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

the pump arm of an oil well,

  the chop and whir of a combine in the sun.

  From my ancestors, the Swedes,

  I suppose I inherit the love of rainy woods,

  kegs of herring and neat whiskey –

  I remember long nights of pinochle,

  the bulge of Redman in my grandpa’s cheek;

  the rug smelled of manure and kerosene.

  They laughed loudly and didn’t speak for days.

  (But on the other side, from the German Mennonites,

  their rag-smoke prayers and porky daughters

  I got intolerance, and aimless diligence.)

  In ’51 during a revival I was saved:

  I prayed on a cold register for hours

  and woke up lame. I was baptized

  by immersion in the tank at Williamston –

  the rusty water stung my eyes.

  I left off the old things of the flesh

  but not for long – one night beside a pond

  she dried my feet with her yellow hair.

  O actual event dead quotient

  cross become green

  I still love Jubal but pity Hagar.

  (Now self is the first sacrament

  who loves not the misery and taint

  of the present tense is lost.

  I strain for a lunar arrogance.

  Light macerates

  the lamp infects

  warmth, more warmth, I cry.)

  DAVID

  He is young. The father is dead.

  Outside, a cold November night,

  the mourners’ cars are parked upon the lawn;

  beneath the porch light three

  brothers talk to three sons

  and shiver without knowing it.

  His mind’s all black thickets

  and blood; he knows

  flesh slips quietly off the bone,

  he knows no last looks,

  that among the profusion of flowers

  the lid is closed to hide

  what no one could bear –

  that metal rends the flesh,

  he knows beneath the white-pointed

  creatures, stars,

  that in the distant talk of brothers,

  the father is dead.

  EXERCISE

  Hear this touch: grass parts

  for the snake,

  in furrows

  soil curves around itself,

  a rock topples into a lake,

  roused organs,

  fur against cloth,

  arms unfold,

  at the edge of a clearing

  fire selects new wood.

  A SEQUENCE OF WOMEN

  I

  I’ve known her too long:

  we devour as two mirrors,

  opposed,

  swallow each other a thousand

  times at midpoints,

  lost in the black center

  of the other.

  II

  She sits on the bed,

  breasts slack,

  watching a curl of dust

  float through a ray of sun,

  drift down to a corner.

  So brief this meeting

  with a strange child –

  Do I want to be remembered?

  Only as a mare might know

  the body of her rider,

  the pressure of legs

  unlike any other.

  III

  The girl who was once my mistress

  is dead now, I learn, in childbirth.

  I thought that long ago women ceased

  dying this way.

  To set records straight, our enmity

  relaxes, I wrote a verse for her –

  to dole her by pieces, ring finger

  and lock of hair.

  But I’m a poor Midas to turn her golden,

  to make a Helen, grand whore, of this graceless

  girl; the sparrow that died was only

  a sparrow:

  Though in the dark, she doesn’t sleep.

  On cushions, embraced by silk, no lover

  comes to her. In the first light when birds

  stir she does not stir or sing. Oh eyes can’t

  focus to this dark.

  NORTHERN MICHIGAN

  On this back road the land

  has the juice taken out of it:

  stump fences surround nothing

  worth their tearing down

  by a deserted filling station

  a Veedol sign, the rusted hulk

  of a Frazer, “live bait”

  on battered tin.

  A barn

  with half a tobacco ad

  owns the greenness of a manure

  pile

  a half-moon on a privy door

  a rope swinging from an elm. A

  collapsed henhouse, a pump

  with the handle up

  the orchard with wild tangled branches.

  In the far corner of the pasture,

  in the shadow of the woodlot

  a herd of twenty deer:

  three bucks

  are showing off –

  they jump in turn across the fence,

  flanks arch and twist to get higher

  in the twilight

  as the last light filters

  through the woods.

  RETURNING AT NIGHT

  Returning at night

  there’s a catalpa moth

  in the barberry

  on the table the flowers

  left alone turned black

  in the root cellar

  the potato sprouts

  creeping through the door

  glisten white and tubular

  in the third phase

  of the moon.

  FAIR/BOY CHRISTIAN TAKES A BREAK

  This other speaks of bones, blood-wet

  and limber, the rock in bodies. He takes

  me to the slaughterhouse, where lying

  sprawled, as a giant coil of rope,

  the bowels of cattle. At the county fair

  we pay an extra quarter to see the her-

  maphrodite. We watch the secret air tube

  blow up the skirts of the farm girls,

  tanned to the knees then strangely white.

  We eat spareribs and pickled eggs,

  the horses tear the ground to pull a load

  of stone; in a burning tent we see

  Fantasia do her Love Dance with the

  Spaniard – they glisten with sweat, their

  limbs knot together while below them farm

  boys twitter like birds. Then the breasts

  of a huge Negress rotate to a march in

  opposing directions, and everyone stamps

  and cheers, the udders shine in blurring

  speed. Out of the tent we pass produce

  stalls, some hung with ribbons, squash

  and potatoes stacked in pyramids. A buck-

  toothed girl cuts her honorable-mention

  cake; when she leans to get me water

  from a milk pail her breasts are chaste.

  Through the evening I sit in the car (the

  other is gone) while my father watches

  the harness race, the 4-H talent show.

  I think of St. Paul’s Epistles and pray

  the removal of what my troubled eyes have seen.

  MORNING

  The mirror tastes him

  breath clouds

  hands pressed against glass

  in yellow morning light

  a jay

  flutters in unaccustomed

  silence

  from bush to limb of elm

  a cow at breakfast

  pauses

  her jaws lax in momentary stillness

  far off a milk truck

  rattles

  on the section road

  light low mist

  floats

  over the buckwheat

  through the orchard

  t
he neighbor’s dogs bark

  then four roosters announce

  day.

  KINSHIP

  Great-uncle Wilhelm, Mennonite, patriarch,

  eater of blood sausage, leeks,

  headcheese, salt pork,

  you are led into church

  by that wisp you plundered for nine children.

  Your brain has sugared now,

  your white beard is limp,

  you talk of acres of corn

  where there is only snow.

  Your sister, a witch, old as a stump,

  says you are punished now for the unspeakable

  sin that barred you from the table for seven years.

  They feed you cake to hasten your death.

  Your land is divided.

  Curse them but don’t die.

  FEBRUARY SUITE

  Song,

  angry bush

  with the thrust of your roots

  deep in this icy ground,

  is there a polar sun?

  Month of the frozen

  goat –

  La Roberta says cultivate

  new friends,

  profit will

  be yours with patience.

  Not that stars are crossed

  or light to be restored –

  we die from want of velocity.

  And you, longest of months

  with your false springs,

  you don’t help or care about helping,

  so splendidly ignorant of us.

  Today icicles fell

  but they will build downward again.

  Who has a “fate”?

  This fig tree

  talks

  about bad weather.

  Here is a man drunk –

  in the glass

  his blurred innocence renewed.

  The Great Leitzel

  before falling to her death

  did 249 flanges on the Roman rings –

  her wrist was often raw

  and bloody

  but she kept it hidden.

  He remembers Memorial Day –

  the mother’s hymn to Generals.

  The American Legion fires blanks

  out over the lassitude of the cemetery

  in memory of sons who broke

  like lightbulbs in a hoarse cry

  of dust.

  Now

  behind bone

  in the perfect dark

  the dream of animals.

  To remember

  the soft bellies of fish

  the furred animals that were part of your youth

  not for their novelty

  but as fellow creatures.

  I look at the rifles

  in their rack upon the wall:

  though I know the Wars

  only as history

  some cellar in Europe might still

  owe some of its moistness to blood.

  With my head on the table

  I write,

  my arm outstretched, in another field

  of richer grain.

  A red-haired doll stares

  at me from a highchair,

  her small pink limbs twisted about

  her neck.

  I salute the postures of women.

  This hammer of joy,

  this is no fist

  but a wonderment got by cunning.

  The first thunderstorm

  of March came last night

  and when I awoke the snow had passed

  away, the brown grass

  lay matted and pubic.

  Between the snow and grass,

  somewhere into the ground with the rain

  a long year has gone.

  TRAVERSE CITY ZOO

  Once I saw a wolf tread a circle in his cage

  amid the stench of monkeys, the noise of musty

  jungle birds. We threw him bits of doughy

  bread but he didn’t see us, padding on through

  some imagined forest, his nose on blood.

  We began to move on in boredom when he jumped

  against the bars, snarled, then howled

  in rage that long shrill howl that must remind

  us of another life. Children screamed and ran,

  their parents passing them in terror – the summer

  day became hard and brittle. I stooped there

  and watched his anger until the keeper

  came with a Flash Gordon gun and shot him full

  of dope. He grew smaller and sputtered into sleep.

  REVERIE

  He thinks of the dead. But they

  appear as dead – beef-colored and torn.

  There is a great dull music

  in the ocean that lapses into seascape.

  The girl bends slowly

  from the waist. Then stoops.

  In high school Brutus

  died upon a rubber knife.

  Lift the smock. The sun

  light stripes her back. A fado wails.

  In an alley in Cambridge. Beneath

  a party’s noise. Bottle caps stuck to them.

  FOX FARM

  In the pasture a shire

  whose broad muscles once

  drew a hayrake,

  a plough,

  can’t hold the weight of his great

  head and neck –

  he will be fed to the foxes.

  And the Clydesdales and saddle nags

  that stray along the fence

  with limps and sagging bellies,

  with rheumy eyes (one

  has no tail).

  But the foxes

  not having known field

  or woods,

  bred, born in long rows of hutches,

  will die to adorn some

  woman’s neck.

  NIGHTMARE

  Through the blinds

  a white arm caresses a vase of zinnias

  beneath the skin

  of a pond the laughter of an eye

  in the loft

  the hot straw suffocates

  the rafters become snakes

  through the mow door

  three deer in a cool pasture

  nibbling at the grass

  mercurous in the moon.

  CREDO, AFTER E.P.

  Go, my songs

  to the young and insolent,

  speak the love of final things –

  do not betray me

  as a dancer, drunk,

  is dumb to his clumsiness.

  DUSK

  Dusk over the lake,

  clouds floating

  heat lightning

  a nightmare behind branches;

  from the swamp

  the odor of cedar and fern,

  the long circular

  wail of the loon –

  the plump bird aches for fish

  for night to come down.

  Then it becomes so dark

  and still

  that I shatter the moon with an oar.

  LISLE’S RIVER

  Dust followed our car like a dry brown cloud.

  At the river we swam, then in the canoe passed

  downstream toward Manton; the current carried us

  through cedar swamps, hot fields of marsh grass

  where deer watched us and the killdeer shrieked.

  We were at home in a thing that passes.

  And that night, camped on a bluff, we ate eggs

  and ham and three small trout; we drank too much

  whiskey and pushed a burning stump down the bank –

  it cast hurling shadows, leaves silvered and darkened,

  the crash and hiss woke up a thousand birds.

  Now, tell me, other than lying between some woman’s legs,

  what joy have you had since, that equaled this?

  THREE NIGHT SONGS

  I

  He waits to happen with the clear

  reality of what he thinks about –

  to be a child who wakes beau
tifully,

  a man always in the state of waking

  to a new room, or at night, waking

  to a strange room with snow outside,

  and the moon beyond glass,

  in a net of branches,

  so bright and clear and cold.

  II

  Moving in liquid dark,

  night’s water,

  a flat stone sinking,

  wobbling toward bottom;

  and not to wait there for morning,

  to see the sun up through the water,

  but to freeze until another glacier comes.

  III

  The mask riddles itself,

  there’s heat through the eye slits,

  a noise of breathing,

  the plaster around the mouth is wet;

  and the dark takes no effort,

  dark against deeper dark,

  the mask dissembles,

  a music comes to the point of horror.

  CARDINAL

  That great tree covered with snow

  until its branches droop,

  the oak, that keeps its leaves through winter

  (in spring a bud breaks the stem),

  has in its utmost branch

  a cardinal,

  who brushing snow aside, pauses for an instant

  then plummets toward earth

  until just above a drift he opens his wings