246 Spiritual poems

i thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest. Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many. ii No more noisy, loud words from me, such is my master’s will. Hence-forth I deal in whispers. The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song. Men hasten to the King’s market. All the buyers and sellers are there. But I have my untimely leave in the middle of the day, in the thick of work. Let then the flowers come out in my garden, though it is not their time, and let the midday bees strike up their lazy hum. Full many an hour have I spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my heart on to him, and I know not why is this sudden call to what useless inconsequence! iii On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded. Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange smell in the south wind. That vague fragrance made my heart ache with longing, and it seemed to me that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion. I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart. iv By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love, which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free. Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou are not seen. If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart—thy love for me still waits for my love. v I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in the forest at midnight? When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away to find in the very next moment its consolation in the left one. vi Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well. Oh, thou beautiful, there in the nest it is thy love that encloses the soul with colors and sounds and odors. There comes the morning with the golden basket in her right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth. And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden pitcher from the western ocean of rest. But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor color, and never never a word. Originally appeared in the December 1912 issue of Poetry magazine.

For Father Bob I. By the road she hovers in heat waves, propped up on a cinderblock wall, revived by mixed house paints, fending for herself like wild mint. She is behind your shoulder, a blind spot, your city's poverty. A figure waits under a freeway ramp, gesturing as if she knows you. The fences and lots have the same dogs, peering through the chain-links, curious. While at the hospital, you see kids play another game of tag outside the emergency room doors and know how fingerprints squander their ridges and how digital minutes dry up under a glare. II. A stump is all that is left of a surveyor's point, a ponderosa pine in the foothills that started the city's perfect grid. The sidewalks of Baseline need more than a grocery bag's empty belly, plastic, a ripped-up flame standing and calling out to an old preacher like yourself. By the cameras mounted on the street lights, you wonder if they recorded the street sinking in the eyes of the woman who died on a bus bench. You pause in front of a freshly painted sign that says "Wrong Way," and see a sign within a sign, a resistance to the newest strip mall, the black lettering unevenly spaced and painted, a homespun warning to keep moving on.

At this hour the soul floats weightlessly through the city streets, speechless and invisible, astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones of dusk suddenly filling the urban sky while the body sits listlessly by the window sullen and heavy, too exhausted to move, too weary to stand up or to lie down. At this hour the soul is like a yellow wing slipping through the treetops, a little ecstatic cloud hovering over the sidewalks, calling out to the approaching night, “Amaze me, amaze me,” while the body sits glumly by the window listening to the clear summons of the dead transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal. Some nights it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strange, unlikely tethering, a furious grafting of the quick and the slow: when the soul flies up, the body sinks down and all night—locked in the same cramped room— they go on quarreling, stubbornly threatening to leave each other, wordlessly filling the air with the sound of a low internal burning. How long can this bewildering marriage last? At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire of stars flaming on the other side of the sky, but the body stares into an empty night sheen, a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels, feverish old loves: don’t separate yet. Let what rises live with what descends.

From loss of  the old and lack of  the new From failure to make the right thing do Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. From words not the word, from a feckless voice From poetic distress and from careless choice Exclude our intellects,  James Joyce. From genteel angels and apostles unappalled From Hollywood visions as virgins shawled Guard our seeing, Grünewald. From calling a kettle an existential pot, From bodying the ghost of  whatever is not, John save us, O most subtle Scot. From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod From eating the pease and rejecting the pod Wolfgang keep us, lover of God. Couperin come with your duple measure Alter our minds against banal pleasure. Dürer direct with strictness our vision; Steady this flesh toward your made precision. Mistress of accurate minor pain, Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane. From pretending to own what we secretly seek, From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek, Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek. From ignorance of structural line and bone From passion not pointed on truth alone Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone. From despair keep us, Aquin’s dumb son; From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One; From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne. That zeal for free will get us in deep, That the chance to choose be the one we keep That free will steel self  in us against self-defense That free will repeal in us our last pretense That free will heal us Jeanne d’Arc, Job,  Johnnie Skelton, Jehan de Beauce, composer  Johann, Dark  John Milton, Charter Oak  John, Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt; Leap, leap between us and the easy out; Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go; Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow. Originally appeared in the June 1957 issue of Poetry magazine.

I From a blue keg, the barrel's thumb-tuned goatskin, the choirs of ancestral ululation are psalms and pivot for the prodigal in a dirt yard at Piaille, are confrontation, old incantation and fresh sacrifice where a ram is tethered, without the scrolled horns, wool locks and beard of the scapegoat, in the Old Testament, or black blood gushing in a trench in Attic ceremony and rite. Death softens the eyes of the still, unbleating sheep, a common ewe, as for you this is common. There is no awe in repetition, no claim, no tribal ecstasy, no pardon in the bent smoke from Guinea, the sprinkled white rum, or the meal crumbled on the small stone altar, in the broken memory of the slaver's coast and the braided villages of thatch and coalpot from the salted passage to this paralysis where your pale feet cannot keep time feel no communion with its celebrants, they keep another time, the time you keep comes with a different metre, your skin what sheath and prison that it has become as a dried chrysalis with no ressurection and one unwished for. Star-embers fade. II I could give facts and dates, but to what use? In the lush chasms and fissures of Choiseul an ogre bred my grandam, whelped my father, erected my tall aunts; slopes with potato vines, and the narrow, clean dark water of River Doree, the fragrant hogplums and chapel of La Fargue; go in search of his own shire, unlatch a gate that opens into Albion, its faery flowers, its source of intellectual bastardy, without embarrassment or degradation, without belligerence or accusation, and mostly selfishly, without self-contempt, a curious and self-nourishing integer outside their given numbers and their dates, as nameless as the bush, beyond heredity or prophecy, or the quiet panic of clocks, the shallow penitence of mirrors. Mongrel. And out of this chord, this discord will come the Atlantic's drone, the Caribbean hum of chaos in an ochre afternoon the enclosing harmony that we call home when the sea mints its quicksilver, when the cedars sag and the light ends up with nothing. The facts! The Facts! The history. The cause. You need a history to make your case. III 1492. 1833. 1930. Dates. The one thing about which there is no discourse. Dates multiplied by events, by consequences, are what add up to History. We have a few coins struck for a mere handful of events, as amateur numismatists, regal profiles, none worthy in the traditional way of memory slavery being an infinity of endeavour without pause or payment, without commemoration, only the long division of day into dark, of drought into rainburst, equinoxes glide over their own shadows, and all our dates, our calendars, hymns and anniversaries, were bequeathed to us. Left to itself the brain would be mantled like coral in the cool shade of a reefs outcrop and turret, swayed like reeds in meditation, dateless. The petals of the sun curl, wilting on its stalk– here comes the quiet lily crescent of the moon. IV From this thick tree issues miraculous bread. The breadfruit makes itself from copious shade, whose dial is the ground's dry, palmate leaves, a voluble, invaluable dome, a library, where all the town's talk is stored, and in whose core is coiled—a tempest, a rising sea in wind, the spinning pages of remorseful texts, Bligh's log and cannonballs and bowling thunder, shelter from the rain and so magnanimous in circumference that it has no time without shade, and shade is suffering. The sun makes their suffering mute. This bedraggled backyard, this unfulfilled lot, this little field of leaves, brittle and fallen, of all the cities of the world, this is your centre. O to be luminous and exact! As this tree is in ripening sunshine, that your own leaves could shine with nourishment, and give such shade and peace, the mirror of each canvas that you sign. Despite acclamation, despite contempt, I was never part of that catalogue in spite of friends in the same business neither of the free-verse orthodoxy, nor the other— the clogged, elegiac thickness of memory; farther away from all that, forever, knee-high in the foam of the page wading by sounding caves. Gradually it hardens, the death-mask of Fame. V And Sancta Trinidad. It is that sacred to me. However fragmentary, through a sunlit hedge, by the running of clear water over the sun-wiry stones and a cool hoarding of bamboos without a bridge phrases of Spain in summer, in the vale of Santa Cruz, perhaps because of the name, but the bamboo's fountains arch, sounding sweet, surreptitious, twittering leaves and shadows moving over indigo mountains. In a green street of hedges and vermilion roofs, and gates that creak open into banana yards and doors that groan on the evocation of ginger behind which are the hill with five cresting palms whose long fingers are stirring tropical almanacs darkened with rain over the grey savannahs of zebu and bison and the small chalk temples of an almost erased Asia, and the ovations of cane through which turbaned horsemen carry feathering lances. The cloud-white egret, the heron whose hue is wet slate, move through a somnolence as sweet as malaria to a child whose parched lips are soothed by a servant or his own mother, to the sudden great sound of rain on the roofs, cloudburst of benediction, dry seas in his ears.

Where once I loved my flesh, That social fellow, Now I want security of bone And cherish the silence of my skeleton. Where once I walked the world Hunting the devil, Now I find the darkness and the void Within my side. First to be good, then to be happy I Worked and prayed. Before the midnight, like the foul fiend, I killed my dear friend. Hope unto hope, dream beyond monstrous dream I sought the world. Now, at the black pitch and midnight of despair, I find it was always here.

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.

When God at first made man, Having a glass of blessings standing by, “Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can. Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie, Contract into a span.” So strength first made a way; Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure. When almost all was out, God made a stay, Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure, Rest in the bottom lay. “For if I should,” said he, “Bestow this jewel also on my creature, He would adore my gifts instead of me, And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature; So both should losers be. “Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlessness; Let him be rich and weary, that at least, If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss him to my breast.”

There are who separate the eternal light In forms of man and woman, day and night; They cannot bear that God be essence quite. Existence is as deep a verity: Without the dual, where is unity? And the ‘I am’ cannot forbear to be; But from its primal nature forced to frame Mysteries, destinies of various name, Is forced to give what it has taught to claim. Thus love must answer to its own unrest; The bad commands us to expect the best, And hope of its own prospects is the test. And dost thou seek to find the one in two? Only upon the old can build the new; The symbol which you seek is found in you. The heart and mind, the wisdom and the will, The man and woman, must be severed still, And Christ must reconcile the good and ill. There are to whom each symbol is a mask; The life of love is a mysterious task; They want no answer, for they would not ask. A single thought transfuses every form; The sunny day is changed into the storm, For light is dark, hard soft, and cold is warm. One presence fills and floods the whole serene; Nothing can be, nothing has ever been, Except the one truth that creates the scene. Does the heart beat, — that is a seeming only; You cannot be alone, though you are lonely; The All is neutralized in the One only. You ask a faith, — they are content with faith; You ask to have, — but they reply, ‘IT hath.’ There is no end, and there need be no path. The day wears heavily, — why, then, ignore it; Peace is the soul’s desire, — such thoughts restore it; The truth thou art, — it needs not to implore it. The Presence all thy fancies supersedes, All that is done which thou wouldst seek in deeds, The wealth obliterates all seeming needs. Both these are true, and if they are at strife, The mystery bears the one name of Life, That, slowly spelled, will yet compose the strife. The men of old say, ‘Live twelve thousand years, And see the need of all that here appears, And Moxen* shall absorb thy smiles and tears.’ These later men say, ‘Live this little day. Believe that human nature is the way, And know both Son and Father while you pray; And one in two, in three, and none alone, Letting you know even as you are known, Shall make the you and me eternal parts of one.’ To me, our destinies seem flower and fruit Born of an ever-generating root; The other statement I cannot dispute. But say that Love and Life eternal seem, And if eternal ties be but a dream, What is the meaning of that self-same seem? Your nature craves Eternity for Truth; Eternity of Love is prayer of youth; How, without love, would have gone forth your truth? I do not think we are deceived to grow, But that the crudest fancy, slightest show, Covers some separate truth that we may know. In the one Truth, each separate fact is true; Eternally in one I many view, And destinies through destiny pursue. This is my tendency; but can I say That this my thought leads the true, only way? I only know it constant leads, and I obey. I only know one prayer — ‘Give me the truth, Give me that colored whiteness, ancient youth, Complex and simple, seen in joy and truth. Let me not by vain wishes bar my claim, Nor soothe my hunger by an empty name, Nor crucify the Son of man by hasty blame. But in the earth and fire, water and air, Live earnestly by turns without despair, Nor seek a home till home be every where!’

I lay down under language it left me and I slept —You, the Comforter, came into the room my blood, my mouth all buttoned away— Makers of houses, books, clothes- makers, goodbye—