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

in Sweden he’d never seen, incestuously,

  in some flower-strewn woods near the water.

  After a New Year’s and his first French meal,

  enchantée of course pursing her thick lips,

  throwing one leg over the other

  in the abandonment of sitting down,

  throwing off room-length heat beneath layers

  of nylon, stuffed with turbot and filet as she is,

  splendidly in health, though her only apparent

  exercise is screwing, “making the love,”

  not gentle-like but as a Mack truck

  noses a loading platform.

  III

  The same “she” seen from a bus

  or store window, often too young,

  across the subway tracks in pure ozone,

  the blond cheerleader with legs

  bared to hundreds of eyes.

  Always a fool before the coins –

  I Ching forcing turmoil, the cauldron.

  The fool has eyes and touch,

  is mammalian. He lacks all odds,

  ruts then is scathed. There’s Helen

  in a Greek nightclub, a hundred

  years old and selling pistachios,

  half a century away from any bed –

  her face a shucked pecan.

  Near the shore in a bed of reeds

  he finally sees her for a moment,

  the moon their only witness,

  a single white eye;

  her face is swirling in the dark,

  changing faces a thousand times

  then slipping back into black water.

  But they are confections, put-together things

  who will not stay in or go out but pause

  on the edge of a room or wherever they are,

  uncertain of what they are or whether they care.

  So are they praised for what they aren’t, young,

  and blamed for what they haven’t, a wilderness

  of blood; pitiful creatures, calcined, watery,

  with airbrushed bodies and brains.

  I write this out of hard silence

  to be rid of it. Not, as once, in love,

  chin on breastbone as if the head

  by its own dull weight would snap,

  a green flower from a green stem.

  LULLABY FOR A DAUGHTER

  Go to sleep. Night is a coal pit

  full of black water –

  night’s a dark cloud

  full of warm rain.

  Go to sleep. Night is a flower

  resting from bees –

  night’s a green sea

  swollen with fish.

  Go to sleep. Night is a white moon

  riding her mare –

  night’s a bright sun

  burned to black cinder.

  Go to sleep,

  night’s come,

  cat’s day,

  owl’s day,

  star’s feast of praise,

  moon to reign over

  her sweet subject, dark.

  SEQUENCE

  I

  The mad have black roots in their brains

  around which vessels clot and embrace

  each other as mating snakes.

  The roots feed on the brain until the brain

  is all root – now the brain is gray

  and suffocates in its own folds.

  The brain grows smaller and beats

  against its cage of bone

  like a small wet bird.

  Let us pity the mad we see every day,

  the bird is dying without air and water

  and growing smaller,

  the air is cold, her beak is sharp,

  the beating shriller.

  2

  He loves her until

  tomorrow or until 12:15 AM

  when again he assumes the firedrake,

  ricochets from the walls

  in the exhaustion of kingship;

  somewhere in his skull the Bible’s leaves

  seem turned by another’s hand.

  The pool table’s green felt is earth,

  ivory balls, people cracked toward leather holes.

  Christ’s blood is whiskey. Light is dark.

  And light from a cave in whose furnace

  three children continue their burning.

  3

  The dead haloed in gladiolus

  and electric organs,

  those impossible hurts, trepanations,

  the left eye punctured with glass;

  he’ll go to Canada with his dog,

  a truly loved and loving creature –

  fish in the water, bear in his den.

  Not fox shrinking before foxhound

  snaps its neck, horse cowered before crop.

  4

  In the woods the low red bridge,

  under it and above the flowing water,

  spiders roost in girder’s

  rust and scale, flaking to touch.

  Swift clear water. Soiled sand,

  slippery green moss on rock face.

  From the red bridge, years back

  he dove into an eddy catching

  the river’s backward bend and swirl,

  wishing not to swim on or in

  as a duck and fish

  but to be the water herself,

  flowing then and still.

  COLD AUGUST

  The sun had shrunk to a dime,

  passing behind the smallest

  of clouds; the field was root

  bare – shorthorns had grazed

  it to leather. August’s coldest

  day when the green, unlike

  its former self, returned to earth

  as metal. Then from a swamp

  I saw two large shadows floating

  across the river, move up the sloping

  bank, float swiftly as shadows against

  the field toward where I stood.

  I looked up as two great red-tailed

  hawks passed overhead; for an instant

  I felt as prey then wheeled to watch

  them disappear in southward course.

  NIGHT IN BOSTON

  From the roof the night’s the color

  of a mollusk, stained with teeth and oil –

  she wants to be rid of us and go to sea.

  And the soot is the odor of brine

  and imperishable sausages.

  Beneath me from a window I hear “Blue Hawaii.”

  On Pontchartrain the Rex Club

  dances on a houseboat in a storm –

  a sot calms the water without wetting a foot.

  I’d walk to Iceland, saluting trawlers.

  I won’t sell the rights to this miracle.

  It was hot in Indiana.

  The lovers sat on a porch swing, laughing;

  a car passed on the gravel road,

  red taillights bobbing over the ruts,

  dust sweeping the house,

  the scent of vetch from the pasture.

  Out there the baleen nuzzles his iceberg,

  monuments drown in the lava of birdshit.

  I scuffle the cinders but the building doesn’t shudder –

  they’ve balanced it on a rock.

  The Charles floats seaward, bored with history.

  Night, cutting you open

  I see you’re full of sour air

  like any rubber ball.

  FEBRUARY SWANS

  Of the hundred swans in West Bay

  not one flies south in winter.

  They breathe the dust of snow

  swirling in flumes across the water,

  white as their whiteness;

  bones slighted by hunger

  they move through the clots of ice,

  heads looped low and tucked to the wind,

  looking for fish in the deep greenness of water.

  Now in the country, far from the Bay,

  from a dark room I see a swan gliding

/>   down the street, larger than a car, silent.

  She’ll need a fish the size of a human

  to feed her hunger, so far from the water.

  But there’s nothing to eat between those snowbanks.

  She looks toward my window. I think:

  Go back to the Bay, beautiful thing,

  it was thirty below last night.

  We gaze at each other until my breath

  has glazed the window with frost.

  THIN ICE

  Now this paste of ash and water;

  water slipping over ice, greenish

  brown water, white ice, November ice,

  thin as glass, shot with air.

  The kinglet, soundless, against the yellow

  grapeleaves of the arbor, smallest of birds;

  shrill day, the blowing, oily Atlantic off

  Strong’s Neck; the salt smell drifts, blown

  through the newish Cape Cod homes.

  On such days children fall down wells,

  or drown falling through thin first ice,

  or fall reaching after the last apple

  the picker neglected, the tree leafless,

  the apple spoiled anyway by frost; toad freezes,

  snake’s taken his hole; the cat makes much

  shorter trips; dog’s bark is louder.

  The green has floated from earth, moved south,

  or drifted upward at night, invisible to us.

  Man walks, throwing off alone thin heat;

  this cold’s life, death’s steamy mark and target.

  NATURAL WORLD

  I

  The earth is almost round. The seas

  are curved and hug the earth, both

  ends are crowned with ice.

  The great Blue Whale swims near

  this ice, his heart is warm

  and weighs two thousand pounds,

  his tongue weighs twice as much;

  he weighs one hundred fifty tons.

  There are so few of him left

  he often can’t find a mate;

  he drags his six-foot sex

  through icy waters,

  flukes spread crashing.

  His brain is large enough

  for a man to sleep in.

  2

  On Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania

  thousands upon thousands

  upon thousands of hawks in migration

  have been slaughtered for pleasure.

  Drawn north or south in spring and fall:

  merlin and kestrel, peregrine, gyrfalcon,

  marsh hawk, red-tailed, sharp-tailed,

  sharp-shinned, Swainson’s hawk,

  golden eagle and osprey

  slaughtered for pleasure.

  MOVING

  Not those who have lived here and gone

  but what they have left: a worn-out broom,

  coat hangers, the legs of a doll,

  errors of possession to remind us of ourselves;

  but for drunkenness or prayers the walls

  collapse in boredom, or any new ecstasy

  could hold them up, any moan or caress

  or pillow-muffled laugh;

  leaving behind as a gift seven rooms of air

  once thought cathedral, those imagined

  beasts at windows,

  her griefs hung from the ceiling for spectacle.

  But finally here I am often there

  in its vacant shabbiness,

  standing back to a window in the dark,

  carried by the house as history, a boat,

  deeper into a year, into the shadow

  of all that happened there.

  WHITE

  To move into it again, as it was,

  the cows rattling in black stalls,

  lowing beneath the wind, the elm

  against the barn, thrashing

  there as shadow, all loose boards

  creaking, the moon drawn,

  pushed rolling white by wind

  and fat,

  bone white

  snow-and-flour white

  white white

  moving into the puddle by the lilacs,

  whiter there, rippling white

  beneath dark green twisting petals.

  To be silvered by her as the barn,

  the grass, the manure pile, the lilacs,

  to look again at the reflection

  of her huge eye in water.

  AFTER THE ANONYMOUS SWEDISH

  Seventeenth century

  Deep in the forest there is a pond,

  small, shaded by a pine so tall

  its shadow crosses her surface.

  The water is cold and dark and clear,

  let it preserve those who lie at the bottom

  invisible to us in perpetual dark.

  It is our heaven, this bottomless

  water that will keep us forever still;

  though hands might barely touch they’ll never

  wander up an arm in caress or lift a drink;

  we’ll lie with the swords and bones

  of our fathers on a bed of silt and pine needles.

  In our night we’ll wait

  for those who walk the green and turning earth,

  our brothers, even the birds and deer,

  who always float down to us

  with alarmed and startled eyes.

  DAWN WHISKEY

  Mind follow the nose

  this honey of whiskey

  I smell through the throat of the bottle.

  I hear a wren in the maple

  and ten million crickets,

  leaf rustle

  behind the wren and crickets,

  farther back a faint dog bark.

  And the glass is cool,

  a sweet cedar post that flames so briskly.

  Sight bear this honey

  through the shell curved around the brain,

  your small soft globes

  pouring in new light –

  remember things that burn with gold

  as this whiskey to my tongue.

  LEGENDA

  This song stays.

  No new one carries us, bears

  us so high, more swiftly.

  And it has no place,

  it changes as we change

  death drawn to silence

  at noon or in still night,

  who knows another, wishes one.

  None wishes night,

  but only one night, one day,

  sun and dark at final rest.

  River at spring crest,

  sky clear blue,

  forest at June greenness,

  delight of eye in brain fully flowering,

  delight of air and light and breath.

  A YEAR’S CHANGES

  This nadir: the wet hole

  in which a beast heaps twigs and bits

  of hair, bark and tree skin,

  both food and turds mix in the warm

  dust its body makes.

  In winter the dream of summer,

  in summer the dream of sleep,

  in spring feasting,

  living dreams through the morning.

  Fall, my cancer, pared to bone,

  I lost my fur, my bite gone dull,

  all edges, red and showing; now naked,

  February painted with ice, preserve me

  in wakefulness – I wait for the rain,

  to see a red pine free of snow,

  my body uncrabbed, unleashed,

  my brain alive.

  In northern Manitoba

  a man saw a great bald eagle –

  hanging from its neck,

  teeth locked in skin and feathers,

  the bleached skull of a weasel.

  To sing not instinct or tact,

  wisdom,

  the song’s full stop and death,

  but audible things, things moving

  at noon in full raw light;

  a dog moving around

  the tree wit
h the shade –

  shade and dog in motion –

  alive at noon in full natural light.

  This nightflower, the size of a cat’s head –

  now moist and sentient –

  let it hang there in the dark;

  bare beauty asking nothing of us,

  if we could graft you to us,

  so singular and married to the instant.

  But now rest picked, a trillium

  never to repeat yourself. Soon enough

  you’ll know dead air, brief homage,

  a sliver of glass in someone’s brain.

  Homesick for a dark, clear black space

  free of objects; to feel locked as wood

  within a tree, a rock deep enough

  in earth never to see the surface.

  Snow. There’s no earth left under it.

  It’s too cold to breathe.

  Teeth ache, trees crack, the air is bluish.

  My breath goes straight up.

  This woods is so quiet

  that if it weren’t for the buffer of trees

  I could hear everything on earth.

  Only talk. Cloth after the pattern is cut,

  discarded, spare wood barely kindling.

  At night when the god in you trips,

  hee-haws, barks and refuses to come

  to tether. Stalk without quarry.

  Yesterday I fired a rifle into the lake.

  A cold spring dawn