505 History and politics poems

(excerpt) Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, As but th’ off-scouring of the British sand; And so much earth as was contributed By English pilots when they heav’d the lead; Or what by th’ ocean’s slow alluvion fell, Of shipwrack’d cockle and the mussel-shell; This indigested vomit of the sea Fell to the Dutch by just propriety. Glad then, as miners that have found the ore, They with mad labour fish’d the land to shore; And div’d as desperately for each piece Of earth, as if’t had been of ambergris; Collecting anxiously small loads of clay, Less than what building swallows bear away; Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll, Transfusing into them their dunghill soul. How did they rivet, with gigantic piles, Thorough the centre their new-catched miles; And to the stake a struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forced ground; Building their watry Babel far more high To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky. Yet still his claim the injur’d ocean laid, And oft at leap-frog ore their steeples play’d: As if on purpose it on land had come To show them what’s their mare liberum. A daily deluge over them does boil; The earth and water play at level-coil; The fish oft-times the burgher dispossest, And sat not as a meat but as a guest; And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs saw Whole sholes of Dutch serv’d up for cabillau; Or as they over the new level rang’d For pickled herring, pickled heeren chang’d. Nature, it seem’d, asham’d of her mistake, Would throw their land away at duck and drake.

On seeing some pictures of the interior of his house, Washington, D.C. Only the casket left, the jewel gone Whose noble presence filled these stately rooms, And made this spot a shrine where pilgrims came— Stranger and friend—to bend in reverence Before the great, pure soul that knew no guile; To listen to the wise and gracious words That fell from lips whose rare, exquisite smile Gave tender beauty to the grand, grave face. Upon these pictured walls we see thy peers,— Poet, and saint, and sage, painter, and king,— A glorious band;—they shine upon us still; Still gleam in marble the enchanting forms Whereupon thy artist eye delighted dwelt; Thy favorite Psyche droops her matchless face, Listening, methinks, for the beloved voice Which nevermore on earth shall sound her praise. All these remain,—the beautiful, the brave, The gifted, silent ones; but thou art gone! Fair is the world that smiles upon us now; Blue are the skies of June, balmy the air That soothes with touches soft the weary brow; And perfect days glide into perfect nights,— Moonlit and calm; but still our grateful hearts Are sad, and faint with fear,— for thou art gone! Oh friend beloved, with longing, tear-filled eyes We look up, up to the unclouded blue, And seek in vain some answering sign from thee. Look down upon us, guide and cheer us still From the serene height where thou dwellest now; Dark is the way without the beacon light Which long and steadfastly thy hand upheld. Oh, nerve with courage new the stricken hearts Whose dearest hopes seem lost in losing thee.

Calm as that second summer which precedes The first fall of the snow, In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds, The City bides the foe. As yet, behind their ramparts stern and proud, Her bolted thunders sleep— Dark Sumter, like a battlemented cloud, Looms o’er the solemn deep. No Calpe frowns from lofty cliff or scar To guard the holy strand; But Moultrie holds in leash her dogs of war Above the level sand. And down the dunes a thousand guns lie couched, Unseen, beside the flood— Like tigers in some Orient jungle crouched That wait and watch for blood. Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade, Walk grave and thoughtful men, Whose hands may one day wield the patriot’s blade As lightly as the pen. And maidens, with such eyes as would grow dim Over a bleeding hound, Seem each one to have caught the strength of him Whose sword she sadly bound. Thus girt without and garrisoned at home, Day patient following day, Old Charleston looks from roof, and spire, and dome, Across her tranquil bay. Ships, through a hundred foes, from Saxon lands And spicy Indian ports, Bring Saxon steel and iron to her hands, And summer to her courts. But still, along you dim Atlantic line, The only hostile smoke Creeps like a harmless mist above the brine, From some frail, floating oak. Shall the spring dawn, and she still clad in smiles, And with an unscathed brow, Rest in the strong arms of her palm-crowned isles, As fair and free as now? We know not; in the temple of the Fates God has inscribed her doom; And, all untroubled in her faith, she waits The triumph or the tomb.

The Chichimecas are in the hills. They have built a huge bonfire. I am at my window with a telescope counting shadows flickering in front of the flames. There must be at least a thousand Chichimecas and their many dogs, for they are the dog people. Maybe there is only one Chichimeca and his dog pacing back and forth in front of the fire trying to make me think that there are one thousand Chichimecas in the hills. There are Chichimecas in the alley. They have taken down the street signs and built another bonfire—STOP, SCHOOL CROSSING, SLIPPERY WHEN WET, the Chichimecas are showing a preference for S’s slithering into smoke. The Chichimecas have broken into the abandoned train station from one of my poems. The one where the sound of the plastic tips of my shoelaces clicks against pavement like lobsters. They are cooking the lobsters in a steel drum. After they have devoured the lobsters, they lie down with their dogs. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff the dogs. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff the Chichimecas, for they have found aerosol paint cans and they are holding rags soaked with paint spray to their noses. This makes the moon come down. Chichi mommy,chichi mommy, chant the Chichimecas as they fall asleep in a pile with their many dogs. Chichi mommy as they snore and dream that the stars are dripping milk into their open mouths.

after Miller Williams This is to say we continued. As though continuing changed us. As though continuing brought happiness as we had known. On a dry field without cover, his skin blistered raw in the sun. Not one among us came, as though he had no relations. What did we say to our brother? How could we leave him alone while soldiers guarded his corpse as though precious to them? One of the women, in darkness, crept to the field where he died, prayed for him, covered him up. Dust over what was not dust. We would have ventured out with her if we had loved ourselves less. We had to think of our children, and he was not coming back. How could we live with the silence, live with our grief and our shame? Death did not heal what he suffered. He was making demands. We did not want him to be there, asking the question he asked us, changing the sound of his name. He had embarrassed us. This is the memory we carried, avoiding the thought that he remained face down among the charred grasses, holding the earth with his hands.

The aeroplane is shaped like a bird Or a giant mechanical penis My father escorts my mother From girlhood to unhappiness A dragonfly has iridescent wings Shorn, it’s a lowly pismire Plucked of arms and legs A throbbing red pepperpod Baby, she’s a girl Pinkly propped as a doll Baby, she’s a pearl An ulcer in the oyster of God Cry little baby clam cry The steam has opened your eyes Your secret darkly hidden The razor is sharpening the knife Abandoned taro-leaf boat Its lonely black sail broken The corpses are fat and bejeweled The hull is thoroughly rotten The worm has entered the ear And out the nose of my father Cleaned the pelvis of my mother And ringed around her fingerbone One child beats a bedpan One beats a fishhook out of wire One beats his half sister on the head Oh, teach us to fish and love Don’t say her boudoir is too narrow She could sleep but in one cold bed Don’t say you own many horses We escaped on her skinny mare’s back Man is good said Meng-Tzu We must cultivate their natures Man is evil said Hsun-Tzu There’s a worm in the human heart He gleaned a beaded purse from Hong Kong He procured an oval fan from Taiwan She married him for a green card He abandoned her for a blonde My grandmother is calling her goslings My mother is summoning her hens The sun has vanished into the ocean The moon has drowned in the fen Discs of jade for her eyelids A lozenge of pearl for her throat Lapis and kudzu in her nostrils They will rob her again and again

Heraldry and all its lovely language; I chose my time there learning elsewhere, where else than land, Landscape, and how to live, in it is not like, nothing is like, the colors or the snow, it is not like pearl and it is not like the glitter of rainwater that darkens the bark against which the occasional bloom-laden branch might be seen shedding petals. No. Here is the past: One was once a boy and read books and could not pronounce the most engaging words and read in silence under blankets. Here one was not like oneself or was quiet and wrong and did not know the words nor how to ask, who to ask. Nor why. Boy’s books with flags. Everyone’s born to the language; anyone can say something. For instance, knight banneret, that’s what she called him, having no use for him after history, she thrust him into the operatic night: A woman’s hand rose above the surface of the lake and caught the glistering sword, and slowly descended into the boy’s refuge, his astonishment, so foreign, so little like home Knights Baronets— inferior barons formed by James I in 1611, the titles were sold and the funds went toward the plantation of Ulster. For this one would receive the right to a Field argent, a sinister hand couped the wrist gules. How foreign she was when God still cared. This is like a life, like a history built fluently, as if on the innocent, Boy-books and children’s crusades: The Reading (al-Korân) versus The Writing (Scripture). Isn’t it interesting, east / west, us / them? Everyone’s born to something. You should have feared the flick of my uncle’s thick wrist and the boat rides when he took me in those days, salt water in the bay and hard slaps against the hull, back from a day of horizons, of shrimp nets, I would lie on the bow feeling anger against my whole boy’s body as the engines uttered their single syllable for twenty miles back to land, a whine more terrible than laughter. The oral tradition, a voice hard and horrifying. One might have been a chevalier. Like someone from the books, was she beautiful? Was your mother lovely and a kind of landscape herself, like snow in dark woods, not like anything else?

A Creole boy from the West Indies brought, To be in European learning taught, Some years before to Westminster he went, To a Preparatory school was sent. When from his artless tale the mistress found The child had not one friend on English ground, She ev’n as if she his own mother were, Made the dark Indian her particular care. Oft on her favourite’s future lot she thought; To know the bent of his young mind she sought, For much the kind preceptress wished to find To what profession he was most inclined, That where his genius led they might him train; For nature’s kindly bent she held not vain. But vain her efforts to explore his will; The frequent question he evaded still; Till on a day at length he to her came, Joy sparkling in his eyes; and said, the same Trade he would be those boys of colour were, Who danced so happy in the open air. It was a troop of chimney-sweeping boys, With wooden music and obstreperous noise, In tarnish’d finery and grotesque array, Were dancing in the streets the first of May.

1 Who will honor the city without a name If so many are dead and others pan gold Or sell arms in faraway countries? What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent— Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge? This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole, —In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains— I heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees. The current carried an echo and the timber of rafts. A man in a visored cap and a woman in a kerchief Pushed hard with their four hands at a heavy steering oar. In the library, below a tower painted with the signs of the zodiac, Kontrym would take a whiff from his snuffbox and smile For despite Metternich all was not yet lost. And on crooked lanes down the middle of a sandy highway Jewish carts went their way while a black grouse hooted Standing on a cuirassier's helmet, a relict of La Grande Armée. 2 In Death Valley I thought about styles of hairdo, About a hand that shifted spotlights at the Student's Ball In the city from which no voice could reach me. Minerals did not sound the last trumpet. There was only the rustle of a loosened grain of lava. In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed. Defend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood. From the futility of solid rock, no wisdom. In Death Valley no hawk or eagle against the sky. The prediction of a Gypsy woman has come true. In a lane under an arcade, then, I was reading a poem Of someone who had lived next door, entitled "An Hour of Thought." I looked long at the rearview mirror: there, the one man Within three miles, an Indian, was walking a bicycle uphill. 3 With flutes, with torches And a drum, boom, boom, Look, the one who died in Istanbul, there, in the first row. He walks arm in arm with his young lady, And over them swallows fly. They carry oars or staffs garlanded with leaves And bunches of flowers from the shores of the Green Lakes, As they came closer and closer, down Castle Street. And then suddenly nothing, only a white puff of cloud Over the Humanities Student Club, Division of Creative Writing. 4 Books, we have written a whole library of them. Lands, we have visited a great many of them. Battles, we have lost a number of them. Till we are no more, we and our Maryla. 5 Understanding and pity, We value them highly. What else? Beauty and kisses, Fame and its prizes, Who cares? Doctors and lawyers, Well-turned-out majors, Six feet of earth. Rings, furs, and lashes, Glances at Masses, Rest in peace. Sweet twin breasts, good night. Sleep through to the light, Without spiders. 6 The sun goes down above the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge And kindles fire on landscapes "made from nature": The Wilia winding among pines; black honey of the Żejmiana; The Mereczanka washes berries near the Żegaryno village. The valets had already brought in Theban candelabra And pulled curtains, one after the other, slowly, While, thinking I entered first, taking off my gloves, I saw that all the eyes were fixed on me. 7 When I got rid of grieving And the glory I was seeking, Which I had no business doing, I was carried by dragons Over countries, bays, and mountains, By fate, or by what happens. Oh yes, I wanted to be me. I toasted mirrors weepily And learned my own stupidity. From nails, mucous membrane, Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen Whose house is made? Mine. So what else is new? I am not my own friend. Time cuts me in two. Monuments covered with snow, Accept my gift. I wandered; And where, I don't know. 8 Absent, burning, acrid, salty, sharp. Thus the feast of Insubstantiality. Under a gathering of clouds anywhere. In a bay, on a plateau, in a dry arroyo. No density. No harness of stone. Even the Summa thins into straw and smoke. And the angelic choirs fly over in a pomegranate seed Sounding every few instants, not for us, their trumpets. 9 Light, universal, and yet it keeps changing. For I love the light too, perhaps the light only. Yet what is too dazzling and too high is not for me. So when the clouds turn rosy, I think of light that is level In the lands of birch and pine coated with crispy lichen, Late in autumn, under the hoarfrost when the last milk caps Rot under the firs and the hounds' barking echoes, And jackdaws wheel over the tower of a Basilian church. 10 Unexpressed, untold. But how? The shortness of life, the years quicker and quicker, not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn. Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts, giggles above a railing, pigtails askew, sittings on chamberpots upstairs when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch just before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter. Female humanity, children's snots, legs spread apart, snarled hair, the milk boiling over, stench, shit frozen into clods. And those centuries, conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night instead of playing something like a game of chess or dancing an intellectual ballet. And palisades, and pregnant sheep, and   pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters, and cows cured by incantations. 11 Not the Last Judgment, just a kermess by a river. Small whistles, clay chickens, candied hearts. So we trudged through the slush of melting snow To buy bagels from the district of Smorgonie. A fortune-teller hawking: "Your destiny, your planets." And a toy devil bobbing in a tube of crimson brine. Another, a rubber one, expired in the air squeaking, By the stand where you bought stories of King Otto and Melusine. 12 Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red-brown seeds beaded in Tuzigoot in the copper desert seven centuries ago. Where ocher rubbed into stone still waits for the brow and cheekbone it would adorn, though for all that time there has been no one. What evil in me, what pity has made me deserve this offering? It stands before me, ready, not even the smoke from one chimney is lacking, not one echo, when I step across the rivers that separate us. Perhaps Anna and Dora Drużyno have called to me, three hundred miles inside Arizona, because except fo me no one else knows that they ever lived. They trot before me on Embankment Street, two hently born parakeets from Samogitia, and at night they unravel their spinster tresses of gray hair. Here there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the day are simultaneous. At dawn shit-wagons leave town in long rows and municipal employees at the gate collect the turnpike toll in leather bags. Rattling their wheels, "Courier" and "Speedy" move against the current to Werki, and an oarsman shot down over England skiffs past, spread- eagled by his oars. At St. Peter and Paul's the angels lower their thick eyelids in a smile over a nun who has indecent thoughts. Bearded, in a wig, Mrs. Sora Klok sits at the counter, instructing her twelve shopgirls. And all of German Street tosses into the air unfurled bolts of fabric, preparing itself for death and the conquest of Jerusalem. Black and princely, an underground river knocks at cellars of the cathedral under the tomb of St. Casimir the Young and under the half-charred oak logs in the hearth. Carrying her servant's-basket on her shoulder, Barbara, dressed in mourning, returns from the Lithuanian Mass at St. Nicholas to the Romers' house in Bakszta Street. How it glitters! the snow on Three Crosses Hill and Bekiesz Hill, not to be melted by the breath of these brief lives. And what do I know now, when I turn into Arsenal Street and open my eyes once more on a useless end of the world? I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door. But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were all that one was permitted to know and take away. The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atro- cious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire. And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights, there was not less bitterness but more. If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is transformed, at last, into harmony. Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun's secondhand-book shop, I am put to rest forever between two familiar names. The castle tower above the leafy tumulus grows small and there is still a hardly audible—is it Mozart's Requiem?—music. In the immobile light I move my lips and perhaps I am even glad not to find the desired word. Berkeley, 1968

Did they enjoy this, those honorary ancestors Of ours, whom we may not speak of as Indians now, But, rather, as Native Americans? Did they, that is, Have the opportunity to take in such views? For there were no roads then, slicing through The hills, opening vistas like this. Astonishing! Unless, perhaps, they were upon the Delaware, A kind of road itself. But, otherwise, would not The land itself have been an inconvenience, The changing leaves an oracle of cruelties To come and not, as for the tourists on a bus, A postcard to sweep up at a glance and then Go home to the similar view they own— One stately maple, or two, intensely orange? Only the birds, may be, might have known These colors, the sudden shift of gears from green To ocher, umber, brightest yellow, deepest red, The colors of the gleeful dead. For birds can fly Above the trees and see what we see from a bus. But is there gladness in their flight? Might it Not as well be night? And Indians (forgive the word), Did they delight more than a bird? Were there Esthetes then as now, before the ax, The ox, the plow? I must believe there were— And why? Because they traded all Manhattan For a handful of ceramic beads. They knew, As we, that a glint of pure bright blue Is worth a whole October day, or two.