Sharks' TeethEverything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.
Eyes Fastened With PinsHow much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.
Safe SexIf he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge
Flying at NightAbove us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like
his.
The Refinery". . . our language, forged in the dark by centuries of violent pressure, underground, out of the stuff of dead life." Thirsty and languorous after their long black sleep The old gods crooned and shuffled and shook their heads. Dry, dry. By railroad they set out Across the desert of stars to drink the world Our mouths had soaked In the strange sentences we made While they were asleep: a pollen-tinted Slurry of passion and lapsed Intention, whose imagined Taste made the savage deities hiss and snort. In the lightless carriages, a smell of snake And coarse fur, glands of lymphless breath And ichor, the avid stenches of Immortal bodies. Their long train clicked and sighed Through the gulfs of night between the planets And came down through the evening fog Of redwood canyons. From the train At sunset, fiery warehouse windows Along a wharf. Then dusk, a gash of neon: Bar. Black pinewoods, a junction crossing, glimpses Of sluggish surf among the rocks, a moan Of dreamy forgotten divinity calling and fading Against the windows of a town. Inside The train, a flash Of dragonfly wings, an antlered brow. Black night again, and then After the bridge, a palace on the water: The great Refinery--impossible city of lights, A million bulbs tracing its turreted Boulevards and mazes. The castle of a person Pronounced alive, the Corporation: a fictional Lord real in law. Barbicans and torches Along the siding where the engine slows At the central tanks, a ward Of steel palisades, valved and chandeliered. The muttering gods Greedily penetrate those bright pavilions-- Libation of Benzene, Naphthalene, Asphalt, Gasoline, Tar: syllables Fractioned and cracked from unarticulated Crude, the smeared keep of life that fed On itself in pitchy darkness when the gods Were new--inedible, volatile And sublimated afresh to sting Our tongues who use it, refined from oil of stone. The gods batten on the vats, and drink up Lovecries and memorized Chaucer, lines from movies And songs hoarded in mortmain: exiles' charms, The basal or desperate distillates of breath Steeped, brewed and spent As though we were their aphids, or their bees, That monstered up sweetness for them while they dozed.
Heroic SimileWhen the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle. They stacked logs in the resinous air, hacking the small limbs off, tying those bundles separately. The slabs near the root were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; the logs from midtree they halved: ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood, moons and quarter moons and half moons ridged by the saw's tooth. The woodsman and the old man his uncle are standing in midforest on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. They have stopped working because they are tired and because I have imagined no pack animal or primitive wagon. They are too canny to call in neighbors and come home with a few logs after three days' work. They are waiting for me to do something or for the overseer of the Great Lord to come and arrest them. How patient they are! The old man smokes a pipe and spits. The young man is thinking he would be rich if he were already rich and had a mule. Ten days of hauling and on the seventh day they'll probably be caught, go home empty-handed or worse. I don't know whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean and there's nothing I can do. The path from here to that village is not translated. A hero, dying, gives off stillness to the air. A man and a woman walk from the movies to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. There are limits to imagination.
VacationI love the hour before takeoff, that stretch of no time, no home but the gray vinyl seats linked like unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall be summoned to the gate, soon enough there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers and perforated stubs—but for now I can look at these ragtag nuclear families with their cooing and bickering or the heeled bachelorette trying to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s exhausted mother waiting to be called up early while the athlete, one monstrous hand asleep on his duffel bag, listens, perched like a seal trained for the plunge. Even the lone executive who has wandered this far into summer with his lasered itinerary, briefcase knocking his knees—even he has worked for the pleasure of bearing no more than a scrap of himself into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late, they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning —a little hope, a little whimsy before the loudspeaker blurts and we leap up to become Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.
Ulcerated tooth keeps me awake, there is such pain, would have to go to the hospital to have it pulled or would bleed to death from the blood thinners, but can't leave Mother, she falls and forgets her salve and her tranquilizers, her ankles swell so and her bowels are so bad, she almost had a stoppage and sometimes what she passes is green as grass. There are big holes in my thigh where my leg brace buckles the size of dimes. My head pounds from the high pressure. It is awful not to be able to get out, and I fell in the bathroom and the girl could hardly get me up at all. Sure thought my back was broken, it will be next time. Prostate is bad and heart has given out, feel bloated after supper. Have made my peace because am just plain done for and have no doubt that the Lord will come any day with my release. You say you enjoy your feeder, I don't see why you want to spend good money on grain for birds and you say you have a hundred sparrows, I'd buy poison and get rid of their diseases and turds.
We enjoyed your visit, it was nice of you to bring the feeder but a terrible waste of your money for that big bag of feed since we won't be living more than a few weeks long. We can see them good from where we sit, big ones and little ones but you know when I farmed I used to like to hunt and we had many a good meal from pigeons and quail and pheasant but these birds won't be good for nothing and are dirty to have so near the house. Mother likes the redbirds though. My bad knee is so sore and I can't hardly hear and Mother says she is hoarse from yelling but I know it's too late for a hearing aid. I belch up all the time and have a sour mouth and of course with my heart it's no use to go to a doctor. Mother is the same. Has a scab she thinks is going to turn to a wart.
The birds are eating and fighting, Ha! Ha! All shapes and colors and sizes coming out of our woods but we don't know what they are. Your Mother hopes you can send us a kind of book that tells about birds. There is one the folks called snowbirds, they eat on the ground, we had the girl sprinkle extra there, but say, they eat something awful. I sent the girl to town to buy some more feed, she had to go anyway.
Almost called you on the telephone but it costs so much to call thought better write. Say, the funniest thing is happening, one day we had so many birds and they fight and get excited at their feed you know and it's really something to watch and two or three flew right at us and crashed into our window and bang, poor little things knocked themselves silly. They come to after while on the ground and flew away. And they been doing that. We felt awful and didn't know what to do but the other day a lady from our Church drove out to call and a little bird knocked itself out while she sat and she bought it in her hands right into the house, it looked like dead. It had a kind of hat of feathers sticking up on its head, kind of rose or pinky color, don't know what it was, and I petted it and it come to life right there in her hands and she took it out and it flew. She says they think the window is the sky on a fair day, she feeds birds too but hasn't got so many. She says to hang strips of aluminum foil in the window so we'll do that. She raved about our birds. P.S. The book just come in the mail.
Say, that book is sure good, I study in it every day and enjoy our birds. Some of them I can't identify for sure, I guess they're females, the Latin words I just skip over. Bet you'd never guess the sparrow I've got here, House Sparrow you wrote, but I have Fox Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Vesper Sparrows, Pine Woods and Tree and Chipping and White Throat and White Crowned Sparrows. I have six Cardinals, three pairs, they come at early morning and night, the males at the feeder and on the ground the females. Juncos, maybe 25, they fight for the ground, that's what they used to call snowbirds. I miss the Bluebirds since the weather warmed. Their breast is the color of a good ripe muskmelon. Tufted Titmouse is sort of blue with a little tiny crest. And I have Flicker and Red-Bellied and Red- Headed Woodpeckers, you would die laughing to see Red-Bellied, he hangs on with his head flat on the board, his tail braced up under, wing out. And Dickcissel and Ruby Crowned Kinglet and Nuthatch stands on his head and Veery on top the color of a bird dog and Hermit Thrush with spot on breast, Blue Jay so funny, he will hop right on the backs of the other birds to get the grain. We bought some sunflower seeds just for him. And Purple Finch I bet you never seen, color of a watermelon, sits on the rim of the feeder with his streaky wife, and the squirrels, you know, they are cute too, they sit tall and eat with their little hands, they eat bucketfuls. I pulled my own tooth, it didn't bleed at all.
It's sure a surprise how well Mother is doing, she forgets her laxative but bowels move fine. Now that windows are open she says our birds sing all day. The girl took a Book of Knowledge on loan from the library and I am reading up on the habits of birds, did you know some males have three wives, some migrate some don't. I am going to keep feeding all spring, maybe summer, you can see they expect it. Will need thistle seed for Goldfinch and Pine Siskin next winter. Some folks are going to come see us from Church, some bird watchers, pretty soon. They have birds in town but nothing to equal this. So the world woos its children back for an evening kiss.
Odysseus to TelemachusMy dear Telemachus,
The Trojan War
is over now; I don't recall who won it.
The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland.
But still, my homeward way has proved too long.
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon,
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.
I don't know where I am or what this place
can be. It would appear some filthy island,
with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs.
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other.
Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son!
To a wanderer the faces of all islands
resemble one another. And the mind
trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons,
run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears.
I can't remember how the war came out;
even how old you are--I can't remember.
Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong.
Only the gods know if we'll see each other
again. You've long since ceased to be that babe
before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks.
Had it not been for Palamedes' trick
we two would still be living in one household.
But maybe he was right; away from me
you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions,
and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.
Eating PoetryInk runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams. I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
Advice to a ProphetWhen you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God's name to have self-pity, Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange. Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us?-- The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, A stone look on the stone's face? Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, How the view alters. We could believe, If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without The dolphin's arc, the dove's return, These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean. Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding Whether there shall be lofty or long standing When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
The Bean EatersThey eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them, And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me, And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad All over, etc., etc.' Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read Sophocles in a fairly good translation And caught that bitter allusion to the sea, But all the time he was talking she had in mind The notion of what his whiskers would feel like On the back of her neck. She told me later on That after a while she got to looking out At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad, Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds And blandishments in French and the perfumes. And then she got really angry. To have been brought All the way down from London, and then be addressed As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty. Anyway, she watched him pace the room And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit, And then she said one or two unprintable things. But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is, She's really all right. I still see her once in a while And she always treats me right. We have a drink And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year Before I see her again, but there she is, Running to fat, but dependable as they come. And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.
In The ParkYou have forty-nine days between death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist. Even the smallest soul could swim the English Channel in that time or climb, like a ten-month-old child, every step of the Washington Monument to travel across, up, down, over or through --you won't know till you get there which to do. He laid on me for a few seconds said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell about his skirmish with a grizzly bear in Glacier Park. He laid on me not doing anything. I could feel his heart beating against my heart. Never mind lie and lay, the whole world confuses them. For Roscoe Black you might say all forty-nine days flew by. I was raised on the Old Testament. In it God talks to Moses, Noah, Samuel, and they answer. People confer with angels. Certain animals converse with humans. It's a simple world, full of crossovers. Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God has a nasty temper when provoked, but if there's a Hell, little is made of it. No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire, and no choosing what to come back as. When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down on atheist and zealot. In the pitch-dark each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.
Last Things For Robert Lowell I In the tunnel of woods, as the road Winds up through the freckled light, a porcupine, Larger than life, crosses the road. He moves with the difficulty of relics— Possum, armadillo, horseshoe crab. To us they seem creatures arthritic with time, Winding joylessly down like burnt-out galaxies. In all their slowness we see no dignity, Only a want of scale. Having crossed the road oblivious, he falls off Deliberately and without grace into the ferns. II In another state are hills as choppy as lake water And, on a hillside there, Is a junkyard of old cars, kept for the parts— Fenders and chassis and the engine blocks Right there in the field, smaller parts in bins In a shed by the side of the road. Cows graze Among the widely spaced rows, Which are irregular only as an old orchard is, Following the contours of the hill. The tops of the cars are bright colors still And as pretty as bottles hung on a bare tree Or painted cinder blocks in a garden. Cars the same age are parked on the road like cannibals. III At the edge of a harbor, in a field That faces the ocean they came by and left by, Statues of soldiers and governors and their queen Lie where the Africans put them. Unbewildered, not without understanding, The marble countenances look at the green Continent; they did their best; plunderers Were fewer among them than men of honor. But no one comes for them, though they have been offered. With chipped extremities, in a chipped regalia They lie at angles of unaccustomed ease. In the parks and squares of England are set up Bolder, more dreadful shapes of the ego, While African lichen confers an antique grandeur On these, from whom men have withheld it. IV At the edge of the Greek world, I think, was a cliff To which fallen gods were chained, immortal. Time is without forgiveness, but intermittenly He sends the old, sentimental, hungry Vulture compassion to gnaw on the stone Vitals of each of us, even the young, as if To ready each of us, even the old, for an unthinkable Event he foresees for each of us—a reckoning, our own.
Those Winter SundaysSundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?
An Old Cracked TuneMy name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother's breast was thorny,
and father I had none.
The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road.
At the LookoutThey always start with quick and eager strides
--Even the one on crutches--up the hill.
The long-legged and the young soon reach the bend,
Then reappear above the heads of slower
Earnest pilgrims puffing up the slope.
Those at the parapet stand, statuesque,
Their tiny silhouettes nicking the sky.
See, some now descend the winding trail--
The young, the tall step out, no longer black
And dwarfed against the vast and cloudless light,
Their blouses khaki, red, and white. In single
File, like beads on a string we cannot see,
They reach the stairway to the parking lot,
Then break apart toward different destinations.
Scattered now, does each still hoard some sense
Of borrowed grace from a purpose briefly snatched
And shared beneath the sky, whatever it was?
Traveling Through the DarkTraveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill CreekAs he moves the mine detector
A few inches over the ground,
Making it vitally float
Among the ferns and weeds,
I come into this war
Slowly, with my one brother,
Watching his face grow deep
Between the earphones,
For I can tell
If we enter the buried battle
Of Nimblewill
Only by his expression.
Softly he wanders, parting
The grass with a dreaming hand.
No dead cry yet takes root
In his clapped ears
Or can be seen in his smile.
But underfoot I feel
The dead regroup,
The burst metals all in place,
The battle lines be drawn
Anew to include us
In Nimblewill,
And I carry the shovel and pick
More as if they were
Bright weapons that I bore.
A bird's cry breaks
In two, and into three parts.
We cross the creek; the cry
Shifts into another,
Nearer, bird, and is
Like the shout of a shadow—
Lived-with, appallingly close—
Or the soul, pronouncing
"Nimblewill":
Three tones; your being changes.
We climb the bank;
A faint light glows
On my brother's mouth.
I listen, as two birds fight
For a single voice, but he
Must be hearing the grave,
In pieces, all singing
To his clamped head,
For he smiles as if
He rose from the dead within
Green Nimblewill
And stood in his grandson's shape.
No shot from the buried war
Shall kill me now,
For the dead have waited here
A hundred years to create
Only the look on the face
Of my one brother,
Who stands among them, offering
A metal dish
Afloat in the trembling weeds,
With a long-buried light on his lips
At Nimblewill
And the dead outsinging two birds.
I choke the handle
Of the pick, and fall to my knees
To dig wherever he points,
To bring up mess tin or bullet,
To go underground
Still singing, myself,
Without a sound,
Like a man who renounces war,
Or one who shall lift up the past,
Not breathing "Father,"
At Nimblewill,
But saying, "Fathers! Fathers!"
PocketsAre generally over or around
Erogenous zones, they seem to dive
In the direction of those
Dark places, and indeed
It is their nature to be dark
Themselves, keeping a kind
Of thieves' kitchen for the things
Sequestered from the world
For long or little while,
The keys, the handkerchiefs,
The sad and vagrant little coins
That are really only passing through.
For all they locate close to lust,
No pocket ever sees another;
There is in fact a certain sadness
To pockets, going in their lonesome ways
And snuffling up their sifting storms
Of dust, tobacco bits and lint.
A pocket with a hole in it
Drops out; from shame, is that, or pride?
What is a pocket but a hole?