The Lion and the Rose (3 page)

It is standing against its own image at last

In a high air.

OF THE SEASONS

Sangre de Cristo Mountains
Santa Fe, New Mexico

You spoke of spring and summer

As we drove through the pinyon-spotted,

Through the leopard-land, the hammer

Of sun on the bronze and the violet.

You spoke of lilies brushing

The horses’ necks in spring

And dry creeks water-rushing,

“In the spring,” you told me.

I remember all that you said

Of the sharp cleavage, the heat,

The cold that makes the head

Bum with an inner tension,

Sound like a glass humming.

Words break in crystal air

And silence is always coming,

“It is here,” you told me.

And when you spoke of summer,

I knew the heat is in waves

And earth begins to shimmer

With violent reds and umber.

On the naked rock you told

How the fierce path of wind

Burned the structure bright as gold,

And rock fire-bare not barren,

“In the summer,” you told me.

We did not speak of winter

For then we turned and saw

The sun crash and then splinter

On peaks till they were flooded

With light that aches with rose,

And all the mountains iced

Are burned again—“and those,”

You said, “are called The Blood of Christ.”

INDIAN DANCES

O have you heard it, far off, the deep drum

Calling from the Plaza all feet to come,

Calling from the Plaza the blood in the wrist

To beat with the drum, the heart in the chest

To beat with the drum, till the flesh is a fruit

That swells with the drum, and from the bone’s root

Aches with the drum, till all bodies are bound

Fast to the drum and the drum to the ground,

And the drum to the earth

As the tree to the earth.

O have you lived in the drum-beat, the deep beat

As the old men move together, their eyelids shut fast,

Move to answer the sound of the drum in their feet

Till the song rises sweet in their old throats at last,

And springs from their throats like a river in flood

That comes from the mountains to answer the blood,

Till the flesh is a fountain and all bodies rise

Like rivers to song and the song goes to the skies,

And the song to the sun

As the tree to the sun.

O have you seen them, the beautiful slow dancers

Whose feet can implore the clouds for their answers,

Whose feet can converse with the ghost of the buffalo,

The light antlered deer, and remember the rainbow,

Whose feet can command the young corn to grow strong,

Whose feet spring as light from the source of the song

As the song from the rivers held secret within

And from drum bound to earth, the fruit of the skin,

And the dance to the skies

As the tree to the skies.

O have you heard the drum-beat and the river of song?

O have you come from far to see the grave dances?

And not known that you came to be freed by the song?

And not known that you came to be healed by the dances,

And not known that you came to witness your birth,

That you came to give back your flesh to the earth,

That you came to give back the deep rivers that rise

In the heart till it floods and pours from your eyes,

To give back the song to the clouds and the great rain,

Until you, imprisoned, are freed of your mortal pain,

As the dead are alone and free,

As the living when born again,

As the tree to the earth.

SANTOS: NEW MEXICO

Return to the most human, nothing less

Will nourish the torn spirit, the bewildered heart,

The angry mind: and from the ultimate duress,

Pierced with the breath of anguish, speak for love.

Return, return to the deep sources, nothing less

Will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,

To carve into our lives the forms of tenderness

And still that ancient necessary pain preserve.

O we have moved too far from these, all we who look

Upon the wooden painted figure, stiff and quaint,

Reading it curiously like a legend in a book—

But it is Man upon the cross. It is the living saint.

To those who breathed their faith into the wood

It was no image, but the very living source,

The saviour of their own humanity by blood

That flows terribly like a river in its course.

They did not fear the strangeness, nor while gazing

Keep from this death their very precious life.

They looked until their hands and hearts were blazing

And the reality of pain pierced like a knife.

We must go down into the dungeons of the heart,

To the dark places where modern mind imprisons

All that is not defined and thought apart.

We must let out the terrible creative visions.

Return to the most human, nothing less

Will teach the angry spirit, the bewildered heart,

The torn mind, to accept the whole of its duress,

And pierced with anguish, at last act for love.

POET IN RESIDENCE

Carbondale, Illinois

THE STUDENTS

I looked behind you for the towers of music,

And for the remembered words, blue hills of childhood;

What human mind had touched yours to the quick?

What passions, hungers streamed through your blood?

Had you been Marie Curie or Keats or some sad queen

Dying in great pomp and pride alone?

Your grandfathers were huge with dreams,

Crossed an ocean and half a continent, breathing hope;

When corn failed further North after a drought,

Migrated down to this hot and fertile land

And named it Little Egypt, Bible in hand;

Brought with them a tradition of fierce work,

Saw cities rise in the wilderness, Thebes and Cairo,

Governed themselves, invented States and rules,

Imagined the marvelous rich life sure to grow

When the ground was cleared, the hard work done,

And on summer evenings, sitting Bible in hand,

Dreamed of a great teacher or poet grandson.

I looked behind you for the towers of music

And found only the broken jazz record

And last week’s magazine gone stale,

An old moan and a blurred word,

A flat face with no deepening scene behind it:

You remember the portraits of the Renaissance,

The face and then behind it the mysterious scene—

The secret river, the soft green unemphatic hill

Where everyone has been and no one has been.

Literature is like this, you know, philosophy

And music have this effect on the personality,

Set behind it a magical, a marvelous world,

Open it up, enlarge it, fill it with wild excitement—

But ignorant of man’s long ecstasy and pain,

You come to books as to a strange dull town

Where you know no one by name and do not care,

And never recognize the Waste Land as your own.

I looked behind you and saw nothing, nothing at all,

But a flat empty wall,

I saw you lonely and bored walking in a dull town;

I saw you letting the books fall.

And then because there was nothing else to do,

I saw you turning on the radio.

CAMPUS

Yes, I have been lonely, angry here,

Lonely on the suffocating walks under the trees

Where faces cross and re-cross bright with sweat,

And damp hands clutch the books unmarked by love.

Intricate and empty this criss-cross movement

Through the green, through the bird song

As if it were a dance but with no meaning,

And I, the stranger, often lit up by anger,

Waiting for someone to ask the simple question,

“Why have you come and who are you, stranger?”

And to say gladly, “Nothing but a voice,

Nothing but an angry joy, a protestation,

Nothing, a gift of nothing on the desolate air—”

Here in the center of America

Steeped deep in the tiger-lily June

Where the iced blue hydrangea

Cuts the air like a tune,

Here where the parched bird is still at noon,

Here in the center of America where it is always noon,

On the secure sidewalks of the typical town,

I go alone and a stranger, a haunted walker,

Full of self-questioning and wonder,

Waiting for the speech, for the word

To break the tension like a clap of thunder,

“How can the books be broken to yield the dynamic answer,

And we embody thought in living as does the dance, the dancer?”

BEFORE TEACHING

These nights when the frog grates shrilly by the pond

And fireflies’ points of flame flicker the gloom,

Where birds are stilled in the dense thicket-heat,

And I have seen through haze a bloody moon

Rise through the trees to make the sober town

A legendary place, a place of fearful glory,

These nights when, knowing I shall have to teach

When morning comes again, are full of fear,

I ask myself, fumbling and full of doubt, angry with time,

How stamp for you as if a gold coin in relief

The single signature of passion and belief?

What through the years endures, the only joy,

The one delight age does increase, the discipline

That fosters growth within it and is ever fertile,

And the great freedom too that comes with this—

And if I cannot do it, why be a poet then,

Or talk of art, or weep for its defeat?

These nights the frog grates and the firefly

Pricks the dense thickets of the gloomy heat

Have known the heart’s will and its savage cry,

And too the delicate cool wind, the blessing on the air.

AFTER TEACHING

I am only beginning to know what I was taught

As a child about poetry, about life, about myself;

It takes a long time for words to become thought,

For thought, the slow burner, to burn through

Into life where it can scorch the palm of a hand,

When what was merely beautiful or strange

Suffers the metamorphosis, the blood-change,

Looks out of eyes or walks down the street,

All that was abstract become concrete,

Is part of you like an eyelash or your hair;

You say “Poetry” and mean you have been there.

You are just beginning to understand

What it is all about, the imaginary land,

Say, “I can’t possibly describe the weather.

It’s as if the sky burned, was all on fire,

Ecstasy that makes ash of bodily desire—

But all I have to show is a stone and a blue feather.”

My children, you with whom I have learned so much,

Do not turn back to these hours; go forward,

Look to the fertile days and years ahead

When all that meaning and its implication,

The full tone and the half-tone and the whisper

Will sound together and keep the mind awake,

As after hearing a difficult quartet

The theme comes clear and you listen again

Long after you had thought you heard;

So it is with the deep thought, the deep word.

Now we are able only to graph the flight;

For we never actually rose from the ground,

Imagine a moment when student and teacher

(Long after the day and the lesson are over)

Will soar together to the pure immortal air

And find Yeats, Hopkins, Eliot waiting there.

But you understand, it cannot happen yet.

It takes a long time to live what you learn: