872 Life poems

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth, Tiny explosions at the waterlines, And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood. It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter. Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books. Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast! Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood, Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight. Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor. Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn; We know that our master has left us for the day.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of those so close beside me, which are you? God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there, And learn by going where I have to go. Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me; so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.

Rich, honored by my fellow citizens, The father of many children, born of a noble mother, All raised there In the great mansion-house, at the edge of town. Note the cedar tree on the lawn! I sent all the boys to Ann Arbor, all the girls to Rockford, The while my life went on, getting more riches and honors— Resting under my cedar tree at evening. The years went on. I sent the girls to Europe; I dowered them when married. I gave the boys money to start in business. They were strong children, promising as apples Before the bitten places show. But John fled the country in disgrace. Jenny died in child-birth— I sat under my cedar tree. Harry killed himself after a debauch, Susan was divorced— I sat under my cedar tree. Paul was invalided from over-study, Mary became a recluse at home for love of a man— I sat under my cedar tree. All were gone, or broken-winged or devoured by life— I sat under my cedar tree. My mate, the mother of them, was taken— I sat under my cedar tree Till ninety years were tolled. O maternal Earth, which rocks the fallen leaf to sleep!

For Harry Cobb Soon I’ll move to Norway. If that’s a bitter pill, well, swill, swallow. I’m going, and I won’t wallow, not in Norway, where they’re so beyond slave labor, with laws that say a clerk must work within five meters of a window through which she can see a tree and by that tree be seen. My mind’s made up. I will be Norwegian with Norwegian trees. I’ll be seer and be seen. It’s a scenic scene, it’s how it goes, I’m going. Tell the top brass, if they ask, I don’t give a damn about their asses. But I will miss the beeches and the ashes. It’s not their fault I’m leaving. They’re only trees, and leaving, I’m Norwegian.

So here hath been dawning Another blue Day: Think wilt thou let it Slip useless away. Out of Eternity This new Day is born; Into Eternity, At night, will return. Behold it aforetime No eye ever did: So soon it forever From all eyes is hid. Here hath been dawning Another blue Day: Think wilt thou let it Slip useless away.

A slow news day, but I did like the obit about the butcher who kept the same store for fifty years.   People remembered when his street was sweetly roaring, aproned with flower stalls and fish stands. The stock market wandered, spooked by presidential winks, by micro-winds and the shadows of earnings.   News was stationed around the horizon, ready as summer clouds to thunder-- but it moved off and we covered the committee meeting at the back of the statehouse, sat around on our desks, then went home early.   The birds were still singing, the sun just going down.   Working these long hours, you forget how beautiful the early evening can be, the big houses like ships turning into the night, their rooms piled high with silence.

I did not come here to sing a blues. Lately, I open my mouth & out comes marigolds, yellow plums. I came to make the sky a garden. Give me rain or give me honey, dear lord. The sky has given us no water this year. I ride my bike to a boy, when I get there what we make will not be beautiful or love at all, but it will be deserved. I’ve started seeking men to wet the harvest. Come, tonight I declare we must move instead of pray. Tonight, east of here, two boys, one dressed in what could be blood & one dressed in what could be blood before the wound, meet & mean mug & God, tonight, let them dance! Tonight, the bullet does not exist. Tonight, the police have turned to their God for forgiveness. Tonight, we bury nothing, we serve a God with no need for shovels, we serve a God with a bad hip & a brother in prison. Tonight, let every man be his own lord. Let wherever two people stand be a reunion of ancient lights. Let’s waste the moon’s marble glow shouting our names to the stars until we are the stars. O, precious God! O, sweet black town! I am drunk & I thirst. When I get to the boy who lets me practice hunger with him I will not give him the name of your newest ghost I will give him my body & what he does with it is none of my business, but I will say look, I made it a whole day, still, no rain still, I am without exit wound & he will say Tonight, I want to take you how the police do, unarmed & sudden & tonight, when we dream, we dream of dancing in a city slowly becoming ash.

Abandoned in a field near Yass a cobwebbed car once kept us warm and when it rained, though we shivered with sickness, there came a moment of perfect happiness, faces nestled in the vinyl, sleep coming on, surrounded by metal that in upcoming decades would oxidise to flakes. Asleep at last, last of the valium, we came to know a car too is a flower and pollen its decay. In the dry air at dawn the cicadas kept still. The space that mass sat in decided how mass was to move. We dreamed of valleys of olive trees, silver side out. The lions preened. We shivered with need. A mechanic showed me once how the spark-paths from spark-plugs looked, if you looked close enough, like mountain ravines from the air. The deeper the groove the faster the current. We shivered, this our habit, this flowing. It takes the breath away. There are gum trees crackling from it two decades later. I slept so still beneath that mass of dreams like sediment compressed beneath a lake. I woke and the tributes and glory were gone and the crops all withered and money was merely the index of anxiety. When we realised this our hearts swelled in exultation. Even time would forget there was reason for fear: that decay seemed to will itself upon us. I was off the air, delirious with substance. The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed. I was off the air, light-headed with voracity. The theme just kept repeating itself, year in year out, same demon different bodies. A nurse said When you stay, when you leave those wet imprints in our airspace, these sheets smell like formaldehyde, like death. We had merely reached early, down the end of the river, the leprosarium of feeling, and all things stood for every other thing, creepers, vines, tendrils, anacondas, inert surrender, such listlessness, and yes the very rage with which we chased the very forms of it, the lineaments of nothingness, the powders of the comatose, the bliss. This was the state of the world. Heading backwards we learned the flea-fish was the smallest animal before the insect kingdom began. Forwards, there were only the sudden deaths of galaxies. And yet when we practised love there seemed on certain days an awful lot of space; and so much sky. Never had I lain then at Kangaroo Valley so comfortable in my own body. A virtual flatness and that centrifuge in the stomach stilled and my spine a spirit-level. The smell of coffee drifting in brought back to me that lily-white girl and that sad hour of need. How brittle every bone was then. How could one not be completely bedraggled by time or compulsion or duplicity? I was all those things and am. I was so tired with the not-being-here inside of it all that fatigue was like oxygen, given of all the givens, sensurround of the gods. But I was gulping and heaving by then. And that is all so long ago. Though when you forget the last time: most likely it is not the last time. And when dreams don’t come, when mastodons and minotaurs curdle in the night-reaches and the bulls lie fallow in dawn-sweats: sleep some more. Wait. Sleep on. And swim.

One of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a hired assassin. JOHN D. MACDONALD You would not recognize me. Mine is the face which blooms in The dank mirrors of washrooms As you grope for the light switch. My eyes have the expression Of the cold eyes of statues Watching their pigeons return From the feed you have scattered, And I stand on my corner With the same marble patience. If I move at all, it is At the same pace precisely As the shade of the awning Under which I stand waiting And with whose blackness it seems I am already blended. I speak seldom, and always In a murmur as quiet As that of crowds which surround The victims of accidents. Shall I confess who I am? My name is all names and none. I am the used-car salesman, The tourist from Syracuse, The hired assassin, waiting. I will stand here forever Like one who has missed his bus— Familiar, anonymous— On my usual corner, The corner at which you turn To approach that place where now You must not hope to arrive.

Turn, turn again, Ape’s blood in each vein! The people that pass Seem castles of glass, The old and the good Giraffes of the blue wood, The soldier, the nurse, Wooden-face and a curse, Are shadowed with plumage Like birds, by the gloomage. Blond hair like a clown’s The music floats—drowns The creaking of ropes, The breaking of hopes, The wheezing, the old, Like harmoniums scold; Go to Babylon, Rome, The brain-cells called home, The grave, new Jerusalem— Wrinkled Methusalem! From our floating hair Derived the first fair And queer inspiration Of music, the nation Of bright-plumed trees And harpy-shrill breeze . . . *  *  *  * Turn, turn again, Ape’s blood in each vein!