CATASTROPHIC BIRTH

Fury and counter fury! The volcano!
Stand firm, unbending. The chemistry
shifts. The retort does not fracture.
The change reveals - change.
The revelation is compact -
compact of regathered fury

By violence lost, recaptured by violence
violence alone opens the shell of the nut.
The best is hard to say - unless
near the break. Unless the shell hold
the kernel is not sweet.
Under violence the meat lies regained

Each age brings new calls upon violence
for new rewards, variants of the old.
Unless each hold firm
Unless each remain inflexible
there can be no new. The new opens
new ways beyond all known ways.

Shut up! laughs the big she-Wop.
Wait till you have six like a me.
Every year one. Come on! Push! Sure,

3

you said it! Maybe I have one next year.
Sweating like a volcano. It cleans you up,
makes you feel good inside. Come on! Push!

The impass becomes a door when the wall
is levelled. The cone lifts, lifts
and settles back. Life goes on. The cone
blocks the crater and lifts half its height.
Life goes on. The orange trees bloom.
The old women talk tirelessly.

The laboratory announces officially
that there is no need to worry. The
cone is subsiding, smoke rises as
a funnel into the blue unnatural sky -
The change impends! A change stutters
in the rocks. We believe nothing can change.

The fracture will come, the death dealing
chemistry cannot be long held back.
The dreaded eruption blocks out the valley,
the careful prognosticator as well as
the idlers. The revelation is complete.
Peace is reborn above the cinders

Only one man is left, the drunkard
who had been confined underground to
rot with the rats and lizards.

4

The old woman who had been combing out
the child's hair is also intact
but at a touch she falls into a heap of ashes

Only he who had been confined
in disgrace underground is rescued alive
and he knows nothing more of it
than to stand and curse the authorities
who left him there so long without food
and liquor while they were digging him out

Rain will fall. The wind and the birds
will bring seeds, the river changes
its channel and fish reenter it.

The seawind will come in from the east.

The broken cone breathes softly on
the edge of the sky, violence revives and regathers.

5

PATERSON : THE FALLS

What common language to unravel?
The Falls, combed into straight lines
from that rafter of a rock's
lip. Strike in! the middle of
some trenchant phrase, some
well packed clause. Then . .
This is my plan. 4 sections: First,
the archaic persons of the drama.

An eternity of bird and bush,
resolved. An unravelling:
the confused streams aligned, side
by side, speaking! Sound
married to strength, a strength
of falling - from a height! The wild
voice of the shirt-sleeved
Evangelist rivalling, Hear

me! I am the Resurrection
and the Life! echoing
among the bass and pickerel, slim
cells from Barbados, Sargossa

Sea, working up the coast to that
bounty, ponds and wild streams--

Third, the old town: Alexander Hamilton
working up from St. Croix,

from that sea! and his parental, a
deeper sea! stopped cold
by that unmoving roar, fastened
there: the rocks silent

but the water, married to the stone,
voluble, though frozen; the water
even when and though frozen
still whispers and moans--

And in the brittle air
a factory bell rang, at dawn, and
snow whines under their feet. Fourth,
the modern town, a

disembodied roar! the cataract and
its clamor broken apart--and from
all learning, the empty
car struck from within, roaring . . .

THE DANCE

In Breugel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breugel's great picture, The Kermess.

Writer's Prologue
to a Play in Verse:

In your minds you jump from doors
to sad departings, pigeons, dreams
of terror, to cathedrals; bowed,
repelled, knees quaking, to the-closed
without-a-key or through an arch
an ocean that races full of sound
and foam to lay a carpet for
your pleasure or a wood that waves
releasing hawks and crows or
crowds that elbow and fight for
a place or anything. You see it
in your minds and the mind at once
jostles it, turns it about, examines
and arranges it to suit its fancy.
Or rather changes it after a pattern
which is the mind itself, turning
and twisting the theme until it gets
a meaning or finds no meaning and
is dropped. By such composition,
without code, the scenes we see move
and, as it may happen, make
a music, a poetry
which the poor poet copies if

and only if he is able - to astonish
and amuse, for your delights,
in public, face to face with you
individually and secretly addressed.

We are not here, you understand,
but in the mind, that circumstance
of which the speech is poetry.
Then look, I beg of you, try and
look within yourselves rather than
at me for what I shall discover.
Yourselves! Within yourselves. Tell
me if you do not see there, alive!
a creature unlike the others, something
extraordinary in its vulgarity,
something strange, unnatural to
the world, that suffers the world poorly,
is tripped at home, disciplined at
the office, greedily eats money -
for a purpose: to escape the tyranny
of lies. And is all they can think
of to amuse you, a ball game? Or
skiing in Van Diemen's land in August
- to amuse you! Do you not come here
to escape that? For you are merely
distracted, not relieved in the blood,

10

deadened, defeated, stultified.

But this! is new. Believe it, to be
proved presently by your patience.
Run through the public appearance
of it, to come out - not stripped
but, if you'll pardon me, something
which in the mind you are and would
be yet have always been, unrecognized,
tragic and foolish, without a tongue.
That's it. Yourself, the thing
you are, speechless - because there is
no language for it, shockingly revealed.

Would it disturb you if I said
you have no other speech than poetry?
You, yourself, I mean. There is
no other language for it than the poem -
falsified by the critics until
you think it something else, fight
it off, as idle, a kind of lie,
smelling of corpses, that the practical
world rejects. How could it be you?
Never! without invention. It is, if
you'll have patience, the undiscovered
language of yourself, which you avoid,
rich and poor, killed and killers,

a language to be coaxed out of poets -
possibly, an intolerable language
that will frighten - to which
you are not used. We must make it
easy for you, feed it to you slowly
until you let down the barriers,
relax before it. But it's easy
if you will allow me to proceed, it
can make transformations, give it
leave to do its work in you.

Accept the convention as you would
opera, provisionally; let me go ahead.
Wait to see if the revelation
happen. It may not.

Or it may come and go, small bits
at a time. But even the chips of it
are invaluable. Wait to learn
the hang of its persuasions as it makes
its transformations from the common
to the undisclosed and lays that open
where - you will see a frightened face!

But believe! that poetry will be
in the terms you know, insist on that
and can and must break through everything,
all the outward forms, to re-dress

12

itself humbly in that which you
yourself will say is the truth, the
exceptional truth of ordinary people,
the extraordinary truth. You shall see.

It isn't masculine more than it is
feminine, it's not a book more than
it is speech; inside the mind, natural
to the mind as metals are to rock,
a gist, puppets which if they present
distinction it is from that hidden
dignity which they, by your leave,
reflect from you who are the play.

This is a play of a husband and a wife.
As you love your husband or your wife
or if you hate him or if you hate
her, watch the language! see if you
think that it expresses something of
the things, to your knowledge, that
take place in the mind and in the world
but seldom on the lips. This play
is of a woman and her lover, all
mixed up, of life and death and all
the secret language that runs through
those curious transactions, seldom
heard but in the deadest presentations

13

now respectfully unnaturalized. This
play is of two races in a counterpoint
of feeling. This play is made of
words whose weighted meanings are
so many cues for you to disentwine,
secretly, to yourself, to see yourself
and to know covertly (as an actor
in that play in which we are all
actors wearing masks - hiding our
identity) the world today. Courteously,
respectfully, anonymously before
the confession booth of music and of
what verse we can manage to pick up
from what we are and what you are
and - to begin . .

For pleasure! pleasure, not for
cruelty but to make you laugh until
you cry, like General Washington
at the river, seeing the travellers
who had had their clothes stolen and
didn't know where to turn. How
he laughed! and how you shall laugh,
to see yourselves, all naked! on
the stage.

to fill our need, and over
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbons

we stuck the green prongs
in the windows hung
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On the

mantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of small
white deer as if they

were walking there. All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare. We

stuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burntout
log's smoldering eye, opening
red and closing under them

and we stood there looking down.
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though we
did not say so) a challenge
above the snow's
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, where

small birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for them
and knocks down

the unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow - Transformed!

Violence leaped and appeared.
Recreant! roared to life
as the flame rose through and
our eyes recoiled from it.

In the jagged flames green
to red, instant and alive. Green!
lost to mind!
Winter's dark towers

from whose sheltered perches
the owl invites
the music of storms,
those sure abutments . . Gone!

and quick in the contracting
tunnel of the grate
appeared a world! Black
mountains, black and red - as

yet uncolored - and ash white,
and infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant, lost,

breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.

18

In Chains

When blackguards and murderers
under cover of their offices
accuse the world of those villanies
which they themselves invent to
torture us - we have no choice
but to bend to their designs,
fight them or be trampled
while our thoughts gnaw, snap and
bite within us helplessly - unless
we learn from that to avoid
being as they are, how love
will rise out of its ashes if
we water it, tie up the slender
stem and keep the image of its
lively flower chiseled upon our minds.

19

Mountain Flowers

What has love or
a flower to do with the mountain?
By the cool spring there are
vines and thorns.
The mountain that breeds them
rises beyond.
The valley is warm.
Pick them, the purple and white,
the blue, the yellow, round
as the sun, the fragile skirted!

23

# A Flowing River

You are lovely as a river
under tranquil skies -
There are imperfections
but a music overlays them -
telling by how dark a bed
the current moves
to what sea that shines
and ripples in my thought

25

The Hounded Lovers

Where shall we go?
Where shall we go
who are in love?

Juliet went
to Friar Laurence's cell
but we have no rest -

Rain water lies on
the hard ground reflecting
the morning sky

But where shall we go?
We cannot resolve ourselves
into a dew

nor sink into the earth.
Shall we postpone it
to Eternity?

The dry heads of the
golden rod
turned to stiff ghosts

# The Cure

Sometimes I envy others, fear them
a little too, if they write well.
For when I cannot write I'm a sick man
and want to die. The cause is plain.

But they have no access to my sources.
Let them write than as they may and
perfect it as they can they will never
come to the secret of that form

interknit with the unfathomable ground
where we walk daily and from which
among the rest you have sprung
and opened flower-like to my hand.

28

To All Gentleness

Like a cylindrical tank fresh silvered
upended on the sidewalk to advertise
some plumber's shop, a profusion
of pink roses bending ragged in the rain -
speaks to me of all gentleness and its
enduring.

Secure in the enclosing rain,
a column of tears borne up by the heavy
flowers, the new and the unlikely, bound
indissolubly together in one mastery .

Out of fear lest the flower be broken
the rose puts out its thorns. That
is the natural way.

We witless wistful
of the flower, unable still by heavy
emphasis to praise enough his silence and
silences

- inventors of opera as national
background, the classic tradition,
bellowing masks, long since decayed, in
our time also perishes :

and they speak,

euphemistically, of the antipoetic!

Garbage. Half the world ignored . .

Is this praise of gentleness ?

The lion
according to old paintings will
lie down with the lamb. But what is meant
has not been precisely enough stated :
missed or - postponed.

The arrow : That the arrow fly !

Forthwith she holds it to the string, the
hygienic arrow ! that, crescent, she
may achieve poise, win perhaps a prize
later at the meet or making a profession
of it grow to be a teacher of the art
- and the innocent shaft, released,
plunges forward . .

The courts are
overcrowded, fear obsesses all intimacies
unless legalized - and money,
articulated to government mounts still
as wonder in the minds of the speculators,
to buy ( the ferment wedging their skulls

wider ) to buy

- shall we say, the grass, or
a small cloud perhaps ( in whose shadow
a lifting wind whirls ) or if Queen Blanche
a pond of waterlilies or the rain itself .

The natural way, to buy !

- to buy off.

But if the wing of a plane in combat,
coming down, an uncertain landing . if
by the shattering prop of a plane he
is knocked into the sea,

gives himself up injured for lost and then -
his wound eased by the seawater - goes
on out of habit swims alone among
the enquiring waves twelve hours, fourteen
hours . .

- picked up and returned to this life.

That too is the natural way,

by claw and law.

For most fear gentleness and misinterpret
it. The smallness of the world is
the cause and the briefness of our lives,

32

Really ?

which if by chance they meet the longer
are, upgrade or downgrade, the wash
and swing .

a matter of indifference,
the wave rising or the wave surving to
the hollow :

swam hour after hour,
the healthy life he'd led formerly at
Seattle holding him .

Or was it, who
can tell ? Come back, for all that,
when they'd released him held incommunicado
in the hospital, to say -

Here I am, come back to you as I promised!

Copernicus, music, do you think yourself
of plays - Is it the occasion or the man ?
Take an apple and split it between
the thumbs. Which one is which ?

- caught
in the shuffling of the wider undulations
one is brought down another

33

lifted by the wash; a rush of algae
proliferant or a mammoth caught in the ice,
hair and all, for dogs later to dig
and devour . .

- all his planning gone into the dirt
for another to build on : the phase,
. . . is supreme -

except for gentleness that joins our lives
in one.

But shoot! shoot straight,
they say and . .

Strength
thrust upon weakness, the convulsive ecstacy
achieved in the moment of conjunction .
- the natural way, to which

. . we are opposed.

The arrow flies ! the barb is driven
home and . .

in the moment of impact we
are left deafened and blinded, blind
to the sun and moon, the brilliant
moonlight leaves, dead to all rivalries,

34

asleep, neutralized

to fish and fowl,
to all movements and uncertainties .

the bird in white above the swimming bird
and from the depths of the wood
the song that is a bird, unseen .

The bomb-sight adjusted destruction hangs
by a hair over the cities. Bombs away!
and the packed word descends - and
rightly so.

Only . that is .

the moment is lost ! without us, the
learned moment. The completion. The
gates opened it also falls away unrecognized.

It is yes, Jakus, the prize: the prize!
the prize - in which that which has been held
from you, my perky lad, is hid.

She was forewoman
to a gang at the foundry whose job it was
to clear the finished parts to
the loading platform; had three misses,
all boys, by the man she lives with -
and may the fourth be a boy also for which

35

he married her.

Tough, huh?

Never had a backache.

Briefness being the challenge and haste,
haste, haste the trap, this up and
that down, ~~this~~ up~~ that~~. . .

Milkweed, a single stalk, on the bare
embankment ( and where
does the imagination begin ?

Violence and
gentleness, which is the core ? Is
gentleness the core?)

Slender green
reaching up from sand and rubble ( the
anti-poetic, they say ignorantly, a
disassociation )

premising the flower.

Among the most violent - sometimes,
rarely, the most violent : the greatest
gentleness . . .

Not the girth of her thigh, but
that gentleness that harbors all violence,

Three Sonets

I

As the eye lifts, the field
is moving - the river,
slowly between the stones
steadily under the bare
branches, heavy slabs close
packed with jagged rime-cupped
edges, seaward -
what was the mudbank
crowded, sparkling
with diamonds big as fists,
unbelievable to witness

2

The silent and snowy mountains
do not change their
poise - the broken line,
the mass whose darkness
meets the rising sun, wakens
uncompromised above the gulls
upon the ice-strewn
river.

38

You cannot succor me,
you cannot change. I will
open my eyes with morning even though
their lids have been sealed for ever
by ice than stone !

3

My adored wife, this - in spite
of Dr Kennedy's remark
that the story of the repeated
injury would sound bad in a divorce
court - the bastard :

In the one woman

I find all the rest - or nothing
and raise them thence and celebrate
them there and close their eyes
and bury them in her and
decorate their graves. Upon her
their memory clings, each one
distinct, enriching her
while I yet live to enjoy, perhaps.

The Rose

The stillness of the rose
in time of war
reminds me of
the long sleep just begun
of that sparrow
his head pillowed unroughed
and unalarmed upon
the polished pavement or
of voluptuous hours
with some
breathless book when
stillness was an eternity
long since begun

Eternity

She had come, like the river
from up county and had work now
in town -

When? Tonight. The street was
dark, she late. Two
young rips

had cavorted down the hill in
the silence, jabbering. Then
he heard

the click of her heels - at his
age! and the darkness
grew milky

away above him and seemed to
move, coming down. She
appeared

bare headed, in pearl earrings
and a cloak. Where shall
we go?

The boy friend was expecting me,
it was hard to
get away.

Where are you supposed to be?
Night, greater than
the cataract

surged in the cisterns of Noah's
chest, enormous night
that makes

of light a fruit, everywhere
active in the dark.

Olympia

would be expecting him, he swam
from her zig-zag through
the dark -

half things bulging and rotted
out hanging, standing at
false angles,

abandoned; drove thence close
to two hundred miles
filling

the tank once near midnight, To
the left, at the second
car tracks,

brother. And the stars performed
their stated miracles.
The wind

rose and howled toward 3 A.M.
with a dash of rain turning
warm. Swift

or slow from capsule to capsule
of the light he saw between
the stars

the sky: velvet, like a leaf,
in detail and counting at
random there

# The Hard Listener

The powerless emperor
makes himself dull
writing poems in a garden
while his armies
kill and burn. But we
keep some relation
to the truth, in poverty
lacking love, of man's
infelicity: say
the late flowers, unspoiled
by insects and waiting
only for the cold.

The Controversy

What do you know about it? the Architect said.
The Executive asked me, What the hell
do you know about business?

Is it so arcane? I can read, I said. Isn't it
just to put 4 and take 5? From whom?
Isn't that all there is to

it? Whom can you best belabor? And do I have
to read the whole of the Apologia
to make up my mind touching

Newman's undecorated place in the world? Who?
they both said. - the situation
and its effects? It's because

of unrelated statements such as that that I
have come to have no respect for
what you say, one of them

looked at me and said. The Jews. Oh the
Jews, the Jews! Is Stinkeroo
Mormun a Jew? If not

then the world is safe (from the Jews!), I can
still read and collate experiences
you never dreamed, I

answered them. Nuts! they said. Very well. Nuts!
and decorated nuts and nuts again,
I said, to you, gentlemen.

46

# These Purists

Lovely: all the essential parts,
like an oyster without a shell
fresh and sweet tasting, to be
swallowed, chewed and swallowed.

Or better, a brain without a
skull. I remember once a guy in
our anatomy class dropped one
from the third floor window on
an organ grinder in Pine Street.

52

A Vision of Labor: 1931

In my head the juxtapositions
impossible otherwise to accomplish:
two young rubber-booted ditchdiggers
beside the bed of the dying bishop--
cracking obscene jokes
at the expense of the flabby woman in
the white bathing suit, the weak breaths
of the old man masquerading under
the double suck of the mule-pump
--by the edge of the sea! the shore
exploded away, constructively,
the sewer going down six feet inside
the seawall along the front of
the cottages--not through them
unfortunately--a cloaca maxima like
the one under the Roman Forum
which alone made that possible in
that place . .

That's it! There, there!
That's the answer. The thing to be
done: Alone made that

possible (before the rest stands)
there in that place.

The girl lying there
supine in the old rowboat reading an
adventure magazine and the two guys
--six foot three each of them
if they were an inch--washing their
hip-boots off in the stream jerking
from the pump at the finished manhole,
washing their hands, their heads
and faces, cupping their hands to drink
the stuff. Geezus! What the hell
kind of water is that to drink? But
they probably know what they're doing
--and looking down the bank at her
lying flat out there in the heat with
her five-and-ten dark glasses on
to protect her eyes from the sun's
glare--looking down and smiling over
her like insane men.

When you've been broke
and damned near starving for
five years you get to look that way,
said my cousin who had had a taste

54

of it. You can't help it. That's
poverty. Both your mind and your body
are affected. But they're just mechanics
damn good ones most of them, like
anybody else.

--the white suit
pulled up tight into her crotch the
way she was lying there facing them
--till they called it off, threw
the switch and the pump
stopped and the bishop died
and--they turned their backs on it,
flung their boots over their shoulders
and went home.

56

# The Last Turn

Then see it! in distressing
detail--from behind a red light
at 53d and 8th
of a November evening, the jazz
of the cross lights echoing the
crazy weave of the breaking mind:
splash of a half purple, half
naked woman's body whose jeweled
guts the cars drag up and down -
No house but has its brains
blown off by the dark!
Nothing recognizable, the whole one
jittering direction made of all
directions spelling the inexplicable:
pigment upon flesh and flesh
the pigment the genius of a world,
against which rages the fury of
our concepts, artless but supreme.

68

The A, B and C of It

a. Love's very fleas are mine. Enter
me worms and all till I crumble
and steam with it, pullulate
to be sucked into an orchid.

b. But the fleas were too shy
didn't want to offend
recoiled from the odors
and couldn't unbend.

c. Take me then, Spirit of Loneliness
insatiable Spirit of Love
and let be - for Time without
odor is Time without me.

62

The Semblables

That red brick monastery in
the suburbs over against the dust-
hung acreage of the unfinished
and all but subterranean

munitions plant: those high
brick walls behind which at Easter
the little orphans and bastards
in white gowns sing their Latin

responses to the hoary ritual
while frankincense and myrrh
round out the dark chapel making
an enclosed sphere of it

of which they are the worm:
that cell outside the city beside
the polluted stream and dump
heap, uncomplaining, and the field

of upended stones with a photo
under glass fastened here and there
to one of them near the deeply
carved name to distinguish it:

63

that trinity of slate gables
the unembellished windows piling
up, the chapel with its round
window between the dormitories

peaked by the bronze belfry
peaked in turn by the cross,
verdegris faces all silent
that miracle that has burst sexless

from between the carrot rows.
Leafless white birches, their
empty tendrils swaying lazily in
the all but no breeze guard

behind the spiked monastery fence
the sacred statuary. But ranks
of brilliant car-tops row on row
give back in all his glory the

late November sun and hushed
attend, before that tumbled
ground, those sightless walls
and shovelled entrances where no

one but a lonesome cop swinging
his club gives sign, that agony

65

# The Storm

A perfect rainbow a wide
are low in the northern sky
spans the black lake

troubled by little waves
over which the sun
south of the city shines in

coldly from the bare hill
supine to the wind which
cannot waken anything

but drives the smoke from
a few lean chimneys streaming
violently southward

66

# The Forgotten City

When with my mother I was coming down
from the country the day of the hurricane,
trees were across the road and small branches
kept rattling on the roof of the car.
There was ten feet or more of water
making the parkways impassable with the wind
bringing more rain in sheets. Brown torrents
gushed up through new sluices in the
valley floor so that I had to take what road
I could find bearing to the south and west,
to get back to the city. I passed through
extraordinary places, as vivid as any
I ever saw where the storm had broken
the barrier and let through
a strange commonplace: Long, deserted avenues
with unrecognized names at the corners and
drunken looking people with completely
foreign manners. Monuments, institutions
and in one place a large body of water
startled me with an acre or more of hot
jets spouting up symmetrically over it. Parks.
I had no idea where I was and promised myself
I would some day go back to study this

curious and industrious people who lived
in these apartments, at these sharp
corners and turns of intersecting avenues
with so little apparent communication
with an outside world. How did they get
cut off this way from representation in our
newspapers and other means of publicity
when so near the metropolis, so closely
surrounded by the familiar and the famous?

69

# The Bare Tree

This bare cherry tree
higher than the roof
last year produced
abundant fruit. But how
speak of fruit confronted
by that skeleton?
Though live it may be
there is no fruit on it.
Therefore chop it down
and use the wood
against this biting cold.

Raleigh Was Right

We cannot go to the country
for the country will bring us
no peace
What can the small violets tell us
that grow on furry stems in
the long grass among lance shaped
leaves?

Though you praise us
and call to mind the poets
who sung of our loveliness
it was long ago!
long ago! when country people
would plow and sow with
flowering minds and pockets
at ease -
if ever this were true.

Not now. Love itself a flower
with roots in a parched ground.
Empty pockets make empty heads.
Cure it if you can but

# The Monstrous Marriage

She who with innocent and tender hands
reached up to take the wounded
pigeon from the branch found it turn

into a fury as it bled. Maddened she clung
to it stabbed by its pain and the blood
of her hands and the bird's blood

mingled while she stilled it for the moment
and wrapped it in her thought's
clean white handkerchief. After that

she adopted a hawk's life as her own.
For it looked up and said, You are
my wife for this. Then she released him.

But he came back shortly. Certainly,
since we are married, she said to him, no
one will accept it. Time passed.

I try to imitate you, he said while she
cried a little in smiling. Mostly,
he confided, my head is clouded

except for hunting. But for parts of
a day it's clear as any man's - by
your love. No, she would

answer him pitifully, what clearer than
a hawk's eye and reasonably the
mind also must be so. He turned his

head and seeing his profile in her
mirror ruffled his feathers and gave
a hawk's cry, desolately.

Nestling upon her as was his wont he
hid his talons from her soft flesh
fluttering his wings against her sides

until her mind, always astonished at
his assumptions, agonized, heard
footsteps and hurried him to

the open window whence he made off.
After that she had a leather belt made
upon which he perched to enjoy her.

94

Sparrows Among Dry Leaves

The sparrows by the iron fence post -
hardly seen for the dry leaves
that half cover them -
stirring up the leaves, fight
and chirp stridently, search and
peck the sharp gravel to
good digestion and love's
obscure and insatiable appetite.

76

Prelude to Winter

The moth under the eaves
with wings like
the bark of a tree, lies
symmetrically still -

And love is a curious
soft-winged thing
unmoving under the eaves
when the leaves fall.

28

Another Year

In the rose garden in the park
let us learn how little there is
to fear
from the competition of conflicting
seasons -
and avoid comparisons,
alone in that still place.
The slender quietness of the old
bushes
is of a virtue all its own . .

# The Clouds

## Filling the mind

upon the rim of the overarching sky, the horses of
the dawn charge from south to north, gigantic beasts
rearing flame-edged above the pit,

a rank confusion of the imagination still uncured,
a rule, piebald under the streetlamps, reluctant
to be torn from its hold.

## Their flanks still

caught among low, blocking forms their fore-parts
rise lucid beyond this smell of a swamp, a mud
livid with decay and life! turtles

that burrowing among the white roots lift their green
red-striped faces startled before the dawn.

A black flag, writhing and whipping at the staffhead
mounts the sepulchre of the empty bank, fights
to be free . . .

South to north! the direction

unmistakable, they move distinct beyond the unclear
edge of the world, clouds! like statues

before which we are drawn - in darkness, thinking of
our dead, unable, knowing no place
where else rightly to lodge them.

Tragic outlines
and the bodies of horses, mindfilling - but
visible! against the invisible; actual against
the imagined and the concocted; unspoiled by hands
and unshaped also by them but caressed by sight only,
moving among them, not that, that propels
the eyes from under, while it blinds: Relief!

- upon whose backs the dead ride, high!
undirtied by the putridity we fasten upon them -
South to north, for this moment distinct and undeformed,
into the no-knowledge of their nameless destiny.

A Cold Front

This woman with a dead face
has seven foster children
and a new baby of her own in
spite of that. She wants pills

for an abortion and says
Uh hum, in reply to me while
her blanketed infant makes
unrelated grunts of salutation.

She looks at me with her mouth
open and blinks her expressionless
carved eyes like a cat
on a limb too tired to go higher

from its tormentors. And still
the baby chortles in its spit
and there is a dull flush
almost of beauty to the woman's face

# Against the Sky

Let me not forget at least,
after the three day rain,
beaks raised aface, the two starlings
at and near the top twig

of the white-oak, dwarfing
the barn, completing the minute
green of the sculptured foliage, their
bullet heads bent back, their horny

lips chattering to the morning
sun! Praise! while the
wraithlike warblers, all but unseen
in looping flight dart from

pine to spruce, spruce to pine
southward. Southward! where
new mating warms the wit and cold
does not strike, for respite.

86

The Gentle Negress

Wandering among the chimneys
my love and I would meet
I with a white skin
she as brown as peat

Her voice was low and gentle
and full of surprise
that I should find her lovely
and search her eyes

with a longing hard to fathom
from what she said
as I sat to comfort her
lying in bed.

To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven

Is it any better in Heaven, my friend Ford, that you found it
in Provence?

I don't think so, for you made Provence a heaven by your
praise of it
to give a foretaste of what might be your joy in the present
circumstance.

It was Heaven you were describing there, transubstantiated
from its narrowness
to resemble the paths and gardens of a greater world where
you now reside.

But, dear man, you have taken a major part of it from us.
Provence, that you
praised so well, will never the same Provence to us now
you are gone.

A heavenly man you seem to me now, never having been for me
a saintly one.

It lived about you, a certain grossness that was not like
the world.

The world is cleanly, polished and well made but
heavenly man
is filthy with his flesh and corrupt that loves to eat and
drink and whore -

to laugh at himself and not be afraid of himself knowing

well he has

no possessions and opinions that are worth caring a broker's

word about

and that all he is, but one thing, he feeds as one will feed
a pet dog.

So roust and love and dredge the belly full in Heaven's
name!

I laugh to think of you wheezing in Heaven. Where is
Heaven? But why

do I ask that, since you showed the way? I don't care a
damn for it

other than for that better part lives beside me here
so long as I

live and remember you. Thank God you were not delicate, you
let the world in

and lied! damn it you lied grossly sometimes. But it
was all, I

see now, a carelessness, the part of a man that is homeless
here on earth.

Provence! the fat assed Ford will never again strain the
chairs of your cafés,

pull and pare for his dish your sacred garlic, grunt and
sweat and lick

his lips. Gross as the world he has left to us he has
become

a part of that of which you were the known part, Provence,
he loved so well.

90

The Entity

Antipoetic is the thing
blossoms mostly in the spring
and when it dies it lives again
first the egg and then the hen

Or is this merely an unreason
flowerless which we beg

Antipoetic masks the season
first the hen and then the egg