Halfway to Silence (2 page)

Invents a land.

2

What other lover

Could ever displace

Despair with all-heal,

Or help me uncover

Sweet herb-of-grace

In the desolate field?

None had your face—

So pure in its poise,

So closed in its power,

That disciplined place

Where the tragic joys

Flower and re-flower.

The Oriole

When maples wear their aureole

Of gauzy green,

Then, only once, I heard the oriole

But rarely seen.

So it was when I found a home

After long unrest,

So it is once more now love has come

To hold me fast.

At the top of the great oak

As I said your name,

We saw him. He was there. He spoke.

The bird of flame.

Old Trees

Old trees—

How exquisite the white blossom

On the gnarled branch!

Thickened trunk, erratic shape

Battered by winter winds,

Bent in the long cold.

Young ones may please

The aesthete,

But old trees—

The miracle of their flowering

Against such odds—

Bring healing.

Let us praise them,

And sing hosannahs

As the small buds grow red

Just before they open.

A Voice

Blurred as though it has been woken

From an underground and secret river,

This voice itself and not the language spoken

Has made the air around me shiver.

Seductive sound, mysterious chord

That speaks its message in the very timbre

And not in a to be deciphered word

That I might hunt down or remember.

It wanders through my dreams and there I learn

I have to make the journey, have to go,

Whatever I must change or overturn

To reach the source, so strong this undertow.

Like a tapped glass the shivered air

Echoes and echoes a single poignant note.

That voice, where does it live? I must go there,

Comfort, entreat, and bless the magic throat.

The Balcony

after Baudelaire

Lover of silence, muse of the mysteries,

You will remember how we supped each night

There on your balcony high in the trees

Where a heraldic lion took late light,

Lover of silence, muse of the mysteries.

The big dogs slumbered near us like good bears;

The old cat begged a morsel from my plate,

And all around leaves stirred in the warm airs

Breathed from the valley as the red sun set.

The big dogs slumbered near us like good bears.

I thought of all the pain and how we met

Late in our lives yet lavishly at ease,

Having assumed an end to old regret

In the eternal present of the trees—

I thought of all the pain and how we met.

There every night we drank deep of the wine

And of our love, still without history,

Yet the completion of some real design

Earned with much thought, muse of the mystery.

There every night we drank deep of the wine.

While out of deprivation a huge flower,

The evening’s passion, was about to bloom.

Such intimacy held us in its power

The long years vanished in a little room,

And out of deprivation, a huge flower.

The Myths Return

Now in this armature

Where the tide rose and rose

Till every crack was filled,

Long echoes still

Reverberate in the hollow cave,

And the walls tremble.

Poseidon

Catching a dolphin

Must have laughed in his fierce joy.

Eons ago

Sacred and creaturely married,

And still those great tides ebb and flow—

As we now know.

Time for Rich Silence

Time for rich silence,

The passionate season,

For the present tense

Beyond speech, outside reason.

Time now to explore

These intricate cages,

Two bodies aware,

Two equipages.

Find the way to unlock

A mysterious door

At the threshold of shock

With the impact of war.

Then gentle fierce joys

On the wave’s rising curve

Till it reaches it poise,

Tumbles, touches the nerve.

And all tumult is done—

Two equipages

In silent communion

Released from their cages.

Three Things

I carried two things around in my mind

Walking the woods and thinking how to say

Shiver of poplar leaves in a light wind,

Threshing of water over tumbled stones,

A brook rippling its interrupted way—

Two things that bring a tremor to the bones.

And now I carry around in my head a third.

The force of it stops me as I walk the wood,

Three things for which no one has found a word—

Wind in the poplar, tremor under the skin

Deep in the flesh, a shiver of more than blood

When lovers, water, and leaves are wholly one.

The Lady of the Lake

Somewhere at the bottom of the lake she is

Entangled among weeds, her deep self drowned.

I cannot be with her there. I know she is bound

To a dead man. Her wide open eyes are his.

Only a part of her surfaces in my arms

When I can lift her up and float her there

Gently to breathe life-giving natural air,

Wind in the leaves, the bright summer’s charms.

For I know I can be hers, hers for a while

But she can never be mine for a year or a day,

Long ago married, her deep self given away,

Though she turns to me sometimes with a luminous smile.

But what I cannot have or cannot keep

Draws me down under the waters, and I come

With him, with her, into a strange communion,

And all is well where the drowned lovers sleep.

First Autumn

What do the trees in the window have to tell

The lovers wrapped in their strange grief,

The lovers wrapped in their strange delight?

What do they hear in the rain, caught in its spell?

What do they see in the turning of a leaf?

What more to be told before the coming of night?

These two who are far apart and yet so near,

These two together and so much alone

Like stars set somewhere out in darkest space—

The trees may say they have nothing to fear.

The rain may tell of wearing down a stone,

But the moody lovers tremble before a face.

The trees in the window are turning toward sleep,

Their light a changing light at the year’s turning,

And the rain repeats its lonely plaintive phrase.

How can these fragile lovers hope to keep

A crimson leaf from falling, or this burning

Maintain forever some hint of their great days?

Mal du Départ

After you have gone

I walk up and down

The strange chilling tomb

This lively house has suddenly become.

Even your white tulips

Turn brown at the lips,

Their freshness gone,

And ashes on the hearth. I am alone.

Absence infects the air

And it is everywhere.

How can I shake off woe,

On what bed lay me down without you?