The Eagle's Mile

  No different from cloud, among the other

  See-through images, as you are flawingly

  Thought of,

  but purely, somewhere,

  Somewhere in all thought.

  Page 9

  Two Women

  I

  Alone here. Beach, drum out

  What you want to say: a dolphin,

  Sockets, sword-flats. Seething landscape of hilts, no limits are set

  In you. Sand, sand,

  Hear me out: Hear me out with wind

  Going over, past

  All sound but sand. Listen,

  Clean vastness, I am alone here.

  I should be, for I have

  No mark.

  Woman, because I don't love you,

  Draw back the first

  Of your feet, for the other will fall

  After it, and keep on coming. Hold back

  A little, your printed pursuit, your

  Unstemming impurity.

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  II

  Early light: light less

  Than other light. Sandal without power

  To mark sand. Softly,

  Her hair downward-burning, she walks here, her foot-touch

  The place itself,

  Like sand-grains, unintended,

  Born infinite.

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  Immortals

  Earth

  Always as it holds us in one place, the earth

  Grows as it moves, exhaling

  Its rooted joy. I stand in tracks

  Where nothing starves. Vegetation, green blush,

  You and I sail today

  Through newly infinite

  Space on this surfeited hillside. Complacency has its own force

  Leafed-out with renewal. I cannot be anything

  But alive, in a place as far

  From the blank and the stark, as this.

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  Air

  Air, much greater than the sea

  More basic, more human than the sea: all thát air

  Is calm:

  unpeopled, wearing the high lucidity

  Of vigil. Maybe one day the mere surface

  Of the earth will feel you. But the air

  You can never keep doesn't know

  When it lived in your chest:

  Mindless, nerveless, breathless,

  The air glitters

  All the outside, and keeps carrying

  You from within.

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  Sea

  Who told you that the sea said something,

  Something toward the beaches?

  Let it spread more, belligerent with light,

  Saying one thing, resounding,

  Up front for all of us!

  Page 14

  To The Butterflies

  homage, Central America

  Open windows; we always have them, háve

  To have them. We widen

  Them all, and butterflies come in, and come

  To rest on our mirrors, breathing with their wings

  Almost like light,

  Or better, almost like flight,

  And then leave. Others come,

  Háve to come, and some of the time this happens

  We are singing, trying hard,

  But it comes out a croak

  From dryness, and when we move it is like

  Moving muscles of powder, but

  Really no muscles are on us; they are all gone

  Into sweat. Every light the hand turns on

  Hurts the eyes, and there is nowhere on earth

  That the heels of the feet

  Are so hot, and they cannot be cooled.

  I love to know nothing

  Of the sun; I love to feel

  That I float, forgotten,

  with two warm rivers

  That cannot touch me, on a stream come down

  Between them from a mountain

  Of frozen rain. We all have wanted,

  Page 15

  Too long, not to have our tears,

  Our salt-showing tears, dry before anyone

  Can see them, dry

  Before we can feel them,

  Or find out what they really have

  To do with grief. To say that I am not true

  To fever is to say I am not

  Loyal to my green country,

  not true, not real

  Myself,

  so I say it in secret

  In steam: Forgive me, butterflies:

  I know you have to have

  All this heat for your colors,

  but you are breathless, too,

  In spite of your breathing

  Wings and God help me I must say it before I melt

  Into the sugar-sick ground:

  If we could do it

  Without dimming the butterflies, we should find some way

  To get on the good side of North: Yes North and enough

  Cold: Yes cold

  And snow! I've heard of it! Flakes lilting onto us!

  Life light on the common grave

  Shapeless with swelter! Every tongue of us out

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  To be new to that taste! Mountains of rain

  Gone into feather-fall

  Floating us out of it! But not dimming not fading

  The butterflies

  or the hats and handkerchiefs.

  Let the wings on our mirrors

  In whatever falls

  Keep breathing Keep burning

  and us, Lord, please

  And us in the dresses and shirts.

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  The One

  No barometer but yellow

  Forecast of wide fields that they give out

  Themselves, giving out they stand

  In total freedom,

  And wíll stand and day is down all of it

  On an ear of corn. One. The color one:

  One, nearly transparent

  With existence. The tree at the fence must be kept

  Outside, between winds; let it wait. Its movement,

  Any movement, is not

  In the distillation. Block it there. Let everything bring it

  To an all-time stop just short of new

  Wind just short

  Of its leaves;

  its other leaves.

  One.

  Inside.

  Yellow.

  All others not.

  One.

  One.

  Page 18

  The Three

  I alone, solemn land

  clear, clean land,

  See your change, just as you give up part

  Of your reality:

  a scythe-sighing flight of low birds

  Now being gone:

  I, oversouling for an instant

  With them,

  I alone

  See you as more than you would have

  Bé seen, yourself:

  grassland,

  Dark grassland, with three birds higher

  Than those that have left.

  They are up * there

  With great power:

  so high they take this evening for good

  Into their force-lines. I alone move

  Where the other birds were, the low ones,

  Still swaying in the unreal direction

  Flocking with them. They are gone

  And will always be gone; even where they believe

  They were is disappearing. But thése three

  Have the height to power-line all

  Land: land this* clear. Any three birds hanging high enough

  From you trace the same paths

  As strong horses circling

  for a man alone, born level-eyed

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  As a pasture, but like the land

  Tilting, looking up.

  This may be it, too.

  Page 20

  The Six

  When you think strong enough, you get somethi
ng

  You don't mean

  And you dó: something prized-out,

  Splintered, like a rock quarry going

  Through you and over you

  Like love, and past and on

  Like love: whatever arms, legs, head,

  Breastbone, whatever feet and hands you love most,

  Most want to live

  And die with, are given out as flying

  Related rock; are charged

  With the life that lives

  By means of stone. The body of your lover tries to form and be

  Those six stones. For some reason

  They are hurtling, and if you meet them head-on

  You will know something nobody means

  But her. She is moving at the speed of light

  Some place else, and though she passes

  Through you like rock-salt, she is still six

  And not one.

  But neither is the rain

  Single, blotting number and stone

  With vibrancy; neither is the rain, I tell you,

  Man riddled with rocks

  And lust:

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  the rain putting out

  Your wretched, sympathetic

  Stone-jawed poetic head, its allotted

  Fresh bodies falling as you stand

  In amongst, falling and more

  Than falling falling more

  Falling now falling

  More than now.

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  Weeds

  Stars and grass

  Have between them a connection I'd like to make

  More offind some way to bring them

  To one level any way I can,

  And put many weeds in amongst. O woman, now that I'm thinking,

  Be in * there somewhere! Until now, of the things I made up

  Only the weeds are any good: Between them,

  Nondescript and tough, I peer,

  The backs of my hands

  At the sides of my face, parting the stringy stalks.

  Tangible, distant woman, here the earth waits for you

  With what it does not need

  To guess: with what it truly has

  In its hands. Through pigweed and sawgrass

  Move; move sharply; move in

  Through anything,

  and hurt, if you have to. Don't come down;

  Come forward. A man loves you.

  Page 23

  Spring-Shock

  All bubbles travelling

  In tubes, and being lights: up down and around

  They were: blue, red and every man uncaught

  And guilty. Prison-paleness

  Over the street between strobes

  Unfailingly. But no light

  On top of anything moving, until

  The last, one:

  one. Whoever it was switched it

  Dead when he saw me. Winter; not dreamlike but a dream and cars

  Of that. I took my stand where they were called

  By absent law to stop, obstructedly raging

  And I could not get in. All their windows

  Were sealed and throbbing

  With strobe, red and blue, red and blue

  And go. One pulled out of the flight

  Of others; pulled up and may have had back-road

  Dust on it red dust in a last shot

  Of blue. A man in a cowboy hat rolled down

  The window on my side. His voice

  Was home-born Southern; Oklahoma, Texas,

  Could have been. Manhandling my overcoat, I slid

  In * there with him. Central Park South, I said,

  A war-safety zone; the St. Moritz.

  He turned up

  One of the streets with no lights. Into the seat

  I settled; black buildings thickened

  Around us, high tenements flattening

  Into squares; warehouses now,

  Page 24

  They were; maybe docks. I watched. No birds.

  No trash-cans. The car died

  Between two alley walls

  And froze, and a voice at last, still

  Out of Oklahoma, said ''I want your money."

  We were present

  In silence. A brought-on up-backward thock

  Took place, and on the fresh blade

  A light alive in the hand

  New-born with spring-shock. It was mine

  At sixty. "I want your car," I said.

  Page 25

  The Eagle'S Mile

  for Justice William Douglas

  The Emmet's Inch & Eagle's Mile

  Blake

  Unwarned, catch into this

  With everything you have:

  the trout streaming with all its quick

  In the strong curve all things on all sides

  In motion the soul strenuous

  And still

  in time-flow as in water blowing

  Fresh and for a long time

  Downhill something like air it is

  Also and it is dawn

  There in merciless look-down

  As though an eagle or Adam

  In lightning, or both, were watching uncontrollably

  For meat, among the leaves. Douglas, with you

  The soul tries it one-eyed, half your sight left hanging in a river

  In England, long before you died,

  And now thát one, that and the new one

  Struck from death's instant

  Lightning's: like mankind on impulse blind-

  siding Godtrue-up together and ride

  On silence, enraptured surveillance,

  The eagle's mile. Catch into this, and broaden

  Into and over

  The mountain rivers, over the leaf-tunnel path:

  Appalachia, where the trail lies always hidden

  Page 26

  Like prey, through the trembling south-north of the forest

  Continent, from Springer Mountain to Maine,

  And you may walk

  Using not surpassing

  The trout's hoisted stand-off with the channel,

  Or power-hang the same in the shattered nerves

  Of lightning: like Adam find yourself splintering out

  Somewhere on the eagle's mile, on peerless, barbaric distance

  Clairvoyant with hunger,

  Or can begin can be begin to be

  What out-gentles, and may evade:

  This second of the second year

  Of death, it would be best for the living

  If it were your impulse to step out of grass-bed sleep

  As valuably as cautiously

  As a spike-buck, head humming with the first male split

  Of the brain-bone, as it tunes to the forked twigs

  Of the long trail

  Where Douglas you once walked in a white shirt as a man