by David Mason
The cliffs will fall away. The voices die.
There was another ship, another time,
but going nowhere. It steamed both day and night.
It made quite a business of making clouds.
The sky poured from its stack, its boilers the same,
and the ship’s hull tugged at cables and lines
lashed to a gravel bulkhead by the road.
It tugged like a leashed dog with boundless hope
but never left the shore, that cloudy ship
with laborers who strove inside the hull.
It rained inside. The men were always wet,
the women too, working wet, and wet
when they quit work and stepped out to the clouds
exhaled from cigarettes they cupped in hands,
talking of food they would like to eat again
and letters they would like to read, dry-eyed.
They too felt time rising from the gray stack.
Time is the kitchen high up in the trees
and time is the cloudy ship, time is the shore.
The people hadn’t known the time before.
Only when it slowed and swayed and clouded out,
only when the coffee in the hand went cool
could anyone be sure they’d touched the hours
or the year of gull cries from an open throat.
A current stirs the trees like tidal grass.
Stand in the kitchen looking out to sea
through stands of waving limbs and feel the wind,
the leaking vessels of the blood go down.
No one can make up time. The sea would laugh,
the crowded rocks whisper among themselves.
The coffee has gone cold. The names are gone.
They are another generation gone.
The room is time, the room is out of time.
The fissured road will fall into the waves.
The ruined millionaire will watch his house
tip like a sandbox toy and slide away.
A colony of ants will have its say
remembered by the beetle rolling dung.
An old man dances, knowing he is young.
A woman dances in the breaking day.
GALLINA CANYON
All night the cattle bellowed,
cows and calves of the separated herd
seeking each other under helpless stars,
never sleeping, even when the dog slept.
Cows and calves of the separated herd,
loud as the far-flung buffalo
never sleeping, even when the dog slept.
I heard a world of other animals,
loud as the far-flung buffalo,
loud as mother bears calling to their young.
I heard a world of other animals
filling the canyon with their awful song.
Loud as mother bears calling to their young,
a night of wailing from the walls,
filling the canyon with their awful song
from open lungs among the cottonwoods.
A night of wailing from the walls.
I could not sleep. The night was at a loss.
From open lungs among the cottonwoods,
mothers were calling to their young.
I could not sleep. The night was at a loss.
All night the cattle bellowed.
Mothers were calling to their young,
seeking each other under helpless stars.
SAYING GRACE
If every moment is
and is a wilderness
to navigate by feel
whether half or whole,
the river takes a turn,
the forest has to burn,
the broken fern to grow.
The silence of a night
of supplicating stars
may answer us aright:
our worries and our cares
are not the same as theirs.
Give us this day more world
than we can ever know.
BRISTLECONE PINE
If wind were wood it might resemble this
fragility and strength, old bark bleeding amber.
Its living parts grow on away from the dead
as we do in our lesser lives. Endurance,
yes, but also a scarred and twisted beauty
we know the way we know our own carved hearts.
TO THE SEA OF CORTEZ
for Robert King
And if I could I would
fall down, fall all the way
down to the breathing sea.
I would pass by the towns
I would pass by the grass
banks where the buffalo graze.
I would fall down, I would
lie down in the red mud
of memory, where Spanish
lances lie with arrowheads.
I would lie down and roll
my being to the sea,
unroll and roll, lap and sing
my body down, and down
and turn at the hard cliffs
and carry the soft soil
with me. Nothing would impede
my downward being, my
desire to lie down like a fawn
in the new grass, like trout
in the shallows, like a child
tired of making letters
out of chalk, or talk
of airy nothings caught
by fingers made of lead.
I would lie down and go,
and go until I found
the sea that rose to meet
whatever thread of me
had made it there, out there
among vaquitas and swift birds,
there where hardy grasses
have not been annihilated,
where the salt tides rise,
looking for currents they
have loved, and finding me.
THE SECRET HEARING
A life that moves to music cannot fail...
—A. D. Hope
Big as a pterodactyl and as old
it seemed. Damn. The muscled force of air.
The straight flight
heedless of gardeners. That was the wild.
No one stood near to see the heron beat
above my head, making me dive for cover
in the autumn flowerbed.
No one saw me kneeling to watch it pass.
Even the marriage I went home to later,
a solitude of children who wouldn’t tell,
knew banishment
unspoken, and fiercely tribal distances.
But I had felt the air pushed from its wings.
I raked and hauled the cartloads of dead leaves
behind my tractor,
singing a made-up tune no person heard,
half-worshipping the world that made such flight,
feeling its hidden music in my lungs,
but safe in the sound
of the diesel engine drowning out my voice.
MENDING TIME
The fence was down. Out among humid smells
and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks
moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands.
Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep
had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer’s woods
or coyotes might have got them, or the far road.
I remember the night, the moon-colored grass
we waded through to look for them, the oaks
tangled and dark, like starting a story midway.
We gazed over seed heads to the barn
toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw
the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue
moving without sound as if charmed
by the moon beholding them out of bounds.
Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn.
The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow
and the story unravels, the sunli
ght creeping back
like a song with nobody left to hear it.
ACROSS THE PYRENEES
We had to change—Iberian rails
were a wider gauge. The tricorn hats
of the Guardia Civil glared in the rain.
Their submachine guns glared, and that’s
how we knew Franco was still alive.
The sleepy passengers packed in,
leaned on baskets or thigh to thigh
as steel on steel made a lurching whine
and we were moving through the night,
the Spanish night, the civil war
of books fresh in my memory
and in the looks these faces bore,
till a man whose thin, unshaven face
was wan with sleeplessness pulled down
a bota full of wine and squeezed
a long stream into his open mouth
and smiled, passing the bag to me.
I grasped the full goatskin of wine.
He showed me how to tip my head
and squeeze the skin until a line
of fruit and sunlight filled my mouth
with a sweat and leather aftertaste.
I passed the skin to a young girl
across from me who wore a chaste
black sweater, but drank the wine
in a long, slow, practiced pull
and shook her pretty head and laughed.
The old man called it “blood of the bull,”
slicing slabs of cheese with a knife
while his plump wife busied herself
paring apples from a plastic sack
she’d taken down from the luggage shelf.
These too were passed among us, bread
and wine, cheese and fruit, and I
had nothing to offer my companions
but a word of thanks they waved away.
Yes—it happened many years ago
in the passing dark of northern Spain.
Some strangers shared their food with me
in the dim light of the night train.
SKETCHES IN THE SUN
Folksong (Anonymous)
I kissed red lips and my lips too were dyed,
and the handkerchief I wiped them with turned red,
and the running stream where I washed that kerchief
colored the shoreline far out into mid-sea.
An eagle swooped down for a drink, and its wings
as it rose stained half the sun, all of the moon.
The Laurel (Achilles Paraschos)
Don’t envy me. Don’t envy the laurel tree,
my roots watered with blood and scalding tears.
Only those who never look for me
are lucky, who seek the rose in their careers.
The sick and disinherited I crown
singly, weaving my envy-poisoned leaves,
a life of pain refining their renown.
Only the poets truly win my wreaths.
The Cypress Tree (Kostis Palamas)
I look out the window; the depth
of sky, all sky and nothing more;
and within it, utterly sky-swept,
a slender cypress; nothing more.
Whether sky is starry or dark,
in drunken blue or thunder’s roar,
always the cypress sways, so stark,
calm, lovely, hopeless; nothing more.
The Ship (C. P. Cavafy)
It certainly resembles him,
this small penciled portrait.
Hurriedly drawn on the ship’s deck
one delightful afternoon.
The Ionian Sea surrounding us.
It resembles him. Yet I remember a greater beauty.
He was painfully sensitive
and this lit up his expression.
He seems to me more beautiful
now when my soul recalls him from the years.
From the years. All of those things are very old—
the sketch, the ship and the afternoon.
Lean Girls (Yannis Ritsos)
Lean girls are gathering salt by the shore,
bending to bitterness, ignorant of the open sea.
A sail, a white sail, beckons from the blue,
and what they do not see in the distance
darkens with longing.
September 1971 (Yiorgos Chouliaras)
Summer incessantly flees from open windows
light burns
the room is flooded with butterflies
at such a time he too
was looking for the dead king’s face
in a gold reflection
the boat was rocking
in the mind’s furrows
and the field split in two
where the armored sun’s bright thorns
rose up
the place smelled of basil
maybe this is the message
of the one we are looking for
in the stone, the birds and the ship
Many names from those days
remain unchanged
but we, what do we know
Aσίνην τε—
a word in Seferis
FIRST CHRISTMAS IN THE VILLAGE
It was unanticipated, the birth,
and late at that, stormy and close,
as we were gathered in by the hearth.
Nothing about it called for words,
though the widow had no children
and taught a game with playing cards.
A fisherman brought an octopus
that sizzled on a metal grate
over the pulsing olive coals.
The widow’s father leaned to the fire
and with a dark blade sawed off a leg
and laid it burning on my plate.
It tasted like a briny steak
with tentacles like tiny lips
oozing the savor of the sea,
my first octopus, its brain afire.
And the illicit cards—Don’t tell the priest—
a wink at caution in the game of living.
That night all human struggle ended,
or recollection wants it so.
That night all murders were forgotten
in the salt abundance and the storm
and the warm fire in the widow’s house
when the vast peace was said to be born.
That night I carried a bucket of coals
back to my rented dwelling, wind
trailing the fading sparks behind—
a small fire, for the warmth it made
as the stars held steady in the dome,
and sleep became an open grave.
GIVEN RAIN
Late in these latitudes,
the given rain, hazel and
evergreen by the small roads
where few are traveling,
inwards, indoors, the books
lie open, read not at random
but by dreaming whimsy
like roads in the dusk.
The child who struggled
to write a name and struggled
harder to believe that name
now moves the pen
of the one who has come indoors
and shaken the rain
and left muddy boots on the mat.
The world is wet
and close and the light
is low, the books
glow with a darkness of their own,
the words like rain in the mind.
It is late in these latitudes.
Sleep on, says the hill
of the night and the tunneling road
bent out of sight.
THE NIGHTMARE VERSION
You arrive at a seaside town
and the wind is blowing a gale,
soaking your clothes with rain.
By the quay you cannot fail
to notice a drowned pig
in the sea wrack and gravel,
a man shooing his dog
away from the pale flesh,
and you feel your spirits sag.
The gale-blown rollers crash
on the black piles of the pier
and it seems that every sash
and door you can see from here
is shut against your face.
Only a pint of bitter
in a dim pub solaces
as you steam in the damp air.
The barman dips his glasses,
tells you it isn’t fair
and you wonder what he means.
You’ve come to find a lair
in the kirkyard by the fence,
a grave without a stone,
but the barman’s acting dense
and leaves you there alone
to nurse the dregs of your pint.
You know you know this town,
the pier on the pummeled point,
because you’ve been here before—
a face in the mirror’s glint,
the beer stains on the floor,
bad weather in your blood,
a pig dead on the shore.
DAYTIME
An empty room, the television on,
rooms where the baby’s fed and the vacuum’s run,
then elevators playing CNN,
a silent baseball game above a bar,
amoebic pictures from a distant star,
three models waving hands across a car—
I see these screens and, feeling pixelated,
dust in a sunbeam, so disintegrated
I can’t divine the cases being stated,
wonder if a particle, afloat,
can teach itself to pray, or to devote
its substance to the god of the remote.
TO HYGEIA
Goddess, I have watched your motions gratify the world.
