48 Morning poems

You hear the sun in the morning through closed shutters. As you sleep the early sky is colored in fish scales, and you open your eyes like a street already lined with fruit.

Brachest, she called it, gentling grease over blanching yolks with an expertise honed from three decades of dawns at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine, where even the oldest in the old men's booth swore as if it were scripture truth they'd never had a breakfast better, rapping a glass sharply to get her attention when it went sorrowing so far into some simple thing— the jangly door or a crusted pan, the wall clock's black, hitchy hands— that she would startle, blink, then grin as if discovering them all again. Who remembers now when one died the space that he had occupied went unfilled for a day, then two, three, until she unceremoniously plunked plates down in the wrong places and stared their wronged faces back to banter she could hardly follow. Unmarried, childless, homely, "slow," she knew coffee cut with chamomile kept the grocer Paul's ulcer cool, yarrow in gravy eased the islands of lesions in Larry Borwick's hands, and when some nightlong nameless urgency sent him seeking human company Brother Tom needed hash browns with cheese. She knew to nod at the litany of cities the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past, to laugh when the hunters asked if she'd pray for them or for the quail they went laughing off to kill, and then—envisioning one rising so fast it seemed the sun tugged at it—to do exactly that. Who remembers where they all sat: crook-backed builders, drought-faced farmers, VF'ers muttering through their wars, night-shift roughnecks so caked in black it seemed they made their way back every morning from the dead. Who remembers one word they said? The Longhorn Diner's long torn down, the gin and feedlots gone, the town itself now nothing but a name at which some bored boy has taken aim, every letter light-pierced and partial. Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill, I picture you one dime-bright dawn grown even brighter now for being gone bustling amid the formica and chrome of that small house we both called home during the spring that was your last. All stories stop: once more you're lost in something I can merely see: steam spiriting out of black  coffee, the scorched pores of toast, a bowl of apple butter like edible soil, bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass, my plate's gleaming, teeming emptiness.

At four o’clock in the gun-metal blue dark we hear the first crow of the first cock just below the gun-metal blue window and immediately there is an echo off in the distance, then one from the backyard fence, then one, with horrible insistence, grates like a wet match from the broccoli patch, flares, and all over town begins to catch. Cries galore come from the water-closet door, from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor, where in the blue blur their rustling wives admire, the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare with stupid eyes while from their beaks there rise the uncontrolled, traditional cries. Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorize the rest, the many wives who lead hens’ lives of being courted and despised; deep from raw throats a senseless order floats all over town. A rooster gloats over our beds from rusty iron sheds and fences made from old bedsteads, over our churches where the tin rooster perches, over our little wooden northern houses, making sallies from all the muddy alleys, marking out maps like Rand McNally’s: glass-headed pins, oil-golds and copper greens, anthracite blues, alizarins, each one an active displacement in perspective; each screaming, “This is where I live!” Each screaming “Get up! Stop dreaming!” Roosters, what are you projecting? You, whom the Greeks elected to shoot at on a post, who struggled when sacrificed, you whom they labeled “Very combative ...” what right have you to give commands and tell us how to live, cry “Here!” and “Here!” and wake us here where are unwanted love, conceit and war? The crown of red set on your little head is charged with all your fighting blood. Yes, that excrescence makes a most virile presence, plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence. Now in mid-air by twos they fight each other. Down comes a first flame-feather, and one is flying, with raging heroism defying even the sensation of dying. And one has fallen, but still above the town his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down; and what he sung no matter. He is flung on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung with his dead wives with open, bloody eyes, while those metallic feathers oxidize. St. Peter’s sin was worse than that of Magdalen whose sin was of the flesh alone; of spirit, Peter’s, falling, beneath the flares, among the “servants and officers.” Old holy sculpture could set it all together in one small scene, past and future: Christ stands amazed, Peter, two fingers raised to surprised lips, both as if dazed. But in between a little cock is seen carved on a dim column in the travertine, explained by gallus canit; flet Petrus underneath it. There is inescapable hope, the pivot; yes, and there Peter’s tears run down our chanticleer’s sides and gem his spurs. Tear-encrusted thick as a medieval relic he waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick, still cannot guess those cock-a-doodles yet might bless, his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness, a new weathervane on basilica and barn, and that outside the Lateran there would always be a bronze cock on a porphyry pillar so the people and the Pope might see that even the Prince of the Apostles long since had been forgiven, and to convince all the assembly that “Deny deny deny” is not all the roosters cry. In the morning a low light is floating in the backyard, and gilding from underneath the broccoli, leaf by leaf; how could the night have come to grief? gilding the tiny floating swallow’s belly and lines of pink cloud in the sky, the day’s preamble like wandering lines in marble. The cocks are now almost inaudible. The sun climbs in, following “to see the end,” faithful as enemy, or friend.

Spiders in the cold, bees in inarticulate bunches hang from a day's work. Waiting for light they wait to see what they will be. A tree lets down green undersides and is maple. A window glints— a thing of saffron kindles with singlehood. In the broad yard each thing dandles its blue, its name, its consequence.

March 29, 2010 Every morning since the time changed I have woken to the dawn chorus And even before it sounded, I dreamed of it Loud, unbelievably loud, shameless, raucous And once I rose and twitched the curtains apart Expecting the birds to be pressing in fright Against the pane like passengers But the garden was empty and it was night Not a slither of light at the horizon Still the birds were bawling through the mists Terrible, invisible A million small evangelists How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smoldering coal Their throats singed and swollen with song In dissonance as befits the dark world Where only travelers and the sleepless belong

A wound is a blossom but only to the living. A May night, birdsong before the first light pierces, chirps out of blackness: My daughter's angry at me and her mother as I was once angry at mine. It's a way of crossing over. I'm so tired now. And my core's all water, flowing somewhere where the sea can't find her. And neither can I. How much longer till I finally lose her? Where is the first dawn wet blossom? Who recalls how I touched her mother once? Or many others? How night is not always easy. Nor are daughters. Nor are sons. And how is it I've become a father watching light sift slowly into the daughterless dark.

She goes out to hang the windchime in her nightie and her work boots. It’s six-thirty in the morning and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch, windchime in her left hand, hammer in her right, the nail gripped tight between her teeth but nothing happens next because she’s trying to figure out how to switch #1 with #3. She must have been standing in the kitchen, coffee in her hand, asleep, when she heard it—the wind blowing through the sound the windchime wasn’t making because it wasn’t there. No one, including me, especially anymore believes till death do us part, but I can see what I would miss in leaving— the way her ankles go into the work boots as she stands upon the ice chest; the problem scrunched into her forehead; the little kissable mouth with the nail in it.

At five I wake, rise, rub on the smoking pane A port to see—water breathing in the air, Boughs broken. The sun comes up in a golden stain, Floats like a glassy sea-fruit. There is mist everywhere, White and humid, and the Harbour is like plated stone, Dull flakes of ice. One light drips out alone, One bead of winter-red, smouldering in the steam, Quietly over the roof-tops—another window Touched with a crystal fire in the sun’s gullies, One lonely star of the morning, where no stars gleam. Far away on the rim of this great misty cup, The sun gilds the dead suburbs as he rises up, Diamonds the wind-cocks, makes glitter the crusted spikes On moss-drowned gables. Now the tiles drip scarlet-wet, Swim like birds’ paving-stones, and sunlight strikes Their watery mirrors with a moister rivulet, Acid and cold. Here lie those mummied Kings, Men sleeping in houses, embalmed in stony coffins, Till the Last Trumpet calls their galleries up, And the suburbs rise with distant murmurings. O buried dolls, O men sleeping invisible there, I stare above your mounds of stone, lean down, Marooned and lonely in this bitter air, And in one moment deny your frozen town, Renounce your bodies—earth falls in clouds away, Stones lose their meaning, substance is lost in clay, Roofs fade, and that small smoking forgotten heap, The city, dissolves to a shell of bricks and paper, Empty, without purpose, a thing not comprehended, A broken tomb, where ghosts unknown sleep. And the least crystal weed, shaken with frost, The furred herbs of silver, the daisies round-eyed and tart, Painted in antic china, the smallest night-flower tossed Like a bright penny on the lawn, stirs more my heart, Strikes deeper this morning air, than mortal towers Dried to a common blindness, fainter than flowers, Fordone, extinguished, as the vapours break, And dead in the dawn. O Sun that kills with life, And brings to breath all silent things—O Dawn, Waken me with old earth, keep me awake!

The night’s drifts Pile up below me and behind my back, Slide down the hill, rise again, and build Eerie little dunes on the roof of the house. In the valley below me, Miles between me and the town of St.-Jeannet, The road lamps glow. They are so cold, they might as well be dark. Trucks and cars Cough and drone down there between the golden Coffins of greenhouses, the startled squawk Of a rooster claws heavily across A grove, and drowns. The gumming snarl of some grouchy dog sounds, And a man bitterly shifts his broken gears. True night still hangs on, Mist cluttered with a racket of its own. Now on the mountainside, A little way downhill among turning rocks, A square takes form in the side of a dim wall. I hear a bucket rattle or something, tinny, No other stirring behind the dim face Of the goatherd’s house. I imagine His goats are still sleeping, dreaming Of the fresh roses Beyond the walls of the greenhouse below them And of lettuce leaves opening in Tunisia. I turn, and somehow Impossibly hovering in the air over everything, The Mediterranean, nearer to the moon Than this mountain is, Shines. A voice clearly Tells me to snap out of it. Galway Mutters out of the house and up the stone stairs To start the motor. The moon and the stars Suddenly flicker out, and the whole mountain Appears, pale as a shell. Look, the sea has not fallen and broken Our heads. How can I feel so warm Here in the dead center of January? I can Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is The only life I have. I get up from the stone. My body mumbles something unseemly And follows me. Now we are all sitting here strangely On top of the sunlight.

5 am .  One-quarter past. Distant chimes inform me this. A bell peal knells the mist. And sunlight’s not yet bludgeoning. But some light gets blood going. Last night it was snowing and now every path’s a pall. Though mine the only footfalls at this hour of awe. Above hangs a canopy of needle leaf. Below, the season’s mean deceit— that everything stays white and clean. It doesn’t, of course, but I wish it. My prayers are green with this intent, imploring winter wrens to trill and begging scuttling bucks come back. There’s something that I lack. A wryneck bullet-beaks a branch. His woodworm didn’t have a chance. What I miss, I’ve never had. But I am not a ghost. I am a guest. And life is thirst, at best. So do not strike me, Heart. I am, too, tinder. I’m flammable as birch bark, even damp. Blue spruce, bee-eater— be sweeter to me. Let larksong shudder to its January wheeze, but gift these hands a happiness just once. It is half passed. And I am cold. Another peal has tolled. I’ve told the sum of my appeals. I need not watch for fox. They do not congregate at dawn. But I would, were I one.