New Collected Poems (4 page)

and the fine spring weather

and the new boat

and our sudden thought

of the water shining

under the morning fog.

Washed into the doorway

by the wake of the traffic,

he wears humanity

like a third-hand shirt

—blackened with enough

of Manhattan's dirt to sprout

a tree, or poison one.

His empty hand has led him

where he has come to.

Our differences claim us.

He holds out his hand,

in need of all that's mine.

And so we're joined, as deep

as son and father. His life

is offered me to choose.

Shall I begin servitude

to him? Let this cup pass.

Who am I?
But charity must

suppose, knowing no better,

that this is a man fallen

among thieves, or come

to this strait by no fault

—that our difference

is not a judgment,

though I can afford to eat

and am made his judge.

I am, I nearly believe,

the Samaritan who fell

into the ambush of his heart

on the way to another place.

My stranger waits, his hand

held out like something to read,

as though its emptiness

is an accomplishment.

I give him a smoke and the price

of a meal, no more

—not sufficient kindness

or believable sham.

I paid him to remain strange

to my threshold and table,

to permit me to forget him—

knowing I won't. He's the guest

of my knowing, though not asked.

I think of us lying asleep,

eyes and hands filled with the dark,

when the arm of the night

entered, reaching into the pockets

of our empty clothes. We slept

in the element of that power,

innocent of it, preserved from it

not even by our wish.

As though not born, we were carried

beyond an imminence we did not

waken to, as passively as stars

are carried beyond their spent

shining—our eyes granted to the light

again, by what chance or price

we do not even know.

The opening out and out,

body yielding body:

the breaking

through which the new

comes, perching

above its shadow

on the piling up

darkened broken old

husks of itself:

bud opening to flower

opening to fruit opening

to the sweet marrow

of the seed—

taken

from what was, from

what could have been.

What is left

is what is.

 

Except in idea, perfection is as wild

as light; there is no hand laid on it.

But the house is a shambles

unless the vision of its perfection

upholds it like stone.

More probable: the ideal

of its destruction:

cloud of fire prefiguring

its disappearance.

What value there is

is assumed;

like a god, the house elects its omens;

because it is, I desire it should be

—white, its life intact in it,

among trees.

Love has conceived a house,

and out of its labor

brought forth its likeness

—the emblem of desire, continuing

though the flesh falls away.

We've come round again

to short days and long nights;

time goes;

the clocks barely keep up;

a spare dream of summer

is kept

alive in the house:

the Queen Anne's lace

—gobletted,

green beginning to bloom,

tufted, upfurling—

unfolding

whiteness:

in this winter's memory

more clear than ever in summer,

cold paring away excess:

the single blooming random

in the summer's abundance

of its kind, in high relief

above the clover and grass

of the field, unstill

an instant,

the day having come upon it,

green and white

in as much light as ever was.

Opened, white, at the solstice

of its becoming, then the flower

forgets its growing;

is still;

dirt is its paradigm—

and this memory's seeing,

a cold wind keening the outline.

Winter nights the house sleeps,

a dry seedhead in the snow

falling and fallen, the white

and dark and depth of it, continuing

slow impact of silence.

The dark

rooms hold our heads on pillows, waiting

day, through the snow falling and fallen

in the darkness between inconsecutive

dreams. The brain burrows in its earth

and sleeps,

trusting dawn, though the sun's

light is a light without precedent, never

proved ahead of its coming, waited for

by the law that hope has made it.

What do you intend?

Drink blood

and speak, old ghosts. I don't

hear you. What has it amounted to

—the unnegotiable accumulation

of your tears? Your expenditure

has purchased no reprieve. Your

failed wisdom shards among the

down-going atoms of the moment.

History goes blind and in darkness;

neither sees nor is seen, nor is

known except as a carrion

marked with unintelligible wounds:

dragging its dead body, living,

yet to be born, it moves heavily

to its glories. It tramples

the little towns, forgets their names.

If reason was all, reason

would not exist—the will

to reason accounts for it;

it's not reason that chooses

to live; the seed doesn't swell

in its husk by reason, but loves

itself, obeys light which is

its own thought and argues the leaf

in secret; love articulates

the choice of life in fact; life

chooses life because it is

alive; what lives didn't begin dead,

nor sun's fire commence in ember.

Love foresees a jointure

composing a house, a marriage

of contraries, compendium

of opposites in equilibrium.

This morning the sun

came up before the moon set;

shadows were stripped from the house

like burnt rags, the sky turning

blue behind the clear moon,

day and night moving to day.

Let severances be as dividing

budleaves around the flower

—woman and child enfolded, chosen.

It's a dying begun, not lightly,

the taking up of this love

whose legacy is its death.

This is a love poem for you, Tanya—

among wars, among the brutal forfeitures

of time, in this house, among its latent fires,

among all that honesty must see, I accept

your dying, and love you: nothing mitigates

—and for our Mary, chosen by the blind

hungering of our blood, precious and periled

in her happy mornings; whose tears are mine.

There's still a degree of sleep

recalls

the vast empty dream I slept in

as a child

sometimes contained a chaos, tangled

like fishline snarled in hooks—

sometimes a hook, whetted, severe,

drawing

the barbed darkness to a point;

sometimes I seemed merely to be falling.

The house, also, has taken shape in it.

And I have dreamed

of the morning coming in

like a bird through the window

not burdened by a thought,

the light a singing

as I hoped.

It comes in and sings

on the corner of the white washstand,

among coleus stems and roots

in a clear green bottle

on the black tabletop

beneath the window,

under the purple coleus leaves,

among spearing

green philodendron leaves,

on the white washstand:

a small yellow bird with black wings,

darting in and out.

To imagine the thoughtlessness

of a thoughtless thing

is useless.

The mind must sing

of itself to keep awake.

Love has visualized a house,

and out of its expenditure

fleshed the design

at this cross ways

of consciousness and time:

its form is growth

come to light in it;

croplands, gardens,

are of its architecture,

labor its realization;

solstice is the height

of its consciousness,

thicket a figuration

of its waking;

plants and stars are made convergent

in its windows;

cities we have gone to and come back

are the prospect of its doorways.

And there's a city it dreams of:

salt-white beside the water.

Waking comes into sleep like a dream:

violet dawn over the snow, the black trees.

Snow and the house's white make a white

the black swifts may come back to.

The mind is the continuity

of its objects, and the coherence

of its objects—the

understanding of each

one thing by the

intelligence of an assemblage.

It is the effort of design

to triumph over the imperfections

of the parts—

the old man's gathering of memories

toward this morning's windows

and pipe and talk, the road

and housefronts all his years

have come by, the squash blooms

of this summer's garden.

The mind falsifies its objects

by inattention. Indirection

is its debasement of what it loves.

It is not given proof

that it is true. It is blind

at the beginning and at the end.

It is the illumination of a passage,

no more.

Speaker and hearer, words

making a passage between them,

begin a community.

Two minds

in succession, grandfather

and grandson, they sit and talk

on the enclosed porch,

looking out at the town, which

recalls itself in their talk

and is carried forward.

Their conversation has

no pattern of its own,

but alludes casually

to a shaped knowledge

in the minds of the two men

who love each other.

The quietness of knowing in common

is half of it. Silences come into it

easily, and break it

while the old man thinks

or concentrates on his pipe

and the strong smoke

climbs over the brim of his hat.

He has lived a long time.

He has seen the changes of times

and grown used to the world

again. Having been wakeful so long,

the loser of so many years,

his mind moves back and forth,

sorting and counting,

among all he knows.

His memory has become huge,

and surrounds him,

and fills his silences.

He lifts his head

and speaks of an old day

that amuses him or grieves him

or both.

Under the windows opposite them

there's a long table loaded

with potted plants, the foliage

staining and shadowing the daylight

as it comes in.