Some Trees: Poems (2 page)

Now we must dip in raw water

These few thoughts and fleshy members.

So evil may refresh our days.

Colin:
She has descended part way!

Now father cut me down with tears.

Plant me far in my mother’s image

To do cold work of books and stones.

Cuddie
: I need not raise my hand

Colin
:
She burns the flying peoples

Cuddie
: To hear its old advice

Colin
:
And spears my heart’s two beasts

Cuddie
: Or cover with its mauves.

Colin
:
And I depart unhurt.

As I sit looking out of a window of the building

I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,

And envy them—they are so far away from me!

Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.

And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little,

Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers!

City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!

But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual,

Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand!

The band is playing
Scheherazade
by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose-and lemon-colored flowers,

Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue),

And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit.

The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood.

First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow

Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat

And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion.

His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white.

Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion,

And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face too often.

But everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one

I doubt they would notice the mustachioed man’s wife.

Here come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the sidewalk

Which is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his teeth.

He is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls in white.

But his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls.

Yet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years,

And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason.

But I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick.

Wait—there he is—on the other side of the bandstand,

Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl

Of fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying

But it seems they are just mumbling something—shy words of love, probably.

She is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes.

She is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her olive cheek.

Obviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in love too;

His eyes show it. Turning from this couple,

I see there is an intermission in the concert.

The paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws

(The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue),

And the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk

About the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school.

Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets.

Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim

That are so popular here. Look—I told you!

It is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny.

An old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan.

She welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink.

“My son is in Mexico City,” she says. “He would welcome you too

If he were here. But his job is with a bank there.

Look, here is a photograph of him.”

And a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather frame.

We thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late

And we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place.

That church tower will do—the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of the sky. Slowly we enter.

The caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have been in the city, and how we like it here.

His daughter is scrubbing the steps—she nods to us as we pass into the tower.

Soon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends before us.

There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces.

There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.

There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies

And there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and beige.

Look! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders.

There are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased,

But the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand.

And there is the home of the little old lady—

She is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself.

How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!

We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son.

We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.

What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.

And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my gaze

Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.

Of who we and all they are

You all now know. But you know

After they began to find us out we grew

Before they died thinking us the causes

Of their acts. Now we’ll not know

The truth of some still at the piano, though

They often date from us, causing

These changes we think we are. We don’t care

Though, so tall up there

In young air. But things get darker as we move

To ask them: Whom must we get to know

To die, so you live and we know?

I’ll do what the raids suggest,

Dad, and that other livid window,

But the tide pushes an awful lot of monsters

And I think it’s my true fate.

It had been raining but

It had not been raining.

No one could begin to mop up this particular mess.

Thunder lay down in the heart.

“My child, I love any vast electrical disturbance.”

Disturbance! Could the old man, face in the rainweed,

Ask more smuttily? By night it charged over plains,

Driven from Dallas and Oregon, always
whither,

Why not now?
The boy seemed to have fallen

From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.

That night it rained on the boxcars, explaining

The thought of the pensive cabbage roses near the boxcars.

My boy.
Isn’t there something I asked you once?

What happened? It’s also farther to the corner

Aboard the maple furniture.
He

Couldn’t lie.
He’d tell ’em by their syntax.

But listen now in the flood.

They’re throwing up behind the lines.

Dry fields of lightning rise to receive

The observer, the mincing flag.
An unendurable age.

The man with the red hat

And the polar bear, is he here too?

The window giving on shade,

Is that here too?

And all the little helps,

My initials in the sky,

The hay of an arctic summer night?

The bear

Drops dead in sight of the window.

Lovely tribes have just moved to the north.

In the flickering evening the martins grow denser.

Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.

Whose face is this

stiff against the blue trees,

Lifted to the future

Because there is no end?

But that has faded

Like flowers, like the first days

Of good conduct. Visit

The strong man. Pinch him—

There is no end to his

Dislike, the accurate one.

While we were walking under the top

The road so strangely lit by lamps

And I wanting only peace

From the tradesmen who tried cutting my hair

Under their lips a white word is waiting

Hanging from a cliff like the sky

It is because of the sky

We ever reached the top

On that day of waiting

For the hand and the lamps

I moisten my crystal hair

Never so calmly as when at peace

With the broken sky of peace

Peace means it to the sky

Let down your hair

Through peaceful air the top

Of ruins because what are lamps

When night is waiting

A room of people waiting

To die in peace

Then strike the procession of lamps

They brought more than sky

Lungs back to the top

Means to doom your hair

Those bright pads of hair

Before the sea held back waiting

And you cannot speak to the top

It moves toward peace

And know the day of sky

Only by falling lamps

Beyond the desert lamps

Mount enslaved crystal mountains of hair

Into the day of sky

Silence is waiting

For anything peace

And you find the top

The top is lamps

Peace to the fragrant hair

Waiting for a tropical sky

The other marigolds and the cloths

Are crimes invented for history.

What can we achieve, aspiring?

And what, aspiring, can we achieve?

What can the rain that fell

All day on the grounds

And on the bingo tables?

Even though it is clearing,

The statue turned to a sweeter light,

The nearest patrons are black.

Then there is a storm of receipts: night,

Sand the bowl did not let fall.

The other marigolds are scattered like dust.

Sweet peas in dark gardens

Squirt false melancholy over history.

If a bug fell from so high, would it land?

He was spoilt from childhood by the future,

which he mastered rather early and

apparently without great difficulty.

B
ORIS
P
ASTERNAK

Darkness falls like a wet sponge

And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch

In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.”

Her tongue from previous ecstasy

Releases thoughts like little hats.

“He clap’d me first during the eclipse.

Afterwards I noted his manner

Much altered. But he sending

At that time certain handsome jewels

I durst not seem to take offence.”

In a far recess of summer

Monks are playing soccer.

So far is goodness a mere memory

Or naming of recent scenes of badness

That even these lives, children,

You may pass through to be blessed,

So fair does each invent his virtue.

And coming from a white world, music

Will sparkle at the lips of many who are

Beloved. Then these, as dirty handmaidens

To some transparent witch, will dream

Of a white hero’s subtle wooing,

And time shall force a gift on each.

That beggar to whom you gave no cent

Striped the night with his strange descant.

Yet I cannot escape the picture

Of my small self in that bank of flowers:

My head among the blazing phlox

Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus.

I had a hard stare, accepting

Everything, taking nothing,

As though the rolled-up future might stink

As loud as stood the sick moment

The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong,

Still, as the loveliest feelings

Must soon find words, and these, yes,

Displace them, so I am not wrong

In calling this comic version of myself

The true one. For as change is horror,

Virtue is really stubbornness

And only in the light of lost words

Can we imagine our rewards.

Eyes shining without mystery,

Footprints eager for the past

Through the vague snow of many clay pipes,

And what is in store?

Footprints eager for the past,

The usual obtuse blanket.

And what is in store

For those dearest to the king?

The usual obtuse blanket

Of legless regrets and amplifications

For those dearest to the king.

Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

Of legless regrets and amplifications,

That is why a watchdog is shy.

Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

These days are short, brittle; there is only one night.

That is why a watchdog is shy,

Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.

These days are short, brittle; there is only one night