The Giant Book of Poetry
Page 38
for the Glenwood stove next winter,
and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure
to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins,
and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in the meadow and hayfield, the
mowing machine
clacketing beside,
while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon’s heat,
you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks,
and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day
from standing grass in the morning.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church
with the light load
of a leather quartertop buggy,
and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you were old and lame,
when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you,
and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground
above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you
where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun’s muzzle
in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain,
and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you,
setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground
made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees
pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn,
and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground—
old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
The Porcelain Couple1
When Jane felt well enough for me to leave her
for a whole day, I drove south by the river
to empty my mother Lucy’s house in Connecticut.
I hurried from room to room, cellar to attic,
opening a crammed closet, then turning
to discover a chest with five full drawers.
I labeled for shipping sofas and chairs,
bedroom sets, and tables; I wrapped figurines
and fancy teacups in paper, preserving things
she cherished—and dreaded, in her last years,
might go for a nickel on the Spring Glen lawn.
Everywhere I looked I saw shelves and tabletops
covered with Lucy’s glass animals and music boxes.
Everywhere in closets, decades of dresses hung
in dead air. I carried garbage bags in one hand,
and with the other swept my mother’s leftover
possessions into sacks for the Hamden dump.
I stuffed bags full of blouses, handkerchiefs,
and the green-gold dress she wore to Bermuda.
At the last moment I discovered and saved
a cut-glass tumbler, stained red at the top,
Lucy l905 scripted on the stain. In the garage
I piled the clanking bags, then drove four hours
north with my hands tight on the Honda’s wheel,
drank a beer looking through Saturday’s mail,
pitched into bed beside Jane fitfully asleep,
and woke exhausted from rolling unendable
nightmares of traffic and fire. In my dreams
I grieved or mourned interchangeably for Lucy,
for Lucy’s things, for Jane, and for me.
When I woke, I rose as if from a drunken sleep
after looting a city and burning its temples.
All day as I ate lunch or counted out pills,
or as we lay weeping, hugging in bed together,
I counted precious things from our twenty years:
a blue vase, a candelabrum Jane carried on her lap
from the Baja, and the small porcelain box
from France I found under the tree one Christmas
where a couple in relief stretch out asleep,
like a catafalque, on the pastel double bed
of the box’s top, both wearing pretty nightcaps.
Philip Levine (b. 1928)
Belle Isle, 19491
We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish high-school girl
I’d never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn’t dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.
Sweet Will1
The man who stood beside me
34 years ago this night fell
on to the concrete, oily floor
of Detroit Transmission, and we
stepped carefully over him until
he wakened and went back to this press.
It was Friday night, and the others
told me that every Friday he drank
more than he could hold and fell
and he wasn’t any dumber for it
so just let him get up at his
own sweet will or he’ll hit you.
“At his own sweet will,” was just
what the old black man said to me,
and he smiled the smile of one
who is still surprised that dawn
graying the cracked and broken windows
could start us all to singing in the cold.
Stash rose and wiped the back of his head
with a crumpled handkerchief and looked
at his own blood as though it were
dirt and puzzled as to how
it got there and then wiped the ends
of his fingers carefully one at a time
the way the mother wipes the fingers
of a sleeping child, and climbed back
on his wooden soda-pop case to
his punch press and hollered at all
of us over the oceanic roar of work,
addressing us by our names and nations—
“Nigger, Kike, Hunky, River Rat,”
but he gave it a tune, an old tune,
like “America the Beautiful.” And he danced
a little two-step and smiled showing
the four stained teeth left in the front
and took another sip of cherry brandy.
In truth it was no longer Friday,
for night had turned to day as it
often does for those who are patient,
so it was Saturday in the year of ‘48
in the very heart of the city of man
where your Cadillac cars get manufactured.
In truth all those people are dead,
they have gone up to heaven singing
“Time on my Hands” or “Begin the Beguine,”
and the Cadillacs have all gone back
to earth, and nothing that we made
that night is worth more than me.
And in truth I’m not worth a thing
what with my feet and my two bad eyes
and my one long nose and my breath
of old lies and my sad tales of men
who let the earth break them back,
each one, to dirty blood or bloody dirt.
Not worth a thing! Just like it was said
at my magic birth when the stars
collided and fire fell from great space
into great space, and people rose one
by one from cold beds to tend a world
that runs on and on at its own sweet will.
Anne Sexton (1928 – 1974)
Her Kind1
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
from The Death of the Fathers: 2.How We Danced2
The night of my cousin’s wedding
I wore blue.
I was nineteen
and we danced, Father, we orbited.
We moved like angels washing themselves.
We moved like two birds on fire.
Then we moved like the sea in a jar,
slower and slower.
The orchestra played
“Oh how we danced on the night we were wed.”
And you waltzed me like a lazy Susan
and we were dear,
very dear.
Now that you are laid out,
useless as a blind dog,
now that you no longer lurk,
the song rings in my head.
Pure oxygen was the champagne we drank
and clicked our glasses, one to one.
The champagne breathed like a skin diver
and the glasses were crystal and the bride
and groom gripped each other in sleep
like nineteen-thirty marathon dancers.
Mother was a belle and danced with twenty men.
You danced with me never saying a word.
Instead the serpent spoke as you held me close.
The serpent, that mocker,
woke up and pressed against me
like a great god and we bent together
like two lonely swans.
With Mercy for the Greedy1
for my friend Ruth, who urges me to make an
appointment for the Sacrament of Confession
Concerning your letter in which you ask
me to call a priest and in which you ask
me to wear The Cross that you enclose;
your own cross,
your dog-bitten cross,
no larger than a thumb,
small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—
I pray to its shadow,
that gray place
where it lies on your letter … deep, deep.
I detest my sins and I try to believe
in The Cross.
I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face,
its solid neck, its brown sleep.
True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.
All morning long
I have worn
your cross, hung with package string around my throat.
It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might,
tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born.
Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.
My friend, my friend, I was born
doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.
Thom Gunn (1929 – 2004)
Still Life1
I shall not soon forget
the grayish-yellow skin
to which the face had set:
lids tight: nothing of his,
no tremor from within,
played on the surfaces.
He still found breath, and yet
it was an obscure knack.
I shall not soon forget
the angle of his head,
arrested and reared back
on the crisp field of bed,
back from what he could neither
accept, as one opposed,
nor, as a life-long breather,
consentingly let go,
the tube his mouth enclosed
in an astonished O.
The Reassurance2
About ten days or so
after we saw you dead
you came back in a dream.
I’m all right now you said.
And it was you, although
you were all fleshed out again:
you hugged us all round then,
and gave your welcoming beam.
How like you to be kind,
seeking to reassure.
And, yes, how like my mind
to make itself secure.
Dan Pagis (1930 – 1986)
Conversation1
Translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell
Four talked about the pine tree. One defined it by genus, species, and
variety. One assessed its disadvantages for the lumber industry. One
Quoted poems about pine trees in many languages. One took root,
stretched out branches, and rustled.
Izet Sarajlic (b. 1930)
Luck in Sarajevo2
translated from Serbo-Croat by Charles Simic
In Sarajevo
in the Spring of 1992,
everything is possible:
you go stand in a bread line
and end up in an emergency room
with your leg amputated.
Afterwards, you still maintain
that you were very lucky.
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
Axe Handles1
One afternoon the last week in April
showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
one-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
without a handle, in the shop
and go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
is long enough for a hatchet,
we cut it to length and take it
with the hatchet head
and working hatch
et, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
with the hatchet, and the phrase
first learned from Ezra Pound
rings in my ears!
“When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.”
And I say this to Kai
“Look: We’ll shape the handle
by checking the handle
of the axe we cut with—”
and he sees. And I hear it again:
it’s in Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century
A.D. “Essay on Literature”—in the
preface: “In making the handle Of an axe
by cutting wood with an axe
the model is indeed near at hand.”—
my teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
translated that and taught it years ago
and I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
and my son a handle, soon
to be shaping again, model
and tool, craft of culture,
how we go on.
What you should know to be a poet1
all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;
dreams.
the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;
kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum’d and golden—
& then love the human: wives husbands and friends.
children’s games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.
work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and lived with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
hunger, rest.
the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, enstasy
real danger. gambles. and the edge of death.
Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
Love after Love1
The time will come