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

  and brakes, fluttering

  in a cloud of snow he pushed aside.

  “THIS IS COLD SALT…”

  This is cold salt

  a pulled tooth

  the freshly set bone:

  the girl who left my bed this morning,

  who smiled last night as her slip

  floated to the floor,

  my Roselita,

  today up on Amsterdam Avenue

  I saw her with her Manuelo.

  JOHN SEVERIN WALGREN, 1874–1962

  Trees die of thirst or cold

  or when the limit’s reached;

  in the hole in the elm

  the wood is soft and punky –

  it smells of the water of a vase

  after the flowers are dumped.

  You were so old we could not weep;

  only the blood of the young,

  those torn off earth in a night’s sickness,

  the daughter lying beside you

  who became nothing so long ago –

  she moves us to terror.

  GARDEN

  Standing at the window at night

  my shadow is the length of the garden –

  I move a huge arm and

  cause plants to spring up,

  tomatoes to ripen.

  My head is as large

  as a strawberry bed and I can

  cup two bales of straw in one hand.

  I take pride in this strength,

  fed by light and darkness,

  wielded against my father’s garden –

  a lord of shadows.

  HORSE

  A

  quarter horse, no rider

  canters through the pasture

  thistles raise soft purple burrs

  her flanks are shiny in the sun

  I whistle and she runs

  almost sideways toward me

  the oats in my hand are sweets to her:

  dun mane furling in its breeze,

  her neck

  corseted with muscle,

  wet teeth friendly against my hand –

  how can I believe

  you ran under a low maple limb

  to knock me off?

  MALEDICTION

  Man’s not a singing animal,

  his tongue hangs from a wall –

  pinch the stone

  to make a moan

  from the throat

  a single note

  breaks the air

  so bare and harsh

  birds die.

  He’s crab-necked from cold,

  song splits his voice

  like a lake’s ice cracking.

  His heart’s a rock,

  a metronome, a clock,

  a foghorn drone of murder.

  God, curse this self-maimed beast,

  the least of creatures,

  rivet his stone with worms.

  WORD DRUNK

  I think of the twenty thousand poems of Li Po

  and wonder, do words follow me or I them –

  a word drunk?

  I do not care about fine phrases,

  the whoring after honor,

  the stipend, the gift, the grant –

  but I would feed on an essence

  until it yields to me my own dumb form –

  the weight raw, void of intent;

  to see behind the clarity of my glass

  the birth of new creatures

  suffused with light.

  YOUNG BULL

  This bronze ring punctures

  the flesh of your nose,

  the wound is fresh

  and you nuzzle the itch

  against a fence post.

  Your testicles are fat and heavy

  and sway when you shake off flies;

  the chickens scratch about your feet

  but you do not notice them.

  Through lunch I pitied

  you from the kitchen window –

  the heat, pained fluid of August –

  but when I came with cold water

  and feed, you bellowed and heaved

  against the slats wanting to murder me.

  PARK AT NIGHT

  Unwearied

  the coo and choke

  of doves

  the march of stone

  an hour before dawn.

  Trees caged to the waist

  wet statues

  the trickling of water –

  in the fountain

  floating across the lamp

  a leaf

  some cellophane.

  GOING BACK

  How long, stone, did it take

  to get that fat?

  The rain made the furrow a rut

  and then among the mint and nettles

  you make your appearance.

  Sink again, you might cover bones.

  HITCHHIKING

  Awake:

  the white hand of

  my benefactor

  drums on the seat

  between us.

  The world had become orange

  in the rearview mirror

  of a ’55 Pontiac.

  The road was covered with bugs

  and mist coiled around

  great house-sized rocks

  and in the distance buried them.

  Village. Passed three limp

  gas stations then one

  whose windows exploded with fire.

  My mouth was filled with plastic cups.

  Final item:

  breakfast, nurtured

  by a miraculous hatred.

  SOUND

  At dawn I squat on the garage

  with snuff under a lip

  to sweeten the roofing nails –

  my shoes and pant cuffs

  are wet with dew.

  In the orchard the peach trees

  sway with the loud

  weight of birds, green fruit, yellow haze.

  And my hammer – the cold head taps,

  then swings its first full arc;

  the sound echoes against the barn,

  muffled in the loft,

  and out the other side, then lost

  in the noise of the birds

  as they burst from the trees.

  DEAD DEER

  Amid pale green milkweed, wild clover,

  a rotted deer

  curled, shaglike,

  after a winter so cold

  the trees split open.

  I think she couldn’t keep up with

  the others (they had no place

  to go) and her food,

  frozen grass and twigs,

  wouldn’t carry her weight.

  Now from bony sockets,

  she stares out on this

  cruel luxuriance.

  LI HO

  Li Ho of the province of Honan

  (not to be confused with the god Li Po

  of Kansu or Szechwan

  who made twenty thousand verses),

  Li Ho, whose mother said,

  “My son daily vomits up his heart,”

  mounts his horse and rides

  to where a temple lies as lace among foliage.

  His youth is bargained

  for some poems in his saddlebag –

  his beard is gray. Leaning

  against the flank of his horse he considers

  the flight of birds

  but his hands are heavy. (Take this cup,

  he thinks, fill it, I want to drink again.)

  Deep in his throat, but perhaps it is a bird,

  he hears a child cry.

  COMPLAINT

  Song, I am unused to you –

  When you come

  your voice is behind trees

  calling another by my name.

  So little of me comes out to you

  I cannot hold your weight –

  I bury you in sleep

  or pour more wine, or lost in another’s

  music, I forget that you ever spoke.
<
br />   If you come again, come with

  Elias! Elias! Elias!

  If only once the summons were a roar,

  a pillar of light,

  I would not betray you.

  RETURN

  The sun’s warm against the slats of the granary,

  a puddle of ice in the shadow of the steps;

  a bluetick hound lopes

  across the winter wheat –

  fresh green, cold green.

  The windmill, long out of use,

  screeches and twists in the wind.

  A spring day too loud for talk

  when bones tire of their flesh

  and want something better.

  LOCATIONS

  to Herbert Weisinger

  1968

  WALKING

  Walking back on a chill morning past Kilmer’s Lake

  into the first broad gully, down its trough

  and over a ridge of poplar, scrub oak, and into

  a larger gully, walking into the slow fresh warmth

  of midmorning to Spider Lake where I drank

  at a small spring remembered from ten years back;

  walking northwest two miles where another gully

  opened, seeing a stump on a knoll where my father

  stood one deer season, and tiring of sleet and cold

  burned a pine stump, the snow gathering fire-orange

  on a dull day; walking past charred stumps blackened

  by the ’81 fire to a great hollow stump near a basswood

  swale – I sat within it on a November morning

  watching deer browse beyond my young range of shotgun

  and slug, chest beating hard for killing –

  into the edge of a swale waist-high with ferns,

  seeing the quick movement of a blue racer,

  and thick curl of the snake against a birch log,

  a pale blue with nothing of the sky in it,

  a fleshy blue, blue of knotted veins in an arm;

  walking to Savage’s Lake where I ate my bread

  and cheese, drank cool lake water, and slept for a while,

  dreaming of fire, snake and fish and women in white

  linen walking, pinkish warm limbs beneath white linen;

  then walking, walking homeward toward Well’s Lake,

  brain at boil now with heat, afternoon glistening

  in yellow heat, dead dun-brown grass, windless,

  with all distant things shimmering, grasshoppers, birds

  dulled to quietness; walking a log road near a cedar swamp

  looking cool with green darkness and whine of mosquitoes,

  crow’s caw overhead, Cooper’s hawk floating singly

  in mateless haze; walking dumbly, footsore, cutting

  into evening through sumac and blackberry brambles,

  onto the lake road, feet sliding in the gravel,

  whippoorwills, night birds wakening, stumbling to lake

  shore, shedding clothes on sweet moss; walking

  into syrupy August moonless dark, water cold, pushing

  lily pads aside, walking out into the lake with feet

  springing on mucky bottom until the water flows overhead;

  sinking again to walk on the bottom then buoyed up,

  walking on the surface, moving through beds of reeds,

  snakes and frogs moving, to the far edge of the lake

  then walking upward over the basswood and alders, the field

  of sharp stubble and hay bales, toward the woods,

  floating over the bushy crests of hardwoods and tips

  of pine, barely touching in miles of rolling heavy dark,

  coming to the larger water, there walking along the troughs

  of waves folding in upon themselves; walking to an island,

  small, narrow, sandy, sparsely wooded, in the middle

  of the island in a clump of cedars a small spring

  which I enter, sliding far down into a deep cool

  dark endless weight of water.

  SUITE TO FATHERS

  for Denise Levertov

  I

  I think that night’s our balance,

  our counterweight – a blind woman

  we turn to for nothing but dark.

  In Val-Mont I see a slab of parchment,

  a black quill pen in stone.

  In a sculptor’s garden

  there was a head made from stone,

  large as a room, the eyes neatly hooded

  staring out with a crazed somnolence

  fond of walled gardens.

  The countesses arch like cats in châteaux.

  They wake up as countesses and usually sleep with counts.

  Nevertheless he writes them painful letters,

  thinking of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Gaspara Stampa.

  With Kappus he calls forth the stone in the rose.

  In Egypt the dhows sweep the Nile

  with ancient sails. I am in Egypt,

  he thinks, this Baltic jew – it is hot,

  how can I make bricks with no straw?

  His own country rich with her food and slaughter,

  fit only for sheep and generals.

  He thinks of the coffin of the East,

  of the tiers of dead in Venice,

  those countless singulars.

  At lunch, the baked apple too sweet with kirsch

  becomes the tongues of convent girls at gossip,

  under the drum and shadow of pigeons

  the girl at promenade has almond in her hair.

  From Duino, beneath the mist,

  the green is so dark and green it cannot bear itself.

  In the night, from black paper

  I cut the silhouette of this exiled god,

  finding him as the bones of a fish in stone.

  II

  In the cemetery the grass is pale,

  fake green as if dumped from Easter baskets,

  from overturned clay and the deeper marl

  which sits in wet gray heaps by the creek.

  There are no frogs, death drains there.

  Landscape of glass, perhaps Christ

  will quarry you after the worms.

  The newspaper says caskets float in leaky vaults.

  Above me, I feel paper birds.

  The sun is a brass bell.

  This is not earth I walk across

  but the pages of some giant magazine.

  Come song,

  allow me some eloquence,

  good people die.

  The June after you died

  I dove down into a lake,

  the water turned to cold, then colder,

  and ached against my ears.

  I swam under a sunken log then paused,

  letting my back rub against it,

  like some huge fish with rib cage

  and soft belly open to the bottom.

  I saw the light shimmering far above

  but did not want to rise.

  It was so far up from the dark –

  once it was night three days,

  after that four, then six and over again.

  The nest was torn from the tree,

  the tree from the ground,

  the ground itself sinking torn.

  I envied the dead their sleep of rot.

  I was a fable to myself,

  a speech to become meat.

  III

  Once in Nevada I sat on a boulder at twilight –

  I had no ride and wanted to avoid the snakes.

  I watched the full moon rise a fleshy red

  out of the mountains, out of a distant sandstorm.

  I thought then if I might travel deep enough

  I might embrace the dead as equals,

  not in their separate stillness as dead, but in music

  one with another’s harmonies.

  The moon became paler,

  rising, floating upward in her arc

  and I with her, intermingled in he
r whiteness,

  until at dawn again she bloodied

  herself with earth.

  In the beginning I trusted in spirits,

  slight things, those of the dead in procession,

  the household gods in mild delirium

  with their sweet round music and modest feasts.

  Now I listen only to that hard black core,

  a ball harsh as coal, rending for light

  far back in my own sour brain.

  The tongue knots itself

  a cramped fist of music,

  the oracle a white-walled room of bone

  that darkens now with a greater dark;

  and the brain a glacier of blood,

  inching forward, sliding, the bottom

  silt covered but sweet,

  becoming a river now

  laving the skull with coolness –

  the leaves on her surface

  dipping against the bone.

  Voyager, the self the voyage –

  dark, let me open your lids.

  Night stares down with her great bruised eye.

  SUITE TO APPLENESS

  I

  If you love me drink this discolored wine,

  tanning at the edge with the sourness of flowers –

  their heads, soldiers’, floating as flowers,

  heads, necks, owned by gravity now as war

  owned them and made them move to law;

  and the water is heavier than war, the heads

  bobbing freely there with each new wave lap.

  And if your arm offends you, cut it off.

  Then the leg by walking, tear out the eye,

  the trunk, body be eyeless, armless, bodiless.