Allen Grossman

A great light is the man who knows the woman he loves A great light is the woman who knows the man she loves And carries the light into room after room arousing The sleepers and looking hard into the face of each And then sends them asleep again with a kiss Or a whole night of love and goes on and on until The man and woman who carry the great lights of the Knowledge of the one lover enter the room toward which Their light is sent and fit the one and the other torch In a high candelabrum and there is such light That children leap up unless the sea swallow them In the crossing or hatred or war against which do not Pray only but be vigilant and set your hand to the work.

This to be beautiful to you Set against all this you know of So ominous, set against it, Overcome, might overcome. This to be beautiful, beautiful, Never alone enough with God Never enough among fountains This be beautiful Spring blue. Leaf love you for this the while I am with you and the while after This earth I am standing on, the Herons and smaller birds possess. This to be beautiful to you The downward fire I spoke of The eel grass, the snowy path, The wide shore, the wide shore. Speak of it, speak it, unceasing, all These lines to the tomb, O turning tree, Set against all this you know of Overcome, will, overcome. Grave tree of the dark plowland under, I will will the whole time to you: Falling water, wave falling, dew Dust, horses, spirits, Spirit.

When the corpse revived at the funeral, The outraged mourners killed it; and the soul Of the revenant passed into the body Of the poet because it had more to say. He sat down at the piano no one could play Called Messiah, or The Regulator of the World, Which had stood for fifty years, to my knowledge, Beneath a painting of a red-haired woman In a loose gown with one bared breast, and played A posthumous work of the composer S—— About the impotence of God (I believe) Who has no power not to create everything. It was the Autumn of the year and wet, When the music started.  The musician was Skillful but the Messiah was out of tune And bent the time and the tone.  For a long hour The poet played The Regulator of the World As the spirit prompted, and entered upon The pathways of His power—while the mourners Stood with slow blood on their hands Astonished by the weird processional And the undertaker figured his bill. —We have in mind an unplayed instrument Which stands apart in a memorial air Where the room darkens toward its inmost wall And a lady hangs in her autumnal hair At evening of the November rains; and winds Sublime out of the North, and North by West, Are sowing from the death-sack of the seed The burden of her cloudy hip.  Behold, I send the demon I know to relieve your need, An imperfect player at the perfect instrument Who takes in hand The Regulator of the World To keep the splendor from destroying us. Lady!  The last virtuoso of the composer S—— Darkens your parlor with the music of the Law. When I was green and blossomed in the Spring I was mute wood.  Now I am dead I sing.

At that time the sheep called to him From their wormy bellies, as they Lay bloating in the field. He was A pastoralist, The schoolhouse hardly handsize In a sky of flax. He began Then to keep the sayings of man (The left hand writing; the right hand Crossing out) farming the time by day With a great rake And in the evening hearing myths Of the hurricane and the tornado (Straws driven through glass), And of the waking in the grave (The sharp hands of brothers buried Together). In the deep night the rat- Traps in the seed room broke the rat's Back, and the rat called to him in The next room over in a penetrating Eloquent way. In the parlor it was Always deep night where the separated Organs of the living slept in jars (The lank goiter and the rotted Appendix) awaiting the end-time When the emasculated ram will rise In the flax-blue sky (Cold as the final bluing of a Sunday wash) And all of us will know The use in beauty of the whole body. In the hay field was the beginning Of knowledge: Sour wine, the great rake hoisted Toward the high sun-altar of the stack And the hoist rope hauled out hard (Like a greased whip of which the stories Told were of the severing of limbs) By two staggering teams—and the whole Sun in its extreme tower of noon. All he heard was violent and sad But he kept on writing the sayings Of man with his left hand, and sent Them off in broken words, and waited In the mortal field Listening to the mice in the bottom Of the stack. Now though the schoolhouse Hangs like a stone over the field Robed in its winding sheet as blue as air, The shepherd hand of eloquence still keeps And flashes Out the sayings of the man— And the other (the right hand of Obliterating habit) sleeps.

Or is it on account of my radiant eye I have lived so long?—I never slept in the study hall, or called anyone by an improper name. I never urinated in a desolate synagogue. I never ate or drank in a desolate synagogue or picked my teeth. I did not walk into a desolate synagogue in the summer just because of the heat, nor in winter just because of cold rain. Also, I know one may not deliver a eulogy for an individual inside a desolate synagogue. But you can read scripture inside a desolate synagogue, or you can teach in a desolate synagogue, or deliver eulogies for the community. When synagogues are deserted they are to be left alone and weeds allowed to grow. One should not pick the weeds, lest there be anguish that the synagogue is in ruins. When are the synagogues to be swept so that weeds do not grow inside them? When they are in use.—When synagogues are in ruins, weeds are not to be picked there. Because I know these things I was approved, although unworthy, after a three-day oral examination before the king of Sicily to whom by custom the power of approval is entrusted. Thereafter, I have worn the laurel crown—my eye radiant to this day.

Getting the child to bed is awful work, Committing that rage to sleep that will not sleep. The lie rots in my throat saying, “O.K. There is balm in Gilead. Go to bed. Honey of generation has betrayed us both.” And truly it is no wild surmise of darkness Nor Pisgah purview of Canaan drowned in blood But only my child saying its say in bed. If madness ever covers me, the caul contract That now but loosely insinuates a shroud I shall go howling into the conscious grave (God keep children from the power of the dog) Follow that note into the uttering horn Awake in the womb from which I was born.

Toward evening, the natural light becomes intelligent and answers, without demur: “Be assured! You are not alone. . . .” But in fact, toward evening, I am not convinced there is any other except myself to whom existence necessarily pertains. I also interrogate myself to discover whether I myself possess any power by which I can bring it about that I who now am shall exist another moment. Because I am mostly a thinking thing and because this precise question can only be from that thoughtful part of myself, if such a power did reside within me I should, I am sure, be conscious of it. . . . But I am conscious of no such power. And yet, if I myself cannot be the cause of that assurance, surely it is necessary to conclude that I am not alone in the world. There is some other who is the cause of that idea. But if, at last, no such other can be found toward evening, do I really have sufficient assurance of the existence of any other being at all? For, after a most careful search, I have been unable to discover the ground of that conviction—unless it be imagined a lonely workman on a dizzy scaffold unfolds a sign at evening and puts his mark to it.

Strapped to the bed of circumcision lies My son. This mutilation ties You to the fathers. They will never let You forget, or your flesh be enfranchised ever, Though you pray all your life long. They set you early on the rack, infect you with a fever Of remembering. In the marriage bed, When you are naked, there the sign is red. There is neither meeting nor mating but the past Cries that you've been waited for and wed already— I will not bless this mark upon your body. For you the hurricane is rising fast; I feel the horns of Moses in my head And Law wrenched again from the dead Hand of deity, and I descend out of the blast to you Mad with loneliness upon this bed. But I reserve also the rage That broke the Law upon you like a rain of stone That other time I saw you so could yearn. The Law is broken, baby. I will not ascend again.