From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Fall 1990, Vol. XII, No. 2
The way the sun will slant,
breaking through the window of the Uptown Café
to light a page from Dickinson or Moore,
may pick up the names of America’s heroes
as they appear on street signs—
Lincoln, Lawrence, Franklin, Jefferson, Clay,
Washington and Water Streets—
to imbue history with artistry,
and that, in the spotlight of a metabolic fire
born of solitude in the midst of crowds,
may flatten the raised fibers of ten blank pages.
Black where there was white, and ink
where there was water, is the current on which rides
the deep guttural imagination of an animal,
the ethereal silence of a plant,
the indifferent face of stone and dirt
and the bittersweet knowledge of a man or woman
buried in ecstasy the way light flies from fire.
Have your bacon and eggs, have your toast.
Simmer again the early pinpricks of sensation:
those wordless turns in the amniotic river,
the ballooning, the shaping, the reaching,
and then the glare, the hands,
the separation and all the half-returns and afternoons.
Swell again toward the little world of the child.
Sit on your hands, now,
the adult who can still feel from fingertip inwards.
Mark how it feels on the bench. Note the air
cool in May as it mummifies briefly and moves on.
Live at the end of your nose,
on the outskirts of the balls of your eyes,
at the purge of your mouth. Push out your stomach
as you breathe, let your chest sag to feel bone.
The kneecap that moves like a seashell,
the elastic and the inelastic upper leg
tuck a leg under your chair.
It is all a spine, from which the leaves of the tree
seem to ask for applause,
and round which the breathing of all life forms
distributes seasons and light. It is ever
a spine distributing the shiver of a ghost
who comes to float from out the fog
these islands, spits, peninsulas and continents.
At the spine-tip end of a leaf
a momentary flame spits from the veins,
the same as the sun sends out a green flash as it dives,
and as the brain may flare
at the end of a spinal message, keeping
in mind every pony stop up the long vertebrae
of calcified civilization,
yet still at the tip end of the earth,
at the farthest reach of a root,
find water in the white dust, and blood in an old stain,
enough to bear the future in the air.
Be your weight. Take your smallest step
from word one, build your home at one o’clock,
when the big hand sweeps it away, build at two, at three
and so on, no more ahead of time than that.
Where grease has touched the corner
of a page, it travels edge to edge, erasing opacity.
Be like oil, sometimes like sand or fire,
blown about but unbroken,
stuff that offers hope to a coughing engine,
to the fouled shore and the frozen.
Watch the honeybee, how little it takes away,
and how often it returns
for the necessity of a queen. You are the bee,
if you are a poet at all, eloping with nectar,
proposing honey, and leaving it stamped into a matrix
of wax, in swarming and smoke to grow old.
I read a page in the café, and read the same again,
and then it begins to grow in size and sweetness.
Now, everyone wants to know about failure.
Mankind likes to come upon the bones of the sparrow
or the flattened hide on the highway,
and return to it as a student of entropy,
noting the white salts that have come to the surface,
the caves eaten by insects, the plucked eyeball.
But I say learn your successes.
Unbend from your studies, let the wind in from the west,
and stay your prayers another hour.
In that hour, that indolence, that dreaming,
an angel may salute you,
the sign of which is a rush of responses
to some small thing on the earth, to which you are noon
on the sundial. In a burst, you must get them out
if there is to be peace, if there is to be
completion, if there is to be the road ahead
which we are all traveling—because love can rub its eyes
and read even the paw marks at road’s edge.
I have lingered over a page,
recording in wrongly-shaped letters Americans
going to work on the noisy streets of cars and cranes,
footsoles scraping to hurry, calling out,
electric switches clicking on at the corner
and old neon signs in windows buzzing to expire,
until the last door closed and an arc of silence
hooded the abandoned outdoors.
I appealed to myself not to make food from poison
or blood from water or song from interval,
but to loiter in the vacancy,
waiting for a signal, an inkling, of truth,
and I never had to wait long,
because sooner or later the most horrible things happened
somewhere that brought an ambulance
and a man running down the street carrying flowers
which only a moment’s thought could tell me
were too early for a death and must be something else.
And after the refueling, what then?
After the regeneration, with the fog easing upwards
from the prone earth into a dissolving embrace,
and the tide turning tail, its last
washing down the mudflats where penlights of air
sent to the surface by living remains
flicker in a constellation too hurried for pictures.
What of the shark’s teeth underfoot?
How goes the tide line of beached seaweed
back to the water? Sit still and see.
Stay at your post, your bridal window into the new day,
resist the urge to begin again, to alter even your shadow,
and so to witness a world unaffected by self.
Steel yourself against the delusion at the bottom
of the cup, where the grounds of coffee
may speak in the shape of a dial. It is not a direction
to be at the center of the compass, nor will you be
revealed by wrapping yourself in glass.
If it were not for words, poor words,
I would never have known the wish that things continue.
Let pleasure continue and pain, and bread
and milk continue to spoil, and erosion
go on as before at the joining of wind and rock
and even where a blade of grass shoulders the road.
Let the apple lose its grip in oversweetness
and the honey settle into layers.
All that falls to the ground to be absorbed
may be confused with death, painted with sad tones,
without a thought for the joy of pure pity
or the painter swept by a ghostly excitement.
Each one of us believes he or she keeps watch,
while in reality we are watched. Each of us
believes we are dying, while in reality we live.
Each of us falls into the trap, tearing away
at the sphere which protects and regenerates us,
the one best described by a pirouette or a cartwheel.
And so the wandering canine knows, the mutt,
knows how a hand may curl into a fist,
or the fist unfold, intuits when the meal ends
and leftovers begin, and remembers the doors of largesse
up lanky alleys to the chimney walls of kitchens.
Walk then with such a dog in town, and with the cat,
the one who parallels your nightly reconnoitering
until you stop and squat, surrendering
to its benign approach. How the independent world
loves that which breathes and yet is still,
like the cat, and will rub at the chance of quick love,
cajoling your shoe and trouser cuff,
arching with half a question, perhaps this one:
“Would you, if I . . . ?” and purring like the underside
of a wave that might have slid inexorably through a dream.
It is a dream to be a human being, cast here among
the dreamless days of cats and dogs,
carrying the burden of their mute imagination.
By animal methods, no need to deny,
and only by animal methods, we have understood
the timelessness of our lives. By sexuality,
we have unlaced the proper shoetops, the stitched waters
of history, and then the lines of entanglement,
the cuneiforms of emotions, the ciphers of agreements,
and found there is a flavor, an odor,
a hope on the edge of uncontainable sensation,
a taste of blissful agony, poised on the head of a pin,
emanating from our bones, a singing wire—
that tight, that tense, that stretched to its limit
and then shattered—the ends pulled apart
now limitless in the distance spreading between them,
the torn tips of the last exposed fibers
splayed, letting go, catching each other as they fall,
creating random sparks that fall to the ground
like bits and pieces of some lost moronic code
staggering, exhausted, into the future.
The report we await goes well beyond the outer rim,
leaping like the vague shape of climax
past the short grasses at the edge of the bluff
that appears after heavy exertion
as an unseen clarity, the sure feeling that if one opened
one’s eyes, and screamed, there would be a limit,
a panel, a backdrop to mark the event. So much have we
been certain, that much have we been pulled
by the next horizon, and the next,
leaving echo after echo. The report we await
is yours to make from the bottom of time,
from the place behind the last, narrowed bits of light,
where sound sucks up sound, the corporeal
equivalent, the adult version of what the child knew
who tumbled into the well, and lay for days
underneath the big story, being of households and news
but to itself the absence of the world
into which it would again be born someday, unabandoned.
If it were not so, memory would serve.
But we have found nothing, and science likewise,
to locate presences of life in long fibers of ink
carried by a heart, nor in the lengthy recitation
of presidents engraved within a street plan, nor in a flair
for the names of battles or the dates of books or yet
in a penchant for destinations and right answers.
Deaf Beethoven in his last quartet better serves.
Where is it, that such sound ends in clarity and calm?
Is it in the mind, in the heart, in the stomach,
in the liver, the reproductive organs, the limbs?
Is it in the pulse and travels through us? Is it on the skin,
absorbing and radiating, warming and chilling? And, too,
how have we known the feeling—sitting, listening?
Such questions are like a harbor of twilights.
They lead us into the valley of unanswerable nights.
They decline, they evade, they ride at anchor
beyond the reach of the pier, a harp to the wind.
Memory is pre-history. Remember, if you can,
the net into which you fell in the pre-conscious dawn,
its gridwork, arrayed along a horizontal figure 8.
The whole of it is here today, in this historical town.
Condense your past, squeeze recurrent dreams,
and look also among the residues of dirt and water,
in the lingering odor of fresh bread, in mold,
and in that which drifts your way from rumor
and idea, from under the forehead of abstractions,
those thunderous proclamations of the mind’s eye.
In little words is sewn an elemental red thread
that holds together old shoes and new philosophies,
cats and dogs, the first and last steps of a stairway,
the careful fugitive and the accidental isolate.
All that was is here, pouring into this moment,
which offers you every chance for tears. But forget,
if you can, all that has gone through the mystic’s cloth,
and spot what disturbs the air with heavy laughter.
Hear it in the cathedral burned into a redwood,
in the fluid gear turning the beacon
at the top of the lighthouse, its light bobbing above
thirteen miles of fog and tidal signatures. See it,
when you can, in the filmy stem of Indian pipe,
devout to fungus but deathly when plucked,
though it takes a day or more to gain that burnt look.
After the blaze that rode the trees and seemed
to keep the sky at bay, in the fresh death of the muck,
legions of fireweed strode the blackened soil,
throwing their youth out while the old ones slept.
You live because a glacier melts, a forest dies,
an animal somewhere falls to its knees,
and you would see in the night face of the owl
a feline curiosity, independent in judgment,
quietly paying out the night to survive. Once again
night’s force has unraveled, its harpoon
lying in a vague acreage of water after feeding.
So many follow the weather, and rehearse it,
riding an impending high like vacationers
and wallowing in crusty lows like bean farmers.
Standing out at dusk, sweeping the last solar wink
over the horizon, throwing back our heads
to fit—lens and shutter—up against the concave
camera obscura overhead, we let go, finally, if only
we stay to look up, the false evidence of edges
and distances where once the commonest objects fit.
Where now does an umbrella belong, or a coat?
The weight of a machine tilts it absurdly
underneath the violent ramshackle orders of a galaxy.
Now the explosion at the heart of a star
walks the beams of the past, now a fiery arrow
rounds the curve, braiding itself in flame. But a rose
might be pictured where a single thread expires,
and the whole head of a flowering mountain ash
turns out to be a nest of stars at a low level of heat.
Miraculous to be alive in a tungsten universe,
to count the windows and change our point of view
according to their shape and location, and ourselves
as well, marked in secret by the birth of each idea,
welcome to men and women but not all,
revising and refuting our gods, burning in the fall,
but first gathering the leaves, and then irresistibly
flinging ourselves into the piles,
sometimes having to do it at the length of the rake
because men and women must fast more than children
to reach the next meal, and because of such things
as give each person a feeling
for the souls of those who knew kisses but few words,
and those who said little but laughed easily,
and some who trembled from the beginning to the end
as if they were connected at both ends
to opposing charges and were fated to be incinerated
where others carried torches with impunity.
When the time comes that you walk inside a cloud,
where others may sense, but not see you,
and you as clear to yourself as ever, charitable
to the lack of visibility, adoring the fog, silencing
desire, flinging your sense of yourself from guidance,
lingering in the great freedom of invisibility,
then inevitably the cloak burns,
and you may be told not to walk on the grass.
The wilderness of the mind comes down to a ranger,
a file of pressed flowers arranged by color,
and the deer who crowd from the trees to lick
the antifreeze of automobiles. When you were inside
the cloud, and your feet rocked slightly with each step
on the watery land, were you (tell us) as alone
with your eyes open as ever you had been asleep?
Here then is a use for the blows of a pencil-point
against the grain of a page. At impact, a purity
is born from the attraction and repulsion of an instant.
One must be fond of the mud road, of boats
with names that itch to flaunt the pulse that wrote them,
of beachcombers, of detectives gone to birding,
of the beautiful handles of hand tools, of dropped coins,
of propellers and sudden rainbows, of distant ice fields
and glacial streams, of tide pools, of house pets,
of gardens and clotheslines and mintweed by doorsteps.
One must be fond of these things,
as of empty churches and old schoolyards in long grass,
because love, even light love, reaches back
and picks up what others held, one way or another,
long after a dig is emptied of pots and bones and teeth.
Out of such fondness, the telling. The blaze
of a face that would tell us washes the yellow light
of after-midnight, the conversation continues,
and the table spreads to include long-missing friends,
presidents, explorers, those who left or returned
and have not been deserted, whether or not they know.
To be located, as here, at the table of one’s examples,
to have for the moment the unmasked,
the everyday, and all of it having slept in the dark,
diving near a dream reef with as many hand holds
as a sponge has openings, where easily
one might have stood fatally upon the dreaded stone fish
or been poisoned from being hauled up too quickly—these
then are one’s “particulars.” I know,
time has overtaken the deciduous, as night again
will paralyze the open eye, and our sodium street lights
will rub and rub the open wounds, the doomsdays,
the little edge that pebbles give to the sound of steps
and spittle gives to song. I know,
all this too will pass, and may have passed already,
but still I address you where last you were seen
and, whether or not you understood chaos
or sensitive dependence, whether or not you felt
the synchronicity of our lives, there is no one else to.
Drink what remains of your coffee, close your book.
Is it possible that we no longer see ourselves
reflected in open theatres,
no longer exist by the grace of lowered cannon
or can be said to have vanished
because a cloud came, or a fog, or death? Let it
now be decided if the rain must be too heavy
for the certainty of charity. Or if we are made of ash.
Or if sufferance has blistered its skin of paint
on the sides of unconquerable mountains. The moon
that drew us to its scent, only to be faceless,
is the cache of our romance, but also a truth that spills
into the faults of the mind, depositing a dewy light
where the shapes of animals, living and extinct,
hover in some wounded swamp from which,
when we fully awake, we see the imagination rising,
cloud-like, slowly lifting and thinning out,
resembling a gifted child’s version of a ghost.
Spring-Summer, 1989
Port Townsend, Washington
