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

  to protect the not-very-precious manuscript,

  tiptoeing barefoot in the tall wet grass

  trying to avoid the snakes.

  With all this rain

  the pond is full.

  The ducks are one week old

  and already speak their language perfectly –

  a soft nasal hiss.

  With no instructions they skim bugs from the pond’s

  surface and look fearfully at me.

  The minister whacks off as does the insurance man,

  habitual golfer, sweet lady in her bower,

  as do novelists, monks, nuns in nunneries,

  maidens in dormitories, stallion against fence post,

  goat against puzzled pig who does not cease feeding,

  and so do senators, generals, wives during TV

  game shows, movie stars and football players, students

  to utter distraction, teachers, butchers, world leaders,

  everyone except poets who fear the dreaded

  growth of hair on the palms, blindness.

  They know that even in an empty hotel room

  in South Dakota that someone is watching.

  With my dog

  I watched a single crow

  fly across the field.

  We are each one.

  Thirty feet up in the air

  near the top of my novel I want a bird to sing

  from the crown of the barn roof.

  A hundred feet away there is a grove of trees,

  maple and elm and ash,

  placed quite accidentally before any of us were born.

  Everyone remembers who planted the lilacs

  forty years and three wars ago.

  In the morning paper

  the arsonist

  who was also a paranoid schizophrenic,

  a homosexual,

  retarded,

  an alcoholic

  who lacerated his body with a penknife

  and most significantly for the rest of us,

  started fires where none where desired,

  on whim.

  Spent months regathering dreams lost in the diaspora,

  all of the prism’s colors, birds, animals, bodies,

  getting them back within the skin

  where they’d do no damage.

  How difficult catching them armed

  only with a butterfly-catcher’s net,

  a gun, airplane, an ice pick,

  a chalice of rainwater, a green headless

  buddha on loan from a veteran of foreign wars.

  Saw that third eye in a dream

  but couldn’t remember if it looked

  from a hole in a wall of ice,

  or a hole in a floor of ice,

  but it was an eye looking from a hole in ice.

  Two white-faced cattle out in the dark-green pasture,

  one in the shade of the woodlot,

  one out in the hot sunlight,

  eating slowly and staring at each other.

  So exhausted after my walk from orchestrating

  the moves of one billion August grasshoppers

  plus fifty thousand butterflies

  swimming at the heads

  of fifty thousand wildflowers

  red blue yellow orange

  orange flowers the only things that rhyme with orange

  the one rabbit in the pasture

  one fly buzzing at the window

  a single hot wind through the window

  a man sitting at my desk resembling me.

  He sneaks up on the temple slowly at noon.

  He’s so slow it seems like it’s taking years.

  Now his hands are on a pillar, the fingers

  encircling it, with only the tips inside the gate.

  After all of this long moist dreaming

  I perceive how accurate the rooster’s crow

  is from down the road.

  You can suffer and not even know you’re suffering

  because you’ve been suffering so long you can’t remember

  another life. You’re actually a dead dog on a country road.

  And a man gets used to his rotten foot.

  After a while it’s simply a rotten foot,

  and his rotten ideas are even easier to get used to

  because they don’t hurt as much as a rotten foot.

  The road from Belsen to Watergate paved

  with perfectly comfortable ideas, ideas to sleep on

  like a mattress stuffed with money and death,

  an actual waterbed filled with liquid gold.

  So our inept tuna cravings and Japan’s (she imitates

  our foulest features) cost an annual

  250,000 particular dolphin deaths,

  certainly as dear as people to themselves

  or so the evidence says.

  Near my lover’s old frame house with a field

  behind it, the grass is a brilliant gold.

  Standing on the gravel road before the house

  a great flock of blackbirds coming over so close

  to my head I see them all individually,

  eyes, crests, the feet drawn out in flight.

  I owe the dentist nine hundred dollars.

  This is more than I made on three

  of my books of poems. But then I am gloriously

  free. I can let my mouth rot and quit

  writing poems. I could let the dentist

  write the poems while I walked into the dark

  with a tray of golden teeth I’d sculpt

  for myself in the forms of shark’s teeth,

  lion’s teeth, teeth of grizzly and python.

  Watch me open my mouth as I wear these wondrous

  teeth. The audience gross is exactly nine hundred!

  The house lights dim. My lips part.

  There is a glimpse of sun.

  Abel always votes.

  Cain usually thinks better of it

  knowing not very deep in his heart

  that no one deserves to be encouraged.

  Abel has a good job & is a responsible screw,

  but many intelligent women seem drawn

  to Crazy Horse, a descendant of Cain,

  even if he only gets off his buffalo pony

  once a year to throw stones at the moon.

  Of course these women marry Abel but at bars and parties

  they are the first to turn to the opening door

  to see who is coming in.

  I was standing near the mow door

  in the darkness, a party going on in the château.

  She was there with her sister.

  We kissed then lay down on fresh straw in a paddock.

  An angry stallion jumped over on top of us.

  I could see his outline clearly against the sky.

  Why did we die so long ago.

  How wind, cloud and water

  blaspheme symmetry at every instant,

  forms that can’t be remembered and stored:

  Grand Marais, Cape Ann at Eastern Point,

  Lake Manyara from a cliff, Boca Grande’s sharks

  giving still water a moving shape – they are there

  and there and there – the waterfall next to a girl

  so obviously on a white horse, to mud

  puddle cat avoids, back to Halibut Point,

  Manitou convulsed in storms to thousand-mile

  weed line in Sargasso Sea to brown violent confluence

  of Orinoco and ocean off Devil’s Gate; mixing wind,

  cloud, water, the purest mathematics of their

  description studied as glyphs, alchemists

  everywhere working with humble gold, somewhere to begin,

  having to keep eyes closed to wind, cloud, water.

  Saw an ox. A black horse I recognized.

  A procession of carts full of flowers

  pulled by nothing. Asymmetrical planets.

  Fish out of their element of water.


  Simple music – a single note an hour.

  How are we to hear it, if at all?

  No music in statement, the lowest denominator

  by which our fragments can’t find each other.

  But I can still hear the notes of April,

  the strained, fragile notes of March:

  convalescent, tentative, a weak drink

  taken over and over in immense doses.

  It is the body that is the suite entire,

  brain firmly fused to the trunk, spine

  more actual than mountains, brain moving

  as a river, governed precisely by her energies.

  Whippoorwill. Mourning dove. Hot morning rain

  changing to a violent squall coming SSW out of the lake,

  thunder enveloping itself then unfolding

  as cloth in wind furls, holds back, furls again;

  running nearly naked in shorts to my shed,

  thunder rattling windows and walls,

  acorns rattling against barn’s tin roof;

  the floor shudders, then stillness as squall passes,

  as strange as a strong wind at summer twilight

  when the air is yellow. Now cool still air.

  Mourning dove.

  Oriole.

  O my darling sister

  O she crossed over

  she’s crossed over

  is planted now near her father

  six feet under earth’s skin –

  their still point on this whirling earth

  now and I think forever.

  Now it is as close to you as the clothes you wear.

  The clothes are attached to your body

  by a cord that runs up your spine, out your neck

  and through the earth, back up your spine.

  At nineteen I began to degenerate,

  slight smell of death in my gestures,

  unbelieving, tentative, wailing…

  so nineteen years have gone. It doesn’t matter.

  It might have taken fifty. Or never.

  Now the barriers are dissolving, the stone fences

  in shambles. I want to have my life

  in cloud shapes, water shapes, wind shapes,

  crow call, marsh hawk swooping over grass and weed tips.

  Let the scavenger take what he finds.

  Let the predator love his prey.

  NEW POEMS FROM SELECTED & NEW POEMS

  to John and Rebecca

  1982

  NOT WRITING MY NAME

  In the snow, that is. The “J” could have been

  three hundred yards into the high pasture

  across the road. The same with the “I” which I intended

  to dot by sprawling and flopping in a drift. The “M”

  naturally would have required something more

  than twelve hundred yards of hard walking as we

  have two empty-bottomed isosceleses to deal with.

  What star-crossed jock ego would churn through those

  drifts to write a name invisible except to crows?

  And the dog would have confused the crows the way

  he first runs ahead, then crisscrosses my path.

  It’s too cold anyhow – ten below at noon though the sun

  would tell me otherwise. And the wind whips coils

  and wisps of snow across the hardened drifts and around

  my feet like huge ghost snakes. These other signatures:

  Vole tracks so light I have to kneel to trace his

  circlings which are his name. Vole. And an unknown bird,

  scarcely heavier than the vole, that lacks a left foot. Fox tracks

  leading up a drift onto my favorite boulder where he swished

  his tail, definitely peed, and left. The dog sniffs

  the tracks, also pees but sparingly. He might need it later,

  he saves his messages. For a moment mastodons float

  through the trees, thunderhead colored, stuffing their maws

  with branches. This place used to be Africa. Now it’s so cold

  there are blue shadows in my footprints, and a blue-shadow

  dog runs next to my own, flat and rippling to the snow, less than

  paper thick. I try to invoke a crow for company; none appears.

  I have become the place the crow didn’t appear.

  FROG

  First memory

  of swimming underwater:

  eggs of frogs hanging in diaphanous clumps

  from green lily pad stems;

  at night in the tent I heard

  the father of it all booming

  and croaking in the reeds.

  ROOSTER

  to Pat Ryan

  I have to kill the rooster tomorrow. He’s being an asshole,

  having seriously wounded one of our two hens with his insistent banging.

  You walk into the barn to feed the horses and pick up an egg

  or two for breakfast and he jumps her proclaiming she’s mine she’s mine.

  Her wing is torn and the primary feathers won’t grow back.

  Chickens have largely been denatured, you know. He has no part

  in those delicious fresh eggs. He crows on in a vacuum. He is

  utterly pointless. He’s as dumb as a tapeworm and no one cares

  if he lives or dies. There. I can kill him

  with an easy mind. But I’m still not up to it. Maybe I can hire

  a weasel or a barn rat to do the job, or throw him to Justine,

  the dog, who would be glad to rend him except the neighbors

  have chickens too, she’d get the habit and we would have a beloved shot

  dog to bury. So he deserves to die, having no purpose. We’ll

  have stewed barnyard chicken, closer to eating a gamebird than

  that tasteless supermarket chicken born and bred in a caged

  darkness. Everything we eat is dead except an occasional oyster

  or clam. Should I hire the neighbor boy to kill him? Will the

  hens stop laying out of grief? Isn’t his long wavering crow

  magnificent? Isn’t the worthless rooster the poet’s bird brother?

  No. He’s just a rooster and the world has no place for him.

  Should I wait for a full wintry moon, take him to the top of the

  hill after dropping three hits of mescaline and strangle him?

  Should I set him free for a fox meal? They’re coming back now

  after the mange nearly wiped them out. He’s like a leaking roof

  with drops falling on my chest. He’s the Chinese torture in the barn.

  He’s lust mad. His crow penetrates walls. His head bobs in lunar

  jerks. The hens shudder but are bored with the pain of eggs.

  What can I do with him? Nothing isn’t enough. In the morning

  we will sit down together and talk it out. I will tell him he

  doesn’t matter and he will wag his head, strut, perhaps crow.

  EPITHALAMIUM

  for Peter and Maria

  For the first time the wind

  blew straight down from the heavens.

  I was wandering around the barnyard

  about three AM in full moonlight

  when it started, flattening my hair

  against my head; my dog cowered

  between my knees, and the last leaves

  of a cold November shot to the ground.

  Then the wind slowed and went back to the north.

  This happened last night and already at noon

  my faith in it is passing.

  A REDOLENCE FOR NIMS

  O triple sob – turned forty

  at midnight – body at dawn

  booze-soddened but hopeful,

  knowing that the only thing

  to remember is dreams.

  Dead clear zero, Sunday afternoon

  in an attic of a closed resort

  on Lake Michigan with one lone

  duck
riding the diminishing

  swells of yesterday’s storm

  against the snowy cliffs of North Manitou:

  Whom are we to love?

  How many and what for?

  My heart’s gone to sea for years.

  This is a prayer, plaint, wish,

  howl of void beneath breastbone.

  Dreams, soul chasers, bring

  back my heart alive.

  FOLLOWERS

  Driving east on buddha’s birthday,

  April 9, 1978, past my own birthplace

  Grayling, Michigan, south 300 miles to Toledo,

  then east again to New York for no reason –

  belled heart swinging in grief for months

  until I wanted to take my life in my hands;

  three crows from home followed above

  the car until the Delaware River where

  they turned back: one stood all black

  and lordly on a fresh pheasant killed

  by a car: all this time

  counting the mind, counting crows,

  each day’s ingredients

  the same, barring rare

  bad luck

  good luck

  dumb luck

  all set in marble by the habitual,

  locked as the day passes moment by moment:

  say on the tracks the train can’t

  turn 90 degrees to the right because it’s not

  the nature of a train,

  but we think a man can dive

  in a pond, swim across it,

  and climb a tree though few of us do.

  MY FIRST DAY AS A PAINTER

  Things to paint:

  my dog (yellow),

  nude women,

  dead coyote with gray whiskers,

  nude women,

  a tree full of crows,

  nude women,