478 Identity poems

(excerpt) I rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heap'd from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this; an uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes Broken and unrepair'd, and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon, Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down. This ride was my delight. I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be: And such was this wide ocean, and this shore More barren than its billows; and yet more Than all, with a remember'd friend I love To ride as then I rode; for the winds drove The living spray along the sunny air Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare, Stripp'd to their depths by the awakening north; And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth Harmonizing with solitude, and sent Into our hearts aëreal merriment. So, as we rode, we talk'd; and the swift thought, Winging itself with laughter, linger'd not, But flew from brain to brain—such glee was ours, Charg'd with light memories of remember'd hours, None slow enough for sadness: till we came Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame. This day had been cheerful but cold, and now The sun was sinking, and the wind also. Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be Talk interrupted with such raillery As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn The thoughts it would extinguish: 'twas forlorn, Yet pleasing, such as once, so poets tell, The devils held within the dales of Hell Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, All that vain men imagine or believe, Or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, We descanted, and I (for ever still Is it not wise to make the best of ill?) Argu'd against despondency, but pride Made my companion take the darker side. The sense that he was greater than his kind Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind By gazing on its own exceeding light. Meanwhile the sun paus'd ere it should alight, Over the horizon of the mountains—Oh, How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy! Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers Of cities they encircle! It was ours To stand on thee, beholding it: and then, Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men Were waiting for us with the gondola. As those who pause on some delightful way Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood Looking upon the evening, and the flood Which lay between the city and the shore, Pav'd with the image of the sky.... The hoar And aëry Alps towards the North appear'd Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark rear'd Between the East and West; and half the sky Was roof'd with clouds of rich emblazonry Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep West into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paus'd in his descent Among the many-folded hills: they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, As seen from Lido thro' the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peakèd isles— And then—as if the Earth and Sea had been Dissolv'd into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering as from waves of flame Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade," Said my companion, "I will show you soon A better station"—so, o'er the lagune We glided; and from that funereal bark I lean'd, and saw the city, and could mark How from their many isles, in evening's gleam, Its temples and its palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to Heaven. I was about to speak, when—"We are even Now at the point I meant," said Maddalo, And bade the gondolieri cease to row. "Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well If you hear not a deep and heavy bell." I look'd, and saw between us and the sun A building on an island; such a one As age to age might add, for uses vile, A windowless, deform'd and dreary pile; And on the top an open tower, where hung A bell, which in the radiance sway'd and swung; We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue: The broad sun sunk behind it, and it toll'd In strong and black relief. "What we behold Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower," Said Maddalo, "and ever at this hour Those who may cross the water, hear that bell Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell, To vespers." "As much skill as need to pray In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they To their stern Maker," I replied. "O ho! You talk as in years past," said Maddalo. " 'Tis strange men change not. You were ever still Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel, A wolf for the meek lambs—if you can't swim Beware of Providence." I look'd on him, But the gay smile had faded in his eye. "And such," he cried, "is our mortality, And this must be the emblem and the sign Of what should be eternal and divine! And like that black and dreary bell, the soul, Hung in a heaven-illumin'd tower, must toll Our thoughts and our desires to meet below Round the rent heart and pray—as madmen do For what? they know not—till the night of death, As sunset that strange vision, severeth Our memory from itself, and us from all We sought and yet were baffled." I recall The sense of what he said, although I mar The force of his expressions. The broad star Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill, And the black bell became invisible, And the red tower look'd gray, and all between The churches, ships and palaces were seen Huddled in gloom;—into the purple sea The orange hues of heaven sunk silently. We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola Convey'd me to my lodgings by the way. The following morn was rainy, cold and dim: Ere Maddalo arose, I call'd on him, And whilst I waited with his child I play'd; A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made, A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being, Graceful without design and unforeseeing, With eyes—Oh speak not of her eyes!—which seem Twin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam With such deep meaning, as we never see But in the human countenance: with me She was a special favourite: I had nurs'd Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first To this bleak world; and she yet seem'd to know On second sight her ancient playfellow, Less chang'd than she was by six months or so; For after her first shyness was worn out We sate there, rolling billiard balls about, When the Count enter'd. Salutations past— "The word you spoke last night might well have cast A darkness on my spirit—if man be The passive thing you say, I should not see Much harm in the religions and old saws (Though I may never own such leaden laws) Which break a teachless nature to the yoke: Mine is another faith"—thus much I spoke And noting he replied not, added: "See This lovely child, blithe, innocent and free; She spends a happy time with little care, While we to such sick thoughts subjected are As came on you last night. It is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill. We might be otherwise. We might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek But in our mind? and if we were not weak Should we be less in deed than in desire?" "Ay, if we were not weak—and we aspire How vainly to be strong!" said Maddalo: "You talk Utopia." "It remains to know," I then rejoin'd, "and those who try may find How strong the chains are which our spirit bind; Brittle perchance as straw.... We are assur'd Much may be conquer'd, much may be endur'd, Of what degrades and crushes us. We know That we have power over ourselves to do And suffer—what, we know not till we try; But something nobler than to live and die: So taught those kings of old philosophy Who reign'd, before Religion made men blind; And those who suffer with their suffering kind Yet feel their faith, religion." "My dear friend," Said Maddalo, "my judgement will not bend To your opinion, though I think you might Make such a system refutation-tight As far as words go. I knew one like you Who to this city came some months ago, With whom I argu'd in this sort, and he Is now gone mad—and so he answer'd me— Poor fellow! but if you would like to go We'll visit him, and his wild talk will show How vain are such aspiring theories." "I hope to prove the induction otherwise, And that a want of that true theory, still, Which seeks a 'soul of goodness' in things ill Or in himself or others, has thus bow'd His being. There are some by nature proud, Who patient in all else demand but this— To love and be belov'd with gentleness; And being scorn'd, what wonder if they die Some living death? this is not destiny But man's own wilful ill." As thus I spoke Servants announc'd the gondola, and we Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea Sail'd to the island where the madhouse stands.

I refuse to settle out of the true choose to communicate through pay phones and paper out here in the country of McAllister & Steiner we are the only Victorians left & I wish I wouldn’t have said that one something that one time when what I really wanted was to finish cutting the okra for the gumbo & read Baudelaire again his L’Invitation au Voyage backwards reveals all of the magic in writing that one can endure each line out loud resounds perfect all week I’ve been thinking about printing a pirated book of such, nothing grand typed on the Remington, 3x4, no address no copyright and fifty limited for whomever I run into

My mother has taken me to Paddington Station. We are inside a whale. My father sleeps all day. When he wakes the cloisters come for him. My sister can sit on her hair. At night, a man sits on her bed. Her bed is covered in oak leaves. The sleeves of my mother’s kaftan trail in the dirt. We keep forgetting it’s not her. The telephone bursts from the wall. The wires are a joke. We get it.

Drepung, Tibet, 1958 So won a name in this place, handing off lath strips to a hammer's measure, seeing the passing girls' slits in roils of timber grain. Mountains, barley, scaffold, dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly from the hoods of faraway bells monks emerging like hairless animals. I was sixteen. What did I know of sovereignty, or the new soldiers by the gate, chinning their shotguns like violins? Nights, a tin roof wind cracked flat; my sister, flushed with child, hushing a child.

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.

The town is old and very steep A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers, And black-clad people walking in their sleep— A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers To her new grave; and watched from end to end By the great Church above, through the still hours: But in the morning and the early dark The children wake to dart from doors and call Down the wide, crooked street, where, at the bend, Before it climbs up to the park, Ken’s is in the gabled house facing the Castle wall. When first I came upon him there Suddenly, on the half-lit stair, I think I hardly found a trace Of likeness to a human face In his. And I said then If in His image God made men, Some other must have made poor Ken— But for his eyes which looked at you As two red, wounded stars might do. He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard, His voice broke off in little jars To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird He seemed as he ploughed up the street, Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet And arms thrust out as if to beat Always against a threat of bars. And oftener than not there’d be A child just higher than his knee Trotting beside him. Through his dim Long twilight this, at least, shone clear, That all the children and the deer, Whom every day he went to see Out in the park, belonged to him. “God help the folk that next him sits He fidgets so, with his poor wits,” The neighbours said on Sunday nights When he would go to Church to “see the lights!” Although for these he used to fix His eyes upon a crucifix In a dark corner, staring on Till everybody else had gone. And sometimes, in his evil fits, You could not move him from his chair— You did not look at him as he sat there, Biting his rosary to bits. While pointing to the Christ he tried to say, “Take it away”. Nothing was dead: He said “a bird” if he picked up a broken wing, A perished leaf or any such thing Was just “a rose”; and once when I had said He must not stand and knock there any more, He left a twig on the mat outside my door. Not long ago The last thrush stiffened in the snow, While black against a sullen sky The sighing pines stood by. But now the wind has left our rattled pane To flutter the hedge-sparrow’s wing, The birches in the wood are red again And only yesterday The larks went up a little way to sing What lovers say Who loiter in the lanes to-day; The buds begin to talk of May With learned rooks on city trees, And if God please With all of these We, too, shall see another Spring. But in that red brick barn upon the hill I wonder—can one own the deer, And does one walk with children still As one did here? Do roses grow Beneath those twenty windows in a row— And if some night When you have not seen any light They cannot move you from your chair What happens there? I do not know. So, when they took Ken to that place, I did not look After he called and turned on me His eyes. These I shall see—

My sister rubs the doll’s face in mud, then climbs through the truck window. She ignores me as I walk around it, hitting the flat tires with an iron rod. The old man yells for me to help hitch the team, but I keep walking around the truck, hitting harder, until my mother calls. I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window, but it falls short. The old man’s voice bounces off the air like a ball I can’t lift my leg over. I stand beside him, waiting, but he doesn’t look up and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open. Mother runs toward us. I stand still, get her across the spine as she bends over him. I drop the rod and take the rifle from the house. Roses are red, violets are blue, one bullet for the black horse, two for the brown. They’re down quick. I spit, my tongue’s bloody; I’ve bitten it. I laugh, remember the one out back. I catch her climbing from the truck, shoot. The doll lands on the ground with her. I pick it up, rock it in my arms. Yeah. I’m Jack, Hogarth’s son. I’m nimble, I’m quick. In the house, I put on the old man’s best suit and his patent leather shoes. I pack my mother’s satin nightgown and my sister’s doll in the suitcase. Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway. I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere. I can break your heart.

I was the lonely one in whom they swarmed in the millions. I was their creature and I was grateful. I could sleep when I wanted. I lived a divided existence in sleepdreams that lit up a silence as dreadful as that of the moon. I have an overly-precise recall of those solitary years before I opened the curtain and drew upon a universe of want that made me so strong I could crack spines of books with one hand.

When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog somewhere in a Germany that has vanished with its forests and hedgerows Shakespeare would have been a young actor starting out in a country that was only a word to Hans who had learned from those who had painted animals only from hearing tales about them without ever setting eyes on them or from corpses with the lingering light mute and deathly still forever held fast in the fur or the feathers hanging or lying on a table and he had learned from others who had arranged the corpses of animals as though they were still alive in full flight or on their way but this hedgehog was there in the same life as his own looking around at him with his brush of camel hair and his stretched parchment of sheepskin as he turned to each sharp particular quill and every black whisker on the long live snout and those flat clawed feet made only for trundling and for feeling along the dark undersides of stones and as Hans took them in he turned into the Hans that we would see

White-Mexican looks like a Latina, not my label a question from a Guatemalan student who's come undone in my ESL class, doesn't get my kind I try to describe how I grew up in Caucasian corn country surrounded by houses on cul-de-sacs that all looked the same, how we were alone in a town of 5000, one black family, one Indian family, one Asian family, and one household of Mexicans, no two, us and the Renterias to whom we were related by marriage before and after my divorce, and they were mixed; still, it was a good living, happy in our cocooness, our oneness, separated by money one direction color on the other: classes, classes, classes, day and night we took lessons: piano, jazz, tap, ballet, the dance team, trumpet, trombone, tennis, Finishing School, and one awful summer golf; Christened, Confirmed, Cathechismized; it all cut me in several places, molding of head and heart making me ultrasensitive, then and now, an observer of the outside, an outsider among my own kind, my very shade, mysterious aloof black haired beauty who can't speak Spanish, living among blue eyed dyed blond bombshells, who held up her head higher because she's shy not stuck-up, understood, undenied, sacrificed to at any price by my beloved little brown parents who taught me well gave up so much so their daughters could shine and they'd swell with pride at the life they had given us, on Sundays we basked in mutual admiration after mass singing our church songs while making breakfast, according to the unspoken doctrine in our house of: fast first eat later after communion, we intruded with our Mexican music bellowing out the open windows the smell of bacon frying, pancakes baking, coffee and eggs scrambled to order it wafted out on beautiful summer mornings out of our house in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, perched on the highest spot one could reach on the East Side of the street for first and second generation immigrants. January 25, 2001