Poems 1962-2012 (32 page)

home or convenience. Persephone, protected,

stares out the window of the chariot.

What does she see? A morning

in early spring, in April. Now

her whole life is beginning—unfortunately,

it's going to be

a short life. She's going to know, really,

only two adults: death and her mother.

But two is

twice what her mother has:

her mother has

one child, a daughter.

As a god, she could have had

a thousand children.

We begin to see here

the deep violence of the earth

whose hostility suggests

she has no wish

to continue as a source of life.

And why is this hypothesis

never discussed? Because

it is not
in
the story; it only

creates the story.

In grief, after the daughter dies,

the mother wanders the earth.

She is preparing her case;

like a politician

she remembers everything and admits

nothing.

For example, her daughter's

birth was unbearable, her beauty

was unbearable: she remembers this.

She remembers Persephone's

innocence, her tenderness—

What is she planning, seeking her daughter?

She is issuing

a warning whose implicit message is:

what are you doing outside my body?

You ask yourself:

why is the mother's body safe?

The answer is

this is the wrong question, since

the daughter's body

doesn't exist, except

as a branch of the mother's body

that needs to be

reattached at any cost.

When a god grieves it means

destroying others (as in war)

while at the same time petitioning

to reverse agreements (as in war also):

if Zeus will get her back,

winter will end.

Winter will end, spring will return.

The small pestering breezes

that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers—

Spring will return, a dream

based on a falsehood:

that the dead return.

Persephone

was used to death. Now over and over

her mother hauls her out again—

You must ask yourself:

are the flowers real? If

Persephone “returns” there will be

one of two reasons:

either she was not dead or

she is being used

to support a fiction—

I think I can remember

being dead. Many times, in winter,

I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,

how can I endure the earth?

And he would say,

in a short time you will be here again.

And in the time between

you will forget everything:

those fields of ice will be

the meadows of Elysium.

A VILLAGE LIFE (2009)

TO JAMES LONGENBACH

TWILIGHT

All day he works at his cousin's mill,

so when he gets home at night, he always sits at this one window,

sees one time of day, twilight.

There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.

It's as his cousin says:

Living—living takes you away from sitting.

In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape

representing the world. The seasons change,

each visible only a few hours a day.

Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness—

abstractions from which come intense pleasures,

like the figs on the table.

At dusk, the sun goes down in a haze of red fire between two poplars.

It goes down late in summer—sometimes it's hard to stay awake.

Then everything falls away.

The world for a little longer

is something to see, then only something to hear,

crickets, cicadas.

Or to smell sometimes, aroma of lemon trees, of orange trees.

Then sleep takes this away also.

But it's easy to give things up like this, experimentally,

for a matter of hours.

I open my fingers—

I let everything go.

Visual world, language,

rustling of leaves in the night,

smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.

I let it go, then I light the candle.

PASTORAL

The sun rises over the mountain.

Sometimes there's mist

but the sun's behind it always

and the mist isn't equal to it.

The sun burns its way through,

like the mind defeating stupidity.

When the mist clears, you see the meadow.

No one really understands

the savagery of this place,

the way it kills people for no reason,

just to keep in practice.

So people flee—and for a while, away from here,

they're exuberant, surrounded by so many choices—

But no signal from earth

will ever reach the sun. Thrash

against that fact, you are lost.

When they come back, they're worse.

They think they failed in the city,

not that the city doesn't make good its promises.

They blame their upbringing: youth ended and they're back,

silent, like their fathers.

Sundays, in summer, they lean against the wall of the clinic,

smoking cigarettes. When they remember,

they pick flowers for their girlfriends—

It makes the girls happy.

They think it's pretty here, but they miss the city, the afternoons

filled with shopping and talking, what you do

when you have no money…

To my mind, you're better off if you stay;

that way, dreams don't damage you.

At dusk, you sit by the window. Wherever you live,

you can see the fields, the river, realities

on which you cannot impose yourself—

To me, it's safe. The sun rises; the mist

dissipates to reveal

the immense mountain. You can see the peak,

how white it is, even in summer. And the sky's so blue,

punctuated with small pines

like spears—

When you got tired of walking

you lay down in the grass.

When you got up again, you could see for a moment where you'd been,

the grass was slick there, flattened out

into the shape of a body. When you looked back later,

it was as though you'd never been there at all.

Midafternoon, midsummer. The fields go on forever,

peaceful, beautiful.

Like butterflies with their black markings,

the poppies open.

TRIBUTARIES

All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.

Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees—

The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;

on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.

In summer, couples sit at the pool's edge.

There's room in the pool for many reflections—

the plaza's nearly empty, the acacia trees don't get this far.

And the Avenue of Liberty is barren and austere; its image

doesn't crowd the water.

Interspersed with the couples, mothers with their younger children.

Here's where they come to talk to one another, maybe

meet a young man, see if there's anything left of their beauty.

When they look down, it's a sad moment: the water isn't encouraging.

The husbands are off working, but by some miracle

all the amorous young men are always free—

they sit at the edge of the fountain, splashing their sweethearts

with fountain water.

Around the fountain, there are clusters of metal tables.

This is where you sit when you're old,

beyond the intensities of the fountain.

The fountain is for the young, who still want to look at themselves.

Or for the mothers, who need to keep their children diverted.

In good weather, a few old people linger at the tables.

Life is simple now: one day cognac, one day coffee and a cigarette.

To the couples, it's clear who's on the outskirts of life, who's at the center.

The children cry, they sometimes fight over toys.

But the water's there, to remind the mothers that they love these children;

that for them to drown would be terrible.

The mothers are tired constantly, the children are always fighting,

the husbands at work or angry. No young man comes.

The couples are like an image from some faraway time, an echo coming

very faint from the mountains.

They're alone at the fountain, in a dark well.

They've been exiled by the world of hope,

which is the world of action,

but the world of thought hasn't as yet opened to them.

When it does, everything will change.

Darkness is falling, the plaza empties.

The first leaves of autumn litter the fountain.

The roads don't gather here anymore;

the fountain sends them away, back into the hills they came from.

Avenue of Broken Faith, Avenue of Disappointment,

Avenue of the Acacia Trees, of Olive Trees,

the wind filling with silver leaves,

Avenue of Lost Time, Avenue of Liberty that ends in stone,

not at the field's edge but at the foot of the mountain.

NOON

They're not grown up—more like a boy and girl, really.

School's over. It's the best part of the summer, when it's still beginning—

the sun's shining, but the heat isn't intense yet.

And freedom hasn't gotten boring.

So you can spend the whole day, all of it, wandering in the meadow.

The meadow goes on indefinitely, and the village keeps getting more and more faint—

It seems a strange position, being very young.

They have this thing everyone wants and they
don't
want—

but they want to keep it anyway; it's all they can trade on.

When they're by themselves like this, these are the things they talk about.

How time for them doesn't race.

It's like the reel breaking at the movie theater. They stay anyway—

mainly, they just don't want to leave. But till the reel is fixed,

the old one just gets popped back in,

and all of a sudden you're back to long ago in the movie—

the hero hasn't even met the heroine. He's still at the factory,

he hasn't begun to go bad. And she's wandering around the docks, already bad.

But she never meant it to happen. She was good, then it happened to her,

like a bag pulled over her head.

The sky's completely blue, so the grass is dry.

They'll be able to sit with no trouble.

They sit, they talk about everything—then they eat their picnic.

They put the food on the blanket, so it stays clean.

They've always done it this way; they take the grass themselves.

The rest—how two people can lie down on the blanket—

they know about it but they're not ready for it.

They know people who've done it, as a kind of game or trial—

then you say, no, wrong time, I think I'll just keep being a child.

But your body doesn't listen. It knows everything now,

it says you're not a child, you haven't been a child for a long time.

Their thinking is, stay away from change. It's an avalanche—

all the rocks sliding down the mountain, and the child standing underneath

just gets killed.

They sit in the best place, under the poplars.

And they talk—it must be hours now, the sun's in a different place.

About school, about people they both know,

about being adult, about how you knew what your dreams were.

They used to play games, but that's stopped now—too much touching.

They only touch each other when they fold the blanket.

They know this in each other.

That's why it isn't talked about.

Before they do anything like that, they'll need to know more—

in fact, everything that can happen. Until then, they'll just watch

and stay children.

Today she's folding the blanket alone, to be safe.

And he looks away—he pretends to be too lost in thought to help out.

They know that at some point you stop being children, and at that point

you become strangers. It seems unbearably lonely.

When they get home to the village, it's nearly twilight.

It's been a perfect day; they talk about this,

about when they'll have a chance to have a picnic again.

They walk through the summer dusk,

not holding hands but still telling each other everything.

BEFORE THE STORM

Rain tomorrow, but tonight the sky is clear, the stars shine.

Still, the rain's coming,

maybe enough to drown the seeds.

There's a wind from the sea pushing the clouds;

before you see them, you feel the wind.

Better look at the fields now,

see how they look before they're flooded.

A full moon. Yesterday, a sheep escaped into the woods,

and not just any sheep—the ram, the whole future.

If we see him again, we'll see his bones.

The grass shudders a little; maybe the wind passed through it.

And the new leaves of the olives shudder in the same way.

Mice in the fields. Where the fox hunts,

tomorrow there'll be blood in the grass.

But the storm—the storm will wash it away.

In one window, there's a boy sitting.

He's been sent to bed—too early,

in his opinion. So he sits at the window—

Everything is settled now.

Where you are now is where you'll sleep, where you'll wake up in the morning.