Poems 1962-2012 (6 page)

as though they will stay where they are.

Instruct me in the dark.

THE SWIMMER

You sat in the tub.

No sand stirred, the dead

waited in the ocean.

Then the tapwater

flooded over you,

sapphire and emerald.

The beach

is as you found it,

littered with objects.

They have brought me here;

I rifle through them,

shell and bone, and am not satisfied.

What brought me to rest was your body.

Far away you turn your head:

through still grass the wind

moves into a human language

and the darkness comes,

the long nights

pass into stationary darkness.

Only the sea moves.

It takes on color, onyx and manganese.

If you are there it will release you

as when, among the tame waves,

I saw your worn face,

your long arms making for shore—

The waves come forward,

we are traveling together.

THE LETTERS

It is night for the last time.

For the last time your hands

gather on my body.

Tomorrow it will be autumn.

We will sit together on the balcony

watching the dry leaves drift over the village

like the letters we will burn,

one by one, in our separate houses.

Such a quiet night.

Only your voice murmuring

You're wet, you want to

and the child

sleeps as though he were not born.

In the morning it will be autumn.

We will walk together in the small garden

among stone benches and the shrubs

still sheeted in mist

like furniture left for a long time.

Look how the leaves drift in the darkness.

We have burned away

all that was written on them.

JAPONICA

The trees are flowering

on the hill.

They are bearing

large solitary blossoms,

japonica,

as when you came to me

mistakenly

carrying such flowers

having snapped them

from the thin branches.

The rain had stopped. Sunlight

motioned through the leaves.

But death

also has its flower,

it is called

contagion, it is

red or white, the color

of japonica—

You stood there,

your hands full of flowers.

How could I not take them

since they were a gift?

THE APPLE TREES

Your son presses against me

his small intelligent body.

I stand beside his crib

as in another dream

you stood among trees hung

with bitten apples

holding out your arms.

I did not move

but saw the air dividing

into panes of color—at the very last

I raised him to the window saying

See what you have made

and counted out the whittled ribs,

the heart on its blue stalk

as from among the trees

the darkness issued:

In the dark room your son sleeps.

The walls are green, the walls

are spruce and silence.

I wait to see how he will leave me.

Already on his hand the map appears

as though you carved it there,

the dead fields, women rooted to the river.

DESCENDING FIGURE (1980)

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

FOR JOHN

I     THE GARDEN

THE DROWNED CHILDREN

You see, they have no judgment.

So it is natural that they should drown,

first the ice taking them in

and then, all winter, their wool scarves

floating behind them as they sink

until at last they are quiet.

And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms.

But death must come to them differently,

so close to the beginning.

As though they had always been

blind and weightless. Therefore

the rest is dreamed, the lamp,

the good white cloth that covered the table,

their bodies.

And yet they hear the names they used

like lures slipping over the pond:

What are you waiting for

come home, come home, lost

in the waters, blue and permanent.

THE GARDEN

1.
The Fear of Birth

One sound. Then the hiss and whir

of houses gliding into their places.

And the wind

leafs through the bodies of animals—

But my body that could not content itself

with health—why should it be sprung back

into the chord of sunlight?

It will be the same again.

This fear, this inwardness,

until I am forced into a field

without immunity

even to the least shrub that walks

stiffly out of the dirt, trailing

the twisted signature of its root,

even to a tulip, a red claw.

And then the losses,

one after another,

all supportable.

2.
The Garden

The garden admires you.

For your sake it smears itself with green pigment,

the ecstatic reds of the roses,

so that you will come to it with your lovers.

And the willows—

see how it has shaped these green

tents of silence. Yet

there is still something you need,

your body so soft, so alive, among the stone animals.

Admit that it is terrible to be like them,

beyond harm.

3.
The Fear of Love

That body lying beside me like obedient stone—

once its eyes seemed to be opening,

we could have spoken.

At that time it was winter already.

By day the sun rose in its helmet of fire

and at night also, mirrored in the moon.

Its light passed over us freely,

as though we had lain down

in order to leave no shadows,

only these two shallow dents in the snow.

And the past, as always, stretched before us,

still, complex, impenetrable.

How long did we lie there

as, arm in arm in their cloaks of feathers,

the gods walked down

from the mountain we built for them?

4.
Origins

As though a voice were saying

You should be asleep by now—

But there was no one. Nor

had the air darkened,

though the moon was there,

already filled in with marble.

As though, in a garden crowded with flowers,

a voice had said

How dull they are, these golds,

so sonorous, so repetitious

until you closed your eyes,

lying among them, all

stammering flame:

And yet you could not sleep,

poor body, the earth

still clinging to you—

5.
The Fear of Burial

In the empty field, in the morning,

the body waits to be claimed.

The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock—

nothing comes to give it form again.

Think of the body's loneliness.

At night pacing the sheared field,

its shadow buckled tightly around.

Such a long journey.

And already the remote, trembling lights of the village

not pausing for it as they scan the rows.

How far away they seem,

the wooden doors, the bread and milk

laid like weights on the table.

PALAIS DES ARTS

Love long dormant showing itself:

the large expected gods

caged really, the columns

sitting on the lawn, as though perfection

were not timeless but stationary—that

is the comedy, she thinks,

that they are paralyzed. Or like the matching swans,

insular, circling the pond: restraint so passionate

implies possession. They hardly speak.

On the other bank, a small boy throws bits of bread

into the water. The reflected monument

is stirred, briefly, stricken with light—

She can't touch his arm in innocence again.

They have to give that up and begin

as male and female, thrust and ache.

PIETÀ

Under the strained

fabric of her skin, his heart

stirred. She listened,

because he had no father.

So she knew

he wanted to stay

in her body, apart

from the world

with its cries, its

roughhousing,

but already the men

gather to see him

born: they crowd in

or kneel at worshipful

distance, like

figures in a painting

whom the star lights, shining

steadily in its dark context.

DESCENDING FIGURE

1.
The Wanderer

At twilight I went into the street.

The sun hung low in the iron sky,

ringed with cold plumage.

If I could write to you

about this emptiness—

Along the curb, groups of children

were playing in the dry leaves.

Long ago, at this hour, my mother stood

at the lawn's edge, holding my little sister.

Everyone was gone; I was playing

in the dark street with my other sister,

whom death had made so lonely.

Night after night we watched the screened porch

filling with a gold, magnetic light.

Why was she never called?

Often I would let my own name glide past me

though I craved its protection.

2.
The Sick Child

—
Rijksmuseum

A small child

is ill, has wakened.

It is winter, past midnight

in Antwerp. Above a wooden chest,

the stars shine.

And the child

relaxes in her mother's arms.

The mother does not sleep;

she stares

fixedly into the bright museum.

By spring the child will die.

Then it is wrong, wrong

to hold her—

Let her be alone,

without memory, as the others wake

terrified, scraping the dark

paint from their faces.

3.
For My Sister

Far away my sister is moving in her crib.

The dead ones are like that,

always the last to quiet.

Because, however long they lie in the earth,

they will not learn to speak

but remain uncertainly pressing against the wooden bars,

so small the leaves hold them down.

Now, if she had a voice,

the cries of hunger would be beginning.

I should go to her;

perhaps if I sang very softly,

her skin so white,

her head covered with black feathers …

THANKSGIVING

They have come again to graze the orchard,

knowing they will be denied.

The leaves have fallen; on the dry ground

the wind makes piles of them, sorting

all it destroys.

What doesn't move, the snow will cover.

It will give them away; their hooves

make patterns which the snow remembers.

In the cleared field, they linger

as the summoned prey whose part

is not to forgive. They can afford to die.

They have their place in the dying order.

II     THE MIRROR

EPITHALAMIUM

There were others; their bodies

were a preparation.

I have come to see it as that.

As a stream of cries.

So much pain in the world—the formless

grief of the body, whose language

is hunger—

And in the hall, the boxed roses:

what they mean

is chaos. Then begins

the terrible charity of marriage,

husband and wife

climbing the green hill in gold light

until there is no hill,

only a flat plain stopped by the sky.

Here is my hand,
he said.

But that was long ago.

Here is my hand that will not harm you.

ILLUMINATIONS

1.

My son squats in the snow in his blue snowsuit.

All around him stubble, the brown

degraded bushes. In the morning air

they seem to stiffen into words.

And, between, the white steady silence.

A wren hops on the airstrip

under the sill, drills

for sustenance, then spreads

its short wings, shadows

dropping from them.

2.

Last winter he could barely speak.

I moved his crib to face the window:

in the dark mornings

he would stand and grip the bars

until the walls appeared,

calling
light, light,

that one syllable, in

demand or recognition.

3.

He sits at the kitchen window

with his cup of apple juice.

Each tree forms where he left it,

leafless, trapped in his breath.

How clear their edges are,

no limb obscured by motion,

as the sun rises

cold and single over the map of language.

THE MIRROR

Watching you in the mirror I wonder

what it is like to be so beautiful

and why you do not love

but cut yourself, shaving

like a blind man. I think you let me stare

so you can turn against yourself

with greater violence,

needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away

scornfully and without hesitation

until I see you correctly,

as a man bleeding, not

the reflection I desire.

PORTRAIT