Honey and Salt (8 page)

        brandish your arms

Slow to a whisper wind, fast to a storm howl.

 

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   The wind carves sand into shapes,

   Endless the fresh designs,

   Wind and ice patient beyond telling.

   Ice can tip mountains over,

   Ice the giant beyond measure.

   And the sun governs valley lights,

   Transforms hats into shoes and back again

   Before we are through any long looking.

 

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   The pink nipples of the earth in springtime,

   The long black eyelashes of summer's look,

   The harvest laughter of tawny autumn,

   The winter silence of land in snow covers,

Each speaks its own oaths of the cool and the flame

   of naked possessions clothed and come naked again:

        The sea knows it all.

        They all crept out of the sea.

 

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These wheels within wheels

These leaves folded in leaves

These wheeling winds

        and winding leaves

Those sprockets

        from those seeds

This spiral shooting

        from that rainfall—

What does a turning earth

        say to its axis?

How should a melon say thanks

Or a squash utter blessings?

 

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In the heave of the hankering sea

God put precisions of music and accord

to be heard in the deepest seabells

amid the farthest violet spawn

moving in seagreen doom and skyblue promise.

The sea shares its tokens—

   how and with whom?

 

To these shores birds return

and keep returning

for the curves of fresh flights.

To these waters fish return

and keep returning

for the fathoming of old waters.

To sky and sea they are born

and keep returning to be reborn.

 

The sharing of the sea goes on

for the sake of wings and fins

ever returning to new skyblue,

ever reborn in new seagreen.

 

Could the gray-green lobster speak

what would he say

of personal secrets?

Could one white gull utter a word—

what would it be?

what white feather of a word?

 

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Among the shapes and shadow-shapes

in the blurs of the marching animals,

among the open forms, the hidden and half-hidden,

who is the Head One? Me? Man?

Am I first over all, I the genus homo?

 

Where did I come from?

How doing now and where to from here?

Is there any going back?

And where might I want to go back?

Is it told in my dreams and hankerings, looking

back at what I was, seeing what I am?

Like so a man talking to himself

of the bitter, the sweet, the bittersweet:

he had heard likenings of himself:

Cock of the walk, brave as a lion, fierce as a tiger,

Stubborn as si mule, mean as a louse, crazy as a bedbug,

Soft as a kitten, slimy as an octopus, one poor fish.

 

Then he spoke for himself:

I am bat-eyed, chicken-hearted, monkey-faced.

Listen and you'll hear it told,

I am a beast out of the jungle.

Man, proud man, with a peacock strut

seeing himself in his own man-made mirrors.

Yet I am myself all the animals.

Mix in among lavender shadows the gorilla far back

And the jungle cry of readiness for death

Or struggle—and the clean breeds who live on

In the underbrush. Mix in farther back yet

Breeds out of the slime of the sea.

Put in a high green of a restless sea.

Insinuate chlorine and mystic salts,

The make-up of vertebrates,

the long highway of mammals who chew

Their victims and feed their children

From milk at a breast,

The fathers and the mothers who battled hunger

And tore each other's jugulars

Over land and women, laughter and language.

Put in mystery without end. Then add mystery.

The memorandum runs long.

I have feet, fins and wings.

I live on land, in the sea, in the air.

I run, fly, sneak, prowl, I kill and eat.

Among killers and eaters I am first.

I am the Head One.

 

What is this load I carry out of yesterday?

What are the bygones of dreams, moans, shadows?

What jargons, what gibberish, must I yet unlearn?

 

I have been a dim plasm in the sea,

rocking dumb, not-so-dumb, dumb again,

a dab and a dangling tangle

swarming and splitting to live again.

 

I have been a drop of jelly

aching with a silver shot of light

   and it sang Be-now Now-be Be-now Now-be.

 

I have been a rockabye baby

sloshed in the sludge of the sea

and I have clung with a shell over me

waiting a tide to bring me breakfast.

 

I have been the little fish eaten by the big one

and I have been the big fish

taking ten lesser fish in one fast gulp.

 

I have been a shrimp, one of a billion,

fed to a million little fish

ending as fodder in the bellies of big fish.

In the seven seas

of the one vast glumbering sea over the globe

I have been eater and eaten,

toiler and hanger-on.

 

I lived half in the sea, half on land,

swimmer and crawler, fins and legs.

 

I traveled with layers of earthworms

grinding limestone into loam.

 

Encased as a snail

I wrought one pure spiral,

an image of no beginning, no end.

“This is the image wherein I live;

the outer form of me to be here

when the dried inner one drifts

away into thin air.”

 

I have journeyed

for sticks and mud and weaving thongs

to build me a home in a bush.

 

I have mounted into the blue sky

with a mate lark on a summer morning,

dropping into sycamore branches to warble.

 

The orioles called me one of theirs;

herons taught me to stand and wait in marsh grass,

to preen my wings and rise with legs bundled behind.

 

I was the awkward pelican

flying low along the florida coast with a baby.

I stood with pink flamingoes

in long lagoons at tallahassee watching sunrise.

 

I am black as a crow with a
caw-caw
in my throat

and I am lush with morning calls of catbird and mocker,

the cardinal's
what-cheer what-cheer

and the redbird's whistle across hemlock timbers

in early april in wisconsin.

 

I have done the cleansing service

of scavengers on land and sea;

the red and sea-green lobsters told me

how they win a living.

I have slunk among buzzards and broken hunger

with a beak in a rottening horse.

I have fed where my greatgrandfathers fed.

 

I know the faint half-words

of the fly and the flea,

the midge, the mosquito.

I was kin of a vampire

doing what a blind thirst told me.

A louse seeking red blood told me

I carry feeders in blood.

 

I ganged up with maggots

and cleaned a cadaver

and left the bones gleaming.

 

I am a grasshopper taking in one jump

a hundred grasshopper lengths.

I buzz with earnest bees

in the lingering sun of apple orchards.

I loiter with tumble bugs

seeming to know solemn causes.

I climb with spiders, throw ladders, nets,

frameworks out of my navel coils.

I am the building ant

of architectonic galleries and chambers.

I am egg, cocoon and moth.

I count my caterpillar rings of black and yellow.

I inch with the inch worms

measuring pearl-green miles of summer months.

I have swept in the ashen paths of weevils,

borers, chinch bugs eating their way.

Born once as a late morning child

I died of old age before noon.

Or again I issued as a luna moth,

circles of gold spotting my lavender wings.

I have zigzagged with blue water bugs

among white lotus and pond lilies.

From my silver throat in the dew of evening

came a whippoorwill call, one, another, more

as a slow gold moon told time with climbing.

 

I am the chameleon taking the tint of what I live on,

the water frog green as the scum he sits on,

the tree frog gray as the tree-bark-gray.

The duck, the swan, the goose, met me as sisters,

the beaver, the porcupine, the chinchilla, as brothers.

The rattlesnakes let me live with them

to eat mice, to salivate birds and rabbits

and fatten in sleep on noontime rocks.

I was a lizard, a texas horned toad,

a centipede counting my century of legs.

I was a crocodile in africa

with a lazy mouthful of teeth.

 

The stealth of the rat, the mink, the squirrel, came.

The weasel gave me his lingo

of now-you-see-me now-you-don't.

The rabbit hideout in clover, the gopher hole,

the mole tunnel, the corn-shock nest of the mouse,

these were a few of my homes.

One summer night with fireflies

I too was fluttering night gold.

 

Long ago I ran with the eohippus,

the little horse that was.

I wore dodo feathers

but that's all passed.

I had a feathered form fade in fog:

you can find it now in feathered fossils.

I was a mammoth, a dinosaur

and other hulks too big to last.

I have been more quadrupeds than I can name.

I was the son of a wild jackass

with swift and punishing heels.

I lifted my legs and carried a camel hump

in slow caravans pausing at nightfall,

lifting my hump again at dawn.

 

I locked my horns with another moose;

our antlers lie locked and our bones whitening.

 

I slouched up hills of ice with polar bears,

practiced smell with the red fox,

trained my fangs with timber wolves.

I fight now for the rights to a carcass.

The killer who crouches, gets set, and leaps

is a kinsman I can call my cousin.

The strangling gibberish of the gorilla

comes out of my anxious mouth.

Among a thousand ring-tailed monkeys

scratching buttocks, sharing fleas,

shinning up trees in guatemala, I am one.

Among the blue-ramped baboons,

chattering chimpanzees and leering orangoutangs,

I am at home using paws for hands, hands for paws.

The howl of one hyena eating another is mine.

In a boneless tube of ooze

I soaked dumb days with sponges

off the gulfcoast sea-bottom.

Now I am the parrot

who picks up palaver and repeats it.

Now I am the river-hog, the hippopotamus

and I am the little bird who lives in his ear

and tells him when to get up and where to go.

I took a long sweet time learning to talk

and now I carry many half-words not yet made,

hankering hoodoo words taking shape in mud:

protoplasm, spermatozoa, phantasms, taboos.

In the pour of a thrush morningsong,