George Oppen

The householder issuing to the street Is adrift a moment in that ice stiff Exterior. ‘Peninsula Low lying in the bay And wooded—’ Native now Are the welder and the welder’s arc In the subway’s iron circuits: We have not escaped each other, Not in the forest, not here. The crippled girl hobbles Painfully in the new depths Of the subway, and painfully We shift our eyes. The bare rails And black walls contain Labor before her birth, her twisted Precarious birth and the men Laborious, burly—She sits Quiet, her eyes still. Slowly, Deliberately she sees An anchor’s blunt fluke sink Thru coins and coin machines, The ancient iron and the voltage In the iron beneath us in the child’s deep Harbors into harbor sand.

I remember a square of New York’s Hudson River glinting between warehouses. Difficult to approach the water below the pier Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier A steel wall: tons in the water, Width. The hand for holding, Legs for walking, The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air! Become the realm of nations. My love, my love, We are endangered Totally at last. Look Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space Which is viviparous: Place of the mind And eye. Which can destroy us, Re-arrange itself, assert Its own stone chain reaction.

‘out of poverty to begin again’    impoverished of tone of pose that common wealth of parlance   Who so poor the words would   with   and take on substantial meaning   handholds   footholds to dig in one’s heels   sliding hands and heels beyond the residential lots   the plots   it is a poem which may be sung may well be sung

5 THE TRANSLUCENT MECHANICS Combed thru the piers the wind Moves in the clever city Not in the doors but the hinges Finds the secret of motion As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices,   murmurs Flaws In the wind Fear        fear At the lumber mastheads And fetched a message out of the sea again Say angel                say powers Obscurely   ‘things And the self’ Prosody Sings In the stones to entrust To a poetry of statement At close quarters A living mind ‘and that one’s own’ what then             what spirit Of the bent seas Archangel of the tide brimming in the moon-streak comes in whose absence earth crumbles 6 Silver as The needle’s eye Of the horizon in the noise Of their entrance row on row the waves Move landward        conviction’s Net of branches In the horde of events the sacred swarm avalanche Masked in the sunset Needle after needle more numerous than planets Or the liquid waves In the tide rips We believe       we believe Beyond the cable car streets And the picture window Lives the glittering crumbling night Of obstructions and the stark structures That carry wires over the mountain One writes in the presence of something Moving close to fear I dare pity no one Let the rafters pity The air in the room Under the rafters Pity In the continual sound Are chords Not yet struck Which will be struck Nevertheless yes 7 O withering seas Of the doorstep and local winds unveil The face of art Carpenter, plunge and drip in the sea Art’s face We know that face More blinding than the sea    a haunted house    a limited Consensus unwinding Its powers Toward the thread’s end In the record of great blows   shocks Ravishment   devastation   the wood splintered The keyboard gone in the rank grass swept her hand Over the strings and the thing rang out Over the rocks and the ocean Not my poem   Mr Steinway’s Poem   Not mine   A ‘marvelous’ object Is not the marvel of things twisting the new Mouth   forcing the new Tongue   But it rang 8 THE TASTE Old ships are preserved For their queer silence of obedient seas Their cutwaters floating in the still water With their cozy black iron work And Swedish seamen dead    the cabins Hold the spaces of their deaths And the hammered nails of necessity Carried thru the oceans Where the moon rises grandly In the grandeur of cause We have a taste for bedrock Beneath this spectacle To gawk at Something is wrong with the antiques, a black fluid Has covered them, a black splintering Under the eyes of young wives People talk wildly, we are beginning to talk wildly, the wind At every summit Our overcoats trip us Running for the bus Our arms stretched out In a wind from what were sand dunes 9 THE IMPOSSIBLE POEM Climbing the peak of Tamalpais the loose Gravel underfoot And the city shining with the tremendous wrinkles In the hills and the winding of the bay Behind it, it faces the bent ocean Streetcars Rocked thru the city and the winds Combed their clumsy sides In clumsy times Sierras withering Behind the storefronts And sanity the roadside weed Dreams of sports and sportsmanship In the lucid towns paralyzed Under the truck tires Shall we relinquish Sanity to redeem Fragments and fragmentary Histories in the towns and the temperate streets Too shallow still to drown in or to mourn The courageous and precarious children 10 BUT SO AS BY FIRE The darkness of trees Guards this life Of the thin ground That covers the rock ledge Among the lanes and magic Of the Eastern woods The beauty of silence And broken boughs And the homes of small animals The green leaves Of young plants Above the dark green moss In the sweet smell of rot The pools and the trickle of freshwater First life,   rotting life Hidden starry life it is not yet A mirror Like our lives We have gone As far as is possible Whose lives reflect light Like mirrors One had not thought To be afraid Not of shadow but of light Summon one’s powers

1 Moving over the hills, crossing the irrigation canals perfect and profuse in the mountains the streams of women and men walking under the high- tension wires over the brown hills in the multiple world of the fly

This Earth the king said Looking at the ground; This England. But we drive A Sunday paradise Of parkway, trees flow into trees and the grass Like water by the very asphalt crown And summit of things In the flow of traffic The family cars, in the dim Sound of the living The noise of increase to which we owe What we possess. We cannot reconcile ourselves. No one is reconciled, tho we spring From the ground together— And we saw the seed, The minuscule Sequoia seed In the museum by the tremendous slab Of the tree. And imagined the seed In soil and the growth quickened So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green Needles of a redwood until the tree Stood in the room without soil— How much of the earth's Crust has lived The seed’s violence! The shock is metaphysical. For the wood weathers. Drift wood And the foot print in the forest grow older. This is not our time, not what we mean, it is a time Passing, the curl at the cutwater, The enormous prow Outside in the weather. In that breeze, The sense of that passage, Is desertion, Betrayal, that we are not innocent Of loneliness as Pierrot, Pierrette chattering Unaware tho we imagine nothing Beyond the streets of the living— A sap in the limbs. Mary, Mary, we turn to the children As they will turn to the children Wanting so much to have created happiness As if a stem to the leaves— —we had camped in scrub, A scrub of the past, the fringes of towns Neither towns nor forest, nothing ours. And Linda five, Maybe six when the mare grazing In the meadow came to her. ‘Horse,’ she said, whispering By the roadside With the cars passing. Little girl welcomed, Learning welcome. The rest is— Whatever—whatever—remote Mechanics, endurance, The piers of the city In the sea. Here are whole buildings Razed, whole blocks Of a city gone Among old streets And the old boroughs, ourselves Among these streets where Petra beat A washpan out her window gathering A crowd like a rescue. Relief, As they said it, The Relief. Petra Decisive suddenly among her children In those crumbling bedrooms, Petra, Petra—. And how imagine it? or imagine Coughlin in the streets, Pelley and the Silver Shirts? The medieval sense seems innocent, the very Ceremony of innocence that was drowned. It was not. But how imagine it Of streets boarded and vacant where no time will hatch Now chairs and walls, Floors, roofs, the joists and beams, The woodwork, window sills In sun in a great weight of brick.

Veritas sequitur ... In the small beauty of the forest The wild deer bedding down— That they are there! Their eyes Effortless, the soft lips Nuzzle and the alien small teeth Tear at the grass The roots of it Dangle from their mouths Scattering earth in the strange woods. They who are there. Their paths Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them Hang in the distances Of sun The small nouns Crying faith In this in which the wild deer Startle, and stare out.

I dreamed myself of their people, I am of their people, I thought they watched me that I watched them that they watched the sun and the clouds for the cities are no longer mine    image    images of existence    (or song of myself?)    and the roads for the light in the rear-view mirror is not death but the light of other lives tho if I stumble on a rock I speak of rock if I am to say    anything      anything if I am to tell of myself    splendor of the roads    secrecy of paths for a word like a glass sphere encloses the word opening and opening myself and I am sick for a moment with fear let the magic infants speak we who have brought steel and stone again and again into the cities in that word blind word must speak and speak the magic infants’ speech driving northward the populist north slowly in the sunrise the lapping of shallow waters tongues of the inlets glisten like fur in the low tides all that childhood envied the sounds of the ocean over the flatlands poems piers foolhardy structures and the lives the ingenious lives the winds squall from the grazing ranches’ wandering fences young workmen’s loneliness on the structures has touched and touched the heavy tools    tools in our hands in the clamorous country birth- light savage light of the landscape magic page the magic infants speak

1 There are things We live among ‘and to see them Is to know ourselves’. Occurrence, a part Of an infinite series, The sad marvels; Of this was told A tale of our wickedness. It is not our wickedness. ‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’ 2 So spoke of the existence of things, An unmanageable pantheon Absolute, but they say Arid. A city of the corporations Glassed In dreams And images— And the pure joy Of the mineral fact Tho it is impenetrable As the world, if it is matter, Is impenetrable. 3 The emotions are engaged Entering the city As entering any city. We are not coeval With a locality But we imagine others are, We encounter them. Actually A populace flows Thru the city. This is a language, therefore, of New York 4 For the people of that flow Are new, the old New to age as the young To youth And to their dwelling For which the tarred roofs And the stoops and doors— A world of stoops— Are petty alibi and satirical wit Will not serve. 5 The great stone Above the river In the pylon of the bridge ‘1875’ Frozen in the moonlight In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing, Which loves itself 6 We are pressed, pressed on each other, We will be told at once Of anything that happens And the discovery of fact bursts In a paroxysm of emotion Now as always.   Crusoe We say was ‘Rescued’. So we have chosen. 7 Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. 8 Amor fati The love of fate For which the city alone Is audience Perhaps blasphemous. Slowly over islands, destinies Moving steadily pass And change In the thin sky Over islands Among days Having only the force Of days Most simple Most difficult 9 ‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’ I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry To dream of that beach For the sake of an instant in the eyes, The absolute singular The unearthly bonds Of the singular Which is the bright light of shipwreck 10 Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing. Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it. 11 it is that light Seeps anywhere, a light for the times In which the buildings Stand on low ground, their pediments Just above the harbor Absolutely immobile, Hollow, available, you could enter any building, You could look from any window One might wave to himself From the top of the Empire State Building— Speak If you can Speak Phyllis—not neo-classic, The girl’s name is Phyllis— Coming home from her first job On the bus in the bare civic interior Among those people, the small doors Opening on the night at the curb Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness— So small a picture, A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us I too am in love down there with the streets And the square slabs of pavement— To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks And it is not ‘art’ 12 ‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’ the rain falls that had not been falling and it is the same world . . . They made small objects Of wood and the bones of fish And of stone. They talked, Families talked, They gathered in council And spoke, carrying objects. They were credulous, Their things shone in the forest. They were patient With the world. This will never return, never, Unless having reached their limits They will begin over, that is, Over and over 13 unable to begin At the beginning, the fortunate Find everything already here. They are shoppers, Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal is without issue, a dead end. They develop Argument in order to speak, they become unreal, unreal, life loses solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game because baseball is not a game but an argument and difference of opinion makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger One’s soul. There is change In an air That smells stale, they will come to the end Of an era First of all peoples And one may honorably keep His distance If he can. 14 I cannot even now Altogether disengage myself From those men With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents, In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies Of blasted roads in a ruined country, Among them many men More capable than I— Muykut and a sergeant Named Healy, That lieutenant also— How forget that? How talk Distantly of ‘The People’ Who are that force Within the walls Of cities Wherein their cars Echo like history Down walled avenues In which one cannot speak. 15 Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me So that I will exist, find my navel So that it will exist, find my nipples So that they will exist, find every hair Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad), Find me.’ 16 ‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat, and only he who was troubled shall find rest, and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved, and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat. . . but he who will work shall give birth to his own father.’ 17 The roots of words Dim in the subways There is madness in the number Of the living ‘A state of matter’ There is nobody here but us chickens Anti-ontology— He wants to say His life is real, No one can say why It is not easy to speak A ferocious mumbling, in public Of rootless speech 18 It is the air of atrocity, An event as ordinary As a President. A plume of smoke, visible at a distance In which people burn. 19 Now in the helicopters the casual will Is atrocious Insanity in high places, If it is true we must do these things We must cut our throats The fly in the bottle Insane, the insane fly Which, over the city Is the bright light of shipwreck 20 —They await War, and the news Is war As always That the juices may flow in them Tho the juices lie. Great things have happened On the earth and given it history, armies And the ragged hordes moving and the passions Of that death. But who escapes Death Among these riders Of the subway, They know But now as I know Failure and the guilt Of failure. As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas We might half-hope to find the animals In the sheds of a nation Kneeling at midnight, Farm animals, Draft animals, beasts for slaughter Because it would mean they have forgiven us, Or which is the same thing, That we do not altogether matter. 21 There can be a brick In a brick wall The eye picks So quiet of a Sunday Here is the brick, it was waiting Here when you were born Mary-Anne. 22 Clarity In the sense of transparence, I don’t mean that much can be explained Clarity in the sense of silence.

9 ‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’ I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry To dream of that beach For the sake of an instant in the eyes, The absolute singular The unearthly bonds Of the singular Which is the bright light of shipwreck 25 Strange that the youngest people I know Live in the oldest buildings Scattered about the city In the dark rooms Of the past—and the immigrants, The black Rectangular buildings Of the immigrants. They are the children of the middle class. ‘The pure products of America—’ Investing The ancient buildings Jostle each other In the half-forgotten, that ponderous business. This Chinese Wall. 26 They carry nativeness To a conclusion In suicide. We want to defend Limitation And do not know how. Stupid to say merely That poets should not lead their lives Among poets, They have lost the metaphysical sense Of the future, they feel themselves The end of a chain Of lives, single lives And we know that lives Are single And cannot defend The metaphysic On which rest The boundaries Of our distances. We want to say ‘Common sense’ And cannot. We stand on That denial Of death that paved the cities, Paved the cities Generation For generation and the pavement Is filthy as the corridors Of the police. How shall one know a generation, a new generation? Not by the dew on them! Where the earth is most torn And the wounds untended and the voices confused, There is the head of the moving column Who if they cannot find Their generation Wither in the infirmaries And the supply depots, supplying Irrelevant objects. Street lamps shine on the parked cars Steadily in the clear night It is true the great mineral silence Vibrates, hums, a process Completing itself In which the windshield wipers Of the cars are visible. The power of the mind, the Power and weight Of the mind which Is not enough, it is nothing And does nothing Against the natural world, Behemoth, white whale, beast They will say and less than beast, The fatal rock Which is the world— O if the streets Seem bright enough, Fold within fold Of residence ... Or see thru water Clearly the pebbles Of the beach Thru the water, flowing From the ripple, clear As ever they have been 29 My daughter, my daughter, what can I say Of living? I cannot judge it. We seem caught In reality together my lovely Daughter, I have a daughter But no child And it was not precisely Happiness we promised Ourselves; We say happiness, happiness and are not Satisfied. Tho the house on the low land Of the city Catches the dawn light I can tell myself, and I tell myself Only what we all believe True And in the sudden vacuum Of time ... ... is it not In fear the roots grip Downward And beget The baffling hierarchies Of father and child As of leaves on their high Thin twigs to shield us From time, from open Time