246 Spiritual poems

There is no age, this darkness and decay Is by a radiant spirit cast aside, Young with the ageless youth that yesterday Bent to the yoke of flesh immortal pride. What though in time of thunder and black cloud The Spirit of the Innermost recedes Into the depths of Being, stormy browed, Obscured by a long life of dreams and deeds— There is no age—the swiftly passing hour That measures out our days of pilgrimage And breaks the heart of every summer flower, Shall find again the child’s soul in the sage. There is no age, for youth is the divine; And the white radiance of the timeless soul Burns like a silver lamp in that dark shrine That is the tired pilgrim’s ultimate goal.

Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon: My breath to heaven like vapour goes; May my soul follow soon! The shadows of the convent-towers Slant down the snowy sward, Still creeping with the creeping hours That lead me to my Lord: Make Thou my spirit pure and clear As are the frosty skies, Or this first snowdrop of the year That in my bosom lies. As these white robes are soil'd and dark, To yonder shining ground; As this pale taper's earthly spark, To yonder argent round; So shows my soul before the Lamb, My spirit before Thee; So in mine earthly house I am, To that I hope to be. Break up the heavens, O Lord! and far, Thro' all yon starlight keen, Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star, In raiment white and clean. He lifts me to the golden doors; The flashes come and go; All heaven bursts her starry floors, And strows her lights below, And deepens on and up! the gates Roll back, and far within For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits, To make me pure of sin. The sabbaths of Eternity, One sabbath deep and wide— A light upon the shining sea— The Bridegroom with his bride!

A roof over my head, protected from the rain, I’m reading, pilgrim father, your letters to your son and wondering if, unlike you, I should head for home. Escaping the turbulence of this modern Rome in a flurry of skyline views and exploding foam, I can see that 747 in flight over Nova Scotia, Lahinch and Limerick, snoring back to the future; I can see the old stormy island from the air, its meteorological gaiety and despair, some evidence of light industry and agriculture, familiar contours, turfsmoke on field and town; I can even hear the cabin crew’s soft ‘fáilte’ and the strains of ‘My Lagan Love’ as we touch down. A recovering Ulster Protestant from Co. Down, I shall walk the Dublin lanes as the days grow shorter, I who once had poems in The New Yorker, and spend old age, if any, in an old mac with the young audibly sneering behind my back, deafened by seagulls and the playground cries of children — ourselves, once — by perilous seas. Now, listening to the rus-in-urbe, spring-in-winter noise of late-night diners while the temperatures rise and the terrible wind-chill factor abates, I realize the daffodils must be out in ditch and glen and windows soon flung wide to the spring rain; and marvel how, a figure out of the past, an old man in a hurry, you stuck it here to the last, negotiating the icefields of 8th Avenue to die on West 29th of the ‘Asian’ flu. But first you met by chance at the riverside a young woman with a sick child she tried to hide (not out of shame, you felt, but anguished pride), soft-spoken, ‘from Donnybrook’, amid the alien corn. ‘It pained me that her bright image should fade.’ Thus your epiphany, and you wrote to explain: ‘The nightingale sings with its breast against a thorn, it’s out of pain that personality is born.’ Things you understood: children, the human face, ‘something finer than honesty’, the kindness of women and the priority of the real. Things that puzzled you: economy, fear, the argument from design, the need to feel secure, the belief in another world besides this one here. Despite your rationalism, did it ever appear that the universe might be really‘magical’, sir, and you yourself a showing-forth of that soul? ‘Art is dreamland.’ When you rejoined the whole what glimpse was given to you in the black hole? Now, to ‘Yeats, Artist and Writer’, may we add that you were at home here and in human nature but also, in your own words, lived and died like all of us, then as now, ‘an exile and a stranger’?

Standing at a desk of cranberries     a small triumph of jumps     I wait longer than the rescue of rains     I send prayers to the terror walking north I do a pantomime on the edge of the cliff     overreacting to the sea and the creatures in back of the house     if  you had just looked out I would have said this is my little resonance The guile of parrots     a carnival     a killing     a crusade    the final 
pursuit either a panorama or a demon The fan click refuses to stop or to cancel its insistence     stubborn in the face of carnage     the once famous once child fortunes     the fifty days of posters     all the field deaths     all the cries of Jimmy! Caddie! Victor! Are you coming? Today not to beard but to wear black     today not to trace the creases on my face     today caught in parts     today to bicep toward justice but not to beard     as if that were even a possibility     even with lasers and goats     an ocean of black dogs and boats     searching for better swells     a more favorable forecast     a mast out of water     I want what the pelican sees An answer comes in the smell of woodsmoke as he passes     by a personal note at the slope of his neck    trials of bridges and the moon alongside Pont Marie     I follow that smell with the O of sails and sorted shoes     with brushes and the corners of candles     a firm clap then the rubber stickiness of stones     I follow the tremble with the white noise of busses and a can of coins     surrounded by Joyce and daughter     blind on a broken chair     hearing cobbles I’m just like you     some dying     some grief     some scotch     my final please unhooked from fire and earrings     knees in the grass     sinking into the sorted dirt     my beach a tree pleading with the summer surf    walking or chased    a finned orange fish that sucks at my sleep    a morning trail in lavender musk     preacher mounds    a human fever    a corner room settled in blue plaid    a pot of red bowls     a curtain of frames     a pitted eye    a hill    a chimney     a pear Where would these words be without a subject?    little carvings of mosquitoes landing on my hands     headaches digging an elision of craters     a great empty blow of air that follows my feet    the big lumber of my dog’s no longer here     his hair an excursion still fluttering on the tile     slush and whispered breath     where the naked man on the street washes his back with purple flowers You keep saying boy like it’s the belt that was used to tie you to the bed     you keep saying bull like you were forced to fight     you keep saying dragon as if courage had no sound     you keep saying hair and crib like babies come out of shells From button to button     what spunky rope    what cold claustrophobe    what caravan of pack dogs    what kink and rocky tunnels do I have to sliver through     every exhausted moon    batteries dwindling toward unnameable and permanent night     my knees pray the floor will open to a new city A door to my back     the molding cheesy and rectal     I run with the horses across the field     the town wiped off the track and left behind    you curl up at the back of my neck and we go bucking over the whole knot of trails     the whole veiny land

The mouth of the cavern is cut along the top like snowy peaks in cartoons—it zigzags. I sweat onto my violet shirt in the shape of a heart, lock that away behind varnish, a hidden floor between stalactites (long trick knives) A lady of Falconbridge & lady of Dorset torn back through the center & made quiet A paper cut black branch set on a red field. A horse draws the carriage past a lake of blue & all the kids are laid down in the forest to live tilt their heads back, Don’t think of stopping your shooting, more drinking! These are to be among the permanent (wrong) colors Ice rats in stairwells, above us centaurs smack their heads into light bulbs. They get excited over massacre Who were once the innocents who never hoped to live out unspoken prayer. A country that laid so dark so long Pyramids send word to the painted mountains don’t try to lie down as it gets late. stay on guard study your drums & then tighten, pound back a few shots more ash on the sea floors Don’t you scrape away too many organs or paint over. Do not temper the spirit. (4-27-07)

I In heaven there is no more sea, and houses no longer need a widow’s walk. And no more widows, there being neither marriage nor giving in marriage. How the air hangs lower and lower on this—I hope —hottest day of summer. A faintly rotten scent the ground gives off brings to mind lilacs that have budded and blossomed. There are no more blossoms, perfume and purple gone for a year, as if forever. In heaven there are no tears, salt water wiped away entirely. One moment I breathe contentment. And then unreasoning sorrow pulses through me, an imperfect tension, as if unending. I have time on my hands. In heaven there is no more dusk, dark, dawn, meridian. And what I know now and for certain: neither the day nor the hour. II It seems clear enough that there is in the brain a particular pain-center, where sensations of every variety check in, to emerge as anguish and hurt. Thus there is not, as we might suppose, a multiplicity of pains, like an arsenal deployed against us, but one pain which puts on, as in a ritual theater, different masks. It need not, even, be a great number of masks, some few faces peopling an endless repertory. From one fairy tale to another, is not the witch the same witch, whether poisoning an apple or fattening the children? III The doctrine changes, blows here and there, hot, cold. One more notion sweeps across the state in gusts, fiercely at first, settling then into a mild rotation. It puts things in motion. It dies down, while pressure somewhere else is building. Called to, across a chasm of thin air, I shape the air to answer. My moments force themselves apart. Breathe out. Breathe in. But as long as you are alive, there is a dead space in your lungs, never emptied, never needing to be filled. The spirit there, stale and sustaining, holds open every possibility, urging none. Ghost money: money to burn. IV On the earliest known sundial, the finger of shadow moves through symbols of the cosmos, but there are no lines drawn to mark off the hours. It does not, in the modern sense, “keep” time, but celebrates its flight, its recurrence, its brightness. V Hermaphrodite, sleeping. Predominance, in the visible, of the right hand —but the eyes now closed. What could there be to dream about, for one already complete? A perfect asymmetrical stability. No need to see or even to look. To know, without having to ask. From any point on the periphery, advancing always towards the body. Both sexes. And both asleep. VI A scream from outside broke our argument and I ran to the door, rushed out onto the sidewalk almost, I thought, before the scream had ended. The night sky, above the street lamp, had a sheen of some dark metal. Sirens—which seemed this evening more frequent than usual, and more strident—state the theme, you have said, of our instant: the howl of a machine hurrying to disaster. And all day, in the violence of delivery, ordinary trucks rattle our sashes. The street lay empty, mercury lit, silence giving us no indication of which way to turn.

After Octavio Paz What’s most human must drive an arrow to the heart. Ghosts, too, must abide by this directive & remain transparent, going about their business in old houses. Before I was an I, I longed to be ethereal. Sprouting wings at will & gliding through cul-de-sacs and malls around the valley. My hands, too, would gradually disappear followed by my arms, then neck & head until my whole body was slight as allergen. Before I was an I, I spoke an old language that would return on drowsy afternoons. Therefore I struggled to say the simplest sentences. So much so that the maligned semicolon became an ardent ally, an island of pause and the deep breath. The comma, too, bless its tiny soul, was the crumb which the god of small favors multiplied tenfold for my morning pie. Before I was an I, knowledge clung to me like burrs & hunger guided my ship like the barefoot light on the sleeping land & sea.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home – With a Bobolink for a Chorister – And an Orchard, for a Dome – Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice – I, just wear my Wings – And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church, Our little Sexton – sings. God preaches, a noted Clergyman – And the sermon is never long, So instead of getting to Heaven, at last – I’m going, all along.

for Erin, for others There are places in this world where you can stand somewhere holy and be thinking If it’s holy then why don’t I feel it, something, and while waiting, like it will any moment happen and maybe this is it, a man accosts you, half in his tongue, half in yours, he asks if maybe you are wanting to get high, all the time his damaged finger twitching idly like on purpose at a leash that holds an animal you can’t quite put your finger on at first, until you ask him, ask the man, and then he tells you it’s a weasel and, of course, it is, you’ve seen them, you remember now, you say Of course, a weasel. There are men inside the world who, never mind how much they tell you that they’re trying, can’t persuade you that it isn’t you, it’s life, it’s life in general where it hurts, a fear, of everything, of nothing, when if only they would name it maybe then you’d stay, you all the time aware it’s you that’s talking, so who’s going anywhere but here, beside them, otherwise why come, why keep on coming, when you can’t get to believing what they tell you any more than you believed the drugs the other man was offering wouldn’t harm you. Still, you think, you took them and you’re still alive, enough to take the hand, that wants, that promises to take you to where damage is a word, that’s all, like yes,so Yes you say,I’ll come, you tell him Show me.

If one saves a butterfly, has one saved the world? Rabbi says: If one saves one butterfly, even with long wings, one butterfly that has fallen into water, it may be said: “He has saved the whole world.” If one saves a motley moth, is it the same? Rabbi: It is valid. If one saves a dirty monkey from a flame, for example, it is as the saying is: He or she has saved the whole world. It is valid for all creatures, and not more so for the creatures who know how to recite the blessings. It is always valid, even on the Sabbath. It is said: The creatures of the sky are owned by no one, like the land. If one saves the Book from being destroyed, is it also saving a world? Rabbi: God forbid, yes, saving the book from the fire, saving the book or books from the fire, is known to be comparable. He who saves a book and he who writes a holy book, it should be said: They have saved the whole world like a book. If one saves a rose, one rose, from the garden of your dead Teacher, is it still appropriate to think: She has saved the world. The Rabbi was silent and seemed troubled. He replied: If the house of the great teacher is in ruins, and the garden is a scandal, and one saves one rose from his garden it is said even of one rose: It is like saving the world. It is also said the rose will grow as large as the world.