When Napoleon saw his shadow
could it be he lacked for words
and often beyond his own
saw shadows fateful as his own?
***
***
Shadows lighter than any mist
fall on the sea’s blue creep,
on the sea’s gray crawl.
Fateful high over
swings the sun
swings the High Witness
of shadows.
Quotations
Said the panama hat to the fedora:
“Sins have different prices in hell.”
Said the fedora hat to the panama:
“Yeah, nickel and dime sins, silver-dollar sins,
sins setting you back a century, a grand,
sins you can’t settle under a million bucks,
tin and aluminum sins, brass sins, copper, old gold,
pint and bushel sins, inch and mile sins,
calculated little teapot sins and roaring tornadoes.”
Skyscrapers Stand Proud
The skyscrapers stand proud.
They seem to say they have
sought the absolute
and made it their own.
Yet they are blameless, innocent
as dumb steel and the dumber
concrete of their bastions.
“Man made us,” they murmur. “We are
proud only as man is proud and we
have no more found the absolute
than has man.”
Pool of Bethesda
A man came to the pool of Bethesda
and sat down for his thoughts.
The light of the sun ran through the line
of the water and struck where the moss on
a stone was green—
The green of the moss wove into the sun silver
and the silent brackets of seven prisms added
to the pool of Bethesda—
Thus a man sat long with a pool and its prisms.
***
First Sonata for Karlen Paula
At an autumn evening bonfire
came rose-candle co-ordinations.
Burning and burnt
came a slow song of fire leaves.
The summer brought
valley breaths of spun moonmist.
Can there be keys
commanding the locks of constellations,
letting loose white spokes of light,
blue waves of flame?
***
***
Make like before, sweet child.
Be you like five new oranges in a wicker basket.
Step out like
a summer evening fireworks over black waters.
Be dizzy in a haze of yellow silk bandannas.
Then in a change of costume
sit silent in a chair of tarnished bronze
Having spoken with a grave mouth:
“Now I will be
a clavichord melody
in October brown.
You will see me in
deep-sea contemplation
on a yellow horse in a white wind.”
***
***
Her room had a number.
Likewise she had a number.
They heard her saying:
“Who is more numbers than I am?
Which of you on a golden morning
has sent a silver bullet
into a crimson target?”
***
***
Daybreak creeps
in a first thin shimmering.
Neither is the day come
nor the night gone.
***
***
Be shabbawobba now
before this pool of day to come.
Speak and be still.
Listen and be still.
A ring of topaz floats in rose-light.
Handles of moongold go in a hush.
The pool welcomes a pair of orange slippers,
the gauze of them winking out and coming back.
Come passwords, come numerals,
come changing altar lights.
Fingers, be cool, strum only half-heard chords.
Let your words be softer than
a slow south wind blo
wing thistledown.
Thou Art Like a Flower
“Thou art like a flower,”
Ran an old song line.
What flower did he mean?
She might have been a quiet blue flower.
She wore crimson carnations perhaps.
She may have planted tall sunflowers
Stooping with hollyhocks around a kitchen doorstep.
They may have picked bluebells together
Or talked about wild arbutus they found.
Perhaps she knew what he meant by telling her:
“Thou art like a flower.”
Solo for Saturday Night Guitar
Time was. Time is. Time shall be.
Man invented time to be used.
Love was. Love is. Love shall be.
Yet man never invented love
Nor is love to be used like time.
A clock wears numbers one to twelve
And you look and read its face
And tell the time pre-cise-ly ex-act-ly.
Yet who reads the face of love?
Who tells love numbers pre-cisely ex-act-ly?
Holding love in a tight hold for keeps.
Fastening love down and saying
“It’s here now and here for always.”
You don’t do this offhand, careless-like.
Love costs. Love is not so easy
Nor is the shimmering of star dust
Nor the smooth flow of new blossoms
Nor the drag of a heavy hungering for someone,
Love is a white horse you ride
or wheels and hammers leaving you lonely
or a rock in the moonlight for rest
or a sea where phantom ships cross always
or a tall shadow always whispering
or a circle of spray and prisms—
maybe a rainbow round your shoulder.
Heavy heavy is love to carry
and light as one rose petal,
light as a bubble, a blossom,
a remembering bar of music
or a finger or a wisp of hair
never forgotten.
Rose Bawn
She believed herself to have gone through tall gateways and to have marched triumphant across fire and thorn. She sat in front of a county building, under a mulberry, and once she mumbled to an invisible Irish sweetheart, “All the knocking of the tumblers of the sea is in my knee bones.”
When the chariots of thunder drove and rolled overhead, she mumbled, “When the water comes through the sieve of the sky, that makes the rain—God does it easy—God does all things easy.”
Memories swept over her like a strong wind on dark waters. She half-whispered, “When the moongold came on the water afterward it was too much money—too much by far—more than we wanted.”
Speech
There was
what we call “words,”
a lot of language,
syllables,
each syllable made of air.
Then there was
s i l e n c e ,
no talk at all,
no more syllables
shaped by living tongues
out of wandering air.
Thus all tongues
slowly talk themselves
into s i l e n c e .
Runaway Colors
The smoke of these landscapes has gone God knows
where.
The sun touches them off with shot gold of an evening,
with a mother’s grey eyes singing to her children.
The blue smudge on a haystack a mile off is gone God
knows where.
The yellow dust of a sheet over Emil Hawkinson’s
cornfield,
The ribbons of red picked at by the high-flying
hard-crying crows,
These too are in the pits of the west God knows where.
Out of the Rainbow End
For Edward Steichen
A delphinium flings a shadow
with a rooted stalk—
a personal shadow.
Each silhouette documents
designs and dooms woven
between shape and shadowshape.
You may add two delphiniums
with seeds lighted in soil
with stalks prepared in loam
toward the upheave into bloom
when stalk and leaves find a path
hold a rocketform of blue
hold it in a velvet stillstand.
In a summer daybreak rain
a huddle of delphiniums
across spikes of fogblue leaves
out of little mistblue cups
trade meditations on being
shapes and shadowshapes.
Cups and bells nod in the sun,
in the fine dust of the wind:
one newborn delphinium laughing
at the long scroll of marriages
whereby she is the latest child
bringing to the bright air her shape,
to the dark earth her shadow.
Shaded out of seven prisms
in choices by living fingers
out of the rainbow end?
Yes and the winds
of many evenings came:
dawns drew in with dew and mist
and the bells of many rains rang.
Soft and lovely
these transients go yet stay
Even their violence goes in velvet.
Sun Dancer
Spider, you have long silver legs.
You may spin diagrams of doom.
Your patterns may throw fine glints
Festooned from wandering silk.
It may be neither art nor money
Nor calisthenics nor engineering.
No man trusts any woman and vice versa.
All men love all women and vice versa.
And all friends cherish each other.
And there are triflers who flirt with death.
Spider, you have long silver legs.
Themes in Contrast
A blue shot dawn,
A white shot dawn,
And she went out.
Into the dawn water
Until the dawn water
Came over her head.
And she came back
Out of the water
Into a blue shot dawn,
Into a white shot dawn.
***
***
The trucks and the cavalry came,
The shoes and the wheels, the tarpaulins
dripping.
And the shadows of the grain elevators
In the hump of the blown white moon,
And the breathing of the tugs and barges
In the change of the fog river gray—
These all crossed over; the day after they
stood up; the day after was something
else again.
Two Fish
when the two fish spoke
their speech was scarlet
they met in a bowl
of molten gold air
they swung in an arch
of seven rainbow sheens
they swam in a grotto
one of a thousand grottoes
they shook their fins
in a green feather dust
Smoke Shapes
Egg Faces
Lights of egg faces, lights of monkey skulls,
meet each other, meet yourselves.
Lights of the morning sun warming the night-
wet wood, fires of far-back mornings fixing
your caldrons cooling to firestone,
meet each other, meet yourselves.
Honey and Salt Page 5
