Ocean rolls resoundingly on and snorts up
foam over beaches.
• III •
Five Stanzas to Thoreau
Yet one more abandoned the heavy city’s
ring of greedy stones. And the water, salt and
crystal, closes over the heads of all who
truly seek refuge.
•
Silence slowly spiraling up has risen
here from earth’s recesses to put down roots and
grow and with its burgeoning crown to shade his
sun-heated doorstep.
•
Kicks a mushroom thoughtlessly. Thunderclouds are
piling on the skyline. Like copper trumpets
crooked roots of trees are resounding, foliage
scatters in terror.
•
Autumn’s headlong flight is his weightless mantle,
flapping till again from the frost and ashes
peaceful days have come in their flocks and bathe their
claws in the wellspring.
•
Disbelief will meet him who saw a geyser
and escaped from wells filled with stones, like Thoreau
disappearing deep in his inner greenness
artful and hopeful.
Gogol
The jacket threadbare as a wolf pack.
The face like a marble slab.
Sitting in the circle of his letters in the grove that rustles
with scorn and error,
the heart blowing like a scrap of paper through the inhospitable
passageways.
The sunset is now creeping like a fox over this country,
igniting the grass in a mere moment.
Space is full of horns and hooves and underneath
the barouche glides like a shadow between my father’s
lit courtyards.
St. Petersburg on the same latitude as annihilation
(did you see the beauty in the leaning tower)
and around the ice-bound tenements floating like a jellyfish
the poor man in his cloak.
And here, enveloped in fasts, is the man who before was surrounded by the herds of laughter,
but these have long since taken themselves to tracts far above the tree line.
Men’s unsteady tables.
Look outside, see how darkness burns hard a whole galaxy of souls.
Rise up then on your chariot of fire and leave the country!
Sailor’s Yarn
There are bare winter days when the sea is kin
to mountain country, crouching in grey plumage,
a brief minute blue, long hours with waves like pale
lynxes vainly seeking hold in the beach gravel.
On such a day wrecks might come from the sea searching
for their owners, settling in the town’s din, and drowned
crews blow landward, thinner than pipe smoke.
(The real lynxes are in the north, with sharpened claws
and dreaming eyes. In the north, where day
lives in a mine both day and night.
Where the sole survivor may sit
at the borealis stove and listen
to the music of those frozen to death.)
Strophe and Counter-Strophe
The outermost circle belongs to myth. There the helmsman sinks upright
among glittering fish-backs.
How far from us! When day
stands in a sultry windless unrest—
as the Congo’s green shadow holds
the blue men in its vapor—
when all this driftwood on the heart’s sluggish
coiling current
piles up.
Sudden change: in under the repose of the constellations
the tethered ones glide.
Stern high, in a hopeless
position, the hull of a dream, black
against the coastline’s pink. Abandoned
the year’s plunge, quick
and soundless—as the sledge-shadow, doglike, big—
travels over snow,
reaches the wood.
Agitated Meditation
A storm drives the mill sails wildly round
in the night’s darkness, grinding nothing. —You
are kept awake by the same laws.
The grey shark belly is your weak lamp.
Shapeless memories sink to the sea’s depths
and harden there to strange columns. —Green
with algae is your crutch. A man
who takes to the seas comes back stiffened.
The Stones
The stones we threw I hear
fall, glass-clear through the years. In the valley
the confused actions of the moment
fly screeching from
treetop to treetop, become silent
in thinner air than the present’s, glide
like swallows from hilltop
to hilltop until they’ve
reached the furthest plateaus
along the frontier of being. There all
our deeds fall
glass-clear
with nowhere to fall to
except ourselves.
Context
Look at the grey tree. The sky has run
through its fibers down in the earth—
only a shrunk cloud is left when
the earth has drunk. Stolen space
is twisted in pleats, twined
to greenery. —The brief moments
of freedom rise in us, whirl
through the Parcae and further.
Morning Approach
The black-backed gull, the sun-captain, holds his course.
Beneath him is the water.
The world is still sleeping like a
multicolored stone in the water.
Undeciphered day. Days—
like Aztec hieroglyphs.
The music. And I stand trapped
in its Gobelin weave with
raised arms—like a figure
out of folk art.
There Is Peace in the Surging Prow
On a winter morning you feel how this earth
plunges ahead. Against the house walls
an air current smacks
out of hiding.
Surrounded by movement: the tent of calm.
And the secret helm in the migrating flock.
Out of the winter gloom
a tremolo rises
from hidden instruments. It is like standing
under summer’s high lime tree with the din
of ten thousand
insect wings above your head.
Midnight Turning Point
The wood ant watches silently, looks into
nothing. And nothing’s heard but drips from dim
leafage and the night’s murmuring deep in
summer’s canyon.
The spruce stands like the hand of a clock,
spiked. The ant glows in the hill’s shadow.
Bird cry! And at last. The cloud-packs slowly
begin to roll.
• IV •
Song
The gathering of white birds grew: gulls
dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships
but stained by vapors from forbidden shores.
Alarm! Alarm! around refuse from a cargo boat.
They crowded in and formed an ensign-staff
that signaled “Booty here.”
And gulls careered across watery wastes
with blue acres gliding in the foam.
Athwart, a phosphorescent pathway to the sun.
But Väinämöinen travels in his past
on oceans glittering in ancient light.
He rides. The horse’s hooves are never wet.
Behind: the forest of his songs is green.
The oak whose leap’s a thousand years long.
The migh
ty windmill turned by birdsong.
And every tree a prisoner in its soughing.
With giant cones glinting in the moonlight
when the distant pine glows like a beacon.
Then the Other rises with his spell
and the arrow, seeing far and wide, flees,
the feather singing like a flight of birds.
A dead second when the horse abruptly
stiffens, breaks across the waterline
like a blue cloud beneath the thunder’s antenna.
And Väinämöinen plunges heavy in the sea
(a jumping-sheet the compass points hold tight).
Alarm! Alarm! among the gulls around his fall!
Like one bewitched, without anxiety,
standing at the center of the picture
of his joy, eleven corn sheaves bulging.
Reliance—an alp-top humming in the ether
three thousand meters up where the clouds sail
races. The puffed basking shark wallows
guffawing soundlessly beneath the sea.
(Death and renewal when the wave arrives.)
And peacefully the breezes cycle through the leaves.
On the horizon thunder rumbles dully
(as the herd of buffalo flees in its dust).
The shadow of a fist clenches in the tree
and strikes down him who stands bewitched
in his joyous picture where the evening sky
seems to glow behind the wild boar’s mask of clouds.
His double, envious, arranges
a secret rendezvous with his woman.
And the shadow gathers and becomes a tidal wave
a tidal wave with riding sea gulls darkened.
And the port-side heart sizzles in a breaker.
Death and renewal when the wave arrives.
The gathering of white birds grew: gulls
dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships
but stained by vapors from forbidden shores.
The herring gull: a harpoon with a velvet back.
In closeup like a snowed-in hull
with hidden pulses glittering in rhythm.
His flier’s nerves in balance. He soars.
Footless hanging in the wind he dreams
his hunter’s dream with his beak’s sharp shot.
He plunges to the surface, full-blossomed greed,
crams and jerks himself around his booty
as if he were a stocking. And then he rises like a spirit.
(Energies—their context is renewal,
more enigmatic than the eel’s migrations.
A tree, invisible, in bloom. And as
the grey seal in its underwater sleep
rises to the surface, takes a breath,
and dives—still asleep—to the seabed
so now the Sleeper in me secretly
has joined with that and has returned while I
stood staring fixedly at something else.)
And the diesel engine’s throbbing in the flock
past the dark skerry, a cleft of birds
where hunger blossomed with stretched maw.
At nightfall they could still be heard:
an abortive music like that from
the orchestra pit before the play begins.
But on his ancient sea Väinämöinen drifted
shaken in the squall’s mitt or supine
in the mirror-world of calms where the birds
were magnified. And from a stray seed, far
from land at the sea’s edge growing
out of waves, out of a fogbank it sprang:
a mighty tree with scaly trunk, and leaves
quite transparent and behind them
the filled white sails of distant suns
glided on in trance. And now the eagle rises.
• V •
Elegy
At the outset. Like a fallen dragon
in some mist- and vapor-shrouded swamp,
our spruce-clad coastland lies. Far out there:
two steamers crying from a dream
in the fog. This is the lower world.
Motionless woods, motionless surface
and the orchid’s hand that reaches from the soil.
On the other side, beyond these straits
but hanging in the same reflection: the Ship,
like the cloud hanging weightless in its space.
And the water around its prow is motionless,
becalmed. And yet—a storm is up!
and the steamer smoke blows level—the sun
flickers there in its grip—and the gale
is hard against the face of him who boards.
To make one’s way up the port side of Death.
A sudden draft, the curtain flutters.
Silence ringing, an alarm clock.
A sudden draft, the curtain flutters.
Until a distant door is heard closing
far off in another year.
•
O field as grey as the buried bog-man’s cloak.
And island floating darkly in the fog.
It’s quiet, as when the radar turns
and turns its arc in hopelessness.
There’s a crossroads in a moment.
Music of the distances converges.
All grown together in a leafy tree.
Vanished cities glitter in its branches.
From everywhere and nowhere a song
like crickets in the August dark. Embedded
like a wood beetle, he sleeps here in the night,
the peat bog’s murdered traveler. The sap compels
his thoughts up to the stars. And deep
in the mountain: here’s the cave of bats.
Here hang the years, the deeds, densely.
Here they sleep with folded wings.
One day they’ll flutter out. A throng!
(From a distance, smoke from the cave mouth.)
But still their summer-winter sleep prevails.
A murmuring of distant waters. In the dark tree
a leaf that turns.
•
One summer morning a harrow catches
in dead bones and rags of clothing. —He
lay there after the peat bog was drained
and now stands up and goes his way in light.
In every parish eddies golden seed
around ancient guilt. The armored skull
in the plowed field. A wanderer en route
and the mountain keeps an eye on him.
In every parish the marksman’s rifle hums
at midnight when the wings unfold
and the past expands in its collapse
and darker than the heart’s meteorite.
An absence of spirit makes the writing greedy.
A flag begins to smack. The wings
unfold around the spoils. This proud journey!
where the albatross ages to a cloud
in Time’s jaws. And culture is a whaling
station where the stranger walks
among white gables, playing children, and
still with each breath he takes he feels
the murdered giant’s presence.
•
Soft black-cock crooning from the heavenly spheres.
The music, guiltless in our shadow, like
the fountain water rising among the wild beasts,
deftly petrified around the playing jets.
The bows disguised, a forest.
The bows like rigging in a torrent—
the cabin’s smashed beneath the torrent’s hooves—
within us, balanced like a gyroscope, is joy.
This evening the world’s calm is reflected
when the bows rest on strings without being moved.
Motionless in mist the forest trees
and the water-tundra mirroring itself.
Music’s voiceless half is here, like the scent
<
br /> of resin rising from lightning-damaged spruce.
An underground summer for each of us.
There at the crossroads a shadow breaks free
and runs off to where the Bach trumpet points.
Sudden confidence, by grace. To leave behind
one’s self-disguise here on this shore
where the wave breaks and slides away, breaks
and slides away.
Epilogue
December. Sweden is a beached
unrigged ship. Against the twilight sky
its masts are sharp. And twilight lasts
longer than day—the road here is stony:
not till midday does the light arrive
and winter’s coliseum rise
lit by unreal clouds. At once
the white smoke rises, coiling from
the villages. The clouds are high on high.
The sea snuffles at the tree-of-heaven’s roots
distracted, as if listening to something else.
(Over the dark side of the soul
there flies a bird, wakening
the sleepers with its cries. The refractor
turns, catches in another time,
and it is summer: mountains bellow, bulged
with light and the stream raises the sun’s glitter
in transparent hand . . . All then gone
as when a film spills out of a projector.)
Now the evening star burns through the cloud.
Houses, trees, and fences are enlarged, grow
in the soundless avalanche of darkness.
And beneath the star more and more develops
of the other, hidden landscape, that which lives
the life of contours on the night’s x-ray.
A shadow pulls its sledge between the houses.
They are waiting.
Six o’clock—the wind
gallops thunderously along the village street,
in darkness, like a troop of horsemen. How
the black turmoil resounds and echoes!
The houses trapped in a dance of immobility,
the din like that of dreams. Gust upon gust
staggers over the bay away
to the open sea that tosses in the dark.
In space the stars signal desperately.
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Page 3
