Earlier Poems (3 page)

Their memories tear
beside places recently stitched.

When I get up in the morning I'm like them
for four or five minutes: I'm anyone
frightened, hungry, somnambulistic, alone.

Wind rustles the black trees once.

Then I grow young.

Some night
I will find myself walking
the sunlit halls of the school for the blind
I used to go past
on my way to the train
on my way to you gliding by one vacant classroom
after another all at once I will stop
inside the doorway
of one where a child
in white shirt and black tie sits
alone at a desk
fingertips pressed to the page
of an immense book
where leaves' shadows stir

and when I wake up
I will not remember
your face won't appear in my mind
and I will lie there a long time
hearing things
the pines outside a car
grinding its engine
a block away
the voice of a crow
this world's chilling star-rise
and I will open my eyes
and get it over with

There are times I can still
sense the congregation
all around me, whispering
to the one who raised the dead;
the one whose own
pulse had ceased, and yet returned
from the tomb.

His face above
in the high
enormously bright golden dome
of the ceiling:
the Face
so different
from the human

face of Jesus clenched
with agony,
or the beautiful Lord
of Hieronymus Bosch
gently bearing his cross through
the sneering crush.
Each Sunday morning

my speechless lost mother
brought me among them there;
they were mostly old people
on canes, and some I remember
were blind: all of them gone
by now, to their Father's mansion
under the grass.

Are you looking
for me? Ask that crow

rowing
across the green wheat.

See those minute air bubbles
rising to the surface

at the still creek's edge—
talk to the crawdad.

Inquire
of the skinny mosquito

on your wall
stinging its shadow,

this lock
of moon

lifting
the hair on your neck.

When the hearts in the cocoon
start to beat,

and the spider begins
its hidden task,

and the seed sends its initial
pale hairlike root to drink,

you'll have to get down on all fours

to learn my new address:
you'll have to place your skull

beside this silence
no one hears.

When was it
you first began to pack?
The earth was already, without your awareness,
the earth without you. Because you left
your battered clothes behind. You left
no address. You simply left,
that's all. And when the first star occurred
to the sky—

60
years later, it is still
dusk: it is what happens
when you return,
unseeable, comatose, your empty sleeve
raised above black waters where
the stars' reflections shine
before the stars appear.

I'm speaking, of course, on the mirror, the shadow, the other. I'm addressing myself to the dreamer of the body: the one whose eyes open, at night, when you close your eyes. The one who leaves your fingerprints on things you touched tomorrow; whose glove is your hand, whose voice is your muteness, whose sight is your … So: inside the darkest room of the darkest house on the darkest avenue in the darkest city, a man is reading a story to his blind identical twin. A man is shaving his blind identical twin. A man is straightening the tie of his blind identical twin. A man is feeding his blind identical twin soup with a large spoon. Now he's helping him on with his coat, they're about to take a little air. As they reach the corner they'll stop, the man will take care to cast a glance left and right before going on; while the brother stands perfectly still, erect, head bowed beneath a black sky in rapt attention to the remote trill of a bird hidden in one of the nearby trees which line this particular street, empty of traffic. All the windows unlit, as you know. No one on earth is awake.

Go to the window: the dead
leaves stream, soundlessly,
into W. Lorain Street,
frightening with no humans.
It is that time of your day
before Dr. Pierces young wife
appears below,
tapping her cane
and leading her young
daughter by the hand. Two swans
glide across the lake's black
glass. The marble clouds glide
overhead, their huge reflections
glide across the water, and their shadow
darkens your address.

Thirty miles or so south of L.A.
stand two hangars, two gigantic tombs
on the plain between
the freeway and the mountains,
remote black swarms of army helicopters every hour
departing and arriving: I still
feel too sick even to think
we lived in their presence
for nearly a year. Oh yes, I remember
it. And when I can't sleep
I think of huge observatories parting soundlessly
or those two domelike structures
we passed once on the coast highway,
the nuclear reactor eerily lit and crane-manipulated all
night long.

And when I'm by myself,
this is my demented song:
Welcome to the university—
it seems you're the only one registered this fall.
You'll notice our nocturnal sprinkling system.
You'll notice the library's books are all blank on the inside.

It was still dark out still snowing
You were still here still asleep

When the leaves came out
Their shadows came out too

I can't remember the summer
I can't remember your voice

But it is still dark out still snowing
You are still here

9 o'clock. The bells come floating in
from town a mile or so off,
the sky is growing dim now:
not far from my fingers
your photograph is developing
a new expression somehow, more hidden, august.
Why is it disturbing to look at the blind
eyes in a picture;
and how did it happen
that I came to live in a room
with somebody who's not there?
Once, I had to get to
the part of the city
where I knew you were living then,
600 miles away—
and now I will have to relive this,
and hear my footsteps in empty side streets again
and again, the distant, electrical
rustling of late afternoon
foreshadowing rain

as I make my way down your block,
as I ring the door of your apartment.
I find out you live by the East River: I walk there
and sit down on a bench. It's getting cold. I wait
and know nothing, feel nothing, see nothing
but this black river flowing to the sea,
the pale hand on my leg.
A small ship appears with all its lights out.
Now I can remember something
like it from my childhood: a large house
gliding slowly through town on a platform
a foot off the ground
in the summer dusk, the stillness before trains. Sleep
casts its clear and healing shadow over me,
because I have never been this by myself yet
and still have a long way to go.

1973

By twilight, by bat light
I enter the hill where

it blocks the still luminous sky,
a wake of crickets'
stillness opening
before my feet.

I take the grass road
which winds upward through oaks
the sun never penetrates;

the creek bed
where nothing is flowing now
but a light breeze.

In back of my shoulders
Orion will rise
by the time I reach the top—
by the time I come to the barbed wire,
where the horses stand quietly breathing in the cold air.
I am that cold, I am not there.

Walnut Creek, California

I did not notice
it had grown dark as I sat there.

Needless to say,
speech no longer came
to your lips even soundlessly now.

You had been out for some time

when, in one slow unwilled motion,
your arm began to rise from the bed,

fingers spread, in a gesture resembling
the one you used to interrupt me,
that we might not miss
a particular passage of music.

I have already considered
the three philosophical problems
worthy of prolonged reflection: Why
are we here?
Is there anything to eat?
Where are our dead friends?

Now it is time
to get dressed.

Behind the wall
I lie facing, the old woman
suffering from gradual disintegration of the spine
and half asphyxiated with
the stench of her own urine
begins another day.
I can hear her now

asking in the little
laughing children from upstairs,
who like to torment her by banging the door,
so she can slit their throats.

And not far from here—not that
far—the long grave

of the river
flows on.

So flow on
my unfathomed horror

black and cold
as space.

As it gets dark tonight
and the two or three stars start to appear
between the bridges and
it can grow no colder,

when the lights come on in the tombs of the skyline,
when the drugged patient hovers a foot above his body,

only tied to this world at the wrist
by the IV needle, futile
hourglass of tears—

I will never again hold your
poor emaciated hand.

I will never again see your
listening face.

The first white crocuses
suddenly appeared
back in Ohio,
one day before
I heard you were gone.

Are you
still here? And if not,
and if not

flow on my black music, flow on
my wind in the hospital hallway—
flow on, flow on
my beginning,
my last address.

March 1980

Where I am going now
I don't yet know:
I have, it appears, no destination, no plan.
In fact no particular longing to go
on anymore, at the moment, the cold
weightless fingers encircling my neck
to make me recite, one more time,
the great reasons for being alive.

Permanent address: unknown.
In the first place, we are not convinced
I exist at all. And if I have
a job

it is to be that hour
when the birds who sing all night long wake
and cease one by one,
and the last stars blaze and go out.

It is to be the beam of morning in the room,

the traveler at your front door;
or, if you wake in the night,
the one who is not
at the door.

The one who can see, from far off,
what you hiddenly go through.

The hammer's shadow in the shadow of a hand.

No one,
and the father of no one.

Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still your strange elderly child.

Buson said the winter rain
shows what is before our eyes
as though it were long ago.
I have been thinking about it for days,

and now I see.
And as I write the hills are turning green.
It does that here. The hills turn slowly
green in the interminable rain of late November,

as though time had begun
running backward
into a cold and unheard-of summer.
We are so far from you.

We are as far from you as stars, as those white
herons standing on the shore,
growing more distinct
as night comes—

What a black road this is.
Orion nailed there

upside down, and banking right
into a cloud and descending

behind Mount Konocti.

(The week that marks the beginning
of my life marks
the beginning
of his death

the hour

Rooms I (I will not say
worked in) once heard in. Words
my mouth heard
then—be
with me. Rooms,
you open onto one
another: still house
this life, be in me
when I leave

[for Dzvinia}

The crawdad absorbed in minute excavations;
trees leaning over the water, the breathing
everywhere. And watching alone
a door I have walked through
into a higher
and more affectionate world—,
my face looking back at me, under the water
moss glowing faintly on stone.
We will not sleep, we will be changed.

The house is cold. It's raining,
getting dark. That's Joseph

for you: it's that time
of the day again.

We had been drinking, oddly enough.
He left.

I thought, A walk—
It's lovely to walk.

His book and glasses on the kitchen table.

[for Keith Hollaman
}

All day I slept
and woke and slept

again, the square
of winter sky lighting

the room,
which had grown

octaves
grayer.

What to do, if the words disappear as you write—
what to do

if they remain,
and you disappear.

In the unshaded hill
where you kill
every day I have climbed
for a glimpse of you; below me
all the earth turned
golden
in the searing wind, the
very wind golden, its abrupt blast
at a bend in the road
as I approach the summit, shining
wind, where you live
waiting to visit
its own Christless invisible blue and quite terminal instant
on some ex-jackrabbit, plummeting
upward, or floating
suspended
past sight-nimbus: close eyes
beholding themselves in the sun.

The street deserted. Nobody,
only you and one last
dirt-colored robin,
clenching its branch
against the wind. It seems
you have arrived
late, the city unfamiliar,
the address lost.
And you made such a serious effort—
pondered the obstacles deeply,
tried to be your own critic.
Yet no one came to listen.
Maybe they came, and then left.
After you traveled so far,
just to be there.
It was a failure, that is what they will say.