Charles Olson

I. Le Bonheur dogwood flakes what is green the petals from the apple blow on the road mourning doves mark the sway of the afternoon, bees dig the plum blossoms the morning stands up straight, the night is blue from the full of the April moon iris and lilac, birds birds, yellow flowers white flowers, the Diesel does not let up dragging the plow as the whippoorwill, the night’s tractor, grinds his song and no other birds but us are as busy (O saisons, O chateaux! Délires! What soul is without fault? Nobody studies happiness Every time the cock crows I salute him I have no longer any excuse for envy. My life has been given its orders: the seasons seize the soul and the body, and make mock of any dispersed effort. The hour of death is the only trespass II. The Charge dogwood flakes the green the petals from the apple-trees fall for the feet to walk on the birds are so many they are loud, in the afternoon they distract, as so many bees do suddenly all over the place With spring one knows today to see that in the morning each thing is separate but by noon they have melted into each other and by night only crazy things like the full moon and the whippoorwill and us, are busy. We are busy if we can get by that whiskered bird, that nightjar, and get across, the moon is our conversation, she will say what soul isn’t in default? can you afford not to make the magical study which happiness is? do you hear the cock when he crows? do you know the charge, that you shall have no envy, that your life has its orders, that the seasons seize you too, that no body and soul are one if they are not wrought in this retort? that otherwise efforts are efforts? And that the hour of your flight will be the hour of your death? III. Spring The dogwood lights up the day. The April moon flakes the night. Birds, suddenly, are a multitude The flowers are ravined by bees, the fruit blossoms are thrown to the ground, the wind the rain forces everything. Noise— even the night is drummed by whippoorwills, and we get as busy, we plow, we move, we break out, we love. The secret which got lost neither hides nor reveals itself, it shows forth tokens. And we rush to catch up. The body whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the elixir In the roar of spring, transmutations. Envy drags herself off. The fault of the body and the soul —that they are not one— the matutinal cock clangs and singleness: we salute you season of no bungling

all wrong And I am asked—ask myself (I, too, covered with the gurry of it) where shall we go from here, what can we do when even the public conveyances sing? how can we go anywhere, even cross-town how get out of anywhere (the bodies all buried in shallow graves?

colored pictures of all things to eat: dirty postcards And words, words, words all over everything No eyes or ears left to do their own doings (all invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses including the mind, that worker on what is And that other sense made to give even the most wretched, or any of us, wretched, that consolation (greased lulled even the street-cars song

I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties. Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross a wet deck. The sea was not, finally, my trade. But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged from that which was most familiar. Was delayed, and not content with the man’s argument that such postponement is now the nature of obedience, that we are all late in a slow time, that we grow up many And the single is not easily known It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote) I note in others, makes more sense than my own distances. The agilities they show daily who do the world’s businesses And who do nature’s as I have no sense I have done either I have made dialogues, have discussed ancient texts, have thrown what light I could, offered what pleasures doceat allows But the known? This, I have had to be given, a life, love, and from one man the world. Tokens. But sitting here I look out as a wind and water man, testing And missing some proof I know the quarters of the weather, where it comes from, where it goes. But the stem of me, this I took from their welcome, or their rejection, of me And my arrogance was neither diminished nor increased, by the communication 2 It is undone business I speak of, this morning, with the sea stretching out from my feet

. . . . . tell you? ha! who can tell another how to manage the swimming? he was right: people don’t change. They only stand more revealed. I, likewise 1 the light, there, at the corner (because of the big elm and the reflecting houses) winter or summer stays as it was when they lived there, in the house the street cuts off as though it were a fault, the side’s so sheer they hid, or tried to hide, the fact the cargo their ships brought back was black (the Library, too, possibly so founded). The point is the light does go one way toward the post office, and quite another way down to Main Street. Nor is that all: coming from the sea, up Middle, it is more white, very white as it passes the grey of the Unitarian church. But at Pleasant Street, it is abruptly black (hidden city 2 Or now, when such houses are not built, or such trees planted, it’s the doctor knows what the parents don’t know. Or the wife doesn’t, of the husband, or the husband, of the other. Sins, they still call them, and let pejorocracy thrive. Only the lady has got it straight. She looks as the best of my people look in one direction, her direction, they know it is elements men stand in the midst of, not these names supported by that false future she, precisely she, has her foot upon (He made the coast, and though he lost his feet for it, and the hands he’d purposely allowed to freeze to the oars, I knew him, drank with my elders, in his own bar, a toast to him Or my other, the top of whose head a bollard clean took away. It was four days before they could get him to Chelsea Marine. This spring I listened to him as good as new, as fresh as it’s always been to hear him talk of the sea. He was puttering in his garden when I came up, looking over his Santa Fe rose. And he took off his hat to show me, how it is all skin where his skull was, too much of a hole for even the newest metal to cover Or the quiet one, who’s died since (died as deck-watchman, on his vessel, in port). Years ago I heard from others how he’d pulled two men out of the sea one night off Eastern Point. They’d not been able to shed their jacks when the ship went over, and when he caught them they were going down too. He hauled them into Brace’s Cove, even though the shore wasn’t there, it was such a storm and the sea so big it had turned the Lily Pond into an arm of itself. Last, he with muscle as big as his voice, the strength of him in that blizzard to have pulled the trawl slack from the very bottom and released his mate from the cod-hook had him out, and almost off, into the snow. It wasn’t that there was so much sea. It was the cold, and that white, until over the dory went and the two of them, one still, were in. The wild thing was, he made the vessel, three miles, and fetched her, found that vessel in all that weather, with his fellow dead weight on him. The sort of eye which later knew the Peak of Brown’s as though it were his own garden (as Bowditch brought the Eppie Sawyer spot to her wharf a Christmas morning) 3 Which is the cream of the milk, of course. And the milk also of the matter, the most of it, those who do no more than drink it in a cup of tea alone of such a night, holding (as she) a certain schooner What still is, in other words. And the remarkable part of it, that it still goes on, still is what counts: the lad from the Fort who recently bought the small white house on Lower Middle (the one diagonally across from the handsome brick with the Bullfinch door) He stood with me one Sunday and eyed (with a like eye) a curious ship we’d both come on, tied to the Gas Company wharf. She had raked masts, and they were unstepped, fitted loose in her deck, like a neck in a collar. He was looking idly, as I was, saying nothing. When suddenly, he turned to a Gloucesterman, a big one, berthed alongside this queer one, and said: “I’ll own her, one day” 4 While she stares, out of her painted face, no matter the deathly mu-sick, the demand will arouse some of these men and women

The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester, the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which (from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe. In this night I moved on the territory with combinations (new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader, my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts. My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop, there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then, I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me) before. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf- house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son, I didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years. But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country. His previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I found him intimate with my former wife: this boy was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts! Black space, old fish-house. Motions of ghosts. I, dogging his steps. He (not my father, by name himself with his face twisted at birth) possessed of knowledge pretentious giving me what in the instant I knew better of. But the somber place, the flooring crude like a wharf’s and a barn’s space I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter was there—that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I hadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut! But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort. The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern The places still half-dark, mud, coal dust. There is no light east of the Bridge Only on the headland toward the harbor from Cressy’s have I seen it (once when my daughter ran out on a spit of sand isn’t even there.) Where is Bristow? when does I-A get me home? I am caught in Gloucester. (What’s buried behind Lufkin’s Diner? Who is Frank Moore?

1 What does not change / is the will to change He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He remembered only one thing, the birds, how when he came in, he had gone around the rooms and got them back in their cage, the green one first, she with the bad leg, and then the blue, the one they had hoped was a male Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat. He had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat, I do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter, he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, “The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now?” His last words had been, “The pool is slime.” Suddenly everyone, ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened, he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought “The pool    the kingfishers’ feathers were wealth    why did the export stop?” It was then he left 2 I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumiere” but the kingfisher de l’aurore” but the kingfisher flew west est devant nous! he got the color of his breast from the heat of the setting sun! The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit) the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings where the color is, short and round, the tail inconspicuous. But not these things were the factors. Not the birds. The legends are legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher will not indicate a favoring wind, or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting, still the waters, with the new year, for seven days. It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters. It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There, six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds. On these rejectamenta (as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born. And, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes a dripping, fetid mass Mao concluded: nous devons nous lever et agir! 3 When the attentions change / the jungle leaps in even the stones are split they rive Or, enter that other conqueror we more naturally recognize he so resembles ourselves But the E cut so rudely on that oldest stone sounded otherwise, was differently heard as, in another time, were treasures used: (and, later, much later, a fine ear thought a scarlet coat) “of green feathers    feet, beaks and eyes of gold “animals likewise, resembling snails “a large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots, and worked with tufts of leaves, weight 3800 ounces “last, two birds, of thread and featherwork, the quills gold, the feet gold, the two birds perched on two reeds gold, the reeds arising from two embroidered mounds, one yellow, the other white. “And from each reed hung seven feathered tassels. In this instance, the priests (in dark cotton robes, and dirty, their disheveled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly over their shoulders) rush in among the people, calling on them to protect their gods And all now is war where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields. 4 Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law Into the same river no man steps twice When fire dies air dies No one remains, nor is, one Around an appearance, one common model, we grow up many. Else how is it, if we remain the same, we take pleasure now in what we did not take pleasure before? love contrary objects? admire and / or find fault? use other words, feel other passions, have nor figure, appearance, disposition, tissue the same? To be in different states without a change is not a possibility We can be precise. The factors are in the animal and / or the machine the factors are communication and / or control, both involve the message. And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time is the birth of the air, is the birth of water, is a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning of another fetid nest is change, presents no more than itself And the too strong grasping of it, when it is pressed together and condensed, loses it This very thing you are II They buried their dead in a sitting posture serpent    cane    razor   ray of the sun And she sprinkled water on the head of my child, crying “Cioa-coatl! Cioa-coatl!” with her face to the west Where the bones are found, in each personal heap with what each enjoyed, there is always the Mongolian louse The light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet in the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness which covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can, long enough as long as it was necessary for him, my guide to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose so you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face, with what candor, look and, considering the dryness of the place the long absence of an adequate race (of the two who first came, each a conquistador, one healed, the other tore the eastern idols down, toppled the temple walls, which, says the excuser were black from human gore) hear hear, where the dry blood talks where the old appetite walks la piu saporita et migliore che si possa truovar al mondo where it hides, look in the eye how it runs in the flesh / chalk but under these petals in the emptiness regard the light, contemplate the flower whence it arose with what violence benevolence is bought what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve what stalks this silence what pudor pejorocracy affronts how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot what breeds where dirtiness is law what crawls below III I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage. And of course, no Roman: he can take no risk that matters, the risk of beauty least of all. But I have my kin, if for no other reason than (as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and, given my freedom, I’d be a cad if I didn’t. Which is most true. It works out this way, despite the disadvantage. I offer, in explanation, a quote: si j’ai du goût, ce n’est guères que pour la terre et les pierres. Despite the discrepancy (an ocean    courage    age) this is also true: if I have any taste it is only because I have interested myself in what was slain in the sun I pose you your question: shall you uncover honey / where maggots are? I hunt among stones

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood jewels & miracles, I, Maximus a metal hot from boiling water, tell you what is a lance, who obeys the figures of the present dance 1 the thing you’re after may lie around the bend of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird! And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight (of the bird o kylix, o Antony of Padua sweep low, o bless the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart, And the flake-racks of my city! 2 love is form, and cannot be without important substance (the weight say, 58 carats each one of us, perforce our goldsmith’s scale feather to feather added (and what is mineral, what is curling hair, the string you carry in your nervous beak, these make bulk, these, in the end, are the sum (o my lady of good voyage in whose arm, whose left arm rests no boy but a carefully carved wood, a painted face, a schooner! a delicate mast, as bow-sprit for forwarding 3 the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain is, as sex is, as moneys are, facts! facts, to be dealt with, as the sea is, the demand that they be played by, that they only can be, that they must be played by, said he, coldly, the ear! By ear, he sd. But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last, that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned? when even our bird, my roofs, cannot be heard when even you, when sound itself is neoned in? when, on the hill, over the water where she who used to sing, when the water glowed, black, gold, the tide outward, at evening when bells came like boats over the oil-slicks, milkweed hulls And a man slumped, attentionless, against pink shingles o sea city) 4 one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born born of yourself, born of hay and cotton struts, of street-pickings, wharves, weeds you carry in, my bird of a bone of a fish of a straw, or will of a color, of a bell of yourself, torn 5 love is not easy but how shall you know, New England, now that pejorocracy is here, how that street-cars, o Oregon, twitter in the afternoon offend a black-gold loin? how shall you strike, o swordsman, the blue-red black when, last night, your aim was mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick And not the cribbage game? (o Gloucester-man, weave your birds and fingers new, your roof-tops, clean shit upon racks sunned on American braid with others like you, such extricable surface as faun and oral, satyr lesbos vase o kill kill kill kill kill those who advertise you out) 6 in! in! the bow-sprit, bird, the beak in, the bend is, in, goes in, the form that which you make, what holds, which is the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what you must be, what the force can throw up, can, right now hereinafter erect, the mast, the mast, the tender mast! The nest, I say, to you, I Maximus, say under the hand, as I see it, over the waters from this place where I am, where I hear, can still hear from where I carry you a feather as though, sharp, I picked up in the afternoon delivered you a jewel, it flashing more than a wing, than any old romantic thing, than memory, than place, than anything other than that which you carry than that which is, call it a nest, around the head of, call it the next second than that which you can do!

As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being! I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered about my mother, some of them taking care to pass beneath the beam of the movie projector, some record playing on the victrola, and all of them desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell I turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it, there?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor poor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations of brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard displays, the dead roaming from one to another as bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed to mere equipments my mother, as alive as ever she was, asleep when I entered the house as I often found her in a rocker under the lamp, and awaking, as I came up to her, as she ever had I found out she returns to the house once a week, and with her the throng of the unknown young who center on her as much in death as other like suited and dressed people did in life O the dead! and the Indian woman and I enabled the blue deer to walk and the blue deer talked, in the next room, a Negro talk it was like walking a jackass, and its talk was the pressing gabber of gammers of old women and we helped walk it around the room because it was seeking socks or shoes for its hooves now that it was acquiring human possibilities In the five hindrances men and angels stay caught in the net, in the immense nets which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels and the demons and men go up and down Walk the jackass Hear the victrola Let the automobile be tucked into a corner of the white fence when it is a white chair. Purity is only an instant of being, the trammels recur In the five hindrances, perfection is hidden I shall get to the place 10 minutes late. It will be 20 minutes of 9. And I don’t know, without the car, how I shall get there O peace, my mother, I do not know how differently I could have done what I did or did not do. That you are back each week that you fall asleep with your face to the right that you are present there when I come in as you were when you were alive that you are as solid, and your flesh is as I knew it, that you have the company I am used to your having but o, that you all find it such a cheapness! o peace, mother, for the mammothness of the comings and goings of the ladders of life The nets we are entangled in. Awake, my soul, let the power into the last wrinkle of  being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires be left upon the earth. Let even your mother go. Let there be only paradise The desperateness is, that the instant which is also paradise (paradise is happiness) dissolves into the next instant, and power flows to meet the next occurrence Is it any wonder my mother comes back? Do not that throng rightly seek the room where they might expect happiness? They did not complain of life, they obviously wanted the movie, each other, merely to pass among each other there, where the real is, even to the display cards, to be out of hell The poverty of hell O souls, in life and in death, make, even as you sleep, even in sleep know what wind even under the crankcase of the ugly automobile lifts it away, clears the sodden weights of goods, equipment, entertainment, the foods the Indian woman, the filthy blue deer, the 4 by 3 foot ‘Viewbook,’ the heaviness of the old house, the stuffed inner room lifts the sodden nets and they disappear as ghosts do, as spider webs, nothing before the hand of man The vent! You must have the vent, or you shall die. Which means never to die, the ghastliness of going, and forever coming back, returning to the instants which were not lived O mother, this I could not have done, I could not have lived what you didn’t, I am myself netted in my own being I want to die. I want to make that instant, too, perfect O my soul, slip the cog II The death in life (death itself) is endless, eternity is the false cause The knot is other wise, each topological corner presents itself, and no sword cuts it, each knot is itself its fire each knot of which the net is made is for the hands to untake the knot’s making. And touch alone can turn the knot into its own flame (o mother, if you had once touched me o mother, if I had once touched you) The car did not burn. Its underside was not presented to me a grotesque corpse. The old man merely removed it as I looked up at it, and put it in a corner of the picket fence like was it my mother’s white dog? or a child’s chair The woman, playing on the grass, with her son (the woman next door) was angry with me whatever it was slipped across the playpen or whatever she had out there on the grass And I was quite flip in reply that anyone who used plastic had to expect things to skid and break, that I couldn’t worry that her son might have been hurt by whatever it was I sent skidding down on them. It was just then I went into my house and to my utter astonishment found my mother sitting there as she always had sat, as must she always forever sit there her head lolling into sleep? Awake, awake my mother what wind will lift you too forever from the tawdriness, make you rich as all those souls crave crave crave to be rich? They are right. We must have what we want. We cannot afford not to. We have only one course: the nets which entangle us are flames O souls, burn alive, burn now that you may forever have peace, have what you crave O souls, go into everything, let not one knot pass through your fingers let not any they tell you you must sleep as the net comes through your authentic hands What passes is what is, what shall be, what has been, what hell and heaven is is earth to be rent, to shoot you through the screen of flame which each knot hides as all knots are a wall ready to be shot open by you the nets of being are only eternal if you sleep as your hands ought to be busy. Method, method I too call on you to come to the aid of all men, to women most who know most, to woman to tell men to awake. Awake, men, awake I ask my mother to sleep. I ask her to stay in the chair. My chair is in the corner of the fence. She sits by the fireplace made of paving stones. The blue deer need not trouble either of us. And if she sits in happiness the souls who trouble her and me will also rest. The automobile has been hauled away.