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ОглавлениеPoems THE LOCATION OF THINGSARCHAICSTHE OPEN SKIES
THE LOCATION OF THINGS
The Location of Things
Why from this window am I watching leaves?
Why do halls and steps seem narrower?
Why at this desk am I listening for the sound of the fall
of color, the pitch of the wooden floor
and feet going faster?
Am I to understand change, whether remarkable
or hidden, am I to find a lake under the table
or a mountain beside my chair
and will I know the minute water produces lilies
or a family of mountaineers scales the peak?
Recognitions
On Madison Avenue I am having a drink, someone
with dark hair balances a carton on his shoulders
and a painter enters the bar. It reminds me
of pictures in restaurants, the exchange of hunger
for thirst, art for decoration and in a hospital
love for pain suffered beside the glistening rhododendron
under the crucifix. The street, the street bears light
and shade on its shoulders, walks without crying,
turns itself into another and continues, even
cantilevers this barroom atmosphere into a forest
and sheds its leaves on my table
carelessly as if it wanted to travel somewhere else
and would like to get rid of its luggage
which has become in this exquisite pointed rain
a bunch of umbrellas. An exchange!
That head against the window
how many times one has seen it. Afternoons
of smoke and wet nostrils,
the perilous makeup on her face and on his,
numerous corteges. The water’s lace creates funerals
it makes us see someone we love in an acre of grass.
The regard of dramatic afternoons
through this floodlit window
or from a pontoon on this theatrical lake,
you demand your old clown’s paint and I hand you
from my prompter’s arms this shako,
wandering as I am into clouds and air
rushing into darkness as corridors
who do not fear the melancholy of the stair.
Piazzas
for Mary Abbot Clyde
In the golden air, the risky autumn,
leaves on the piazza, shadows by the door
on your chair the red berry
after the dragonfly summer
we walk this mirroring air our feet chill
and silver and golden a portrait
by Pinturicchio we permanently taste the dark
grapes and the seed pearls glisten
as the flight of those fresh brown birds
an instant of vision that the coupling mind
and heart see in their youth
with thin wings attacking a real substance
as Pinturicchio fixed his air.
After all dragonflies do as much
in midsummer with a necessary water
there is always a heaviness of wings.
To remember
now that the imagination’s at its turning
how to recall those Pierrots of darkness
(with the half-moon like a yellow leg of a pantaloon)
I would see you again (like the purple P
of piazza).
Imagination
thunder in the Alps yet we flew above it
then met a confusion of weather and felt
the alphabet turning over when we landed
in Pekin. I read the late Empress’s letters
and thought they were yours,
that impeccable script followed by murders
real or divined
as the youth leaning over the piazza
throwing stones at his poems. He reads
his effigy in the one that ricochets
he weeps into the autumn air
and that stone becomes golden as a tomb
beware the risky imagination
that lines its piazzas
with lambswool or for sheer disturbance
places mirrors for Pinturicchio
to draw his face at daybreak
when the air is clear of shadows
and no one walks the piazza.
All Grey-haired My Sisters
All grey-haired my sisters
what is it in the more enduring
clime of Spring that waits?
The tiger his voice once prayerful
around the lax ochre sheen
finally in withering sleep
its calendar,
Relatives
delicious plumages your scenery
has a black musical depth
the cardinal flies into
he learns to repeat on an empty
branch your distillations. Sombre
mysteries the garden illumines
a shape of honey hive
the vigorous drones lighting
up your face as fortunes pour
from your cold pockets into the heat
and glaze, fortresses
for those memories brisk
in the now doubling air,
Adventuresses
guided by the form and scent
of tree and flower blossoming
the willow once frail now image
cut of stone so to endure,
My darlings
you walked into the wars
with wreaths of pine cones, you lay
by the sea and your sweet dresses
were torn by waves as over each receded
and pebbles were lifted at your feet
in the foam,
Ancestress
with blond boating hair
as daisies drop at your wrists
which flight are you making?
down the lime aisles
I see your sashes disappear.
Why should I count you more equinoctal, sun?
Smoothly the oars into the bay
the ultramarine fast as a castle, or rock
its soul plunged to craters virginal
the rapid twist of spume to all-forgetting
wrecks, intensely now that story’s done.
Mermaids your hair is green. I recognize
the powerful daylight heat. My savages
a cooling torpor rearranges,
as at its southern margins, the oak.
From your journals
He said: “In nymphic barque”
She replied: “A porcupine.”
And later,
“Reason selects our otherness.”
In the broad strange light,
a region of silences. The delphic
clouded tree knows its decline,
if you were to forget animosities, girls,
and in the pagan grass slide heedlessly
blossoms would return such songs
as I’ve sung of you, the youthful ashes
fling upward settling fragrant
brightness on your dusky marquetry,
All grey-haired my sisters
this afternoon’s seraphicness
is also fading. Linger while
I pass you quickly lest the cherry’s
bloom changed to white
fall upon my head.
Windy Afternoon
Through the wood
on his motorcycle piercing
the hawk, the jay
the blue-coated policeman
Woods, barren woods,
as this typewriter without an object
or the words that from you
fall soundless
The sun lowering
and the bags of paper
on the stoney ledge
near the waterfall
Voices down the roadway
and leaves falling over there
a great vacancy
a huge leftover
The quality of the day
that has its size in the North
and in the South
a low sighing that of wings
Describe that nude, audacious line
most lofty, practiced street
you are no longer thirsty
turn or go straight.
Russians at the Beach
The long long accent
the short vowel
that thing wrapped around a palm tree
is it this water, or this jetty?
The blue, in air dismal
to the face further than sand
then green rolling its own powder
you will provide you stranger
The cargo intimate cargo
of lashes and backs bent like a crew
the miles are vast and the isthmus
shows five-toed feet
erect thunders all afternoon
You have traveled
more than this shore where
the long bodies
wait
their thin heads
do not understand
They are bent
the breeze is light
as the step of a native is heavy
you are tired
but you breathe
and you eat
and you sleep where the stream is narrow
where the foam has left off
ascending
the day meets your borders
so easily
where you have discovered it.
The Hero Leaves His Ship
I wonder if this new reality is going to destroy me.
There under the leaves a loaf
The brick wall on it someone has put bananas
The bricks have come loose under the weight,
What a precarious architecture these apartments,
As giants once in a garden. Dear roots
Your slivers repair my throat when anguish
commences to heat and glow.
From the water
A roar. The sea has its own strong wrist
The green turf is made of shells
it is new.
I am about to use my voice
Why am I afraid that salty wing
Flying over a real hearth will stop me?
Yesterday the yellow
Tokening clouds. I said “no” to my burden,
The shrub planted on my shoulders. When snow
Falls or in rain, birds gather there
In the short evergreen. They repeat their disastrous
Beckoning songs as if the earth
Were rich and many warriors coming out of it,
As if the calm was blue, one sky over
A shore and the tide welcoming a fleet
Bronzed and strong as breakers,
Their limbs in this light
Fused of sand and wave are lifted once
Then sunk under aquamarine, the phosphorous.
Afterwards this soundless bay,
Gulls fly over it. The dark is mixed
With wings. I ask if that house is real,
If geese drink at the pond, if the goatherd takes
To the mountain, if the couple love and sup,
I cross the elemental stations
from windy field to still close. Good night I go to my bed.
This roof will hold me. Outside the gods survive.
Les Réalités
It’s raining today and I’m reading about pharmacies
in Paris.
Yesterday I took the autumn walk, known in May
as lovers’ walk.
Because I was overwhelmed by trees (the path from the playhouse
leads into a grove and beyond are the gravestones),
squirrels and new mold it is a good thing today
to read about second-class pharmacies where
mortar and plastic goods disturb death a little
and life more. It is as if perpetual rain
fell on those drugstores making the mosaic brighter,
as if entering those doors one’s tears
were cleaner.
As if I had just
left you and was looking for a new shade of powder
orchidée, ambre, rosé, one very clarified and true
to its owner, one that in a mirror
would pass for real and yet when your hand falls upon it
(as it can) changes into a stone or flower of the will
and triumphs as a natural thing,
as this pharmacy
turns our desire into medicines and revokes the rain.
In the Middle of the Easel
My darling, only
a cubist angle seen after
produces this volume in which our hearts go
(tick tick)
I see you in a veil of velvet
then I’m quiet because you’ve
managed the apples, you’ve arranged
to sit. You are twice clothed
in my joy, my nymph.
Painters who range up and down
Mont hill or Mont this, disarray
in the twilight those boulevards,
make every stroke count and when one of the Saints
(in the dark apse tonal) quits,
I’m with you.
Together we’ll breathe it,
you and I in the sleeve forgiving requiem,
in the priest tinted air.
In the gaslight that ridiculous plume
reminds me of hawks, I admire
their arc, I plunge
my everyday laughter into that kimono wing
what a studio soar! What rapture!
The gifted night, the billowing dark!
The heroine Paint sobs
“No one who has ever loved me
can tell me why
there are two birds at my wrist
and only one flies.”
On the Way to Dumbarton Oaks
The air! The colonial air! The walls, the brick,
this November thunder! The clouds Atlanticking,
Canadianing, Alaska snowclouds,
tunnel and sleigh, urban and mountain routes!
Chinese tree
your black branches and your three yellow leaves
with you I traffick. My three
yellow notes, my three yellow stanzas,
my three precisenesses
of head and body and tail joined
carrying my scroll, my tree drawing
This winter day I’m
a compleat travel agency with my Australian
aborigine sights, my moccasin feet padding
into museums where I’ll betray all my vast
journeying sensibility in a tear dropped before
“The Treasure of Petersburg”
and gorgeous this forever
I’ve a raft of you left over
like so many gold flowers and so many white
and the stems! the stems I have left!
Cape Canaveral
Fixed in my new wig
the green grass side
hanging down
I impart to my silences
operas.
Climate cannot impair
neither the grey clouds nor the black waters
the change in my hair.
Covered with straw or alabaster
I’m inured against weather.
The vixen’s glare, the tear on the flesh
covered continent where the snake
withers happily and the nude deer
antler glitters, neither shares
my rifled ocean growth
polar and spare.
Eyes open
spinning pockets
for the glass harpoons
lying under my lids
icy as summers
Nose ridges
where the glaciers melt
into my autumnal winter-fed cheek
hiding its shudder in this kelp
glued
cracked as the air.
Sunday Evening
I am telling you a number of half-conditioned ideas
Am repeating myself,
The room has four sides; it is a rectangle,
From the window the bridge, the water, the leaves,
Her hat is made of feathers,
My fortune is produced from glass
And I drink to my extinction.
Barges on the river carry apples wrapped in bales,
This morning there was a sombre sunrise,
In the red, in the air, in what is falling through us
We quote several things.
I am talking to you
With what is left of me written off,
On the cuff, ancestral and vague,
As a monkey walks through the many fires
Of the jungle while a village breathes in its sleep.
Someone stops in the alcove,
It is a risk we will later make,
While I talk and you bring your eyes to the fibre
(as the blade to the brown root)
And the room is slumberous and slow
(as a pulse after the first September earthquake).
Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
I just said I didn’t know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berries
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished.
The Crisis
Not to be able to carry mice to your room
when you have walked the boulevards
with rain at your tail and umbrellas
opened an edifice of dragoons
preparing to ascend when the park was hungrier,
its bursting branches were loaves
under the yellow sky. Alas the great days
of desire have passed.
Prepare for bulbs and minor grasses; seize on
imported mauves, ivory cutlasses prepared
in Switzerland for sailors whose white eyelashes
will curtain the whim of captains and make
graceful the long Cape trip. You will sail
upon mats of periwinkles, if you prefer.
Why tramp now the marshes where the expert mice
rest on borders and sit
with their pierced hearts? They have grown fat
under the discipline of raiders who need in the night
corridor a lawful pillow, in the black watches
a slim straw purchased for a mouse, a hat
to cover the dark marches and the small
confidences laid on cushions before daybreak
when fountains plash and mirrors reflect
the thick mud where armies have passed.
Upside Down
Old slugger-the-bat
don’t try to control me
I’ve a cold in my head
and a pain in one side
it’s the cautious climate
of birds.
Where the bitter night shows
fat as an owl the skeleton
not counting the skin.
This species can’t bite,
but it has a hurt. We’ve all got birds
flying at us
little ones over the toes.
The hand that holds is webbed
no knuckles
but the bone grows.
Seeing You Off
Bracketed in my own barn
where ignorant as those armies
I flash my light upon the Hudson
and shout continental factories
take fire! Send navies out from Jersey
let there be more edens
of soap and fats
Such splendors make rigid a democracy
define its skeleton
permit the night to cleanse its air
with moving vans
olympic as dawn
Upon the big liner
moored at last
by little landscape poems
frail as lifeboats
settling down to rest
While we kiss in the saloon
far above the cries
from plows and auto parts
sending up goodbyes
as ugly as those waifs of paper
on the pier
or that truck profiled into gloom
his whole insides protest
Departures make disgust into a cartoon
of rose Nabiscos and I digest
the sinking afternoon in a fleet
of taxicabs dead sure as you
and Carthage after?
we’ll float on that wine-dark sea
Safe Flights
To no longer like the taste of whisky
This is saying also no to you who are
A goldfinch in the breeze,
To no longer wish winter to have explanations
To lace your shoes in the snow
With no need to remember,
To no longer pull the two blankets
Over your shoulders, to no longer feel the cold,
To no longer pretend in the flower
There is a secret, or in the earth a tomb,
And no longer water on stone hurting the ear,
Making those five noises of thunder
And you tremble no longer.
To no longer travel over mountains,
Over small farms
No longer the weather changing and the atmosphere
Causing delicate breaks where the nerves confuse,
To no longer have your name shouted
And your birthmark again described,
To no longer fear where the rapids break
A miniature rock under your canoe,
To no longer repeat the mirror is water,
The house is a burden to the weak cyclone,
You are under a tent where promises perform
And the ring you grasp as an aerialist
Glides, no longer.
Sadness
We were walking down a narrow street.
It was late autumn. In my hotel room
the steam heat had been turned on. In the office
buildings, in the boutiques, coal was lit.
That morning I had been standing at the window
looking out on the Tuileries. I had been crying
because the yellow tulips were gone and all the children
were wearing thin coats. I felt an embarrassing pain
distributed over my arms which were powerless
to order the leaves to blossom or the old women
on the stairs to buy shoes to cover their feet.
Then you took my hand. You told me that love
was a sudden disturbance of the nerve ends
that startled the fibres and made them new
again. You quoted a song about a man running
by the sea who drew into his lungs the air
that had several times been around the world.
A speck of coal dust floated down and settled on my lapel.
Quickly with your free hand you rubbed out the spot.
Yet do you know I shall carry always
that blemish on my breast?
Jaffa Juce*
This orange bric-a-brac has a paper luster very decadent.
Crossing Hyde Park I am brimming
with sad thoughts of the Royal Bank of Scotland
when the shepherd calls to his sheep
and daylight crisps my hands in streaks.
The primroses are lying in thin groups of threes
transparent as the fool’s stammer
when the old king came wailing to his pool
and vagabonds clustered
to the guard’s hall
hoping to see
a burning palace. Then the family
sat down to tea.
There’s a lady in a macintosh
trying to climb a wall. Her tears
her broken tears,
more fabulous for their tumult caused
(by moonlight assembling pears,
a Jericho harp for the guests)
she has heard the museum mating chairs,
seen the varnished fragments of the bomb
meeting in a closer circle.
Reginald after the battle!
What a cry for a miner, alas he’s lost
his keys and can’t locate the platter.
The silver cooking geese have left the plain,
no one shoves the tin
My darling
Weymouth sands are green
There’s drought in the wind
there’s ash in our eye
the poor dead hands are clean
Sing derry down
the hospital shakes its leaves
For the players
and their laughing daughters, the morning is bright
upon the square, the air shows its face
like a powdered Indian, the fog
is braced with sun; over the setting
heyday toasts there’s a ring of moon
for tomorrow.
A crown lies
under the cake. They’re borrowing streamers
for the race and white candles with tartan crests
burn in the cellars below the streets. The Crescent
has an Egyptian hue. Everyone is civil.
Buns in the oven, cider in the hall,
pleasant sings our land.
Who frets above the stair with sour eye in glove?
Is it the Marvellous Boy? Someone crept from a grove?
Who carries the axe with sharpened blade,
not that wraith of laureates under the hill?
The prisoner or the emigrant horde?
Ho for the emigrant’s song!
“In this autumn’s double grace from war
I watch the housefronting plummets of cream
wear echoes of sinks
and banners of choice portals
when I ride my sorrel to Marble Arch
praying for the liquidating
skin to melt
into a victory column
built like a ship
bonded for New Plymouth where my fortune
(folios of bent seed)
will take root on the first wave
will take root.”
In Dock
We are living at an embarkation port
where the gulls
and the soft-shoed buoys
make Atlantic soundings
This air of ours is photographing fish
and the rice and the white antelope pelts
are asleep in the dark orchid hold
where old women have sent their black lids to be parched
and young bronze boys are tying knots in their limbs
while the spume and the salt
send thick-painted pictures to the hatchway
O Thracian! O Phoenician!
Vergilian harbors are wearing laurels
yet our hideaways are empty
as your camphor bottles, the scent
the wild scent has fled the hills
to couple under thyme beds
and the nectar of honey, it too has faded.
Fleeting rivers, your robberies
have paved our zones, you’re alive in our hearts
as yesterday or tomorrow
or the ghost ship from Athens
plying its shuttered bark
crying Zeus! Zeus!
as it shatters this pier.
People in Wartime
Attilio, the minor Hun,
Rose with the sun.
Washed his face
In a little grape
And cried, This is I.
This is one who would
Conquer
The fever
And the world outside.
With this he took a stride
Across his hall bedroom,
Faced the broken glass
And into the mirror sighed,
Such was I.
Now am I to become
This singular juxtaposition
Between the man
And his decision
Am I history, or am I a plot?
Or such was his reflection
For
He was not interested
In
Art
Or politics
Or women
Or even getting ahead,
I have said
He was a minor character
And his misery
Was not Alpine,
But extremely particular,
Was he history, or was he not?
Landing
This afternoon I am very careful.
I watch myself. I watch the egg
Unhatched. I am the sight
Over the egg, like an aviator
Unknowing, but confident
That the instrument will behave.
The window outscaped
Brings the climate indoors.
The eye is free, adorned
By that which is becoming.
What is near, prevalent, adored
By the inner is echoed
By the ear. My conscience
Is receptive. I sight the cause
Of the exterior and so I hear
What is sounded in the interior.
Yet the break is this:
The germinal is split.
Not content with eye and sphere,
I race the continual
And drift to the absurd,
The conjugal, from which
The flight is only heard.
History
for Frank O’Hara
Old Thing
We have escaped
from that pale refrigerator
you wrote about
Here
amid the wild woodbine landscapes
wearing a paper hat
I recollect
the idols
in those frozen tubs
secluded by buttresses
when the Church of
Our Lady cried Enough
and we were banished
Sighing
strangers
we are
the last even breath
poets
Yet the funicular
was tied by a rope
It could only cry
looking down
that midnight hill
My lights are
bright
the walk is
irregular
your initials
are carved on the sill.
Mon Ami!
the funicular
has a knife
in its side
Ah allow these nightingales to nurse us
Oriental Movie
Lady your orange back
is waving at Foujita
we’re all in a canoe
sipping the light drink of the tamarind bark
while the white-eyed paddles
whisper orange
and blue
and the solemn wall says
orange and blue
to your cunning slant-eyed rind
of a rainstorm shining
in the gloom
like the lights
of Hong Kong brewed
on the hill
and tomorrow there’ll be another
thin brush a thinner brush
The Crisis
After the white-collared boats
the smithies will return
then we shall hear
the ding dong.
After the laundries, the lavatories of trains
when velvet returns
we shall see the snails
making their own ding dong
when it rains.
After the rich seas, the closed stations,
the plumed clocks, the long balconies,
a quiet vista of snails.
In the time of great kings
I hid this knife with a friend
to cut off the trail (silver)
which led to my house.
Ding dong
without a shell.
Having to wait until it was over
I stayed on a sofa
when Madame returned
she discovered
a frieze on the wall and she exclaimed
in horror
(it was over)
You have murdered our friend!
Ding dong
from now on.
West Sixty-fourth Street
for Miriam and Mitchell Ittelson
The room isn’t as white as you’d suppose
(accustomed to a cube of ice
or a flake of eiderdown in Pekin
after the palace was closed; the warriors
in thin shirts tried to open the door
they found a message written in clear ink
forgetting to describe the tracks on the Yangtze floes)
There’s a sign of Work and Joy
facing the brave night whose shoulders
are covered with primary colors
under which we succumb with a smile
Permitting the glass blowers to thicken their bottles
while candelabra melt into forests
gathering their heartache
into bouquets of grass
Yet wicker is impermanent as these burning lights
when at daybreak it is said
“the painter has dropped his brush in the canal”
So afterwards we’ll go on to the Villa
I’ll play you its record the next time we go for a walk
in Central Park the hour the statues say “yes.”
The Time of Day
Or when I see a sailor in front of my house on the
sidewalk
He is hurrying, the church bells are ringing:
« Okay! » says the man who takes the money.
Or when two nuns enter the library, one of them is
going to smile
She is not thinking of what is ahead:
« Okay! » says the man who takes the money.
Or the mannequin who opens a closet full of hats
His arm holds his elbow and the hand caresses the
face while he selects:
« Okay! » says the man who takes the money.
Or when someone addresses me who is not a regular
member of the Army
And I answer, good afternoon Major:
« Okay! » says the man who takes the money.
Or when I go into the room and close my door
It is the hour for decisions and I am going to take
a little nap:
« Okay! » says the driver.
Heroic Stages
for Grace Hartigan
I had thought you were disappearing
under the desperate monuments of sand
I discovered you were leaning on grass
which after green is noble.
In the sunlight each morning
is delivered to your table
among the oranges and white bottles
the Quest.
If ever after Valhalla should proclaim
a string of knights (usually seen wandering)
this grey silent space would be orchestrated
for their maneuvers. And way over there
shining by itself in the blue twilight
a misunderstood Chalice.
Grand breaks!
the forest is growing too high
(the waves are longer; there is no sound)
the river has turned from its bed
rocks have no moss they have plumes
the chiaroscuro results in serpents.
Danger!
where only the poets
held to the routes by the tender-eyed peasants
and you painters
who have drawn those deep lines on the globes
are without anger and starvation.
My penitent self sing when you perceive
it is a kindergarten
of giants where grapes are growing.
The wind is southerly.
You face a park. There are wings in this atmosphere,
sovereigns who pour forth breezes to refresh
your atlas.
Rulers
have exacted fares, the former slope was icy.
Now in the Spring air with leaves posed above benches
the waterfall as hesitant as ever,
Biography removes her gauntlet
to cast care from your brow.
In America, the Seasons
You in the new winter
stretch forth your hands
they are needles,
the sun quivers,
the landsman translates
epine.
False starter,
regretter of seasons,
you are tomahawking
summer
and
I incline toward you
like dead Europe
wrapped in loose arms.
Yet on this plain
who would hesitate?
seeing the funeral of grass
the thin afternoon
plundering the rocks,
the broken leaves
and silence incontinently snapped.
Who hears Piers calling now?
It is the face
under the blanket
we watch.
Belgravia
I am in love with a man
Who is more fond of his own house
Than many interiors which are, of course, less unique,
But more constructed to the usual sensibility,
Yet unlike those rooms in which he lives
Cannot be filled with crystal objects.
There are embroidered chairs
Made in Berlin to look like cane, very round
And light which do not break, but bend
Ever so slightly, and rock at twilight as the cradle
Rocks itself if given a slight push and a small
Tune can be heard when several of the branches creak.
Many rooms are in his house
And they can all be used for exercise.
There are mileposts cut into the marble,
A block, ten blocks, a mile
For the one who walks here always thinking,
Who finds a meaning at the end of a mile
And wishes to entomb his discoveries.
I am in love with a man
Who knows himself better than my youth,
My experience or my ability
Trained now to reflect his face
As rims reflect their glasses,
Or as mirrors, filigreed as several European
Capitals have regarded their past
Of which he is the living representative,
Who alone is nervous with history.
I am in love with a man
In this open house of windows,
Locks and balconies,
This man who reflects and considers
The brokenhearted bears who tumble in the leaves.
In the garden which thus has escaped all intruders
There when benches are placed
Side by side, watching separate entrances,
As one might plan an audience
That cannot refrain from turning ever so little
In other directions and witnessing
The completion of itself as seen from all sides,
I am in love with him
Who only among the invited hastens my speech.
In the Alps
Where goes this wandering blue,
This horizon that covers us without a murmur?
Let old lands speak their speech,
Let tarnished canopies protect us.
Where after the wars, the peaceable lions,
The forests resting from their struggle,
The streams with loads upon their icy backs,
Is this a reason for happiness,
That one speaks after such a long time,
That the hand one holds leads one far away?
Is this a fairy tale then?
This new-discovered place where one can dream
Of tigers with fair hair and houses whose hearths
Are tended by knights lingering there?
Riding down to Venice on borrowed horses
The air is freed of our crimes,
Lovers meet in the inns of our fathers
And everywhere after dusk the day follows.
The Past of a Poem
Do you remember as I do,
the beautiful dressing that covered
the old poem?
There it lay not quite dead,
nor even suffering, but so quiet
the linen didn’t stir
and all that heartache, the way
water runs in sewers
and you walk over them
sometimes twisting your heel
knowing how dirty the river
under the slender neat street
You might even refuse
to put a bird in it
if the feathers
weren’t too moist and stained,
a difficult color
The cold water flat that June
night you put your hands on the radiator
crushed by your fingers
yet still fresh that poem
from its bewildering year
Come close to it now
and listen, don’t you hear
“septic sighs of sadness”?
ARCHAICS
Atalanta in Arcadia
Atalanta who paces the roadway
January wind in her tresses
throws leaves against the wall,
only her lover waits in the shade
adoring his thin magnetic ankles.
On Arcadian nights the eager moon
has two fellows who hold the balloon,
that’s all they have to do,
until day cast in bronze
makes Atalanta angry and they fall
beside a stream of air
arms flailing at her strenuous leap,
so fair when she promenades
Venus proclaims her a glorious follower,
if the path her lover takes is steep, perhaps
he shall slip and she will bury her tears
in his garments,
then other nymphs will laugh with her
for briefly the promises of mortals
are cheerless.
Careless Atalanta,
that boy once continual shadow prepares
for the age of athletes, the ritualistic
grass uncovers his apple and bees
are stumbling in your sacred pasture.
Who is there to warn Atalanta
that her huntress days are over?
Who will tell her
of the famous youth pursuing her?
And the speed with which her girlhood
will be consumed?
The sweetness of the capture?
If one kind god hiding in the thicket
would change that last strophe!
“From Eyes Blue and Cold”
From eyes blue and cold
the nymphs drink
your snow
Olympus
There on watchful
heights dawn prepares her lesson
as the groves thicken with
one’s first song
See now its wing arch
over the valley and the brisk foot
of the satyr no longer limping
From eyes blue and cold
out of the abandoning water
another goddess
Again Olympus
from your delicate forgeries
a naïve daybreak
Hoof, reed, horn
will bring to the sandy river
a far-off coastal lithesomeness
when she awakes
with seaweed in her arms
from eyes blue and cold
shares that beauty
Dido to Aeneas
I love you
I have permitted myself to say choirs
(as if the late birds sang in branches) when for them
in the dusk at wind set
the garage eave yields its water cup.
Not for us the paling light
the white urn at the driveway,
nor for us the palmettos and the squeak
of tiles. The fountain at noonday cries,
“You are not here” and the sea at its distance
calls to a single path flanked by hibiscus,
the sea reminds itself each day
that it is solitary and the bather gambles
in its waves as a suicide who says “tomorrow is
another” an hour in the wrecker foam.
I love you
I am writing your name as if I were a Trojan
who expected someone else to smooth the shore
of souls who said
to the great reaches of wave and salt,
“I am replenishing as a light falling on a single tree”
and it is wonderful like ice on a floe,
I love you
miracle, mirror, word, all the same
you come, you go
I love you
(on my rioting lawns the plaster flamingos
endure your wonder)
Green Awnings
Leander walked over with a basket of peonies.
He was eating grapes he had picked by the old
cottage where he stayed and where there was a door
hung with vines. He was living on grapes, training
his muscles for that solitary climb. Somedays the tower
seemed higher and he felt a little blue twinge
in his arm.
She was sewing a white heron into her gown.
Messages came each day from her father, but
she ignored them, preferring to think of the pale
autumn legs of her bird.
She put water in a vase and wished for flowers.
It was half-past three, but the Latin sun
stayed in the room. How she longed to bathe
in the river. How piteous to be a prisoner
when one was as young as she knew herself to be
in her mirror. She was as earnest as her parents
and nightly prepared her body. She was hopeful
and prayed to the stars who liked her.
She went to the window.
Games need companions, he decided, and sat on the grass.
He had pretended that tree was the armor of his friend, Catylus,
and used up his arrows. The river urged him
to practice his stroke. Later floating on his back,
looking up at the tower, he saw an arm pulling
at an awning strap. What was his surprise when
the green canvas loosed, a girl’s hair fell after it.
Palm Trees
What an arch your
heavy burlap branches
decide they’ll go into!
(the first plunge did not destroy
that green youth hid itself)
And now freshly you start to go upward
You want to reach a curve that will draw
the sky to yourself and say blue
here is your arabesque!
The woman walks near you
Under the sea a fern resembles you
The heat stops and waits
and you give nothing.
Calm fan no one touches
In the Campagna
“It was kind of you to ask”
you there at the entrance.
The cave looked even darker,
darker than the covering leaves
A suspicious person would say
they guarded.
You wanted to know if we wished
to throw off our shields and rest
Lay our heads in the shade
and take from the dripping roof water
A cupful to drink.
Your heart was visible
your hand open
Why did we stare
and grasp our pikes?
Why are we cautious whom the forests
had refused comfort?
Stones on the hillside
bruised our feet
And the well had been empty.
Why are we shy of your pillow
your twin black eyes?
The thunder came nearer
it made a road in our ears
Rain fell yet we lingered
at the cave’s door
Waiting for familiar torrents
expecting an ordinary storm blast
As a nephew might stop
at our house his shoulders loaded
With town purchases
vegetables and dress stuffs
This nephew who was often troublesome
who was stealthy at equinox
Yet of our sister’s blood
all the same.
You, are you Cerberus, four-footed
who halts us this night
While lightning
pitches straw about
And trees glitter strangely?
We, four men lost
on a starless mountain
In the middle of the year,
Your question: “Will you enter?”
What does it mean?
“Who will accept our offering at this end of autumn?”
to Seferis
That shock of hair in the white morning
We were up early while the grain was heaviest
and the earth was taking leaves to its stairwell
We, our arms in the heat, felt a chill
while the sun turned over, went around our shoulder
It was a cold glare; honey in the jars
clasped and unclasped the shell.
You of the thick twist, like an earring
your hair, pendulous and coarsely welded,
As if walking toward the gate one had stopped
and picked up this object, shouted “archaic”
To the tombsman who had accompanied the discoveries,
neither literate nor blind, whose weight
Bore down on the sand like a helmet
pressing his curls.
This fruit of the land remembers
the warmth of the braziers on its marbles
The dew on its columns
and in its branches the wind
Tossing into the cistern
the strength-bearing seeds,
Vengeful the storms and afterwards
the pines meagre as they are,
Slowly goes the animal
up the mountain edge,
For us carrying the bronze,
who will not be there at harvest.
THE OPEN SKIES
The Voice Tree
Of Anger and Sorrow
Growth
the parallel vines
from you to me
a white shadow, a break
on the window, a cast
To my tears that fall straight
as the birch, thick and round
as bulbs at your base.
Seasons, horizons,
natal days and those
that are dark
I celebrate wisely
or with terror or watch
the leaves as they fall
minutely and crack
the wide underground.
Raven and bird from far-off
… at your neck
feathers of sea tern
tree of iodine and blue …
When you are spine
and leafless branch
how you will rage
you will force me
in the garden packed with snow
to surround you with fire
to pad your roots with ash
the red flames to your green throat
the wild spark to your open mouth
Then your voice in the smoke
leaping and shouting
the icicles melting, melting.
Lights of My Eyes
Lights of my eyes
my only
they’re turning it off
while we’re asleep on this shore
and the thick daffodils
are crying
lights of my eyes
don’t be afraid of me
what we saw
rivers and roads
ruins
the cast of the sculpture in winter
They will return your voice
and I’ll go on singing “adieu”
Snow Angel
The storm’s threat and ache
Angels are in peril there on the rooftops
Angels are grey
Sticks the prancing
sticks to give them shelter it rained and webs
broke wings shrank the branch-bearing river
shook
bewildered as a sun
Magister who brings
thunder the firs are ready for their burden
underground fires are lit
in the dark sits
the first Angel of snow
tomorrow in the outraged
sky
his form
Santa Fe Trail
I go separately
The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me
ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands
it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched
where the westerly winds
and the traveler’s checks
the evensong of salesmen
the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases
where no one speaks English.
I go separately
It is the wind, the rubber wind
when we brush our teeth in the way station
a climate to beard. What forks these roads?
Who clammers o’er the twain?
What murmurs and rustles in the distance
in the white branches where the light is whipped
piercing at the crossing as into the dunes we simmer
and toss ourselves awhile the motor pants like a forest
where owls from their bandaged eyes send messages
to the Indian couple. Peaks have you heard?
I go separately
We have reached the arithmetics, are partially quenched
while it growls and hints in the lost trapper’s voice
She is coming toward us like a session of pines
in the wild wooden air where rabbits are frozen,
O mother of lakes and glaciers, save us gamblers
whose wagon is perilously rapt.
Nocturne
Toi, Seine, tu n’as rien. Deux quais, et voilà tout …
VERLAINE
Do you know what silence means?
Deux quais, et voilà tout.
My dear, my dear,
The skaters tremble.
In the grey there is no void.
The grey resembles ice as the stairs
This city. The voice begins
Like the ice to tremble.
Oh! foreign vase
On the mantel your force
Is tremendous as if the ice were soft
And you immovable.
Or the white statue,
Statue of lace
Moved even her hand or her face
Leaned backward into the past.
So my mysterious, unbroken calm,
This fortitude you have kept for an hour.
Do you know what silence means?
Deux quais et voilà tout.
The First of May
My eye cannot turn toward you
Night
because it has Day watching.
(A spoon heated over the fire,
a cup with milk in it
shadows at its brim.)
I would like to go for a walk
in the dark
without moonbeams
down that path of mushrooms
in my nightdress
without shoes.
I would like to sit under your wall
and you fortify me
as you did once on the road,
a stranger.
I would like to steal
and take it to you.
I would like to go to a hotel
with you.
Turn out the lights!
Your arms, I feel them,
your eyes, I cannot see them.
Day is watching me
from over the transom.
Day whose light is blinding me,
as lightning on the firebreak
of a mountain,
who brings me a quail
caught in the smoldering underbrush
where the smell is of yucca
and sage.
Day brings me this bird.
I must go and feed it
with milk from the cup,
a few drops on the spoon.
The sirens are screaming
in the streets.
It is an order to take cover.
And I, I
must bring this bird to shelter.
I must not be caught out
in the night
unless I am willing
to give you up Day forever,
when I join the guerrillas,
who would like my cup
and spoon,
who would roast my bird
and eat it.
Dardanella
Those forms in gauze
we see as arches
the tile replaces with mountain
the script says: As water this life
poets go to the mountain
followed by girls in white
The king of the heavy mustache
“like buffaloes these men”
cannot find dawn in his sleep
So agents prepare the morning mosquito
it must be noisy yet not alarming
Those who hear it across the valley
in their ears closed with honey
will feel the sting of bells
in the palace only one vase need splinter
from his arms only the virgin need struggle
the boy knows now to kiss
he will ride horses to the blue dome.
Twenty-four veils in a pile
and hatchoutchoui houri
for hours and hours and hours
the patient needy camel lifts his neck
over the sun brick petals catch
that is all … no vines … no miles
… no hills … no caves in the hills …
women walk to the fountain
Pasha is with the Consul
the French woman writes letters a violet eye
toward the boy who has peed on the tile
she forgets the name for raisin says plum
Milk say the heavens regarding the white sand
Bosphorus click of eel in your wave off Egypt
tow-ridden plain of Kilid Bahr
trees and risk where ancient bouncing flat
is war land of the tomb otherwise lids
Air in the arch is black
as sighs from vessels cast
on the shut-off tide.
The Brown Studio
Walking into the room
after having spent a night in the grove
by the river
its duskiness surprised me.
The hours I had spent under foliage,
the forms I had seen were all sombre,
even the music was distinctly shady, the water
had left me melancholy, my hands I had rinsed
were muddy. I had seen only one bird with a bright
wing, the rest were starlings,
the brownness alarmed me.
I saw the black stove, the black chair,
the black coat. I saw the easel, remembering it as
an ordinary wood tone, rather pale, I realized
it was inky, as were the drawings.
Of course you weren’t there, but a photograph was.
Actually a negative. Your hair didn’t show up at all.
Where that fairness had lit the open ground,
now there was an emptiness, beginning to darken.
I believed if I spoke,
if a word came from my throat
and entered this room whose walls had been turned,
it would be the color of the cape
we saw in Aix in the studio of Cézanne,
it hung near the death’s head, the umbrella,
the palette cooled to grey,
if I spoke loudly enough,
knowing the arc from real to phantom,
the fall of my voice would be,
a dying brown.
All Elegies Are Black and White
To Robert Motherwell
When Villon went to his college
he wore a black gown
he put his hood up when
he went out on the black streets.
He ate black bread
and even drank a kind of black wine,
(we don’t have any longer)
it wasn’t that good Beaune
his skill taught him how to steal,
a disappearing drink also.
The sky was white over Paris,
until it fell in the streets,
like a sky over mountains,
disturbing and demanding.
When you are in Spain
you think of sky
and mountain where the forest
is without water.
You think of your art
which has become important
like a plow
on the flat land.
There are even a few animals
to consider.
And olives.
Do you regard them separately?
The forms of nature,
animals, trees
That bear a black burden
whose throat is always thirsty?
I know of Seville of black carriages
one factory
one river
the air is brown.
Alas we have fair hair, are rojo.
Throw a mantilla over your face
rojo of the light,
walk only in the white spaces.
The trains that cross back and forth
the borders of Elegy
sleep all afternoon, at night
lament the lost shapes.
I think when you oppose
black against white,
archaeologist you have raised a dream
which is bitter.
The white elegy
is the most secret elegy.
One may arrive at it
from the blue.
The sky in Spain is high.
It is as high as the sky
in California.
When one begins with white and blue
it is necessary for one’s eyes to darken.
One may have fair hair in Spain,
yet the trouble of blue eyes!
Unless one can always live
sparsely as in Castille.
(How wise you are to understand
the use of orange with blue.
“Never without the other.”)
And what courage to allow oneself
to become black and blue!
It is necessary that eyes be black
so the white may deepen
in them the white may sink,
it can then be constant, as music
is constant, or a marriage, or fountains,
or a palace whose shadow is constant.
To make an Elegy of Spain
is to make a song of the abyss.
It is to cut a gorge into one’s soul
which is suddenly no longer private.
This privacy which has become invaded
straightens itself up, it sings,
“I am proud as a cañon.”
Can you imagine the shock over the world
against which two enormous black rocks roll
this world that looks like a white cloud
shifting its buttocks?
When the guitar strikes
A procession of those tasters of ecstasy
the thieves of dark and light
beginning with Villon
whose black songs are elegies
whose elegies are white
Dios!
The Open Skies
I
Molluscs in their shell
the skies
Breathe up and down
unspiraling
Open skies
seeded with light and stone
II
Pattern of drift Is eye of air
stray ephemeral visible hand from sky form?
III
Revolving day prisoner in the openness
Smiling lips daylight fair
unbreakable you seem
Hitched to me as I
window thrust to you
IV
Cloudless
you take
My happiness
rising in the morning
Light descends to me
buoyantly I stare
A tremor on this hand
light has touched
I pass into your frailness
Noiseless hour
span of float and flight
Sky without lever or stress
V
Tough the cone to shelter
Ecstatic harking to upward dome
VI
Ash and ember
creature and skin
Soft body of unprotected gilt
VII
Sky whose fancy
sways and swings above
All quick airiness
and slow guide
Without you I cannot see.
Hurricane
The house. The pictures there on the wall
and the rug I slept on it as a child
near the dining table, drowned while they ate.
Now a threat, a dawn of horse hooves, a manger
where the straw is blown and hens in the yard,
their tail feathers high, and cat with open eyes.
I wonder before it strikes from the low clouds, I
not yet to bed near the steps where leaves lie,
how far the water will rise?
If the storm only a few miles from here,
if its white cheek and wet arm,
its eyelash curled
and its wrist angry and at last free
will touch this house, will caress
the old furniture and names erase them,
if the roof, all the chambers
will be lifted from our faces, will we
go gladly into its barn, magnified by wet
and rain and drops that slope
increasingly to that eave where we wait
for darkness, or thunder, or night
on the drenched tile
to lead us away?
His Jungle
Recognized only its hands
That monkey face is known later
and the wind accompanying it.
Torrents replace the usual seasons
conquest by variety
A handsome thunder, a thaw
Out of the earth comes another air
smoky as animal.
He lifts his hands to his face.
The stone he must roll it.
He must rub the flakes without
Being shaken.
He must break down the door
Behind it.
That tree how many leaves
Strain it. He wonders
If a four-legged beast
Will find the flower
And eat it. Rather it than him.
If that place going round
Beyond the trees if the door’s most
Difficult inscription will be lost
In the whirl
Will escape him.
Will be too mashed will remind
Him of mold will have gone
Too far and he dislike
Black as he fears green,
A chatter in the grass,
Wind replacing ivory
With a tusk makes him drop
His tools.
It is the headsman,
Earth’s fragile runner who is caught
In his trap who describing pain
Plaits a monkey face
Arc and area wide enough
For both to fire.
Timor Mortis, Florida
White foam tide
waves descending
line of blue and white
blue submarine
where the dark sweel of thrust
retched water
Gulf whose eye is bluest screen
Aii the width of it settling
and frozen fish warming
Aii the width of it settling
A near palm leans, frond chilled
arched breeze and frontal cold
North Ice
sweep across a bright lateral
all plumes peaked, riders wary
risked sails the ride
hot and cold
a headland wilderness
odd winter, a dismay
to treat as cemetery. Wind.
In gardens, in snow, in flurry and flake
the bird wren, bare tree, to follow.
Desire at the stake of palmetto
Desire the empty marina tideless
Sands
Oars in the fronds
through bullrushes
Sunset the backland washes gates
While silt as light as dawn
over the threshing sea
Sand
The distance
see
the miles produce
reckoning,
water
extending
Sand
while
the sky airs itself
requests
clouds remain
in numbers
far off
also
the hand,
eyes, limbs
sand tests
coolness and heat
body levels
… Remain flat
planes fly over you
under a belly
prone side
of earth end
Neutral
to haughty black land and sea
that swank of blue
clammering
greed of ear
and rapacious its thunder,
or even the mild wave at
dawn’s edge
a honey
when youthfully it begins to boil
and foam wildly spilled
… noonday
Salt throat
the tongue clasps the swell,
releases sends monitoring ceaseless
thirst back to ocean depth
tides return to dark
The skeleton
shock of wave lift, a column
on the shore its profile ever foreign
its ruin permanent recurs
The bowl has changed color
gulls flown inland,
Poets walk across you their footprints
cannot shock your softness, on you
shells, pearls, weeds
discards as on a mountain top
is found record of horizon
as Patmos is an isle,
As you are mouth and sable skin
range of the sandle-footed
Rejoice
in ancient nothingness
Wave
i
And preparing a net
Wave
whose arm is green
your
half-wayness I, too, would meet you there
in foam
Borders
the rip slices turns backwards
swimmers this treachery is cast by mirrors
once in profile only this multiplied
the arrow backstroke sent to bliss
we cry deepest and turn not daring to spy
full-face on ocean crest that carries on
on
space now azure fullest where the depth
is danger
long roll
Again the ride
And equinoctal plunge
it dares beach the horizon
with you
wailings
(that drift shrieks at low tide)
bubbling
the loose and soggy shelf
Bell
ii
the eye tolls as burnished as Bell
on coral the wave breaks or here
cold zone of equal blue and grey
Tritons’ throng appears
where zephyrs
cast skyward by the spume glance down
on islands of the deep mermaids
we’ll never see or hear yet each
wave rolling brings in brightest
phosphorescence their hair
a lyre
sweet voice of brine
other secrets
in the tease and stress of wave song
Sun
multipowered it brushes
thins and splays
burns
wild-lidded over foam in air to touch
Remembering the violence
we turn on house pillow and let
dolphins surmise us (dreams) the lap
of shore water enter our heads as ponds
forced from sea are inlets, we are
islets become soft become grassy
turning swaying to each and yet
the angry
it calls
Noon
the crab walks
Night
small fish
Rock and dawn
Fog
iii
I would walk from this porch to your farthest
do I dare
Lights without you the house is ghosty
the pier is broken
its points are webbed
cricket and bird song about alas
until morning the great sea and ledge
from which pines such low soundings pines
that are green and sea that is swelling
sea whose earth is sandy who in sleep
changes as the pilot arm beckons
the arm we lie on shifts
early the stir
to crease from night close to begin
to gather to fall as Wave
Bountiful and Bare
Geography
cold
Moon track across the snow field
a saddle I ride its rope
into the light
the flank is soft
a fine departure the snow
bears my weight
to the mosses
the ripest blossoms fall
turn black in water
so dependency on sun is error
rather blue milk fields skimmed
and grass shod of twilight plain
than urn water swamp
on however
the swamp leaves at horse’s neck
a chatter of owl and bird fright
the rope loosens
the hand is moist with vine leech
a journey wince of cowhide
shriek and storm where weather
suddenly
warms
we reach the pole
of earth statues
heat
visibleness decreases
immaculate as a heron
without rust
I shine
the snow in the wound
becomes stucco
the magnificent sun
waves a flag above it
*Jaffa Juce is an orange drink high in vitamins, low in price, bottled and drunk in Britain.
