Collected Poems (4 page)

are still strange and comforting.

The pines outside, immobile

as chessmen, fume turps

that blend with the soap taste

of the sheets and with the rot

of camphor and old newspapers

in the bare bureau drawers.

Jarred by a headlight’s glare

from the country road, the crumbling

plaster swarms with shadows.

The bulb in the barn, dull

and eternal, sways and flickers

as though its long drool

of cobwebs had been touched,

and the house loosens, unmoors,

and, distending and shuddering, rocks

me until I fall asleep.

In December the mare

I learned to ride on died.

On the frozen paddock hill,

down, she moaned all night

before the mink farmers

came in their pickup

truck, sat on her dark

head and cut her throat.

I dream winter. Shutters

slamming apart. Bags

crammed with beer bottles

tipping against clapboard.

Owls in chimneys.

Drafts; thieves; snow.

Over the crusty fields

scraps of blue loveletters

mill wildly like children,

and a fat woman, her rough

stockings tattered away

at a knee, sprints in high,

lumbering bounds among

the skating papers. Out

to the road — red hydrant,

bus bench, asphalt —

a wasp twirling at her feet,

she is running back.

My first kiss was here.

I can remember the spot —

next to a path, to

a cabin, a garden patch —

but not how it happened

or what I felt, except

amazement that a kiss

could be soundless. Now,

propped on an elbow,

I smoke through the dawn, smudging

the gritty sheets with ash.

Day finally. The trees

and fences clarify, unsnarl.

Flagstones, coins, splash

across the driveway crowns

and the stark underbrush

animals go away.

A rickety screen door bangs,

slaps its own echo

twice. No footsteps

but someone is out sifting

ashes in the garbage pit.

Suddenly dishes jangle

the bright middle distances

and the heat begins again:

by now the ground must be

hard and untillable as ice.

Far off from the house,

the lake, jellied with umber

weed scum, tilts toward

the light like a tin tray.

Dead rowboats clog

the parched timber dam

and along the low banks

the mounds of water rubble

I gathered yesterday

have dried and shrunk down

to a weak path wobbling

back and forth from the edge.

The Other Side

Across the way hands

move nervously on curtains,

and behind them, radiated

with arc light, silver,

there is almost no face.

Almost no eyes look at me through this air.

Almost no mouth twists

and repeats, following my mouth, the shrill ciphers

that cross like swallows.

Tonight the breeze from the distillery

stinks of death. Do you think men have died

in the vats tonight? Everyone waits,

sick with the stench of mash

and spirits, and the tubs lick

their own sides with little splashes,

little bubbles that pop, clearing themselves.

In this breeze, it is strange to be telling myself,

Life, what are you saying?

In this breeze, almost like hands, words

climb on the thin gauze of curtains

and drop. Men float

from corner to corner, and, almost like hands,

birds put their sore wings under the eaves

and sleep.

Of What Is Past

I hook my fingers into the old tennis court fence

and kneel down in an overgrowth of sharp weeds

to watch the troopers in their spare compound drill.

Do you remember when this was a park? When girls

swung their rackets here in the hot summer mornings

and came at night to open their bodies to us?

Now gun-butts stamp the pale clay like hooves.

Hard boots gleam.

And still, children play tag and hide-and-seek

beyond the barriers. Lovers sag in the brush.

It’s not them, it’s us: we know too much.

Soon only the past will know what we know.

Ashes Ashes We All Fall Down

how come when grandpa is teaching the little boy

to sing he can’t no matter what remember even

though he taps time hard with his teeth like a cricket even

though he digs in hard with his fingers how come?

and when he grows tall he will name everyone

he meets father or mother but will still have no songs

he leans back among the cold pages he falls down

in the palace of no sleep where the king cries and

in the new country the musical soldiers will

beat him he will sell silver consonants out

of his car the lady will cup his dry testicles

in the drone the soldiers beat him again

I miss you now can you

remember the words at least? and the

new name? when pain comes

you must kill it when beauty comes

with her smiles you must kill them I

miss you again I miss you white

bug I miss you sorrow rain radio I miss

you old woman in my bible in the dream

Trappers

In the dark with an old song

I sit, in the silence,

and it knows me

by heart and comes faltering

gently through me

like a girl in love,

in a room, evening,

feeling her way.

When mountain men

were snowed in for months

in the Rockies, sleet

hissing over the sharp crust

to hollow places, branches

groaning through the night,

they must have done what I do

now, and been as terrified.

I let a word out,

and what comes, an awful drone,

a scab, bubbles up

and drills away unfadingly.

Later, in a place far

from here, feeling softly on her neck

like a fly, she will gaze

into the sunlight, and not see me.

Being Alone

Never on one single pore Eternity

have I been touched by your snows

or felt your shy mouth tremble,

your breath break on me

like the white wave. I have not felt

your nakedness tear me

with hunger or your silver hands

betray me but today I promise

whatever flower of your house

should bloom I will stay

locked to its breast.

Like little fish who live

harmlessly under the bellies of sharks,

I will go where you go,

drift inconspicuously

in the raw dredge of your power

like a leaf, a bubble of carrion,

a man who has understood and does not.

Trash

I am your garbage man. What you leave,

I keep for myself, burn or throw

on the dump or from scows in the delicious river.

Your old brown underpants are mine now,

I can tell from them

what your dreams were. I remember

how once in a closet with shoes

whispering and mothballs, you held on

and cried like a woman. Your nights stink

of putrid lampshades, of inkwells and silk

because my men and I with our trails

of urine and soft eggs and our long brooms

hissing, came close.

What do they do with kidneys and toes

in hospitals? And where did your old dog go

who peed on the rug and growled?

They are at my house now, and what grinds

in your wife’s teeth while she sleeps

is mine. She is chewing

on embryos, on the eyes of your lover,

on your phone book and the empty glass

you left in the kitchen. And in your body,

the one who died there and rots

secretly in the fingers of your spirit,

she is hauling his genitals out, basket

after basket

and mangling all of it in the crusher.

Giving It Up

It is an age

of such bestial death

that even before we die

our ghosts go.

I have felt mine while I slept

send shoots over my face,

probing some future char

there, tasting the flesh

and the sweat

as though for the last time.

And I have felt him

extricate himself and go,

crying, softening himself

and matching his shape

to new bodies; merging,

sliding into souls,

into motors, buildings,

stop signs, policemen —

anything.

By morning, he is back.

Diminished, shorn

of his light, he lies crumpled

in my palm, shivering

under my breath like cellophane.

And every day

there is nothing to do

but swallow him like a cold

tear

and get on with it.

For Gail, When I Was Five

My soul is out back eating your soul.

I have you tied in threads like a spider

and I am drinking down your laughter

in huge spoonfuls. It is like tinsel.

It sprays over the crusty peach baskets

and the spades hung on pegs. It is like air

and you are screaming, or I am, and we are

in different places with wild animal faces.

What does God do to children who touch

in the darkness of their bodies and laugh?

What does he think of little underpants

that drift down on the hose like flowers?

God eats your soul, like me. He drinks

your laughter. It is God in the history

of my body who melts your laughter

and spits it in the wounds of my life like tears.

Don’t

I have been saying what I have to say

for years now, backwards and forwards

and upside down and you haven’t heard

it yet, so from now on

I’m going to start unsaying it:

I’m going to unsay what I’ve said already

and what everyone else has said

and what hasn’t even been said yet.

I’m going to unsay

the northern hemisphere

and the southern,

east and west, up

and down, the good

and the bad. I’m going to unsay

what floats just over my skin

and just under: the leaves

and the roots, the worm

in the river and the whole river

and the ocean and the ocean

under the ocean. Space

and light are going,

silence, sound, flags,

photographs, dollar bills:

the sewer people and the junk people,

the money people and the concrete people

who ride out of town on dreams

and love it, and the dreams,

even the one pounding

under the floor like a drum —

I’m going to run them all down

again the other way

and end at the bottom.

Do you see? Caesar is unsaid

now. Christ

is unsaid. They trade toys

but it’s too late.

The doctor is unsaid, cured;

the rubber sheet grows

leaves, luscious and dark,

and the patient feels them

gathering at the base

of his spine like a tail.

It is unsaid

that we have no tails —

an old lady twirls hers

and lifts

like a helicopter.

Time turns

backwards in its womb and floats out

in its unsaying.

It won’t start again.

The sad physicist

throws switches but all

the bomb does is sigh inwardly

and hatch like an egg,

and little void-creatures

come, who live

in the tones between notes,

innocent and unstruck.

A baby fighting for air

through her mother’s breast

won’t anymore: the air is unsaid.

The skeleton I lost in France

won’t matter. No picnics,

no flattened grass,

no bulls.

Everything washes up,

clean as morning.

My wife’s wet underwear in the sink —

I unsay them,

they swallow me

like a Valentine.

The icebox is growing baby green

lima beans for Malcolm Lowry.

The house fills with love.

I chew perfume

and my neighbor kissing me good morning

melts and goes out

like a light.

There is bare rock

between here and the end.

There is a burnt place

in the silence.

Along my ribs, dying of old age,

the last atom dances

like a little girl. I unsay

her yellow dress, her hair,

her slippers

but she keeps dancing,

jumping back and forth

from my face to my funny bone

until I burst out laughing.

And then I unsay

the end.

Just Right

the way we get under cars and in

motors you’d think we were made for them our hands

slotting in the carbs our feet

on the pedals and how everything

even flowers even the horns of cattle fits

just right it is like nail and hole

even apples even hand grenades with indentations

for our fingers and the detonations patterns finding us

all this given and how ungrateful we are

dreaming that someday we won’t touch anything

that all this space will close on us

the fire sprout through us and blossom and

the tides

dear father of the fire save me enough room please

and dear water-mother I’d like two clear drops