Poems 1962-2012 (4 page)

Neglect. Open my room, trees. Child's come.

MERIDIAN

Long Island Sound's

Asleep: no wind

Rustles down the inlet

In the sagging light

As, stalled at

Vanishing, two Sunday sailboats

Wait it out,

Paralysis, or peace,

Whichever, and the drained sun

Sinks through insects coalesced

To mist, mosquitoes

Rippling over the muddy ocean.

LATE SNOW

Seven years I watched the next-door

Lady stroll her empty mate. One May he turned his head to see

A chrysalis give forth its kleenex creature:

He'd forgotten what they were. But pleasant days she

Walked him up and down. And crooned to him.

He gurgled from his wheelchair, finally

Dying last Fall. I think the birds came

Back too soon this year. The slugs

Have been extinguished by a snow. Still, all the same,

She wasn't young herself. It must have hurt her legs

To push his weight that way. A late snow hugs

The robins' tree. I saw it come. The mama withers on her eggs.

TO FLORIDA

Southward floated over

The vicious little houses, down

The land. Past Carolina, where

The bloom began

Beneath their throbbing clouds, they fed us

Coldcuts, free. We had our choice.

Below, the seasons twist; years

Roll backward toward the can

Like film, and the mistake appears,

To scale, soundlessly. The signs

Light up. Across the aisle

An old man twitches in his sleep. His mind

Will firm in time. His health

Will meet him at the terminal.

THE SLAVE SHIP

Sir: Cruising for profit

Close to Portsmouth we have not

Done well. All winds

Quarrel with our course it seems and daily the crew whines

For fresh woman-

flesh or blood again. No gain

Accumulates; this time I fear with reason. There's no

Other news. A week ago

We charged a trader stocked with Africans

I knew for royal but their skin fixed terror in my men's

Eyes—against my will they mounted her and in the slow

Dawn off Georgia stole her whole

Hold's gold and slew that living cargo.

SOLSTICE

June's edge. The sun

Turns kind. Birds wallow in the sob of pure air,

Crated from the coast … Un-

real. Unreal. I see the cure

Dissolving on the screen. Outside, dozing

In its sty, the neighbors' offspring

Sucks its stuffed monster, given

Time. And now the end begins:

Packaged words. He purrs his need again.

The rest is empty. Stoned, stone-

blind she totters to the lock

Through webs of diapers. It is Christmas on the clock,

A year's precise,

Terrible ascent, climaxed in ice.

THE INLET

Words fail me. The ocean traveling stone

Returns turquoise; small animals twinkle in a haze

Of weed as this or that sequence

Of pod rattles with complete delicacy on the rotten vine.

I know what's slipping through my fingers.

In Hatteras the stones were oiled with mud.

The sunset leaked like steak blood,

Sank, and my companion weaved his fingers

Through my fingers. Wood's Hole,

Edgartown, the Vineyard in the rain,

The Vineyard not in the rain, the rain

Fuming like snow in Worcester, like gas in the coal

Country. Grass and goldenrod come to me,

Milkweed covers me over, and reed. But this riddle

Has no name: I saw a blind baby try

To fix its fists in tendrils

Of its mother's hair, and get air. The air burns,

The seaweed hisses in its cistern …

           Waveside, beside earth's edge,

           Before the toward-death cartwheel of the sun,

           I dreamed I was afraid and through the din

           Of birds, the din, the hurricane of parting sedge

           Came to the danger lull.

           The white weeds, white waves' white

           Scalps dissolve in the obliterating light.

           And only I, Shadrach, come back alive and well.

SATURNALIA

The year turns. The wolf takes back her tit

As war eats at the empire

Past this waxworks, the eternal city.

We have had our round. What

Lords rise are not of Rome: now northward some two-bit

Vercingetorix sharpens his will. A star

Is born.            Caesar

Snores on his perch above the Senate.

This is history. Ice clogs the ducts; my friend,

I wake to frost

On marble and a chill men take for omen

Here. The myth contracts. All cast

For comfort, shun their works to pray,

Preening for Judgment. Judgment fails. One year,

Twenty—we are lost. This month the feasts begin.

Token slaves suck those dripping fowl we offer

To insure prosperity.

THE HOUSE ON MARSHLAND (1975)

WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE

KAREN KENNERLY

TOM GILSON

ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT

I     ALL HALLOWS

ALL HALLOWS

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

THE POND

Night covers the pond with its wing.

Under the ringed moon I can make out

your face swimming among minnows and the small

echoing stars. In the night air

the surface of the pond is metal.

Within, your eyes are open. They contain

a memory I recognize, as though

we had been children together. Our ponies

grazed on the hill, they were gray

with white markings. Now they graze

with the dead who wait

like children under their granite breastplates,

lucid and helpless:

The hills are far away. They rise up

blacker than childhood.

What do you think of, lying so quietly

by the water? When you look that way I want

to touch you, but do not, seeing

as in another life we were of the same blood.

GRETEL IN DARKNESS

This is the world we wanted.

All who would have seen us dead

are dead. I hear the witch's cry

break in the moonlight through a sheet

of sugar: God rewards.

Her tongue shrivels into gas …

           Now, far from women's arms

and memory of women, in our father's hut

we sleep, are never hungry.

Why do I not forget?

My father bars the door, bars harm

from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though

you meant to leave,

as though it never happened.

But I killed for you. I see armed firs,

the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Nights I turn to you to hold me

but you are not there.

Am I alone? Spies

hiss in the stillness, Hansel,

we are there still and it is real, real,

that black forest and the fire in earnest.

FOR MY MOTHER

It was better when we were

together in one body.

Thirty years. Screened

through the green glass

of your eye, moonlight

filtered into my bones

as we lay

in the big bed, in the dark,

waiting for my father.

Thirty years. He closed

your eyelids with

two kisses. And then spring

came and withdrew from me

the absolute

knowledge of the unborn,

leaving the brick stoop

where you stand, shading

your eyes, but it is

night, the moon

is stationed in the beech tree,

round and white among

the small tin markers of the stars:

Thirty years. A marsh

grows up around the house.

Schools of spores circulate

behind the shades, drift through

gauze flutterings of vegetation.

ARCHIPELAGO

The tenth year we came upon immense sunlight, a relief

of islands locked into the water. These became our course.

Eleven months we drifted, toward the twelfth

wandered into docile ocean, a harbor. We prepared for peace.

Weeks passed. And then the captain saw

the mouth closing that defined our port—we are

devoured. Other voices stir. Water

sneers against our ship, our shrunk number runs

in two packs: madness and suicide. The twelfth year

the captain calls his name, it has no meaning, and the crew

shrieks in its extremity.

THE MAGI

Toward world's end, through the bare

beginnings of winter, they are traveling again.

How many winters have we seen it happen,

watched the same sign come forward as they pass

cities sprung around this route their gold

engraved on the desert, and yet

held our peace, these

being the Wise, come to see at the accustomed hour

nothing changed: roofs, the barn

blazing in darkness, all they wish to see.

THE SHAD - BLOW TREE

—
for Tom

1.
The Tree

It is all here,

luminous water, the imprinted sapling

matched, branch by branch,

to the lengthened

tree in the lens, as it was

against the green, poisoned landscape.

2.
The Latent Image

One year he focused on a tree

until, through sunlight pure as never afterward, he saw

the season, early spring, work upon those limbs

its white flower, which the eye

retains: deep in the brain

the shad-blow coins its leaf in this context,

among monuments, continuous with such frozen forms

as have become the trained vine,

root, rock, and all things perishing.

MESSENGERS

You have only to wait, they will find you.

The geese flying low over the marsh,

glittering in black water.

They find you.

And the deer—

how beautiful they are,

as though their bodies did not impede them.

Slowly they drift into the open

through bronze panels of sunlight.

Why would they stand so still

if they were not waiting?

Almost motionless, until their cages rust,

the shrubs shiver in the wind,

squat and leafless.

You have only to let it happen:

that cry—
release, release
—like the moon

wrenched out of earth and rising

full in its circle of arrows

until they come before you

like dead things, saddled with flesh,

and you above them, wounded and dominant.

THE MURDERESS

You call me sane, insane—I tell you men

were leering to themselves; she saw.

She was my daughter. She would pare

her skirt until her thighs grew

longer, till the split tongue slid into her brain.

He had her smell. Fear

will check beauty, but she had no fear. She talked

doubletalk, she lent

her heat to Hell's: Commissioner, the sun

opens to consume the Virgin on the fifteenth day.

It was like slitting fish. And then the stain

dissolved, and God presided at her body.

FLOWERING PLUM

In spring from the black branches of the flowering plum tree

the woodthrush issues its routine

message of survival. Where does such happiness come from

as the neighbors' daughter reads into that singing,

and matches? All afternoon she sits

in the partial shade of the plum tree, as the mild wind

floods her immaculate lap with blossoms, greenish white

and white, leaving no mark, unlike

the fruit that will inscribe

unraveling dark stains in heavier winds, in summer.

NATIVITY POEM

It is the evening

of the birth of god.

Singing &

with gold instruments

the angels bear down

upon the barn, their wings

neither white

wax nor marble. So

they have been recorded:

burnished,

literal in the composed air,

they raise their harps above

the beasts likewise gathering,

the lambs & all the startled

silken chickens … And Joseph,

off to one side, has touched

his cheek, meaning

he is weeping—

But how small he is, withdrawn

from the hollow of his mother's life,

the raw flesh bound

in linen as the stars yield

light to delight his sense

for whom there is no ornament.

TO AUTUMN

—
for Keith Althaus

Morning quivers in the thorns; above the budded snowdrops