Preambles

    I
    Vagrant, back, my scrutinies
    The candid deformations as with use
    A coat or trousers of one now dead
    Or as habit smacks of certitude

    Even cosmographies, broad orchards
    The uncountable trees Or a river
    Seen along the green monotonies
    Of its banks And the talk

    Of memorable ideals ending
    In irrelevance I would cite
    Wind-twisted spaces, absence
    Listing to a broken wall

    And the cornered noons
    Our lives played in, such things
    As thwart beginnings, limit Or
    Juxtapose that longest vision

    A bright bird winged to its idea
    To the hand stripped
    By a damaged resolution
    Daily of its powers Archai

    Bruited through crumbling masteries
    To hang like swollen apples
    In the river, witnesses
    Stilled to their clotted truth All

    Discursion fated and inept
    So the superior reality
    Of photographs The soul's
    Tragic abhorrence of detail.

    II

    Only, if then, the ordered state
    The storied sentiment of rest
    Of the child hand in the father's
    Rigored, islands tethered

    To complicit seas, and tempering
    Winds to lull the will
    To evidence, to the ripe profit
    Of perfections, gardens

    Rhyming the space we walk in
    Harmony of season and design So
    Statues hold through every light
    The grave persuasive

    Candors of their stride And so
    The mind in everything it joins
    And suffers to redeem apart
    Plays victim to its own intent

    Divines generics blooded
    To its needs The sculptor
    Lending outward in his stroke
    To each defeat a signature

    The just reconnaissance
    That even fruit, each excellence
    Confirms its course A leisure
    As of sap or blood arrested

    Only once and to the prime
    Its issue vivifies A sun
    Luring the divisioned calms
    The days extended under it.

    III

    But only loosed or salient
    Out of this unbinding stream
    The stain of dyings seen
    On pavements and on blurted

    Slopes of ground As there
    Where your farthest reach
    Is lived of want or membership
    The ranged and slackened traffics

    Cease A bird in mid-flight
    Falls, let silence, hair
    The credible of touch adventure
    There Or certain laughters

    Freedoms and the heat
    Of only arms and of the thighs
    These even love's rejoinder
    As of every severed thing

    The ecce only, only hands
    Or hardnesses, the gleam a water
    Or a light, a paused thing
    Clothes in vacua killed

    To a limbless beauty Take
    These torn possessives there
    Where you plead the radiant
    Of your truth's gloom Own

    To your sleep, your waking
    The tread that is walked
    From the inner of its pace
    The play of a leaf to an earth.


    Old World Travelogue

    Back and late the northern valleys
    And the carved centers of the west
    Pitiably risen in flat places,
    Their space, their calendar, a name
    Affixed to treaties, distinctly ending:

    The last stop, the wide sense of the edge.
    Even these sure and splendid differences
    Will mimic them, the wiser seemings
    Of an open south, a mystery of flesh
    More real, and incommutable —

    Still in those starks the lungs will stumble,
    Start to a skyline's baffled summoning:
    One who strays at a rubbled limit,
    Leans to a river and river-lights,
    Hair blown, the spell of bridges ...

    Spurned divisions that will not close,
    Gather to a claim, let the will relent:
    So streets encountered in a guileless sun,
    Words shaped to their translated sense,
    A life contrived in a warmer country.


    Landscape (Sicily)

    I have seen your steeples and your lands
    Speared by awkward cactuses and long birds
    Flatten your yellow stones, your worn mountains.

    Surely where those hills spilled villages
    Toward the sea I should have wanted
    Savagery, a touch icier than physical sport;

    But vegetation withered from a forest
    Of inconclusive starts, memory only
    Gathered to a shade in the sun-sorrowed square.

    A shade, sun-struck, whose hold will cover
    The play of boys in blood-red clothing
    And call your seasons to a wall of flatted rhythms,

    To a slow summit of retreating days,
    days Like winds through given linen, through dust.
    These green reductions of your ancient freedoms —

    The stunted olive, the lizard fixed
    In soundless grasses, your yellow stones
    Rubbed by the moon, the moon-quelled beaches,

    And all asceticisms grown separate, skilled
    To plump intrinsic endings — the fig-tree's
    Sudden, rounded fingers; history

    At the close will cripple to these things:
    A body without eyes, a hand, the vacant
    Presence of unjoined, necessary things.

    Pilgrim Heights


    Something, something, the heart here
    Misses, something it knows it needs
    Unable to bless — the wind passes;
    A swifter shadow sweeps the reeds,
    The heart a colder contrast brushes.

    So this fool, face-forward, belly
    Pressed among the rushes, plays out
    His pulse to the dune's long slant
    Down from blue to bluer element,
    The bold encompassing drink of air

    And namelessness, a length compound
    Of want and oneness the shore's mumbling
    Distantly tells — something a wing's
    Dry pivot stresses, carved
    Through barrens of stillness and glare:

    The naked close of light in light,
    Light's spare embrace of blade and tremor
    Stealing the generous eye's plunder
    Like a breathing banished from the lung's
    Fever, lost in parenthetic air.

    Raiding these nude recesses, the hawk
    Resumes his yielding balance, his shadow
    Swims the field, the sands beyond,
    The narrow edges fed out to light,
    To the sea's eternal licking monochrome.

    The foolish hip, the elbow bruise
    Upright from the dampening mat,
    The twisted grasses turn, unthatch,
    Light-headed blood renews its stammer —
    Apart, below, the dazed eye catches

    A darkened figure abruptly measured
    Where folding breakers lay their whites;
    The heart from its height starts downward,
    Swum in that perfect pleasure
    It knows it needs, unable to bless.


    The Sun Goes Blind

    The sun goes blind against my hand,
    I lay the blue surrender of a bay
    Down the burning corner of my reach.

    The clouds retard and turn and catch,
    Their casuistries cannot detain
    What monody I move them through.

    I let one silent flank alone
    Of grazing pine encroach upon
    The helmed embankments of my air.

    Nameless, some quick or yellow bird
    Finds me too wide to thread to flight,
    Too still from bough to fretful bough.

    Earth presses me in cramped duress —;
    It is too gross a weight to be
    Withheld, to labor forth —
      this
    Weight itself of weightlessness.


    Scene Recalled

    How should I not have preferred
    The flinted salt of occasion?

    The stern
    Adequation I required of my eye:

      A time
      Of gulls riding out,
      Of the tide going cold at my ankles;

      A scene
      Held tall as postponement,
      As authority printed to landscape.

    You are not the first man who exacted
    Of flight it ascend through his shoulder;

    Through the copper of nightfall the silver.


    Solstice

    Instance, the fire
    that is in these facts, the burning
    bearing into every edge
    across the calm that
    bridges them
      here
    is it, the central all
    slumped in the sun
    breezing itself its mid-day fever

    a spire
    is off, or fraught
    awash, no special
    grass but flat and porch
      and only
    jackbird sulks in his tree
    the fire of his silence in me.


    Snow

    Now sudden, or again, this easy
    Quieter. You will know its fall
    And what it lies on,
    All, sign, metal, tar
    One long and skeletal reductum

    As, but warm, this side the pane
    You purchase sense for.
    But the gods give down
    Chill unities, the pulver of an under-
    Lying argument, assuager

    Of nothing nameable: you know
    The light snow holds and what
    Its bodyable shape
    Subdues, the gutter of all things
    A virgin unison; and how

    The glass that frames this waste
    Of contour lames to blur
    The baffled figure
    To the drift he scurries through
    — Blear hazarder. More bold,

    The discrepant mind will break
    The centrum of its loss, now
    Sudden and again,
    Mistake its signature, as though
    Snow were its poem out of snow.


    Waters

    Sunlight stitching the water —
    an oar silverly lifted.
    And blue, and yellow, and red boats drift —
    like pleasures in a mind that needs no center.

    One and one
    leaves scuff into the lake and stop
    drily as swans exchange their motions.

    Last year's leaves. And boys
    — stopping and starting
    among the new vague blazes of the trees,
    yellow, and suggested green — have now
    a stiffened squirrel hung upon a stick
    and lower him
    with the firm excitement of natural action

    his quick and singular attentions, all
    that green and ragged round of starts
    slipped under sieving waters.


    Waters (2)

    Broad emptiness of waters watched
      dull slant of light
      the roused abeyances of earth

    So Chinese paintings
      not correcting the world
      invoke world-absences

    Importantly
      because a breathing serves these pauses
      as though we were alone
      all birds south
      our loyalties renewing.


    Earth and Sorrows

    Grasses like knives and drilled
    By the roots strangled The upward
    Downward tearings, and the dread
    Irresistible sucking at a bruised
    Defenseless sex This remorseless
    Forcing of a sickened ecstasy
      Earth
    In her sensible labors pouring
    The green extorted oils Giving
    Past shame Or weeping Or rejoicing

    Let the winds consider
    If these be the flower of her sorrow.

    Relic


    I will see her stand
    half a step back of the edge of some high place
    or at a leafless tree in some city park
    or seated with her knees toward me and her face turned toward the window

    And always the tips of the fingers of both her hands
    will pull or twist at a handkerchief
    like lovely deadly birds at a living thing
    trying to work apart something exquisitely, unreasonably joined.


    Three Elementary Prophecies

    1. For Departure

    You will not want what gives this going speech
    Only as loss the stay of it
    Not the rhythm drained into its sense
    Like a world surviving

    Only as absence, as a silence touched
    A thing out of the body gone, desire
    Or a blood-accustomed dread

    Nor seek a knowledge of this breach
    A name of it, as love
    The flawless metamorphosis of dying
    Stilled to its idea

    Or membered like presentiment or choice
    To your days' held mine
    A sentence, or the letter of a truth

    Only this presence destined
    As a weather from its source
    Toward broad or violent unleashings
    Fables of the suffered and the joined

    The rest unnumbered and devoid
    A wind that will not move or pass
    Rain tangled to a ruin, to
    A season's felled forgotten root.


    2. For Passage

    Think then the ruin of your thoughts, and where
    The persistent blood beats still under them,
    Of birds you cannot follow with your eye.

    Think the dark and breeding thickets
    Where lowly animals die, and over the gloom
    Bright birds passing in the light:

    "What is your life if not the flashed stroke
    Of your meaning, of water
    Hurled once or blindly against rock,

    Your living laid to the pillow of its sleep
    As windows close to the street's tumult,
    To love's long minute and the lips ..."

    Nail your will to the yellow fallings
    Of your days, as tragedies slip
    Their herald warnings through their acts.

    Own land and sky, all seeing suffering things,
    Water riding water, wing and roof,
    The rip and baggage of all your ways.


    3. For Return

    Far, the farthest exile, and the steed
    You ride must paw the ground, riderless,
    Death's resignation come to matter

    To mercies walked from the same blue fulcrum
    Where your powers impel you
    Unobscured by necessary pities,
      hungers
    Come like numbered birds in the common air
    And needs before they improvise their names

    There love will touch where your energies begin
    Where your hand asks you light from primary colors,
    Assembles a mystery detained by sorrows

    Like roofs the color of particular houses
    And the logic of unexpected trees, love
    Like sons will be far in the night
    Close, as horses in the night, and welcome.


    What Speaking Silent Enough?

    What silence speaking enough —:
    Salt arbors, Archangels of the sea
    Have slipped through slow impendings
    Past risen things (what speech within?)
    Of terrible ripeness
    Of wet defeatingness
    (Is a dripping body silent?)
    As the sea contains, if this were lived in the sea;
    If this were life there illumined.


    That Ground

    What acid eats the blind clay smile,
    The earth how far, pummeled
    In soft rain odors.

    Never will it be possible to illumine that ground,
    But know how her breathing
    Shapes the hapless arms of trees;

    How hair exhumes a menace of boughs,
    Unvisited radiants darkling in the leaf;

    And the smile a voice abused in winds,
    The lips made possible
    In virtue of silence,
    Of the new distance of the earth.


    This Face of Love

    Nor prospect, promise solely such
    Breathed honey as in breathing
    Clamps the lung and lowers life
    Into this death the very dying
    Meaning of that breath that beats
    To black and beating honey in an air
    Thrown knowledgeless imageless
    Or only the wet hair across her eyes.


    For the Child Unanswered in Her

    What scene, what street you started from
    Is not abolished:
    Stairwell, day-rise, long intonation of rain and piano,
    And the dreamt animal meadow —
    All laid waste, even at hair's breadth pierceable.

    Child-heart, the illegible promise
    Is not delivered in natural thickness
    Of star and belly-loam.

    Here by consummate gravities
    Walls that have done and nothing
    Pleads entrance to the mother arm:

    — O listen,
    The splendid throat of every column
    Aloud in the beating nipple.

    Bridgelessly lit as the seed's leap,
    Convene your gaze to the Mortal Brow
    Always near, always unable to return your wish.


    Relic (2)

    Who can say we are wrong to fail the circuit of guesses —
    For I enter for you the frail damage of these lights
    (Dear one forgive a driven youth its steel forgeries).

    What you desert now loses me haltingly,
    Surely voyager where you are, and welcomed
    To your trackless survival of eyes;

    As by gracious rain, frail windows,
    Your eyes' help for the bitter green of the leaves.


    Relic (3)

    Icarian instant O my love!
    That, and the hell you are burned for —
    Your inverted egypt of timelessness:
    That the years are an endless arcade
    Where horizon to horizon
    The far-shot streamers of your fireworks
    Never quite extinguish.


    Responsibilities and Farewell

    Final, irredeemable, all
    Saw that, coming to themselves,
    The elision, strung, and farewell.

    All were entered, entrusted, spoken
    To the end, cancelled.
    Saw youth,
    The secret ascetic, the gunner,
    Broken of all littler love, taken —

    Was it some fool head in a gutter,
    Blanks, or peaces, secrets of old men —
    A shoe, a hat, a yellow, or a bench;

    Or the eye of the human survivor?

    Wiped of all but the whole desire,
    Welcomed to the least all-seeing pleasure.


    The End of the Private Mind

    The end of the private mind
    was in stone, in such thrifty thicknesses
    including the connections
    including the bits
      — That
    was the letting of it, it was not
    obscure, but public as nails, as
    stains in a flock of summery gutters

    The death of it was generous
    as it lived, only silly, and yet
    not sillier, for Care
    like an empty sleeve ...
      For Care,
    a shy grass quiet in the cracks.


    This Tree

    Earth feeds him insoluble warmths
    His hold however pensive
    Sensed for greennesses
    That blacken him

    Leaves more earthen
    And aloft
    Thumb breezes
    For a sport
    More true than honest air can teach

    Bark is no skin
    So rightly ribbed
    A vigil scarred, a trust
    That quickens to a shield

    Nor sun lodestone

    That his own iron strive
    Like no unarrowed thing
    Above
    To cleave leaf's origin

    To greet arriving
    What repose
    As rooted and as raw
    As any tree that is

    The careless proof of seed and seed.


    Death of the Poet

    (in mem. B. Pasternak)

    Wind riffling the hair the pages
    And somewhere eyes on naked stalks —
    Now the doors are standing slammed,
    Small statues parry what music they can.

    She pries in one or two small creases
    But barely a trace along the shawl
    Of the crude fidelity that bore her down —

    There, in the lightning's breach, an instant —
    There, within the thunder's rally —
    No, he took the tally of his death along.

    Late in the muddy rut of roadway
    Bootprints tarry their dregs of rain,
    The moon once more is made of smoke
    Above a grave all knees and elbows.

    Statuary SIX POEMS

    1. Tags, or Stations

    Tags, or stations, every bold
    Approximate of everything, like leaves
    The only pulp of what an autumn ought to be
    Or landscape but the faltered posit,
    Botched illation of a scenery;

    Not this film and driven random
    Purpose cannot bend, or take,
    But what disarms the as-such of your aim
    Pinned as were a street to the fake
    Of direction only, only

    The nisus of an argument, a hand
    Fingered, nothing fingering, a word
    The beating syllable of no word's voice
    Or a footbeat no one walks toward
    You, yourself the journey you rehearse.


    2. All of This

    All of this, the literal streets
    Will never end, the steps, and pavement
    Though you stop, or stop forever
    Gripped to an immortal truth,
    A word literal as one word only.

    The flavor of this rain will lick you
    Where you stand, where standing one
    Or one emotion drowns your air:

    You, where you are, eternal-eyed,
    The apparition of what will, what iron
    Archangel of its parable?

    All this, the pavement, footsteps
    And of rain, the long, the light of it
    On metal, stone
      — the throat's own violence
    Deserts that cry, that silence
    You, your posture, are perfected by.


    3. Portrait

    Ich bin ein Bild
    Verlangt nicht dass ich rede. — Rilke

    I spoke, my voice sounded,
    And I heard: — as things that pause
    Are brightened, cleared by angers —
    Anger by desire wounded.

    Far, far up the land
    I found a shoreline, birds
    Standing and no sea
    Slapping it, nor wind

    But arrested things
    I could not hear;
    Angers bent by angers,
    Breath in the lungs stunned.

    And my throat still instinct
    With its pleasure
    Started and was still,
    The vein swollen, intact.