WALKING THE BOUNDARIES

 

 

I

 

                        This is the season of the scent

                        of cool, smooth stones and warm 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; “All

                        is silence on the other side of the wall.”

            Traffic, even rioting can go on,

            but we hear only silence.  Imagine a swan,

            a lake, another garden and another.

            That is what walls do: invent the other.

                        Education 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 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, 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’s seen

                        in elevators, anyplace where looks

            are barricades and we pull in our feelers.

            Going places en huit clos stops wheeler-

                        dealers, captured in a frame

                        as still life.  Don’t you like your name?

            If not, be sure you’re not the only one

            who needs to hide 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 proclaiming, “Soccer is life.”

                        Or the fault expands between

                        nations or men.  Both swimming teams

            would bless themselves and kiss their St. Kit’s medals

            when we were in school; one always lost.

 

            To fight for one’s own 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 another

                        trusts your choice of what to brew.

            A place that always draws us has a face,

            and it is ours.  Rich neighbors mark their space

            with KEEP OUT signs that tell us, “Touch-me-not;

                        you don’t belong here; I belong

            to nowhere, having 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 expressway.  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 he impressed

            the order he had made there.  When I call

            to mind his white cape cottage, snugged in shawl

            of deepest shade, its black box glossy by

            the fast road’s filthy squall, I think of why

                        we make these tidy plots that nap

along the highway ours.  They put us on the map.

 

                        Or, dispossessed of self-made lien,

                        we choose to enter on a scene

            set for further acts of history.

            What’s harder is to dodge the high-rise den

            in hive aswarm with little lives.  On 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 coon and her brood

            tumbled from the cupboard when I moved

                        into her home.  The light tubes sang

                        when the gale called out to them,

            and always, 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 required to take one’s life

and give it up to some cold specialty-

like trying on a coffin just for size?

If managed lightly, humbly, wittingly,

we must be grateful; thank you, Mr. Roget!

But Arendt’s tight-closed system mapped all ways

            through every country of conception.

            Sympathy was an exception,

            hence impossible- 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.