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

  And if your brain offends you…

  If Christ offends you, tear him out,

  or if the earth offends you, skin her

  back in rolls, nailed to dry

  on barnside, an animal skin in sunlight;

  or the earth that girl’s head,

  throwing herself from the asylum roof,

  head and earth whirling earthward.

  Or if we reoccur with death our humus, heat,

  as growths or even mushrooms; on my belly

  I sight for them at dead-leaf line –

  no better way – thinking there that I hear

  the incredible itch of things to grow,

  Spring, soon to be billion-jetted.

  Earth in the boy’s hand, the girl’s head,

  standing against the granary; earth a green

  apple he picked to throw at starlings,

  plucked from among green underleaves,

  silver leaf bellies burred with fine white hairs;

  the apple hurled, hurtling greenly with wet solidity,

  earth spinning in upon herself,

  shedding her brains and whales and oceans,

  her mountains strewn and crushed.

  II

  In the Quonset shed unloading the fertilizer,

  each bag weighing eighty pounds,

  muscles ache, lungs choke with heat and nitrogen;

  then climbing the ladder of the water tank

  to see in the orchard the brightness of apples,

  sinking clothed into the icy water, feet thunking

  iron bottom, a circle of hot yellow light above.

  The old tree, a McIntosh:

  sixty-eight bushel last year,

  with seventy-three bushel the year before that,

  sitting up within it on a smooth branch,

  avoiding the hoe, invisible to the ground,

  buoyed up by apples, brain still shocked,

  warped, shaved into curls of paper,

  a wasps’ globe of gray paper –

  lamina of oil and clouds –

  now drawing in greenness, the apples

  swelling to heaviness on a hot August afternoon;

  to sing, singing, voice cracks at second sing,

  paper throat, brain unmoist for singing.

  Cranking the pump to loud life,

  the wheel three turns to the left,

  six hundred feet of pipe lying in the field;

  the ground beneath begins shaking, bumping

  with the force of coming water, sprinklers whirl,

  the ground darkening with spray of flung water.

  After the harvest of cabbage the cabbage roots,

  an acre of them and the discarded outer leaves,

  scaly pale green roots against black soil,

  to be forked into piles with the tomato vines;

  a warm week later throwing them onto the wagon,

  inside the piles the vines and leaves have rotted,

  losing shape, into a thick green slime and jelly.

  III

  Or in the orchard that night

  in July: the apple trees too thick

  with branches, unpruned, abandoned,

  to bear good fruit – the limbs

  moving slightly in still air with my drunkenness;

  a cloud passed over the moon

  sweeping the orchard with a shadow –

  the shadow moving thickly across the darkening field,

  a moving lustrous dark, toward a darker woodlot.

  Then the night exploded with crows –

  an owl or raccoon disturbed a nest –

  I saw them far off above the trees,

  small pieces of black in the moonlight

  in shrill fury circling with caw caw caw,

  skin prickling with its rawness

  brain swirling with their circling

  in recoil moving backward, crushing

  the fallen apples with my feet,

  the field moving then as the folds

  of a body with their caw caw caw.

  Young crows opened by owl’s beak,

  raccoon’s claws and teeth,

  night opened, brain broken as with a hammer

  by weight of blackness and crows,

  crushed apples and drunkenness.

  Or Christ bless torn Christ, crows,

  the lives of their young

  torn from the darkness,

  apples and the dead webbed branches

  choking the fruit;

  night and earth herself

  a drunken hammer, the girl’s head,

  all things bruised or crushed

  as an apple.

  THE SIGN

  I

  There are no magic numbers or magic lives.

  He dreams of Sagittarius in a thicket,

  dogs yipe at his hooves, the eye of the archer

  seaward, his gaze toward impossible things –

  bird to be fish, archer and horse a whale

  or dolphin; then rears up, canters

  away from the shore across a wide field

  of fern and honeysuckle brambles

  to a woods where he nibbles at small

  fresh leeks coming up among dead leaves.

  Strange creature to be thought of,

  welded in the skull as unicorn,

  hooves, bow, quiver of arrows and beard;

  that girl sitting at cliff edge

  or beside a brook, how does he take her?

  He lifts her up to kiss her,

  and at night standing by a stream,

  heavy mist up to his flanks,

  mist curling and floating through his legs,

  a chill comes over him;

  she in restless sleep in a small stone cottage.

  Between the scorpion and goat,

  three signs –

  winter in Cancer and this love of snow.

  And contempt for all signs, the nine

  spokes of the sun, the imagined belt

  of dark or girdle in which night

  mantles herself. The stars guide

  no one save those at sea

  or in the wilderness; avoid what stinks

  or causes pain, hate death and cruelty

  to any living thing.

  You do not need the stars for that.

  II

  But often at night something asks

  the brain to ride, run riderless;

  plumed night swirling, brain riding itself

  through blackness, crazed with motion,

  footless against the earth,

  perhaps hooves imagined in lunacy;

  through swamps feared even in daytime

  at gallop, crashing through poplar

  thickets, tamarack, pools of green slime,

  withers splattered with mud, breathing

  deep in an open marsh in the center of

  the great swamp, then running again

  toward a knoll of cedar where deer feed,

  pausing, stringing the bow, chasing

  the deer for miles, crossing a blacktop road

  where the hooves clatter.

  On a May night walking home from a tavern

  through a village with only three streetlights,

  a slip of moon and still air moist with scent of first grass;

  to look into the blackness by the roadside,

  and in all directions, village, forest,

  and field covered with it:

  eighteen miles of black to Traverse City

  thirteen miles of black to Buckley

  nineteen miles of black to Karlin

  twelve miles of black to Walton Junction

  And infinite black above;

  earth herself a heavy whirling ball of pitch.

  If the brain expands to cover these distances…

  stumbling to the porch where the cat

  has left an injured snake that hisses with the brain,

  the brain rearing up to shed the black
/>   and the snake coiled bleeding at its center.

  III

  Not centaur nor archer but man,

  man standing exhausted at night

  beneath a night sky so deep and measureless,

  head thrown back he sees his constellation,

  his brain fleshes it and draws the lines

  which begin to ripple then glimmer,

  heave and twist, assume color, rear up,

  the head high, the chest and torso gleaming,

  beard glistening, flanks strapped with muscle,

  hooves stomping in place, stomping night’s floor,

  rearing again, fading, then regaining terror,

  the bow in hand, a strung bow, and arrow fitted,

  drawn back, the arrow molten-tipped.

  Slay. He only still “slays.”

  And when the arrow reaches earth I’ll die.

  But in morning light, already shrill and hot

  by ten, digging a well pit, the sandy earth crumbles

  and traps the legs, binding them to earth; then digging

  again, driving a shallow well with a sledge,

  the well-tip shaded as an arrowhead, sledge hitting

  steel with metallic ring and scream; the pump head

  and arm bound to pipe, sitting in damp sand

  with legs around the pipe pumping the first water

  onto my chest and head – head swollen with pain

  of last night’s sign and leavings of whiskey.

  On another morning, the frost as a sheet

  of white stubbled silk soon to melt into greenness,

  partridge thumping ground with wings to call their mates,

  near a river, thick and turbulent and brown –

  a great buck deer, startled

  from a thicket, a stag of a thousand stories,

  how easily his spread antlers trace a back and bow

  not unlike your own, then the arc of him

  bounding away into his green clear music.

  WAR SUITE

  I

  The wars: we’re drawn to them

  as if in fever, we sleepwalk to them,

  wake up in full stride of nightmare,

  blood slippery, mouth deep in their gore.

  Even in Gilgamesh, the darker bodies

  strewn over stone battlements,

  dry skin against rough stone, the sand

  sifting through rock face, swollen flesh

  covered with it, sand against blackening lips,

  flesh covered with it, the bodies

  bloating in the heat, then hidden,

  then covered; or at an oasis, beneath

  still palms, a viper floats toward water,

  her soft belly flattened of its weight, tongue

  flicking at water beside the faces of the dead,

  their faces, chests, pressed to earth, bodies

  also flattened, lax with their weight,

  now surely groundlings, and the moon

  swollen in the night, the sheen

  of it on lax bodies and on the water.

  Now in Aquitaine, this man is no less dead

  for being noble, a knight with a clang

  and rasp to his shield and hammer;

  air thick with horses,

  earth fixed under their moving feet

  but bodies falling, sweat and blood

  under armor, death blows, sweet knight’s

  blood flowing, horses screaming, horses

  now riderless drinking at a brook, mouths sore

  with bits, sweat drying gray on flanks,

  noses dripping cool water, nibbling

  grass through bits, patches of grass

  with the blood still red and wet on them.

  II

  I sing sixty-seven wars; the war now,

  the war for Rapunzel, earth cannot use

  her hair, the war of drowning hair

  drifting upward as it descends,

  the lover holding his cock like

  a switchblade, war of

  apples and pears beating against the earth,

  earth tearing a hole in sky, air to hold

  the light it has gathered, river bending

  until its back is broken, death a black

  carp to swim in our innards.

  Grand wars; the final auk poised

  on her ice floe, the wolf shot

  from a helicopter; that shrill god

  in her choir loft among damp wine-colored

  crumpled robes, face against a dusty

  window, staring out at a black pond

  and the floor of a woodlot

  covered with ferns – if that wasp

  on the pane stings her…

  cancer to kill child, child to kill cancer,

  nail to enter the wood, the Virgin

  to flutter in the air above Rome like a Piper Cub,

  giraffe’s neck to grow after greener leaves,

  bullet to enter an eye, bullet

  to escape the skull, bullet to fall

  to earth, eye to look for its skull,

  skull to burst, belly to find its cage or ribs.

  Face down in the pool, his great fatty

  heart wants to keep beating; tongue pressed

  to rug in a chemical hallway; on a country

  road, caught by flashbulb headlights,

  he wishes suddenly to be stronger than a car.

  III

  The elephant to couple in peace,

  the porpoise to be free of the microphone;

  this page to know a master, a future,

  a page with the flesh melodious,

  to bring her up through the page, paper-shrouded,

  from whatever depth she lies,

  dulling her gift, bringing her to song

  and not to life.

  This death mask to harden before

  the face escapes, life passes

  down through the neck – the sculptor

  turns hearing it rub against the door.

  Mind to stay free of madness, of war;

  war all howling and stiff-necked dead,

  night of mind punctuated with moans and stars,

  black smoke moiling, puling mind striped as a zebra,

  ass in air madly stalking her lion.

  Fire to eat tar, tar to drip,

  hare to beat hound

  grouse to avoid shot

  trout to shake fly

  chest to draw breath

  breath to force song,

  a song to be heard,

  remembered and sung.

  To come to an opening in a field

  without pausing, to move there in a full circle of light;

  but night’s out there not even behind the glass –

  there’s nothing to keep her out or in;

  to walk backward to her, to step

  off her edge or become her edge,

  to swell and roll in her darkness,

  a landlocked sea moving free –

  dark and clear within her continent.

  AMERICAN GIRL

  I

  Not a new poem for Helen,

  if they were heaped…

  but she never wanted a poem,

  she whose affections the moment aimed.

  And not to sing a new Helen into being

  with t’adores, anachronistic gymnastics,

  to be diligent in praise of her

  only to be struck down by her.

  Sing then, if song,

  after bitter retreat,

  on your knees,

  as anyone who would love.

  My senses led me here

  and I had no wit to do otherwise.

  Who breathes. Has looked upon. Alone.

  In the darkness. Remembers.

  Better to sit as a boy did in a still

  cool attic in fall, tomatoes left to ripen

  in autumn light on newspapers,

  sucking his honeyed thumb, the forbidden

  mag
azine across the lap and only

  the mind’s own nakedness for company;

  the lovely photo, almost damp,

  as supple and pink to the eye,

  a hot country of body

  but unknown and distant,

  perhaps futureless.

  A child once thought the dead were buried

  to bear children: in the morning from his loft

  in the fumes of wood smoke and bacon

  he watches them dress, their bathing suits drying

  by the stove. The water will fill them up.

  II

  He dreams of Egypt in Sunday School,

  the maidens of Ur-of-Chaldea, Bathsheba bathing

  on her rooftop, the young virgin brought

  to David to warm his hollow bones. And the horror

  of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s frenzy

  with his daughters; women railed against

  in Habakkuk and Jeremiah, Isaiah’s feverish

  wife and Christ and the woman at the well –

  to look in lust is to do without doing;

  eyes follow the teacher’s rump as she leaves the room.

  At sixteen his first whore, youngish

  and acrid, sharing with her a yellow room

  and a fifth of blackberry brandy;

  first frightened with only his shoes on,

  then calmed, then pleased, speechlessly

  preening and arrogant. They became

  blackberry brandy but never sweetly again –

  vile in Laramie before dawn through

  a darkened bar and up the long backstairs,

  on Commerce St. in Grand Rapids shrieking

  with gin. He craved some distant cousin