Denise Levertov

This person would be an animal. This animal would be large, at least as large as a workhorse. It would chew cud, like cows, having several stomachs. No one could follow it into the dense brush to witness its mating habits. Hidden by fur, its sex would be hard to determine. Definitely it would discourage investigation. But it would be, if not teased, a kind, amiable animal, confiding as a chickadee. Its intelligence would be of a high order, neither human nor animal, elvish. And it would purr, though of course, it being a house, you would sit in its lap, not it in yours.

My wedding-ring lies in a basket as if at the bottom of a well. Nothing will come to fish it back up and onto my finger again. It lies among keys to abandoned houses, nails waiting to be needed and hammered into some wall, telephone numbers with no names attached, idle paperclips. It can’t be given away for fear of bringing ill-luck It can’t be sold for the marriage was good in its own time, though that time is gone. Could some artificer beat into it bright stones, transform it into a dazzling circlet no one could take for solemn betrothal or to make promises living will not let them keep? Change it into a simple gift I could give in friendship?

How gray and hard the brown feet of the wretched of the earth. How confidently the crippled from birth push themselves through the streets, deep in their lives. How seamed with lines of fate the hands of women who sit at streetcorners offering seeds and flowers. How lively their conversation together. How much of death they know. I am tired of ‘the fine art of unhappiness.’

To lie back under the tallest oldest trees. How far the stems rise, rise before ribs of shelter open! To live in the mercy of God. The complete sentence too adequate, has no give. Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of stony wood beneath lenient moss bed. And awe suddenly passing beyond itself. Becomes a form of comfort. Becomes the steady air you glide on, arms stretched like the wings of flying foxes. To hear the multiple silence of trees, the rainy forest depths of their listening. To float, upheld, as salt water would hold you, once you dared. . To live in the mercy of God. To feel vibrate the enraptured waterfall flinging itself unabating down and down to clenched fists of rock. Swiftness of plunge, hour after year after century, O or Ah uninterrupted, voice many-stranded. To breathe spray. The smoke of it. Arcs of steelwhite foam, glissades of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion— rage or joy? Thus, not mild, not temperate, God’s love for the world. Vast flood of mercy flung on resistance.

The old wooden steps to the front door where I was sitting that fall morning when you came downstairs, just awake, and my joy at sight of you (emerging into golden day— the dew almost frost) pulled me to my feet to tell you how much I loved you: those wooden steps are gone now, decayed replaced with granite, hard, gray, and handsome. The old steps live only in me: my feet and thighs remember them, and my hands still feel their splinters. Everything else about and around that house brings memories of others—of marriage, of my son. And the steps do too: I recall sitting there with my friend and her little son who died, or was it the second one who lives and thrives? And sitting there ‘in my life,’ often, alone or with my husband. Yet that one instant, your cheerful, unafraid, youthful, ‘I love you too,’ the quiet broken by no bird, no cricket, gold leaves spinning in silence down without any breeze to blow them, is what twines itself in my head and body across those slabs of wood that were warm, ancient, and now wait somewhere to be burnt.

The red eyes of rabbits aren't sad. No one passes the sad golden village in a barge any more. The sunset will leave it alone. If the curtains hang askew it is no one's fault. Around and around and around everywhere the same sound of wheels going, and things growing older, growing silent. If the dogs bark to each other all night, and their eyes flash red, that's nobody's business. They have a great space of dark to bark across. The rabbits will bare their teeth at the spring moon.

‘That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed. ‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’ Something about his brother dying. The serfs’ punishments have not ceased to suppurate on their backs. Woodlots. People. Someone crying under the yellow autumn birchgrove drove him wild: A new set of resolves: When gambling, that almost obsolete fever, or three days with the gypsies sparked him into pure ego, he could, just the same, write home, ‘Sell them.’ It’s true. ‘Still,’ (someone who loved her said, cold and firm while she dissolved, hypocrite, in self disgust,lectrice) ‘Still, he kept on. He wrote all that he wrote; and seems to have understood better than most of us: to be human isn’t easy. It’s not easy to be a serf or a master and learn that art. It takes nerve. Bastard. Fink. Yet the grief trudging behind his funeral, he earned.’

I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of death, the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring and howling, howling, nevertheless I see for a moment that's not it: it is the First Things. Word after word floats through the glass. Towards me.

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry. I who don’t know the secret wrote the line. They told me (through a third person) they had found it but not what it was not even what line it was. No doubt by now, more than a week later, they have forgotten the secret, the line, the name of the poem. I love them for finding what I can’t find, and for loving me for the line I wrote, and for forgetting it so that a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, for assuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all.

I am angry with X, with Y, with Z, for not being you. Enthusiasms jump at me, wagging and barking. Go away. Go home. I am angry with my eyes for not seeing you, they smart and ache and see the snow, an insistent brilliance. If I were Psyche how could I not bring the lamp to our bedside? I would have known in advance all the travails my gazing would bring, more than Psyche ever imagined, and even so, how could I not have raised the amber flame to see the human person I knew was to be revealed. She did not even know! She dreaded a beast and discovered a god. But I know, and hunger to witness again the form of mortal love itself. I am angry with everything that is filling the space of your absence, breathing your air. Psyche, how blessed you were in the dark, knowing him in your flesh: I was wrong! If I were Psyche I would live on in darkness, and endure the foolish voices, barking of aeolian dogs, the desert glitter of days full of boring treasures, walking on precious stones till my feet hurt, to hold you each night and be held close in your warmth in a pitchblack cave of a room and not have to wait for Mercury, dressed in the sad gray coat of a mailman and no wings on his feet, to bring me your words.