Collected Earlier Poems (4 page)

Now take this fellow here

Who is about to find

The summit of his life

Founded upon disaster.

Lovers can learn as much

Every night in bed,

For whatever flesh can touch

Is never quite enough.

They know it is tempting fate

To hold out for perfect bliss.

And yet the whole world over

Blind men will choose as master

To lead them the most blind.

And some day men may call me,

Because I’m old and tough,

And never had a lover,

The instrument of this.

LACHESIS: OR, THE PAST

Well, now. You might suppose

There’s nothing left to be said.

Outcast, corrupt and blind,

He knows it’s night when an owl

Wakes up to hoot at the wise,

And the owl inside his head

Looks out of sightless eyes,

Answers, and sinks its toes

Into the soft and bloody

Center of his mind.

But miles and miles away

Suffers another man.

He was young, open-hearted,

Strong in mind and body

When all these things began.

Every blessed night

He attends the moonstruck owl,

Familiar of the witless,

And remembers a dark day,

A new-born baby’s howl,

And an autumnal wetness.

The smallest sign of love

Is always an easy target

For the jealous and cynical.

Perhaps, indeed, they are right.

I leave it for you to say.

But to leave a little child,

Roped around the feet,

To the charities of a wolf

Was more than he could stomach.

He weighed this for an hour,

Then rose to his full height,

The master of himself.

And the last, clinching witness.

The great life he spared

He would return to punish

And punish himself as well.

But recently his woes

Are muted by the moon.

He no longer goes alone.

Thorns have befriended him,

And once he found his mother

Hiding under a stone.

She was fat, wet, and lame.

She said it was clever of him

To find her in the dark

But he always had been a wise one,

And warned him against snails.

And now his every word

Is free of all human hates

And human kindliness.

To be mad, as the world goes,

Is not the worst of fates.

(And please do not forget

There are those who find this comic.)

But what, you ask, of the hero?

(Ah well, I am very old

And they say I have a rambling

Or a devious sort of mind.)

At midnight and in rain

He advances without trembling

From sorrow unto sorrow

Toward a kind of light

The sun makes upon metal

Which perhaps even the blind

May secretly behold.

What the intelligence

Works out in pure delight

The body must learn in pain.

He has solved the Sphinx’s riddle

In his own ligaments.

And now in a green place,

Holy and unknown,

He has taken off his clothes.

Dust in the sliding light

Swims and is gone. Fruit

Thickens. The listless cello

Of flies tuning in shadows

Wet bark and the silver click

Of water over stones

Are close about him where

He stands, an only witness

With no eyes in his face.

In spite of which he knows

Clear as he once had known,

Though bound both hand and foot,

The smell of mountain air

And an autumnal wetness.

And he sees, moreover,

Unfolding into the light

Three pairs of wings in flight,

Moving as water moves.

The strength, wisdom and bliss

Of their inhuman loves

They scatter near the temple.

And some day men may call me,

Because I’m old and simple

And never had a lover,

Responsible for this.

On the summer road that ran by our front porch

                         Lizards and snakes came out to sun.

It was hot as a stove out there, enough to scorch

                         A buzzard’s foot. Still, it was fun

To lie in the dust and spy on them. Near but remote,

                         They snoozed in the carriage ruts, a smile

In the set of the jaw, a fierce pulse in the throat

Working away like Jack Doyle’s after he’d run the mile.

Aunt Martha had an unfair prejudice

                         Against them (as well as being cold

Toward bats.) She was pretty inflexible in this,

                         Being a spinster and all, and old.

So we used to slip them into her knitting box.

                         In the evening she’d bring in things to mend

And a nice surprise would slide out from under the socks.

It broadened her life, as Joe said. Joe was my friend.

But we never did it again after the day

                         Of the big wind when you could hear the trees

Creak like rockingchairs. She was looking away

                         Off, and kept saying, “Sweet Jesus, please

Don’t let him near me. He’s as like as twins.

                         He can crack us like lice with his fingernail.

I can see him plain as a pikestaff. Look how he grins

And swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.”

Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?

“Adam, my child, my son,

These very words you hear

Compose the fish and starlight

Of your untroubled dream.

When you awake, my child,

It shall all come true.

Know that it was for you

That all things were begun.”

Adam, my child, my son,

Thus spoke Our Father in heaven

To his first, fabled child,

The father of us all.

And I, your father, tell

The words over again

As innumerable men

From ancient times have done.

Tell them again in pain,

And to the empty air.

Where you are men speak

A different mother tongue.

Will you forget our games,

Our hide-and-seek and song?

Child, it will be long

Before I see you again.

Adam, there will be

Many hard hours,

As an old poem says,

Hours of loneliness.

I cannot ease them for you;

They are our common lot.

During them, like as not,

You will dream of me.

When you are crouched away

In a strange clothes closet

Hiding from one who’s “It”

And the dark crowds in,

Do not be afraid—

O, if you can, believe

In a father’s love

That you shall know some day.

Think of the summer rain

Or seedpearls of the mist;

Seeing the beaded leaf,

Try to remember me.

From far away

I send my blessing out

To circle the great globe.

It shall reach you yet.

for Dimitri Hadzi

But to the girdle do the gods inherit
,
Beneath is all the fiend’s
.    
KING LEAR

This mild September mist recalls the soul

                         To its own lust;

               On the enchanted lawn

It sees the iron top of the flagpole

               Sublimed away and gone

Into Parnassian regions beyond rust;

And would undo the body to less than dust.

Sundial and juniper have been dispelled

                         Into thin air.

               The pale ghost of a leaf

Haunts those uncanny softnesses that felled

               And whitely brought to grief

The trees that only yesterday were there.

The soul recoils into its old despair,

Knowing that though the horizon is at hand,

                         Twelve paltry feet

               Refuse to be traversed,

And form themselves before wherever you stand

               As if you were accursed;

While stones drift from the field, and the arbor-seat

Floats toward some
millefleurs
world of summer heat.

Yet from the void where the azalea bush

                         Departed hence,

               Sadly the soul must hear

Twitter and cricket where should be all hush,

               And from the belvedere

A muffled grunt survives in evidence

That love must sweat under the weight of sense.

Or so once thought a man in a Greek mist—

                         Who set aside

               The wine-cup and the wine,

And that deep fissure he alone had kissed,

               All circumscribing line,

Moved to the very edge in one swift stride

And took those shawls of nothing for his bride.

Was it the Goddess herself? Some dense embrace

                         Closed like a bath

               Of love about his head;

Perfectly silent and without a face.

               Blindfolded on her bed,

He could see nothing but the aftermath:

Those powerful, clear hoofprints on the path.

In the third month, a sudden flow of blood.

The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, and the joy

Also of the harp. The frail image of God

Lay spilled and formless. Neither girl nor boy,

But yet blood of my blood, nearly my child.

                         All that long day

Her pale face turned to the window’s mild

                         Featureless grey.

And for some nights she whimpered as she dreamed

The dead thing spoke, saying: “Do not recall

Pleasure at my conception. I am redeemed

From pain and sorrow. Mourn rather for all

Who breathlessly issue from the bone gates,

                         The gates of horn,

For truly it is best of all the fates

                         Not to be born.

“Mother, a child lay gasping for bare breath

On Christmas Eve when Santa Claus had set

Death in the stocking, and the lights of death

Flamed in the tree. O, if you can, forget

You were the child, turn to my father’s lips

                         Against the time

When his cold hand puts forth its fingertips

                         Of jointed lime.”

Doctors of Science, what is man that he

Should hope to come to a good end?
The best

Is not to have been born
. And could it be

That Jewish diligence and Irish jest

The consent of flesh and a midwinter storm

                         Had reconciled,

Was yet too bold a mixture to inform

                         A simple child?

Even as gold is tried, Gentile and Jew.

If that ghost was a girl’s, I swear to it:

Your mother shall be far more blessed than you.

And if a boy’s, I swear: The flames are lit

That shall refine us; they shall not destroy

                         A living hair.

Your younger brothers shall confirm in joy

                         This that I swear.

for Claire White

Great joy be to the sailor if he chart

The Odyssey or bear away the Fleece

Yet unto wisdom’s laurel and the peace

Of his own kind come lastly to his start.

And when shall I, being migrant, bring my heart

Home to its plots of parsley, its proper earth,

Pot hooks, cow dung, black chimney bricks whose worth

I have not skill to honor in my art.

My home, my father’s and grandfather’s home.

Not the imperial porphyry of Rome

But slate is my true stone, slate is my blue.

And bluer the Loire is to my reckoning

Than Caesar’s Tiber, and more nourishing

Than salt spray is the breathing of Anjou.

(
AFTER DU BELLAY
)

Father, adonoi, author of all things,

               of the three states,

the soft light on the barn at dawn,

               a wind that sings

in the bracken, fire in iron grates,

               the ram’s horn,

Furnisher, hinger of heaven, who bound

               the lovely Pleaides,

entered the perfect treasuries of the snow,

               established the round

course of the world, birth, death and disease

               and caused to grow

veins, brain, bones in me, to breathe and sing

               fashioned me air,

Lord, who, governing cloud and waterspout,

               o my King,

held me alive till this my forty-third year—

               
in whom we doubt
—

Who was that child of whom they tell

               in lauds and threnes?

whose holy name all shall pronounce

               Emmanuel,

which being interpreted means,

               “
Gott mit uns
”?