I. THE FIGURED WHEEL The figured wheel rolls through shopping malls and prisons, Over farms, small and immense, and the rotten little downtowns. Covered with symbols, it mills everything alive and grinds The remains of the dead in the cemeteries, in unmarked graves and oceans. Sluiced by salt water and fresh, by pure and contaminated rivers, By snow and sand, it separates and recombines all droplets and grains, Even the infinite sub-atomic particles crushed under the illustrated, Varying treads of its wide circumferential track. Spraying flecks of tar and molten rock it rumbles Through the Antarctic station of American sailors and technicians, And shakes the floors and windows of whorehouses for diggers and smelters >From Bethany, Pennsylvania to a practically nameless, semi-penal New Tow In the mineral-rich tundra of the Soviet northernmost settlements. Artists illuminate it with pictures and incised mottoes Taken from the Ten-Thousand Stories and the Register of True Dramas. They hang it with colored ribbons and with bells of many pitches. With paints and chisels and moving lights they record On its rotating surface the elegant and terrifying doings Of the inhabitants of the Hundred Pantheons of major Gods Disposed in iconographic stations at hub, spoke and concentric bands, And also the grotesque demi-Gods, Hopi gargoyles and Ibo dryads. They cover it with wind-chimes and electronic instruments That vibrate as it rolls to make an all-but-unthinkable music, So that the wheel hums and rings as it turns through the births of stars And through the dead-world of bomb, fireblast and fallout Where only a few doomed races of insects fumble in the smoking grasses. It is Jesus oblivious to hurt turning to give words to the unrighteous, And is also Gogol's feeding pig that without knowing it eats a baby chick And goes on feeding. It is the empty armor of My Cid, clattering Into the arrows of the credulous unbelievers, a metal suit Like the lost astronaut revolving with his useless umbilicus Through the cold streams, neither energy nor matter, that agitate The cold, cyclical dark, turning and returning. Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments. Scientists and artists festoon it from the grave with brilliant Toys and messages, jokes and zodiacs, tragedies conceived >From among the dreams of the unemployed and the pampered, The listless and the tortured. It is hung with devices By dead masters who have survived by reducing themselves magically To tiny organisms, to wisps of matter, crumbs of soil, Bits of dry skin, microscopic flakes, which is why they are called "great," In their humility that goes on celebrating the turning Of the wheel as it rolls unrelentlingly over A cow plodding through car-traffic on a street in Iasi, And over the haunts of Robert Pinsky's mother and father And wife and children and his sweet self Which he hereby unwillingly and inexpertly gives up, because it is There, figured and pre-figured in the nothing-transfiguring wheel. THE UNSEEN In Krakow it rained, the stone arcades and cobbles And the smoky air all soaked one penetrating color While in an Art Nouveau cafe, on harp-shaped chairs, We sat making up our minds to tour the death camp. As we drove there the next morning past farms And steaming wooden villages, the rain had stopped Though the sky was still gray. A young guide explained Everything we saw in her tender, hectoring English: The low brick barracks; the heaped-up meticulous Mountains of shoes, toothbrushes, hair; one cell Where the Pope had prayed and placed flowers; logbooks, Photographs, latrines--the whole unswallowable Menu of immensities. It began drizzling again, And the way we paused to open or close the umbrellas, Hers and ours, as we went from one building to the next, Had a formal, dwindled feeling. We felt bored And at the same time like screaming Biblical phrases: _I am poured out like water; Thine is the day and Thine also the night; I cannot look to see My own right hand . . . ~I remembered a sleep-time game, A willed dream I had never thought of by day before: I am there; and granted the single power of invisibility, Roaming the camp at will. At first I savor my mastery Slowly by creating small phantom diversions, Then kill kill kill kill, a detailed and strangely Passionless inward movie; I push the man holding The crystals down from the gas chamber roof, bludgeon The pet collie of the Commandant's children And in the end flush everything with a vague flood Of fire and blood as I drift on toward sleep In a blurred finale, like our tour's--eddying In a downpour past the preserved gallows where The Allies hung the Commandant, in 1947. I don't feel changed, or even informed--in that, It's like any other historical monument, although It is true that I don't ever at night any more Prowl rows of red buildings unseen, doing Justice like an angry god to escape insomnia. And so, O discredited Lord of Hosts, your servant gapes Obediently to swallow various doings of us, the most Capable of all your former creatures--we have No shape, we are poured out like water, but still We try to take in what won't be turned from in despair: As if, just as we turned toward the fumbled drama Of the religious art shop window to accuse you Yet again, you were to open your red heart To show us at last the secret of your day and also, Because it also is yours, of your night. THE VOLUME Or a crippled sloop falters, about to go under In sight of huge ritual fires along the beach With people eating and dancing, the older children Cantering horses parallel to the ghostlike surf. But instead the crew nurse her home somehow, And they make her fast and stand still shivering In the warm circle, preserved, and they may think ~Or else I have drowned, and this is the last dream.~ They try never to think about the whole range and weight Of ocean. To try to picture it is like looking down >From an immense height, the oblivious black volume. To drown in that calamitous belly would be dying twice. When I was small, someone might say about a delicate Uncorroded piece of equipment, that's a sweetwater reel-- And from the sound ~sweetwater~, a sense of the coarse, Kelp-colored, chill sucking of the other, Sour and vital; governed by the moon, or in the picture Of the blind minotaur led by the little girl, Walking together on the beach under the partial moon, Past amazed fishermen furled in their hoodlike sail. Last Easter, when the branch broke under Caroline And the jagged stub, digging itself into her thigh as she fell, Tore her leg open to the bone, she said she didn't want to die. And now the scar like a streak of glare on her tan leg Flashes when she swims. Otherwise, it might be a dream. The sad, brutal bullhead with its milky eye tilts upward Toward the stars painted as large as moths as the helpless Monster strides by, his hand resting on the child's shoulder, All only a dream, painted, like the corpse's long hair That streams back from the dory toward the shark Scavenging in Brook Watson and the Shark, The gray-green paint mysterious as water, The wave, the boat-hook, the white faces of the living, The hair that shows the corpse has dreamed the picture, It is so calm; the boat and the shark and the flowing hair All held and preserved in the green volume of water. THE COLD I can't remember what I was thinking...the cold Outside numbs purposes to a blur, and people Seem to be more explicitly animal-- Stamping the snow, our visible patient breath Around our faces. When we come inside An air of mortal health steams up from our coats, Blood throbbing richer in the whitest faces. When I stop working, I feel in a draft Leaking in somewhere. In the hardware store-- I think because it was a time of day When people mostly are at work--it seemed All of the other customers were old, A group of I think five or six . . . a vague Memory of white hair or of elder voices, Their protective coats and gloves and boots Holding the creature warmth around their bodies. I think that someone talked about the weather; It was gray, then; then brighter after noon For an hour or two. As if half-senile already, In a winter blank, I had the stupid thought About old age as cozy--drugged convalescence; A forgetful hardihood of naps and drinks; Peaceful, without the fears, pains, operations That make life bitterest, one hears, near the end . . . The needle ~Work~ unthreaded--not misplaced. Bitterest at its own close, the short harsh day Does lead us to hover an extra minute or two Inside our lighted offices and stores With our coats buttoned, holding the keys perhaps; Or like me, working in a room, alone, Watching out from a window, where the wind Lifts up the snow from loaded roofs and branches, A cold pale against the sky's darkening gray-- Watching it now, not having been out in hours, I come up closer idly, to feel the cold, Forgetting for a minute what I was doing. FAERYLAND Thin snow, and the first small pools of dusk Start to swell from the low places of the park, The swathe of walks, rises and plantings seeming As it turns gray to enlarge--as if tidal, A turbulent inlet or canal that reaches to divide Slow dual processionals of carlights on the street, The rare vague beacon of a bar or a store. Shapes of brick, soiled and wet, yaw in the blur. Elder, sullen, the small mythical folk Gather in the scraps of dark like emigrants on a deck, Immobile in their fur boots and absurd court finery. They are old, old; though they stand with a straight elegance, Their hair flutters dead-white, they have withered skin. Between a high collar and an antic brim The face is collapsed, or beaked like a baby bird's. To them, our most ancient decayed hopes Are a gross, infantile greed. The city itself, Shoreline muffled in forgotten need and grief, To us cold as a stone Venus in the snow, for them Shows the ham-fisted persistence of the new-born, Hemming them to the crossed shadows of cornice and porch, Small darknesses of fence-weeds and streetside brush; We make them feel mean, it has worn them out, Watching us; they stir only randomly to mete Some petty stroke of revenge--arbitrary, unjust, Striking our old, ailing or oppressed Oftener than not. An old woman in galoshes Plods from the bus, head bent in the snow, and falls, Bruising her hip, her bags spilled in the wet, The Old Ones watch with small grave faces, nearly polite: As if one of them had willed a dry sour joke, a kind of pun-- A small cruel fall, lost in a greater one. It means nothing, no more than as if to tease her They had soured her cow's milk, or the cat spilled a pitcher, Costing her an hour's pleasure weeding in the heat, Grunting among the neat furrows and mounds. Tonight, In the cold, she moans with pursed face, stoops to the street To collect her things. Less likely, they might Put the fritz on the complex machines in the tower Of offices where she works--jam an elevator Between floors, giving stranded bosses and workers a break, Panicking some of them, an insignificant leak Or let in some exquisite operation bobbing In the vast, childlike play of movement That sends cars hissing by them in the night: The dim city whose heedless, clouded heart Tries them, and apes them, the filmy-looking harbor Hard in a cold pale storm that falls all over. THREE ON LUCK ~Senior Poet~ "Does anybody listen to advice? I'll soothe myself by listening to my own: Don't squander the success of your first book; Now that you have a little reputation, Be patient until you've written one as good, Instead of rushing back to print, as I did-- Too soon, with an inferior second book That all the jackals will bite and tear to pieces. The poet-friends I loved had better sense, Or better luck~~and harder lives, I think. But Berryman said he wanted the good luck To be nearly crucified. The lucky artist, He said, gets to experience the worst~~ The worst conceivable ordeal or pain That doesn't outright kill you. Poor man, poor John. And he didn't knock on wood. It gives me gooseflesh . . . One of these days, we'll have a longer visit; I think of you and Ellen as guest-starlets, Well-paid to cross the lobbies of life, smiling, But never beaten up or sold or raped Like us the real characters in the movie. I'm sure that image would yield to something solid Given a meal together, and time to talk." ~Late Child~ "I never minded having such old parents Until now; now I'm forty, and they live And keep on living. Seneca was right-- The greatest blessing is to be hit by lightning Before the doctors get you. Dim, not numb, My father has seen it all get taken away By slow degrees--his house, then his apartment, His furniture and gadgets and his books, And now his wife, and everything but a room And a half-crippled brain. If I was God, I hope I'd have the will to use the lightning-- Instead of making extra fetuses That keep on coming down, and live, and die. My sisters look so old, it makes me feel As if my own life might be over, and yet He planted me when he was older than I am. And when the doctor told her she was pregnant, They celebrated; in their shoes, I wouldn't. It wouldn't be nice to have to wield the scissors, And say when any one life was at its peak And ripe for striking. But if God was God, His finger would be quicker on the trigger." ~Prostate Operation~ "In all those years at work I must have seen A thousand secretaries, mostly young; And I'm the kind of man who's popular Around an office--though that's a different thing, Of course, from getting them to bed. But still, I never cheated on her; now, I can't. I don't regret them, exactly, but I do Find myself thinking of it as a waste. What would I feel now, if I'd had them all? Blaming them, maybe, for helping to wear it out? One thing's for sure, I wouldn't still have her-- Not her. I guess I'd have to say that, no, I don't regret them; but if we do come back, I think I'd like to try life as a pimp Or California lover-boy; just to see . . . Though I suppose that if we do come back I may have been a randy King already, With plenty of Maids and Ladies, keeping the Queen Quiet with extra castles, or the axe. But that's enough of that. I'll be Goddammed If I become another impotent lecher, One of these old boys talking and talking and talking What he can't do--it's one life at a time." THE NEW SADDHUS Barefoot, in unaccustomed clouts or skirts of raw muslin, With new tin cup, rattle or scroll held in diffident hands Stripped of the familiar cuffs, rings, watches, the new holy-men Avoid looking at their farewelling families, an elaborate Feigned concentration stretched over their self-consciousness and terror, Like small boys nervous on the first day of baseball tryouts. Fearful exalted Coptic tradesman; Swedish trucker; Palestinian doctor; The Irish works foreman and the Lutheran Optometrist from St. Paul: They line up smirking or scowling, feeling silly, determined, All putting aside the finite piercing recklessness of men Who in this world have provided for their generation: O they have Swallowed their wives' girlhoods and their children's dentistry, Dowries and tuitions. And grown fat with swallowing they line up Endless as the Ganges or the piles of old newspapers at the dumps, Which may be blankets for them now; intense and bathetic As the founders of lodges, they will overcome fatigue, self-pity, desire, O Lords of mystery, to stare endlessly at the sun till the last Red retinal ghost of actual sight is burned utterly away, And still turn eyes that see no more than the forehead can see Daily and all day toward the first faint heat of the morning. Ready O Lords to carry one kilo of sand more each month, More weight and more, so the fabulous thick mortified muscles Lurch and bulge under an impossible tonnage of stupid, Particulate inertia, and still O Lords ready, men and not women And not young men, but the respectable Kurd, Celt, Marxist And Rotarian, chanting and shuffling in place a little now Like their own pimply, reformed-addict children, as they put aside The garb, gear, manners and bottomless desires of their completed Responsibilities; they are a shambles of a comic drill-team But holy, holy--holy, becoming their own animate worshipful Soon all but genderless flesh, a cooked sanctified recklessness-- O the old marks of elastic, leather, metal razors, callousing tools, Pack straps and belts, fading from their embarrassed bodies! THE CHANGES Even at sea the bodies of the unborn and the dead Interpenetrate at peculiar angles. In a displaced channel The crew of a tanker float by high over the heads Of a village of makers of flint knives, and a woman In one round hut on a terrace dreams of her grandsons Floating through the blue sky on a bubble of black oil Calling her in the unknown rhythms of diesel engines to come Lie down and couple. On the ship, three different sailors Have a brief revery of dark, furry shanks, and one resolves To build when he gets home a kind of round shrine or gazebo In the small terraced garden of his house in a suburb. In the garden, bees fumble at hydrangeas blue as crockery While four children giggle playing School in the round gazebo. (To one side, the invisible shaved heads of six priests Bob above the garden's earth as they smear ash on their chests, Trying to dance away a great epidemic; afterwards one priest, The youngest, founds a new discipline based on the ideals Of childlike humility and light-heartedness and learning.) One of the sailor's children on his lunch hour years later Writes on a napkin a poem about blue hydrangeas, bees And a crockery pitcher. And though he is killed in a war And the poem is burned up unread on a mass pyre with his body, The separate molecules of the poem spread evenly over the globe In a starlike precise pattern, as if a geometer had mapped it. Overhead passengers in planes cross and recross in the invisible Ordained lanes of air traffic--some of us in the traverse Passing through our own slightly changed former and future bodies, Seated gliding along the black lines printed on colored maps In the little pouches at every seat, the webs of routes bunched To the shapes of beaks or arrowheads at the black dots of the cities. THE LIVING The living, the unfallen lords of life, Move heavily through the dazzle Where all things shift, glitter or swim-- As on a day at the beach, or under The stark, absolute blue of a snow morning, With concentric peals of brightness Ringing in the cold air. They seem drugged, Their abrupt good fortune clings heavily With the slow away and pomp of dirty velvet, Their purple, the unaccustomed garb-- Worn slipshod--of the Court Of Misrule: animal-headed, staring As if sleepy or drunk, riding a goat Or perched backwards on a donkey, Widdershins, hectic. Beggars, bad governors, We thrive awkwardly--some maimed slightly In the course of war; some torn by fear sometimes; Yet not paralyzed: we are moved. The strange Stories of the degradations of the martyrs-- Crucified upside-down, cooked live On a grille--bother us doubly; in themselves, And because a strange opiate intervenes As if they were suffering now, at this Apex of time, and for some reason we Could not concentrate, lost on the slopes Below. We ape court manner clumsily; Or shake fists, in awkward parade, Exalted and confused. Even in affliction--grotesque Illnesses, poverty, ruined hopes, the world's Rage and the body's--the most miserable Find in the mere daylight and air A miraculous daily bread. Fairy bread: We eat and are changed. Survivors After a catastrophe, transported, feel Nearly as if they could find the lost, Luckless ones, somewhere, perhaps not far-- Crowded, maybe, behind some one Of the innumerable doors of the palace. Plump Chance beams like an effigy Of Mardi Gras--the apparent origin And end of so much: disease, fame, Unemployment, intrigue. The world, random, Is so real, it is as if our own Good or bad luck were here only As a kind of filler, holding together Just that much of the adjacent Splendor and terror. Only, Sometimes, a sharp, violent burr, discordant, Sizzles for one instant in jagged Hachures in the brain momentary scream Of the powersaw wincing back >From a buried nail. Seizure: with a rising Whoop, like a child on a steep slide, A woman fell heavily to the floor A few feet away from me, her scalp Split a little, blood on my sleeve As I raised her shoulders, acting the part Of a stranger helping--asking a clerk To please get something to cover her, Please call for an ambulance, maybe She has a had a seizure. Epileptic-- The Falling Evil, something about the tongue, Something for the teeth. But her mouth Was not rigid, her eyes open--why Should she look at me knowingly, Almost with contempt, was she crazy?-- As if I had made her fall: or were no Stranger at all but a son, lover, lord And master who had thus humiliated her And now, tucking the blanket around her, Hypocritical automaton, pretended To urge~~as if without complicity or shame Or least sense of betrayal--the old embrace Of this impenetrable haze, this prolonged But not infinite surfeit of glory. II. HISTORY OF MY HEART I One Christmastime Fats Waller in a fur coat Rolled beaming from a taxicab with two pretty girls Each at an arm as he led them in a thick downy snowfall Across Thirty-Fourth Street into the busy crowd Shopping at Macy's: perfume, holly, snowflake displays. Chimes rang for change. In Toys, where my mother worked Over her school vacation, the crowd swelled and stood Filling the aisles, whispered at the fringes, listening To the sounds of the large, gorgeously dressed man, His smile bemused and exalted, lips boom-booming a bold Bass line as he improvised on an expensive, tinkly Piano the size of a lady's jewel box or a wedding cake. She put into my heart this scene from the romance of Joy, Co-authored by her and the movies, like her others-- My father making the winning basket at the buzzer And punching the enraged gambler who came onto the court-- The brilliant black and white of the movies, texture Of wet snowy fur, the taxi's windshield, piano keys, Reflections that slid over the thick brass baton That worked the elevator. Happiness needs a setting: Shepherds and shepherdesses in the grass, kids in a store, The back room of Carly's parents' shop, record-player And paper streamers twisted in two colors: what I felt Dancing close one afternoon with a thin blonde girl Was my amazing good luck, the pleased erection Stretching and stretching at the idea. ~She like me, She likes it,~ the thought of legs under a woolen skirt, To see eyes "melting" so I could think ~This is it, They're melting!~ Mutual arousal of suddenly feeling Desired: ~This is it: "desire"!~ When he came out Into the street we saw it had begun, the firm flakes Sticking, coating the tops of cars, melting on the wet Black street that reflected storelights, soft Separate crystals clinging intact on the nap of collar And cuff, swarms of them stalling in the wind to plunge Sideways and cluster in spangles on our hair and lashes, Melting to a fresh glaze on the bloodwarm porcelain Of our faces, Hey nonny-nonny boom-boom, the cold graceful Manna, heartfelt, falling and gathering copious As the air itself in the small-town main street As it fell over my mother's imaginary and remembered Macy's in New York years before I was ever born, II And the little white piano, tinkling away like crazy-- My unconceived heart in a way waiting somewhere like Wherever it goes in sleep. Later, my eyes opened And I woke up glad to feel the sunlight warm High up in the window, a brighter blue striping Blue folds of curtain, and glad to hear the house Was still sleeping. I didn't call, but climbed up To balance my chest on the top rail, cheek Pressed close where I had grooved the rail's varnish With sets of double tooth-lines. Clinging With both arms, I grunted, pulled one leg over And stretched it as my weight started to slip down With some panic till my toes found the bottom rail, Then let my weight slide more till I was over-- Thrilled, half-scared, still hanging high up With both hands from the spindles. Then lower Slipping down until I could fall to the floor With a thud but not hurt, and out, free in the house. Then softly down the hall to the other bedroom To push against the door; and when it came open More light came in, opening out like a fan So they woke up and laughed, as she lifted me Up in between them under the dark red blanket, We all three laughing there because I climbed out myself. Earlier still, she held me curled in close With everyone around saying my name, and hovering, After my grandpa's cigarette burned me on the neck As he held me up for the camera, and the pain buzzed Scaring me because it twisted right inside me; So when she took me and held me and I curled up, suck It was as if she had put me back together again So sweetly I was glad the hurt had torn me. She wanted to have made the whole world up, So that it could be hers to give. So she opened A letter I wrote my sister, who was having trouble Getting on with her, and read some things about herself That made her go to the telephone and call me up: "You shouldn't open other people's letters," I said And she said "Yes--~who taught you that?"~ ~As if she owned the copyright on good and bad, Or having followed pain inside she owned her children >From the inside out, or made us when she named us, III Made me Robert. She took me with her to a print-shop Where the man struck a slug: a five-inch strip of lead With the twelve letters of my name, reversed, Raised along one edge, that for her sake he made For me, so I could take it home with me to keep And hold the letters up close to a mirror Or press their shapes into clay, or inked from a pad Onto all kinds of paper surfaces, onto walls and shirts, Lengthwise on a Band-Aid, or even on my own skin-- The little characters fading from my arm, the gift Always ready to be used again. Gifts from the heart: Her giving me her breast milk or my name, Waller Showing off in a store, for free, giving them A thrill as someone might give someone an erection, For the thrill of it--or you come back salty from a swim: Eighteen shucked fresh oysters and the cold bottle Sweating in its ribbon, surprise, happy birthday! So what if the giver also takes, is after something? So what if with guile she strove to color Everything she gave with herself, the lady's favor A scarf or bit of sleeve of her favorite color Fluttering on the horseman's bloodflecked armor Just over the heart--how presume to forgive the breast Or sudden jazz for becoming what we want? I want Presents I can't picture until they come, The generator flashlight Italo gave me one Christmas: One squeeze and the gears visibly churning in the amber Pistol-shaped handle hummed for half a minute In my palm, the spare bulb in its chamber under my thumb, Secret; or, the knife and basswood Ellen gave me to whittle. And until the gift of desire, the heart is a titular, Insane king who stares emptily at his counselors For weeks, drools or babbles a little, as word spreads In the taverns that he is dead, or an impostor. One day A light concentrates in his eyes, he scowls, alert, and points Without a word to one pass in the cold, grape-colored peaks-- Generals and courtiers groan, falling to work With a frantic movement of farriers, cooks, builders, The city thrown willing or unwilling like seed (While the brain at the same time may be settling Into the morning ~Chronicle~, humming to itself, Like a fat person eating M&Ms in the bathtub) IV Toward war, new forms of worship or migration. I went out from my mother's kitchen, across the yard Of the little two-family house, and into the Woods: Guns, chevrons, swordplay, a scarf of sooty smoke Rolled upwards from a little cratewood fire Under the low tent of a Winesap fallen With fingers rooting in the dirt, the old orchard Smothered among the brush of wild cherry, sumac, Sassafras and the stifling shade of oak In the strip of overgrown terrain running East from the train tracks to the ocean, woods Of demarcation, where boys went like newly-converted Christian kings with angels on helmet and breastplate, Bent on blood or poaching. ~There are a mountain and a woods Between us~--a male covenant, longbows, headlocks. A pack Of four stayed half-aware it was past dark In a crude hut roasting meat stolen from the A&P Until someone's annoyed father hailed us from the tracks And scared us home to catch hell: We were worried, Where have you been? In the Woods. With snakes and tramps. An actual hobo knocked at our back door One morning, declining food, to get hot water. He shaved on our steps from an enamel basin with brush And cut-throat razor, the gray hair on his chest Armorial in the sunlight--then back to the woods, And the otherlife of snakes, poison oak, boxcars. Were the trees cleared first for the trains or the orchard? Walking home by the street because it was dark, That night, the smoke-smell in my clothes was like a bearskin. ~Where the lone hunter and late bird have seen us Pass and repass, the mountain and the woods seem To stand darker than before~--words of sexual nostalgia In a song or poem seemed cloaked laments For the woods when Indians made lodges from the skin Of birch or deer. When the mysterious lighted room Of a bus glided past in the mist, the faces Passing me in the yellow light inside Were a half-heard story or a song. And my heart Moved, restless and empty as a scrap of something Blowing in wide spirals on the wind carrying The sound of breakers clearly to me through the pass Between the blocks of houses. The horn of Roland V But what was it I was too young for? On moonless Nights, water and sand are one shade of black, And the creamy foam rising with moaning noises Charges like a spectral army in a poem toward the bluffs Before it subsides dreamily to gather again. I thought of going down there to watch it a while, Feeling as though it could turn me into fog, Or that the wind would start to speak a language And change me--as if I knocked where I saw a light Burning in some certain misted window I passed, A house or store or tap-room where the strangers inside Would recognize me, locus of a new life like a woods Or orchard that waxed and vanished into cloud Like the moon, under a spell. Shrill flutes, Oboes and cymbals of doom. My poor mother fell, And after the accident loud noises and bright lights Hurt her. And heights. She went down stairs backwards, Sometimes with one arm on my small brother's shoulder. Over the years, she got better. But I was lost in music; The cold brazen bow of the saxophone, its weight At thumb, neck and lip, came to a bloodwarm life Like Italo's flashlight in the hand. In a white Jacket and pants with a satin stripe I aspired To the roughneck elegance of my Grandfather Dave. Sometimes, playing in a bar or at a high school dance, I felt My heart following after a capacious form, Sexual and abstract, in the think, thrum, Thrum, come-wallow and then a little screen Of quicker notes goosing to a fifth higher, winging To clang-whomp of a major seventh: listen to ~me~ Listen to ~me~, the heart says in reprise until sometimes In the course of giving itself it flows out of itself All the way across the air, in a music piercing As the kids at the beach calling from the water, ~Look, Look at me,~ to their mothers, but out of itself, into The listener the way feeling pretty or full or erotic revery Makes the one who feels seem beautiful to the beholder Witnessing the idea of the giving of desire--nothing more wanted Than the little singing notes of wanting--the heart Yearning further into giving itself into the air, breath Strained into song emptying the golden bell it comes from, The pure source poured altogether out and away. III RALEGH'S PRIZES And Summer turns her head with its dark tangle All the way toward us; and the trees are heavy, With little splays of limp green maple and linden Adhering after a rainstorm to the sidewalk Where yellow pollen dries in pools and runnels. Along the oceanfront, pink neon at dusk: The long, late dusk, a light wind from the water Lifting a girl's hair forward against her cheek And swaying a chain of bulbs. In luminous booths, The bright, traditional wheel is on its ratchet, And ticking gaily at its little pawl; And the surf revolves; and passing cars and people, Their brilliant colors--all strange and hopeful as Ralegh's Trophies: the balsam, the prizes of untried virtue, Bananas and armadillos that a Captain Carries his Monarch from another world. THE SAVING Though the sky still was partly light Above the campsite clearing Where some men and boys sat eating Gathered near their fire, It was full dark in the trees, With somewhere a night hunter Up and out already to pad Unhurried after a spoor, Pausing maybe to sniff At the strange, lifeless aura Of a dropped knife or a coin Buried in the spongy duff. Willful, hungry and impatient, Nose damp in the sudden chill, One of the smaller, scrawnier boys Roasting a chunk of meat Pulled it half-raw from the coals, Bolted it whole from the skewer Rubbery gristle and all, And started to choke and strangle-- Gaping his helpless mouth, Struggling to retch or to swallow As he gestured, blacking out, And felt his father lift him And turning him upside down Shake him and shake him by the heels, Like a woman shaking a jar-- And the black world upside down, The upside-down fire and sky, Vomited back his life, And the wet little plug of flesh Lay under him in the ashes. Set back on his feet again In the ring of faces and voices, He drank the dark air in, Snuffling and feeling foolish In the fresh luxury of breath And the brusque, flattering comfort Of the communal laughter. Later, Falling asleep under the stars, He watched a gray wreath of smoke Unfurling into the blackness; And he thought of it as the shape Of a newborn ghost, the benign Ghost of his death, that had nearly Happened: it coiled, as the wind rustled, And he thought of it as a power, His luck or his secret name. THE QUESTIONS What about the people who came to my father's office For hearing aids and glasses--chatting with him sometimes A few extra minutes while I swept up in the back, Addressed packages, cleaned the machines; if he was busy I might sell them batteries, or tend to their questions: The tall overloud old man with a tilted, ironic smirk To cover the gaps in his hearing; a woman who hummed one Prolonged note constantly, we called her "the hummer"--how Could her white fat husband (he looked like Rev. Peale) Bear hearing it day and night? And others: a coquettish old lady In a bandeau, a European. She worked for refugees who ran Gift shops or booths on the boardwalk in the summer; She must have lived in winter on Social Security. One man Always greeted my father in Masonic gestures and codes. Why do I want them to be treated tenderly by the world, now Long after they must have slipped from it one way or another, While I was dawdling through school at that moment--or driving, Reading, talking to Ellen. Why this new superfluous caring? sI want for them not to have died in awful pain, friendless. Though many of the living are starving, I still pray for these, Dead, mostly anonymous (but Mr. Monk, Mrs. Rose Vogel) And barely remembered: that they had a little extra, something For pleasure, a good meal, a book or a decent television set. Of whom do I pray this rubbery, low-class charity? I saw An expert today, a nun--wearing a regular skirt and blouse, But the hood or headdress navy and white around her plain Probably Irish face, older than me by five or ten years. The Post Office clerk told her he couldn't break a twenty So she got change next door and came back to send her package. As I came out she was driving off--with an air, it seemed to me, Of annoying, demure good cheer, as if the reasonableness Of change, mail, cars, clothes was a pleasure in itself; veiled And dumb like the girls I thought enjoyed the rules too much In grade school. She might have been a grade school teacher; But she reminded me of being there, aside from that--as a name And person there, a Mary or John who learns that the janitor Is Mr. Woodhouse; the principal is Mr. Ringleven; the secretary In the office is Mrs. Apostolacus; the bus driver is Ray. A WOMAN Thirty years ago: gulls keen in the blue, Pigeons mumble on the sidewalk, and an old, fearful woman Takes a child on a long walk, stopping at the market To order a chicken, the child forming a sharp memory Of sawdust, small curls of droppings, the imbecile Panic of the chickens, their affronted glare. They walk in the wind along the ocean: at first, Past cold zinc railings and booths and arcades Still shuttered in March; then, along high bluffs In the sun, the coarse grass combed steadily By a gusting wind that draws a line of tears Toward the boy's temples as he looks downward, As the loud combers booming over the jetties, Rushing and in measured rhythm receding on the beach. He leans over. Everything that woman says is warning, Or a superstition; even the scant landmarks are like Tokens of risk or rash judgment--drowning, Sexual assault, fatal or crippling diseases: The monotonous surf; wooden houses mostly boarded up; Fishermen with heavy lines cast in the surf; Bright ridal pools stirred to flashing >From among the jetties by the tireless salty wind. She dreams frequently of catastrophe-- Mourners, hospitals, and once, a whole family Sitting in chairs in her own room, corpse-gray, With throats cut; who were they? Vivid, The awful lips of the wounds in the exposed necks, Herself helpless in the dream, desperate, At a loss what to do next, pots seething And boiling over onto their burners, in her kitchen. They have walked all the way out past the last bluffs, As far as Port-Au-Peck--the name a misapprehension Of something Indian that might mean "mouth" Or "flat" or "bluefish," or all three: Ocean On the right, and the brackish wide inlet Of the river on the left; and in between, Houses and landings and the one low road With its ineffectual sea-wall of rocks That the child walks, and that hurricanes Send waves crashing over the top of, river And ocean coming violently together In a house-cracking exhilaration of water. In Port-Au-Peck the old woman has a prescription filled, And buys him a milk shake. Pouring the last froth >From the steel shaker into his glass, he happens To think about the previous Halloween: Holding her hand, watching the parade In his chaps, boots, guns and sombrero. A hay-wagon of older children in cowboy gear Trundled by, strangers inviting him up To ride along for the six blocks to the beach-- Her holding him back with both arms, crying herself, Frightened at his force, and he vowing never, Never to forgive her, not as long as he lived. DYING Nothing to be said about it, and everything-- The change of changes, closer or further away: The Golden Retriever next door, Gussie, is dead, Like Sandy, the Cocker Spaniel from three doors down Who died when I was small; and every day Things that were in my memory fade and die. Phrases die out: first, everyone forgets What doornails are; then after certain decades As a dead meaphor, "-dead as a doornail-" flickers And fades away. But someone I know is dying-- And though one might say glibly, "everyone is," The different pace makes the difference absolute. The tiny invisible spores in the air we breathe, That settle harmlessly on our drinking water And on our skin, happen to come together With certain conditions on the forest floor, Or even a shady corner of the lawn-- And overnight the fleshy, pale stalks gather, The colorless growth without a leaf or flower; And around the stalks, the summer grass keeps growing With steady pressure, like the insistent whiskers That grow between shaves on a face, the nails Growing and dying from the toes and fingers At their own humble pace, oblivious As the nerveless moths that live their night or two-- Though like a moth a bright soul keeps on beating, Bored and impatient in the monster's mouth. FLOWERS The little bright yellow ones In the January rain covering the earth Of the whole bare orchard Billions waving above the dense clumps Of their foliage, wild linoleum of silly Green and yellow. Gray bark dripping. Or the formal white cones tree-shaped Against the wild linoleum of silly Green and yellow. Gray bark dripping. Or the formal white cones tree-shaped Against the fans of dark leaf Balanced as prettily in state As the wife of the king of the underground Come with palms on her hips to claim the golden apple of the sun. Sexual parts; presents. Stylized to a central O ringed by radiant lobes or to the wrapped Secret of the rose. Even potatoes have them. In his dead eyeholes The clownish boy who drowned In the tenth grade--Carl Reiman!--wears them Lear wears them and my dead cousins Stems tucked under the armpit Buttons of orange in the mouth, In a vernal jig they are propelled by them: Dead bobbing in floral chains and crowns Knee lifted by the pink and fuchsia Half-weightless resurrection of heel and toe, A spaceman rhumba. Furled white cup Handfuls of violet on limp stems The brittle green stalk held between arm and side Of one certain dead poet-- And they push us away: when with aprons Of petals cupped at our chin We try to join the dance they put Their cold hands on our chest And push us away saying No We don't want you here yet--No, you are not Beautiful and finished like us. THE GARDEN Far back, in the most remote times with their fresh colors, Already and without knowing it I must have begun to bring Everyone into the shady garden--half-overgrown, A kind of lush, institutional grounds-- Singly or in groups, into that green recess. Everything Is muffled there; they walk over a rich mulch Where I have conducted them together into summer shade And go on bringing them, all arriving with no more commotion Than the intermittent rustling of birds in the dense leaves, Or bird's nests in chains or knots that embroider The sleek sounds of water bulging over the dam's brim: Midafternoon voices of chickadee, kingbird, catbird; And the falls, hung in a cool, thick, nearly motionless sheet >From the little green pond to shatter perpetually in mist Over the streambed. And like statuary of dark metal Or pale stone around the pond, the living and the dead, Young and old, gather where they are brought: some nameless; Some victims and some brazen conquerors; the shamed and the haunters; The harrowed, the cherished, the banished--or mere background figures, Old men from a bench, girl with glasses from school--all brought beyond Even memory's noises and rages, here in the quiet garden. A LONG BRANCH SONG Some days in May, little stars Winked all over the ocean. The blue Barely changed all morning and afternoon: The chimes of the bank's bronze clock; The hoarse voice of Cookie, hawking -The Daily Record- for thirty-five years. SONG OF REASONS Because of the change of key midway in "Come Back to Sorrento" The little tune comes back higher, and everyone feels A sad smile beginning. Also customary is the forgotten reason Why the Dukes of Levis-Mirepoix are permitted to ride horseback Into the Cathedral of Note Dame. Their family is so old They killed heretics in Languedoc seven centuries ago; Yet they are somehow Jewish, and therefore the Dukes claim Collateral descent from the family of the Virgin Mary. And the people in magazines and on television are made To look exactly the way they do for some reason, too: Every angle of their furniture, every nuance of their doors And the shapes of their eyebrows and shirts has its history Or purpose arcane as the remote Jewishness of those far Dukes, In the great half-crazy tune of the song of reasons. A child has learned to read, and each morning before leaving For school she likes to be helped through The Question Man In the daily paper: Your Most Romantic Moment? Your Family Hero? Your Worst Vacation? Your Favorite Ethnic Group?--and pictures Of the five or six people, next to their answers. She likes it; The exact forms of the ordinary each morning seem to show An indomitable charm to her; even the names and occupations. It is like a bedtime story in reverse, the unfabulous doorway Of the day that she canters out into, businesslike as a dog That trots down the street. The street: sunny pavement, plane trees, The flow of cars that come guided by with a throaty music Like the animal shapes that sing at the gates of sleep. THE STREET Streaked and fretted with effort, the thick Vine of the world, red nervelets Coiled at its tips. All roads lead from it. All night Wainwrights and upholsterers work finishing The wheeled coffin Of the dead favorite of the Emperor, The child's corpse propped seated On brocade, with yellow Oiled curls, kohl on the stiff lids. Slaves throw petals on the roadway For the cortege, white Languid flowers shooting from dark Blisters on the vine, ramifying Into streets. On mine, Rockwell Avenue, it was embarassing: Trouble--fights, the police, sickness-- Seemed never to come For anyone when they were fully dressed. It was always underwear or dirty pyjamas, Unseemly stretches Of skin showing through a torn housecoat. Once a stranger drove off in a car With somebody's wife, And he ran after them in his undershirt And threw his shoe at the car. It bounced Into the street Harmlessly, and we carried it back to him; But the man had too much dignity To put it back on, So he held it and stood crying in the street: "He's breaking up my home," he said, "The son of a bitch Bastard is breaking up my home." The street Rose undulant in pavement-breaking coils And the man rode it, Still holding his shoe and stiffly upright Like a trick rider in the circus parade That came down the street Each August. As the powerful dragonlike Hump swelled he rose cursing and ready To throw his shoe--woven Angular as a twig into the fabulous Rug or brocade with crowns and camels, Leopards and rosettes, All riding the vegetable wave of the street >From the John Flock Mortuary Home Down to the river. It was a small place, and off the center, But so much a place to itself, I felt Like a young prince Or aspirant squire. I knew that Ivanhoe Was about race. The Saxons were Jews, Or even Coloreds, With their low-ceilinged, ubeleivably Sour-smelling houses down by the docks. Everything was written Or woven, ivory and pink and emerald-- Nothing was too ugly or petty or terrible To be weighed in the immense Silver scales of the dead: the looming Balances set right onto the live, dangerous Gray bark of the street.