Donald Revell

If we meet each other in Hell it’s not Hell. — Geoffrey Hill i How is it I can never find Or call to mind One image of Christ walking slowly in the rain, In a steady, gentle rain, The kind that shapes an afterimage Just for a moment of the man Like a cloak of shadow following Or like a blank page After it’s been turned? The dead are concealed from us But not distorted by the rain. They remember our having remembered. A woman curls up on the sofa. Years before the fact she sleeps Her death and drapes it Even now, exactly as she must. Just after dawn, In the wren’s eye There are no blossoms left in the trees, And yet the sunlight blazons white New flowers onto every leaf. The wren’s eye gorges itself, Bursting the new life. The memory of a tree is the tree. Christ could fly. Impale upon him certain words Good as Greek For the impulse of the earth is to seek A language of flowers That do not die, turning A hair’s breadth toward us Even now, exactly as they must. If it was justice I saw Fall from the sun Onto boys ruining the one Flower shared between them, So be it. The woman on the sofa wears a little wing In her sleep. When she awakes, Its twin will be the wren in the dream Nearly there, nearly all the way There into the human day. Rain falls out of brilliant sunshine. For a moment, her window Fills with catastrophe, boys Torn apart and scattered, white petals Blackening the glass, Exacting recent justice. So strange that the recent past, As chaste As antiquity, as the orangery Of a blind eye, should at once appear Preposterous Yet achingly tender. Modern times are too cautious. The boyish, florid love of catastrophe Has thrust a fist into the dawn, And the scent of that fist, Whose citron betters daylight, Is wasted on modern times. Not long ago, you and I Nearly captured a wren. Christ lifted His face then, And rain fell all day until evening. ii In a corner of my garden, there is a spider’s web Entirely armored in rose petals broken off by rain. The spider will learn to eat roses, or he will starve to death. This is political economy for modern times. The planet dies. The planet starves its cruel interiors First, with a blazon of colors and soft poetry. Next, It apportions one small bird to every tree and sets fire To the trees. The rest is the cold business of the oceans Who have never forgiven us for breathing air. Homer was tempted. Loose thighs of oblivion Welcomed humanity away from itself and from life, And only one of the Bronze-Age host refused that welcome. He was the father of starvation, entirely armored In the disguise of a real man, destroyer of oceans. We have made ugly war upon distinctions. Canon bleeds a wedding into the gigue, and “when I try to imagine a faultless love or” the seedtime Of my deepest convictions — that the soul is immortal, That a woman couched upon a fragile little wing Created the creator of the universe — thought, Or rather the entire machinery of truth and terror Usurps a newborn king, i.e. imagination. Phaedrus, step down. There is a little wing wearing sunshine Like wind in the white hair of the bee you never imagined. An infinitesimal distance goes on forever. At the moment of death, the light hand of Attic stele Softly lights upon the shoulder of eternity, And thought yields to flesh and flesh yields to imagination, Sexing this or that unimaginable creation With new hair. It makes a difference. We are bound to one another And to God by harrowing, albeit helpless distinctions, Impossible to bridge, imperative to love well. We are free, but briefly. The pattern of a leaf branches Out from human hearts, and the blood spills Into the pattern a stone makes crashing into windshields. God follows. The wrist and wing of the beloved follow Close behind, and not even Hell prevails against This new extinction. Slow time is the beginning Of no time at all. The light hand of Attic stele Wrests me from the sleep I’d imagined life to be — The walking stone, the irreparable Gethsemane — And I am awake, wearing a green flesh newly fashioned From my heart. coda Should the bird outlast the blossom in the tree? Keep faith, but keep it silently, Starveling. I keenly remember there were two of us, And a stand of poplars like a kiss Quavering Upon the shade of the earth where no earth was Ready to bear the weight of us Relinquishing Soul for substance, pistil of white campion For color, continuance and one Unbelieving Substance of perfect memory. There were no trees. The sun was shining.

It has never been so easy to cry openly or to acknowledge children. Never before could I walk directly to the center of an island city feeling the automatism of millions drawing one pious breath, shouldering the sunset, holding it up in the oily tree-line a while longer. Years ago, I was never sad enough and nothing but a hotel that I could tear to pieces and reconstruct inside a shoebox felt like home. My parents died. Their miserable possessions washed up in other hotels, dioramas of the febrile romantic. I take my first lover, already gray at her temples and more reticent than shy, more tacit than admiring, to the bus stop by the Jewish Museum. We wait in the dark a long time. She does not kiss me. She hurries up out of the oily street onto the humming, fluorescent podium of the last bus where I see her a last time, not waving to me, not lovable, erect in the freedom we traduced years ago in our first kiss. Never deny the power of withdrawal. Never doubt that thought and time make things small. Never refuse the easy exit line or prescribed uncomprehending gesture. At childhood’s end, none can tell happiness from buoyancy. None of it made any difference— the patricides, the hotels ill-constructed, the inconstant starlight of drugs and rebellion. We are no more complicated than our great-grandparents who dreaded the hotel life. Like them, we seek the refuge of warm days in January, a piety whose compulsion is to survive according to explicit laws no young woman adores or young man follows with darling hunger.

It doesn’t matter A damn what’s playing— In the dead of winter You go, days of 1978— 79, and we went Because the soldiers were beautiful And doomed as Asian jungles Kept afire Christ-like In the hopeless war I did not go to in the end Because it ended. The 20 th century? It was a war Between peasants on the one side, Hallucinations on the other. A peasant is a fire that burns But is not consumed. His movie never ends. It will be beautiful Every winter of our lives, my love, As Christ crushes fire into his wounds And the wounds are a jungle. Equally, no matter when their movies end, Hallucinations destroy the destroyers. That’s all. There has never been a President of the United States. And the 21 st century? Hallucination vs. hallucination In cold battle, in dubious battle, No battle at all because the peasants Have gone away far Into the lost traveler’s dream, Into a passage from Homer, A woodcutter’s hillside Peacetime superstition movie. On a cold night, Hector. On a cold night, Achilles. Around the savage and the maniac The woodcutter draws a ring of fire. It burns all winter long. He never tires of it And for good reason: Every face of the flames is doomed and beautiful; Every spark that shoots out into the freezing air Is God’s truth Given us all over again In the bitter weather of men’s Hallucinations. There has never been A President of the United States. There has never been a just war. There has never been any life Beyond this circle of firelight Until now if now is no dream but an Asia.

Unreal precision of the houses at first light

I am so lonely for the twentieth century, for the deeply felt, obscene graffiti of armed men and the beautiful bridges that make them so small and carry them into the hearts of cities written like words across nothing, the dense void history became in my beautiful century. When a man talks reason, he postpones something. He gets in the way of a machine that knows him for the sad vengeance he is, somewhere close to the bald name of his city. "New York" means "strike back." "Attica" means "strike back" and so does anyplace in the world in the huge eyes and tender hands of my century. I went to the capital. I had a banner, and there were thousands of people like me. There was an airplane, and for a moment heavy with laurel and sprays of peach blossom something that has never happened before stretched like a woman's shadow on a hedge between the plane and the people who saw it flying. It was the real name of the century. It told everyone to strike back until there was no reason in the world except a machine stalled overhead that knows everyone and is as delicate as peach blossom. But the poor years come too late.

The last snow is baited. Where the future shatters it unbends. The dry bed of entirety, where the sun bends, shatters. I was not afraid to tell you: unobscene at the first and then the third horizon, a copse-mountain opened so near to me I weighed nothing, and you laid the flower in my mouth. These are not animals. These are the partial genocides deeply uncompensated. Under the grass there is nothing but water and two wings.

Some motionless conflict in the sky As of Milton’s angels painted there In all their radiance and red malice It is a special happiness and universal Simply to know the names of colors And to see them said She mixed the colors for house painters That was Binghamton Rochester Indianapolis I’ll take less luck if it means less stink she said A special happiness When clouds contest with clouds In fixed flamboyance Good versus Evil or beautiful cold hair God loosed angels on us and they are the air

What are my friends? Mouths, not eyes for Bitterest underflesh of the farewell. I was a man and suffered like a girl. I spoke underneath to where the lights are Pretty, pretty, pretty whence they came to tell One God gets another. My friends are Mouths for God, tearing me. In such a world Broken only daughter opens to splendor. My first thought was that dying is a deep well Into the image of death, a many of one girl. Later it meant to smile with no face, where Mirrors are mouths. Cupid and Psyche wore Blindfolds made of glass, which explains why girls Get to heaven early mornings Adam fell. Gods after gods we go. Still later, Friends shouldered high mountains to the lee shore. Gashed, and the gash a fountain of waters, The landscape defames a single flower: Amaranth. Magic hides an island world Of boys and one daughter. I buried a pearl In God’s eye. And yet He sees her, Defames her, considers His time well Spent imagining a continent of flowers Whose final climate is a broken girl. Bells of a Cretan woman in labor Hurled from a tower, flesh realer Than the ground she somehow upwards curled Into the bloom of her groin where bells Are bees. I am an old man with a new beard. I am the offspring of my child sprung from hell. Shipwreck makes peninsular metaphor Out of my hatred, her rape, and one bell tower. Confusion suicides the poems, heaven I heard Where the juice runs from stone-struck flowers. At the end of the world I must use proper Violence. Nothing is more true to tell. Tell the taut-strung higher calendars I’ve a margent in mind and new words Hope to say, catastrophe to hear, Old confederates and inwood apples Where apples never shone. Also tell Of mountains shouldered underneath one flower Called amaranth. They tired of the world Who made the world this way. God never Did, never will. If you were to call From the bottom of the ocean, the words, Every one to me a living daughter, Would shout wild mercy as never was before.

(variations on the testimony and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1637-1638) I. Given to sweet motion the wilderness believes one fair one of flowers to be a moral blossom. We go so far. Walks now, only legend remaining. "I came afterwards to the window when you was writing." But in their documents her judges had written "Insolent." In its branches spirit shelters air with wailing. The air thunders unavailingly there. "Fear is a snare. Why should I be afraid." If I was in error but not mistaken, if my glass was gone but not broken (defaced) 2. My path illuminates all the interior of a dusky mirror, the left shoulder higher than the right is in memory's intricate. We must study distinctions aftertimes will adore. if the glass be taken away, we shall see more. God is going. Walks now, only God remaining. (wanting) an immediate promise He will deliver them (wanting)         in a day of trouble These emotions she retained in the universal heart, in a new eye: rational charity active piety appearing as blindness appears in the face in bright sunlight exactly like a smile. 3. "Here is a great stir about graces and looking to hearts, but give me Christ. Tell me not of meditations and duties, but tell me of Christ." Christ is one thing. The soul is another the wild outskirt of the earth will prove the ruin of. And mischief, the poor babe, grew in the forest. (defaced) A stick a bunch of rags a flower need no transformation. The hour given to sweet motion is a soul. I came to the window when God was going. In low condition, little number and remoteness things outbreaks of temper had a kind of value and even a comfort. 4. A memory a promise or a flower sheared away was not made but taken from a bush of wild roses. Seeing them, she began to cry out for a red rose. "God has left me to distinguish between the voice of my Beloved and John Baptist and Antichrist." But daybreak unites what belongs together, and there are two kinds of distinction. There are (something wanting) "What he declares he does not know himself." I know a day of small and a day of infancy. At the window vividly just now and entirely inarticulate the form given to sweet motion broke apart and there's colors all kinds all round. 5. Of realities surrounding us, their pith and substance was wasted wronged misplaced. "I desire to speak to our teacher." In a state of desire, what belongs together ignores the barriers. Daybreak have you any word your own or I one fair one remaining? God is gone, only a window and a wilderness remaining, not made but taken, thinnest fantasy of beginnings taken from a bush of wild red roses.

All their songs are of one hour Before dawn, when the birds begin. I sing another. In helpless midday, at the hour Even sparrows have no heart to shrill Comes news . . . Suddenly, the unimaginable Needs imagination and finds none. Violet ocean only nothing. Smoke of thyme and of cedar, Ornate birds, nothing. Even a god who came here, Hearing a sweet voice, Would find only old fires now, Brittle in the blackened trees. She was mast and sail. She was A stillness pregnant with motion, Adorable to me as, all my life, I have hidden a cruel, secret ocean In sinews and in sleep and cowardice. She forgave me. Once, she wept for me. Our child died then, and she is with him.