Late in the Day (3 page)

What opens day's eye slowly to the

Spring?

Sun-tiger. Solstice wheel.

Vast holy engines of violet and willow.

The planet in the pale sky.

Aloof and noble, the great buttes

rear up their rimrock, let

their slopes slide motionlessly down

in the necessary curve from heaven.

Some ruthlessness befits old age.

Tender young herbs are generous and pliant,

but in dry solitudes the grey-leaved sage

stands unforthcoming and defiant.

I walked by the sea-creek side.

The wind laughed, the gulls cried.

Sweet water lapped on salt sand

between the deep sea and the deep land.

The lionesses of the mind are dangerous.

Big sinuous dun bodies range

the plains of sleep. The fangs are sharp.

The fire-yellow eyes fix on my heart.

Untongued I turn to still

forgetting all I will.

Light lies the shadow

on the way I go.

The bell in Iera

No mercy was in that Tuscan bell.

The hard discordant fist of sound

struck each small hour—paused—struck again

in the stone silence of the mountain town.

The trains in Portland

Greedy of sleep, the city has decreed

the grand, companionable travellers must be dumb,

distance and darkness desolate of those voices

crying at far crossings,
I come, I come
.

The owls in Forest Park

On the remotest edge of hearing,

like the first star uncertain to the eye,

a small trill trembling in tree-shadows.

The wait. The fainter yet reply.

Andromache if you'd known

of the ragged carrion thing

to be dragged round day

after day the walls of Troy

by order of Achilles and had seen

yourself in shame on some gaunt

Greek island Pyrrhus' slave

when in the windy sunlight

with you Hector laughing on the battlement

lifted up your little son

soon to be thrown to death

from that high wall by order of Ulysses

and the child frightened

by his father's helmet cried a little

and you laughed again together

in that moment if you'd known

all as we who read Homer know it

what would you have done differently?

The crowds that cheered me when I took the Gold,

who were they then? Where are they now?

It's queer to think about. Do they know how

you look at the hurdles, long before you're old,

and wonder how you ever ran that race?

I'm not sorry, now all's said and done,

to lie here by myself with nowhere to run,

in quiet, in this immense dark place.

Let me go out and in the door

of your great hall,

serve in your kitchen, sweep your floor.

Old as I am, let me before

I get too old to work at all,

work for you a little more.

As in the past, by owning me

you set me free.

Command my whole obedience,

use my little strength and sense

to shape the end I do not see,

your mystery, my recompense.

i. Dickens' Hard Times

“Girl Number Twenty, define a horse.”

But Cissie the circus rider

can't say what a horse is

to the schoolmaster so blinded by abstractions

he can't see a horse.

ii. Delacroix's Drawing

This line of ink isn't around the horse.

It ropes and bridles a certain

thing seen from a certain angle

on a piece of paper, once.

Something's caught but nothing's kept.

iii. Judith's Fear of Naming

She fears that definition will destroy

the secret thingness of the thing,

as if a dictionary could contain

the rhythmic hooves, the nostril widening,

the great hard-beating heart.

To define's not to confine,

words can't reach so far.

Even the poet's line can only hold

a moment of the uncontainable.

The horse runs free.

Dreadful, this death, dragging

so many lives and lively minds along

after it into unmeaning,

endless, imbecile silence.

The more ways there are to say Mother

the wiser the world is.

Never are there enough

words for Well done! or Welcome!

A line of verse revives lost Aprils.

In the name for Home lie whole nations.

The unused word may be the useful one.

Old nouns are in no hurry.

Old verbs are very patient.

The water of life is learning.

May elders ever tell the mythic origins

in the almost-lost old language

to children cheated of knowledge

of their own holy inheritance.

May myopic scholars scowl

forever at fragments of inscription,

so that the young may yawn

long over grim grammars, learning

to speak the tongues unspoken

and hear a human music otherwise unheard.

This big one is called “Mountain Silence,”

but it's the one beyond it, “The Sierra

Divide,” that holds silence

the way a grey stone bowl holds water.

Looking into the painting

I think how it is itself

silent. How we move in silence

among these painted skies and mountains.

How the charity of a painting,

its gift I will carry out of the museum,

may be its silence,

full and quiet as a bowl of water,

that I can hold later in my soul's hands

and look into and see how light falls on granite.

Since keeping house and raising kids

don't count as jobs, I only ever had one.

I started out as a prentice

at five years old, and at near eighty-five

in most ways I still am one,

being a slow learner. And the work

is quite demanding.

The boss who drives the shiny yellow car

and those nine sisters up there by the spring

are tough, but fair. There's times

you can't get them to listen,

but they've always got their eye on you.

They don't let botched work pass.

Sometimes the pay is terrible.

Sometimes it's only fairy gold.

Then again sometimes the wages

are beyond imagination and desire.

I am glad to have worked for this company.

An eagle anger with a broken wing

struggles inside my body and strikes blind

to break the iron bars with iron beak.

Far too late now for cure or soft healing.

To such deep injury no hand is kind.

Within me is the way the bird must take,

in this cage all the sky she can attain,

the wide, clear, patient silence of the mind

where flight goes far and fierce thought can forsake

words and seek distances out past all pain,

ache, and heartache.

July, August

high over the uplands of summer evening gold stretches on long after Venus has followed the sun down

and the silver of Vega is only longing and guesswork till always it seems all at once the bright wings

shine out to carry the Swan in silence across the river of midnight to the warm dim shore where the first

bird

will speak

November, December

down from

the high

hill of Fall

a road goes

through dark

to cold

past a ring of great grey-shouldered stones that keep the secret of the moment when the unseen sun

stops

and turns

A slight, white drift

of high mist down the river

and all blue goes grey.

The sun turns silver.

Summer's honey drains away.

Dry cottonwoods shiver.

Three-quarter moon outshines

stars around her, slides

west to the tide rising,

cold, cold and wild.

October's last night goes

lone to the day of souls,

a ghost on a north wind blowing

wild, wild and cold.

Between the acts, the interval.

The leaves were late to fall, this fall.

Between the verdict and the doom,

a whisper in the waiting-room.

A non-event between events

holding a secret and a sense.

A winter wind just whispers where

two winter trees stand tense and bare.

Ashland, Oregon, 2014

On August thirtieth

on the deck above the deck

above the little leaf-hidden river

where old raddled hippies

smoke pot and shout fuck at each other

in the small city

that thrives on Shakespeare's language

in the late evening

of the late summer

of the late, late age we've come to

I sit and hear the crickets chorusing

and a far crow caw

and I want to write a poem

that says late twilight

and the very end of August,

my golden August,

and all summer

and I guess I've written it.

No not quite yet.

Here:

wind of the end

of summer, wind

of the end of day

softly

play

in the leaves, in the many

leaves

softly softly

from all the air

gather, evening,

everywhere

The form is from Goethe's “Nachtgesang.”

I sought a newer music,

but it rang false and wrong.

I'd find a tune and lose it,

hearing an older song.

I'd find a tune and lose it,

and always, all day long,

among my thoughts and doings

half heard some older song.

Among my thoughts and doings

a tune would ring out strong,

yet change when I pursued it,

lost in that older song.

The tunes of my own choosing

all sounded false and wrong.

I sought a newer music,

I found an older song.

In Alice's wood where things forgot their names

and fawn and child walked together fearless,

a stone might flower, a spring burst into flames,

a heavy human soul go light and careless.

But through the forest of the failing mind

where words decay like leaves, and paths long trodden

are lost, the soul plods onward to no end,

fawns, children, flowers, flames forgotten.

words for a country song

Coming down the cloudy side

leaving the bright behind us

isn't any place to hide

where the rain won't find us

Driving down so low so fast

all the sunlight in the past

Coming down the cloudy side

to another weather

got to be a place to hide

and try to stay together

The world looks so cold and wide

coming down the cloudy side

Come with me my sorrow

come away with me

where the road grows narrow

westward to the sea

where the waters darken

slow as evening falls

where no winds waken