Poems 1962-2012 (30 page)

you want Orpheus, you want death.

Orpheus who said “Help me find Eurydice.”

Then the music began, the lament of the soul

watching the body vanish.

II

THE EVENING STAR

Tonight, for the first time in many years,

there appeared to me again

a vision of the earth's splendor:

in the evening sky

the first star seemed

to increase in brilliance

as the earth darkened

until at last it could grow no darker.

And the light, which was the light of death,

seemed to restore to earth

its power to console. There were

no other stars. Only the one

whose name I knew

as in my other life I did her

injury: Venus,

star of the early evening,

to you I dedicate

my vision, since on this blank surface

you have cast enough light

to make my thought

visible again.

LANDSCAPE

—
for Keith Monley

1.

The sun is setting behind the mountains,

the earth is cooling.

A stranger has tied his horse to a bare chestnut tree.

The horse is quiet—he turns his head suddenly,

hearing, in the distance, the sound of the sea.

I make my bed for the night here,

spreading my heaviest quilt over the damp earth.

The sound of the sea—

when the horse turns its head, I can hear it.

On a path through the bare chestnut trees,

a little dog trails its master.

The little dog—didn't he used to rush ahead,

straining the leash, as though to show his master

what he sees there, there in the future—

the future, the path, call it what you will.

Behind the trees, at sunset, it is as though a great fire

is burning between two mountains

so that the snow on the highest precipice

seems, for a moment, to be burning also.

Listen: at the path's end the man is calling out.

His voice has become very strange now,

the voice of a person calling to what he can't see.

Over and over he calls out among the dark chestnut trees.

Until the animal responds

faintly, from a great distance,

as though this thing we fear

were not terrible.

Twilight: the stranger has untied his horse.

The sound of the sea—

just memory now.

2.

Time passed, turning everything to ice.

Under the ice, the future stirred.

If you fell into it, you died.

It was a time

of waiting, of suspended action.

I lived in the present, which was

that part of the future you could see.

The past floated above my head,

like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable.

It was a time

governed by contradictions, as in

I felt nothing
and

I was afraid.

Winter emptied the trees, filled them again with snow.

Because I couldn't feel, snow fell, the lake froze over.

Because I was afraid, I didn't move;

my breath was white, a description of silence.

Time passed, and some of it became this.

And some of it simply evaporated;

you could see it float above the white trees

forming particles of ice.

All your life, you wait for the propitious time.

Then the propitious time

reveals itself as action taken.

I watched the past move, a line of clouds moving

from left to right or right to left,

depending on the wind. Some days

there was no wind. The clouds seemed

to stay where they were,

like a painting of the sea, more still than real.

Some days the lake was a sheet of glass.

Under the glass, the future made

demure, inviting sounds:

you had to tense yourself so as not to listen.

Time passed; you got to see a piece of it.

The years it took with it were years of winter;

they would not be missed. Some days

there were no clouds, as though

the sources of the past had vanished. The world

was bleached, like a negative; the light passed

directly through it. Then

the image faded.

Above the world

there was only blue, blue everywhere.

3.

In late autumn a young girl set fire to a field

of wheat. The autumn

had been very dry; the field

went up like tinder.

Afterward there was nothing left.

You walk through it, you see nothing.

There's nothing to pick up, to smell.

The horses don't understand it—

Where is the field, they seem to say.

The way you and I would say

where is home.

No one knows how to answer them.

There is nothing left;

you have to hope, for the farmer's sake,

the insurance will pay.

It is like losing a year of your life.

To what would you lose a year of your life?

Afterward, you go back to the old place—

all that remains is char: blackness and emptiness.

You think: how could I live here?

But it was different then,

even last summer. The earth behaved

as though nothing could go wrong with it.

One match was all it took.

But at the right time—it had to be the right time.

The field parched, dry—

the deadness in place already

so to speak.

4.

I fell asleep in a river, I woke in a river,

of my mysterious

failure to die I can tell you

nothing, neither

who saved me nor for what cause—

There was immense silence.

No wind. No human sound.

The bitter century

was ended,

the glorious gone, the abiding gone,

the cold sun

persisting as a kind of curiosity, a memento,

time streaming behind it—

The sky seemed very clear,

as it is in winter,

the soil dry, uncultivated,

the official light calmly

moving through a slot in air

dignified, complacent,

dissolving hope,

subordinating images of the future to signs of the future's passing—

I think I must have fallen.

When I tried to stand, I had to force myself,

being unused to physical pain—

I had forgotten

how harsh these conditions are:

the earth not obsolete

but still, the river cold, shallow—

Of my sleep, I remember

nothing. When I cried out,

my voice soothed me unexpectedly.

In the silence of consciousness I asked myself:

why did I reject my life? And I answer

Die Erde überwältigt mich:

the earth defeats me.

I have tried to be accurate in this description

in case someone else should follow me. I can verify

that when the sun sets in winter it is

incomparably beautiful and the memory of it

lasts a long time. I think this means

there was no night.

The night was in my head.

5.

After the sun set

we rode quickly, in the hope of finding

shelter before darkness.

I could see the stars already,

first in the eastern sky:

we rode, therefore,

away from the light

and toward the sea, since

I had heard of a village there.

After some time, the snow began.

Not thickly at first, then

steadily until the earth

was covered with a white film.

The way we traveled showed

clearly when I turned my head—

for a short while it made

a dark trajectory across the earth—

Then the snow was thick, the path vanished.

The horse was tired and hungry;

he could no longer find

sure footing anywhere. I told myself:

I have been lost before, I have been cold before.

The night has come to me

exactly this way, as a premonition—

And I thought: if I am asked

to return here, I would like to come back

as a human being, and my horse

to remain himself. Otherwise

I would not know how to begin again.

A MYTH OF INNOCENCE

One summer she goes into the field as usual

stopping for a bit at the pool where she often

looks at herself, to see

if she detects any changes. She sees

the same person, the horrible mantle

of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.

That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—

everything in nature is in some way her relative.

I am never alone,
she thinks,

turning the thought into a prayer.

Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore

how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.

Also that he embraced her, right there,

with her uncle watching. She remembers

sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.

Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,

the chilling insight that from this moment

she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool

will never return. A woman will return,

looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,

I was abducted,
but it sounds

wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.

Then she says,
I was not abducted.

Then she says,
I offered myself, I wanted

to escape my body.
Even, sometimes,

I willed this.
But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance

wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—

she says them in rotation.

Death, husband, god, stranger.

Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.

I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can't remember herself as that person

but she keeps thinking the pool will remember

and explain to her the meaning of her prayer

so she can understand

whether it was answered or not.

ARCHAIC FRAGMENT

—
for Dana Levin

I was trying to love matter.

I taped a sign over the mirror:

You cannot hate matter and love form.

It was a beautiful day, though cold.

This was, for me, an extravagantly emotional gesture.

. . . . . . . . your poem:

tried, but could not.

I taped a sign over the first sign:

Cry, weep, thrash yourself, rend your garments—

List of things to love:

dirt, food, shells, human hair.

. . . . . . . . said

tasteless excess. Then I

rent the signs.

AIAIAIAI cried

the naked mirror.

BLUE ROTUNDA

I am tired of having hands

she said

I want wings—

But what will you do without your hands

to be human?

I am tired of human

she said

I want to live on the sun—

*   *   *

Pointing to herself:

Not here.

There is not enough

warmth in this place.

Blue sky, blue ice

the blue rotunda

lifted over

the flat street—

And then, after a silence:

*   *   *

I want

my heart back

I want to feel everything again—

That's what

the sun meant: it meant

scorched—

*   *   *

It is not finally

interesting to remember.

The damage

is not interesting.

No one who knew me then

is still alive.

My mother

was a beautiful woman—

they all said so.

*   *   *

I have to imagine

everything

she said

I have to act

as though there is actually

a map to that place:

when you were a child—

*   *   *

And then:

I'm here

because it wasn't true; I

distorted
it—

*   *   *

I want she said

a theory that explains

everything

in the mother's eye

the invisible

splinter of foil

the blue ice

locked in the iris—

*   *   *

Then:

I want it

to be my fault

she said

so I can fix it—

*   *   *

Blue sky, blue ice,

street like a frozen river

you're talking

about my life

she said

*   *   *

except

she said

you have to fix it

in the right order

not touching the father

until you solve the mother

*   *   *

a black space

showing

where the word ends

like a crossword saying

you should take a breath now

the black space meaning

when you were a child—

*   *   *

And then:

the ice

was there for your own protection

to teach you

not to feel—

the truth

she said

I thought it would be like

a target, you would see

the center—