Denise Levertov

Though the road turn at last to death’s ordinary door, and we knock there, ready to enter and it opens easily for us, yet all the long journey we shall have gone in chains, fed on knowledge-apples acrid and riddled with grubs. We taste other food that life, like a charitable farm-girl, holds out to us as we pass— but our mouths are puckered, a taint of ash on the tongue. It’s not joy that we’ve lost— wildfire, it flares in dark or shine as it will. What’s gone is common happiness, plain bread we could eat with the old apple of knowledge. That old one—it griped us sometimes, but it was firm, tart, sometimes delectable ... The ashen apple of these days grew from poisoned soil. We are prisoners and must eat our ration. All the long road in chains, even if, after all, we come to death’s ordinary door, with time smiling its ordinary long-ago smile.

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct. Gull feathers of glass, hidden in white pulp: the bones of squid which I pull out and lay blade by blade on the draining board— tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce the heart, but fragile, substance belying design.               Or a fruit,mamey, cased in rough brown peel, the flesh rose-amber, and the seed: the seed a stone of wood, carved and polished, walnut-colored, formed like a brazilnut, but large, large enough to fill the hungry palm of a hand. I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glow in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

A doll's hair concealing an eggshell skull delicately throbbing, within which maggots in voluptuous unrest jostle and shrug. Oh, Eileen, my big doll, your gold hair was not more sunny than this human fur, but your head was radiant in its emptiness, a small clean room. Her warm and rosy mouth is telling lies—she would believe them if she could believe: her pretty eyes search out corruption. Oh, Eileen how kindly your silence was, and what virtue shone in the opening and shutting of your ingenious blindness.

A voice from the dark called out, ‘The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster. Peace, not only the absence of war.’ But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can’t be imagined before it is made, can’t be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid. A feeling towards it, dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have until we begin to utter its metaphors, learning them as we speak. A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses . . . A cadence of peace might balance its weight on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence, an energy field more intense than war, might pulse then, stanza by stanza into the world, each act of living one of its words, each word a vibration of light—facets of the forming crystal.

Silent, about-to-be-parted-from house. Wood creaking, trying to sigh, impatient. Clicking of squirrel-teeth in the attic. Denuded beds, couches stripped of serapes. Deep snow shall block all entrances and oppress the roof and darken the windows.    O Lares, don’t leave. The house yawns like a bear. Guard its profound dreams for us, that it return to us when we return. November 1969

After I had cut off my hands and grown new ones something my former hands had longed for came and asked to be rocked. After my plucked out eyes had withered, and new ones grown something my former eyes had wept for came asking to be pitied.

Pale, then enkindled, light advancing, emblazoning summits of palm and pine, the dew lingering, scripture of scintillas. Soon the roar of mowers cropping the already short grass of lawns, men with long-nozzled cylinders of pesticide poking at weeds, at moss in cracks of cement, and louder roar of helicopters off to spray vineyards where braceros try to hold their breath, and in the distance, bulldozers, excavators, babel of destructive construction. Banded by deep oakshadow, airy shadow of eucalyptus, miner’s lettuce, tender, untasted, and other grass, unmown, luxuriant, no green more brilliant. Fragile paradise. .   .   .   . At day’s end the whole sky, vast, unstinting, flooded with transparent mauve, tint of wisteria, cloudless over the malls, the industrial parks, the homes with the lights going on, the homeless arranging their bundles. .   .   .   . Who can utter the poignance of all that is constantly threatened, invaded, expended and constantly nevertheless persists in beauty, tranquil as this young moon just risen and slowly drinking light from the vanished sun. Who can utter the praise of such generosity or the shame?

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt! And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees the sweet rain drifting through western air a white sweating bull of a poet told us our cunts are ugly—why didn't we admit we have thought so too? (And what shame? They are not for the eye!) No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy, caves of the Moon ...          And when a dark humming fills us, a coldness towards life, we are too much women to own to such unwomanliness. Whorishly with the psychopomp we play and plead—and say nothing of this later.             And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.

Genial poets, pink-faced earnest wits— you have given the world some choice morsels, gobbets of language presented as one presents T-bone steak and Cherries Jubilee. Goodbye, goodbye, I don’t care if I never taste your fine food again, neutral fellows, seers of every side. Tolerance, what crimes are committed in your name. And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread, blood donors. Your crumbs choke me, I would not want a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never falter: irresponsive to nightmare reality. It is my brothers, my sisters, whose blood spurts out and stops forever because you choose to believe it is not your business. Goodbye, goodbye, your poems shut their little mouths, your loaves grow moldy, a gulf has split the ground between us, and you won’t wave, you’re looking another way. We shan’t meet again— unless you leap it, leaving behind you the cherished worms of your dispassion, your pallid ironies, your jovial, murderous, wry-humored balanced judgment, leap over, un- balanced? ... then how our fanatic tears would flow and mingle for joy ...

As the stores close, a winter light opens air to iris blue, glint of frost through the smoke grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk. As the buildings close, released autonomous feet pattern the streets in hurry and stroll; balloon heads drift and dive above them; the bodies aren't really there. As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens, a woman with crooked heels says to another woman while they step along at a fair pace, "You know, I'm telling you, what I love best is life. I love life! Even if I ever get to be old and wheezy—or limp! You know? Limping along?—I'd still ... "