A Little Song To the Heliotrope, Which Cannot See the Sun Mastodon 3:00 Metric Exercise A Disaster in the Afternoon Python Like an Emblem of Hope Social Neighborhood J'ai du Larry & Me bonecat The sky / was huge To A and B, My Friends Who Are Not in Books The Knife's Blade To Shadow Inflation Before My Father Before Me The Pigfoot Rebellion > Milkweed for Howard Nemerov Milkweed is pertinent now, so in the air That everyone is thinking in its terms. The housewife doesn't dare hang out the wash Without considering milkweed; engineers Decide today to redesign the air Filters they thought perfected. It's a fact: Milkweed has come to live and be lived with. Reprieved, the birds have ceased to pluck their breasts To line their nests--though few enough are still Fixing for eggs when milkweed begins to hatch Exploding from the brown sun-brittled pods. Occasional nestlings get mistaken meals, Beakfuls of milkweed someone took for bugs: Like anything in the air, it seems all things Eventually: a faery's shuttlecock As soon as seeds blown from the plainest plant. Step in a cataract of light on a day Like this, look up and see another race Cast from its place and looking for its place; Riding the wind toward distant, solid ground, They scatter golden light on their scattered way. The Cambridge Quakers In the park behind the meetinghouse the Cambridge Quakers glow on the round walk; summer suits and dresses in discrete procession, family after separate family passes among trellissed leaves up the stone steps faithful still to the memory of the night's dew, dazzled and eased again at every stair. The pointillist Quakers flicker between the branches, file past the sunken court where Longfellow, head and shoulders, presides over slabs and benches patterned by the light's unhurried pointing of branches turned through the summer day. The sun is stirring this bowl of stones; it simmers the day until the flecks of yellow seem fixed on the stairs, set before the feet of the unbuttoned Quakers leaving the meetinghouse; the saffron frocks flare and cotton jackets flash over shoulders impatient with the settled patterns of the walk and branches turning slowly certain on a Sunday afternoon. Lore All my intelligence of beasts: Inklings of men. How the childhood dog can turn Sudden as a fuse (Never my dog, but she Sainted all eighteen years), The camel's back break. How the cheetah who is not The strongest cat in town Dragging home antelope Glares mad into brush from side to side. I know the housecat's lust for looking-glass, Dolphins' for speech through a sounding sea. Most clear of all it is That to the great wet eye of a horse, standing Across the fence like one to gossip with, That sky is not called blue nor even sky: I and another sort of animal Have circled slowly with a closed Impassive room as referee, Sat and stared through eyes at eyes Like lovers An equal distance from the door. A Prayer for Violets On the window-sill across the alley there are always shoes, old shoes with tall thick heels. The old woman rotates them like crops; every pair is black, scuffed gray. At night her television blares across to us. Its gray light affronts the moon. One afternoon while the light turned gold my wife was bringing in from the fire escape our rose bush in its redwood tub. The woman's face glimmered above the shoes and called out, 'Where are you taking my garden?' Tonight she is a shape like a heap of stone fruit in that flickering light, waiting for God to come on and tell her the sacrifice is approved, the shoes will ascend tomorrow in a golden shaft. But this evening, when the foxfire ages the shoes and freezes the old woman, I put my book down and lean toward the window and pray that God will leave the shoes, unpolished, filled heel to toe with good loam and thick with violets drinking the moonlight. A Day toward the End of Winter I One waits in the cold and thinks, Waiting must end; The bus must come, or love, the equinox. And love or bus or equinox may come In fact: Not through machina of desire. To bear the wait Suddenly grown unbearable, one shifts In irritation, acquiescence, finds A new stance of waiting Or of not waiting, Standing merely under the sky. The bus one seeks in the east may come Bounding out of the south, Fracturing southern sky. II The sky was molten yesterday that now Solidifies and darkens, lumped and gouged. Trees stick up into the holes and shiver. They look as lost as amputated threads Between two layers of velvet, one of which Was sold this morning. Someone prepares a dress For early spring. It matches the close felt Gray on young antlers. It is nearly done. Then she will lean to meet the trees' caress When the days fit the nights like a new pelt. III Everything rhymes with spring. All comes, all fits, Not with the cling of winter mist; The gold the eye has Tried to deduce from limbering skies Thrusts from the other heaver as The crocuses' appropriate surprise. Dancing to Guitars Summer, and the strings of guitars go flat in their cases. The living gut relaxes in its case, and we eat little. Surrounded by the buzz of flies and fans our thoughts thicken. We sit, eyes sore with rubbing away the sun, staring out the window at passersby, and wonder, should we try to sleep the flat afternoon away? Nothing solidifies. Once there was power in summer unlocking in our limbs to swim, to make waves, to reach floats moored far out to scale tall trees a current in the fingers to bring the guitars up to pitch and set flies to rout with the buzz of brisk Spanish dances. Delicate fire ran in our limbs. It was verve beyond our winters, it lay between us, sucking us together. It drew us into figures beyond ourselves. Now there is nothing more antique than the sullen weight of limbs. Pedestrians amble below our eyes, we do not follow. The boxes stay in their cases. Nothing dances. Man with a Shotgun He steps to the porch and squints out as if these were his father's lands again. Crows freckle the far elms. He is alone, gun his only prop. Dog's dead, flung bloated into the field, now dry as the dry field's furrows: leather thing. Crows wait in bleachers of elm. This would be harvest time, on other lands. The gun too has outlived its purpose. Sky has clapped shut over this space. It waits for a word which will not be spoken, holds its own breath back from elms, back from dog's crusted fur, from ground's dead dust, holds it for a gesture nobody's going to make. Crows wait too. They do not cry out. Man does not raise his gun. Dog doesn't smile. Come Down to That Seabury's _Sermons_, 1793, 1798, 1815, in crumbling leather stand in gold and burn slowly in sunlight. Around the Anglican the British church refused to consecrate first Bishop in America, the dust dancing attendance on the living light attests the revolutions of the earth. If all this dust is only dust then nothing means a thing except the thing itself--unless the eye of God . . . unless . . . If reading is the ground where inference and implication meet then sculptor, farmer and geologist meeting upon that ground may read the rocks, enrich the rocks, may found the stone firmly to bear its weight in height and breadth and depth in the mansion of the human universe, and dust may be the finest earth. In the Inn my great-aunt's great-great-uncle built, here in the kitchen where the women baked the daily staff and on the distaff spun the thread the children measured and the men cut and wove and stitched into human shape, in the hearth where ashes stirred stirs dust. To My Student Gone to Israel '_None but a mule denies his family._' Arab proverb And now you've changed midwest for Middle East And Campus Gothic for the Wailing Wall. They gave you a gun, and bullets for the beast, Trained you, installed you where the blow will fall. Between patrols you write, along with dreams Of sprinklers, 'I see things now in right relief: The good stands out. You know what nothing means Until you choose the beauty of belief.' You've found the truth, guarding a zone of dunes None but a mule would fight a camel for, Only a man a man. The wind draws runes With sand, and rubs them out again with more. And still I stand my terms before the board, Erasing mistakes and thinking toward the East Where you prepare the battles of the Lord And write me letters full of private peace. lying awake 8/24/72 around my ears the sounds rise in slow eddies high in the center pulse the ridged whistles of crickets the swish of a few cars lifts midnight blue to the window now and then your pages rustle to my right so I think of a goatherd sitting on warm stone rhythmically brushing his goatskin musette on the stone the goats are amused but browse and leave his gazing cicadas above sway chewing the air in the high branches beside his stone a stream whispers of oceans so far away there is time for a long sleep down the hills past stones and goatherds and on through cities past windows where the whispers rise like blue mists to mingle with the brushing of page on page till the lady sleeps and the white sea takes the stream Moira I When you get so old the face of Lachesis mingles in your short sight with the mask of Atropos, and you don't give much of a damn anyway who it is snickering in the shadows grown so attached to you; when the faces of friends stream tirelessly through your vision: some, as through a distorted glass, the children of themselves-- like early and late editions of yesterday's paper gone to wrap some rotting thing; then it's time, and barely, to remember being sixteen, a child standing in a field struck blind temporarily by the sight of someone you thought was something else, some piece of you, an emissary. Her feet were rooted firmly on the hill, it was nothing like that; but holding something that did not shiver like the frantic leaves, and thoughtlessly commanding the unfocussed sun to become the shadow of her own shining, she made herself the sign of an old pact, a ritual future, your very lens-- Fate, in fact. II Now, half a century later, caught on your way out in a mirror in the front hall, recognizing your own deformity, you think you should shiver her image with a cry; strain swearing and red-faced to shatter with your own voice that dim, lying glass that says, red-faced, that you believed it. Go ahead, shout it down; waver away, upstairs again to mutter in your stuffy room, too bright and smelling of Vicks and cough syrup: swear she was a murderess of children. III If you could only see what happens is not what is meant to happen, none of this was of necessity, nor was she responsible, only irresponsible; turn around. Look again. Only a man can shape his own shadow. IV Over the years you forgot it all, as a man who's lost his way will pretend sometimes he meant all along to be just where he is. Your friends passed on, died off, leaving sons who didn't listen when your voice meandered back to what had been like a reflected river. And now, after all, old and seeing again as at sixteen only what your mind sees, you pass over again that early loss of sight as a thing which is not to be lost in an old man's eyes. A Little Song She beyond all others in deepest dreams comes back. You shun sleep, lying in darkness, breath held, hearing that voice over the rustling dry grass breathing in darkness. Walk for miles each day, with a dog to watch, pen paper, ink, try, focus attention somewhere else. But Mi, Sol, Re go the notes her voice slips into your blind heart. Once you knew each inch of her body. No more. Only one thing, caught in your faithful ear, still lives. Your eyes lie. Even in dreams the face fades. Only a singing. She's your cane these days. When you tap, she tells how far you've strayed. Tap trees by the road, you hear how hollow things are. Listen, You'll hear in high limbs voices of dry leaves. To the Heliotrope, Which Cannot See the Sun Lover to poet lends his art Of drifting past and past a place, Learning its flowered face by heart, Inventing a beloved face. He lives by glimpses. All his hope He earns by tedium, walking by A wall awake with heliotrope, And learns to love its stone reply. Should either into either fade And either win their one delight, Division gone, both lose their trade, Caught up in vision, squander sight. Eyes too adoring to digress Engross the single sun for hours Unless the poet's fickleness Save lovers from the fate of flowers. Mastodon 'To sculpt an elephant, chip from a large block anything that doesn't look like an elephant.' He fell and was drowned too far from where the confrere dinosaurs basked in their tar-pits to decompose in peace. He froze before he could drown, and merely slept snug in a new block of the pole's building. And while he slept he became extinct. He began to wonder, in his glacial way, being kept so long in nature's antechamber, whether he was ignored or just forgotten and by whom. Who was left? He forgot. When the little fellows he remembered as busybodies with stone-chip spears attacked the ancient ice and laid him bare, he found himself so exhausted with waiting as to have forgotten the protocol. He could not play the old game, stamping about trumpeting while they pelted him with brickbats; for who would not, having lived so long protected from the passions of the sun, functionless, ill at ease, wish merely to rise and step again into the fumbling hands of the sea? 3:00 This night growing up was born an old man. It grows austere: the gaudy stuff of desire is left behind, a peacock adolescence passed. The muscles of remorse begin to atrophy as the moon relaxes down. On the wall the Turner is dead as a cat's closed eye. The sheets have lost their fishy glimmer; they negate our wrapped bodies. Only the maniac workshop of the clock still counts. No world calls beyond the window in summer voice of car horns challenging. The grass is black. Wind whistles in the air conditioner. Memory, murdered, comes back to haunt. The pillow is like a ballistics box. The air too seems to trace and claim attempts of light, till only the clock's green, stiff fingers irradiate the night, working toward three-owe-one. Metric Exercise The river of her will not fail into sand (beside streams in the park I linger with her). Let her be so long and the sun so play in dark eyes. Heron, eye-bright, taut to miss nothing and pluck a jewelled sustenance up for radiance of wing: I am three-fourths of a fool, one part beyond praise. Her clothing is of kinds that a dreamed river would wear, rugged and soft, absorbing of the light in its matte darkness except gleams, glints like quick smiles. This lady: let her be prime feather to guide flight, and I swear fealty. At sunset I have limbered my wings, thrown her her glints, thought hard upon flight. Out there there is the austere knowledge of birds-- the land chequered with brown rivers, men, small earth. Over this, wide sky, and between no clouds to blur sight that searches as to embrace, kiss what it can't, the sun's self above the river that has its way under the sky, over dark earth, its bright eye. At sunset I am a blue glint in her eye; the last fish of the day is glimmering in depths and commands (sweetly) me down to my ignorance. A Disaster in the Afternoon In the heat they wander from room to room Absently picking up alabaster Eggs from wooden cups and fingering them Thoughtfully, without thought. The party is Ready to break up, only there may be Rain. They seek idly for shade, or more than Shade, something else since, though swollen with heat, Bulging to fart out the idle guests as They fidget from room to room, the rooms are Dim with blinds, blinded. Clouds are coming up And the rain comes down. Much of the dampness And all of the heat, wilting the eager Corsages of the ladies, remain. The Party is ready to break up, but how Is one to leave in this downpour? Where could One go anyway, since it is clearly Too hot for sleep or food, if anything Is clear. The rain taps as a man's fingers May drum on a table between crises. The guests move less and less, having found the Last equilibrium equidistant Each from the calories of the others. Through the window's just-ajarness, threading Neatly each head by its two ears like a Pearl, a siren's frenzied grief whirls closer, Pierces, whirls on down the scale toward silence. Python A great argyle sock tree-hung for Christmas (stuffed stiff with blackjacks, silencers, the long black toys of death) in the dappled leaflight writhes. Maybe it is wind, moving the leaves. Master clown, _Pan troglodytes_ below gambols snuffing a little wind, watching with half a happy eye. You know the story: Death winds & the wind dies. Like an Emblem of Hope He might come out of a cartoon. Draped in much overcoat He follows his wife from Christmastime Aisle to aisle, contending Against a sea of faces, Adding to his arms at every counter Another parcel or two, None of which alone, it may be, Weighs a great deal or is very large, But which have summed a structure constantly more Precarious, what With socks for Grandpa, sisters' Scarves and dresses, aunts' and Uncles' books and for the Kids toys of a dozen bizarre Unmanageable shapes and stuck In a crevice two new ties For him. His wife is short and gray And nicely dressed, her taste Is good. Her energy's immense. By accident as I pass I catch His eye and that moment, Surely by accident, The grand disheveled lovingly gathered Pile shifts by a fraction and all At once begins to fracture into constituent Gifts, a Christmas Cornucopia-- >From his gray Eyes to mine, just as the first Package speaks its independence flares A dream: Deep in a forest In sun of a summer evening, no one But birds and trees and possums For audience and maybe God, A jongleur keeps a dozen toys aloft, Hoops and hoop-sticks, dolls, Tops and a shining sword, shattering The light with brilliance of their tumbling. Social When people pass at a double door they turn (they must turn) inward toward each other's face, and meet with foolishness if, linked like fingers by the two doors' clasp, they refuse to smile. (For feeling foolish each resents the other's eyes.) More: if a wind on one side eases In and presses in the Out, In's pressing in helps Out, eases the pressure. This is not conundrum but choregraphy, the rhythm of social acts, the chain gang's grace. In a meadow far from double doors a girl dreams among flowers. The watchers say Who? Who did she leave the dance with? Early too, they say. >From mezzanines I've watched long lines turning in pairs this way, making a chain of allemande-lefts like a chain of flowers a girl has woven while she stands, the circle slipping from her fingers, broken to a single braid. Even the weariest, laden with bags or shrewdness, tricked into stranger-smiles, caught up, have gathered from the dance a grace, as flowers bask in a girl's rapt hands. Neighborhood for Donald Finkel The bear's my neighbor next cave down-- keeps to himself; allows me the squirrels, I leave him the trout. He keeps folks at their distance for us both. He's a quiet soul. Oh, in spring he roars some at night-- I find his marks eight foot up the pines. Come summer, he settles in, says nothing more than he's got to say. Once in a space we come across each other-- stand still on our own sides of the juniper, looking, nod, go on about our business. In autumn, stream starts freezing up, he sees his time-- rest of that year I miss him. The bear knows what he knows. J'ai du I wanted to laugh when I saw her smiling at him; pale moon mouth in the same old crescent, cradling him--eyes that were gone already, a green god's-fire taken on that twisted torch-- lips that opened like a wound to say she did. Did he? You bet. I wanted to laugh when she was shackled by a finger to that jackal, who hadn't even stolen her, surely not from a mad young dog chuckling masterless in a back pew. But when her father, 'in the perfect image of a priest,' pronounced them one person, I had to laugh. Larry & Me we called her Loud but that was never true she went off to Nigeria one year & sent us each a carved mask two different but so much the same & both so very neat in front with shiny black paint & red paint & yellow paint on all the appropriate exaggerated features & all the lines between colors so clear & sharp & both so cliche grotesque like comic-book demons they hardly seemed (till you turned them over and saw the rough inside would slash ribbons in your face if you tried them on yourself) custom-made but they were ours all right. bonecat bonecat clatters across cage (sound all muffled inside by skin) but paws ply fat pads padpad. secretarybird starts up foppish leg up franticking at no sound of caged bonecat (image imaging: crunchable bird bones cracked marrowmash mixed in bloodmeat) not nice bonecate keep your bloody mind at home keeper key-clanks tut-tuts captives chides: noiseless nasty children keep kindness: chides keeper bonecat bares crunchbone at gibbered bird keeperman slings meat inside cages jolly gross fingers clutching great jewelly hunks of hungerslake slung in slaps bonecat sideskull wolf it bonecat what the hell crunch ruby cowmeat since secretary flesh flaps hysteriastabbed in steelbar barricadoed cage The sky was huge, as he had said it would be. It sat cleanly on his mountains, and filled the wild fields with color. Because he had said it would be beautiful, it was. Or because it was beautiful, he said it would be. I was aware of him behind me, in the house, and in the fields in front; and above me in the sky, filling all things with their own colors. I wrote in a small book that he was larger in every way than myself. The blue ink forced me back to the sky: I froze when his shadow fell across the page. He stood beside me on the porch, looked out on his world and saw that it was good, and smiled. That day long I saw looking out, a guest in his world, and tried to be easy there; but the sky only drained me away to a thin, blue shell. To A and B, My Friends Who Are Not in Books for Mona Van Duyn Another summer: bookcase-building time. I've made the yellow sawdust rise all day, Six days it's filled the air and slowed the light Lapping the coteries of other years. I've paid a week for space to shelve a year Of new acquaintances, volumes of friends. My friends outside this room are like this room's Forests of books I fell and range to hand: Here's James, in whom I find unfolded B; A is a simple soul, I learn from Proust. Thinking my leisure here would help me learn More than your winter nights of talk in bars, Gestures among the leaves on autumn walks, My friends, I've tried to make you characters Flat as the leaves of books, like leaves between The stiff, preserving pages of my books. I'd rather check my heart to learn the time Than read my passions' passing from the clock. It seems that all this dust has closed my eyes. My friends, I'm taking off the day to clean. The Knife's Blade 'Black is the earth-globe one inch under.' Ted Hughes the sludge in water-pipes the pipes themselves everything's black inside cows (till they're drawn & quartered) are big sacks of darkness & warm needles it was black once, warm & moist you liked it too well to remember now that your limbs are clean once they drew & quartered souls to extract the blackness like a fistful of sludge & cast it away but the pipes themselves . . . & it only worked because they couldn't close them up again they knew they were right when they saw the oily smoke rising into the face of heaven right about them all, every mother's son not one mistake & inside the knife's blade it was very dark To Shadow Noon sets the tips of pines on fire; trunks' shapes are half-guessed. The goshawk's claws glint among ragged feathers. My feet trace out the hurried way. When the field and its winding path answer no question, pose nothing, my stride slows; easy light casts down the tree behind me till, a shade, I wind through the branching shadow. Evening's levelling everything. When I see the hawk's smooth winging home, it seems the world lays down arms forever. (Hunched in the thick grass, a blind spot swimming in this blind repose, a mole thrusts through its long labor, through this short peace of night.) Light wears thin. I hear doves whistling in the dark. On the wide field, day lies down to sleep, a man worn dark, his own shadow's weary hunter. Inflation There was a time (such songs begin this way) When every jewel that graced a pocket, each Pebble and shell, keepsake of thought's delay Over some bit of world, had a private speech, The stored-up, light, long story of a day. But now there greet the fingers, when they reach Their refuge, in place of something that might relate The feel of summer, searchings of a beach-- Car, house, and office on a chain, a weight Of paper, a half-handful of silver speech. Before My Father Before Me My mother's mother painted her Perhaps in 1936 At perhaps thirteen In the tentative light of a White Mountain dream. The house not shown Is sold to strangers now. It might be raked leaves the color of her hair She watches, flushed. Her high and silken blouse is the same Blue-green as the mountains, A color almost of sea. In 1936 her eyes, Half as old as when I met them, half As old as I am now, Were dry as leaves, Bright as the scattered leaves. My grandmother nearly always painted trees. In this there are only mountains, things Keeping their blue distance. The old lady is dead. Her brush Made these mountains of a half-known mother's wish Or set them down as they were by her daughter's eyes Composed of vague desire and the sea. She dreams of distance Hazy and wide as the North Atlantic, Peopled with strangers; Holds it still as she holds her blazing Head for her mother's brush. Between pale lips she Breathes the world that invests her Into being, Formless, Perfect: A woman with my own face, Thinking of other things. The Pigfoot Rebellion When the hair is carefully trimmed away You find in the pig's forefoot a little hole Through which the legion of devils bow in and out. Say they enter on a summer morning, Leaving the marks of their tiny claws as six Small rings. Then, 'please the pigs,' As the Saxons say, those trotters flash In as fiddle a jig as you who listen Candidly will hear from any warm Sly singer in the mud: 'Oh the mud is good, There's plenty of good to be found in slops, And the best of the good is a beast in shade. They'll slit my ear and cast me out Unfit for human consumption. Bub, I'll follow anyone home who feeds me, yes, And live to a hundred and five or ten.' Oh trim The hair from a pig's forefoot; I'll show you why A poke is best from the inside. And a sty.