Sonnets to Eurydice
by Dennis M. Hammes
SONNETS
TO
EURYDICE
by Dennis M. Hammes
SCRAWLMARK PRESS
Moorhead, Minnesota
The FISHHOOK Group
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Sonnets To Eurydice
Copyright 1970, 1972, 1973 1974, 1975, 1976, 1979,
1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986,
1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, (C)1991, 1992, 1994
by FISHHOOK and Dennis M. Hammes
All rights reserved.
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may be reproduced to paper by any means including mechanical,
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whether analog or digital, or electronic broadcast,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
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graphics, and attendant files), may be copied for
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Scrawlmark Catalog #SE1.1
ISBN:
LCC Cat. Nr.:
Scrawlmark Publishing
1016 South 3rd Street
Moorhead, Minnesota 56584
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Legei pou `Hrakleitos `oti panta Xwrei kai ouden menei.
-- Plato, Cratylus
Das Wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blicke
Der vorwarts sieht, wie viel noch uebrig bleibt
-- Gottfried Wilhelm von Goethe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
PREFACE
These are not so much my feelings as the disco-
vering them; not so much them as the discovering
what I liked or dared like, and finally, less even
that than the discovering of the value of liking this
feeling or that, will I, nil I, no matter that I
liked, scorned, feared, etc. it, for all are in the
entire course governed finally by that statement of
Russell's, which has been with me through all I have
written: "I suggest that an emotion which can be
destroyed by a little mathematics is neither very
genuine nor very valuable."
To the extent that genuine, or accurate, feeling
reflects natural law, it can be said that feeling,
process, and their result in the sonnets, had, in
Rilke's words, "stormily imposed themselves." The
storm has lasted nineteen years as seasonally and
variably as the monsoon, the chinook, and the bliz-
zard, and like these is more or less destructive.
But if these have taught me anything, it is that to
love any thing genuinely requires the letting go of
something else -- and that this grief, or relief, has
no effect on the love other than to let it be the
more itself.
The sonnets are thus more a description of
process, in the first person ignorant, than they are
any definition of something the reader may wish to
lean upon. (Many readers have resented this, some
deeply.) It may dangerously be presumed that the
ignorance fights to and succeeds at progression out
of itself to something that it can lean on, something
that is immediately and permanently more valuable;
but as one of the early sonnets already intimates,
this result has probably nothing like the stability
of a car lot with each make and model priced in its
parking place. Rather it is as flying by the seat of
one's pants: it cannot be taught, but it can be
learned. And if these show only that it can be done,
already is learned half of what is needed to fly.
10/23/88
dmh
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
for
Terry
l'envoi
I seal this sneaking ark to you who bid
Me save our beast-bound thoughts their certain term
Through plural flesh and mockeries of form;
The rainbow dam the covenant-doomed flood,
The firmament at devil leaks the brood
Sea surge in the gall gullet of the worm
That mimes our red tide and consumes the storm-
Accumulated crumb our long vein bared,
And Kronos ever gobble his own brat
To make us lonely for the ones we were
When we were older than our songs were worth,
The stumble sounds in seven pairs set forth
To tout faint Eurydice on her tour
And tell her hearing is their Ararat.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
1
Three seasons' span, the iris is a tuber,
Slow in the earth through humus or through gall
To bloom for one brief week, a poet's goober --
But leaves both bronze and rhizome in the fall.
When fifty falls shall handicap our run
And we move slow, though not for any thought,
If we have only bronze for courses won
Then age is all that age has slowly wrought.
To grave a graven earth's a sorry trot,
Coursing a course to end where we began :
Unless we get us all our grandsires got
The iris will have last of any man.
Then let us swell the front while blood is green
Before we must be bronze, and ever lean.
2
As though bees knew the brevity of best,
The fullest lilac is alive with stings;
And though this prime must fall, it ever brings
Broad wonder at how every breath is dressed,
And inspiration at the breath's behest
That joy is highest that must dance to strings :
A cricket has a year to wear its wings,
And still -- and that is why -- they are caressed.
Then lilac has more beauty than a brief
Whose brevity is argued by the deaf
Whose credence is the requisite of creed,
And bees and I don't quibble at the doom
That we must fumble blooms while they are bloom,
For we inherited a quitclaim deed.
3
Such times as memory and I agree
And I can draw you to my windward rail,
Then two or three planes grow to be a sail
Floodlight on blue; the spheroid of the sea
Rolls up its edges to encompass me.
And though I watch, at any evening's mail,
Your chestnut in the chipmunk's sunfired tail,
I'm not bound by the duty we could be
Because of this. Because of this, I lie
Within the thinning armour of my pen,
Erasing absense from the empty sight
With line descriptions of the hungry I;
Unsatisfied, I draw the day, and then
My ears howl with the emptiness of night.
4
The time we played the summer day its dare
With lazy ayes, guitars, and breathless swims,
Orange auras leed the lay of auburn hair
And ripples licked long highlights at your limbs.
These forms of sun and woman lost their mass
In molding memory's amoebic fluff;
Their mettle won't hold half a gram of gas,
But, to hold me, they have steel enough.
Now I play Patience, cheating in the dole
Of worthless tricks to overcall your /quid
Pro quo/, but you will always have control :
Mind's ions will remain the days we did
Until time plays his lone black ace, to trump
The murmur of their most important pump.
5
The sill distills the silent, night-numbed lawn
As light distorts world lived through window glass;
But to my touch, even your pulse must pass
Through every wanwood garden I have grown.
My pinemeal lies thick with the lilacs' spawn,
Muffling footsteps pressed to tended grass
Grown silent to considerable mass;
I turn to your light scent, but you are gone.
How long must I listen to the note
Of time's bum ticker ringing out its guard,
Intoning "Halt-and-Who" in civil rote,
Condemned to be both watch and hurried ward?
Once, once, if I could plod in nodding nap,
Or trade this magnum handgun for a trap!
6
Out of the snow I fell into estate
And all meet bounds ran oozing into spring
To choose for me their own demand and date,
The time to sweat, and shorter time to sing.
Evicted from April without voice or vote,
I roll the crawling of July's blunt heat
So massive I must dream to stay afloat
But only sleep to dream encumbered feet :
Monstrosity of showing too much life
For one man's being to contain its blood,
Leech lilac overflows my flickering knife,
Still growing as I prune its purple flood.
How have the lines I thought to tend so well
Become this prison, this malignant cell?
7
Again, you flow like lilac to my mind
Who slowly grow through what my weather wrought,
Transfiguring common elements out of kind
To bloom a while, and then recede to thought.
Was bloom your mentor, or was lilac taught?
You of yourself outsoar the elbowed crowd,
Embrace the air as life enough, and brought
The first dumb bloom by which I was allowed
To assume the rainbow, caliper a cloud.
Yet if I dream some secret `why' or `how,'
Or measure god, life's size or shape, too proud
To foot the weather, being tomorrow now,
My eager reach jerks on the blankets' girth,
And wakes to roots caught tightly in the earth.
8
Can hardened hands that lately wrestled Rome
Ignore the texture of their lance-loved flesh,
Or wipe their leafgrown green to let sun crush
The lilacs that stood tall beside their gnome,
To be a chestnut filly's living comb,
Then make her main attendant of the brush?
To keep the stable sealed and fencing fresh,
The constant groom must be in constant roam.
Though I might learn to love her easy rein,
The gentle leather of a common course
And favored saddle, she is not a horse
To leave the parlor for the jousting lane,
And though she seat me for my talk of Grails,
I serve the lilac's leafmeal in my nails.
9
Should my scant hay coax her from where her eyes are
The focus of that clover-clouted hill,
Will choke her quick the handy present ties her
To paddocks pricked by seedpod-doddered dill.
She is too blooded for this drying stile,
All pecker-heckled, worn in long retrace
Of heavy lines that strut about her guile
And maim her movement in reciting grace.
If her fact and action streak these frames
And chafe time's harness best when blessed to run,
Then I can't hold her to these meldewed hames;
Her being is in being, not having done,
And take to pasture knowing her a day,
I'll keep her only if she goes her way.
10
The grave's grit growls along my arm's dumb ear
As keys that made their love with your short life
Grow gross, resistant, an enfeebled wife
Whose aspirin speech assaults me to endear
Whatever taste remains to local beer.
Their unoiled obbligato, dancing fife
Caper this once-proud carriage, beersong rife;
Struts struck, they clown in anaesthetic cheer.
Yet limbweight ever slides my midnight palms :
You, through the chalk shriek of my digits' dirks
Skirl keys, a loan glove whose lithe lunar wrong
As Sheba bodied Solomon to Psalms
Still taps the bokken's oak to /soter's/ jerks
Who awed the clod tad of my tongue to song.
11
Sunshine girl, the gold peal of your skin
Blinds me to myself; your ringing voice
Deafens the clock as your quick blood beats thin
The gargoyle past and foils me into choice.
But though I slash the tendrils at my heels
To paint the walls, the rotting baulks remain
To stay bent beams, and so the ceiling reels;
Not disrepair, but nothing to maintain.
No bloom can stay within these windy walls;
If you be lilac, you must hie away
From the Midas of these mildewed halls
Whose only substance is their own decay,
Sure death for any woman who would hold
A termite king, that chews his love to gold.
12
You, basslissom, scissor of limbs-au-lait
Afloat, shoot past the toehold where I lean,
Sand straining, chest against a roiled careen
Of underbridge whitewater like the whey
Of time; curds hurdled, I regain the quay
Of solid dreams, to set a common scene :
A beachside bower where the sunshine sheen
Of flesh wakes fresh desire to have my way.
And then recoil from these remembered weights
And silkshot textures, dreams' quick exhalations;
My morningafter megaton rock church
Slams ambling fingers, yellowed page of hates
Grown green again in nurtured generations :
John Calvin turns in my grave heart's slow lurch.
13
These rocks, the shocks of which curse toes
That clam the sand in search of your gone Grail :
Brief draught of days, brimmed weekend in wet clothes
Or none, substantial as a clam's stormed trail,
These stones protest. Than your curved heave of hip
Less soft, more slick but with the stream's hair ooze,
More skate, that slats dreams into a fat lip --
There is more comfort in dud buddy booze.
(Again, the rocks.) Rammed hard against the whelp
Of water-lilies, jealousy like granite
Grades the flash of flesh that offered help,
Monolithic time, past's mass this planet.
Leave that amoebic love its lumpy slough :
Who hates his blood despises it in you.
14
Once a slick cutlass, dreaming the duel dawn,
My temper was the common tide's disaster;
Now I choke physics before the Roger's drawn,
Afraid that love heave to, take aim and blast her.
My song packed thick in common mustard plaster,
I think to bring in sense with little mimes
Of a fever-shook, self-leeching poetaster
Who sets his sickroom with his blooming rimes.
And all bent ended if I kiss at limes,
The palsied lips stop, cured, locked on their harbor,
That sail by sinking, who won't learn betimes
That Occam is too dull to scrape the Barber.
Sick troubadour, whole mute, the logic rocks :
Who'd cure himself must cure his paradox.
15
How soft, how often have you brushed my thought,
To thrum and weave the webbing of my nerves
Until their whole synaptic net is caught
Up with you! Design, plucked, reels with curves
And I career from when to when, my now
Excused of all crabbed toil, harsh sound and light :
Why snarl the present with the means-and-how
When the knotless future is so right?
But Nissl bodies, being less than lithe,
Exhaust themselves before the web of then
Is one tenth loomed or lost; some hormones writhe
And I become my hunger once again :
Of now, of having been, of yet-to-be,
Bare being is the bobbin of the three.
16
These golden toadstools bullet from the birch
So slowly, yet bowl low those sacred themes
That life looms after death, but never dreams.
Gold-girdled girth, a meal-bogged log's a church
Unstating awe, saw-spared to be the perch
Of preaching fungus; crumbling browns and creams
To palette them again in what it schemes
Well-flavored colors, it becomes its search.
But, slowly though we grow our mushroom sense,
Frost will wreak its muckwork, overnight
Reporridging our elements to stew;
So I stake out this tentative defense
To hound the grave cook's ladle with our might
That you live here as I have lived in you.
17
As you watched lightcaps roll a sea of grain,
A Mourning-Cloak streak by, two chipmunks play,
Oak timbers crash in pressure from the rain,
And Gothic domes eroded by the day,
You, too, have known the clock-struck whim
To make a cloud's quick orange solidify --
Succumbed to hunger's humbling interim
Of time just bare to see a hue and cry.
So, when I taste the speed of all that grows
Brief blooms, the mindprint of an evening when
Your whole attention folded in a rose
Propels the bandaged digit of my pen
Beyond the thin inertia of a mind
That, sworn to nothing, only aids the wind.
18
Twin turbines whistle like a stooping hawk
Over the bobber-hobbled phone lines, glide
To spook bucolic walleyes and elide
Our interim. Flight-whimsied, like an auk
Sham-tumbling imagined sunsets, back I walk
To keen the Wailing Wall my bird-stained pride
Calls pen-and-sword : my tackle hung, I hide
A hook-slung plug in every heronsquawk.
The fabric of flight torn, I try mind's amends
By flying these winsome want-ads of my speech,
But curse the sucker whose mudpudding tries
At bottom hope to soar to lofty ends;
Then to this clouded muddle comes your Beech
Reminding me that even hard steel flies.
19
Quills swilling ink and steel, I learned to fly
By spreading wings without a flap or crew,
But knew your radar's omnipresent eye
Had flailed the scare from air before I flew;
So you, who are my sole substantial mood,
Flight plan these fledgeling hops from stump to perch,
But if the leaves where I have stopped to brood
Show form, it will be said that I'm the birch.
Then even I, whose mudfeet nibs first soared
To solo from your insubtantial shove
A grossbeaked heron, must leave you underscored :
When best in flight, then I am least in love.
And yet my vulture must admit you room :
The Lycoming outsoars the thieving plume.
20
Though you are skyjacked by your will to fly,
Hoist on the talons of a falcon mind
That steers by stars and holds its own helm blind,
You, like your radar, cannot turn to try
Your own crisp Christian or your lisping Bligh
Yourself, but fly to leave yourself behind
And so become whatever you may find
The jury world's reflected in your eye.
Touch down, then, to reflect yourself in me,
Who, like you, like that changeling Irish elf,
Am so chamelion I may not descry
My own persona; there, between us, see
The infinite reflection of yourself
That shatters your mirror's small, one-sided lie.
21
The omni spreads its silent beacon Morse
To home steel pigeons to your radar plot;
A silent desklamp lights my pen its course
Through airways of my known and fancied thought,
To land a page on phage or calculus
Brought out of midnight cloud, inclement weather
Of trying to show that `one' and `one' is `us'
To spark this hearth by striking us together.
But some control assigned us separate rays,
Else frequencies that interfere to hiss
The singing in yourself, though singing sways
The elements allowing me to kiss;
And that my voice won't choke on rivet lugs
Though you fly aircraft -- I, to find the bugs.
22
The trees' tall fingers furl their living lace
Antennas to your pulse of flight's designs
As though the steepled popple sought your trace
Through poured Aurora as I seek these lines.
And you : entowered where the radar's eye
Sees you less often than I see you here
Through empty airways after each goodbye,
What antenna tends your inner ear?
We round one third of earth on evening watch
Collecting passwords from a varied crew,
And though we reach alone, and sort by touch,
My way seems solid : blind, I still hear you.
Whose sibilant foot, what creak of oiled leather,
What night guard holds your interlude together?
23
One letter like rain; my sky intones the south,
Counting days a Lodestar rounds its laps
From you to you, avoiding gravid traps
Such as I set myself in your long drouth :
One outline sentence swells to your full mouth
As I join Berkeley, Leibniz, and such chaps
As castle passes at your lone "perhaps,"
Nor any absolution cure this truth :
Sugar stitched to thymine in thought's socket
Congeals a lone resolve I take for granite
As Armstrong footed man a barren planet :
My intuitions shame the shrieking rocket
But burn out short of dreams that would drygulch us
To leap the inch of my own central sulcus.
24
The bright aurora flash through time, expanding
Gauze from an exotic dancer, but
The "Dance of Seven Veils" finds me outstanding
In my field, less dunce to why than what.
An axe-struck regular I stump, remaining whole
Bound to earth's gravid curve and ancient blame
Until mauve's movement, some blinked jink cajole
Me back that only permafloating game.
Then logged limbs smoke to space, blown broad and loose
From cause to cosmos; transfinite, I see
Bright Baltimore swap sky with Betelgeuse --
Stars in a dancing space containing me --
But words clang at the body's plodding pawn
Whose proof must cavil where the queen be gone.
25
Fishhooked, you leap aloft, "why /me/"s
Atug these lines, trying these bobs we make
Against the other (I would rather wake
Against the other), nib-spooned potpourris;
Nor I escape the adverse noodler's fees,
Long nights to pantrolled knees in a cold lake,
Then hoist on my own /gaffe/ : this scaled hake
Though flying fills you more than poetry.
Duck dare, the gull's foil limb, airoiler arm
Uncurled and copied in aluminum,
Fly higher than clang claimed the more /elat/ --
Irrelevant. This overrules : we warm
On what the rose disclosed. Then come
And turn the sheet while I let out the cat.
26
So you hear wheezing in athsmatic rime
What I behold myself, and yet am not;
From every aging stroke, chalk shrieks of time
And early terrors' senile polyglot.
We might match tempos, log the hearth of now
To bank these hours' calm caulk on graying days
And cavern rooms that howl the wind of how,
Letting age grow with us those things we praise;
But since I can't conjoin minds in the flesh,
I bridge brain fissures, doublecrossing doubt
By walking when I was tall and lilac fresh,
To make that do when I must do without;
And this achronic posture is my choice
Since I must wrench my back to hear your voice.
27
You come as geese that stroke a crystal lake
By massed red oaks adjusted with the breeze
In simple sums whose numbers meld to make
A Monet seascape almost Japanese.
Faint figures solved, each air-oiled plume becomes
From beak to cowlick, flying's master die :
Sheenshatter webs tuck back as each one thumbs
A flick of alulae to lick the sky
And hangs on integrals of wind and wing,
The gaggle haggling flightplans or plain fun
Clean in the air. Windcleaver chins afling
Snow geese are flight, and don't care how it's done.
This go-and-touch drops at the river mouth.
But always flight. And always somewhat south.
28
The howling yesterday tonight is still;
The tomcat rolls his stomach to the fire
That heckles echoes up the chimney spire
And holds night mirrored at the windowsill.
This space, though dawn will ram its random will
Tomorrow through the daydream of desire;
This time to place a pawn, time to inquire
Or scratch one problem with a buzzard quill.
Caught in ephemera that is flight's renown,
The blaze of days, impending frost's gray rape
Of untried sap, the apple standing brown,
-- Accumulate to leave scant time to gape
At painted trees, much less to paint the town.
You, push? Day's squeeze enough.
-- Peel us a grape.
29
Beyond this pane, snow fluffs the marigold,
Nosegays and poison ivy coexist,
Rocks recapitulate their ancient cold,
Or mushrooms prowl the early morning mist.
There's more than glass dividing fire from night
And oak leaves gleely whithered by a world
That pops improbabilities to sight
And men from records they have lately birled.
The moons wink when eclipses split their gravel
And stars confound the cosmos with a joke;
Flesh has a shorter orbit, quick to travel.
Blow up the fire; there's little warmth in smoke.
Then darkness will become arm-pillowed light
That binds our grabbag in the elbow's bight.
30
In that small room the water of your hour
Wraps you from flight's panoramic ease
While high auroras ripple; the taut tease
Of surface tension tents your latent power
To draw fresh breath in some uncustomed flower,
Yet each attempt at gills ends with a wheeze
As dreams drown, while Bernoulli's magic frees
Even the heron from your fishbowl tower.
Caught in the walleye of those gauges' slow,
Finned ignorance of air, whose blind surmise
Sees only water in the cirrus' flow
And mildews the held breath as the wonder dries,
How lonely you must be, I think I know :
The radar drinks the wind, and never cries.
31
The trees blaze brighter; swells even the thistle
As space awaits your coming like the street
Stills everything to color as the whistle
Starts the parade. Joy lingers, though as fleet
As gable-level geese, or sudden blanch
At purple cliffs of cloud, mock terror stacked
In instant fiction of their avalanche,
All theory released by breathless fact.
Neither the birch nor this fantastic dawn
Mean by their glowing, yet one broad belief
Survives beyond the theses they will spawn
To spurn the windrow like a winter leaf :
Let cosmic physics resurrect the day,
It's our conjunction, holds the night away.
32
The wind hoots in the bronchi of the trees
While owls ogle the humilities of wing,
The blackbirds walk, crows crouch; no feathered thing
Dares yet to dawdle in the Beaufort breeze
That dandles at your slipstream, though it please
The numbered mileages to add this fling
To the cawed courses sculling at the spring
That flirt that hemisphere while this one sneeze.
Then let sham tumble accidents of height
That, born to feathers or the sooted quill
Stall when the strange song sting the stranger mouth :
It's more than dare parts careful thought and flight
That parts the spit of weather, though the will
First stutter that would sing its own strong south.
33
Lissom aluminum, though quick to astound
With /tout en l'air/ and reel, compiles a log
Swelled gravid with each leap; some scoured cog
Must scatter /pas de deux/ the both renowned.
Then proud struts prop a low, erratic mound,
All polish swallowed in the gagging fog;
The wing husks echo to the squatting frog
While all these postures but embrace the ground.
Yet here these echo in a living skull,
Their slow feet palaver the quicking pulse
Of thought's lithe ions, feel the flash and gel
Of foundling knowledge come to someone else
Not as the dandy speculates a ball
But as we rub our thighs against a waltz.
34
Gravity bet, my feet plied pedals, sped
Balanced boozejug elbows breeze-akimbo
A-chin the wind where oaks experiment red,
That lane. That lane. A suckerpunch, your limbo.
Tripod steadier one foot, I straddle steel
Less strong than hollow, treads against sunflow,
Backbucking wind, brakelock a slipping wheel.
Roll back. Regain. Perspectives in a row,
Lake, leaves, the same. House, yes. Stratus blind,
Untubed and slapped to skylight, but your trace
Missing some lines, unscened even to mind;
Whole attitudes of you vacate this place.
Alternatives these landscapes, yes : a mole
Nosing for grubs' bloat sweets; a cellarhole.
35
How like the leech of hunger, this; your absence
Sucks the joy from bright beliefs of leaves
And nuthoused squirrels in their return; a sense
Of loss dilutes these colors' catch, bereaves
The longer sleep before the final frost
Congeals bright senses in the dragonfly;
These colors have no benefit nor cost
And are no answer -- no one asked them why.
Yet hunger, occupied with beans, leaves joy
To dwell at autumn through a snowbound season;
Your vacancy leaves nothing to alloy
With time, and empties life from empty reason.
More than these ring, or glass along the bar,
My mind rings with the pluck of your guitar.
36
Your waist at my counter I remember now --
An alien comfort, updraft in routines
Of cutlery, blacked pancakes and brown beans;
A time nontransient, dream-concretion, /frau/
That even the air tries hard to disallow;
A lissom bulk uncharacters these scenes,
And redefines the flyers from the means,
But leaves the reticle without a "pow."
So you in my loose but finite headspace wrong
Unawkward ways whose blunt backyardlight gleam
Is too of stars; and of the living song
You make of time, the pulsing of its theme
Seems not enough to break an apron-thong
To charter at the flightplan of a dream.
37
Now neither Bacchanal of bloom and birds
Nor snow's pragmatic lines relieve the day
Of dribbling clouds and watercolor words;
The lone street lamp reveals diluted, gray
Unspeculating masses; slack limbs splay
As, leaf by leaf, fleet colors leave the stalks
Of stark, black trunks, while kissproof themes go stray
One friend by friend, in short, unfinished talks.
Bombastic promises of equinox
Fade with the lilac's husk, and life lies slight
In twisted seed pods, crisp on concrete blocks.
Yet four split logs can space away the night,
And though my rooms are neither broad nor far,
In their still air may echo who we are.
38
Day rammed by day, as glaciers will crush rocks
With rocks, /Wrm/ time abrades my sense
And barrens it, forbidding sunbound flocks
Touch down to this self-rending stone; so dense,
Your absence seems to weight whole continents.
Against that mass the barrelstove's bubble tries
A soot-choked chimney whose squeezed air relents
To belch gall gases black against my eyes.
These prayerwheel pages whirl, but dream ink dries
To crumple tissue futures you would bless
With breath and movement; though art falsifies
Harsh fact, these won't return your easy dress
Nor let me flash to ashes, turn by turn :
Iced wood cleaves clean, stacks square, and will not burn.
39
Gross winter can be dealt with, brought to gain
In skates and skiboots, brandy and a fire;
Snow kept from walks and driveways, and, in main,
Its mass disposed to place with wood and wire.
The squirrels sleep silent in the maple grove.
Protests of muscle at the axe and saw
Flow out through flannel hassocked at the stove.
There's less of chance in nature, more of law,
And deeper solitude in longer night;
Though days are shorter, they are less pellmell
As scenes resolve themselves in black and white;
If it is cold, it's definite as well.
But autumn birch lapse barren, leaf from limb
The way doubt plucks the color from a dream.
40
Too like the popcorn, these, uneasing you
In teasing you to art; a twangtune tongue
That wrinkles as it tries to write you young
Slang-tangles with techniques it can't eschew.
(Matches the thinking.) Dump of a decade, two,
Three tens of seasons' pulpwood lies where flung;
Instead of your live joy, I've only sung
Of where the bear has wallowed in the dew.
Now midnight kilowatts among the mildew
Mute the syncopation from your pulse
In untrained themes whose tempos tread you false
And telescope your span to what you will do,
To dream that this confetti be me, who
Still tumbles the kaleidoscope of you.
41
The saw leans silent at the chimney wall
And turns, of its own balance, from the bricks
Whose way it is to bite at teeth, leave nicks
And kidgrin edges, that they squall
Through slabs, eschewing the solid drawl
Of native metal. Though it knows no tricks
Other than to turn its back on bricks,
We two have made some mighty acorns fall.
But I've no quarrel with the logs it's laid.
Nor one with it; it's been a certain school.
We've made the highest woodpile we have made :
So high, to pile at woodpiles is to fool
With what's turned fooling. It's not a want of blade
Unscales this, but the standing of the tool.
42
How can I sing my cabin's peace to you
When wheels' black lipstick smears the runway tar
And duralum lolls limp, a homely gar
Gone fish-flanked in the early moon's bright dew?
When wind distorts the contrails you just drew,
Or enroute turbulence leaves a twisted spar
To make you think you might have walked as far,
No Nowalaimie Downasleep will do --
I only know when I observe dried fronds
End in their earth, or, tired with their art,
Whole fields of tall sunflowers shrug the bonds
Of contract with the sun, to wait the mart
In random attitudes of twisted bronze,
I, too, swell with the gall to pad my part.
43
Stark and storklimbed, grossbeaked, slow to fly,
Unlimber thimbleheaded dimwit; bare
Minimum of bird (beak, bone, and dare);
This heavy heron, tenor torquenecked try
At flights whose birdbrained sentence gangles by
You sparrow pinioned, albatrossed to wear
A lumberlegged apostle of the air;
This deadweight to our /gaudeamus/, I.
The lesson of your rollercoaster course
Shows how you love the gravity of limbs
Astride your aims and airways that you force
With each wing thrust seem disconnected whims
Yet landings are what solo flight endorse
No more than errors master paradigms.
44
More than a pane stands firm between the pith
Of brittle barks and whites or spitting storms,
And more than wonder, wilting in the dorms
From quarters spent sequestered with its kith;
Much more than faith that humbles at a myth
Or makes its mediocrity of norms
Slams nails, details an elevation, warms
The kit and boodle, or the weaponsmith.
If you would spend the chloride of your thought
In wistful, sudden luster for the cheek
That bids the bay with noises it was brought,
Then water what is dry; I need not speak
A single foreign attitude I fought,
And as for this old roof, it doesn't leak.
45
We, bonebeaked bastards of old flesh jerked taut
By new designs of neurons, feel the flare
Of wings with sight that plights us to the rare
And wheel of will that we are what we wrought;
Yet fear is not our sight, but that we sought :
And we are hunted in that what we dare
Is not the kind of feathers that we wear
But that we try the plume to prove the thought.
Feet numb the gillstirred slough. The hunters grow
Succumbed with standing, jealous of the flight
Of every shorthop sparrow and crude crow
Who copies us, yet certain of their right
To steal our distance with the stolen glow
Of fire that answers dark with appetite.
46
Two days of casting purls defend my feet
And interface cold ice from colder thought,
Estranger of the ice-caked ducks I cheat
By trapping bits of summer, yet I squat,
Stumped : this was no country for a camp,
So you were right. And other things are mauve.
The overflowing pipe I dump and tamp
And match the sawdust-constellated stove
To melt the snow that fences at the floor --
Weapon of wind and omnipresent night
That slips a scimitar between the door
And where its frame should be, but isn't, quite.
It could, but for the bowsaw's summer thrum
Be cutting me, not my lineoleum.
47
Naked we came, and naked I would lie
To have your truth beside me, head to head.
What is one lie of friends? And what imply
A lein upon your balance, mine be fed?
If I plead pain of hollow leg and life,
Or that I'm stumped, still fishing in a slough
Of walleyed biclops, principals of strife
Whose only rout's the cheese and wry of you,
Naked we stand to judgment of the fee
Of any summer's stream, cursed but to choose
Our own spring compass, speed, and frequency.
If any claim the course who scorn the clues,
Take wing. Outsoar the lamprey's obscene ruff;
The sucking of the clock is leech enough.
48
The bullrush dried, the ash beartrapped in ice,
The pond's pace slows within a creaking wreath
Of frozen fir, the stark chaff of wild rice.
The kiss of frost reveals the crystal teeth
Behind the hum and mumble of slow motion
Grown these clods, numb, comatose with sleep
That nothing nostrum short of snowsnake lotion :
This chill sleeps one season, but lives deep.
Yet let them lie. My steps' slow splashing shunts
None but transient fowl from these deep swells;
The blunt, cragged countenance that fronts
These numbered hopes, unadmirable cells,
Is too much beak, an epe'e struck in bone.
Let ducks lead ducks. The heron hunts alone.
49
The wavicles through this bright barrel pass
Affected and affecting without blame
Of origin; in this great tiny glass
The cannibal and victim loom the same
Drop from the bucket, bucket from the pond,
Unvoiced and reeling with the heave and hum
Of season, and their voice in me no fond
Division, only telltale atrium.
These troglodytes of sense, whose ways converge
The choice of life to how the charge compel
The shape and slap of what will keep, what purge,
Prove choice be mastered in the stupid cell.
I rack these slides as you rack me, elide
Into vague yesterday -- yet I abide.
50
I am that I am, this nexus, clot
Of probables pertaining to a place
Once nebulous -- I, I am the lone base
That graced a wish to gel to what I got :
The days slip, ticking, but I hear you not.
A cast of letters struts before my face
But I am all that fixes all in space,
And more past effort, all my future lot.
/One replica of self./ To /tete-a-tete/
This trace, your seeing so unlocus me,
Repeating breath, the slug and furnace-grate
Whose slag draws dull disciples to agree
That sight's itself; the fire can dissipate
To spray all space and still not cease to be.
51
The tape slaps off. Uncertain sounds we tried
Without recourse to touch, attempts to point
Similitudes of sight, recede, anoint
A memory too loved, as one who died.
Another death : your image, rigored, dried
Of action -- vanished tempostatic point;
My elsewhere, your familiar; welded joint
Now parallel but self, not view beside.
Translated into ions, you abrade
Against the dottle of my rapid breast
Of time and small success, your accolade
Reduced to golly like a gravied vest
Congeals the party, dilute marinade
Too simmered with my want, too much expressed.
52
The walleye swallows as a hoverharp
Dares airborne scares, but sunspot dragonfly
Cannot, with windnet wings, persuade the carp
To part from slurping to purloin the sky.
Those eyes tip upward only to defy
The happenings whose aptitude they smear
To shapes that snap or else are tippled by
The stupid, drooping countenance of fear.
Each mouth the center of an ecosphere
With eyes akimbo, it is chow eat chow
Is paradise enow : your lissom Lear
Is paradigm those shamans disallow
Whose gag's a ghost that gobbles what does not,
So leave their goblins glad to be forgot.
53
One star strobes southward, proving the slow page
Of calculated sights; a figure wrought
In duralum and dare, bright aerophage
That glides on gas squeezed solid by a thought.
Aluminum-limned fish, the sucker sieves
His swill with gills that succour every breath
Of spirogyra, while their sugar gives
Euglenic genesis in every death:
Parades of pottage cycle out the night
In motions scored and scaled, but /sans/ excuse.
What birthstone did you trade for appetite,
That makes you now so glad to be of use?
Dumb chemicals I cannot love or hate;
In mumbling that I am, I am too late.
54
Why do you tease this hermit hamlet, still
Demanding motives of a riddled smock
For what demands a simple act of will
To make to rush what trickles through the clock?
Canned in aluminum like common bock
You neither age and neither churchkey churls
Nor Benedictine bishopric unfrock.
They beat the clock, who let the day to girls
In lighter boards than leak the stuff that whirls
The bursting aster, hand grenades of grouse,
Squadrons of geese above the Stens of squirrels
And sniping chipmunks all about the house :
September trembles; still, it tweaks my nose.
So let's incense the gods. And lose our clothes.
55
I'll waste no chloride that I cease to care
For stock in common futures, the bright get
Of darling inside dope, mere floral dare;
When act shames object, it is time to bet
The cherished chassis to the churning pot,
Chance losing the dear locus of the self
To future's fickle taste, the quick blood clot
Within a single page or half a shelf.
Fresh naps and heaven are a servant's wage
And faith excuse more chance than any god;
Who will their eyes to see will see and gauge
What floral law allow, and what need prod.
For lilac goals, the enzymes care enough;
They cannot spill, who wallow in the stuff.
56
I parallel the moon, shins counting logs,
A grace of grass against the surplus boot
That whispers self against the bursting frogs,
Exploding wings, and the cajoling hoot,
To touch the core that compasses this trek,
The reference of sense strewn spastic, guy
Against unamiable sway and beck
Of images composed with either eye :
You are the scent of smoke toward which I vault
Through woodland overtreed and denizened
To tell the hearth-stone, cherry in the malt,
Emplaced at outset to preserve the end,
One proof against caprice and charming elf
In being first the hearthstone of yourself.
57
The scherzo dulls before the record's run
But half its rainbow past the diamond head;
I will not fly the wish, shoot flies instead
And jump the grooves of duty and the gun,
But cannot jump the sword, that unbegun
With waiting for your princess to behead
The fondled edge with purpose, A to Zed,
And issue both the virgin and the Hun.
Never the vets, but newsreel soldiers, click-
Frozen in the stride toward semi-glorious,
We hand-in-hand until, the goal before us,
Such anticipation crowds the clock
The jangled beats won't sweeten into chorus
Because our bull will not come to full cock.
58
Some time now into this work-curdling love
Begun almost by chance (though you did not
Bar genuflection) : such a gentle shove
Sent fingers stumbling to their keys, and hot.
Some little time since your smooth polyglot
Of shifting textures tutored at my hand,
Grape-turgid, bursting, eager to besot
That dietary, gnarled appendage (bland
By habit if not choice). Even the sand
Was loth to leave you when you left the beach:
A sharkskinned nibbler took my arm to stand
And left our bodies lying, each to each,
But how blame afterimage after all,
If bodies get the whole world in a ball?
59
Calculating stars, contested time
To fly by that same pressure at the breast
That bids the lips kiss one admitted guest
Than kiss the numbers from their random rime,
I strain to the compression of a prime
That made me a provincial /beau geste/,
And quite, quite mad, but only north northwest
And brought bent purpose your surprise of lime.
A wirehandled plane, day circles earth
To fall where it began a model flight,
Still tethered like a buzzard at a birth
Whose cord's the limit of its appetite.
Resmoke your sextant when you measure worth:
The day may be our length. We are its height.
60
Should that bronze bosom know it's beautiful,
Or that pretender feel that he is king,
Except the one observe me dutiful
And either quiver as I pluck and sing?
All gold is mud until one strike a ring
And every structure but a pile of sand
Until the rebar and the scaffold sting
And recoil make a hooker of the hand,
But what you see is less than was planned,
For grasping at the object shortens reach.
It is the mother proves the child demand,
But it is not the student proves I teach;
Let lawyers wallow in my careful height,
And as for you, be still -- and let me write.
61
The woodpile simmers in the fouriers
Of painted ice their candles have deferred
From pumpkins, grinning failure to amaze
The children years of candy have inured,
But, piled behind the trigger of a word
That crawls like green mold through the mayonnaise
Your absence darkens earlier a third
A world that wobbles from the paraphrase
Our minute hands behead with moulinets
To limp toward winter under standard time,
And life leaks through the chatter of the chaise
That putters pretense of the man that I'm
That had, face up beneath your noonward height
Dispelled Orion's skirmish with the night.
62
Not that our slug will shrink within its husk,
Slip vision as slow playtime slips a boy
While you lapse sleepy, nodding toward your dusk
With less joy than with images of joy;
What sorrows sharpen in our mill and thresh
While age blunts pleasure, age cannot misplace.
Not convolution of the cooling flesh
Denudes more surface to a stinging race
Gashed ashen features to essential rage :
That all that heat must lapse to tepid norm
Is energy of living, not mere age,
A coal-cored tempest, cooling into form.
It is but that whose sense of alamode
Would let a living blowtorch warm a toad.
63
The hawk glare glazed as sleep dissolved esteem
Quit of its sight and postured as the frog;
The low sow grunted, nuzzling a dream
And dog cursed dog and resonance of dog.
Night woke to all its dull accustomedness
To sanction darkness; over all the sky
One shade of shadow settled to redress
The rigorous necessity of eye.
Two things alone are worthy of recall :
The single candle keeping back the glass;
Your face. Two coals described a lazy scrawl
As you became a mountain to my palm,
Nor I make boast of any better thing
Than finding there a song I did not sing.
64
No, no, no, no love?
Why should the knotted worm, the doubled flies,
The drooling mongrel and the bitch be warm;
Why men the gloating ministers despise
Raise arms to make the least of couples norm
Or brag of boys that brag how well they feel
Provided that the thing is vermiform?
How know that sensible warm swell who steal
The swell from rigor with their spastic digs
That long-kept value quail, repeal
The careful heart to shudder flanks of pigs
That prides of pimps serve up our Visigoth?
"Know, know, know, know Love!"
And so I knew -- but never reckoned sloth.
65
With "Sumer cumen in," your throat turned chill
And harsh-scaled in the clutch of viral thaws,
Reminder of the voice of one who still
Remains in thought, but speaks to give me pause.
Then I was choked by acquisition's flaws :
Bright gifts are easier than turbid art,
And pillage simpler, still, the marble straws
The Seven Hills that conquered only part.
Yet I will not pursue a spastic start
But blame the earpiece, microphone, or virus
For grave chill, that takes the private mart
With spoil, when those often loved will wire us;
So I am dumb; and I will not lax dumber
And argue with the plentitude of Sumer.
66
The mailbox stands, a birdbombed sentry, bent
To wait delayed arrivals in the rain
Unmercenised, while hope still mutters, "Lent,"
Though it's July, and never was germane.
Still though the void and airy atoms dance
Poor sustenance, that leaves a hollow shell,
It thus sustains a ringing resonance
Of any voice it does not know so well.
So does my current hunger flesh my strength
By making sentry's sense of that which hides,
Is apprehended, challenged, and at length
Is recognised, and recognised resides,
That I'll make no sot sentry raise a stink
Nor you dilute your vision wasting ink.
67
As humming numbers tumble into racket,
The wind's word furled and gathered weight to cramp
A skirl of lace escaping from her jacket,
A lady bug comes tromping on my lamp.
Such interim conscripted, vapid vamp,
Convex enigma, concentrated weight
Of dome and dare descends from trill to tramp
Assault on lines that less than lilt this late.
Shazam whatever prosecution state,
The orchids of your wings will say their say:
Protrudes between the bonehulled husk this spate
Of flight's own fans, anticipating day,
When yet you'll leap, and yet weight twice abhor
The freedom in that flight weight mock you for.
68
Still slow to smell the smelt and slow to sky,
And slower still to any /savoir faire/,
To any balance nothing but the tare
And deadweight to our /gaudeamus/ : I.
What fist of feathers, combing through the wry
With shag legs trailing and the choler spare,
The paper airplane's turgid luminaire,
Compass the genesis of things that fly?
Yet all the ancient weights of love are truer
Your tumble come to palm or midnight strophe;
The laugh lasts laughter, Eros is more Cupid
When you're in the blue your flight makes bluer.
Flight dared to fletch, I dare to scratch this trophy :
Love being lover, stupid is more stupid.
69
The tetrads quiver spruce and nuance by nuance
Turn formula to dance; these four drawn arms
Coax force to song and resonance to force
The rhetoric of rosin from the forms
Whose trace in time is tune that time will trace
In the loosed substance of forgotten thought
That wakes from wheat and tastes its waking false,
That mind that sing become the mind song write.
And four arms draw this movement face to face,
Astride the concert that the art invite,
The song cohabit flesh, the being course
Whatever life the careful scoring caught,
And turn again to atmospheric fluff
To be redrawn if we were good enough.
70
They hope that it will turn your salt to salt
Who numb your course with numbers; others gnaw
That let resentment let the common law
Lick empty envelopes to name your fault,
And multiplying iamb by penult
To fly confetti in that williwaw
Commands no prejudice and fails to draw
Low views through their recombinant Foucault,
So when the whicker of your engine rolls
About these wind-Octobered walls and spooked
By scribblings of outwintered mice and moles,
Then I who have been candled, belled, and booked,
Am that more certain than these evening coals
That I'll abide your quibble --
Lot's wife looked.
71
Because the pipes leap up, the people thought
They stole their thunder from the mouths of gods
Whether that humbling Brook had thought or not
How notes were wrought from steel, and steel from clods.
These tones were wrung of numbers more than notes.
So, too, the duo stark in white and black
That stands each to the each as promise floats
Imposed of tone past candle, bell, and book,
Compose an interval against the rest
Held silent by their organ, stones, and awe,
Who, having bowed the heads the others blessed,
May draw whatever notes they see to draw,
While excommunicate of common gods,
Two pull these stops against the claims of clods.
72
This infernal thighangle of hope
That sets my pitch apitch; that jollies night
And slights of fear to calliope
The fair to ordinaries, and the right;
That lets me lay the hesitant for might
And giddiness, the wish to love induce
Those layered lauds or lows of faltered flight;
This fools. This fools. Desire is mean excuse
To maul the mooneyed munchings of a moose
With counterpoint beyond its tune, to gall
With want that waits contralto of a goose,
Or carry back their summer in a ball.
Then let the specter of its passing pine
For those who fear their joy.
I shall sing mine.
73
What you have done is done. It is a trick
Of ways of was continued into might
Dis-still the soul, forbid it to alight
In any joy less than the final pick
Of prodded schemes, wail the imagined brick
Gone stray from or forbid the perfect height
Set on a hill to stay the common night.
Nor are you its window's ending wick.
Be then a stately hovel, O my soul :
Love fire and ice, but care to keep the coal.
You are the sum your sorrows seek to rend,
That cry that any brick is not the whole :
Part hearth, part fire, and part the welcomed friend;
A place that is, and does not wait to end.
74
Oh friend of this, our distance into time,
Still friend amid that carnival of fear
That substitutes for goal a length of clime,
Swell in your breath the world, and hold it dear.
Nor in that rush to make another's thrall
Let loose yourself, that joy become the huff
From gate to gate, from ordered start to stall
And strangers' locks. Once won is proof enough.
The apple, or the ridge of yonder range
Are in themselves yourself, or means to be,
Were once the strange, now means to breathe the strange
As morning clover, not the keeper's tea.
If trails should offer carrots or a clue
And you should find them out, by all means, do.
75
Were all my senses stupid as the snail
To give me but the clabber of a thing :
Four tastes, a smear of smell, and whether mail
That bruise or bruise, or sister flesh to sing;
Were any pudding colored by the plum
As much as perfumed, and the thread of such
As I exude behind to wake from dumb
And cry me brother to my bumbling touch
But only this, but this, and there were more
By leaves to springs in ways to stripe my prime
On this bright stem than stem enough to score
All ways upon that venture into rime.
Then in your other love you halve my haste
And in two lips bring twice my prime to taste.
76
The corpse will not lie still. It flows between
The sometime prison of the failing bones,
Dilutes with rain and chemicals; unseen
It tints the wind and undersides of stones.
Becoming leaves of lilac, waves of corn,
It finishes a figure, seeks advance;
And reared in praise, or only to adorn,
It is a dancer, making out a dance.
Glory of movement, death of being still,
The dance or dungeon is the only dole;
Tripped from life to struggle up from swill
That, cursed with stillness, builds another role,
And, dancing, knows each strange, slow dance to be
Its own sweet reason for the dance to be.
77
And how the savage God recedes
Before the microscope and coil,
To hide behind a string of beads
And leave his tribe with holy toil.
The heretic gives sacred oil
To entrails of a strange device
Whose heresy it is to spoil
The proper faith, as well as nice;
Delivers mountains in a trice
And turns the desert into green.
Too little joy, too high a price :
The unseen must remain unseen
Or else the faithful must perspire
To make the heaven they admire.
78
Just like my beard, this memory of you,
Or I'd be shut of both; to say, "begone,"
And stubble the sink with detritus of dawn
Demands time, digging, and a broader view
Than I'm afforded. Anaesthetic, too --
The eager edge, misguided by a yawn
Slices my roughs, and ready blood is drawn
Too forth. And there are better things to do.
Especially as this cutting comes undone
(Ha) overnight. And even overday
The stubble spears my neck like apple rind
Blooded with sunshine. Better this than none,
This manageable brush; and give you stray
To second-growth my thoughts, if we've a mind.
79
Shall I breed lilacs in an empty truce
Or leave the overwhelming bloom for gall
Of glove and scabbard, and the sounding spruce
Nothing but the yelping of the /salle/?
The nectardrunkenness that tastes of things
To spit the pips precisely where they land
Does not leave pollen to the want of wings
Though backyards bear the bark of the Garand.
The difficulty in these paradigms
Buonarotti saw as still as stone,
And gave the god those overbearing limbs
To lift the grape, though tired to the bone
With those who pray that heaven seek to please,
And sit to curse the garden, meat, and cheese.
80
And spring cajole the lilac's colored stuff
To wake from physics to the garden tea,
Why shall it scribble fancy on the cuff,
Denying salt to stupefy the sea?
How often will the often reborn breath
Cooped stupid in the cells come forth but clone
Recruited into cribbing shibboleth,
Pretend in clay what stays already stone
At last to groom its evitable grief?
There is more blood in coleus than these;
More breathing in the bottom of a leaf
Than reeks from this inanimated wheeze
That laboring for invention rears amiss
From every compost of a former kiss.
81
I do not need to look at you to see you,
To see your words to say that I must say;
A prairie and a mountain range away
I need not wear your arms or friends to be you;
The toil and song that answer here to me, you
Know in delight, and know again by day;
Then, seeing that this will, that other may,
You seek to see still others, that might free you.
The water is that running is a brook
And still is ice and scented is the sea,
Or to your quiet running or your book
The water comes, and sometimes comes to be
A lilac, or a thing that thinks to look
That beauty is, but is but you and me.
82
Worms and weeds do not, I think, give thanks.
They suck the ground, but do not taste the dirt,
Or think to thrust the earth between their flanks,
But take no pleasure, never daring hurt.
Their plodding speed blitzes what none contest
But not to ruin or to grandeur; quickly
The loan of last year's labors slowly pressed
From sun stands forth again, not thickly
And not to fruit, but still to stand or crawl
Not very far. Life green by chance and browned
By other chance is given spring to fall
When ground is pulled from weed, or weed from ground.
Then how does lilac answer with such bloom,
Whose pillaged armloads decorate my room?
83
Gather the flakes of bees, the motley earth,
The severed lives of silk and year of girl
That flush our variegated day of her
And we will make a locket against wrath.
Then stone defend the sting of us from us
And steel and the sterile earth bulk from the wreath
All our careful keeping of this past
When blood in passing shook the passing heart.
Let no man see that passing of the sun
From mouth to mouth, and if any learn
What arabesques the dervish dust attain
In his long crawl to dancing, tell him none,
Or what rest have the staggered, gravid soul,
The kiss of rain awake the petiole?
84
The words and wires both dangle, and I lose
What little sentence I proposed these bits
In snarls of colored words and ulnar fits.
Electrons, or our meanings' quick-breathed thews,
They ought to go through PNP's in queues,
But, giggling from nits to light and back to nits,
Estrange Marconi's more sedate "dah-dit"s
For these conversions, stranger than the Jews'.
Shall I make light of such a store of arts
As mind last took and laid, and having care
Leave lay to woo to unity the parts
Of such as squeak of fissiles for their chair?
My lilac love, at least, will never go
Rattling the tins of dons, that moves this slow.
85
The tungsten stutters, and the building shakes
But here's no apparition; if you turned
Against your pillow or your dream of lakes
And midnights when pine sparked while minutes burned
To take my hand and hurry up my stairs,
An empty sheet is all your present now,
Even as mine; those tremors but the airs
Put on by earth that knows forever how
But, shy our purpose, lifts the tops of hills
With a hot heat to see if rocks will dance
In our bones' absence, if the empty fills
Or full pours out. In our most awesome glance
Is the mere hope of certain movement, but
Whatever the world for 'how' we still know 'what.'
86
I should not ever let these pines pitch woo
In hamlets of the shelf, nor specied chase
Bribe off my Cyrano, as yeomen do;
Should sweet my breath to Eddy in your face
Instead of licking at the stamps between :
Your least drawn breath smells corporated labor,
Not mutual, but snuffing at the scene;
A prodigal whose pencil weighs a caber
For Bifrost; heaven made of overfond
Subliteracy with a careful seam;
A cottage curd aged but a bit beyond
That every man's high sentence starts a scream.
Yet will the honeyed monuments incline
That stole my dear, for I will steal their line.
87
When hands acquire the curl of easy tools
And wonder dulls in mantras of old psalms
Come the voices of the surging schools
Whose rush falls to the upturned ears like alms.
They sing of flying; could they sing of less
Who have had flight? And if they foot the earth
When they let go the wind to walk this press,
Is not their air implicit in their dearth?
A phrase falls from the sky. The words of air;
The noise that when it yawps and whistles, sings;
The magic words. The words that say, "Up There."
And whistle of a background noise of wings.
Then squawk the wind's word : this will lure the goose.
We'll not let flight let out that we're not loose.
88
Shall I derange my fifteen wits for you
And hide in concert what you will not hear
Outright? Or help you to pretend the glue
Lets you pretend no synthesis but fear,
And so arrange contraption in the clear
That music mums the harping of its parts
As scrolls excuse the tenor of the gear
That picks these scales alilt to weight our hearts?
And wish pure implication of your starts,
Nor cant nor quaver, but the dream of rage :
Byzantium grumbles through your partied arts,
Apotheoses head, but sunders parts :
Eternal youth, Atlantic geriphage
No cirsumstance assembles into age.
89
Much have I travelled where the realms were sold
And many fettered homes and gardens seen,
The figures of great men all growing green,
Streaked with the young, their elders merely old.
The timid gather into noise; the bold
In ancient armours with a greater lien
On empty children than the fighting spleen
Knew in their fathers, fiddled with and foaled
In prim, precocious want of being it.
Now stout Cortez goes by ordered plane
To slit those bellies poorly armed again
While mothers pray they are not seeing it!
Oh, for a draught of that most civil sonnet
Whose mother said,
"Come with your shield, or on it!"
90
Being out of season with the tone of youth
And green before accomplishment of age,
Cursing small facts less succulent than truth
Bought by decripitudes, a kind of rage
Takes all and over; like a bumble bee
Banging anthers, I take up the rub
Of morsel against morsel, trying not to be
Stupid at hectares. Here and here's a nub
Of what the honey is; let the sweet sun
Further the rest. Let hornets build them fresh
And out of kilter, and the same old dun;
Somewhere's a hollow structure begging flesh,
Its comb whatever flake by flake will grow,
And built to living, not to leave it show.
91
A sense of ocean rolls across this plain
Even in the choke of August dust :
Here we would breathe water after rain
But for a lunar shrugging of the crust.
And so it is, though rooted by our trust
In sudden April's accident of bloom
Between one season with our minute thrust
From either cruelty of living room,
We'll not lie quiet under that perfume,
Nor rigidly allow the common law
Consumption that tells lovers to resume
The /droit du seigneur/ of the williwaw,
But, waking from another sediment
Weight out the strata that the rest invent.
92
This cat knows meditation. Maybe you
Are what he muses with his eyes half shut
And lazing at his nose (our world's whole hue,
Your ministry of hands); perhaps the mutt
Most recently offensive, or the thought
That there is yet the lingering of mouse
Beside a certain board, and that he ought
Maintain tom-satisfaction in this house.
And ours in him. Perhaps. And now /t'ai ch'i,/
The world expelled to pull each limb in place,
Assume the Nine Short Forms, inspect the /ghi,/
And then to the arrangement of the face.
All grace and power harbour in that ease,
Meticulously fattening on fleas!
93
Soft pad the slitted eyes of hungry thought
Through all the rustling detritus of mind :
But reason, like the waiting cat, has caught
But only what was there for it to find.
To pounce a rustling leaf, may catch the wind
At work within the plumbing of a leaf
Or littering the mouth, the breath amend
All hopes with simple sight, or let belief
Stroll the cathedral of this Fall, no grief
Parade its pennants to a bruised desire.
Comes to the waiting ear the wind's own laugh
And heated hints, the promise and the dare
Delivered with one voice, the chance
To dance the only dance there is to dance.
94
A cup you touched and tippled, I put out,
For what's a cup but lately touched? Not touch.
Not even staple drunk. Indeed, not much.
What touch and sip become, are what's about.
That you will drink again is not to pout,
Becoming more than was, for was is clutch,
And sip that will not take another such
Is thirst, and like the empty cup, is doubt.
Then put it from your pantry with the press
Of else that aged the giddy joy of self
In these disposable containers; do
From silver what we learned to do from glass
And keep the being fuller than the shelf
With what remains : the recipe of you.
95
For god's sake, hold your tone and let me sing!
For should, accusing love, you choose to kill
The thing you choose, with second to the skill,
You've chosen choosing absence of the thing
That would have brought you all it was to bring
But that you willed it execute its will
By burying what lives, and buried fill
The past, not heart nor arm, with ragged ring.
Then let the dead past have its dead, but know
That steel rings steel and parries flesh the arm,
That mind kiss pencil, lip kiss lip as warm
As love kissed love in any age ago :
Or choose another, yet until you prove
Your love with choosing this, none ever love.
96
Not poems, nor the promises of gods
Shall last beyond the intimates of love :
If flies still snuffle fragrances of clods,
Bees busy cosmos, or awed students prove
Identities of stars; if silver crawl
Dendritic like a snowflake through a stone
Or iron like dawn turn blue to write that all
Is still as all, shall love be left alone?
Then do not want an ending, but to do
That straining of a stride and stretch of thought
That every lover that preceded you
Lavished on large world, until had caught
Beyond the love, the being of all one
That is the same since loving was begun.
97
Of all the beings each may choose to hope
Through age on age and skill on skill in time,
Achieving this man's art or woman's scope,
Not one will fill inflated faults of rime;
Nor even ten. And slow though numbers creep
That tell our sentence toward our end of when,
We know not what we'll see before we sleep
Nor how much alter that we'll love again.
And play the puss or stalk it as the cat;
Rehearse the morsel or the alien street,
Ears aching with the suddenness of that
Which is to happen, semitense to greet
The shadow or the shattering of the fur,
Still, still, the step, the wonder, and the purr.
98
The word for sword is foil, and the ring
Of guard on guard, and attitudes of blade
Are hues of war; yet only steel's deep sting
Will ever show particulars of shade.
The word for wing is number, and so light
Balanced with engines, rivets, and the maul;
Is even lighter than the fault of flight
Whose height we stomach at a heavy crawl.
And let us try the word for love, that touch
That cannot tell caresser from carressed :
Past attitude, or war, or math, how much
One ever read of other lovers' best
Or practiced for the dropping of the glove,
Still steals that touch :
the word for love is love.
99
Though now this word, being sung, is being lost
And the bones divided with the land,
Cage filled with clay that snuffed your mantle
Still, lilac will out wit this stupid frost,
Breathing where word has failed and fear has cost
Heaven; and though the lay of bone to gladness
Has its need of something like your dance
To teach it chirp, breed epic in a boast;
And though the mouth forget the voice taste breath
With every taking of the toast and milk,
The arm mum tone whose flesh was twice the word
And eyes wince words to preference for broth,
Yet will word kiss word in the tubered dark
Until the bone course forth. Song will be heard.
100
What is there can love that cannot kill
Part, cut by sabre or the edge of speech
Afraid to wound the hope admit the ill
Or kiss hope while the love drain with the leech?
What draw the union that the green shall grin
And feed an emptiness the heart's own oil
That purpose stagger out the bared chalk's groan
The lengthening and unexampled mile?
Not I shall offer you to fears, nor ask
In tribute to my errors, they be thine :
The callus also, swordsman's utter task
In cutting evils from us, murder mine.
That map made flesh, the bone repeat from dry
Choose me its father choosing you am I.
101
There is too much and not enough of you
Demands the burden of my breathhold hours;
The figure promise half the world I woo,
The other mouth but drool that warm milk sours.
Our pretty groping of your emptiness
Still ciphers us to us with everything
Was hailed with willow while the hand grew less
From telling profits to an idol king
Whose small electors mudpie every art
Whose children cannot tolerate such sight
And ears the rushing of their telltale heart
-- "But they're just ears!" and then my age alight,
For every tale last while the fire stabs
And you but leap to lick your mother's scabs.
102
You who pulled our salt surge to yourself
To lie a beached fish lolled by small sensation
Quickly borne and quicker doffed as chaff,
From seed to sewer but a shower, creation
And the reek of love tossed with the towels,
Ate with your other mouth to spit us out,
Digestion bypassed, tremble at the trowel's
Lewd tuck and kiss yet plain of boredom, pout,
Deny Elias to the grinding guns,
Mew hull and trysail tautened by the storm
While lanyards molder in corroded runs,
Your mutiny outeaten by a worm.
You'll stay no passing object but a wake
Whose trouble swells the course the captain take.
103
How in and out about where there's a garden
Or even an excuse, the daubers go :
Shillelagh shapes, these bumper stickers pardon
The past's tense "flee" with conjugated "flow."
Not since you sipped my lamplight has the wheat
Made twentywitted marrow of the churl
Who breaks his biscuit in the judgment seat
And offers half to vacuum grieved of girl.
Even the toadstool tunnels to the sun
And worms go flying when the robin blabs;
The stone keep nothing from the urge to fun :
One insult -- cornfed Monte Crisco stabs.
Love crawls all animals, rewrites all men
While you play 'possum in your little pen.
104
Momentous thing this dying is; mischance,
Or wilful negligence that brings a man
To vacancies where elders fell from dance,
Bring him again to self : where he began
Is momently the measure of his span.
The web of word, the careful having seen
Turn not so much to dissolution than
To having slipped below a certain mean
Of staying coherent, to a pure serene
Of slumber after daring giddiness; mere spate
Not period. We wake to a strange scene,
And having lost all words and wit. And late.
And death's no door to this saloon, but hinge
That swats the wondering drunk back to his binge.
105
If we had world enough, and time,
It were uncriminal to trace
The each slow minute of your face
And every lineage of our form
Could figure us in want of shame
And end an envy of its course
In every pleasure's lazy vice
And ending be its only crime.
But all we are not ending, such
Are near ahead as always were
And though the being them is sure
The mystery is ever which
In unbecoming them, will sue
The want of us from me and you.
106
Issues from this gruel the simple soul
And reels to being flavors, or the sauce
Of some slight oscillation of the foal,
And now in liquid stillness, now in toss
Becomes the giddy slide of swallow, green
And caterpillar ripple to a moth,
The flit of flight the secret in the broth.
Figure on figure, stance on stance become
The liquid slide of act on act, a grace
In being is compounding its next sum,
This lonely multitude in consort trace
Another rime of names, and as that moves
Identifies itself, and finding loves.
107
It's the /panache/ stands up to dance and still
Or dancing makes itself a haste in those
Who will not stretch beyond their pains to skill
That dress the flesh to dance instead of pose,
But foodstuff to the gratitudes of flesh
That otherwise parade its hopes in raw
Wounds that the appointed boots keep fresh
That appetite might benefit from awe.
But dance love only dance the love refute
The hostage second heart, deny the edge
The yielding parry of an absolute,
To let their pose hello the fondled Judge
Whose god he is, for he will tell them they
May dance on whom they will, and need not pay.
108
Neither grief nor gratitude for grief
Will ever tell beyond the ticking heart
What finally close the playpen of belief
Away with the trod words, the voice come art :
Killing, my dear, is not compulsory,
Nor stabling the pale steed to save the sword
Some days of travel, titillating worry,
Or sifting treason from a common word :
When in the course of human being the steel
Be attitude absolving din come tax,
Long prayers and bingo wear the pious wheel,
And wives and daughters polish up their backs
That men must bleed to do their job at all,
Tie up the sword : the horse will bolt the stall.
109
Two seasons wake in reaching for their term
And one in groping finds itself a treat
Beyond its own control, the dainty form
Twitch-bested, dottle-dented to the meat
By joy's own jolt : exhuberance of arm
Exceeds the reach of reason for the tone
That it would have and hold, and hold from harm,
And holding, pops the ice cream from the cone.
Then season solves finesse, and reaching finds
Muhammed hands made tough by molehills touch
You shorter than desire : the bellguard blinds
The compensated arm its parry binds.
When will your reaching after mountains touch
These harp-strapped hands that love to pick too much?
110
Not since strewn Miletus has time thumb
Tamed soul's quick spider to the working rage;
The shroud shrugged fall, neat Euridie stands dumb
At having climbed the miracle of age
To wake to will an empire from a cage,
Whose cooled cavort the hovel of the part
That cavil height, the civil sea's green sludge
Creep carpets in the valleys' flood, your art
But grope a graveyard in the gibbon heart
That, left to the gamble groom of the dream's dram
Drown, drawn in dabs from whom the old tort blurt
And shrug the stone to toll the long pram tomb.
All strains hurled sloven, yet the rose retort,
The slow tale love to shame the random term.
111
Something there is that does not love to sleep,
That swells the lilac when the color's done;
That hurls the salmon streamward, stirs the sheep,
And sends the glacier rushing to the sun.
And /tout en l'air/ the music and the seed
That skirl the August sky while crickets call
Agree that something is, and has agreed
That there will still be crickets, after all.
And if a thing so small can be so sure
That it will clatter at my hearth, can you
With your superior schooling so demur
From anything a cricket's certain to?
It is but April cruel that you must bet
That you are you, and have not learned it yet.
112
Shall those bleat blessing on the repast past
Whose stone sting seconds the surprise your flower
Touch from the march of molecule to blast
In the red-tubed palm? The worm dream power
That pass beatitudes of stride to cower
If wind's twerp cheep its platitude to plain
And nod the seed slid soak the sacred hour
The crop's crude bigamy beget the crane.
The sail soul silt the brindled salt, refrain
The simple stone from monuments of sight
As lilac drink the dram, the leaves' seive strain
The sham scum its simplicity of light,
That lord laud table whose contempt of stone
Recycle singing from the time-doomed bone.
113
Like lilac, you transform my common quartz
When to the midnight of my knotted fist
Come humming as spring plum swells timid snorts
To kiss my blarney stone to amethyst.
And I will sing, not cry, you take world's wrist
Though tonsure jerk the sheet; the crumpled ball
Of tangled tongues foregathered at the grist
Growls forth from faith to mumble at the wall
Without your with. Though through the song the all
Is less than cosmic, still the lilting map
Makes short the trip the peeping soul must crawl
That it would leave behind the numbing lap,
And if our separation must be long,
It's all that ever stretches out a song.
114
"If we could glue the leaves on trees," he said,
"We'd never have to rake," and I agreed.
And said, he tweaked his pruning shears to speed.
Not having clever proverbs, leaves, instead,
I bowed to where the subject problem spread
Before the bag, and brushed and pushed and kneed
Another year to promises of seed
The cautious crow already upped and fled.
A penny for the guy. And one for those
Whose love is for the lilac of the year,
Before the daily detritus has strawn
Conditions on the carpet of the lawn :
I'll take October, that the shaking shear
The dross of days from everything that grows.
115
Everywhere one sits there are the stones
And every stone the record of some say,
The scratch of some soft thing that wrote its day
With its own nose, and did not burden brains
To learn the lurch of dicing with its bones
To leave what cuneiform they've learned to clay
That stutters softly in the slowing gray
At those who dare the terrors of old runes.
And creak the chalk or rub the verdigris
There is no record of postnatal pout
Until our literacy manage this
Slow waking to identities of doubt;
But split the pen or split the chrysalis,
The same wings beat the air to finding out.
116
Though all our surface stutter into war
And wake climb wake to aggravate their end
Nor any alter any washed ashore,
The lake abide though all the water rend
From every devil wanting dividend :
Let witling nature, jealous of the deep,
Amaze itself with mayflies, to attend
What grasp an hour and gasp itself to sleep
Nor let to any better comfort keep
Whatever will the waning day asail
Than something that some rotting poet peep
Between our yellings of the Beaufort Scale
And all our rush from spring to neap, and yet
I wit our water wot the what it wet.
117
Cold in the earth the love of song lies deaf
But not that clay has stopped the ears from praise;
The blood is more red than the frostbit leaf
Whose halleluia counts a single craze.
I am not crazy at a love or song
For neither name the autumn at a blush;
Leaves' works are short, but that of trees is long,
And slower than the thrushsong is the thrush.
Though thick with earth, the blood grows red that dare
The breath, this lone profession of all bloods,
And deeper breathe the more the breath grow rare,
And soar this heaven held between the floods
Who dare the curse of Pharaohs to exhume
Disordered papers from a dusty room.
118
Like as this tingling bearing tell the forge
And flows of heat and skitter of the stone,
And tell ahead the hurtling engine's surge,
The course converge into this metrophone.
It was your ear that taught the tendon sing
And iron heed iron that nurture at a thought;
That concert clearest at your vanishing
Though what remain is but the shape we sought,
A matter of possession laughs the lost
And might have been can still and still become
In quiet forgings of the dear possessed,
And breathing stars beget more radium :
For all the world's a forge for steel to sing
And life's not pattern but a patterning.
119
A little while, and there were the words.
And the words released the bounded tongue
To drag the brain by lesser roots along,
Far where atoms made no mode to bide.
There in the dark the soul shall never brood
The tongue attest the often-tasted slang
Born and watered of the minor tang,
The long sobs of fall the dying never dared.
Be moderate, you gods, in what you bear
For this brat image of your aching selves
And bastard murmur of the playpen floor :
The stupid meat is what the torture saves
For laws are learned out of the root despair
And love alone because the soul still raves.
120
There is no telling : you will have the poem
Denuded for the tipple of its lips
Like orchids stripped of flowersweat and phloem
To nestle on the clamor of your tips
But well above the cloth. The dancer slips
From slick to slick the whole whose handling puts
No fingerprint, whose slipper never trips
Your primer pattern with a turn that boots
The guts of troth, parading empty suits
To while the music last, and lasts the while.
And after the flowered word, the word for fruits.
The word for admiration. Word for smile.
It will, by god, from Hades, though it trips :
Nor fake my countenance by reading lips!
121
Still and still you bicker of assault,
Who squander stillness that its stealth abrades
Your own unfashioned substance, and its shades
Displace your lesser stuff and storm your fault.
High sentence ringing in an empty vault
Behind the willow, epitaph parades
Its preexcuse for fading out -- and fades,
Its only port proposing that it halt.
And still and still you arrogate that calm
By which the tones of concert still them out
Of random strains assorted by the palm
Is but the silent litany of doubt :
A train of bridal tombstones sworn to qualm
The still and still, and still and still you pout.
122
You all chameleon and dimpled Grail,
You /are/ a chalice of most simpled rim :
Warmed of the lips of commons warmed by him
The hostage love bespeak. The ceased heart hail
That what cannot be sung succumb to Braille,
That willowed Orpheus, the threats of Pym,
And intonations of the Madame Mim
Cannot entice the student stroke to fail :
How supple is the willing novice lip
That kiss the sustenance and kiss the sweet
And kiss as well the place the two lips meet,
That though the Master lover age, and trip,
And stall from station in a single slip,
Still, Grail form novice, and the lover beat!
123
Lilac, you, whose death from frost forebodes
The April prank of yet another death
And knowing still rehearse the early modes
And pentatones that modulate the breath
From shriek to lilac in a season, hold
In your least crotchet the true cruelty
Of giving over to the threat of mold
That power to sing, your awesome fealty.
For everything that sings yet louder sings
Of every tatter in its rise to grace :
And ears must hear : it is the song that flings
The roar of triumph from the tattered face.
Then pay less heed to that I wear that thing :
The victory I sing is that I sing.
124
The chestnut alters shadows and the bats
Stream from the cavern on the moon away;
And there the tick of nothing moved, great cats'
Digestive musks, the rattler's question -- nay,
Those have the ancient rectitude about them;
Those all belong, and still to them their law.
And age alone records it be without them,
Nor bone nor film of ash remain to draw.
It was their winter kept them warm; their play
Filled aching hollows of the skull with time
And the wind's word; and never any day
But word made flesh and raised the flesh to crime.
And glee possess these empty girls and boys
Who then possessed the glee, and who the noise?
125
What caverns have we clambered in our climb
From rotifer to Rotary! Allow,
For cavern-crawling writes more human rime
By days to eons else we took the plow,
That Wilderness were Paradise enow,
We score all progress toward the Loaf and Jug
And still more stately mansions. At the brow
We strain, yet if there is a hug
From any Book of Verses, the least tug
Drops trembling Pluto in a tidy heap,
So. Give the man a totem pole to lug.
Whisper so, to make the woman weep.
And on we tripidate, the brow perspire
To worship random noises from the lyre.
126
For song will out and some where you are singing,
If noncely nowhere but my echoed skull,
The law abides and widely my upbringing
With that sweet day of you. And I am full
From wide to wide with your assured wherever,
Nor do I know, nor even need to know
If you're away, or yesterday, or never,
For that the fallen seed constrains to grow.
The turning of the corner or the clock
Bring you to mind and so will bring to me
But whether to conspire or to mock
Will be what singing make itself to be,
And so the always at my back I hear
That perfect singing want the perfect ear.
127
Comes mewling in the chuckled dark this strange
And bedwhite creature I at last despise
For that it will not listen at its eyes
As robin-quickly reflex made a hinge
So lower down. No. In the dark is dange-
R. Shies as struck from singing's wild surmise,
And clutches in the dance; and for replies
Goes up on lines, and argues like a sponge.
You wore your whiteness like a long white glove,
Full dressed for concert when you were most wife.
Full counterpoint your spice, you wholly clove
And at your touch the virginal got life --
Libretto is ephemeral, not false,
But now I play, while you play someone else.
128
For every course at least four times the sky
Bespeaks us on and smirks our smaller clocks.
More this we fear for those that learn our fox --
Child, student, most especial my --
That often love is more impressed by spry
Adjusting play and nursing paradox
Than by the fitting of the feet to blocks
And way to compass for the hungry I.
That is no country for old men. Its crown
Is thorn to rote-soothed foreheads, and the gall
Of fearing for one's lover since one's death
Forces from the heaven of the brown
The cruelty of green, that makes us all
Spit on the clay, who breathe the ancient breath.
129
So "God is dead," now, are we? That they sleep
Has ever been ingratitude to kids
Unvisited when bedcrumbs cause the peep
That lifts the light in under gummied lids.
No. Once again the several god awakes
Though well-uncoupled from the corpse, ta, ta,
To kindle lighting in the darkened jakes.
Sing "Oh, what Love"?? What necrophilia.
My one unfriendly eye gifts unicorns
On any chimney cherished by a stork;
It were more capital you cuckold Norns
Or prod a brown bear with a haying fork,
Than that you sing the seventh day to hear
And wake to climb the summit of a sphere.
130
We love the coffins, that they came to us
As sundry god assuredly did not,
Uneditored of birth, that omnibus
Baroque complagiarist of comely plot.
But whence the coffins? Hadn't polyglot
Some chapters since Creation to revise
The speaking parts so that the infant snot
Need not evade the vowels, and the eyes
Have props to pose at purpose? Wild surmise
That shamans mummied, drawing out the brains,
Still struts and frets at jackals, and mudpies
Are kept by corners from the spank of rain :
We will our voices to the very stones,
And still graffiti covers up our tones.
131
A curse of poontang on a comely course
The Vatican would fig except the phiz
To stall the student where the action is-
N't, moving Polynesian, speaking Morse,
Collecting men commended by the Bourse,
Demands responses to its pay-scaled Ms. --
Five thousand years of fevered synthesis
Should pall to Peter from the modern vers-
ion?
Paul fell blind with sight; prudent Perseus
Shined up to shield appearances to scalp
The price of foreplay; she the vorpal sword
Need never snack, swamp water well afford
Reflection quite enough for us to whelp
The peeping shibboleth /that/ preppie play us.
132
/Porgi amor/ there was when there was ear
And let him hear, albeit with machination,
Press of a supporting cast! What fear
Makes concert count the house, and estimation
Close the play to property and stage,
To strut and fret in pretty place, and suck
Evening and evening on an empty rage
At yet an empty room? Another Tuck
Will not at bottom solve the ass of brown
For that he must quit aye to quibble not
Or trouble Falstaff with the able crown
And so put out the light to keep the spot;
Nor will the shaken resume resume
Disordered papers in a dusty room.
133
Like dogs dependent on their days for cat
To tell a fight who cannot tell a marking,
And hydrants for the vincible elat
Of what still smells but is no longer barking,
The empty synapse flinches from the light
To solder cytosine to having been
What one dared not, not quite, to be despite
A chatechism warranted to win.
Out of the rootwrecked dark and ancient song
I made you this of you to make of this
A thing that made you less than made so wrong
A thing for kissing what refused the kiss,
But watch a future where I will not be,
In sleeping in the dark, you sleep with me.
134
Why should I wake to will your walk resume
Now summer has relented of /my/ limbs?
"To every thing a time." November dims,
Drives heave with ice, the shivering louts assume
The ferns' long stare at sun, and thymine's groom
Becomes a dream the stolen halberd trims
With half a year of rime the college rims
To measure out tradition with the broom.
Sleep, then, as the sunspots in a fly,
The polka-skirted hollyhock, the slap
Of bass who slop at stars; or wonder why
A sleeping cat could choose to leave a lap
When none will be the toy. But leave me dry,
I leave your leaving when I leave the map.
135
You stood so with your arms so full of bloom
That once or twice your face reflected color :
Sunlight spreading in an empty room
Is for an afternoon the lilacs' dolor.
What there was of attitudes so solar
Grew you to envy of their little day
Whose countenance you lightened into pallor,
A longer Lent inherent in your may.
No plundered armload led me lose my say,
But such a silence voice itself were numb
Lest it be clipped to clamor your bouquet
And show you voiced by singing cosmos dumb,
As those who study silence with a noise
Will ever echo empty girls and boys.
136
Long on the loon green dark of booming ice
Not thick enough to bear the trembling flesh
Hudora steels rush, throwing out a sash
Of where I've almost been, where almost cris-
Is, far from navesides waiting under rice
For their own hope to kiss the steel or crash
The party, but who have no wish to splash
Or tender stretch marks as our gambit's price.
It is the worth of daring, daring worth,
And dark has no dominion over it :
As stroke by stroke the stripe extract the fear
From ignorance, the shape of earth stand forth
And strop the straining to a perfect fit :
Who has the steel to stride it, he will hear.
137
Three years you sat and picked at your guitar
The way you picked your plate when you were three,
Refusing bits of mushroom. My. How far
You've come, babe, since I had to snip the tree
That stopped my singing to the former thee
That nakedness outstripped an age of rime,
That old enough and unlike it had made
Up your mind what not to look at. Time
Was actual and act a curse : sublime
Construction of a thing that would rejoice
Because it had had joy was only mime
And more unique the child deny joy voice.
But then you gave the failed guitar to me
And so you had to hear and I to see.
138
Now how this drafty garret of my soul
Creaks in crosswinds, sways to ruckus trains,
Accommodates the mice. Unchosen hole
From all whose holes there gibber all the brains
From maggot beyond gibbon, if I grant
That those are brains and that the vector's up;
But up it is, or curse myself to pant
And pummel no more purpose than a pup.
And let the pup his sham tongue twang the bone
Its mockery of meat, my blood gone dust
That can't bite back, it is as good as stone
For what I've mind, and unlike stone knows lust
That cannot quitclaim anyhow, or cuss
This ambling gamble, as it houses us.
139
Like rose from the stone's guts squeezed,
these human arts.
Agony, no : particular of process,
And like all process wanting all its parts
Each with its tempo. Tolerance of dross is
Small, but filtering lets total losses
Overrule the rapture with result.
Still looking only up at awesome crosses,
The pious alm becomes a formal cult
Before the stubborn child become adult
To propagate his cribsprung williwaw.
Then all swill willow else your voice insult
His army of adulterated law,
Our pied apostasy leave you alone
To cull you from the captivating stone.
140
"Combustion slides in cylinders of steel" --
No. White temper in a gnatsfart time
Slams fifty four ton carriage into wheel
And every wheel a half inch into lime;
And as they breast to purpose from the past
Their clothing wrap who fathered this event
As children press their terror of the blast,
The body hammered by its own intent.
You know nothing who've not set the bolts
In August dust or brushed the lazy snow
From boots and sighting glasses while the dolts
Slept through the morning papers' claim to know
Of "ground gained" and "democracy achieved,"
These designated victors, those bereaved.
141
As praise is water, sipping at the stones
Washed clean by constant centuries of praise
Above the treelines, ignorant of bones,
Of detritus, of dung, of ordered ways
Of coming down from mountains bound by rocks
That bound it so the last time it came down
From climbing after breaking of the locks
That bound it so to course, to dung, to down :
So would I praise, so would I wash my drouth
To sing of you, to sing you to your fears,
A mountain seepage to my blistered mouth
In whose reflection all the mountain hears,
But that the water turn the course it greet
To gather most where I have pressed my feet.
142
There is no music but the reach of arms
For enemy or friend or for what reach
For friend or arm, for music and for speech :
There is no music in the best of dreams.
And dreams are all that gurgle in the prams
And sprawl at angle on the tingled beach
With skin acream and tauter than the peach
Your borrowed noises fleshing out their proms.
What loves has aged, but age is terrible
When sweetened dreams of age that had no labor
But the dream itself parade past spring
To songs and acres less than arable
That grew some anyway : more than the sabre
Human voices wake them when they sing.
143
That sack of sea you wear : suspended dirt
So quick to temper, timid in the end
And crabby toward the wrong it would offend;
You wear your beauty like a riding quirt,
Throw vitriol no farther than your shirt,
Unable to involve what cannot mend
With any vulture as a final friend,
Because you keep no spite, but only hurt.
A pride in puissance or the gladsome gland
Is one kind sin; the other, want of pride
In ancient judgment, and that it command
Who will ignore it, not because they bid,
But that their sin condemned them to a stand
That cannot overcall the spade we did.
144
The strawn sun spalls into the yellowed rooms
And cleverly you yodel cockadoodle,
Rubbing the Lazarus the flesh assumes
With chrisoms to remove the spoor of boodle
Sunk to in the dark. And thus remiss,
Your kit replace your kiss, a daily droodle
Condescending in antithesis.
But sleep will not adept, nor custom stall
With its accumulating ambergris
The sweet that roll the world into the bawl
The reawakened is and law arraigns
Who paint their maggot with a social scrawl,
And no song salvage for the Jacks and Janes
Their ministries have mummied to the brains.
145
The lockup rattles on the forty-five
So badly mere prediction missed the mark,
And so no cartridge kissed the steel alive
And all the bull continues in the dark.
The force that through the blued steel drives the shell
Slams my green thumb; that whispers back from pines
Despoils my ear; and I am not to tell
How on the squirrel's cones the kitty dines;
But one love dead, I cannot congress those
Whose many motions property the spent
While hating language, that the tongue disclose
The flavor hidden by the argument,
So I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
To go and tell her what she thinks she knows.
146
Better to hide away what would have been
With the broad spade and let them have violets.
What quiet reading would survive the din
When children essay into triolets,
Anyway? Fold this, and let the sword rust
For you have claimed my figure with the sword
To threaten with my sword, abandoned lust
For terror leaned in papers on a board.
So would it lie but she would rather sleep
Along a callus worried by the song
Of steel that whirls to separate the sheep
By their whole hundreds into right and wrong,
And at the cling of iron proceeds to do
What you in any masque were coward to.
147
Though wrapped on air, my wrist still aims epees,
Thumb hackled back, aimed even in the dark
At something only it asserts to mark;
Calligrapher in steel, still tries a phrase
But has to target some used book displays :
The lovely feelings that the training hark
Expend all effort snickering the snark
With nothing but a lilac to amaze.
One walked so loudly some blind singer saw
Troy sparked, the ashes rise, the heroes fall --
But smash the plaster of Paris, your alto law
Dispels the curse of swelling with her gall,
For you'll not have the household common raw
So some Iphegenia keeps her doll.
148
Your to my gopher-tousled beans' bed stride
Flash photographs the what we would betime,
But faster than your thigh to thigh elide
My breath hangs up with trying to drop the dime
Before my prophet takes sweat slave, the quirk
Implicit, that it be before my crime
Against your fishing laws untimely jerk
The line away from what I'd lay fileted,
And I'll blame love, for it is lovers' perk
Allows applause before the lines are played
So long as there's no vote to swell the clout
By running trump before the ruff is laid,
And they can dream, and they can do without
Who'll venture but three days to gig a trout.
149
There is still wonder in an early chant;
And what though my guitar have lost a string
That make to play a strain? To this I cling
For every tatter in its mortal want
As far it wean me from the primer slant.
And what, years add such water to the thing
That no child practice at this parrying
For that it's insufficiently /avant/?
These shapes,
though all the arms of Thrace between us,
Or we've no arms, perhaps no will, to do,
Were still high model while the ages grew :
All arms their age denied, one plaster Venus
Beckons still to whom do not abhor
To wear arms that a man has worn before.
150
Your liquid song gone running through the soil
Of cauliflowered plots, your glad bouquet
Betrays by grace of its essential toil
That in the end the earth cannot dismay
That lot who leak into it anyway
As first excuse and last resort from harm,
Nor any elegance your time portray
Convert the church the instant quarks can charm.
"When elements to elements conform
And dust is as it should be," it will sing,
But here is that short season of a storm
That stirred the planet Ocean into spring
Whose millions rouse up long enough to peep
Resentment, set the thumb, and back to sleep.
151
How far between the stars! Nothing enough
To fall right off here; where that heavy law
Cannot remind freesailing that you saw
The end of ocean. Moon foots too much fluff
For what wish want : the troughed thought luff
Against what be, that Odysseus draw
Glands' admiration, every ship shall yaw,
For none may tack, save you afford a puff.
How far between the stars. Yet they will be,
And none will ever show the start mistook
A thousand strokes before the course began
Nor all the sweat that fathomed you and me,
And you, too, puff at oars, and with this book
At last have language without the man.
152
You are as in the park the peonies
That bear the winter sleeping under hay
Burst up from stubble in a randy splay
To bare their heads against the southern breeze
Betimes abandoned and betimes to tease
The waiting fumble, bothering the day
With randy shapes in naked ricochet
As gaily and as conscious of the bees.
And Thomas, Teddy, George and Abe revolve
The aliening stars, that lose themselves
Until the very Dipper shall dissolve
From dumping April in the petalled lake,
You will sway forth from under crowns of leaves
And men weep song with wanting you to wake.
153
Would that you, who referee these games
Were half as sempiternal as the fun,
The grammar, or the figures with Greek names!
Damn /all/ this noise of resurrection!
For if we cannot sing, we still can bitch,
And find those tones displeasing to the Hun.
If life is little but a series glitch
And death prefer the lot of them at once,
The only figure that the shroud can stitch
Is making an improvement on the dunce.
Then if I spend a lifetime from that trend,
At last I go -- for the experience --
How shall I sing the steel that sing an end
Until I have left something to append?
154
The earth rolls over as the rooster howls
And Sunday levels lovers, wives, and tarts
In commonwealth. Ablution leaves the towels
Accumulate the humble scum of arts
That rose again from that despair of Sartre's;
Mascara tremble and the comb tresspass,
God reassembles from his eval parts,
In tentative revival from morass.
And when the sermon, holding up the mass,
Proclaims a solemn high communion,
Hosannah raises palms before an ass
And absolution's lemming juices run,
The congregation lowly crawl the floor
Amewl for all the loves they were before.
155
Why have I sailed this homolytic law,
Whose waves assemble into molecules
That, molecules to foodstuff, food to maw,
The maw beget our being, and being fools?
And all that your Penelope unplight
Be learning but a hunger run amok,
And whether for the favor or the fight,
I need not tell in time to beat the clock
Of world revolution. Let it spite
Me thrice before the squeaking weathercock,
I reelect myself another term
And term alone will overcall the mock:
Wherever homostyle repeat the germ
Ulysses slips the lotos of the worm.
156
How without you have these notes been wrung,
That we arrange, eliminate or scrawl;
But it is not a dressing of a doll
My face and every sense retrace the song
Of every breath that sang, the /sturm und drang/
That words replay, nor words decay and gall :
Not only may I only here have all,
But every part where every part belong.
But then we want the perfect mood to vote
Enough we strike a song without the singer
Not to have to flee the fouled note,
Allowing raptures build on every ringer,
And this invention force the flesh keep pace
With every wrinkle in an ageless face.
157
Why do I know surprise that your avant
But step from stipulate to state and spit
For love or lucre only that it want?
Always the mouse will vote to have his teat
Between the tooth and talon under pressure,
Universe be largess of the flit
Of time that slave eternity, and, yeh, sure,
Wisdom be a sermon on Marantz,
Procession solve a sisyphus with Escher,
And litany baptize the fer-de-lance.
Let none awaken long enough to die,
For all we know is that those only dance
Who help the camel through the needle's eye
Nor suck the public spit your taste ally.
158
What foods these morsels be that fuel your flight
Around the bouncing carbon carousel
With wantonness of will, but appetite
Rehearses at you not the half so well
As when you let these elements yourself.
And even though each eager breath compel
One thousand bits of Ghibelline and Guelph
To make one voice that whisper in the ear,
And every trip that slip this river Alph
Be novel as a bubble's always sphere
And lone kaleidoscope or any kiss,
The waking love the knight but not the gear.
Then revel at the wake in solving this
That all that wake must love antithesis.
159
Too many ghosts whose only breath is mine
Have taken up my time to tell them off,
Which gave them so much plasm and design
That when I told them, all they did was scoff.
But now the salt and lemon grief of you
Have drawn the damp of the baptismal trough
To leave a more tenacious residue
Still not enough to rear your derriere;
Had lips that power, then I would wear them through.
That power is yours to wake or to impair,
And yet your sleep is half the bellyache
The shudder in the head engenders there;
It's as inspired nor half as mad as Blake
To halve my breath and keep you half awake.
160
The cornstalks cross their arms and chatter fall
Replacing crickets with the cricket's ghost,
But though your sense of debt shut up the /salle/
These Mason jars have tripled what I grossed.
If I could can the instant of the sword
To titillate the fear or taste the boast,
Such simple fare would never close Fort Ord:
The infant hand still flouts the velvet glove,
That what it got the scaffold will afford
Once more asneer at being hung above
The diligent, and shysters haul the crap
That every tyrant is composted of;
So oaks drop into scabbards, and the scrap
Still warms the swordsman for another slap.
161
As Mozart giggles through the infant noise
And sends an ancient crotchet to derange
What prose proposes, your scent redeploys
The sense the random roses would estrange.
For you the hydra homostyle exudes
These spirited half spirits in exchange,
That lick the finger pointing at the foods,
Uplift the leg to will the world a judge,
Run from the noises that defend their broods,
And think no better thing than learn a grudge.
And will my while to fashion your undress
To fish your flesh or tell your fouls or fudge
And figure at the rapier, why address
What will not learn how not to leave a mess?
162
Bury my voice and burn these pages, do
Unto all others all you think they dare
Because they dare to seem the same as you;
That bladder cauliflowers all the care
That ever kissed the sentry to Bataan,
Since it is not the smooch that starts the fair
Nor every schoolgirl gets beneath the swan.
So if the dream is all the get of that,
I'll get from you the quicker to the yawn
Within whose death you bury nothing flat,
For if my blood dilute with every dew
For I must clue the plum your photostat,
What is your profit if I plumb the clue
To so forget we wake again as you?
163
Since Charles had his hair done /a la/ Pym,
There issues from the press the simple chap
To bawl that he has seen as though the glim
Were cleverness beyond the mortal slap,
And classes vote diplomas, tout /belles-lettres/
The sucking of a soggy gingersnap.
But none who sing Planck's Consonant forget
The class of courses that of course confound
The world behind an issue bayonet :
For some there was the belling of the hound;
For most, the cat. So bet upon the fox
When common bays for boys are better found
Than speech beyond the binding of the box
They sleep at length in to perfume the phlox.
164
The air sags, clogged with gnats and natty news
Breeding deadlocks out of a live land.
Since Gettysburg is now so many years
Your owners say you are the way you planned.
A tired transistor fails; the picture blears.
Your pickets charge you are a chattel ware
But words are gray waves at the candied ears
Whose bravery is such they almost dare
Hieronymus' Garden of Delight:
Some things can leave no seeds but fancy swear
In men who have their love, but you are rite
Adonis finds too uniform to choose
Without a purgatory's hope of spite,
Nor will you end the set between the yews.
165
The belly that I tickle children kick
And speckle with the slap of scars; the clog
Of that fell fall at shoulder wears the fog