Collected Poems (36 page)

those old cravings — but the striving to will themselves from themselves is only a dream,

the dead know what death has brought is all they need now because all else was already possessed,

all else was a part of the heart as it lived, in what it had seen and what it had suffered,

in the love it had hardly remarked coming upon it, so taken it was with its work of volition.

I can hardly believe that so little has to be lost to find such good fortune in death,

and then, as I dream again the suspensions of will I’m still only just able to dream,

I suddenly know I’ve beheld death myself, and instead of the terror, the flexions of fear,

the repulsion, recoil, impatience to finish, be done with the waiting once and for all,

I feel the same surge of acceptance, patience, and joy I felt in my dead rising in me:

I know that my dead have brought what I’ve restlessly waited all the life of the dream for.

I wait in joy as they give themselves to the dream once again; waiting, I’m with them again.

Light

Always in the dream I seemed conscious of myself having the dream even as I dreamed it.

Even now, the dream moving towards light, the field of light flowing gently towards me,

I watch myself dreaming, I watch myself dreaming and watching, I watch both watchers together.

It almost seems that this is what dream is about, to think what happens as it’s happening.

Still, aren’t there disturbing repercussions in being in such an active relation with dream?

What about nightmare, for instance; nightmare is always lurking there out at the edges,

it’s part of dream’s definition: how be so involved in the intimate workings of dream

without being an accomplice of nightmare, a portion of its cause or even its actual cause?

Doesn’t what comes to me have to be my fault, and wouldn’t the alternative be more troubling still —

that I might
not
be the one engendering this havoc, that I’m only allowed to think so,

that the nightmare itself, hauling me through its vales of anguish, is the operative force?

What do I mean by nightmare itself, though? Wouldn’t that imply a mind here besides mine?

But how else explain all the
care,
first to involve me, then to frighten me out of my wits?

Mustn’t something with other agendas be shaping the dream; don’t all the enticements and traps

suggest an intention more baleful than any I’d have for visiting such mayhem on myself?

And if this isn’t the case, wouldn’t the alternative be as bad; that each element of the dream

would contain its own entailment so that what came next would just do so for no special reason?

How frivolous dream would be, then: either way, though, so much subjugation, so little choice.

Either way, isn’t the real nightmare my having so little power,
even over my own consciousness?

Sometimes, when I arrive in dream here, when I arrive nearly overwhelmed with uncertainty here,

I feel a compulsion to renounce what so confounds me, to abdicate, surrender, but to what?

I don’t even know if my despair might not be another deception the devious dream is proposing.

At last, sometimes, perhaps driven to this, perhaps falling upon it in exhaustion or resignation,

I try to recapture how I once dreamed, innocently, with no thought of being beside or beyond:

I imagine myself in that healing accord I still somehow believe must precede or succeed dream.

My vigilance never flags, though; I behold the infernal beholder, I behold the uncanny beheld,

this mind streaming through me, its turbulent stillness, its murmur, inexorable, beguiling.

V

Helen

1.

More voice was in her cough tonight: its first harsh, stripping sound would weaken abruptly,

and he’d hear the voice again, not hers, unrecognizable, its notes from somewhere else,

someone saying something they didn’t seem to want to say, in a tongue they hadn’t mastered,

or a singer, diffident and hesitating, searching for a place to start an unfamiliar melody.

Its pitch was gentle, almost an interrogation, intimate, a plea, a moan, almost sexual,

but he could hear assertion, too, a straining from beneath, a forcing at the withheld consonant,

and he realized that she was holding back, trying with great effort not to cough again,

to change the spasm to a tone instead and so avert the pain that lurked out at the stress.

Then he heard her lose her almost-word, almost-song: it became a groan, the groan a gasp,

the gasp a sigh of desperation, then the cough rasped everything away, everything was cough now,

he could hear her shuddering, the voice that for a moment seemed the gentlest part of her,

choked down, effaced, abraded, taken back, as all of her was being taken from him now.

2.

In the morning she was standing at the window; he lay where he was and quietly watched her.

A sound echoed in from somewhere, she turned to listen, and he was shocked at how she moved:

not
enough
moved, just her head, pivoting methodically, the mechanisms slowed nearly to a halt,

as though she was afraid to jar herself with the contracting tendons and skeletal leverings.

A flat, cool, dawn light washed in on her: how pale her skin was, how dull her tangled hair.

So much of her had burned away, and what was left seemed draped listlessly upon her frame.

It was her eye that shocked him most, though; he could only see her profile, and the eye in it,

without fire or luster, was strangely isolated from her face, and even from her character.

For the time he looked at her, the eye existed not as her eye, his wife’s, his beloved’s eye,

but as
an
eye, an object, so emphatic, so pronounced, it was separate both from what it saw

and from who saw with it: it could have been a creature’s eye, a member of that larger class

which simply indicated sight and not that essence which her glance had always brought him.

It came to him that though she hadn’t given any sign, she knew that he was watching her.

He was saddened that she’d tolerate his seeing her as she was now, weak, disheveled, haggard.

He felt that they were both involved, him watching, her letting him, in a depressing indiscretion:

she’d always, after all their time together, only offered him the images she thought he wanted.

She’d known how much he needed beauty, how much presumed it as the elemental of desire.

The loveliness that illuminated her had been an engrossing narrative his spirit fed on;

he entered it and flowed out again renewed for having touched within and been a part of it.

In his meditations on her, he’d become more complicated, fuller, more essential to himself.

It was to her beauty he’d made love at first, she was there within its captivating light,

but was almost secondary, as though she was just the instance of some overwhelming generality.

She herself was shy before it; she, too, as unassumingly as possible was testing this abstraction

which had taken both of them into its sphere, rendering both subservient to its serene enormity.

As their experience grew franker, and as she learned to move more confidently towards her core,

became more overtly active in elaborating needs and urges, her beauty still came first.

In his memory, it seemed to him that they’d unsheathed her from the hazes of their awe,

as though her unfamiliar, fiery, famished nakedness had been disclosed as much to her as to him.

She’d been grateful to him, and that gratitude became in turn another fact of his desire.

Her beauty had acknowledged him, allowed him in its secret precincts, let him be its celebrant,

an implement of its luxurious materiality, and though he remained astonished by it always,

he fulfilled the tasks it demanded of him, his devotions reinvigorated and renewed.

3.

In the deepest sense, though, he’d never understood what her beauty was or really meant.

If you only casually beheld her, there were no fanfares, you were taken by no immolating ecstasies.

It amused him sometimes seeing other men at first not really understanding what they saw;

no one dared to say it, but he could feel them holding back their disappointment or disbelief.

Was this Helen, mythic Helen, this female, fleshed like any other, imperfect and approachable?

He could understand: he himself, when he’d first seen her, hadn’t really; he’d even thought,

before he’d registered her spirit and intelligence, before her laughter’s melodies had startled him —

if only one could alter such and such, improve on this or that: he hardly could believe it now.

But so often he’d watched others hear her speak, or laugh, look at her again, and fall in love,

as puzzled as he’d been at the time they’d wasted while their raptures of enchantment took.

Those who hadn’t ever known her sometimes spoke of her as though she were his thing, his toy,

but that implied something static in her beauty, and she was surely just the opposite of that.

If there was little he’d been able to explain of what so wonderfully absorbed him in her,

he knew it was a movement and a process, that he was taken towards and through her beauty,

touched by it but even more participating in its multiplicities, the revelations of its grace.

He felt himself becoming real in her, tangible, as though before he’d only half existed.

Sometimes he would even feel it wasn’t really him being brought to such unlikely fruition.

Absurd that anyone so coarse and ordinary should be in touch with such essential mystery:

something else, beyond him, something he would never understand, used him for its affirmations.

What his reflections came to was something like humility, then a gratitude of his own.

4.

The next night her cough was worse, with a harsher texture, the spasms came more rapidly,

and they’d end with a deep, complicated emptying, like the whining flattening of a bagpipe.

The whole event seemed to need more labor: each cough sounded more futile than the last,

as though the effort she’d made and the time lost making it had added to the burden of illness.

Should he go to her? He felt she’d moved away from him, turning more intently towards herself.

Her sickness absorbed her like a childbirth; she seemed almost like someone he didn’t know.

There’d been so many Helens, the first timid girl, then the sensual Helen of their years together,

then the last, whose grace had been more intricate and difficult to know and to exult in.

How childishly frightened he’d always been by beauty’s absence, by its destruction or perversity.

For so long he let himself be tormented by what he knew would have to happen to her.

He’d seen the old women as their thighs and buttocks bloated, then withered and went slack,

as their dugs dried, skin dried, legs were sausaged with the veins that rose like kelp.

He’d tried to overcome himself, to feel compassion towards them, but, perhaps because of her,

he’d felt only a shameful irritation, as though they were colluding in their loss.

Whether they accepted what befell them, even, he would think, gladly acquiescing to it,

or fought it, with all their sad and valiant unguents, dyes, and ointments, was equally degrading.

His own body had long ago become a ruin, but beauty had never been a part of what he was.

What would happen to his lust, and to his love, when time came to savage and despoil her?

He already felt his will deserting him; for a long time, though, nothing touched or dulled her:

perhaps she really was immortal, maybe his devotion kept her from the steely rakings of duration.

Then, one day, something at her jowls; one day her hips; one day the flesh at her elbows …

One day, one day, one day he looked at her and knew that what he’d feared so was upon them.

He couldn’t understand how all his worst imaginings had come to pass without his noticing.

Had he all this while been blind, or had he not wanted to acknowledge what he’d dreaded?

He’d been gazing at her then; in her wise way, she’d looked back at him, and touched him,

and he knew she’d long known what was going on in him: another admiration took him,

then another fire, and that simply, he felt himself closer to her: there’d been no trial,

nothing had been lost, of lust, of love, and something he’d never dreamed would be was gained.

5.

With her in the darkness now, not even touching her, he sensed her fever’s suffocating dryness.

He couldn’t, however much he wanted to, not let himself believe she was to be no more.

And there was nothing he could do for her even if she’d let him; he tried to calm himself.

Her cough was hollow, soft, almost forgiving, ebbing slowly through the volumes of her thorax.

He could almost hear that world as though from in her flesh: the current of her breath,

then her breastbone, ribs, and spine, taking on the cough’s vibrations, giving back their own.

Then he knew precisely how she was within herself as well, he was with her as he’d never been:

he’d unmoored in her, cast himself into the night of her, and perceived her life with her.

All she’d lived through, all she’d been and done, he could feel accumulated in this instant.

The impressions and sensations, feelings, dreams, and memories were tearing loose in her,

had disconnected from each other and randomly begun to float, collide, collapse, entangle;

they were boiling in a matrix of sheer chance, suspended in a purely mental universe of possibility.

He knew that what she was now to herself, what she remembered, might not in truth have ever been.