Some Trees: Poems (3 page)

And that soon gotten over.

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

Some blunt pretense to safety we have

And that soon gotten over

For they must have motion.

Some blunt pretense to safety we have:

Eyes shining without mystery

For they must have motion

Through the vague snow of many clay pipes.

Perhaps this valley too leads into the head of long-ago days.

What, if not its commercial and etiolated visage, could break through the meadow wires?

It placed a chair in the meadow and then went far away.

People come to visit in summer, they do not think about the head.

Soldiers come down to see the head. The stick hides from them.

The heavens say, “Here I am, boys and girls!”

The stick tries to hide in the noise. The leaves, happy, drift over the dusty meadow.

“I’d like to see it,” someone said about the head, which has stopped pretending to be a town.

Look! A ghastly change has come over it. The ears fall off—they are laughing people.

The skin is perhaps children, they say, “We children,” and are vague near the sea. The eyes—

Wait! What large raindrops! The eyes—

Wait, can’t you see them pattering, in the meadow, like a dog?

The eyes are all glorious! And now the river comes to sweep away the last of us.

Who knew it, at the beginning of the day?

It is best to travel like a comet, with the others, though one does not see them.

How far that bridle flashed! “Hurry up, children!” The birds fly back, they say, “We were lying,

We do not want to fly away.” But it is already too late. The children have vanished.

The music brought us what it seemed

We had long desired, but in a form

So rarefied there was no emptiness

Of sensation, as if pleasure

Might persist, like a dear friend

Walking toward one in a dream.

It was the toothless murmuring

Of ancient willows, who kept their trouble

In a stage of music. Without tumult

Snow-capped mountains and heart-shaped

Cathedral windows were contained

There, until only infinity

Remained of beauty. Then lighter than the air

We rose and packed the picnic basket.

But there is beside us, they said,

Whom we do not sustain, the world

Of things, that rages like a virgin

Next to our silken thoughts. It can

Be touched, they said. It cannot harm.

But suddenly their green sides

Foundered, as if the virgin beat

Their airy trellis from within.

Over her furious sighs, a new

Music, innocent and monstrous

As the ocean’s bright display of teeth

Fell on the jousting willows. We

Are sick, they said. It is a warning

We were not meant to understand.

The mythological poet, his face

Fabulous and fastidious, accepts

Beauty before it arrives. The heavenly

Moment in the heaviness of arrival

Deplores him. He is merely

An ornament, a kind of lewd

Cloud placed on the horizon.

Close to the zoo, acquiescing

To dust, candy, perverts; inserted in

The panting forest, or openly

Walking in the great and sullen square

He has eloped with all music

And does not care. For isn’t there,

He says, a final diversion, greater

Because it can be given, a gift

Too simple even to be despised?

And oh beside the roaring

Centurion of the lion’s hunger

Might not child and pervert

Join hands, in the instant

Of their interest, in the shadow

Of a million boats; their hunger

From loss grown merely a gesture?

Each servant stamps the reader with a look.

After many years he has been brought nothing.

The servant’s frown is the reader’s patience.

The servant goes to bed.

The patience rambles on

Musing on the library’s lofty holes.

His pain is the servant’s alive.

It pushes to the top stain of the wall

Its tree-top’s head of excitement:

Baskets, birds, beetles, spools.

The light walls collapse next day.

Traffic is the reader’s pictured face.

Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits;

Worms be your words, you not safe from ours.

Don’t ask me to go there again

The white is too painful

Better to forget it

the sleeping river spoke to the awake land

When they first drew the wires

across the field

slowly air settled

on the pools

The blue mirror came to light

Then someone feared the pools

To be armor enough might not someone

draw down the sky

Light emerged

The swimming motion

At last twilight that will not protect the leaves

Death that will not try to scream

Black beaches

That is why I sent you the black postcard that will never deafen

That is why land urges the well

The white is running in its grooves

The river slides under our dreams

but land flows more silently

What time the orioles came flying

Back to the homes, over the silvery dikes and seas,

The sad spring melted at a leap,

The shining clouds came over the hills to meet them.

The old house guards its memories; the birds

Stream over colored snow in summer

Or back into the magic rising sun in winter.

They cluster at the feeding station, and rags of song

Greet the neighbors. “Was that your voice?”

And in spring the mad caroling continues long after daylight

As each builds his hanging nest

Of pliant twigs and the softest moss and grasses.

But one morning you get up and the vermilion-colored

Messenger is there, bigger than life at the window.

“I take my leave of you; now I fly away

To the sunny reeds and marshes of my winter home.”

And that night you gaze moodily

At the moonlit apple-blossoms, for of course

Horror and repulsion do exist! They do! And you wonder,

How long will the perfumed dung, the sunlit clouds cover my heart?

And then some morning when the snow is flying

Or it lines the black fir-trees, the light cries,

The excited songs start up in the yard!

The feeding station is glad to receive its guests,

But how long can the stopover last?

The cold begins when the last song retires,

And even when they wing against the trees in bright formation

You know the peace they brought was long overdue.

The screen of supreme good fortune curved his absolute smile into a celestial scream. These things (the most arbitrary that could exist) wakened denials, thoughts of putrid reversals as he traced the green paths to and fro. Here and there a bird sang, a rose silenced her expression of him, and all the gaga flowers wondered. But they puzzled the wanderer with their vague wearinesses. Is the conclusion, he asked, the road forced by concubines from exact meters of strategy? Surely the trees are hinged to no definite purpose or surface. Yet now a wonder would shoot up, all one color, and virtues would jostle each other to get a view of nothing—the crowded house, two faces glued fast to the mirror, corners and the bustling forest ever preparing, ever menacing its own shape with a shadow of the evil defenses gotten up and in fact already exhausted in some void of darkness, some kingdom he knew the earth could not even bother to avoid if the minutes arranged and divine lettermen with smiling cries were to come in the evening of administration and night which no cure, no bird ever more compulsory, no subject apparently intent on its heart’s own demon would forestall even if the truths she told of were now being seriously lit, one by one, in the hushed and fast darkening room.

He is sherrier

And sherriest.

A tall thermometer

Reflects him best.

Children in the street

Watch him go by.

“Is that the thinnest shadow?”

They to one another cry.

A face looks from the mirror

As if to say,

“Be supple, young man,

Since you can’t be gay.”

All his friends have gone

From the street corner cold.

His heart is full of lies

And his eyes are full of mold.

Until the first chill

No door sat on the clay.

When Billy brought on the chill

He began to chill.

No hand can

Point to the chill

It brought. Where a chill

Was, the grass grows.

See how it grows.

Acts punish the chill

Showing summer in the grass.

The acts are grass.

Acts of our grass

Transporting chill

Over brazen grass

That retorts as grass

Leave the clay,

The grass,

And that which is grass.

The far formal forest can,

Used doubts can

Sit on the grass.

Hark! The sadness grows

In pain. The shadow grows.

All that grows

In deep shadow or grass

Is lifted to what grows.

Walking, a space grows.

Beyond, weeds chill

Toward night which grows.

Looking about, nothing grows.

Now a whiff of clay

Respecting clay

Or that which grows

Brings on what can.

And no one can.

The sprinkling can

Slumbered on the dock. Clay

Leaked from a can.

Normal heads can

Touch barbed-wire grass

If they can

Sing the old song of can

Waiting for a chill

In the chill

That without a can

Is painting less clay

Therapeutic colors of clay.

We got out into the clay

As a boy can.

Yet there’s another kind of clay

Not arguing clay,

As time grows

Not getting larger, but mad clay

Looked for for clay,

And grass

Begun seeming, grass

Struggling up out of clay

Into the first chill

To be quiet and raucous in the chill.

The chill

Flows over burning grass.

Not time grows.

So odd lights can

Fall on sinking clay.

Jealousy. Whispered weather reports.

In the street we found boxes

Littered with snow, to burn at home.

What flower tolling on the waters

You stupefied me. We waxed,

Carnivores, late and alight

In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

Beyond the bed’s veils the white walls danced

Some violent compunction. Promises,

We thought then of your dry portals,

Bright cornices of eavesdropping palaces,

You were painfully stitched to hours

The moon now tears up, coffing at the unrinsed portions.

And love’s adopted realm. Flees to water,

The coach dissolving in mists.

A wish

Refines the lines around the mouth

At these ten-year intervals. It fumed

Clear air of wars. It desired

Excess of core in all things. From all things sucked

A glossy denial. But look, pale day:

We fly hence. To return if sketched

In the prophet’s silence. Who doubts it is true?

A novice was sitting on a cornice

High over the city. Angels

Combined their prayers with those

Of the police, begging her to come off it.

One lady promised to be her friend.

“I do not want a friend,” she said.

A mother offered her some nylons

Stripped from her very legs. Others brought

Little offerings of fruit and candy,

The blind man all his flowers. If any

Could be called successful, these were,

For that the scene should be a ceremony

Was what she wanted. “I desire

Monuments,” she said. “I want to move

Figuratively, as waves caress

The thoughtless shore. You people I know

Will offer me every good thing

I do not want. But please remember

I died accepting them.” With that, the wind

Unpinned her bulky robes, and naked

As a roc’s egg, she drifted softly downward

Out of the angels’ tenderness and the minds of men.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded

So that we may resemble a taller

Impression of ourselves. Moths climb in the flame,

Alas, that wish only to be the flame:

They do not lessen our stature.

We twinkle under the weight

Of indiscretions. But how could we tell

That of the truth we know, she was

The somber vestment? For that night, rockets sighed

Elegantly over the city, and there was feasting:

There is so much in that moment!

So many attitudes toward that flame,

We might have soared from earth, watching her glide

Aloft, in her peplum of bright leaves.

But she, of course, was only an effigy

Of indifference, a miracle

Not meant for us, as the leaves are not

Winter’s because it is the end.

These are amazing: each

Joining a neighbor, as though speech

Were a still performance.

Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning

From the world as agreeing

With it, you and I

Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are: