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

  the self in the mirror,

  nude women,

  a favorite cloud,

  nude women,

  a worn-out scalpel,

  nude women,

  dead friends,

  nude women ages 14–80 (12–82),

  call me wherever you are at noon

  in the glory of noon light,

  bring your dogs and birds,

  everybody is welcome:

  nude women spinning in godlike whirls

  creating each other in endless

  streams of human eggs!

  WAITING

  There are no calls from the outside.

  Miracles are the perversity of literature.

  We should know that by now.

  Only that these never-revealed connections of things

  lead us oddly on. Caesar’s legions

  entering Greenland’s ice, the scout far in front

  wanting to do battle where there are

  no enemies,

  never were any enemies.

  NOON

  Spring: despondency,

  fall: despair,

  onset of winter

  a light rain in the heart

  the pony tethered to the telephone

  pole day after day until he’s eaten

  the circle, moved to another pole,

  another circle: winter never deepens

  but falls dead upon the ground,

  body of the sky whirled

  in gray gusts:

  from Manitoba stretched brains

  of north; heat for heart, head,

  in smallest things – dry socks,

  strange breasts, an ounce of sun

  glittering above the blue shadows

  of the barn.

  BIRTHDAY

  The masques of dream – monk in his

  lineage – what does he wear to shield

  himself? First shield made of a cloud,

  second – a tree, third – a shadow; and

  leading to the stretched coils of light

  (how they want to gather us up

  with our permission), three men.

  Two dead tho’ dead is supernumerary.

  The cause is the effect.

  He laughed like a lake would

  but only once, never twice into the same

  mystery. Not ever to stop but only

  to drop the baggage, to shed the

  thirty-ninth skin.

  CLEAR WATER 3

  Ah, yes. Fame never got anyone

  off the hook, it seems. Some poignant

  evidence to be offered here in McGuane.

  There’s a cutoff beyond which a certain

  number of people know you exist for various

  reasons, good or bad or with a notorious

  indifference. Said Spicer:

  My vocabulary did this to me. Meaning

  what he was, near death in an alcoholic ward.

  Crane or Cavafy. Alcohol as biography

  more surely than serial poems. I doubt it.

  We are drawn to where we end like water

  for reasons of character, volume, gravity,

  the sound we make in passing/not all the sounds

  we made in passing in one place – a book.

  Each day’s momentum of voice carrying

  backward and forward to the limits, beginning

  and end. We drink to enchant our voices,

  to heal them, to soothe with laughter, to glide

  awhile. My words kill, killed, me, my lord. Yes.

  DŌGEN’S DREAM

  What happens when the god of spring

  meets spring? He thinks for a moment

  of great whales traveling from the bottom

  to the top of the earth, the day the voyage

  began seven million years ago

  when spring last changed its season.

  He enters himself, emptiness

  desiring emptiness. He sleeps

  and his sleep is the dance of all the birds

  on earth flying north.

  WEEPING

  for Dave Kelly from long ago

  Six days of clouds since

  I returned from Montana,

  a state of mind out West.

  A bleak afternoon in the granary killing flies and wasps.

  Sitting on a zafu watching flies.

  Two days ago a sandhill crane flew over

  so low I could see an eyeball clearly cocked

  toward my singular own.

  As I drink I miss more flies.

  I am searching out the ecstatic life

  with flyswatter and wineglass in hand,

  the sky above an inverted steel sink.

  I am looking for weeping

  which is a superior form of rest.

  Can’t there be dry weeping? Nope.

  Dry weeping is like dry fucking

  which most of us remember as unsatisfying.

  Wet fucking is another story

  but not the object here, though decidedly

  more interesting than weeping.

  I would frankly like to throw

  myself around and have some real passion.

  Some wet passion! to be sure.

  At nineteen in 1957 on Grove Street in NY

  I could weep about art, Hart Crane, my empty

  stomach, homesickness for pheasants and goldenrod,

  Yesenin’s suicide, a red-haired girl with an improbable

  butt, my dad planting the garden alone.

  It was a year in which I wrung out pillowcases at dawn.

  But this is the flip side of the record, a log

  of the search for weeping. I’ve been dry

  for a decade and it isn’t panning out.

  Like a Hollywood producer I sit by a pool

  and hatch inane plots against the weeping imagination,

  spinning wheels, treading water,

  beating the mental bishop,

  flogging the mental clam,

  pulling the mental wire

  like a cub scout in a lonely pup tent.

  I’m told I laugh too much.

  I laugh deeply at Johnny Carson monologues,

  at my poetry, at health food & politics,

  at the tragic poetry of others, at the weedy garden,

  at my dog hitting the electric fence,

  at women freeing themselves when I am in bondage,

  at the thought of my death.

  In fact I’m tickled pink with life.

  I actually have a trick to weep but it’s cheating.

  I used it once when I was very drunk.

  I thought of the deaths of my wife and daughters.

  I threw myself to the floor weeping.

  I wept horribly and shook, gnashed my teeth.

  I must die before them.

  THE CHATHAM GHAZAL

  It is the lamp on the kitchen table

  well after midnight saying nothing but light.

  Here are a list of ten million measurements.

  You may keep them. Or throw them away.

  A strange warm day when November has forgotten

  to be November. Birds form shrill clouds.

  Phototropiques. We emerge upward from liquid.

  See the invisible husks we’ve left behind called memories.

  The press wonders how we drink so much poison and stay

  alive. The antidote is chance, mobility, sleeplessness.

  They’ve killed another cow. With the mountain of guts

  I also bury all of the skins of thirty-seven years.

  MARRIAGE GHAZAL

  for Peter & Beck

  Hammering & drifting. Sea wrack. Cast upon & cast out.

  Who’s here but shore? Where we stop is where shore is.

  I saw the light beyond mountains turned umber by morning.

  I walked by memory as if I had no legs. Or head.

  In a bed of reeds I found my body and entered it,

  taking my life u
pon myself, the soul made comfortable.

  So the body’s a nest for the soul and we set out inland,

  the figure of a walker who only recognized the sea and moon.

  And coming to the first town the body became a chorus –

  O my god this is a place or thing and I’ll stay awhile.

  The body met a human with fur and the moon mounted her head

  in an arc when she sat & they built a boat together.

  MARCH WALK

  I was walking because I wasn’t upstairs sitting.

  I could have been looking for pre-1900 gold coins

  in the woods all afternoon. What a way to make a living!

  The same mastodon was there only three hundred years from

  where I last saw him. I felt the sabers on the saber tooth,

  the hot wet breath on the back of my hand. Three deer

  and a number of crows, how many will remain undisclosed:

  It wasn’t six and it wasn’t thirty. There were four girls

  ranging back to 1957. The one before that just arrived

  upstairs. There was that long morose trip into the world

  hanging onto my skin for a quarter of a mile, shed with some

  difficulty. There was one dog, my own, and one grouse

  not my own. A strong wind flowed over and through us like

  dry water. I kissed a scar on a hip. I found a rotting

  crab apple and a distant relative to quartz. You could spend

  a lifetime and still not walk to an island. I met none of the

  dead today having released them yesterday at three o’clock.

  If you’re going to make love to a woman you have to give

  her some of your heart. Else don’t. If I had found a gold coin

  I might have left it there with my intermittent interest in

  money. The dead snipe wasn’t in the same place but the rocks

  were. The apple tree was a good place to stand. Every late fall

  the deer come there for dessert. They will stand for days

  waiting for a single apple to tumble from the upmost limb.

  THE WOMAN FROM SPIRITWOOD

  Sleeping from Mandan to Jamestown,

  waking near Spiritwood in the van,

  shrinking in fever with the van

  buffeted by wind so that it shudders,

  the wind maybe fifty knots straight N by NW

  out of Saskatchewan. Stopping for gas we see men

  at the picnic tables cleaning the geese they’ve shot:

  October first with the feathers carried off by the wind

  into fields where buffalo once roamed, also

  the Ogalala & Miniconjou Sioux roamed in search

  of buffalo and Crazy Horse on a horse that outlived him.

  She comes out of the station, smiling, leaning into the wind.

  She is so beautiful than an invisible hand reaches

  into your rib cage and twists your heart one notch

  counterclockwise. There is nowhere to go.

  I’ve been everywhere and there’s nowhere to go.

  The talk is halting, slow until it becomes

  the end of another part of the future.

  I scratch gravel toward and from this wound,

  seeing within the shadow that this shadow casts

  how freedom must be there

  before there can be freedom.

  GATHERING APRIL

  for Simic

  Stuffing a crow call in one ear

  and an unknown bird’s in the other,

  lying on the warm cellar door out of

  the cool wind which I take small sparing

  bites of with three toes still wet from the pond’s

  edge: April is so violent up here you hide

  in corners or, when in the woods, in swales

  and behind beech trees. Twenty years ago

  this April I offered my stupid heart up to

  this bloody voyage. It was near a marsh

  on a long walk. You can’t get rid of those

  thousand pointless bottles of whiskey

  that you brought along. Last night after

  the poker game I read Obata’s Li Po.

  He was no less a fool but adding those

  twenty thousand poems you come up

  with a god. There are patents on all

  the forms of cancer but still we praise

  god from whom or which all blessings flow:

  that an April exists, that a body lays itself

  down on a warm cellar door and remembers, drinks

  in birds and wind, whiskey, frog songs

  from the marsh, the little dooms hiding

  in the shadow of each fence post.

  WALTER OF BATTERSEA

  for Anjelica

  I shall commit suicide or die

  trying, Walter thought beside

  the Thames – at low tide and very

  feminine.

  Picture him: a cold November day,

  the world through a long lens; he’s

  in new blue pants and races the river

  for thirty-three steps.

  Walter won. Hands down. Then lost

  again. Better to die trying! The sky

  so bleak. God blows his nose above

  the Chelsea Flour Mills.

  What is he at forty, Nov. 9, 1978, so far

  from home: grist for his own mill; all

  things have become black-and-white

  without hormonal surge.

  And religious. He’s forgiven god

  for the one hundred ladies who turned him

  down and took him up. O that song –

  I asked her for water and she gave

  me kerosene.

  No visions of Albion, no visions at all,

  in fact, the still point of the present winding

  about itself, graceful, unsnarled. I am

  here today and gone tomorrow.

  How much is he here? Not quite with

  all his heart and soul. Step lightly

  or the earth revolves into a berserk

  spin. Fall off or dance.

  And choosing dance not god, at least

  for the time being. Things aren’t what

  they seem but what they are – infinitely

  inconsolable.

  He knows it’s irony that’s least

  valuable in this long deathwatch.

  Irony scratching its tired ass. No trade-offs

  with time and fortune.

  It’s indelicate to say things twice except

  in prayer. The drunk repeats to keep

  his grasp, a sort of prayer: the hysteria

  of the mad, a verbless prayer.

  Walter recrossed the bridge which was

  only a bridge. He heard his footsteps

  just barely behind him. The river is not

  where it starts and ends.

  AFTER READING TAKAHASHI

  for Lucien, Peter, and Whalen

  Nothing is the same to anyone.

  Moscow is east of Nairobi

  but thinks of herself as perpetually west.

  The bird sees the top of my head,

  an even trade for her feathered belly.

  Our eyes staring through the nose bridge

  never to see each other.

  She is not I, I not her.

  So what, you think, having little

  notion of my concerns. O that dank

  basement of “so what” known by all

  though never quite the same way.

  All of us drinking through a cold afternoon,

  our eyes are on the mirror behind

  the bottles, on the snow out the window

  which the wind chases fruitlessly,

  each in his separateness drinking,

  talk noises coming out of our mouths.

  In the corner a pretty girl plays pinball.

  I have no language to talk to her.

  I
have come to the point in life when

  I could be her father. This was never true before.

  The bear hunter talked about the mountains.

  We looked at them together out of the

  tavern window in Emigrant, Montana.

  He spent fifty years in the Absaroka Mountains

  hunting grizzly bears and, at one time, wolves.

  We will never see the same mountains.

  He knows them like his hands, his wife’s

  breasts and legs, his old dog sitting outside

  in the pickup. I only see beautiful mountains

  and say “beautiful mountains” to which he nods

  graciously but they are a photo of China to me.

  And all lessons are fatal: the great snowy owl

  that flew in front of me so that

  I ducked in the car; it will never happen again.

  I’ve been warned by a snowy night, an owl,

  the infinite black above and below me to look

  at all creatures and things with a billion eyes,

  not struggling with the single heartbeat

  that is my life.

  THE THEORY & PRACTICE OF RIVERS & NEW POEMS

  In Memoriam

  GLORIA ELLEN HARRISON

  1964–1979

  1985, 1989

  THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RIVERS

  The rivers of my life:

  moving looms of light,

  anchored beneath the log

  at night I can see the moon

  up through the water

  as shattered milk, the nudge

  of fishes, belly and back

  in turn grating against log

  and bottom; and letting go, the current

  lifts me up and out

  into the dark, gathering motion,

  drifting into an eddy