New Collected Poems (3 page)

It is no longer necessary to sleep

in order to dream of our destruction.

We take form within our death, the figures

emerging like shadows in fire.

Who is it? speaking to me of death's beauty.

I think it is my own black angel, as near me

as my flesh. I am never divided from his darkness,

his face the black mask of my face. My eyes

live in his black eye-holes. On his black wings

I rise to sing.

His mouthing presences attend

my singing:

Die more lightly than live,

they say. Death is more gay.

There's no argument

against its certainty, at least, they say.

I know they know as surely as I live my death

exists, and has my shape.

But the man so forcefully walking,

say where he goes,

say what he hears and what he sees

and what he knows

to cause him to stride so merrily.

He goes in spring

through the evening street

to buy bread,

green trees leaning

over the sidewalk,

forsythia yellow

beneath the windows,

birds singing

as birds sing

only in spring,

and he sings, his footsteps

beating the measure of his song.

In an open window

a man and a woman

leaning together

at the room's center

embrace and kiss

as if they met

in passing,

the spring wind

lifting the curtain.

His footsteps carry him

past the window,

deeper into his song.

His singing becomes conglomerate

of all he sees,

leaving the street behind him

runged as a ladder

or the staff of a song.

To his death? Yes.

He walks and sings to his death.

And winter will equal spring.

And for the lovers, even

while they kiss, even though

it is spring, the day ends.

But to the sound of his passing

he sings. It is a kind of triumph

that he grieves—thinking

of the white lilacs in bloom,

profuse, fragrant, white

in excess of all seasonal need,

and of the mockingbird's crooked

arrogant notes, hooking him to the sky

as though no flight

or dying could equal him

at his momentary song.

When he goes out in the morning

and comes back at night

his landlady is there

watching him, leaning

forward in her chair, one hand

holding the curtain back,

simply curious, simply old,

having stashed away her knickknacks

in three commemorative rooms,

stored up a winter's breathing,

forbidden the cold

to come in. She dreams

she's dying in her sleep

and wakes up afraid, to breath in

again her breathed-out breath.

Who will outlast?

She waits for him, faithful

to his arrivals and to the place;

he brings back life to her,

what he salvages of himself daily

from the shut-out air.

They don't speak.

She just observes his homecoming,

lifelike in her chair

as the shell of a wan moth

holding to the lace.

Paradise might have appeared here,

surprising us, a rackle of sublime coordinates

figuring over the trees, surprising us, even

though the look of the place seems not

altogether unexpectant of such an advent,

seems not altogether willing to settle

for something less: the fine light

prepared in the taut statuary of the oaks;

venerable churches of muted brick;

Greek porches presiding at the ends

of approaches; delicate fanlights over doorways

delicate and symmetrical as air, if air

prepared, preened itself for Paradise

to appear, surprisingly, but not very, in this place

—all it needs to
be
Paradise is populace.

(What has appeared, surprisingly, but not very

—stepping out the door, and down the steps,

groping for each next-lower step

with a left foot her expansive exquisitely garmented

paunch has prevented her seeing for thirty-five

years—is a rich, fat, selfish,

ugly, ignorant, old

bitch, airing her cat.)

His enemy, the universe, surrounds him nightly with stars

going nowhere over the cold woods that has grown now,

with nightfall, totally dark, the stars deeper in the sky

than darkness; his thoughts go out alone into the winds

of the woods' dark. He sits in the doorway and softly

plays the guitar; his fingers are stiff and heavy

and touch the strings, not dextrously, so that he plays

his own song, no true copy of a tune; sometimes the notes

go away from melody, form singly, and die out,

singly, in the hollow of the instrument, like single small

lights in the dark; his music has this passion,

that he plays as he can play. All day he has walked

in the woods with his gun, ruin of summer, iron-rust,

crumpled bronze, under the bare trees, devouring song. Now

the trees of darkness grow tall and wide; nobody's

silence is in the woods. In the hush of all birds

who love light, he lets go free to die in the broad woods

in the dark the notes of his song.

Like a room, the clear stanza

of birdsong opens among the noises

of motors and breakfasts.

Among the light's beginnings,

lifting broken gray of the night's

end, the bird hastens to his song

as to a place, a room commenced

at the end of sleep. Around

him his singing is entire.

for Robert Hazel

What death means is not this—

the spirit, triumphant in the body's fall,

praising its absence, feeding on music.

If life can't justify and explain itself,

death can't justify and explain it.

A creed and a grave never did equal the life

of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts

of ancient stones at the beginning of April.

The black clothes of the priests are turned

against the frail yellow of sunlight and petal;

they wait in their blackness to earn joy

by dying. They trust that nothing holy is free,

and so their lives are paid. Money slots

in the altar rails make a jukebox of the world,

the mind paying its gnawed coins for the safety of ignorance.

A sparrow is

his hunger organized.

Filled, he flies

before he knows he's going to.

And he dies by the

same movement: filled

with himself, he goes

by the eye-quick

reflex of his flesh

out of sight,

leaving his perfect

absence without a thought.

I employ the blind mandolin player

in the tunnel of the Métro. I pay him

a coin as hard as his notes,

and maybe he has employed me, and pays me

with his playing to hear him play.

Maybe we're necessary to each other,

and this vacant place has need of us both

—it's vacant, I mean, of dwellers,

is populated by passages and absences.

By some fate or knack he has chosen

to place his music in this cavity

where there's nothing to look at

and blindness costs him nothing.

Nothing was here before he came.

His music goes out among the sounds

of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance

and meaning of what he plays.

It's his music, not the place, I go by.

In this light which is just a fact, like darkness

or the edge or end of what you may be

going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees

and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up

his mandolin, the lantern of his world;

his fingers make their pattern on the wires.

This is not the pursuing rhythm

of a blind cane pecking in the sun,

but is a singing in a dark place.

He comes along the street, singing,

a rag of a man, with his game foot and bum's clothes.

He's asking for nothing—his hands

aren't even held out. His song

is the gift of singing, to him

and to all who will listen.

To hear him, you'd think the engines

would all stop, and the flower vendor would stand

with her hands full of flowers and not move.

You'd think somebody would have hired him

and provided him a clean quiet stage to sing on.

But there's no special occasion or place

for his singing—that's why it needs

to be strong. His song doesn't impede the morning

or change it, except by freely adding itself.

In the empty lot—a place

not natural, but wild—among

the trash of human absence,

the slough and shamble

of the city's seasons, a few

old locusts bloom.

A few woods birds

fly and sing

in the new foliage

—warblers and tanagers, birds

wild as leaves; in a million

each one would be rare,

new to the eyes. A man

couldn't make a habit

of such color,

such flight and singing.

But they're the habit of this

wasted place. In them

the ground is wise. They are

its remembrance of what it is.

For whatever is let go

there's a taker.

The living discovers itself

where no preparation

was made for it,

where its only privilege

is to live if it can.

The window flies from the dark

of the subway mouth

into the sunlight

stained with the green

of the spring weeds

that crowd the improbable

black earth

of the embankment,

their stout leaves

like the tongues and bodies

of a herd, feeding

on the new heat,

drinking at the seepage

of the stones:

the freehold of life,

triumphant

even in the waste

of those who possess it.

But it is itself the possessor,

we know at last,

seeing it send out weeds

to take back

whatever is left:

Proprietor, pasturing foliage

on the rubble,

making use

of the useless—a beauty

we have less than not

deserved.

The tall marigolds darken.

The baby cries

for better reasons than it knows.

The young wife walks

and walks among the shadows

meshed in the rooms.

And he sits in the doorway,

looking toward the woods,

long after the stars come out.

He feels the slow

sky turn toward him, and wait.

His birthright

is a third-hand Chevrolet,

bought for too much. “I

floorboard the son of a bitch,

and let her go.”

My old friend, the owner

of a new boat, stops by

to ask me to fish with him,

and I say I will—both of us

knowing that we may never

get around to it, it may be

years before we're both

idle again on the same day.

But we make a plan, anyhow,

in honor of friendship