Poetry that fails to communicate to the reader or hearer is nothing, and poetry that does not sing is something but not poetry.
Unlike paints or musical notes, which remain appearances or sounds throughout the artistic process, words persist in meaning things apart from their appearance and sound whether a poet likes it or not. As a result, the love of words had better keep company with a proper respect for what they say. If the structure and the music of a poem are lacking, then intellectual brilliance will not make it a good poem. On the other hand, it is the duty of a poet to say what he means or at least to mean what he says. After all, words communicate meanings to the reader or hearer. (This is not to say, of course, that a good poet tries for a pedestrian, factual accuracy; poetic license, like allusion, is a useful tool.)
In harmony with this necessary concern for content, my ambition as a poet is to overcome the limiting concept of a poetic subject matter. We have outgrown the notion of poetic diction; we do not speak of sheep as “the fleecy care” or fish as “the finny tribe.” No longer are we allowed to torture syntax in order to fix the meter or rhyme scheme. Obsolete expressions (thee-thou-thy, wouldst, doeth, and the like) are not available to achieve formality the easy way. And yet there still seems to be such a thing as legitimate poetic subject matter. The safest choice of subject these days is perhaps the sensibility of the poet, which unfortunately may lack interest for many others. And as a minor contribution to the art, I avoid poetic punctuation, especially the capitalization of the beginning of each line just because This Is A Poem.
Structurally, I am something of a formalist, little able to sing the lyrics without knowing the tune. Put another way, for me there is no solution without a problem, no answer without a question. By this, I intend no disrespect for the improvisations of free verse. On the contrary, they seem to me the hardest kind of poetry to write really well; a Marianne Moore comes as a sort of miracle.
I choose to publish electronically and to give away a part of my copyright (short of plagiarism or use for gain) in order to encourage the growth of a cultural community. A while back, our great cities were hugely alive and centers of a common culture. A man with a blue shirt and a lunch box could debate with you the merits of his favorite composer (Gershwin, Copeland); a woman in a flowered apron could yell from the fire escape through a mouthful of clothespins her favorite poet (Whitman, Eliot) or prose writer (Mansfield, Porter, O’Connor).
Poetry has become inaccessible to almost everyone now, read by poets and critics and buried in journals which purport to control what poetry should be – much as the New York galleries have controlled visual art to its great disadvantage. In time, donations of copyright and the availability of the internet may provide an expanded forum for poetry and other art forms. Upon that event, we can become a cultural community once again – and even without leaving home for the city. Imagine.
In the meantime, I encourage you to recite, print, copy and distribute my poetry. After all, few writers make a living from poetry. You can only help the cause of poetry, in my opinion, by publishing mine. As Dr. Johnson observed, “Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.” Nonetheless, there are rules.
1. No plagiarism. Do not pretend that you or anyone other than myself is the author of any of my poems. Do always give proper credit to C. H. Connors. Do not change any of my poems – even if your version is better.
2. Do not make money from my poetry without my permission. If I don’t expect to make money from my poetry, why should you?
My poetry is now also available in book form, and books are an irreplaceable pleasure and convenience for you and the friends on your gift list. I invite your book orders, requests for permission, and critical comments at cconnors@midcoast.com or P.O. Box 182, Tenants Harbor, Maine, 04860. Let’s be neighbors in the City of What-Is-Written.
Cary
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
(for Rachel, who dreams in
Brooklyn)
By the park, my daughter dreams
of young firemen who helped her home
with bags and babies – dead
beneath the tower. One said,
“What’s this we hear? You’re leaving us?
Rachel, we’d never flee
this home of ours, no matter what it meant
to live and die like me.”
by tower, park, and spangled sea.
Her train of the fretful living slips
quick-quick, click-clack through the empty station
lighted like a stage
and mobbed with ghosts who played
their time, now mount to a phantom tower.
If well connected, we
may raise these dead, as every generation
turns salvation’s key:
by tower, park, and spangled sea.
Life or death means parting from
the darling hopes and loves we lose;
the sense of loss seeps in
throughout, like sense of sin.
“I take my place among my City’s
types, from body free,”
the legless beggar sang, propped up against
a golden Trumpery:
by tower, park, and spangled sea.
Because the name of life is Change,
all are dying as they live.
We part in pain from love,
with care from work we have,
from work and love we never had,
to come or still undreamed.
Things will or won’t outlast each living soul;
what will is how things seemed:
the tower, the park, and the spangled sea.
Misfit moderns strut their stuff
in carefully preserved quaint towns;
but part of this City’s maze
dies each day, replaced
anew in other forms, the more
rebuilt the same if we –
beggar, fireman, scholar, fashion-plate –
with single eye may see:
the tower, the park, and the spangled sea.
Love is a rule that places us
where we belong in time. The plant
on our tenement window sill,
how a sea breeze fills
a curtain, that rock in the park where you read
and dream and the tower seem
perfected; love would have synchronal things
in timeless time agree:
the tower, the park, and the spangled sea.
Its spirit survives this City’s parts,
how these things mattered reborn in its people:
eyes taking pictures of old
between the body and soul.
Augustine thought death was born of sin,
wrote, “Love means I want you to be,”
a way of seeing and so a way of being,
root and branch of the one tree:
the tower, the park, and the spangled sea.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Please don’t, or not if you value our friendship.
“My love is like a red, red rose.” How shocking!
I mean what I say.
To what shall I compare my twisted daughter,
source of clanging sounds? My blasted
hopes? Her starry hand beached on the strand
of her mother’s breast,
she stirred expensive men to rudeness. So
I put my books away for good,
and cells and symbols poured from our storming brains.
You’ll thank me some day.
For you, dear friend who lost your only son,
it must have been a grief so wild
it burned the world. You could not rebuild;
you walked away.
A simple spider would put on a stone
to bear about in place of young
and charm the desolation of her loss.
You take what you get.
So art can but create eternities,
impervious and odor-free,
while every day steals a child away
and leaves another:
just as fondly cherished, just as feebly
clutched at by compare to lesser
works in flesh and flower, rock and river.
Waste not, want not.
What’s left when all that perishes is gone?
Not even a lion or a rose.
Another world than this one, tiny but perfect,
no one can spoil:
revered delusion, just like all delusions,
stopping time with chatter of beauty,
crafted by proud authors to keep them sane.
No more, no less.
From “cold white peaks” of self-congratulation,
they brood upon the scene below
or, throwing their caps in the air, they prance in step,
crying, “Flimnap Forever.”
Reward of sport, the bonhomie and spoils,
belong to those who play The Game;
and No Girls Allowed except on Sundays.
You’ll be sorry.
But games need only serve and not be true.
Balked by a thousand stony griefs,
I look at men of consequence and see
grooming baboons.
Where there is no recovery for one,
there’s none for her who truly mourns.
Doubt what’s done, what’s lifeless, timeless, prized.
Because, that’s why.
Doubt that the eyes and bones of the Only One
yet sleep in speech of pearls and coral.
Tell the truth, that the best is always gone
and yet to come.
Once quick, it runs to death despite our wish.
Beyond compare to stars and starfish,
every mortal form shall fleeting reign.
I mean what I say.
Welded to the hot South by duty, looking
old among cheap chinoiserie,
Left with a gaudy sun and the smell of cooking,
when will I see
steep streets leaning to the sea,
white town stepping down to quay, to dark
harbor water, verdigris
where brushed by art
of Northern light, pale, pellucid, cool and tart?
The sign of the fish long bartered for a low rapport
with poisoners, my hoard of prix
pointless as life sinks on a lifeless shore,
when may I leave
this still, tideless inland sea
that lifts its dirty mirror to a ravaged
sky, these deadly tenebrae,
when read the message,
find the strait way home and take the wished-for passage?
On the rim where eskers of the West give out
to drumlins marching to the sea,
tried by fire, by ice tempered, now
true North is East.
The sea speeds the subarctic toward me;
swell skips past, flinging flowers, casts
showers of foamy roses; see
how the whales dance,
the seals laugh, the birds shout, my soul cheers before the mast.
I
When nature ruled the world by terror,
we were a puny race.
Small wonder we conceived the error
wind bewailed our case,
cast shepherd and shepherdess in verse and vase
and haunted home with fauns and talking
roots our footfalls set to squawking:
even that half-human cur,
our Caliban constrained to speak pentameter.
Just yesterday, when I was a child
on the lonely road from Pitt
to Torr, pursuit of classics piled
in the lit farmhouse kit-
chen couldn’t charm with civilizing wit
the brute beyond the curtilage, past
sweet laurel drifted through the last
of our sugar trees before a vast
hardwood stretching like the question never asked.
Big cats on the abrupt hills
paced the hard path;
From cozy walls in the hollow’s still-
ness, burst the viper’s wrath.
Old Man Fredsall sledded to town with stacks
of children for a graveyard roadside,
stood in our door til one more load died.
And from our house for all their days
the Seelyes met the stone-cold gaze
of the round pond, deeper than wide,
where their small son, Ethan, slipped and died;
slipped in the dark tarn and drowned in the black, black, blackness.
And we, the dull-eyed, vacant seed
scrambled away as urgently
as turtles newly hatched must,
beating to the sea.
Spring permits belief in free-
dom now that the roads are clear
and the dead can be buried. Let us flee
with automatic speed
from the quickening land that will have us:
from those who lie blinded by the land,
tucked under flowered quilts: from hand
of Fredsall, five miles down
and as many up our hill
over and over with all his chil-
dren, and never mind until
they were frozen logs on the ground:
from Missus Seelye’s memory,
who milked her cows and worked our piece
until the hour she died from
cancer. Just that time,
for once she owned to a foolish pain
and had herself a lie-down:
Traveling light in the city of,
by, and for
the people, I’d perfect blooms above
a concrete soil, cracked from shores
of finding, not the past’s dense floors
of tearing thickets hung with white,
appallingly lovely spiders.
“Nature can suck out the soul through an eye
or an ear; stay
inside your head,” chirped the raptor, high
over quarry. But, “Every kind will pay
the price of its strength,” twin fox heads say,
eyes bright with hate over back of pew
in clever church, “J’accuse.”
The shadow of wings discerned, grim twins,
foreboding and
remorse, recall us to our sins.
We’ve slaughtered all the lions and
their symmetry and leveled the land,
built over our hill and stopped the view
with smut. Places we knew
live on in the mind only, stand
like the dead stars that guide by their true
light. I hail from the Land of Cary. Who are you?
The earth we spoiled will cleanse herself and heal,
purged of the Masterful Ape. Too smart to feel,
too clever to say true, too able to refrain,
we lose by winning. Worship Her whose reign
only the meek inherit; leave the plain
where cranes of black gold genuflect to Mammon, steal
to land’s end where the lighthouse’ metric peal
tolls battles of the sun and moon, and kneel
where breath of cold, salt floods can quench a hectic brain
and bless with sacraments withheld the strain
of my simple, man-made girl’s possessed refrain,
her dear, demented voice singing, singing in the night.
Here, the sea moderates the chills
and fever of the continental reach.
In the beginning, when life inspired my ills
an inland beauty was bitter, idling speech,
summer hotter, winter colder. The sill
of Johnnycake Mountain with its mean extremes
was known as Satan’s Kingdom, and it seemed
the glacier had pressed and stamped each face and will.
Halfway down was an enchanted clearing,
level and still, where the abandoned road
wound past ruined foundations lapped by waves
of roses with forgotten names. There flowed
across the S-curve a shallow brook, and nearing
as I rode that earth-stream point that gave
to right and left at once and back and forth,
nor up nor down the mountain, I came to birth
into a place beyond directions, bliss
as if there were some other creation from this.
I know that time has passed. My hair
is faded, and the drawers are crammed
with old letters. The evening air
is perfumed by other gardens, and
I sit and swipe half-heartedly
at Dickinson’s persistent fly.
When I was no taller than this sea
of flowers, there was a bright green sky
above a rainbow-spattered view;
it was a town of flowers. That truth
now the field is underfoot
is gone with the girl I was and her youth.
Yet though the woods have grown back through
the cast-off harrow, and a tree
now drives the wagon, stone walls hew
these woods to fields of former years.
A vanished glacier plucked the front
from hills and drew the valley’s face.
It is here and not here. Hunt
for it; it is in a special place.
The past and the future are borne in the hour;
those who know when they will die
just have less future in them – for
you can’t step in the same high
water twice, but you can again.
When my arms are full of light,
I can feel instead a warm, round hen,
sleek silky feathers stuffed with life,
with beating and clucking, this ball of meat
bursting with life and eggs. My fingers
in the sun are full of a neat
brown piece of pretty life that lingers,
having perished these fifty years.
(They say the science of the soul
is the new faith; what drives our tears
is never lost, just cubbyholed.
The fallacy was to determine
what should be recalled at last;
the flow of trends secures their preferment.)
Now a dark horse canters past
the flower’s tropism, in and out
of seasons, under bare branches bathed
in rosy light and hung about
with tinkling crystals, through a swathe
fragrant with hay, the footfalls soft
upon fields of childhood’s vanished farm
and down the broad green valley of far-off
school days, clattering over the charmed
pavements of towering cities, a babble
of tongues on the air, whispering like wind.
There falls a stillness after the rabble
of clamorous scenes and stories, skin
cooled as the gravel road underfoot
rises, dips and winds among
the heavy-shouldered boulders, brutes
asleep on the floor of the forest, flung
by the genius of the ice, playing
a game of statues. The soft mane
brushes the backs of my hands, swaying
in cadence with hoofbeats measured refrain,
pounding out numbers, blood keeping time,
its song in my ears as the light fades;
the rider aware alone of the ride
gallops on among the gathering shades.
alpha
Sandpainting in a noisy corner
of my master’s house
breathes hope into the failing dream
I saved from the wide, pale sea
of perished girlhood’s empty and unquiet days,
dream of islands out of time,
play at Cat’s Cradle, certain dances:
piece of string to figure with
in the air,
piece of chalk to guide my steps
til the rain,
toy kaleidoscope to see with
come what may.
beta
Substance and color, form and pattern
spoke not of self
but of our shared disorder and turned
the ketchup into a rose window.
Today, the little filings clump themselves as always
about the object of regard.
(I look, but not at her, not her.)
What on earth did the Great Ones do?
Stirred old chaos,
and shook til the pieces sorted out.
See, dear stranger,
how that which we compose composes
each of us.
In the pause where the year brings around,
a final gush of flowers from the South
scents the breeze, stirs once the will
to love, and all is still.
At last, out of the clear North
of us, after the hazy torpidity, before
the whipping firs and falling water,
falls the light in Autumn.
(for Leah, who wanted a Tomorrow Sandwich and got tomatoes like the rest of us)
A dark age in a man-made forest,
rendered in grisaille. I thought,
in the Old World as a young tourist,
those openings to rooms wrought
in shuttered stone at once could prove
reincarnation and define
those generations. What strange love
will speak for us and draw our lines?
Once I went to Canterbury
on a train to see what the past
looked like. Was it a hut on a prairie
or perhaps a ruin? They asked
my child if she’d eat “to-MAH-to.” “I’d LOVE
a Tomorrow Sandwich,” she cried, enchanted.
At the end of a narrow street, above
the pavement flew the vassal-planted
vaults of blue and gold, free-soared
the vast magic castle. I stood
at the turn of the twisted stairs where warred
the king and his bishop for a sainthood,
folded in the bloody lap
of a famous martyrdom and knew
I had been there before, foresaw the trap
closing around me gently, true
to my loves, but suited strangely, as artists
are, to destiny as duty.
Now I stand stricken, long-lost chartist,
in attics with remembered beauty,
wearing a piece of clothing for each
of my dead friends. After a life
of needful service, who will redeem
this rubble? Who would speak to a wife,
stranded among these scraps and tag ends?
The women who went before would say,
“Waste nothing.” They pieced the castoff ends
of the journey of a lifetime, away
in a covered wagon, into a rule
called “The Road to California.” Speaking
a private language, a troubled pool
of baby things deep on the creaking
boards, this tide of rags, eddies
about my feet in wavelets, laps
my ankles; I feel the beat of the steady
coriolis lapping at
the world and winding time – backward
and forward in creation’s dance.
Hills become islands, rivers run slackward
or to the full, the smoothly slanted
floor of the sea concealed and revealed,
the do-si-do of oceans, march
of mountains in and out, reeling
beneath the earth and made once more.
From fields too wide to span,
the peasant stock from which I came
looked up where towering spires acclaim
the lordly works of Man.
Now gamesters’ hands exalt
the winnings of the peerless bid
and utter rubbish bees outdid,
ignoble stones to fault.
(an old-fashioned dialogue between Self and Soul)
SELF (alto voice):
Lucky traveler, romanced by the road,
the old home can’t get me with its load
of traps for a garden, stinking nets
spread across the threshold: hard abode,
petrified by bitter mist and bowed
like wood bleached by flood and set
down like salted bones. At least, I’m told
one house, mean and cheap, stays on the cold
market for a housewife yet.
CHORUS:
One day, a half a century later, dressed
in rags and leaning on a stick, distressed
soul returns disguised as a crone
and finds the highway come to the house, now pressed
against that driftwood pitched on shingle, messed
by fumes, tormented by crossroad’s groan.
And the spirit sang as jaws of death ingressed
to shear away the face, a monstrous guest,
and leave a dollhouse or geode stone,
split to bare its passages to flow
of traffic, its hearths and scenes of private woe,
its thresholds crossed by proud brides.
SOUL (treble voice):
Rooms that holding birth and death would know,
can count the loves and selves lost by cockcrow,
won by nightfall. Because of tides
that guide our times, row or mow or sew,
sticks and rags are our lives, and tiny clothes
in the attic. You who left its side
are part of its story along with those who died.
It is good to live in a house, long long to bide
its time. The grizzled children know
that it will be there always, if laid by,
dismantled by loving hands that testify
to work of nature that goes slow,
not beaten to obscurity. As I
might put it, “Since our time began to fly,
we’ve always lived at The Landing, though
we had to rebuild.”
SELF AND SOUL (duet):
Who are they to blow
away the rock wrought those years ago
by fire and ice and crush the pride
of a neighborhood that grew like flocks that ride
the civil air together, packs that stride
ancestral freeholds? Hand of Hun,
come out of nowhere as wheel of fortune spun,
set plastic mammoth on asphalt plain to stun
the soul, undifferentiated
death, deformed organ to incubate
‘non-natural persons.’ Those who stay and wait
are homesick for where they are, and those
who left now come from nowhere. To this gross
rebirth, can nature bring a spirit? Close
by fieldlark’s fluid tongue, will still
she find a holy voice to bless, distill
her rainbow rain, sifting crystal spills
of sound all over this black hole’s draw?
(a homily)
One is dying indeed when the secret is out
and the children gather round the bed
each keeping his own counsel.
For a while, friends think they hear our dead
voices in the marketplace, misled
by a strange perfume – then nothing. Long
ago, the unlettered died misread.
Now 1984 has come and gone,
we all do. Let us praise in public song
the mother whose charred body wrapped
her unharmed daughter in her strong
embrace, the one survivor of a trap
where hundreds crashed and burned. The usual pap
in the Yakville Times would have it she land-
ed on her senseless. Why remap
the landscape of our lives, as if to pan
a tasteless rumor? A crossing guard outran
our doomed children’s fate. She flung
them to safety and died where she played her hand,
staking her life for theirs. Curse the tongue
that hushed her fame at once and left unsung
her act as a fool mistake, killed
her memory while it was young.
And what of the guttering hope with blazing will
who shuffled into the freshest bend in the chill
torrent, breaking out of the warm,
smelly void where, often ill,
stooped and toothless, he served a life term
for a brain that we found wanting in substance or form.
The guilt of the warders defended sagely
the unlocked basement door, norm-
ally unused – like him, forgot for an age.
And, “He had the mind of a baby,” to assuage
our pity before we could be sure
compassion was in us. Yak turned a page.
“He was nothing like us, forget it.” Now immured
in our years, we see that we have been on tour
in a time machine. Toward the end,
all we knew has gone, like moor
and rider from a moving train. And then,
we ourselves are context. The man depends
on the mask, flesh shrinking from the brazen
weight of public comment, blends
into the pit, at one with its scorn, its praise
or its indifference. All our earthly days
forever after must be spent
as radiance or scars emblazoned
on confluent worlds. Oh, sing your discontent
in unvexed numbers, lead a cause, invent
the shape of grace – with the purity
of Fra Angelico, who lent
the homely Christian vessel’s history
the glory of his vision, mystery
to fill its images of the dull
and the deformed – the sanctity
of Wyeth’s fishing nets hung spread out tall
in wings to catch for all to see
a light that never shined on you and me.
(upon watching a Wild America program about the color blue in nature)
Form must yield to his better half
in union we adore as beauty.
Sky and water were all color,
formless when the world began,
formless, and the world began
with nothing under heaven’s blue sea,
only water’s sky-blue answer
to the sun’s creating laugh.
While silent giants mildly troll,
like shapes of peace in dreams they slip
from pole to starstruck pole
beneath the sea-dark brim:
their excellence blue.
Invisible, the Texas viper,
whose blue phase is one
with close-held soil of home,
insidious, matures a riper
spit by lying low,
knows how the West was won.
The bluebird of happiness isn’t blue
but colorless. It takes its hue
from sunny days at beck
of penchant to reflect.
Mountain lions are born, we’re told
with eyes blue by default. The will
is gentle, kind and good until
they gain the savage gold.
Most birds sing at dawn or dusk
in blue of day’s or night’s husk,
bound like us by color
to the facts of nature’s order.
str. Give or take a maker,
there must be a Creation.
None but a universal pattern
need leave nothing out,
and leaving nothing out,
will make the right shape happen.
But only a god could know it all,
get it right, and live forever.
We know in part after the curse,
said the partial saint whose mid-life call
came as a revelation. Or –
we get a sporting chance to breathe
a molecule that Jesus breathed,
a chance to know it – never.
And have I said that the universe
and all the art of it must falter
on that day when days there are no more?
ant. Come out and dance with me;
the small can make you free.
Like those who marvell in a garden,
for one burial burn,
safe in the well-wrought urn.
The great require our pardon
for some faults, yet their music lives,
and so do all who join the song.
Rapt in their bond, the mother and child
and Mary, their painter, survive their lives.
The Black Knight warred against the dark,
“After our death that live may we,
Timor mortis conturbat me.”
Handprints on the walls
of caves across the world: the wild
first women piped paint at the hand that gives,
nor knew of the others who left that self-same mark
ep. on every unimagined continent.
(for Elizabeth Drew, in memory of her poetry seminars, 1958-1959)
E agle-eyed Mnemosyne, mother
sweet and fierce, look down on things long gone and brood upon the mountains, stoop
L ike hawks of home to folded
hill where ice-carved tarn gives back the lidless stare of moon, and tower
I n time of youth; lean over sorry farm, cradle dark and
sour of silence, and pass on;
Z oning ever lower, drop in
decades ringed with years, and turn
A long the howling vortex
where I hear a storm of souls,
B lood of elemental
forebears, roar and
E bb; stand still at door.
T he lady white and small in swirls of chair
H olds my hooded heart
enchanted on her ungloved hand; she
D reams aloud in that bright house, set in ordered garden, speaks of
R ush of rhythmic wings that
beat in time with universal song of man and planets; she
E xtends her fragile arm; I climb the painted air, clothed with
hills and all the rivers in my veins;
W idening through realms of
gold, I ride the Empyrean crowned with stars, dreaming other worlds beyond the
rim.
The local gallery, it seems, could buy
the lesser works of masters, better efforts
by the minor painters. Not the sought-for
gleam of treasure in the deep rich night,
this merely smudgy Rembrandt. Here’s the right
Chirico, though, “The Anguish of Departure,”
blocks of sun and shadow harshly pictured,
having more to do with thought than sight.
Approaching in the glare some terminus
beyond which nothing is the same and hope
is gone, how bright is grief, with searching rays
of hot dispair contrasting shades in us
of here and gone, of now and past, before
it all became too late and far away.
O pity poor Peggy Noonan,
Hitched her wagon to a star
And found Disneyland.
Crossed by the gift of speech, she joined a band
of youth in public life, the herald star
and nascent flower of liberal power. Their van
of privileged fellows traveled from here to far,
attractive, able, rich, exclusive, tanned.
A sense of separation spread to mar
ambition like a stain. She left them soon, and
feeling put-upon, she changed her tune.
O pity poor Peggy Noonan,
Hitched her wagon to a star
And found Disneyland.
Changed her tune from classical to canned
because she saw they knew each other. Far
in past of lucky caste, they had a hand
in freedom’s cause or at the least were par
with Kennedys. Their bays and ivy fanned
the smudge of disapproval. See you tar
your betters to look brighter; pray for ruin, and
blame your darkness on an Other’s noon.
O pity poor Peggy Noonan,
Hitched her wagon to a star
And found Disneyland.
Taking a turn, she blamed Them for the land
within they showed her, quite by chance, where bar
the shuddering, gulping swamps of alien sand.
Yet change of party still has left her far
from pleased: success, belonging to the clan.
She said things she didn’t mean; they started to jar.
A slave does not believe what its his doom
and fate to utter. One were the words and the tune.
O pity poor Peggy Noonan,
Hitched her wagon to a star
And found Disneyland.
As always, now this need to reach the outer
brow of land, no matter how far off the seas
across a human habitation clouding
like a rash sweet rills and leas.
Why creep through incrustation
blasting like a dread disease
the face of comely planet? What salvation
waits a half a continent away, until
I dwell in swelling sense of celebration,
standing still at tidal sill
adorned with blue scarf curled and
island centered on it fill
the eye? To end as I began, where world is
small and tide is high, might bless with rising life
the brooding headlands. Ever eastward hurled with
weather, pilgrim wander, wife
to Avalon, to North, by
compass driven where time’s knife
of ice has riven oldest hills on earth. My
merry, wrinkled hills go swimming where I fix
my foot and face the sea. They tumble forth like
babes or wedding guests, round hicks
in pink and blue and mauve. Land
torn from another world, old mixed
in young, new continent with old close-woven,
parent in the child enfolded, who can say
where one begins and other ends? Hills dove and
islands surfaced in the bay.
Now who can say what love has
joined them at the valley, way
of water? How their borders move above as
rise or fall of sea require? What seiche foretells
where soul and body differ? When the cove was
empty as a corpse, caged bell’s
enduring knell sang loudly,
“Alleluia, tide still wells,
Creator and Redeemer.” Voyage out, we
sought to shape the city to our praise and craved
control of nature, whether world without we
mastered, world within we braved.
The voyage back, a random
beauty gives life meaning, saved
from talus on the floor our arts abandon,
read in talus on the shore. Did glacier run
for this, to catch our composition’s ransom,
pour it from the mountain, ton
on ton to pave the verge and
decorate the meadow? One
may feel for painted evergreens and birch in
pallid ledges leaning, longing felt when young
for absent lover’s face at soft hot surging
core from where all forms are wrung.
Consume and keep, we said who
hope to be consumed by tongue
of holy fires and rocked in stony bed to
music of the spheres as part of all we thought,
believed in, knew and were. Before I wed new
forms, for now paths I have sought,
halls, currents blaze in mind the
trails I tread, dear custom-taught,
along the landscape of my soul, that binds a
world to its reflection, saves in little all
it pictures. Now we cling to life in tidal
lands beyond the terminal
moraines, within the shadow
of the raptor. If it fall
upon me and I know it, sinking at slow
passes, bitter-tasting death washes back
black and brackish in the mouth. But sad though
mortal state may be, some crack
in armor of the plane or
passenger, so long as lack
of knowledge of our coming end may deign, our
life flows forth untouched by death, however sure,
however lying soon or late in wait for
us. If vigor, bloom endure,
in what sense are we dying?
For the time allowed, the lure
of place is immortality. In thriving
age, the best places never are much changed.
A hundred years, and all the dear surviving
will be gone, but seas so strange
if not forever, longer
linger. River runs its range
and streams into the sea as if to longed-for
assignation, flings embrace of silver veins
out over heaving darkness. Is it stronger
like Aurelius the Sane
to leave one’s mark and die, or
to surrender on the wane
and gain the general flood? Whatever prior
thought is gone, nothing goes to nothing. Can
the soul by losing self in formless mire
put on power of the land
or quicken with the water?
Trust this spill from awkward hand
of littoral meanings, an unbeliever’s psalter:
blood and sweat and tears will always be of salt.
(in memory of Adolf Homberger)
When we were young and tired, who now at dawn
with industry of those engaged to fawn
hustle forth into the sulfurous airs
of home toward the County Courthouse where
Daddy forged our steel connections, give
the indispensable assistance of
the Good Old Boys from out the Good Old Ward,
the Professor made us feel the hard
condition of our ignorance and then
rejoice in it, promise-crammed, for when
there is much to learn, there is much
to come. The noblest problem’s just a grudge
unless thought suit an action to the word,
returning work to love and love to work.
Down from the dais’ scarred and riven height
he strode like Jove, his raised hands charged with light,
twin bolts to banish ancient darkness’ reign
and quicken pathways of the untried brain:
the line of enquiry and call of roll!
By these two means, he played upon the hall
to sound us out. Our answers stood if true
by antiphon, responsively, in lieu
of lecture, as a witness’ answers tell
the story if one chooses questions well.
Sometimes, he’d mount the rows with martial eye,
each step a beat in time to diatribe,
til awfully at rest beside the peccant,
poised like doom to drop, he left the fecund
subject of the faulty answer, seized
the hapless creature’s notes and as he pleased,
crisply turning over leaves, began
upon the foolish musings of the man.
Yet there was no malice in this man
and no one was hurt. He construed his plan
not to disparage sourly but empower
with the endless value of an hour
(bright hole in time through which a sighted truth
marks for good the landscape of one’s youth)
to the human mind and hand and way
in whose image all the gods were made.
His teaching did not suffer from a lack
of faith in us but was a pious act.
His Austrian fin de siecle pedagogy,
just by way of the redeemer’s habit,
kept the best of the older world, the one
from which he fled, defenestrating from
the loo to undertake that pilgrimage
he came to venerate in middle age
from his exclusive suburb, ducking Gerry
aft his own expensive topiary.
Our final term, he called us “Sir,” heedless
of our genders. Now he gazed in needless
awe at tattered pupils. His the eye
that inward turning sees what bye and bye
will come to be within the fraying case:
the more the wear, the surer wings to race.
He was blind to this blind town and blessed
the ground as if the place that held this guest,
imagine, saved him. His escape, another
law degree, a home much like the other
were his doing, not the sad, bad town’s
for having him. It just let him go on
until it ceased to do so. He left to take
a Chair in the great far city. For the sake
of stubborn loyalty, he would come back
for services of home, for care, to Yak
and revel in his colleagues’ troubled caution,
“A place to come from, not a destination.”
But he had his doctors here, believed
in their good will. He died about to leave
the clinic after minor surgery
and no one knew a thing about it. He
became the evidence in his own case,
admitted by the rule that fate keeps pace
with states of mind that bare intent and faze
the living with a wishful dead man’s gaze
bent on setting fatal course to seek:
“I think that I shall go to Crooked Creek.”[1]
His folly was respectable and killed him.
More, this end was likely; the past had willed him
to deny that other Adolf, simple,
focused, murderous, a man of the people
but hardly for them, driven by one wish,
for the small pond that makes such men big fish.
But his the civil need for the spirit’s home
that leads to blind, unbidden faith in some
ill-suited place constrained to serve belief
in Greater Good or some such grand conceit,
inform with meaning one’s existence, offer
rank due pride because in worthy Order.
His, too, the civil need to quaff the mead
of gratitude in lusty gulps, to heed
the world as he required it be in health,
in order to continue as himself,
to die as live by faith that doctors heal,
lawyers help, and a people’s commonweal
concerns itself with credo like his own:
the soul unique, however poor, alone
or hated for good reason on death row,
perhaps with form and comeliness in woe
for none but pacifists, that alpha and
omega of vocation, solid land
without which we are lost in vacant space,
the moral landscape without feature paced
by Everyman, that literal witness blessed
with fundamental answers strained from texts,
to whom the Law of Averages applies,
thumping the Bible prior to telling lies.
So for relief of Anyman, bright Key,
the faithful said his prayers in equity,
“Before the lord our king where he might be
in Promised Land.”[2] In the wide and searching beam
of reason, right procedure equally
provided was all people’s guarantee.
Surely, matters of life and death, like laws,
are always recognizable, because
the enemy arrives in uniform
and breaks the door down. Careless of the norm,
he mistook his place, imputing goodness
to a world not as he thought or was,
where law is policy and science gain
and the professions all corrupt or vain.
The unpleasant truth is, better people
don’t endure in jungles, snatching keep
where the end justifies the means
to grasp entitlements due fortune’s deans.
The fittest to survive, some killing bore,
is usually fit for little more.
An insect trod upon a man and crushed him.
Still, he blessed the young with vision, touched them.
We see we are our argument and not
our fame, our song, expired on Yak town’s hot,
unwholesome breeze and not the hall’s weak tears,
shed for fun. We are a dance of years,
beaten out on plains of lead and death,
not the gold cast, as we wane to rest,
at our flying feet. So our teacher lends
such gracious means to justify our ends.
Proust was recalled by taste to a vanished world;
for me, the past is opened up by thought
of surfaces I’ve touched: the flow unfurled
of dark road streaming North, of cobbles fraught
with antecedent meanings, brasses sought
in Europe – relics pressed by pilgrim feet.
That flowers sprang where saints have walked, saints taught.
On sounder grounds, the Natives call a weed
“the white man’s footprint.” In between, a cheat
swore looking down became the latter Argonaut.
Imprisoned in the rats cage of success
for failure to do good and love the truth,
we learn humanity disused breeds out.
Scientists who lie to gratify
the common greedy wishes creep from plastic
dens to batten on the blood of mothers;
friends fall to illnesses long since controlled
albeit not for anyone or not
for anyone not in highest power;
nurses lose their civil leave to keep
the loving finger on the beating back.
So many died, so many lost their minds,
so many never grew, that others might
write in mournful numbers requisite
within the grant proposed and save themselves
in simple, rising from each clever challenge
to craft a test to justify the answers
as yet a lower form of life until
a tide of human misery rolls people
blooming in food for Titans, self-made mutants.
The state as Great Facilitator tithes
to float its noisome, poisoned cloud aloft;
after a hundred years, the light in Quincy
that sickened little Henry’s temperate soul
casts a shadow, darkens the Capitol.
Court above, court below, we measure
our future worth by whose rude lust for sway
cancels our dreams of light, whose might says No
to us when most unseasonably right.
Turn from the hazy glare of untouchable
corruption’s endless summer; drive farther up
and farther in, past the sedgy keogs.
But I have heard that the top of the world drops
in dust to somber plains of iron crossed
by stolid streams draining to the Arctic.
Stop in the middle North of the frozen mean,
find the enchanted way and step aside
into a pastel scape of headlands pillowing,
spun sugar clouds of candy rock, billowing
over unstill water burning cold,
the temperature of conscious utterance.
Without rhymes or reasons, girdled by
this richly fringed and jeweled intertidal,
neither land nor sea, stand and see
before you, the domed island at the center
of the vision, garlanded with mist,
if drowned mountain crowned with silver circlet
or planet cinctured in blue space. Where smoke
and roses ride the air, behind you, hear
the galled pines singing, fretted with bitter globes.
Now trim the skill disused to praise again
creation’s bones exposed here, the will of god
the soundless watery surround, ringed round
with currents of her inference we chart
at times in part or not in time, who are
simply less successful than the lichens.
Our laches forgiven, unclean hands new washed,
the bell on running swell tolls our limitations.
REAL PRINCESSES KISS FROGS
I
His ring came home packaged as hazardous waste.
On a good day,
he read Descartes and wondered if we were real,
my destructive husband.
But if he loved to hurt his wife for fun,
is now all one.
And if he judged by his contempt for others,
no longer matters.
Even a brisk, modern sort of undoing,
forbidding wails of protest at the injustice
of it all, may purify, exalt
to martyrdom the waxy figure, carved
and recarved, fitted with sterile, plastic parts.
So modern schoolmarms speak of dying children,
“He has had his trip to Disneyland.”
Some experimental funding paid,
and finally, of course, the coverage,
invoked to render out the last bit
of goody from the hapless case. (Admitted,
all martyrdom must be expedient
to any torturer, a deer to the hunter
chasing his childhood dreams a week a year.)
So he rose again as Everyman,
without peculiar faults, relieved utterly
of personal responsibility,
invested with the wishes of consolers,
a shape to be colored in with their own dolors.
II
“Male and female created He them.”
We remained, but the Garden has darkened:
as rumors spread from empty caves
on the Dead Sea
to my Celtic people
that Eve’s rebellious appetite
for knowledge authored her subjection,
her husband’s discontent,
and the knowing thought of death.
Assumption of guilt is the price we pay
for our illusion of control,
as nature and morality
fall weeping in each other’s arms.
“All flesh is grass,” the Hebrew preacher
gallantly proposed.
“But Eden means our suffering
is wrong, and sacrifice
required to put it right,” breathes soul,
willfully unwise.
III
Hermitage and sacrifice,
the basic drives we call upon,
our backs to the wall, can placate gods
and men and even keep the goblins
on the dark side of the window.
“Je vis comme si,” confessed a bitter scholar,
who saw at last he gave himself away
to live with alien tribes whose faith in magic
he could hardly share.
And if our sister hadn’t died at Aulis,
Troy and all the heroes
had turned to arts of peace.
IV
I still prefer the sail to the landing,
for everyone the self-same ending.
All Moses got was a glimpse,
and that of a barren place.
All rising’s by a winding way;
the switchbacks are essential.
So Eden’s twilight was our dawn.
To know we know sets us apart
from other beasts who put each other
on the plate like the innocent bear,
take a chicken like the forthright fox.
But knowingly to waste, to spoil,
whether the means is a bomb or a lie,
is doing evil since our rise
to grace from mindless life in paradise.
V
Our pets have not the beautiful
and dangerous gift of tongues.
Mea culpa, I have loved
my horses and my hounds
more than my violent husband.
VI
A married woman is a colonized city,
a land under the Romans.
“Render unto Caesar,” and “the meek
shall inherit,” not Caesar’s sons:
the desperate faith of slave and proper woman.
A martyr’s victory of silent stillness,
who never lost because we never strove,
were never wrong because we never spoke,
smacks of sour grapes (Aesop’s or
the Bible’s, take your pick.) And what is more,
to win belief in the impossible
may gain control of the believer’s soul.
So the more unlikely side of the story,
opposed to what we know,
always becomes established orthodoxy:
transubstantiation, metamorphosis.
So marriage goes in the Land of Litotes,
believing way too much in the power of a kiss.
INNER / OUTER
In ninety-six, I read my Christmas books.
Pagels’ inference from Eve compares
Aurelius, depressed quite often, hooked
by duty, destiny, the grave affairs
of those fate calls to greatness, golden heirs
on a forced march downward to the tomb in tune
with Pomp and Circumstance – unlike the prayers
that broke the back of ancient logic, runes
enchanting to the poor, the doomed, and those rough-hewn
by suffering, exulting in the soul’s
equality and everlasting life.
And Gordimer’s heroes, longing to be whole
and crossed by history, must grope through its strife
for balance in a crooked world, for a life
of one’s own between the Dutchman and his victim.
Someone I know became a priest and wife
and scientist, resolving worlds of dictum
in herself; in Gordimer’s phrase, she lives through the skin.
THE WAY TO LARISSA, A DIALOGUE
(Yakville Housewife Meets Xantippe)
Y.H.
“Let me introduce myself, an older woman,
having been Successful lucklessly enough.
I could only be a bimbo, soccer mom, or
old maid teacher, tried them all by turns, the stuff
and very source of separation. And as I age,
every second shopgirl tries to cheat me. Dozens
of years of days of hours consumed without a trace
but for these mean and caustic ashes, doing husband’s
cooking, cleaning, shopping, weeding, washing, lying,
here I lie – buried in a standard case.
A paperback analyst saw woman’s soul as dying
after needful generation of the race,
since by her nature she can never emulate
a Tribal Chieftan, Elder Statesman, any Public
Type of the Mature, Accomplished Figure. Great
with pregnant dreams, I find I stand like those stilted arctic
villages, that last by keeping the chill that upholds them.
Surely, I must share the patron saint of both
the scholar and the shoolboy, pedantry and doldrums;
be good all year, pretend belief, and get the gold.
How I wish I were the Truthflower, turning dead
and white if harvested for any domestic table,
lost its heavenly blue. It won’t let us pretend
and savor its downfall.”
XAN:
“Up from the noisome fog of my fable,
I was there in the broad hall with your high school suitor
in the days when the steady boyfriend collared his girl
by
the back of the nape between his thumb and forefinger, herding
her along, her face in shadow – for you all
looked down. What was the dark thought behind that down-
cast face? Perhaps the alien growing in you, taking
parts against its mind, suspected with a frown
that life is not a play nor goodness skill at acting.
Don’t you recall those perfect-seeming English ladies,
cycling out thrice daily for an egg, a bun,
a cutlet, irreproachable in tweeds or maybe
summer shirtwaist, de rigueur the corset, dun-
toned Oxfords (two-inch heels), the proper stockings, hat –
such visions of sturdy, upright posture, poised to backpedal,
acting much to their advantage, yet they had
less freedom moving through their world than these worm gatherers
with their flags and girlie stickers, not to mention
unwashed cowboy way out West with super hat
and duper buckle making us think of him as handsome.
Hat or flag’s low dues to pay. But a caveat –
better be a partial mismatch with your world
than render everything you make of self to Caesar.
To navigate at all in climes of time, to hold
some course through currents of belief and social weather,
is to run counter to the tidal step and gesture.
Dancing on the offbeat won’t win Belle of the Ball,
but homage to convention can’t make you successful;
it can only make you more conventional.”
Y.H.:
“You mean – if you cannot join them, lick them? Are you mad?
The dying Rosalind Franklin’s Nobel Prize was handed
to a callow boy who judged her not so bad
if only she’d worn lipstick. Rachel Carson’s passion
for the planet was impossible to pundits,
since her only children were adopted. Do
you really think that lipstick or gestation undoes
gales of clever, willful malice? Is the truth
that even tokens are beside the point although
expedient on some occasions? But our hushing,
full defeat is easy for the wicked, so
inclined, or just indifferent. And all our rushing
to and fro has no effect upon the pendulum
in the passage, slicing off even pieces of life.”
XAN.:
“What ought to count is how you get there in the interim.
Daphne sacrificed her form to own her life;
Apollo could catch and keep and own her only as
a laurel crown. So they could have what they most wanted,
not their way of wanting it. Suppose he had
a future as a poet, and she, the huntress hunted,
would have made a wretched mistress. Voluntary
acts, by choice or not, make character, are what
we become; the bashful, courteous murderer was very
much a killer; the respected wife-beater was
a brute; to build the ramp to Massada was the act
of a slave, however to be pitied. All your truly
well intended works unite the matter and
the essence, soul and substance, in one single body,
making you whole as if incarnate in a world
of shades upholding brazen masks. But what the next Dark
Age
will make of you I cannot say. antio ”
BODY AND SOUL AT THE MET
It takes a pagan head to
make flesh speak,
to mold or
paint the thought itself:
as “Mourning Woman,”
carve the shape of grief.
And this “Etruscan
Mars” himself
is framed as
weaponry propelled
by his own warrior
stance. Now see unbridled
horse and
naked rider meld
in a newborn thing, the “Horseman” of its title.
These
lifeless wooden virgins, though, are idle,
posed with old-young
babes against a ground
cluttered with symbols:
orthodox recitals
of the doctrine of the
soul unbound.
So at the thought of
death, we prise the mind
from
works in clay mortality has signed.
CREATIVITY
God creates alone what passes;
we make God and all the other
Verities of an eternal nature.
God creates alone what passes,
ever-turning, none alike,
each matchless form a moving stream of life.
God creates alone what passes,
our demotics not it’s wonders,
bodies running on like song of waters.
God creates alone what passes,
quicksilver flashings under sunstar:
one course run, the difference forever.
God creates alone what passes;
we arrange dried Everlastings.
ODE TO ROSALIND FRANKLIN
“with love and squalor”
Had ever Science more than one
true love, the bride that nature won,
worshipping his truth
with all her starry youth?
Her eyes were first of all to see,
her hands to capture faithfully
the chain of being’s face,
the spiral stair to grace.
Self-slaughtered with much imaging,
she sank untimely in a ring
of paunchy pirates bloated
with advantage, gloating
thieves and warlocks, hear their canting.
They died as men by sycophancy,
their meaning of life self-looted.
She lives on where the truth is.
THE OLD GUIDE
(for my cousin, Frank Connors)
Some things never changed,
my tourists working hard
for their two weeks a year
out of the private yard.
A mountain in a green sea,
an island in a blue:
it was there for them
where the roads don’t go.
I could show them hope,
the journey into self
from lives too great to bear,
from lives too strait to wear.
With places never went
and people never knew,
they found themselves familiar
as if had been there ever.
The way we warm to towns
with one of everything
and all in harmony,
seasoned and unspoiled,
or how we give our all
and serve the least of Man
so what is fundamental
in our nature wins,
we find what’s truly needed
when the junk is gone.
All is there that matters:
fire, water, stone.
WALKING THE BOUNDARIES
I
This is the season of the scent
of cool, smooth stones and warm quick flowers;
fog takes color to a higher power.
As spring moves North, it’s time I went
to walk the boundaries and find the markers.
Underfoot the land holds harder;
I can shoulder tools and all
and not bog down on the long haul.
I’ll paint the gates eat up with salt,
though all my labor lacks the power
to change what’s lost if only by default.
Still, this coating colors and conserves what’s ours.
Now a frog plucks an untuned string;
listen for the tree speech shouted down
by history. And consider the artful things:
estranging fences of the mind, the battlement’s frown.
II
But boundlessness is nothingness;
it is death, the loss of self,
identity, and meaning and a wealth
of borders we recross and bless.
They mark off safety from uncertainty,
and sameness from what hope there be,
the past from future, freedom and
confinement, ends, beginnings, lands
of What-There-Is and How-It-Is.
There must be a place from which we turn
and we must know just where that haven is,
some native country of those who died and the way we were.
I wonder what the landscape of the soul
might look like. Certain painters have invented
horrors, attics littered with broken toys
once dear to someone. May mine seem this home of my contentment.
III
Auden knew about walls, wrote “All
is silence on the other side of the wall.”
Traffic, even rioting can go on,
but we hear silence. Imagine a swan,
a lake, another garden and another.
That’s what walls do: invent the other.
Learning uproots us from our gardens,
and advancement often comes
as exile. Some decide who we
had better (or else!) pretend to be
or lock us out for who we really are;
a culture like an aggressive growth chokes what was ours.
Or layer enclosures one above another
by some hierarchy, those above
believed too easily, and yet those others
lower martyred as outsiders, but nobody loved.
IV
The sourpuss pose of teenaged Marines
stares back at us in any box
we’re bunched in: subways, busses; it is seen
in elevators, places where looks
are barricades and we pull in our feelers.
Going en huit clos stops wheeler-
dealers, captured in a frame
as still life. Don’t you like your name?
If not, you’re not the only one
who hides because he cannot run.
Bounded like a chessboard, games we play
say, “I am safe and sane like you, not stowaway.”
So join the club; a membership includes
scapegoats to order when too much goes wrong.
The better climbers reach the top as Judas
sheep, survival threatened such that self is the toll.
V
At the station, once I saw
two young Muslim sisters, heads
heavily swaddled. Below, the elder yawed
about in skin-tight silks and suedes.
The younger, innocent, was still cut off
at the neck by a shirt that read, “Soccer is life.”
Or the fault expands between
nations or men. Both swimming teams
would bless themselves and kiss their medals
when we were in school; one always lost.
To fight for one’s city was held just
by the ancients; but loyalty will lose her virtue peddled
as the property of state. Still free
from nationhood, all Europe once was bright,
traversed by flowages of boundless peoples
til a darkness brought the wrong of being always right.
VI
I think that places have a temper
very much as people do.
One burns witches, but we find another
trusts our choice of what to brew.
A place that always draws us has a face,
and it is ours. The rich mark their space
with KEEP OUT signs reading, “Touch-me-not;
you don’t belong here; I belong
to nowhere, with nothing that can move
you but the power to deny.”
When I was young in Beantown, the old black guy
across the way raised up a glory of roses, proved
from sooty soil within the chainlink fence
of his landlord. He gave tours to passers-by;
“This is Lincoln, this is Peace.” He’s died,
his garden under the parkway. What he gave, we possess.
VII
Once as I rode North through the mess
of shapeless suburbs, I glimpsed a man
engaged in sweeping all around the plan
of his place as if by touching to impress
the order he had made there. When I call
to mind his cottage, snugged in shawl
of shade, its black box glossy by
the fast road’s filthy squall, think why
we make these tidy plots that nap
by highways. They put us on the map.
Or, dispossessed of any self-made lien,
we choose instead to enter on an antique scene
set for further acts of history.
What’s harder is to dodge the high-rise den
in hive aswarm with little lives. Through treed
estate or storied part of city, a trust descends.
VIII
In the cabin I loved best,
there were no finished walls and ceilings.
Useful beams and pipes turned to the guest
a rugged, much-loved face’s healing
look. A mother raccoon and her numerous brood
tumbled from cupboards when I moved
into her home. The light tubes sang
when the gale called out to them,
and always, salt on everything.
Oh, where did nature’s and our world
begin and end? Surely, not with a wall.
And what of that island place whose ample tides can bring
a deeper understanding of transition?
We, remote as continents, discuss
how much gets left behind by repetition –
on the edge, where only birds cry to us.
IX
What courage is needed to take one’s life
and give it up to some specialty—
like trying on a coffin just for size?
If managed humbly, wittingly,
we must be grateful; thank you, Mr. Roget!
But Arendt’s system mapped all ways
through every country of conception.
Sympathy was an exception,
hence forbidden - where only it
would do. The limits worth their keep
are there to be transcended; poetry
that breaks the language barrier says more than it meant.
Yeats’ dancer dances, sheepgut undergoes
unchanged that change to music contemplated
with passion by the Bard, the new estate
springing from another look at what we know.
A WINTER’S TALE
or
What common things rejoice the old or young,
the rise or setting of a moon or sun,
the lyric chime of bell in fog or storm,
blanket of snow or meadow-flower bloom,
the wonder of departure and return,
of tinsel vines, glass fruits in the cold of the year,
season of artifice, lighting the dark and the sere.
“I see this is the time the unjust man
doth thrive.” But virtue’s cultivation prunes
away unruly freedoms, works a ban
on light and color, fruit and flower, ruins
that logic of redemption out of tune
with just deserts and fair rewards of strife:
If life holds seeds of death, might death hold seeds of life?
WOMEN OF THE WORLD
Why should Renaissance paintings always pose
madonnas out of doors, sheltered at most
by pergola or porch? Bellini’s owes
in part her strangeness to her throne as outpost.
Far without a city like a toy,
walled and empty, she lays out her boy,
whose livid looks already seem brought low,
over her lap. She draws back in woe,
their only neighbors fated snake and bird
by man’s first disobedience cast as foes.
The future’s here with her; as if they’d heard,
carpenters, intent, rush to and fro.
A modern sovereign rose to single rule
from outcast station as a prostitute –
so courtesans excelled in thought’s pursuit
as reigning intellects of ancient schools –
quite impossible to picture her
as framed within a Dutch interior.
We must image as beyond the pale
a public destiny for womankind.
Attempts to place her in our order fail;
the virgin is all mother, the whore all mind.
OLD APPLE TREES
For me more than any tour abolie,
these bits of broken orchard now surviving
in unlikely places are my continuity,
a hope time past as yet may be time living.
Married tree couples now are drowning in woods.
Or tipped this way and that, they peek and reach like odd misgivings
from the waste places, from ditches by roads,
in tatters, ancient refugees from orchards
fractured by improvements. Speaking of much, they encode
another time: left to fight a rearguard
action, a sunken past by marker buoys
made manifest, or as if the present had rough holes in its floorworks.
The past is another country, buried like Troy
beneath a layer of meaning, where we lingered
oh so long as young and comely with our pretty toys.
It was kind to us; we thrived here, singing:
in different sunlight, under another starlight, by other seas.
SONG TO ANOTHER CAROLYN
Say, “To mend this world is [her] religion”
(so to paraphrase Great Penn),
to praise and pray to l’ange humain,
when like Zola she gazes on the Stygian,
when like Gorky plumbs The Lower Depths,
nonetheless to raise a gaude
to wealth of life and good embodied,
though greed has done the dirty, and poverty has wept.
Not the artist’s job, to juice you like a fruit,
squeezing tears with happenings
billed as, “powerful, compelling, dissolute.”
Tragedy is fated, given men and things;
so should be the odd reprieve.
Old Man Bean, expiring with his sentence, wrings
out breaths without the drug in prison he received.
Schools said to help Little Girl Bean
take her shining genius for deficiency.
But starving Baby Bean skips his sad death scene,
laughing as pathos succumbs to sense.
Mom discovers food banks; so, the gods intervene.
III
And what of Asphalt Man, whose work it is
to tar the landscape over?
His suit and tie, his hair, his eyes,
his thoughts are asphalt-colored.
A tempting target, with his new-built villa,
but who would stoop to fire?
His bride is paralyzed. Was he the driver?
Somehow he must pay: anxious, bumbling, mired.
Honest and honorable author,
make rich and poor kindred, show at a glance
all suffer from that which makes man suffer;
serve truth, triumphant enemy of chance.
PARTIALITY
A god demanded death for
Agamemnon’s daughter,
slaughtered by her father
so a war could happen,
stopped the sacrifice
of Isaac to emplace
Avram’s patrimony,
three faiths of pain and waste –
no room for many women,
many men of reason.
Gods have manly interests.
SONG OF LOT’S WIFE
On the shore, the bones of the world
are scrubbed by time and its story.
Creation’s face beams back at us,
our ripples of loss and worry.
If taken from this radiant home,
I’d look back to turn
into one of its pillars of stone,
so the smile could be my own.
Our science has achieved its opposite
and taken us down a peg or two.
Our animal nature has come unglued
from ghost; we’re Things equipped with skills and wit.
Once we had a soul because we thought
the world was also made in part
of spirit. Taught by story, art
and church, we went about the earth in awe.
Those who went before believed with ease,
an opening between two roots
gave passage to the underworld.
Enchanted bridges spanned the burning seas
between defeat and safety, peril and hope.
Of host of angels, fairy host,
song sifted from the sky or rose
in mists of heavenly vapor from the moat.
By silver water, fruit of gold bowed low
to free the spellbound prince from form
of tree or beast, or keep from harm
the peasant girl before whom all will bow.
What shall we do with all our magic now?
Our wands are turned to sticks to beat
each other off and school belief.
Once, our gift of meaning to our world
gave back the gift of meaning to our days.
But
even still, imagination
lets
all understanding happen;
even then, curiosity was praise.
AGRIBUSINESS,
a pastoral
The milk
production farm,
a
thousand cattle strong,
is biologically controlled by its design.
A
workforce in white coats
and
rubber gloves devotes
its anxious care behind the No Admittance signs
to
newborns in their cells.
Our
tour guide proudly tells
how Baby gets colostrum fed by intubation,
then
is bottled like
a
Skinner-managed tyke.
In a grass-free lot with row on row of sheds,
each
hut has its growing cow,
chained
to it like a hound;
unlike a dog, she’s never entertained and petted.
Growth
accomplished for
this
lot, their bits of earth
are scraped away by ‘dozers and replaced with clean.
The
move to an adult barn
ties
the milker down
to stanchions for her life; there are no pastures
here.
The
monstrous udders of some
are
seen to brush the ground.
“It’s all about production,” our modern Virgil
boasts.
“From artificial insemination to the market,
nothing is wasted.” Even the dead make saleable
compost.
A cow is melting, wrapped in her sawdust sheets and
blankets,
she and her bedding becoming one. “There is no smell.”
One of the ladies asks how she died. “Calving,” he tells her,
then translates, “She died giving birth.” A murmur
of dismay, a keening, breezes among the women,
recalling all the times it could have been oneself,
how close one came with this child or the other to
death.
“A loss;” he adds, “A fresh cow’s worth a lot of
cash.”
Only
visitors from another world
could
feel for the poor lost cow-girl, her pain and failure,
for
to allow her to be fully creature
will
allow her to be somewhat human.
One
is put in mind of those Egyptian
gods
with animal and bird heads, only
the
body in man’s image to make them holy.
Shall
we call her Sylvia,
who
in life was just a number
stamped upon her ugly regulation earrings?
Granted,
the better people tired
of
executions, cockfights.
But
say, what peace is possible
between
the hammer and the forge?
THE VIA NEGATIVA
(“It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room.)
The statue of a mounted Antony
at Piazza del Campadoglio used to have,
they say, a barbaric figure sprawled, debris
beneath the conquering hero’s trampling hooves.
Today, that vanquished form has been removed,
defeated by the modern sense of tact.
But still, the horse is smaller than the rider –
this piece of Caesar’s arrogance reminder
of the ghost of broken native stranger –
just another allotrope of pride.
O may not ekphrasis of that negation
serve to deny our works of mundane murder.
Giving pride of place to such omission,
by an apophasis show The Master,
he before whom slaves and spoils parade;
nor forget the fasces head the pageant.
Spirit of the exiled, shunned, betrayed
we patronize with pity, the unassisted,
grant that we may bring to mind the missing,
and guard us from unsuitable loves and hates.
YES, VIRGINIA . . .
When Virginia came calling and found a letter
in her hand upon a hallway table,
she saw how like a dove the mind was able,
taking flight, to rest elsewhere unfettered.
Because rebirth may be important
if no justice and no luck,
there is a curious rejoicing
when our health rebels, each mordant
sign observed by flown soul, voicing
freedom from the carnal muck.
At last, we find what sort of spell
had brought to life the lifeless golem,
learn at last if lean we must
wholly on the totem –
or, this last best part of us,
by making sense of body thus,
is sent upon another errand,
meant for a separate breath.
The clock beats out the life of its mate, the heart.
But on the way, a word disturbs a pebble
from the spacious wash of recollection;
from the ordered life breaks out an art.
It opens ways impossible to chart:
dimensions of design, belief, connection,
transformation, memory, perception.
The mind may rise like the sea when it departs,
trailing sinuous veils, and takes to the air
and presses inland from its element.
It comes to dance upon the shore, aware
of silent music past our discontent.
We sleep as slaves of time; the clock takes over.
When we wake, we wake another day older.
ON THE EDGE
The children were pleasantly surprised
that it grew never really dark upon the water.
True darkness, the perfect absence of light,
was left behind us with the safe interior.
MOTHER OF THE MUSES, HEAR OUR PLEA
The silver sound of a bell is clearest
sound in deadly tempest. Chime
of dreaded tocsin, tolling our time,
is calling us down from all held dearest
through strata of past striving, seas
of self, and deeps of Memory.
GHOSTS
I
I have reached a quickening age
when my darling dead
begin to fill the active air
in bright, essential shades
like finches swooping and darting everywhere,
like Giotto’s stubby angels.
2
For a true vacation, go
into a bygone life.
Hermit-crabwise, come to know
its shell – and then to see,
to feel – to cough at the Paxtons’ smoky fire,
or have dear Jane to tea.
3
“And did those feet in ancient times
walk upon England’s shore?”
They say a North Sea fish still mimes
St. Peter’s thumbprint, marked
by the Fisherman as the one in ancient lore
of another miracle worked.
4
The Star of Mary’s built on five
like creatures of the sea.
Was she “Miryam” when alive,
like oceans, “bitter, salt?”
And did an unknown pagan tongue between,
moved by magic, talk?
5
And how did the Biblical account
of Jesus’ siblings survive –
and Peter’s marriage – evading Councils,
their doctrines by which we live?
We are heirs to histories that thrive
if lost, undone, outlived.
6
Even language allows its use
within unbending laws,
but when it uses us, a Muse,
the limits fall away.
To serve as oracles must give us pause;
if instruments, who plays?
ELEGIAC
(Swing it like Simonides.)
'
'When Pony 'died, I saw 'Eagle fly 'low and 'slow in for'mation
'circling 'over 'her, 'hail and fare'well in 'one.
'Suddenly, 'cruel 'arctic 'air felt 'warm and a 'deer stepped
'out of the 'woods, her 'twin 'fawns at her 'side in the 'snow,
'staying with 'us as per'haps she 'stayed in the 'barn with the 'pony
'on the 'doe’s longest 'nights 'all of that 'terrible 'year.
'We were 'not to 'know such 'things, the 'pony’s 'people,
'only to 'learn at the 'end 'she had a'nother 'life,
'part of a 'natural 'order, with 'friends in the 'forest and 'skyways.
'Now my 'horse always 'sleeps, 'and my 'sheep, by her 'grave.
NEWFOUNDLAND SUITE,
A SONNET SEQUENCE
FIRST STOP, NORTH SYDNEY
Our Appalachian slopes are also floor
beneath the sea that leads to Labrador,
to Newfoundland and on to Ireland, Norway.
At last, we come to do the Trail in our way.
Now it begins. Soft night will come to mask
these asphalt acres overlooked by neon,
strobing, probing: “Destination
it urges, du navire est Port Aux Basques.”
Launched from our accustomed contexts, we
quite suddenly are simply who we are,
exalted in still streams of pilgrims by
the joy of embarkation. Spilled on high,
light swims in colors over rain-slick seas
of tar, and bluegrass ripples from a car.
I want to jump our truck and dance around
to celebrate this fair expectancy
illuminating savage desert ground,
a welcome and a welcoming esprit.
CHOICE
a sonnette
Motoring audibly with a compulsive sway
in the titanic fist of the black unfathomed sea,
committed to our dark uncertainty,
the risk already taken, we have no say
but faith in strangers not to make at our cost
the important mistake. Can arrival never be,
or any new thing, unless control is lost?
THE DEFENSE
On arrive. The ascending road from the boat
is carved like a scar in the sky-high face
of a flat-topped cliff with the port at its base,
crammed at land’s end as all the remote
and outposted towns will be, like a float
of boxes scattered aground in the space
between the sea’s edge and the rock’s embrace.
The sheen on the cliff’s face is like a coat –
of foil, then the sudden hills come like bowls,
cones, tables, set down on a rug of peat,
the broad bog embroidered with sequin pools.
Why this rubbish of household conceit!
O, the Glacier has been here so lately it hurts
my heart, and I am afraid and I run –
to commonplaces, covertured
by kitchen matters, a disturbed
mother armored to avert
confusion with her wooden spoon.
GOD IN GROS MORNE
Then up, up, up the coast toward the top of the world,
to embrace at my age the absolutely new.
The Labrador’s flag of white and green and blue
must charm as meant with images unfurled
of snow and trees and water. But here is hurled
the mantle’s moony rock. What power threw
these sterile slabs of mountain, what force drew
the fiery shades that frighten, from under the world
the shapes that shock, these emblems unfit for banners,
these mesas with corroding orange slopes
sliced off of Hell by Armageddon’s Planner.
The guts should not be seen, stones green as hopes
turned red at touch of air like clotted blood.
“These are my thoughts, which are not your thoughts,” says God.
A NAKED TRUTH
Remember how in Oxford the past went on?
Deep and mighty works of Man survive,
an outflow breaking from its time, alive
on its own terms, into a future sun.
Viewed from a distance, the ages of the earth
march stately, masked by strata of man’s work.
But here, the life, health, aging of the sphere
untouched, becomes uncomfortably clear,
revealed as a rapid downhill clatter to rubble.
The land is new and changing fast, the troubled
land is born and dies. See how it is born
unclothed, as yet infertile. I’d much rather
plot a book, than know how these my bones
shall turn to stones and flesh to land and water.
GOD AND SIR WILFRED GRENFELL
The famous savior of an obscure people,
preacher, doctor, public leader, made
a Savior in his image, to whose trade
as Blessed Carpenter he raised his steeple.
So, the playing fields of England beat
from somewhat unsuccessful youth, complete
and self-made fin-de-siecle Superman,
adventurer in quest of roomy land
to hold his grand ambitions, New Found Land.
He gave to it a hospital and schools,
an orphanage, a co-op to displace
the Company’s oppression, built a base
of volunteers from around the world. No tool
of a Victorian God could turn his hand
to more, his match to this hard place unique.
Always to him the sinful were the silly –
shiftless slackers fuelled by flower power.
He preached a God who in his famous hour
made doors and windows fit without a squeak.
Not for him the Lord who considered lilies.
THE ENDURING UNPOPULARITY OF LADY GRENFELL
I
Was it the Doctor or his wealthy bride
who made the wedding wait upon the mansion
in this plain land of calloused helping hands and
grateful survivors, self-taught and self-made?
A fundraising tour gave rise to the storybook
romance on shipboard. He always told the truth:
without her, the Grenfell Project would have failed.
For her part, when she took the wedding veil,
she put on her husband’s ambition like a habit,
labored in his works, served hosts of guests
and wrote his thirty books at his request.
Push a button at the Centre, learn
her housework suffered, the official word
on her achievement, mean and British-ish.
II
At once too strange and too conventional,
her great mistake – lacking his chances to be
one of the boys, with sailors braving the Sea
of Labrador – was to fail to be one of the girls.
His rise to greatness was grounded on the downtrod,
so he lived their lives and swam and fished
and preached their earthy fundamental wish
for betterment, and they floated his vast imago.
But she imported the ante-bellum way
of her father’s South and farmed her babies out
for feeding, made servants of her neighbors, flouting
large-hearted customs of those whose liberty
depended upon the sharing of what they had.
It all went to show that they had nothing to add.
GOOD MEN DON’T MAKE FOR GOOD SAGAS
(Viking camp, St. Anthony, NF)
Happy the land Where planting and judgment
Ripen in quiet, Mind-sown order.
Ever is tragedy, Death, unintended –
Loss of crops, Fall of children.
No great name Tramps the page.
So old Iceland, Holding all equal,
Cast out its killers. The outlaw Grettir
Circles his country From cave to cave,
Forever neither There nor gone,
Peripheral figure To shore and water,
Inner, outer, Self and other.
The banished Erics, Red with man-blood,
On the edge, Less map and compass,
Cling to the North Atlantic rim.
OUTPOST
I
An outpost was built from selves, self-made, not heir
to Roman invaders, despoiling for Fatherland.
The cast-offs of an age, like Rome that bid
self-sacrifice to Empire, just jumped ship
or somehow washed up on their destiny
to live by one law: help one another or die.
For the first time owners, they put on the place they
mastered like a garment, and it became them.
What one could do raised up the self reborn,
the carpenter he who best could tease a home
or stroke a boat from the poverty of the grove.
Fishermen were essential, and a healer.
One might be called to preach or serve as teacher,
or mother of many and founder of her people.
II
For us, the Good Life makes of virtue a past-
time. We are parallel climbers, not a web,
striving to an artificial end
and stranded each alone in a terrible waste.
Those who before were kept in their place, by binding
together made by hand a place for them.
You would stake your life like them for the dream,
all risk and hardship worth it, of your finding
like the wished-for gem in the stony stream –
Your Genius! the resounding village name,
the valued character you were meant to be,
your simple actions future legends, fame
spreading through the woods and over water
and down the generations as forever.
A REAL PLACE
I
(somewhere near Bar Harbor, Maine)
Difficult and uncertain to find True Land:
perhaps that barren, strewn with boulders, can
be saved for a time, or that erratic the size
of a barn’s too hard to crush and truck for the price.
These
woods are grown-back farmland, the farmers gone
to pre-fabs out on the public highway, past
our
Keep Out signs -- now gardeners, cleaners, nans –
displaced like the earth and stones the ice laid down.
And we are the homeless, lost in paradise,
on a loneliness of roads, private, leading
each to a costly prison, sweet, contrived,
architect-designed, and nothing-meaning.
Clowns and jokers all, like Falstaff, lying
in a slum, we’ll “babble of green field,” dying.
CODA: When we must say goodbye at last,
no bulldozed and replanted tracts
will live so lovely in the mind
as that lost land we strove to leave
behind.
(NF and Labrador)
This landscape has defended itself;
no former empires worked the land.
It is unworkable, hard strand
between the sea and deep-walled shelf
of vast interior tableland.
At intervals were struck from the ledge,
by a hard life rubbing on the edge,
the tiny outposts that still stand
like lights that guide to the spirit’s frontier
where public and private blend without strife
and the place and the people are there as one,
white in the North like the frost rings of stone.
It was an artist who cried out in tears,
“Goodbye to Greenland as if to life!”
IMPLIED WEATHER
The silence of the long way North tells stories,
signs and symbols of life along the road
in cottages hauled on shingle beside their dories.
Drying teepees of stunted spruce encode
the coming winter where no hardwoods grow,
a family’s name on each precious tower of fuel.
The imported gravel of the roadbed does dual
service as garden soil in which to sow
food in this barren land, the root crops that keep.
Tall saplings are lashed to useless four foot posts
provided by a far-off State to mark
the road in snow to ten feet, twenty, deep.
But for now, the summer sun along these coasts
shines merrily on each tidy potato park
and pretty pygmy spruce trees pasted down
by an absent wind against the roadcut’s crown.
A TENT IN LABRADOR
With just a modicum of help from Bean
and the Province, the tent is up in Labrador.
I had a good night, cozy in a storm,
lulled by thundering surf not far from Green-
land. I rose and washed in it. The undertow
threw me over and rinsed me well, and I shared
with my giggles in its roars of laughter, dared –
this place in eyes and ears and all over – to know
what creatures must learn: what a place will truly require.
And we, the alien race, would rather be
anything but helpless. Alone in the wild,
still searching the globe for our spirits’ home, we see
we must be one with the world around us to find
engagement with its meaning and peace of mind.
The Labrador is a spirit world, stripped
of flesh and trappings, polar in its extremes,
a place as it was made. And so it seems
to stand in praise of sacred authorship.
Is its essence visible by our inner light
(as some have held that poetry beats with the pulse),
or is there some racial memory history slights
of a Stone Age disagreeable to monks
and so unpreserved? I have no Roman past,
so putting away society and culture,
I listen with an ancient disused sense for
ancestral voices and drink of iceberg water.
With this communion, I feel on my tongue at last
air breathed back thousands of years, burst free and re-enter.
THE WIND IN WRECKHOUSE
Across the two-lane road drives a special wind
this place makes just for highways, the kind of wind
that happens when opposing forces meet:
steadily pressing ever more, it repeats
“OUT -- OUT!” Nowhere to go between
the sea and the moor in Wreckhouse, the only road
a deathtrap as wind tops a hundred fifty. Routine-
ly the station warns: seek shelter, stay off the road,
its voice a modern stand-in for native foresight.
Amundsen learned from the folk what he needed to know:
snow houses warmed by body heat and a forthright
little boat that skipped among the floes.
The others before him had died by battering at
the weather with battalions. Their juggernaut
assaulted -- and fell still in the crushing ice,
where only love would do, the love of place.