New Collected Poems

  began to live.

  My passage grew into that country

  like a vine, as if remaining

  when I’d gone, responsive to the season’s

  change, boding a continuance of eyes;

  not the place or the distance

  made it known to me,

  but the direction so ardently obeyed,

  preserving my advance

  on the edge of virgin light,

  broken by my shadow’s stride;

  I wouldn’t recognize the way back.

  I approach my death, descend

  toward the last fact; it is

  not so clear to me now as it once seemed;

  when I hunted in the new lands

  alone, I could foresee

  the skeleton hiding with its wound

  after the fear and flesh were gone;

  now

  it may come as a part of sleep.

  In winter the river hides its flowing under the ice

  —even then it flows,

  bearing interminably down; the black crow flies

  into the black night;

  the bones of the old dead ache for the house fires.

  Death is a conjecture of the seed

  and the seasons bear it out;

  the wild plum achieves its bloom,

  perfects the yellow center of each flower,

  submits to violence—

  extravagance too grievous for praise;

  there are no culminations, no

  requitals.

  Freed of distances

  and dreams, about to die,

  the mind turns back to its approaches:

  what else have I known?

  The search

  withholds the joy from what is found,

  that has been my sorrow;

  love is no more than what remains

  of itself.

  There are no arrivals.

  At the coming of winter

  the birds obey the leviathan flock

  that moves them south,

  a rhythm of the blood that survives the cold

  in pursuit of summer;

  and the sun, innocent of time

  as the blossom is innocent of ripeness,

  faithful to solstice, returns—

  and the flocks return;

  the season recognizes them.

  If it were possible now

  I’d make myself submissive

  to the weather

  as an old tree, without retrospect

  of winter, blossoming,

  grateful for summers hatched from thrushes’ eggs

  in the speckled thickets

  —obedient

  to darkness,

  be innocent of my dying.

  GREEN AND WHITE

  The wind scruffing it, the bay

  is like a field of green grass,

  and the white seagulls afloat

  in the hackling of the green bay

  are like white flowers blooming

  in the field,

  for they are white

  and come there, and are still

  a while, and leave, and leaving

  leave no sign they ever were there.

  Green is no memorial to white.

  There’s danger in it. They fly

  beyond idea till they come back.

  A MAN WALKING AND SINGING

  for James Baker Hall

  1.

  It is no longer necessary to sleep

  in order to dream of our destruction.

  We take form within our death, the figures

  emerging like shadows in fire.

  Who is it? speaking to me of death’s beauty.

  I think it is my own black angel, as near me

  as my flesh. I am never divided from his darkness,

  his face the black mask of my face. My eyes

  live in his black eye-holes. On his black wings

  I rise to sing.

  His mouthing presences attend

  my singing:

  Die more lightly than live,

  they say. Death is more gay.

  There’s no argument

  against its certainty, at least, they say.

  I know they know as surely as I live my death

  exists, and has my shape.

  2.

  But the man so forcefully walking,

  say where he goes,

  say what he hears and what he sees

  and what he knows

  to cause him to stride so merrily.

  He goes in spring

  through the evening street

  to buy bread,

  green trees leaning

  over the sidewalk,

  forsythia yellow

  beneath the windows,

  birds singing

  as birds sing

  only in spring,

  and he sings, his footsteps

  beating the measure of his song.

  In an open window

  a man and a woman

  leaning together

  at the room’s center

  embrace and kiss

  as if they met

  in passing,

  the spring wind

  lifting the curtain.

  His footsteps carry him

  past the window,

  deeper into his song.

  His singing becomes conglomerate

  of all he sees,

  leaving the street behind him

  runged as a ladder

  or the staff of a song.

  3.

  To his death? Yes.

  He walks and sings to his death.

  And winter will equal spring.

  And for the lovers, even

  while they kiss, even though

  it is spring, the day ends.

  But to the sound of his passing

  he sings. It is a kind of triumph

  that he grieves—thinking

  of the white lilacs in bloom,

  profuse, fragrant, white

  in excess of all seasonal need,

  and of the mockingbird’s crooked

  arrogant notes, hooking him to the sky

  as though no flight

  or dying could equal him

  at his momentary song.

  THE COMPANIONS

  When he goes out in the morning

  and comes back at night

  his landlady is there

  watching him, leaning

  forward in her chair, one hand

  holding the curtain back,

  simply curious, simply old,

  having stashed away her knickknacks

  in three commemorative rooms,

  stored up a winter’s breathing,

  forbidden the cold

  to come in. She dreams

  she’s dying in her sleep

  and wakes up afraid, to breath in

  again her breathed-out breath.

  Who will outlast?

  She waits for him, faithful

  to his arrivals and to the place;

  he brings back life to her,

  what he salvages of himself daily

  from the shut-out air.

  They don’t speak.

  She just observes his homecoming,

  lifelike in her chair

  as the shell of a wan moth

  holding to the lace.

  THE ARISTOCRACY

  Paradise might have appeared here,

  surprising us, a rackle of sublime coordinates

  figuring over the trees, surprising us, even

  though the look of the place seems not

  altogether unexpectant of such an advent,

  seems not altogether willing to settle

  for something less: the fine light

  prepared in the taut statuary of the oaks;

  venerable churches of muted brick;

  Greek porches presiding at the ends

  of approaches; delicate fanlights over doorways

/>   delicate and symmetrical as air, if air

  prepared, preened itself for Paradise

  to appear, surprisingly, but not very, in this place

  —all it needs to be Paradise is populace.

  (What has appeared, surprisingly, but not very

  —stepping out the door, and down the steps,

  groping for each next-lower step

  with a left foot her expansive exquisitely garmented

  paunch has prevented her seeing for thirty-five

  years—is a rich, fat, selfish,

  ugly, ignorant, old

  bitch, airing her cat.)

  THE BIRD KILLER

  His enemy, the universe, surrounds him nightly with stars

  going nowhere over the cold woods that has grown now,

  with nightfall, totally dark, the stars deeper in the sky

  than darkness; his thoughts go out alone into the winds

  of the woods’ dark. He sits in the doorway and softly

  plays the guitar; his fingers are stiff and heavy

  and touch the strings, not dextrously, so that he plays

  his own song, no true copy of a tune; sometimes the notes

  go away from melody, form singly, and die out,

  singly, in the hollow of the instrument, like single small

  lights in the dark; his music has this passion,

  that he plays as he can play. All day he has walked

  in the woods with his gun, ruin of summer, iron-rust,

  crumpled bronze, under the bare trees, devouring song. Now

  the trees of darkness grow tall and wide; nobody’s

  silence is in the woods. In the hush of all birds

  who love light, he lets go free to die in the broad woods

  in the dark the notes of his song.

  AN ARCHITECTURE

  Like a room, the clear stanza

  of birdsong opens among the noises

  of motors and breakfasts.

  Among the light’s beginnings,

  lifting broken gray of the night’s

  end, the bird hastens to his song

  as to a place, a room commenced

  at the end of sleep. Around

  him his singing is entire.

  CANTICLE

  for Robert Hazel

  What death means is not this—

  the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall,

  praising its absence, feeding on music.

  If life can’t justify and explain itself,

  death can’t justify and explain it.

  A creed and a grave never did equal the life

  of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts

  of ancient stones at the beginning of April.

  The black clothes of the priests are turned

  against the frail yellow of sunlight and petal;

  they wait in their blackness to earn joy

  by dying. They trust that nothing holy is free,

  and so their lives are paid. Money slots

  in the altar rails make a jukebox of the world,

  the mind paying its gnawed coins for the safety of ignorance.

  SPARROW

  A sparrow is

  his hunger organized.

  Filled, he flies

  before he knows he’s going to.

  And he dies by the

  same movement: filled

  with himself, he goes

  by the eye-quick

  reflex of his flesh

  out of sight,

  leaving his perfect

  absence without a thought.

  A MUSIC

  I employ the blind mandolin player

  in the tunnel of the Métro. I pay him

  a coin as hard as his notes,

  and maybe he has employed me, and pays me

  with his playing to hear him play.

  Maybe we’re necessary to each other,

  and this vacant place has need of us both

  —it’s vacant, I mean, of dwellers,

  is populated by passages and absences.

  By some fate or knack he has chosen

  to place his music in this cavity

  where there’s nothing to look at

  and blindness costs him nothing.

  Nothing was here before he came.

  His music goes out among the sounds

  of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance

  and meaning of what he plays.

  It’s his music, not the place, I go by.

  In this light which is just a fact, like darkness

  or the edge or end of what you may be

  going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees

  and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up

  his mandolin, the lantern of his world;

  his fingers make their pattern on the wires.

  This is not the pursuing rhythm

  of a blind cane pecking in the sun,

  but is a singing in a dark place.

  TO GO BY SINGING

  He comes along the street, singing,

  a rag of a man, with his game foot and bum’s clothes.

  He’s asking for nothing—his hands

  aren’t even held out. His song

  is the gift of singing, to him

  and to all who will listen.

  To hear him, you’d think the engines

  would all stop, and the flower vendor would stand

  with her hands full of flowers and not move.

  You’d think somebody would have hired him

  and provided him a clean quiet stage to sing on.

  But there’s no special occasion or place

  for his singing—that’s why it needs

  to be strong. His song doesn’t impede the morning

  or change it, except by freely adding itself.

  THE WILD

  In the empty lot—a place

  not natural, but wild—among

  the trash of human absence,

  the slough and shamble

  of the city’s seasons, a few

  old locusts bloom.

  A few woods birds

  fly and sing

  in the new foliage

  —warblers and tanagers, birds

  wild as leaves; in a million

  each one would be rare,

  new to the eyes. A man

  couldn’t make a habit

  of such color,

  such flight and singing.

  But they’re the habit of this

  wasted place. In them

  the ground is wise. They are

  its remembrance of what it is.

  MAY SONG

  For whatever is let go

  there’s a taker.

  The living discovers itself

  where no preparation

  was made for it,

  where its only privilege

  is to live if it can.

  The window flies from the dark

  of the subway mouth

  into the sunlight

  stained with the green

  of the spring weeds

  that crowd the improbable

  black earth

  of the embankment,

  their stout leaves

  like the tongues and bodies

  of a herd, feeding

  on the new heat,

  drinking at the seepage

  of the stones:

  the freehold of life,

  triumphant

  even in the waste

  of those who possess it.

  But it is itself the possessor,

  we know at last,

  seeing it send out weeds

  to take back

  whatever is left:

  Proprietor, pasturing foliage

  on the rubble,

  making use

  of the useless—a beauty

  we have less than not

  deserved.

  THE FEAR OF DARKNESS

  The tall mar
igolds darken.

  The baby cries

  for better reasons than it knows.

  The young wife walks

  and walks among the shadows

  meshed in the rooms.

  And he sits in the doorway,

  looking toward the woods,

  long after the stars come out.

  He feels the slow

  sky turn toward him, and wait.

  His birthright

  is a third-hand Chevrolet,

  bought for too much. “I

  floorboard the son of a bitch,

  and let her go.”

  THE PLAN

  My old friend, the owner

  of a new boat, stops by

  to ask me to fish with him,

  and I say I will—both of us

  knowing that we may never

  get around to it, it may be

  years before we’re both

  idle again on the same day.

  But we make a plan, anyhow,

  in honor of friendship

  and the fine spring weather

  and the new boat

  and our sudden thought

  of the water shining

  under the morning fog.

  THE GUEST

  Washed into the doorway

  by the wake of the traffic,

  he wears humanity

  like a third-hand shirt

  —blackened with enough

  of Manhattan’s dirt to sprout

  a tree, or poison one.

  His empty hand has led him

  where he has come to.

  Our differences claim us.

  He holds out his hand,

  in need of all that’s mine.

  And so we’re joined, as deep

  as son and father. His life

  is offered me to choose.

  Shall I begin servitude

  to him? Let this cup pass.

  Who am I? But charity must

  suppose, knowing no better,

  that this is a man fallen

  among thieves, or come

  to this strait by no fault

  —that our difference

  is not a judgment,

  though I can afford to eat

  and am made his judge.

  I am, I nearly believe,

  the Samaritan who fell

  into the ambush of his heart

  on the way to another place.

  My stranger waits, his hand

  held out like something to read,

  as though its emptiness

  is an accomplishment.

  I give him a smoke and the price

  of a meal, no more

  —not sufficient kindness