The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems Read online

  pistol shot. The Siege of Leningrad. Crows feasting on all of those

  frozen German eyes. Good Russian crows that earned a meal putting

  up with all of that insufferable racket of war. Curious crows watching

  midnight purges, wary of owls, and the girl in the green dress

  on the ground before a line of soldiers. She and the crow exchange

  pitiless glances. She flaps her arms but is not wingéd. Maybe

  there is one ancient crow that remembers the Czarina’s jeweled

  sleigh, the ring of its small gold bells; and the sickly wingéd

  horse in the cellar of the Winter Palace, product of a mad breeding

  experiment for eventual escape, how it was dumped into the Neva

  before the talons grew through the hooves, the marvel of it lost

  in the uproar of those days, the proof of it in the bones somewhere

  on the floor of the Baltic delta. But we all get lost in the course

  of empire, which lacks the Brownian movement’s stability. We count

  on iron men to stick to their guns. Our governments are weapons

  of exhaustion. Poems fly out of yellow windows at night with a stall

  factor just under a foot, beneath our knees and the pre–Fourth of

  July corn in the garden. At least at that level radar can’t detect

  them and they’re safe from State interference. We know perfectly

  well you flapped your arms madly, unwingéd but craving a little flight.

  29

  We’re nearing the end of this homage that often resembles a

  suicide note to a suicide. I didn’t mean it that way but how

  often our hands sneak up on our throats and catch us unaware.

  What are you doing here we say. Don’t squeeze so hard. The hands

  inside the vodka bottle and on the accelerator, needles and coke-

  sore noses. It’s not very attractive, is it? But now there is rain

  on the tin roof, the world outside is green and leafy with bluebirds

  this morning dive-bombing drowning worms from a telephone wire,

  the baby laughing as the dog eats the thirty-third snake of the

  summer. And the bodies on the streets and beaches. Girl bottoms!

  Holy. Tummies in the sun! Very probably holy. Peach evidence almost

  struggling for air! A libidinal stew that calls us to life however

  ancient and basal. May they plug their lovely ears with their big

  toes. God surely loves them to make them look that way and can I

  do less than He at least in this respect. As my humble country

  father said in our first birds-and-bees talk so many years ago: “That

  thing ain’t just to pee through.” This vulgarity saves us as

  certainly as our chauvinism. Just now in midafternoon I wanted

  a tumbler of wine but John Calvin said, “You got up at noon. No wine

  until you get your work done. You haven’t done your exercises to

  suppress the gut the newspaper says women find most disgusting.

  The fence isn’t mended and the neighbor’s cow keeps crawling through

  in the night, stealing the fresh clover you are saving for Rachel

  the mare when she drops her foal.” So the wine bottle remains

  corked and Calvin slips through the floorboards to the crawl space

  where he spends all of his time hating his body. Would these concerns

  have saved you? Two daughters and a wife. Children prop our rotting

  bodies with cries of earn earn earn. On occasion we are kissed. So odd

  in a single green month to go from the closest to so far from death.

  30

  The last and I’m shrinking from the coldness of your spirit: that

  chill lurid air that surrounds great Lenin in his tomb as if we

  had descended into a cloud to find on the catafalque a man who has

  usurped nature, isn’t dead any more than you or I are dead. Only

  unlikely to meet and talk to our current forms. Today I couldn’t

  understand words so I scythed ragweed and goldenrod before it could

  go to seed and multiply. I played with god imagining how to hold His

  obvious scythe that caught you, so unlike the others, aware and

  cooperative. Is He glad to help if we’re willing? A boring question

  since we’re so able and ingenious. Sappho’s sparrows are always

  telling us that love will save us, some other will arrive to draw

  us cool water, lie down with us in our private darkness and make

  us well. I think not. What a fabulous lie. We’ve disposed of sparrows

  and god, the death of color, those who are dominated by noon and

  the vision of night flowing in your ears and eyes and down your

  throat. But we didn’t mean to arrive at conclusions. Fifty years are

  only a moment between this granary and a hanged man half the earth

  away. You are ten years younger than my grandmother Hulda who still

  sings Lutheran hymns and watches the Muskegon River flow. In whatever

  we do, we do damage to ourselves; and in those first images there

  were always cowboys or cossacks fighting at night, murdered animals

  and girls never to be touched; dozing with head on your dog’s chest

  you understand breath and believe in golden cities where you will

  live forever. And that fatal expectancy – not comprehending that we

  like our poems are flowers for the void. In those last days you

  wondered why they turned their faces. Any common soul knew you

  had consented to death, the only possible blasphemy. I write to

  you like some half-witted, less courageous brother, unwilling to tease

  those ghosts you slept with faithfully until they cast you out.

  POSTSCRIPT

  At 8:12 AM all of the watches in the world are being wound.

  Which is not quite the same thing as all of the guitars on earth

  being tuned at midnight. Or that all suicides come after the mail-

  man when all hope is gone. Before the mailman, watches are wound,

  windows looked through, shoes precisely tied, toothcare, the

  attenuations of the hangover noted. Which is not the same as

  the new moon after midnight or her bare feet stepping slowly toward

  you and the snake easing himself from the ground for a meal.

  The world is so necessary. Someone must execute stray dogs and

  free the space they’re taking up. I can see people walking down

  Nevsky Prospect winding their watches before you were discovered

  too far above the ground, that mystical space that was somewhere

  occupied by a stray dog or a girl in an asylum on her hands

  and knees. A hanged face turns slowly from a plum to a lump of

  coal. I’m winding my watch in antipathy. I see the cat racing

  around the yard in a fantasy of threat. She’s preparing for

  eventualities. She prizes the only prize. But we aren’t the cats

  we once were thousands of years ago. You didn’t die with the

  dignity of an animal. Today you make me want to tie myself to

  a tree, stake my feet to earth herself so I can’t get away. It didn’t

  come as a burning bush or pillar of light but I’ve decided to stay.

  A LAST GHAZAL

  Anconcito. The fisheater. Men were standing on cork rafts

  on the water, visible between great Pacific swells.

  So in Ecuador you decide to forget her in St. George in

  Normandy. Try not to think of a white horse for several days.

  All of the lilacs in the yard lie when they take you back to your

  youth. There are white hairs on yo
ur chin, you can’t jump the fence.

  What is this feeling that the police are ineluctably closing

  in and you will miss many of your daughters’ birthdays.

  There are still flowers of evil that want to lead you to another

  life. We have photographic evidence of this in color, black-and-white.

  Asleep and in a dreaming state near death I feel the awkward girl

  in my head say please not now, I haven’t quite lived yet.

  A DOMESTIC POEM FOR PORTIA

  This is all it is.

  These pictures cast up in front of me

  with the mind’s various energies.

  Hence so many flies in this old granary.

  I’ve become one of those blackened beef sides

  hanging in a South American market so when I sing

  to myself I dispel a black cloud around my mouth

  and when Linda brings iced tea she thinks I’m only

  a photo in the National Geographic and drinks the tea

  herself, musing he’s snuck off to the bar

  and his five-year pool game.

  This seems to be all it is.

  Garcia sings Brown-eyed women and red grenadine.

  Some mother-source of pleasure so that the guitar

  mutes and revolves the vision of her as she rinses

  her hair bending thigh-deep in the lake, her buttocks appear

  to be struggling by themselves to get out of that bikini

  with a faint glisten of sun at each cheek-top.

  But when I talked to her she was thin in the head,

  a magazine photo slipping through the air like

  a stringless kite.

  It’s apparent now that this is all there is.

  This shabby wicker chair, music, the three PM

  glass of red wine as a reward for sitting still

  as our parents once instructed us. “Sit still!”

  I want my head to go visit friends, traveling they call it

  and without airports. Then little Anna up to her neck

  in the lake for the first time, the ancient lineage

  of swimming revealing itself in her two-year-old fat

  body, eyes sparkle with awe and delight in this natural

  house of water. Hearing a screech I step to the porch

  and see three hawks above the neighbor’s pasture

  chasing each other in battle or courtship.

  This must be all there is.

  At full rest with female-wet eyes becoming red wondering

  falsely how in christ’s name am I going to earn

  enough to keep us up in the country where the air

  is sweet and green, an immense kingdom of water nearby

  and five animals looking to me for food, and two daughters

  and a mother assuming my strength. I courageously fix

  the fence, mulch the tomatoes, fertilize the pasture –

  a nickel-plated farmer. Wake up in the middle

  of the night frightened, thinking nearly two decades

  ago I took my vows and never dreamed I’d be responsible

  for so many souls. Eight of them whispering provide.

  This could very well be all that there is.

  And I’m not unhappy with it. A check in the mail that will

  take us through another month. I see in the papers

  I’ve earned us “lower class”! How strange. Waiting

  for Rachel’s foal to drop. That will make nine. Provide.

  Count my big belly ten. But there’s an odd grace in being

  an ordinary artist. A single tradition clipping the heads

  off so many centuries. Those two drunks a millennium ago on

  a mountaintop in China – laughing over the beauty of the moment.

  At peace despite their muddled brains. The male dog, a trifle

  stupid, rushes through the door announcing absolutely nothing.

  He has great confidence in me. I’m hanging on to nothing today and

  with confidence, a sureness that the very air between our bodies,

  the light of what we are, has to be enough.

  MISSY 1966–1971

  I want to be worthy of this waking dream –

  floating above

  the August landscape

  in a coffin with my dog

  who’s just died from fibroid cancer.

  Yes. We’ll be up there and absorb

  the light of stars and phosphorus

  like the new army telescopic sights

  and the light hanging captive

  in clouds

  and the light glittering upward

  from the water

  and porch lights

  from the few trucks & cars

  at 3 AM

  and one lone airliner.

  Grief holding us safe in a knot we’ll float

  over every mile we covered, birch clump, thorn apple,

  wild cherry trees and aspen in search of grouse,

  your singular white figure fixed then as Sirius the Dog Star.

  I think this crazed boy striking

  out at nothing

  wants to join you

  so homeward

  bound.

  FOUR MATRICES

  1. HOME

  New Matrices, all ice. Fixed here and solidly.

  What was that song? My grave is hiding from me.

  I’ll go to that juniper thicket across

  the road. Or stay here. Or go. Or stay.

  A contessa. A girl on a roan horse behind

  the goldenrod. The barn. The whiskey shelf.

  Count options, false starts. And glooms of love,

  the lover’s next-room boredom. Juliet’s in Verona.

  Juliets are always in Verona after a few days.

  Or trout and grouse, wading & walking after them.

  Days of it. Dis. Dis. Dis. Dante called it,

  this actual hell, this stillness. Lasting

  how long? Waking is visionary. I’ll awake but

  to sleep again, new and bitter each new time.

  2. COUNTING ARIZONA

  Amphora in rocks. Kachina of fur and rust. The land

  here seemed burned out & wasn’t; just no lushness

  of green, verdigris, leaves in sweet rot or swamps.

  I don’t belong and won’t, perhaps only less foreign

  than the natives. INDIANS: Zuni, Navajo, Jicarilla,

  Papago, Mescalero Apache, Hopi. Aliens. That range is

  owned by cone-nosed beetles, cattle, scorpion and snake

  and the mines. A few deer, javelinas, quail, mountain thrush

  and jackrabbit. Frightened. I count and point. Beware.

  Just off the road’s shoulder is wilderness and finally

  Mexico and peopleless. And too much sun. I want to go home.

  3. HOME

  Cores. Knots. A vortex around which nothing swirls

  or moves. Here then. Where I am now and can’t seem

  to move, some perfect cripple; a suspended brain.

  It was cold, it is cold. It will be cold. And dry.

  A root hits tablerock, curls upward, winds around

  itself until it becomes a noose. Obvious! Obvious!

  All the better. Simple things: just now a horse walked

  past the window. I was naked when I carried the dying dog

  to the couch. And weeping with alcohol and rock and

  cold and stillness, horses and roots, unmoving brain.

  4. THE SEA

  Screw-gumption despite cold rain and clouds drifting below treetops.

  Poor thing, strung up by false & falser delights; not lost,

  a word that weighs nothing except lost to one’s self, floating.

  How light these imagined loves, floating too, from the head

  in a night’s sleep when the body’s heat is nonmental.

  It’s a happy mage that walks through the world with his eyes

  e
arthward using clouds only for a pick-me-up. The brain’s not

  a solid thing he thinks eating calf’s brains. But butchers

  are solid people. Somewhere between butcher and that unstable

  weight is ballad, some song, though not moving to our obvious

  harmonies. Count those waterbirds and beware, costumed as women;

  part air and part water. But we are drawn to them as clumsy

  rowboats sunk in fifty fathoms. After drifting the oceans for years.

  NORTH AMERICAN IMAGE CYCLE

  to Tom McGuane

  The boy stood in the burning house. Set it up

  that way, and with all windows open. I don’t want

  a roof. I want to fill all those spaces where we

  never allow words to occur.

  Crudities:

  implausible as this brilliantly cold

  day in late June, barely forty. Two horses outside

  the granary door, braced leaning into the wind

  not even trying to figure it out.

  And the great shattering cold waves

  On Good Harbor Bay, the sea permanently bleak;

  a squall line a hundred miles long, the island a dull

  ugly green, and only one brief sweep of yellow light.

  It is nearly against nature and that is why I love

  it and would not trade it for all your princely heart.

  The snail is beautiful, nearly Persian. Do we dwell in

  or on beauty? The Belgian mare in my barn weighs 2300 lbs.

  but thinks of herself oddly as woman, very feminine and shy

  tossing her flaxen mane then rolling hugely & wantonly

  in the snow. She takes the proffered apple not with her teeth

  but delicately with her lips.

  Phenomenon. Agonies. Mostly unshared. Dear Friends

  the nightmare I recounted was pastel. I believed in numbers.

  What is so crisp and intense as a number? Not our bodies

  in their average frenzies. Fortunately the heart