A Grain of Mustard Seed (5 page)

Withdraws under a leaf

Or simulated bog

(This is frog’s sign of grief),

Closes his eyes to brood.

Frogs do not weep, they hide.

The camera makes him cross.

Eyes glaze or tightly close;

His whole expression’s changed.

He will not take a pose,

He has become estranged

Who was so bright and gay—

“Hysterical,” they say,

As subject, total loss—

Burrows himself away,

Will not rise to a fly:

The frog is camera-shy.

A form of lunacy?

But whose face does not freeze,

Eyes shut or wildly blink?

Who does not sometimes sneeze

Just at the camera’s wink?

Withdraw to worlds inside?

Invent himself a bog?

And more neurotic we

Than the spontaneous frog,

Sometimes cannot decide

Whether to weep or hide.

Eine Kleine Snailmusik

“THE SNAIL WATCHERS ARE
interested in snails from all angles… At the moment they are investigating the snail’s reaction to music. ‘We have played to them on the harp in the garden and in the country on the pipe,’ said Mr. Heaton, ‘and we have taken them into the house and played to them on the piano.’ ”

—
The London Star

What soothes the angry snail?

What’s music to his horn?

For the “Sonata Appassionata,”

He shows scorn,

And Handel

Makes the frail snail

Quail,

While Prokofieff

Gets no laugh,

And Tchaikovsky, I fear,

No tear.

Piano, pipe, and harp,

Dulcet or shrill,

Flat or sharp,

Indoors or in the garden,

Are willy-nilly

Silly

To the reserved, slow,

Sensitive

Snail,

Who prefers to live

Glissandissimo,

Pianissimo.

The Fig

Under the green leaf hangs a little pouch

Shaped like a gourd, purple and leathery.

It fits the palm, it magnetizes touch.

What flesh designed as fruit can this fruit be?

The plump skin gives a little at the seam.

Now bite it deep for better or for worse!

Oh multitude of stars, pale green and crimson—

And you have dared to eat a universe!

Hawaiian Palm

Being ourselves still earthbound,

All we see in the beginning

Is tree rooted, tree from the ground,

That tensile gray trunk just leaning

(Literal, stiff, a little off-plumb)

Over the lazy purple and greening

Of waves on the coral honeycomb.

From here our wandering eyes mount

Slowly to its surprising head,

A baroque casque, a great fount

Of spiny plumes that tremble their load,—

See first panache against flat blue,

And only later under this shade

The clutch of rich ovarian fruit.

The tree is separated essence,

First rooted, then fruitful, standing

Unmoved, it would seem, and tense.

We do not catch the subtle blending

Until we are bored, half in trance,

Able to sense the ever-spending

Rich presence as a dance.

Vision, airborne, is shifted slightly

To watch the singing mind in motion.

Wind plays the pleated leaves so sweetly

Form is not broken; silence is seen,

A shimmer, a music for the eye;

And now we penetrate all sheen

To wisdom, rooted, dancing lightly.

Part Four

A Hard Death

We have seen how dignity can be torn

From the naked dying or the newly born

By a loud voice or an ungentle presence,

Harshness of haste or lack of reverence;

How the hospital nurse may casually unbind

The suffering body from the lucid mind.

The spirit enclosed in that fragile shell

Cannot defend itself, must endure all.

And not only the dying, helpless in a bed,

Ask for a little pillow for the head,

A sip of water, a cool hand to bless:

The living have their lonely agonies.

“Is there compassion?” a friend asked me.

“Does it exist in another country?”

The busy living have no time to see

The flowers, so silent and so alive,

That paling to lavender of the anemone,

That purpling of the rose no one can save,

Dying, but at each second so complete

A photograph would show no slightest change.

Only the human eye, imperfect but aware,

Knows that the flower arrested on the air

Is flying through space, doing a dance

Toward the swift fall of petals, all at once.

God’s Grace, given freely, we do not deserve,

But we can choose at least to see its ghost

On every face. Oh, we can wish to serve

Each other gently as we live, though lost.

We cannot save, be saved, but we can stand

Before each presence with gentle heart and hand;

Here in this place, in this time without belief,

Keep the channels open to each other’s grief;

Never accept a death or life as strange

To its essence, but at each second be aware

How God is moving always through each flower

From birth to death in a multiple gesture

Of abnegation; and when the petals fall

Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well.

I saw my mother die and now I know

The spirit cannot be defended. It must go

Naked even of love at the very end.

“Take the flowers away” (Oh, she had been their friend!),

And we who ached could do nothing more—

She was detached and distant as a star.

Let us be gentle to each other this brief time

For we shall die in exile far from home,

Where even the flowers can no longer save.

Only the living can be healed by love.

The Silence

At first the silence is a silence only,

A huge lack rather than a huge something.

I listen for a voice in this dead vacuum,

Feel destitute, abandoned, full of dread.

Season of growing light and dirty snow

When we are too vulnerable for words.

The silence—at first it is empty.

Tears fall out of my eyes like falling leaves.

To whom, to what is it goodbye? Such grief.

At first the silence is a silence only.

Season of separation and the winter freeze.

Only the skies are open these hard days.

The brooks are numbed inside their caves of ice.

Who knows—who can?—what is in store for us?

Our dying planet where the glazed fields shine—

No gentle snow falls in this cruel time.

Silence, a membrane. Somehow I must get through

Into the universe where stars still flock,

To the rich world not empty but wide open,

Where soul quietly breathes and is at home.

First, I must go beyond the loneliness,

Refuse dependence and not ask for love.

So I went up the hill with my raw grief,

Found lambs there, shivering, newly born.

The sheep’s gruff voice, anxious, as she licked one,

Repeated a hoarse word, a word torn from her,

I had never heard that sound before—

That throaty cry of hunger and arrival.

Oh yes, I nearly drowned with longing then…

Now winter hills surround me in the evening light.

A dying sun, cold sky flushed with rose

Speak of the separation in all birth.

At first the silence is a silence only…

But huge lack bears huge something through the dark.

Annunciation

In this suspense of ours before the fall,

Before the end, before the true beginning,

No word, no feeling can be pure or whole.

Bear the loss first, then the infant winning;

Agony first, and then the long farewell.

So the child leaves the parent torn at birth.

No one is perfect here, no one is well:

It is a time of fear and immolation.

First the hard journey down again to death

Without a saving word or a free breath,

And then the terrible annunciation:

And we are here alone upon the earth.

The angel comes and he is always grave.

Joy is announced as if it were despair.

Mary herself could do nothing to save,

Nothing at all but to believe and bear,

Nothing but to foresee that in the ending

Would lie the true beginning and the birth,

And all be broken down before the mending.

For there can never be annunciation

Without the human heart’s descent to Hell.

And no ascension without the fearful fall.

The angel’s wings foretold renunciation,

And left her there alone upon the earth.

At Chartres

Perhaps there is no smallest consolation,

No help, no saving grace, no little ease;

Only the presence of this pure compassion

We lifted up, who fall upon our knees.

Nothing we have to give it or implore.

It does not speak to us. It has no face,

And is itself only an open door—

Forever open, that will never close.

Here we are measured by our own creation.

Against this little anguish, this short breath,

Those choirs of glass rise up in an ovation,

Ourselves so small, this house so huge with faith.

Here we are measured against the perfect love,

Transparent glowing walls define and free.

The door is open, but we cannot move,

Nor be consoled or saved. But only see.

Once More At Chartres

A desperate child, I run up to this gate

With all my fears withheld and all my dark

Contained, to breathe out in one breath

All I have carried in my heart of death,

All I have buried in my mind of hate.

Once more I stand within the ancient ark.

Chartres, you are here who never will not be,

Ever becoming what you always are.

So, lifted by our human eyes, each hour,

The arch is breathed alive into its power,

Still being builded for us who still see

Hands lifting stone into the perilous air.

A child, I rest in your maternal gaze,

That which encompasses and shelters, yet,

Lifting so gently, still demands re-birth,

Breaks open toward sky the dark of earth,

And proves unyielding where the rose is set,

Where Love is light itself and severe praise.

Chartres, you the reason beyond any faith,

The prayer we make who never learned to pray,

The patient recreator of creation,

O distant friend, O intimate relation,

You living seed in the disease of death,

And long becoming of our only day,

I stand within your arduous embrace.

This is pure majesty, there is no other.

I suffer all beginnings and all ends.

Here this enclosure opens and transcends

All weaker hopes under your tragic face—

The suffering child here must become the mother.

Jonah

I come back from the belly of the whale

Bruised from the struggle with a living wall,

Drowned in a breathing dark, a huge heart-beat

That jolted helpless hands and useless feet,

Yet know it was not death, that vital warm,

Nor did the monster wish me any harm;

Only the prisoning was hard to bear

And three-weeks’ need to burst back into air.

Slowly the drowned self must be strangled free

And lifted whole out of that inmost sea,

To lie newborn under compassionate sky,

As fragile as a babe, with welling eye.

Do not be anxious, for now all is well,

The sojourn over in that fluid Hell,

My heart is nourished on no more than air,

Since every breath I draw is answered prayer.

Easter Morning

The extreme delicacy of this Easter morning

Spoke to me as a prayer and as a warning.

It was light on the brink, spring light

After a rain that gentled my dark night.

I walked through landscapes I had never seen

Where the fresh grass had just begun to green,

And its roots, watered deep, sprung to my tread;

The maples wore a cloud of feathery red,

But flowering trees still showed their clear design

Against the pale blue brightness chilled like wine.

And I was praying all the time I walked,

While starlings flew about, and talked, and talked.

Somewhere and everywhere life spoke the word.