New Collected Poems Read online

  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.

  THE THIEF

  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 BROKEN GROUND

  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.

  FINDINGS

  (1969)

  THE DESIGN OF THE HOUSE:

  IDEAL AND HARD TIME

  1.

  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.

  2.

  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.

  3.

  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.

  4.

  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.

  5.

  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.

  6.

  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.

  7.

  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.

  8.

  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.

  9.

  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.

  10.

  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 HANDING DOWN

  1. The light

  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.

  2. The conversation

  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.

  3. The old man is older in history than in time

  “I’ve lived in two countries

  in my life

  and never moved.”

  He has spoken of the steamboats

  of his boyhood, the whistles

  still clear to him

  in the upriver bends,

  coming down to the landings

  now disappeared, their names

  less spoken every year.

  He has remembered the open days

  of that first country

  —“It was free here

  when I was a boy”—and the old

  brutalities and sorrows.

  And now they talk of power

  and politics and war, agonies

  now, and to come,

  deaths never imagined

  by the old man’s generation.

  The mistakes of the old

  become the terrors of the young.

  In the face of his grandson he sees

  something of himself, going on.

  Moved by the near suffering

  of other men, he has taken them

  into the body of his thought.

  “If I died now, I wouldn’t lose

  much. It’s you young ones

  I worry about.”

  4. He looks out the window at the town

  Beyond the windows, past the fern

  and the pot rims and the patterned

  vine leaves, and the trees

  in the yard, are the white housefronts

  and storefronts of the little town,

  facing the road. There are only

  the two directions: coming in

  and going out. And all

  who take one take both.

  The town, “port of entry

  and departure for the bodies

  as well as the souls of men,”

  aspires to the greatness of the greatest

  city of the mind—with its dead

  for baggage. It suffers its dead beside it

  under the particular grass, the summary stone.

  Their hill keeps a silence into which

  the live town speaks a little.

  They are the town’s shut record, all

  their complexity perished—victims

  of epidemics, meanness, foolishness,

  heredity, war, recklessness, chance,

  pride, time. None ever escaped.

  That is the history of the place.

  The town, its white walls

  gleaming among black

  shadows and green leaves,

  stands on the surface of the eye.

  And the town’s history is the eye’s

  depth and recognition—is the mind’s

  discovery of itself in its place

  in a new morning.

  5. He has lived through another night

  He begins the knowledge

  of the sun’s absence.

  He’s likely to wake up

  any hour of the night

  out of his light sleep

  to know—with clarity like

  the touch of hands in the dark—

  the stillness of the room.

  The silence

  stretches over the town

  like a black tent, whose hem

  the headstones weight.

  Into it come, now

  and again, hard footsteps

  on the road, remote

  sudden voices, and then

  a car coming in, or

  going out, the headlights

  levering the window’s

  image around the walls.

  And he considers the size

  of his life, lying in it there,

  looking up out of it

  into the darkness,

  the transparence of all

  his old yea
rs between him

  and the darkness.

  Before it’s light

  the birds waken, and begin

  singing in the dark trees

  around the house, among the leaves

  over the dampened roofs

  of the still town

  and in the country thickets

  for miles. Their voices

  reach to the end of the dark.

  6. The new house

  At the foot of his long shadow

  he walked across the town

  early in the morning

  to watch the carpenters at work

  on a new house. The saws released

  the warm pine-smell into the air

  —the scent of time to come, freshly

  opened. He was comforted by that,

  and by the new unblemished wood.

  That time goes, making

  the jointures of households, for better

  or worse, is no comfort.

  That, for the men and women

  still to be born, time is coming

  is a comfort of sorts.

  That there’s a little of the good

  left over from a few lives

  is a comfort of sorts.

  He has grown eager

  in his love for the good dead

  and all the unborn.

  That failed hope

  doesn’t prove the failure of hope

  is a comfort of sorts.

  Grown old and wise, he takes

  what comfort he can get, as gladly as once

  he’d have taken the comfort he wished for.

  For a man knowing evil—how surely

  it grows up in any ground and makes seed—

  the building of a house is a craft indeed.

  7. The heaviness of his wisdom

  The incredible happens, he knows.

  The worst possibilities are real.

  The terrible justifies

  his dread of it. He knows winter

  despondences, the mind inundated

  by its excrement, hope gone

  and not remembered.

  And he knows vernal transfigurations,

  the sentence in the stems of trees

  noisy with old memory made new,

  troubled with the seed

  of the being of what has not been.

  He trusts the changes of the sun and air:

  dung and carrion made earth,

  richness that forgets what it was.

  He knows, if he can hold out

  long enough, the good

  is given its chance.