Because I’m old and plain
And never had a lover,
The authoress of this.
CLOTHO: OR, THE PRESENT
Well, there he stands, surrounded
By all his kith and kin,
Townspeople and friends,
As the evidence rolls in,
And don’t go telling me
The spectacle isn’t silly.
A prince in low disguise,
Moving among the humble
With kingly purposes
Is an old, romantic posture,
And always popular.
He started on this career
By overthrowing Fate
(A splendid accomplishment,
And all done in an hour)
That crucial day at the temple
When the birds crossed over the pasture
As was said by my sister, here.
Which goes to show that an omen
Is a mere tissue of lies
To please the superstitious
And keep the masses content.
From this initial success
He moved on without pause
To outwit and subdue a vicious
Beast with lion’s paws,
The wings of a great bird,
And the breasts and face of a woman.
This meant knowing no less
Than the universal state
Of man. Which is quite a lot.
(Construe this as you please.)
Now today an old abuse
Raises its head and festers
To the scandal and disease
Of all. He will weed it out
And cleanse the earth of it.
Clearly, if anyone could,
He can redeem these lands;
To doubt this would be absurd.
The finest faculties,
Courage and will and wit
He has patiently put to use
For Truth and the Common Good,
And lordly above the taunts
Of his enemies, there he stands,
The father of his sisters,
His daughters their own aunts.
Some sentimental fool
Invented the Tragic Muse.
She doesn’t exist at all.
For human life is composed
In reasonably equal parts
Of triumph and chagrin,
And the parts are so hotly fused
As to seem a single thing.
This is true as well
Of wisdom and ignorance
And of happiness and pain:
Nothing is purely itself
But is linked with its antidote
In cold self-mockery—
A fact with which only those
Born with a Comic sense
Can learn to content themselves.
While heroes die to maintain
Some part of existence clean
And incontaminate.
Now take this fellow here
Who is about to find
The summit of his life
Founded upon disaster.
Lovers can learn as much
Every night in bed,
For whatever flesh can touch
Is never quite enough.
They know it is tempting fate
To hold out for perfect bliss.
And yet the whole world over
Blind men will choose as master
To lead them the most blind.
And some day men may call me,
Because I’m old and tough,
And never had a lover,
The instrument of this.
LACHESIS: OR, THE PAST
Well, now. You might suppose
There’s nothing left to be said.
Outcast, corrupt and blind,
He knows it’s night when an owl
Wakes up to hoot at the wise,
And the owl inside his head
Looks out of sightless eyes,
Answers, and sinks its toes
Into the soft and bloody
Center of his mind.
But miles and miles away
Suffers another man.
He was young, open-hearted,
Strong in mind and body
When all these things began.
Every blessed night
He attends the moonstruck owl,
Familiar of the witless,
And remembers a dark day,
A new-born baby’s howl,
And an autumnal wetness.
The smallest sign of love
Is always an easy target
For the jealous and cynical.
Perhaps, indeed, they are right.
I leave it for you to say.
But to leave a little child,
Roped around the feet,
To the charities of a wolf
Was more than he could stomach.
He weighed this for an hour,
Then rose to his full height,
The master of himself.
And the last, clinching witness.
The great life he spared
He would return to punish
And punish himself as well.
But recently his woes
Are muted by the moon.
He no longer goes alone.
Thorns have befriended him,
And once he found his mother
Hiding under a stone.
She was fat, wet, and lame.
She said it was clever of him
To find her in the dark
But he always had been a wise one,
And warned him against snails.
And now his every word
Is free of all human hates
And human kindliness.
To be mad, as the world goes,
Is not the worst of fates.
(And please do not forget
There are those who find this comic.)
But what, you ask, of the hero?
(Ah well, I am very old
And they say I have a rambling
Or a devious sort of mind.)
At midnight and in rain
He advances without trembling
From sorrow unto sorrow
Toward a kind of light
The sun makes upon metal
Which perhaps even the blind
May secretly behold.
What the intelligence
Works out in pure delight
The body must learn in pain.
He has solved the Sphinx’s riddle
In his own ligaments.
And now in a green place,
Holy and unknown,
He has taken off his clothes.
Dust in the sliding light
Swims and is gone. Fruit
Thickens. The listless cello
Of flies tuning in shadows
Wet bark and the silver click
Of water over stones
Are close about him where
He stands, an only witness
With no eyes in his face.
In spite of which he knows
Clear as he once had known,
Though bound both hand and foot,
The smell of mountain air
And an autumnal wetness.
And he sees, moreover,
Unfolding into the light
Three pairs of wings in flight,
Moving as water moves.
The strength, wisdom and bliss
Of their inhuman loves
They scatter near the temple.
And some day men may call me,
Because I’m old and simple
And never had a lover,
Responsible for this.
LIZARDS AND SNAKES
On the summer road that ran by our front porch
Lizards and snakes came out to sun.
It was hot as a stove out there, enough to scorch
A buzzard’s foot. Still, it was fun
To lie
in the dust and spy on them. Near but remote,
They snoozed in the carriage ruts, a smile
In the set of the jaw, a fierce pulse in the throat
Working away like Jack Doyle’s after he’d run the mile.
Aunt Martha had an unfair prejudice
Against them (as well as being cold
Toward bats.) She was pretty inflexible in this,
Being a spinster and all, and old.
So we used to slip them into her knitting box.
In the evening she’d bring in things to mend
And a nice surprise would slide out from under the socks.
It broadened her life, as Joe said. Joe was my friend.
But we never did it again after the day
Of the big wind when you could hear the trees
Creak like rockingchairs. She was looking away
Off, and kept saying, “Sweet Jesus, please
Don’t let him near me. He’s as like as twins.
He can crack us like lice with his fingernail.
I can see him plain as a pikestaff. Look how he grins
And swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.”
ADAM
Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?
“Adam, my child, my son,
These very words you hear
Compose the fish and starlight
Of your untroubled dream.
When you awake, my child,
It shall all come true.
Know that it was for you
That all things were begun.”
Adam, my child, my son,
Thus spoke Our Father in heaven
To his first, fabled child,
The father of us all.
And I, your father, tell
The words over again
As innumerable men
From ancient times have done.
Tell them again in pain,
And to the empty air.
Where you are men speak
A different mother tongue.
Will you forget our games,
Our hide-and-seek and song?
Child, it will be long
Before I see you again.
Adam, there will be
Many hard hours,
As an old poem says,
Hours of loneliness.
I cannot ease them for you;
They are our common lot.
During them, like as not,
You will dream of me.
When you are crouched away
In a strange clothes closet
Hiding from one who’s “It”
And the dark crowds in,
Do not be afraid—
O, if you can, believe
In a father’s love
That you shall know some day.
Think of the summer rain
Or seedpearls of the mist;
Seeing the beaded leaf,
Try to remember me.
From far away
I send my blessing out
To circle the great globe.
It shall reach you yet.
THE ORIGIN OF CENTAURS
for Dimitri Hadzi
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend’s. KING LEAR
This mild September mist recalls the soul
To its own lust;
On the enchanted lawn
It sees the iron top of the flagpole
Sublimed away and gone
Into Parnassian regions beyond rust;
And would undo the body to less than dust.
Sundial and juniper have been dispelled
Into thin air.
The pale ghost of a leaf
Haunts those uncanny softnesses that felled
And whitely brought to grief
The trees that only yesterday were there.
The soul recoils into its old despair,
Knowing that though the horizon is at hand,
Twelve paltry feet
Refuse to be traversed,
And form themselves before wherever you stand
As if you were accursed;
While stones drift from the field, and the arbor-seat
Floats toward some millefleurs world of summer heat.
Yet from the void where the azalea bush
Departed hence,
Sadly the soul must hear
Twitter and cricket where should be all hush,
And from the belvedere
A muffled grunt survives in evidence
That love must sweat under the weight of sense.
Or so once thought a man in a Greek mist—
Who set aside
The wine-cup and the wine,
And that deep fissure he alone had kissed,
All circumscribing line,
Moved to the very edge in one swift stride
And took those shawls of nothing for his bride.
Was it the Goddess herself? Some dense embrace
Closed like a bath
Of love about his head;
Perfectly silent and without a face.
Blindfolded on her bed,
He could see nothing but the aftermath:
Those powerful, clear hoofprints on the path.
THE VOW
In the third month, a sudden flow of blood.
The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, and the joy
Also of the harp. The frail image of God
Lay spilled and formless. Neither girl nor boy,
But yet blood of my blood, nearly my child.
All that long day
Her pale face turned to the window’s mild
Featureless grey.
And for some nights she whimpered as she dreamed
The dead thing spoke, saying: “Do not recall
Pleasure at my conception. I am redeemed
From pain and sorrow. Mourn rather for all
Who breathlessly issue from the bone gates,
The gates of horn,
For truly it is best of all the fates
Not to be born.
“Mother, a child lay gasping for bare breath
On Christmas Eve when Santa Claus had set
Death in the stocking, and the lights of death
Flamed in the tree. O, if you can, forget
You were the child, turn to my father’s lips
Against the time
When his cold hand puts forth its fingertips
Of jointed lime.”
Doctors of Science, what is man that he
Should hope to come to a good end? The best
Is not to have been born. And could it be
That Jewish diligence and Irish jest
The consent of flesh and a midwinter storm
Had reconciled,
Was yet too bold a mixture to inform
A simple child?
Even as gold is tried, Gentile and Jew.
If that ghost was a girl’s, I swear to it:
Your mother shall be far more blessed than you.
And if a boy’s, I swear: The flames are lit
That shall refine us; they shall not destroy
A living hair.
Your younger brothers shall confirm in joy
This that I swear.
HEUREUX QUI, COMME ULYSSE, A FAIT UN BEAU VOYAGE…
for Claire White
Great joy be to the sailor if he chart
The Odyssey or bear away the Fleece
Yet unto wisdom’s laurel and the peace
Of his own kind come lastly to his start.
And when shall I, being migrant, bring my heart
Home to its plots of parsley, its proper earth,
Pot hooks, cow dung, black chimney bricks whose worth
I have not skill to honor in my art.
My home, my father’s and grandfather’s home.
Not the imperial porphyry of Rome
But slate is my true stone, slate is my blue.
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And bluer the Loire is to my reckoning
Than Caesar’s Tiber, and more nourishing
Than salt spray is the breathing of Anjou.
(AFTER DU BELLAY)
RITES AND CEREMONIES
I THE ROOM
Father, adonoi, author of all things,
of the three states,
the soft light on the barn at dawn,
a wind that sings
in the bracken, fire in iron grates,
the ram’s horn,
Furnisher, hinger of heaven, who bound
the lovely Pleaides,
entered the perfect treasuries of the snow,
established the round
course of the world, birth, death and disease
and caused to grow
veins, brain, bones in me, to breathe and sing
fashioned me air,
Lord, who, governing cloud and waterspout,
o my King,
held me alive till this my forty-third year—
in whom we doubt—
Who was that child of whom they tell
in lauds and threnes?
whose holy name all shall pronounce
Emmanuel,
which being interpreted means,
“Gott mit uns”?
I saw it on their belts. A young one, dead,
Left there on purpose to get us used to the sight
When we first moved in. Helmet spilled off, head
Blond and boyish and bloody. I was scared that night.
And the sign was there,
The sign of the child, the grave, worship and loss,
Gunpowder heavy as pollen in winter air,
An Iron Cross.
It is twenty years now, Father. I have come home.
But in the camps, one can look through a huge square
Window, like an aquarium, upon a room
The size of my livingroom filled with human hair.
Others have shoes, or valises
Made mostly of cardboard, which once contained
Pills, fresh diapers. This is one of the places
Never explained.
Out of one trainload, about five hundred in all,
Twenty the next morning were hopelessly insane.
And some there be that have no memorial,
That are perished as though they had never been.
Made into soap.
Who now remembers “The Singing Horses of Buchenwald”?
Collected Earlier Poems Page 3
