Sheet white egg faces, strong and sad gorilla
mugs, meet yourselves, meet each other.
Long Heads
Sleep, long-face of the long-head family.
Go back to the inside of the ten thousandth
mountain you came from.
Out of sleep you came; back to sleep you go.
Eyes out of morning twilights, how now it is easy
to join up with evening twilights.
Nose cut from the spear handle of a morning star
finding its mirror-slant in a mountain rock nose,
how now it is easy to sit next and alongside an
evening star spear handle.
Yearn, too; you might as well yearn; yearners or
not, out of sleep, back to sleep; this is put on
the mouth.
Sleep, long-face, back now to the inside of the
ten thousandth mountain.
Three Shrines
Three shrines a woman has for a man.
She loves him for what he is out in the world.
She loves him for what he seems to her of which
the world knows nothing.
She loves him for the touch of his personal
magnets.
Thus we might frame these three declarations and
listen to bystanders:
Is that so?
Who told you—a little bird?
What are these personal magnets?
What is a shrine?
You mean she never opened
a barrel of snakes for him?
Variations on a Theme
She was given crystal flesh for a home.
And her windows were tremulous to visions.
Love me, love me, was her often cry.
She put lover higher than all else.
She carried series of love-birds and gave away.
***
***
Pour love deep into me.
Thus ran her cry.
Let me have all love.
She murmured this want.
Love may be toil, waste, death
Yet come pour love deep into me.
Thus her years ran to one theme.
Timesweep
I was born in the morning of the world,
So I know how morning looks,
morning in the valley wanting,
morning on a mountain wanting.
Morning looks like people look,
like a cornfield wanting corn,
like a sea wanting ships.
Tell me about any strong beautiful wanting
And there is your morning, my morning,
everybody’s morning.
Makers and givers may be moon shaken,
may be star lost,
Knowing themselves as sea-deep seekers,
both seeking and sought,
Knowing love is a ring and the ring endless,
Seeing love as a wheel and the wheel endless.
Love may be a hard flesh crying its want.
Love may be a thin horizon air,
thinner than snowwhite wool finespun,
finer than any faint blue mist
blown away and gone on yesterday’s wind.
There are hungers
for a nameless bread
out of the dust
of the hard earth,
out of the blaze
of the calm sun.
Blow now, winds, you so old at blowing.
Oat at the river, pine at the rocks,
brandish your arms
Slow to a whisper wind, fast to a storm howl.
***
***
The wind carves sand into shapes,
Endless the fresh designs,
Wind and ice patient beyond telling.
Ice can tip mountains over,
Ice the giant beyond measure.
And the sun governs valley lights,
Transforms hats into shoes and back again
Before we are through any long looking.
***
***
The pink nipples of the earth in springtime,
The long black eyelashes of summer’s look,
The harvest laughter of tawny autumn,
The winter silence of land in snow covers,
Each speaks its own oaths of the cool and the flame
of naked possessions clothed and come naked again:
The sea knows it all.
They all crept out of the sea.
***
***
These wheels within wheels
These leaves folded in leaves
These wheeling winds
and winding leaves
Those sprockets
from those seeds
This spiral shooting
from that rainfall—
What does a turning earth
say to its axis?
How should a melon say thanks
Or a squash utter blessings?
***
***
In the heave of the hankering sea
God put precisions of music and accord
to be heard in the deepest seabells
amid the farthest violet spawn
moving in seagreen doom and skyblue promise.
The sea shares its tokens—
how and with whom?
To these shores birds return
and keep returning
for the curves of fresh flights.
To these waters fish return
and keep returning
for the fathoming of old waters.
To sky and sea they are born
and keep returning to be reborn.
The sharing of the sea goes on
for the sake of wings and fins
ever returning to new skyblue,
ever reborn in new seagreen.
Could the gray-green lobster speak
what would he say
of personal secrets?
Could one white gull utter a word—
what would it be?
what white feather of a word?
***
***
Among the shapes and shadow-shapes
in the blurs of the marching animals,
among the open forms, the hidden and half-hidden,
who is the Head One? Me? Man?
Am I first over all, I the genus homo?
Where did I come from?
How doing now and where to from here?
Is there any going back?
And where might I want to go back?
Is it told in my dreams and hankerings, looking
back at what I was, seeing what I am?
Like so a man talking to himself
of the bitter, the sweet, the bittersweet:
he had heard likenings of himself:
Cock of the walk, brave as a lion, fierce as a tiger,
Stubborn as si mule, mean as a louse, crazy as a bedbug,
Soft as a kitten, slimy as an octopus, one poor fish.
Then he spoke for himself:
I am bat-eyed, chicken-hearted, monkey-faced.
Listen and you’ll hear it told,
I am a beast out of the jungle.
Man, proud man, with a peacock strut
seeing himself in his own man-made mirrors.
Yet I am myself all the animals.
Mix in among lavender shadows the gorilla far back
And the jungle cry of readiness for death
Or struggle—and the clean breeds who live on
In the underbrush. Mix in farther back yet
Breeds out of the slime of the sea.
Put in a high green of a restless sea.
Insinuate chlorine and mystic salts,
The make-up of vertebrates,
the long highway of mammals who chew
Their victims and feed their children
From milk at a breast,
The fathers and the mothers who battled hunger
&
nbsp; And tore each other’s jugulars
Over land and women, laughter and language.
Put in mystery without end. Then add mystery.
The memorandum runs long.
I have feet, fins and wings.
I live on land, in the sea, in the air.
I run, fly, sneak, prowl, I kill and eat.
Among killers and eaters I am first.
I am the Head One.
What is this load I carry out of yesterday?
What are the bygones of dreams, moans, shadows?
What jargons, what gibberish, must I yet unlearn?
I have been a dim plasm in the sea,
rocking dumb, not-so-dumb, dumb again,
a dab and a dangling tangle
swarming and splitting to live again.
I have been a drop of jelly
aching with a silver shot of light
and it sang Be-now Now-be Be-now Now-be.
I have been a rockabye baby
sloshed in the sludge of the sea
and I have clung with a shell over me
waiting a tide to bring me breakfast.
I have been the little fish eaten by the big one
and I have been the big fish
taking ten lesser fish in one fast gulp.
I have been a shrimp, one of a billion,
fed to a million little fish
ending as fodder in the bellies of big fish.
In the seven seas
of the one vast glumbering sea over the globe
I have been eater and eaten,
toiler and hanger-on.
I lived half in the sea, half on land,
swimmer and crawler, fins and legs.
I traveled with layers of earthworms
grinding limestone into loam.
Encased as a snail
I wrought one pure spiral,
an image of no beginning, no end.
“This is the image wherein I live;
the outer form of me to be here
when the dried inner one drifts
away into thin air.”
I have journeyed
for sticks and mud and weaving thongs
to build me a home in a bush.
I have mounted into the blue sky
with a mate lark on a summer morning,
dropping into sycamore branches to warble.
The orioles called me one of theirs;
herons taught me to stand and wait in marsh grass,
to preen my wings and rise with legs bundled behind.
I was the awkward pelican
flying low along the florida coast with a baby.
I stood with pink flamingoes
in long lagoons at tallahassee watching sunrise.
I am black as a crow with a caw-caw in my throat
and I am lush with morning calls of catbird and mocker,
the cardinal’s what-cheer what-cheer
and the redbird’s whistle across hemlock timbers
in early april in wisconsin.
I have done the cleansing service
of scavengers on land and sea;
the red and sea-green lobsters told me
how they win a living.
I have slunk among buzzards and broken hunger
with a beak in a rottening horse.
I have fed where my greatgrandfathers fed.
I know the faint half-words
of the fly and the flea,
the midge, the mosquito.
I was kin of a vampire
doing what a blind thirst told me.
A louse seeking red blood told me
I carry feeders in blood.
I ganged up with maggots
and cleaned a cadaver
and left the bones gleaming.
I am a grasshopper taking in one jump
a hundred grasshopper lengths.
I buzz with earnest bees
in the lingering sun of apple orchards.
I loiter with tumble bugs
seeming to know solemn causes.
I climb with spiders, throw ladders, nets,
frameworks out of my navel coils.
I am the building ant
of architectonic galleries and chambers.
I am egg, cocoon and moth.
I count my caterpillar rings of black and yellow.
I inch with the inch worms
measuring pearl-green miles of summer months.
I have swept in the ashen paths of weevils,
borers, chinch bugs eating their way.
Born once as a late morning child
I died of old age before noon.
Or again I issued as a luna moth,
circles of gold spotting my lavender wings.
I have zigzagged with blue water bugs
among white lotus and pond lilies.
From my silver throat in the dew of evening
came a whippoorwill call, one, another, more
as a slow gold moon told time with climbing.
I am the chameleon taking the tint of what I live on,
the water frog green as the scum he sits on,
the tree frog gray as the tree-bark-gray.
The duck, the swan, the goose, met me as sisters,
the beaver, the porcupine, the chinchilla, as brothers.
The rattlesnakes let me live with them
to eat mice, to salivate birds and rabbits
and fatten in sleep on noontime rocks.
I was a lizard, a texas horned toad,
a centipede counting my century of legs.
I was a crocodile in africa
with a lazy mouthful of teeth.
The stealth of the rat, the mink, the squirrel, came.
The weasel gave me his lingo
of now-you-see-me now-you-don’t.
The rabbit hideout in clover, the gopher hole,
the mole tunnel, the corn-shock nest of the mouse,
these were a few of my homes.
One summer night with fireflies
I too was fluttering night gold.
Long ago I ran with the eohippus,
the little horse that was.
I wore dodo feathers
but that’s all passed.
I had a feathered form fade in fog:
you can find it now in feathered fossils.
I was a mammoth, a dinosaur
and other hulks too big to last.
I have been more quadrupeds than I can name.
I was the son of a wild jackass
with swift and punishing heels.
I lifted my legs and carried a camel hump
in slow caravans pausing at nightfall,
lifting my hump again at dawn.
I locked my horns with another moose;
our antlers lie locked and our bones whitening.
I slouched up hills of ice with polar bears,
practiced smell with the red fox,
trained my fangs with timber wolves.
I fight now for the rights to a carcass.
The killer who crouches, gets set, and leaps
is a kinsman I can call my cousin.
The strangling gibberish of the gorilla
comes out of my anxious mouth.
Among a thousand ring-tailed monkeys
scratching buttocks, sharing fleas,
shinning up trees in guatemala, I am one.
Among the blue-ramped baboons,
chattering chimpanzees and leering orangoutangs,
I am at home using paws for hands, hands for paws.
The howl of one hyena eating another is mine.
In a boneless tube of ooze
I soaked dumb days with sponges
off the gulfcoast sea-bottom.
Now I am the parrot
who picks up palaver and repeats it.
Now I am the river-hog, the hippopotamus
and I am the little bird who lives in his ear
and tells him when to get up
and where to go.
Honey and Salt Page 6
