Crossing the Water

  The heat-cracked crickets congregate

  In their black armorplate and cry.

  The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,

  And the crickets come creeping into our hair

  To fiddle the short night away.

  The Surgeon at 2 A.M.

  The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven.

  The microbes cannot survive it.

  They are departing in their transparent garments, turned aside

  From the scalpels and the rubber hands.

  The scalded sheet is a snowfield, frozen and peaceful.

  The body under it is in my hands.

  As usual there is no face. A lump of Chinese white

  With seven holes thumbed in. The soul is another light.

  I have not seen it; it does not fly up.

  Tonight it has receded like a ship’s light.

  It is a garden I have to do with—tubers and fruits

  Oozing their jammy substances,

  A mat of roots. My assistants hook them back.

  Stenches and colors assail me.

  This is the lung-tree.

  These orchids are splendid. They spot and coil like snakes.

  The heart is a red bell-bloom, in distress.

  I am so small

  In comparison to these organs!

  I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.

  The blood is a sunset. I admire it.

  I am up to my elbows in it, red and squeaking.

  Still it seeps up, it is not exhausted.

  So magical! A hot spring

  I must seal off and let fill

  The intricate, blue piping under this pale marble.

  How I admire the Romans—

  Aqueducts, the Baths of Caracalla, the eagle nose!

  The body is a Roman thing.

  It has shut its mouth on the stone pill of repose.

  It is a statue the orderlies are wheeling off.

  I have perfected it.

  I am left with an arm or a leg,

  A set of teeth, or stones

  To rattle in a bottle and take home,

  And tissues in slices—a pathological salami.

  Tonight the parts are entombed in an icebox.

  Tomorrow they will swim

  In vinegar like saints’ relics.

  Tomorrow the patient will have a clean, pink plastic limb.

  Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light

  Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.

  Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.

  The angels of morphia have borne him up.

  He floats an inch from the ceiling,

  Smelling the dawn drafts.

  I walk among sleepers in gauze sarcophagi.

  The red night lights are flat moons. They are dull with blood.

  I am the sun, in my white coat,

  Grey faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers.

  Two Campers in Cloud Country

  (ROCK LAKE, CANADA)

  In this country there is neither measure nor balance

  To redress the dominance of rocks and woods,

  The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds.

  No gesture of yours or mine could catch their attention,

  No word make them carry water or fire the kindling

  Like local trolls in the spell of a superior being.

  Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacation

  Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;

  Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses.

  It took three days driving north to find a cloud

  The polite skies over Boston couldn’t possibly accommodate.

  Here on the last frontier of the big, brash spirit

  The horizons are too far off to be chummy as uncles;

  The colors assert themselves with a sort of vengeance.

  Each day concludes in a huge splurge of vermilions

  And night arrives in one gigantic step.

  It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little.

  These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people:

  They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.

  In a month we’ll wonder what plates and forks are for.

  I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.

  The Pilgrims and Indians might never have happened.

  Planets pulse in the lake like bright amoebas;

  The pines blot our voices up in their lightest sighs.

  Around our tent the old simplicities sough

  Sleepily as Lethe, trying to get in.

  We’ll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn.

  Mirror

  I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

  Whatever I see I swallow immediately

  Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

  I am not cruel, only truthful—

  The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

  Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

  It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

  I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

  Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

  Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

  Searching my reaches for what she really is.

  Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

  I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

  She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

  I am important to her. She comes and goes.

  Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

  In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

  Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

  On Deck

  Midnight in the mid-Atlantic. On deck.

  Wrapped up in themselves as in thick veiling

  And mute as mannequins in a dress shop,

  Some few passengers keep track

  Of the old star-map on the ceiling.

  Tiny and far, a single ship

  Lit like a two-tiered wedding cake

  Carries its candles slowly off.

  Now there is nothing much to look at.

  Still nobody will move or speak—

  The bingo players, the players at love

  On a square no bigger than a carpet

  Are hustled over the crests and troughs,

  Each stalled in his particular minute

  And castled in it like a king.

  Small drops spot their coats, their gloves:

  They fly too fast to feel the wet.

  Anything can happen where they are going.

  The untidy lady revivalist

  For whom the good Lord provides (He gave

  Her a pocketbook, a pearl hatpin

  And seven winter coats last August)

  Prays under her breath that she may save

  The art students in West Berlin.

  The astrologer at her elbow (a Leo)

  Picked his trip-date by the stars.

  He is gratified by the absence of icecakes.

  He’ll be rich in a year (and he should know)

  Selling the Welsh and English mothers

  Nativities at two and six.

  And the white-haired jeweler from Denmark is craving

  A perfectly faceted wife to wait

  On him hand and foot, quiet as a diamond.

  Moony balloons tied by a string

  To their owners’ wrists, the light dreams float

  To be let loose at news of land.

  Whitsun

  This is not what I meant:

  Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows,

  Bald eyes or petrified eggs,

  Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets,

  Lard-pale, sipping the thin

  Air like a medicine.

  The stopped horse on his chromium pole

  Stares through us; his
hooves chew the breeze.

  Your shirt of crisp linen

  Bloats like a spinnaker. Hat-brims

  Deflect the watery dazzle; the people idle

  As if in hospital.

  I can smell the salt, all right.

  At our feet, the weed-mustachioed sea

  Exhibits its glaucous silks,

  Bowing and truckling like an old-school oriental.

  You’re no happier than I about it.

  A policeman points out a vacant cliff

  Green as a pool table, where cabbage butterflies

  Peel off to sea as gulls do,

  And we picnic in the death-stench of a hawthorn.

  The waves pulse and pulse like hearts.

  Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie

  Seasick and fever-dry.

  Zoo Keeper’s Wife

  I can stay awake all night, if need be—

  Cold as an eel, without eyelids.

  Like a dead lake the dark envelops me,

  Blueblack, a spectacular plum fruit.

  No air bubbles start from my heart. I am lungless

  And ugly, my belly a silk stocking

  Where the heads and tails of my sisters decompose.

  Look, they are melting like coins in the powerful juices—

  The spidery jaws, the spine bones bared for a moment

  Like the white lines on a blueprint.

  Should I stir, I think this pink and purple plastic

  Guts bag would clack like a child’s rattle,

  Old grievances jostling each other, so many loose teeth.

  But what do you know about that

  My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall?

  Some things of this world are indigestible.

  You wooed me with the wolf-headed fruit bats

  Hanging from their scorched hooks in the moist

  Fug of the Small Mammal House.

  The armadillo dozed in his sandbin

  Obscene and bald as a pig, the white mice

  Multiplied to infinity like angels on a pinhead

  Out of sheer boredom. Tangled in the sweat-wet sheets

  I remember the bloodied chicks and the quartered rabbits.

  You checked the diet charts and took me to play

  With the boa constrictor in the Fellow’s Garden.

  I pretended I was the Tree of Knowledge.

  I entered your bible, I boarded your ark

  With the sacred baboon in his wig and wax ears

  And the bear-furred, bird-eating spider

  Clambering round its glass box like an eight-fingered hand.

  I can’t get it out of my mind

  How our courtship lit the tindery cages—

  Your two-horned rhinoceros opened a mouth

  Dirty as a bootsole and big as a hospital sink

  For my cube of sugar: its bog breath

  Gloved my arm to the elbow.

  The snails blew kisses like black apples.

  Nightly now I flog apes owls bears sheep

  Over their iron stile. And still don’t sleep.

  Last Words

  I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus

  With tigery stripes, and a face on it

  Round as the moon, to stare up.

  I want to be looking at them when they come

  Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.

  I see them already—the pale, star-distance faces.

  Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.

  I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.

  They will wonder if I was important.

  I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!

  My mirror is clouding over—

  A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.

  The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

  I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam

  In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye hole. I can’t stop it.

  One day it won’t come back. Things aren’t like that.

  They stay, their little particular lusters

  Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.

  When the soles of my feet grow cold,

  The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me.

  Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots

  Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good smell.

  They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart

  Under my feet in a neat parcel.

  I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,

  And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.

  Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  On the stiff twig up there

  Hunches a wet black rook

  Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

  I do not expect a miracle

  Or an accident

  To set the sight on fire

  In my eye, nor seek

  Any more in the desultory weather some design,

  But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

  Without ceremony, or portent.

  Although, I admit, I desire,

  Occasionally, some backtalk

  From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:

  A certain minor light may still

  Leap incandescent

  Out of kitchen table or chair

  As if a celestial burning took

  Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—

  Thus hallowing an interval

  Otherwise inconsequent

  By bestowing largesse, honor,

  One might say love. At any rate, I now walk

  Wary (for it could happen

  Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,

  Yet politic; ignorant

  Of whatever angel may choose to flare

  Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook

  Ordering its black feathers can so shine

  As to seize my senses, haul

  My eyelids up, and grant

  A brief respite from fear

  Of total neutrality. With luck,

  Trekking stubborn through this season

  Of fatigue, I shall

  Patch together a content

  Of sorts. Miracles occur,

  If you care to call those spasmodic

  Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,

  The long wait for the angel,

  For that rare, random descent.

  Metaphors

  I’m a riddle in nine syllables,

  An elephant, a ponderous house,

  A melon strolling on two tendrils.

  O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

  This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.

  Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.

  I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

  I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,

  Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

  Maudlin

  Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag

  In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin

  Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man,

  Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg:

  Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig

  He kings it, navel-knit to no groan,

  But at the price of a pin-stitched skin

  Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.

  Ouija

  It is a chilly god, a god of shades,

  Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.

  At the window, those unborn, those undone

  Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,

  An envious phosphorescence in their wings.

  Vermilions, bronzes, colors of the sun

  In the coal fire will not wholly console them.

  Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark

  For the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim.

  The glass mouth
sucks blood-heat from my forefinger.

  The old god dribbles, in return, his words.

  The old god, too, writes aureate poetry

  In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,

  Fair chronicler of every foul declension.

  Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled

  His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper

  When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air

  And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.

  Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur

  Ravel above us, mistily descend,

  Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.

  He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair

  Who has saltier aphrodisiacs

  Than virgins’ tears. That bawdy queen of death,

  Her wormy couriers are at his bones.

  Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.

  I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe

  What flinty pebbles the ploughblade upturns

  As ponderable tokens of her love.

  He, godly, doddering, spells

  No succinct Gabriel from the letters here

  But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.

  Two Sisters of Persephone

  Two girls there are: within the house

  One sits; the other, without.

  Daylong a duet of shade and light

  Plays between these.

  In her dark wainscotted room

  The first works problems on

  A mathematical machine.

  Dry ticks mark time

  As she calculates each sum.

  At this barren enterprise

  Rat-shrewd go her squint eyes,

  Root-pale her meager frame.

  Bronzed as earth, the second lies,

  Hearing ticks blown gold

  Like pollen on bright air. Lulled

  Near a bed of poppies,

  She sees how their red silk flare

  Of petalled blood