Poemunity — your poem community

Travel is a vanishing act Only to those who are left behind. What the traveler knows Is that he accompanies himself, Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked, Stolen, or lost, or mistaken. So one took, past outposts of empire, “Calmly as if in the British Museum,” Not only her Victorian skirts, Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith In the civilizing mission of women, Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor; Another, friend of witch-doctors, Living on native chop, Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes, Heralded her astonishing arrival Under shivering stars By calling, “It’s only me!” A third, Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate That a woman could travel as easily as a man, Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears And only once permitted a tribal chieftain To stroke her long, golden hair.

She is large and matronly And rather dirty, A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it. Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year And put up with her husband, I don't know. She likes to eat. She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs, When food is going. Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes. She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls, Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth Like sudden curved scissors, And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue, And having the bread hanging over her chin. O Mistress, Mistress, Reptile Mistress, Your eye is very dark, very bright, And it never softens Although you watch. She knows, She knows well enough to come for food, Yet she sees me not; Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything, Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless, Reptile mistress. Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth, She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her, She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak. Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away. Mistress, reptile mistress, You are almost too large, I am almost frightened. He is much smaller, Dapper beside her, And ridiculously small. Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look, His, poor darling, is almost fiery. His wimple, his blunt-prowed face, His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs, So striving, striving, Are all more delicate than she, And he has a cruel scar on his shell. Poor darling, biting at her feet, Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet, Nipping her ankles, Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell. Agelessly silent, And with a grim, reptile determination, Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents' long obstinacy Of horizontal persistence. Little old man Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity, Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle, And hanging grimly on, Letting go at last as she drags away, And closing his steel-trap face. His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face. Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle. And how he feels it! The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos, The immune, the animate, Enveloped in isolation, Forerunner. Now look at him! Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescence saw him crucified into sex, Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself. Divided into passionate duality, He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness, Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself In his effort toward completion again. Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris, The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces, And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously. And so behold him following the tail Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse, Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence, Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, Roaming over the sods, Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell. Their two shells like domed boats bumping, Hers huge, his small; Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles, And stumbling mixed up in one another, In the race of love — Two tortoises, She huge, he small. She seems earthily apathetic, And he has a reptile's awful persistence. I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue. While I, I pity Monsieur. "He pesters her and torments her," said the woman. How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I. What can he do? He is dumb, he is visionless, Conceptionless. His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not As her earthen mound moves on, But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin, Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell, And drags at these with his beak, Drags and drags and bites, While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.

married a woman who was perfectly happy to turn half their apartment into a laboratory including the cadavers necessary to her husband’s explorations in surgery. He also wrote articles on the ears of birds and in Latin, an anatomist, standing motionless in the middle of the road thinking that electricity must activate the blood while the muscles, themselves living Leyden jars, flowered among those who found it difficult to believe that electricity is an animal lost in a garden of showering towers and, as with all living things, a certain degree of the domestic filtered down between his hands to land in a dusting of involuntary silver across the surface of every nerve.

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal, There where the vines cling crimson on the wall, And in the twilight wait for what will come. The leaves will whisper there of her, and some, Like flying words, will strike you as they fall; But go, and if you listen she will call. Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal— Luke Havergal. No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes; But there, where western glooms are gathering, The dark will end the dark, if anything: God slays Himself with every leaf that flies, And hell is more than half of paradise. No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies— In eastern skies. Out of a grave I come to tell you this, Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss That flames upon your forehead with a glow That blinds you to the way that you must go. Yes, there is yet one way to where she is, Bitter, but one that faith may never miss. Out of a grave I come to tell you this— To tell you this. There is the western gate, Luke Havergal, There are the crimson leaves upon the wall. Go, for the winds are tearing them away,— Nor think to riddle the dead words they say, Nor any more to feel them as they fall; But go, and if you trust her she will call. There is the western gate, Luke Havergal— Luke Havergal.

She was always elsewhere. That’s what Mom wants carved on her stone. When did she first realize there was an Elsewhere, and that she was in it? What baby songs did she sing from wherever she was down to me in my crib? The lullabies of   Elsewhere. On birthdays she filled little flowerpots with chocolate ice cream and a real zinnia, chocolate jimmies for dirt. I tasted the cold chocolate, I opened the gifts. If  they were real, I was real. I was in the Elsewhere too.

After Lyle Lovett If I had a ginko tree I'd climb it in the evening. If I had a marmoset He'd climb the tree with me. If we saw a falling star I'd wish I had a rocket. If I had a rocket I'd drag the star back home. If I went to space I'd pick up a satellite. If I had my own moon I wouldn't be so sad. If I weren't so sad I wouldn't need a companion. If I sold my marmoset I'd have a lot of cash. If I had some money I'd buy an Eldorado. (Silver, 1959, With fins like raptor wings.) I'd shine that Eldorado and drive it to my father's. If I had a father I'd take him for a ride.

My little lack-of-light, my swaddled soul, December baby. Hush, for it is dark, and will grow darker still. We must embark directly. Bring an orange as the toll for Charon: he will be our gondolier. Upon the shore, the season pans for light, and solstice fish, their eyes gone milky white, come bearing riches for the dying year: solstitial kingdom. It is yours, the mime of branches and the drift of snow. With shaking hands, Persephone, the winter’s wife, will tender you a gift. Born in a time of darkness, you will learn the trick of making. You shall make your consolation all your life.

Sleep little baby, clean as a nut, Your fingers uncurl and your eyes are shut. Your life was ours, which is with you. Go on your journey. We go too. The bat is flying round the house Like an umbrella turned into a mouse. The moon is astonished and so are the sheep: Their bells have come to send you to sleep. Oh be our rest, our hopeful start. Turn your head to my beating heart. Sleep little baby, clean as a nut, Your fingers uncurl and your eyes are shut.

Lullee, lullay, I could not love thee more If thou wast Christ the King. Now tell me, how did Mary know That in her womb should sleep and grow The Lord of everything? Lullee, lullay, An angel stood with her Who said: “That which doth stir Like summer in thy side Shall save the world from sin. Then stable, hall, and inn Shall cherish Christmas-tide.” Lullee, lullay, And so it was that Day. And did she love Him more Because an angel came To prophesy His name? Ah no, not so, She could not love Him more, But loved Him just the same. Lullee, lullay. Originally appeared in the December 1938 issue of Poetry magazine.

Lie me down to heal in sleep, do not let me wake In sin, the tongue Cancels another year, another painted storm In the coral caves, some pious poet Drunk on vapors Swatting tomb-bats in the nightwood, would that Wayward bark sunned white Be also thunder, a hill of bones drumming—thud Thud, a wake Of buzzards braiding into the loosening skull—the redoubled fists Of students like an island in the bramble chained—I have been told To reason, lawless, empty, without rights— But I am old Not age, I have been told To match its columns by our footfall, prophet—I am not The straw or garland of our Sirens, not the brow Of holly, nor the warble Of any lark