Blood Lyrics (2 page)

It was that it didn’t need

or require

my belief

that I leant upon it

as a tired worker

upon

a gate.

I prefer it even to love,

alone and without ghost

it falls a hard weather,

a withdrawing room

that revives me to stolen daylight

in which I feel no wish

to brush a gleaming finish

over the sheen-broken glass

I’ve arranged and rearranged,

an apprentice of mosaics

who will not be taught but asks

to be left alone with the brittle year

so carnivorous of all I’d made.

But the snow I love covers

my beasts and seas,

my ferns and spines

worn through and through.

I will change your life, it says,

to which I say
please
.

When a human is asked about a particular fire,

she comes close:

then it is too hot,

so she turns her face —

and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears,

always on the other side of the fire. The fire

she’s been asked to tell the story of,

she has to turn from it, so the story you hear

is that of pines and twitching leaves

and how her body is like neither —

all the while there is a fire

at her back

which she feels in fine detail,

as if the flame were a dremel

and her back its etching glass.

You will not know all about the fire

simply because you asked.

When she speaks of the forest

this is what she is teaching you,

you who thought you were her master.

[Tell me it’s April,

tell me you live into a little girl,

when I tip you back to lay you down

your breath remains and keeps remaining,

tell me the morning trucks delivered bread

to the market while we were sleeping,

that the newspaper is flung against our door,

tell me it woke us, it is Sunday, all we have to do is

reach outside, in it comes! and open it —]

The massive inner life of ice

descends over the violet newborn

of this city. The open-mouthed statues

of the winter fountain, the tourist horses

stomping their hollow bones,

the apple-skins and feathers.

O see it try to break our world.

But if a hundred years ago influenza

almost took this city,

if tags were tied to toes when patients

were carried into the wards —

if they said
but I’m still living

as the horrified doctors covered themselves away —

then, my love, we should wake

to each other and ransack

this flushed skin of everything

but praise.

In that tight-sheltered ghost

of quiet I keep,

I count her more dearly

than any genesis night

when the first dark fell

and the father reckoned up

the world. How I count

is day in and out

and without end.

I need no sabbath

from the count

seated in my closed, open,

half-shut eyes.

Strange we must be

to the maker who made us

less weary in love than he.

Despair is still servant

to the violet and wild ongoings

of bone. You, remember, are

that which must be made

servant only to salt, only

to the watery acre that is the body

of the beloved, only to the child

now leaning forward into

the exhibit of birches

the forest has made of bronze light

and snow. Even as the day kneels

forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,

kneel, they all kneel,

the city, the goat, the lime tree

and mother, the fearful doctor,

kneel. Don’t say it’s the beautiful

I praise. I praise the human,

gutted and rising.

I come to you without wound

and in the strength of my life.

Heaven cannot touch me; neither can the earth.

In this clear field, the stripped birch does not represent me,

thus I give back the respect I once stole.

I give back its own life trying to break through

the low canopy draped like an abandoned wedding tent.

I am without wound, but this is a small slat

I speak through and briefly.

By the end of these words, strength

might be gone, new pain come, old pains returned

as elderly selves grown quiet

with the knowledge of what did

and did not happen.

Long live such confidence as I have these five minutes now.

Long live the primate’s human eyes inside of the cage.

Long live the surgeon steady enough

to examine the bloody heart beating in his hands

before the minutes are up

and it must be put back

inside.

Some things qualify as silence, but wake us

like the disappearance of birdcall that kept us asleep

because we took it as dream-stitch

or the early steps of the beloved lighting the stove

until we wake only when the stove

remains unlit against the day

now bewildering each hibernation,

each lightly drugged feather, each stun and lie.

Morning opens with the comforts of my unbeaten body

a tinkerer’s stack of quiltings and cannings the cloth finch

half-attached to a mobile of warblers and wrens

in the meantime my country sends post to mothers and fathers

back again fly a trinity of boys

with their throats cut out

simultaneity drinks twig tea and stitches

a hidden seam

I take a string to a bittern’s back and tie it

to the looping newborn delight

then read of each strangulation no bone or larynx

for proof maybe each part was tossed to bay

a medieval saint was asked what would you do if you knew

it was the end of the world

I’d dig in my garden he said

oh saint it’s a good answer

but here the end is torn out

one by one.

[We’re here because we’re here because

we’re here, because we’re here

We’re here because we’re here because

we’re here, because we’re here

I hear the young scouts a-singing.]

I was trying to remember the songs of the valley

shouting to the hilltops, streams and meadows rushing —

but something banned me from such songs. Something

wanted me to resign from praise,

perhaps for my whole life,

perhaps past my life

into the banishment

of the far, blind eternity.

What can I do? I have seen vineyards and orange groves

rise after seasons of sudden freeze.

The markets in my town burst with avocado, grain, ale,

sweet alyssum sold in handfuls. Yet gratitude

is not allowed me, not without offense.

Not in my country.

If we are at war let the orchards show it,

let the pear and fig fall prior to their time,

let the radios die

and the hounds freeze over their meat,

let the balconies crack their planked backs as we recline,

let the streets of stock and trade split open,

let the horses pulling at the fields

wither beneath us.

Let each year decay and each decade:

to receive report is not enough,

equations of the mathematician must

each come wrong, strangely, inexplicably, the remedies

must run dry,

the violet must let no more tincture

and the waters no more cool.

When, at mudtimes, we trek to the waterfall,

there it should no longer be —

nothing should fall where the guidebook says,

not orchids, not taro,

not the market, not the fishmonger thrashing carp against rock

where once we bought it bloody on the board.

If we are at war with a holy book in our hands

let it shrivel to slag; its teachings

cannot survive the drone

and will not gleam while villagers drink the ditch.

If we wage it, let the war breach up

into the light, let it unseam our garments

where they hold fast, let each button and string fail

until we run to hide ourselves

in alleys where at least rats and refuse

and the sleeping poor show some partial ghost

of what’s abroad.

If we war there ought to be a sign.

Our lives should feel like cut-outs of lives,

paper dolls drifting to the ground,

ready for chalk outlines.

But still our horses ripple their flanks

and the orange grove shakes green in the warm wind it loves.

We laze on the balcony with clear water in the glass.

At the newsstand stacks of cigarettes

with their sure wrappings and that little red pull, candies and juices

made of wild thriving corn.

In winter we ornament fountains with Christmas lights,

in spring more falsely, and more falsely,

the scent of heather and sedge grows rich through the transom.

Before the war

the soul

spoke so clearly

we took it for an imbecile.

But now the war can’t know what it wants:

we make meals, pay a tax, and dream nothing

hard enough to wake us.

Not once have I dreamt of the war.

I forgot it quietly, unwantingly, and because

there were peaches everywhere, peaches

that shouldn’t have happened,

nor the idea of blessing at sundown,

the orchard lit into an avenue

of torchlight.

Down by the pond, addicts sleep

on rocky grass half in water, half out,

and there the moon lights them

out of tawny silhouettes into the rarest

of amphibious flowers I once heard called
striders
,

between, but needing, two worlds.

Of what can you accuse them now,

                        beauty?

Chalky as white spruce

in hill fog pressed away from Sacre Coeur,

not one in seventy tongues

that make love acute and possessed are speaking now

their dozens of faiths and doubts. Just chrome whisperings,

endearments. Still, the priest of these wards must know

which voice, which prayer,

which he finds eases. Which unfolds

a rope ladder from this housefire, which will not

sleep but comes into the metal bed

after the nurses go and chants your own secret

incompletion into death. All I want, I said,

is to know this.

     Visit the sick, he answered.

Night —

the common hours

for loosened souls

to be hastened into the kingdom

of unspecified light.

Admit coming upon the fallen horse at evening,

now asleep but withered, now reducing as you near, now

a dell pony at your feet beneath the alder dead,

admit it is too much to both see and bear. You must

either not see or not bear, or see and bear

some quickened portion, the portion allotted to say

this is simply the field

of what occurs on earth.

The Lord is a man of war

I read by window and wick

and for once I believed

the book of Exodus true

the origin of our points sharpened

with fire our axes bows our pikes

and finally I could see

the cooling lava pits of their eyes

their giant gingko ears

their bellows of desert pain

how elephants became elephantry

how the woman who fevered with pox

became after death a weapon

a contagion to catapault over fortified walls

and finally I knew

why in this theater

the missiles are named

Savage Sinner Scapegoat

Peacekeeper and Goblet

Herren er en stridsmann

my descent is of the Vikings so

man is a Lord of war.

[Here is the board, here the water.

Baptism is as bad as they say:

you must renounce the devil

you never met.]

Comes August, comes December,

then April thinned of its birds.

Again August, ten times.

Fathers forage the bombed chemical plant

for barrels to carry water

from the lime-bright pools to houses

leaning inside hot wind.

To think a war might give a gift:

a pool, a clean bucket.

The soldierly ready

of human sadness: it must, by nature, hover.

I water the date palm at dawn in the desert acre. I can see

it’s not alive; the landscape doesn’t need me. This is May,

May should riffle pollen toward another,

women should weave fans of stiff reeds

to sweep air palm to palm, but my friend says he just tries

to keep his body busy. Sunday a horror movie,

Tuesday the opera, Thursday tea with the reclusive poet

who comes out just for him. He is an audience to the arts

of extremity in the apartment that gilds itself

a mean irony of light.

Time passes, is the early summer squash.

He asks the farmer how he cooks it —

I scoop the seeds and cut butter and nutmeg

into its little boat —

but at the end of each living task

there is a fringe of loss.

The heart works hard at the apprenticeship

of a diligent hand learning to pull

wet porcelain into a thinness of wall

just prior to what’s brittle. We talked of remedies

last week on the phone — can you swim the bay,

I ask, take in the cats, put up the Japanese shades,

trace your life in pins? The loss of love will

try it all.

Dear merchant of a twice-stolen boat,

when surgeons cut deeply

into the dark matter, you said, I believe

we can be made whole again.

What did you mean,
again?