Babette Deutsch

Then was the grown-up world of tall decision, Its beauty of late nights denied a child; World of bewildering gifts, and strange derision, Alien alike whether it frowned or smiled, Yet your least wish was governed by its laws. The landscape and the weather both were odd, Exploding with effects that hid a cause Serene and lonely as the Will of God. Recall it: peopled by an august race, Immune to the passions that attack the young, And knowing all. There every commonplace Must be translated from a marvellous tongue. Now is the world of grandeur dwindled, shrunk To what the stupidest can understand. The shabby treasures of an exile’s trunk Include no passport to that wonderland, Though you are told you are a citizen. The scenery is changed, the climate dull; The fateful masks are faces, gods are men; Most nights are long and few are magical. But there are strangers even here: their speech Is rich in barbarous mystery, their ways Are private, who live wholly beyond reach, Admired and feared, though none of us obeys Their foreign rule. No dictators, and yet Strong utterly. While we, with pity wrung For what they must do, suffer, learn, forget, Feel shy when we approach them. They are young.

Into this net of leaves, green as old glass That the sun fondles, trembling like images In water, this live net, swung overhead From branch to branch, what swam? The spider’s thread Is less passive, where it appears to float Like a bright hair clinging to the wind’s coat. Hot at work, history neither schemes nor grieves Here where the soaking dead are last year’s leaves, And over them slung, meshed with sun, a net No creature wove, none frantically tried to fret. The huge weight of time without its sting Hangs in that greenly cradling woof. A wing Has caught there, held. Held. But not to stay, We know, who, how slowly, walk away.

What do we need for love—a midnight fire Flinging itself by fistfuls up the chimney In soft bright snatches? Do we need the snow, Gentle as silence, covering the scars Of weeks of hunger, years of shabby having? Summer or winter? A heaven of stars? A room? The smiling mouth, the sadness of desire Are everywhere the same. If lovers go Along an unknown road, they find no less What is familiar. Let them stay at home, And all will still be strange. This they know Who with each heartbeat fight the fear of change.

If you press a stone with your finger, Sir Isaac Newton observed, The finger is also Pressed by the stone. But can a woman, pressed by memory’s finger, In the deep night, alone, Of her softness move The airy thing That presses upon her With the whole weight of love? This Sir Isaac said nothing of.

Content that now the bleeding bone be swept Out of her reach, she lay upon her side. In a blonde void sunk deep, she slept, she slept Bland as a child, slept, breathing like a bride. Color of noons that shimmer as they sing Above the dunes, her sandy flanks heaved slow. Between her paws curled inward, billowing Waves of desert silence seemed to flow. The crowd was gone, the bars were gone, the cage Thinned into air, the sawdust and the fleas Winnowed by sleep to nothing. After food, Absence possessed her: bliss keener than rage, If slumber’s prisoner at a bound could seize This ghostly freedom, lapping it like blood.

These are the streets where we walked with war and childhood Like our two shadows behind us, or Before us like one shadow. River walks Threaded by park rats, flanked by battleships, Flickering of a grey tail on the bank, Motionless hulls Enormous under a dead grey sky. Farther, the harbor and the miscolored waters Rocking their flotsam under the blank round eye At the masthead staring down the rats to come, Beyond the fisher gulls. And the windows full of ropes and hardware, Doorways, barreled, yawning on the dark, Wall-eyed alleys, coils of husky smells, The breath of journeys strong there. Streets whose sordid beauty joked readily with hope. The taller avenues, And walls that smiled like unpurchased horizons, Swung intimate views out of a foreign room, Hung a gate upon a garden's fable, Walls that frowned With aged remorseless eyes Or the gloom of thunderlit landscapes, opening A door into that placeless country Where the sad animal is blithe, free and at home. Too, those halls Where we stepped lightly among the creatures Whom death had tamed, who yet crouched, sprang, or flew, Fierce as hunger, graceful as joy, Until we knew, as in a half silvered mirror, the half Captive image of immortality. These are the old places, and walking there As then with war and childhood, I look into the shadows' faces. They appal. Yet often I will see (The marvels floating alive upon that stream, The breathing of delight like purest air) Another place: that you contrived Between midnight and morning In your dream, and in the morning Took me there. We greeted it, who could not stay. But it is there, Surviving disbelief, surviving even what the malign years prepare.

Fawns in the winter wood Who feel their horns, and leap, Swans whom the bleakening mood Of evening stirs from sleep, Tall flowers that unfurl As a moth, driven, flies, Flowers with the breasts of a girl And sea-cold eyes. The bare bright mirrors glow For their enchanted shapes. Each is a flame, and so, Like flame, escapes.