Poemunity — your poem community

Ocean which I pushed up with my fingers so I could touch the orange sand below and white mountain which is not white but for getting caught in the cold Stay here where it is warm and where the sun shines, for later celestial garlands of dead light will draw you into the cold for sure

No one saw the first ones swim ashore centuries ago, nudged by waves into the marsh grasses. When you look into their faces, there is no trace of the ship seized with terror, the crashing waves and the horses’ cries when thrown overboard. Every afternoon you ride your bicycle to the pasture to watch the twitch of their manes and ivory tails unroll a carpet of silence, to see ponies lost in dream. But it isn’t dream, that place your mind drifts to, that museum of memory inventoried in opposition to the present. You felt it once on a plane, taking off from a city you didn’t want to leave, the stranded moment when the plane lifts into the clouds. That’s not dream, it’s not even sleeping. It is the nature of sleeping to be unaware. This was some kind of waiting for the world to come back.

I We thrill too strangely at the master's touch; We shrink too sadly from the larger self Which for its own completeness agitates And undetermines us; we do not feel— We dare not feel it yet—the splendid shame Of uncreated failure; we forget, The while we groan, that God's accomplishment Is always and unfailingly at hand. II Tumultuously void of a clean scheme Whereon to build, whereof to formulate, The legion life that riots in mankind Goes ever plunging upward, up and down, Most like some crazy regiment at arms, Undisciplined of aught but Ignorance, And ever led resourcelessly along To brainless carnage by drunk trumpeters. III To me the groaning of world-worshippers Rings like a lonely music played in hell By one with art enough to cleave the walls Of heaven with his cadence, but without The wisdom or the will to comprehend The strangeness of his own perversity, And all without the courage to deny The profit and the pride of his defeat. IV While we are drilled in error, we are lost Alike to truth and usefulness. We think We are great warriors now, and we can brag Like Titans; but the world is growing young, And we, the fools of time, are growing with it:— We do not fight to-day, we only die; We are too proud of death, and too ashamed Of God, to know enough to be alive. V There is one battle-field whereon we fall Triumphant and unconquered; but, alas! We are too fleshly fearful of ourselves To fight there till our days are whirled and blurred By sorrow, and the ministering wheels Of anguish take us eastward, where the clouds Of human gloom are lost against the gleam That shines on Thought's impenetrable mail. VI When we shall hear no more the cradle-songs Of ages—when the timeless hymns of Love Defeat them and outsound them—we shall know The rapture of that large release which all Right science comprehends; and we shall read, With unoppressed and unoffended eyes, That record of All-Soul whereon God writes In everlasting runes the truth of Him. VII The guerdon of new childhood is repose:— Once he has read the primer of right thought, A man may claim between two smithy strokes Beatitude enough to realize God's parallel completeness in the vague And incommensurable excellence That equitably uncreates itself And makes a whirlwind of the Universe. VIII There is no loneliness:—no matter where We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends Forsake us in the seeming, we are all At one with a complete companionship; And though forlornly joyless be the ways We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there, Like scattered lamps in unfrequented streets. IX When one that you and I had all but sworn To be the purest thing God ever made Bewilders us until at last it seems An angel has come back restigmatized,— Faith wavers, and we wonder what there is On earth to make us faithful any more, But never are quite wise enough to know The wisdom that is in that wonderment. X Where does a dead man go?—The dead man dies; But the free life that would no longer feed On fagots of outburned and shattered flesh Wakes to a thrilled invisible advance, Unchained (or fettered else) of memory; And when the dead man goes it seems to me 'T were better for us all to do away With weeping, and be glad that he is gone. XI So through the dusk of dead, blank-legended, And unremunerative years we search To get where life begins, and still we groan Because we do not find the living spark Where no spark ever was; and thus we die, Still searching, like poor old astronomers Who totter off to bed and go to sleep, To dream of untriangulated stars. XII With conscious eyes not yet sincere enough To pierce the glimmered cloud that fluctuates Between me and the glorifying light That screens itself with knowledge, I discern The searching rays of wisdom that reach through The mist of shame's infirm credulity, And infinitely wonder if hard words Like mine have any message for the dead. XIII I grant you friendship is a royal thing, But none shall ever know that royalty For what it is till he has realized His best friend in himself. 'T is then, perforce, That man's unfettered faith indemnifies Of its own conscious freedom the old shame, And love's revealed infinitude supplants Of its own wealth and wisdom the old scorn. XIV Though the sick beast infect us, we are fraught Forever with indissoluble Truth, Wherein redress reveals itself divine, Transitional, transcendent. Grief and loss, Disease and desolation, are the dreams Of wasted excellence; and every dream Has in it something of an ageless fact That flouts deformity and laughs at years. XV We lack the courage to be where we are:— We love too much to travel on old roads, To triumph on old fields; we love too much To consecrate the magic of dead things, And yieldingly to linger by long walls Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight That sheds a lying glory on old stones Befriends us with a wizard's enmity. XVI Something as one with eyes that look below The battle-smoke to glimpse the foeman's charge, We through the dust of downward years may scan The onslaught that awaits this idiot world Where blood pays blood for nothing, and where life Pays life to madness, till at last the ports Of gilded helplessness be battered through By the still crash of salvatory steel. XVII To you that sit with Sorrow like chained slaves, And wonder if the night will ever come, I would say this: The night will never come, And sorrow is not always. But my words Are not enough; your eyes are not enough; The soul itself must insulate the Real, Or ever you do cherish in this life— In this life or in any life—repose. XVIII Like a white wall whereon forever breaks Unsatisfied the tumult of green seas, Man's unconjectured godliness rebukes With its imperial silence the lost waves Of insufficient grief. This mortal surge That beats against us now is nothing else Than plangent ignorance. Truth neither shakes Nor wavers; but the world shakes, and we shriek. XIX Nor jewelled phrase nor mere mellifluous rhyme Reverberates aright, or ever shall, One cadence of that infinite plain-song Which is itself all music. Stronger notes Than any that have ever touched the world Must ring to tell it—ring like hammer-blows, Right-echoed of a chime primordial, On anvils, in the gleaming of God's forge. XX The prophet of dead words defeats himself: Whoever would acknowledge and include The foregleam and the glory of the real, Must work with something else than pen and ink And painful preparation: he must work With unseen implements that have no names, And he must win withal, to do that work, Good fortitude, clean wisdom, and strong skill. XXI To curse the chilled insistence of the dawn Because the free gleam lingers; to defraud The constant opportunity that lives Unchallenged in all sorrow; to forget For this large prodigality of gold That larger generosity of thought,— These are the fleshly clogs of human greed, The fundamental blunders of mankind. XXII Forebodings are the fiends of Recreance; The master of the moment, the clean seer Of ages, too securely scans what is, Ever to be appalled at what is not; He sees beyond the groaning borough lines Of Hell, God's highways gleaming, and he knows That Love's complete communion is the end Of anguish to the liberated man. XXIII Here by the windy docks I stand alone, But yet companioned. There the vessel goes, And there my friend goes with it; but the wake That melts and ebbs between that friend and me Love's earnest is of Life's all-purposeful And all-triumphant sailing, when the ships Of Wisdom loose their fretful chains and swing Forever from the crumbled wharves of Time.

O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; Tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know. Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away. Retard the sun with gentle mist; Enchant the land with amethyst. Slow, slow! For the grapes’ sake, if they were all, Whose leaves already are burnt with frost, Whose clustered fruit must else be lost— For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

1 A smudge for the horizon that, on a clear day, shows the hard edge of hills and buildings on the other coast. Anchored boats all head one way: north, where the wind comes from. You can see the storm inflating out of the west. A dark hole in gray cloud twirls, widens, while white rips multiply on the water far out. Wet tousled yellow leaves, thick on the slate terrace. The jay’s hoarse cry. He’s stumbling in the air, too soaked to fly. 2 Knuckles of the rain on the roof, chuckles into the drain- pipe, spatters on the leaves that litter the grass. Melancholy morning, the tide full in the bay, an overflowing bowl. At least, no wind, no roughness in the sky, its gray face bedraggled by its tears. 3 Peeling a pear, I remember my daddy’s hand. His thumb (the one that got nipped by the saw, lacked a nail) fit into the cored hollow of the slippery half his knife skinned so neatly. Dad would pare the fruit from our orchard in the fall, while Mother boiled the jars, prepared for “putting up.” Dad used to darn our socks when we were small, and cut our hair and toenails. Sunday mornings, in pajamas, we’d take turns in his lap. He’d help bathe us sometimes. Dad could do anything. He built our dining table, chairs, the buffet, the bay window seat, my little desk of cherry wood where I wrote my first poems. That day at the shop, splitting panel boards on the electric saw (oh, I can hear the screech of it now, the whirling blade that sliced my daddy’s thumb), he received the mar that, long after, in his coffin, distinguished his skilled hand. 4 I sit with braided fingers and closed eyes in a span of late sunlight. The spokes are closing. It is fall: warm milk of light, though from an aging breast. I do not mean to pray. The posture for thanks or supplication is the same as for weariness or relief. But I am glad for the luck of light. Surely it is godly, that it makes all things begin, and appear, and become actual to each other. Light that’s sucked into the eye, warming the brain with wires of color. Light that hatched life out of the cold egg of earth. 5 Dark wild honey, the lion’s eye color, you brought home from a country store. Tastes of the work of shaggy bees on strong weeds, their midsummer bloom. My brain’s electric circuit glows, like the lion’s iris that, concentrated, vibrates while seeming not to move. Thick transparent amber you brought home, the sweet that burns. 6 “The very hairs of your head are numbered,” said the words in my head, as the haircutter snipped and cut, my round head a newel poked out of the tent top’s slippery sheet, while my hairs’ straight rays rained down, making pattern on the neat vacant cosmos of my lap. And maybe it was those tiny flies, phantoms of my aging eyes, seen out of the sides floating (that, when you turn to find them full face, always dissolve) but I saw, I think, minuscule, marked in clearest ink, Hairs #9001 and #9002 fall, the cut-off ends streaking little comets, till they tumbled to confuse with all the others in their fizzled heaps, in canyons of my lap. And what keeps asking in my head now that, brushed off and finished, I’m walking in the street, is how can those numbers remain all the way through, and all along the length of every hair, and even before each one is grown, apparently, through my scalp? For, if the hairs of my head are numbered, it means no more and no less of them have ever, or will ever be. In my head, now cool and light, thoughts, phantom white flies, take a fling: This discovery can apply to everything. 7 Now and then, a red leaf riding the slow flow of gray water. From the bridge, see far into the woods, now that limbs are bare, ground thick-littered. See, along the scarcely gliding stream, the blanched, diminished, ragged swamp and woods the sun still spills into. Stand still, stare hard into bramble and tangle, past leaning broken trunks, sprawled roots exposed. Will something move?—some vision come to outline? Yes, there— deep in—a dark bird hangs in the thicket, stretches a wing. Reversing his perch, he says one “Chuck.” His shoulder-patch that should be red looks gray. This old redwing has decided to stay, this year, not join the strenuous migration. Better here, in the familiar, to fade.

October is when night guzzles up the orange sherbet sunset and sends the day to bed before supper and October is when jack-o’-lanterns grin in the darkness and strange company crunches across the rumple of dry leaves to ring a doorbell. October is when you can be ghost, a witch, a creature from outer space… almost anything! And the neighbors, fearing tricks, give you treats.

Although a tide turns in the trees the moon doesn't turn the leaves, though chimneys smoke and blue concedes to bluer home-time dark. Though restless leaves submerge the park in yellow shallows, ankle-deep, and through each tree the moon shows, halved or quartered or complete, the moon's no fruit and has no seed, and turns no tide of leaves on paths that still persist but do not lead where they did before dark. Although the moonstruck pond stares hard the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe. Each mind's a different, distant world this same moon will not leave.

I It’s odd to have a separate month. It escapes the year, it is not only cold, it is warm and loving like a death grip on a willing knee. The Indians have a name for it, they call it: “Summer!” The tepees shake in the blast like roosters at dawn. Everything is special to them, the colorful ones. II Somehow the housewife does not seem gentle. Is she angry because her husband likes October? Is it snow bleeds softly from her shoes? The nest eggs have captured her, but April rises from her bed. III “The beggars are upon us!” cried Chester. Three strangers appeared at the door, demanding ribbons. The October wind . . . nests IV Why do I think October is beautiful? It is not, is not beautiful. But then what is there to hold one’s interest between the various drifts of a day’s work, but to search out the differences the window and grate— but it is not, is not beautiful. V I think your face is beautiful, the way it is close to my face, and I think you are the real October with your transparence and the stone of your words as they pass, as I do not hear them.

I used to think the land had something to say to us, back when wildflowers would come right up to your hand as if they were tame. Sooner or later, I thought, the wind would begin to make sense if I listened hard and took notes religiously. That was spring. Now I’m not so sure: the cloudless sky has a flat affect and the fields plowed down after harvest seem so expressionless, keeping their own counsel. This afternoon, nut tree leaves blow across them as if autumn had written us a long letter, changed its mind, and tore it into little scraps.

These times strike monied worldlings with dismay: Even rich men, brave by nature, taint the air With words of apprehension and despair: While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray, Men unto whom sufficient for the day And minds not stinted or untilled are given, Sound, healthy, children of the God of heaven, Are cheerful as the rising sun in May. What do we gather hence but firmer faith That every gift of noble origin Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath; That virtue and the faculties within Are vital,—and that riches are akin To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?