Collected Poems (40 page)

I flinched it off, and saw — sorrow! — a warbler, gray, black, yellow, in flight already away.

It stopped near me in a shrub, though, and waited, as though unstartled, as though unafraid,

as though to tell me my reflex of fear was no failure, that if I believed I had lost something,

I was wrong, because nothing can be lost, of the self, of a lifetime of bringing forth selves.

Then it was gone, its branch springing back empty: still oak, though, still rose, still world.

III

Realms

Often I have thought that after my death, not in death’s void as we usually think it,

but in some simpler after-realm of the mind, it will be given to me to transport myself

through all space and all history, to behold whatever and converse with whomever I wish.

Sometimes I might be an actual presence, a traveler listening at the edge of the crowd;

at other times I’d have no physical being; I’d move unseen but seeing through palace or slum.

Sophocles, Shakespeare, Bach! Grandfathers! Homo erectus! The universe bursting into being!

Now, though, as I wake, caught by some imprecise longing, you in the darkness beside me,

your warmth flowing gently against me, it comes to me that in all my after-death doings,

I see myself as alone, always alone, and I’m suddenly stranded, forsaken, desperate, lost.

To propel myself through those limitless reaches without you! Never! Be with me, come!

Babylon, Egypt, Lascaux, the new seas boiling up life; Dante, Delphi, Magyars and Mayans!

Wait, though, it must be actually you, not my imagination of you, however real: for myself,

mind would suffice, no matter if all were one of time’s terrible toys, but I must have you,

as you are, the unquenchable fire of your presence, otherwise death truly would triumph.

Quickly, never mind death, never mind mute, oblivious, onrushing time: wake, hold me!

Storm

Another burst of the interminable, intermittently torrential dark afternoon downpour,

and the dozens of tirelessly garrulous courtyard sparrows stop hectoring each other

and rush to park under a length of cornice endearingly soiled with decades of wing-grease.

The worst summer in memory, thermal inversion, smog, swelter, intimations of global warming;

though the plane trees still thrust forth buds as though innocent April were just blooming,

last week’s tentative pre-green leaflings are already woefully charred with heat and pollution.

Thunder far off, benign, then closer, slashes of lightning, a massive, concussive unscrolling,

an answering tremor in the breast, the exaltation at sharing a planet with this, then sorrow;

that we really might strip it of all but the bare wounded rock lumbering down its rote rail.

A denser veil of clouds now, another darkening downlash, the wind rises, the sparrows scatter,

the leaves quake, and Oh, I throw myself this way, the trees say, then that way, I tremble,

I moan, and still you don’t understand the absence I’ll be in the void of unredeemable time.

… Twelve suns, the prophecies promise, twelve vast suns of purification will mount the horizon,

to scorch, sear, burn away, then twelve cosmic cycles of rain: no tree left, no birdsong,

only the vigilant, acid waves, vindictively scouring themselves again and again on no shore.

Imagine then the emergence: Oh, this way, the sky streaked, Oh, that way, with miraculous brightness;

imagine us, beginning again, timid and tender, with a million years more this time to evolve,

an epoch more on all fours, stricken with shame and repentance, before we fire our forges.

Interrogation II

after the painting by Leon Golub

(Four interrogators; a victim, bound and hooded; red walls, a ladderlike device with chain; a chair)

1.

There will always be an issue: doctrine, dogma, differences of conscience, politics, or creed.

There will always be a reason: heresy, rebellion, dissidence, inadequate conviction or compliance.

There will always be the person to command it: president or king, dictator or chief of staff,

and the priest or parson to anoint it, consecrate it, bless it, ground its logic in the sacred.

There will always be the victim; trembling, fainting, fearful, abducted, bound, and brought here;

there will always be the order, and the brutes, thugs, reptiles, scum, to carry out the order.

There will always be the room, the chair, the room whose walls are blood, the chair of shame.

There will always be the body, hooded, helpless; and the soul within, trembling, fearful, shamed.

2.

If I am here, hooded, helpless,

within these walls of blood,

upon this chair of shame,

something had to think me here.

I lived within my life,

I only thought my life,

I was stolen from it:

something
thought
me from it.

If something thought me,

there had to be a mind,

and if there was a mind,

it had to be contained, revealed,

as I thought mine was,

within a strip of temporal being.

If it was another mind,

like mine, that thought

and bound and brought me here,

some other consciousness

within its strip of being,

didn’t it, that bit of being,

have to feel as I must feel

the nothingness against it,

the nothingness encroaching

on the rind of temporality,

the strand of actuality,

in which it is revealed?

Wasn’t it afraid

to jeopardize the sensitivity

with which it knows itself,

with which it senses being

trembling upon nothingness,

struggling against nothingness,

with which it holds away

the nothingness within itself

which seems to strive to join

into that greater void?

When it stole me from my life,

abducted me and bound me,

wouldn’t it have felt itself

being lost within the void

of nothingness within it?

Wasn’t it afraid?

3.

Why are you crying?

Nothing is happening.

No one is being tortured,

no one beaten.

Why are you crying?

Nothing is happening.

No one’s genitals nails spine

crushed torn out shattered.

No one’s eardrums burst with fists,

no one’s brain burst with bludgeons.

Why are you crying?

Nothing is happening.

No one’s bones unsocketed

fractured leaching marrow.

No one flayed, flogged, maimed,

seared with torches,

set afire racked

shot electrocuted hung.

Why are you crying?

Nothing is happening.

There is only a chair,

a room, a ladder,

flesh indelibly marked

with pain and shame.

Why are you crying?

Nothing is happening.

4.

The human soul, the soul

we share, the single soul,

that by definition

which is our essential being,

is composed of other souls,

inhabited by other beings:

thus its undeniable power,

its purity, its vision,

thus its multiplicity

in singularity.

I understand the composition

of the soul, its communality,

but must I share my soul

with brutes and reptiles,

must I share my being,

vision, purity, with scum?

Impossible that in the soul

the human species

should be represented

as these brutes and thugs;

mortal substance

bodied as these reptiles.

Soul would loathe itself,

detest its very substance,

huddle in its lurk of essence

howling out its grief

of temporality, snarling out

its rage of mutability,

rather than be represented

by these beasts of prey.

The human soul is being

devoured by beasts of prey.

The human soul is prey.

5.

I didn’t know the ladder to divinity on which were dreamed ascending and descending angels,

on which sodden spirit was supposed to rarify and rise, had become an instrument of torment,

wrist-holes punctured in its rungs, chains to hold the helpless body hammered in its uprights.

I didn’t know how incidental life can seem beside such implements of pain and degradation;

neither did I know, though, how much presence can be manifested in the hooded, helpless body:

brutalized and bound, sinews, muscles, skin, still are lit with grace and pride and hope.

We cry from shame, because the body and the soul within are mocked, displayed, and shamed.

There will always be a reason, there will always be a victim, rooms of blood, chairs of pain.

But will there be the presence, grace and hope and pride enduring past the pain and shame?

Song

A city square, paths empty, sky clear; after days of rain, a purified sunlight blazed through;

all bright, all cool, rinsed shadows all vivid; the still-dripping leaves sated, prolific.

Suddenly others: voices, anger; sentences started, aborted; harsh, honed hisses of fury:

two adults, a child, the grown-ups raging, the child, a girl, seven or eight, wide-eyed, distracted.

“You, you,” the parents boiled on in their clearly eternal battle: “you creature, you cruel,”

and the child stood waiting, instead of going to play on the slide or the swing, stood listening.

I wished she would weep; I could imagine the rich, abashing gush springing from her:

otherwise mightn’t she harden her heart; mightn’t she otherwise without knowing it become scar?

But the day was still perfect, the child, despite her evident apprehension, slender, exquisite:

when she noticed me watching, she precociously, flirtily, fetchingly swept back her hair.

Yes, we know one another, yes, there in the sad broken music of mind where nothing is lost.

Dear one, love,
they were so sweetly singing:
where shall I refuge seek if you refuse me?

Insight

1.

All under the supposition that he’s helping her because she’s so often melancholy lately,

he’s pointing out certain problems with her character, but he’s so serious, so vehement,

she realizes he’s
attacking
her, to hurt, not help; she doesn’t know what might be driving him,

but she finds she’s thinking through his life for him, the losses, the long-forgotten sadnesses,

and though she can’t come up with anything to correlate with how hatefully he’s acting,

she thinks
something
has to be there, so she listens, nods, sometimes she actually agrees.

2.

They’re only arguing, but all at once she feels anxiety, and realizes she’s afraid of him,

then, wondering whether she should risk expressing it to him, she understands she can’t,

that the way he is these days he’ll turn it back on her, and so she keeps it to herself,

then, despite herself, she wonders what their life’s become to have to hide so much,

then comes a wave of disappointment, with herself, not him, and not for that initial fear,

but for some cowardice, some deeper dread that makes her ask, why not him?

3.

He’s very distant, but when she asks him what it is, he insists it’s nothing, though it’s not,

she knows it’s not, because he never seems to face her and his eyes won’t hold on hers;

it makes her feel uncertain, clumsy, then as though she’s somehow supplicating him:

though she wants nothing more from him than she already has — what would he think she’d want? —

when she tries to trust him, to believe his offhanded reassurance, she feels that she’s pretending,

it’s like a game, though very serious, like trying to talk yourself out of an imminent illness.

4.

If there are sides to take, he’ll take the other side, against anything she says, to anyone:

at first she thinks it’s just coincidence; after all, she knows she’s sometimes wrong,

everyone is sometimes wrong, but with him now all there seem to be are sides, she’s always wrong;

even when she doesn’t know she’s arguing, when she doesn’t care, he finds her wrong,

in herself it seems she’s wrong, she feels she should apologize, to someone, anyone, to him;

him, him, him; what is it that he wants from her: remorse, contrition, should she just
die?

5.

He’s telling her in much too intricate detail about a film he’s seen: she tries to change the subject,

he won’t let her, and she finds she’s questioning herself — must she be so critical, judgmental? —

then she’s struck, from something in his tone, or absent from his tone, some lack of resonance,

that why he’s going on about the movie is because there’s nothing else to say to her,

or, worse, that there are things to say but not to her, they’re too intimate to waste on her:

it’s
she,
she thinks, who’s being measured and found wanting, and what should she think now?

6.

This time her, her story, about something nearly noble she once did, a friend in trouble,

and she helped, but before she’s hardly started he’s made clear he thinks it’s all a fantasy,

and she as quickly understands that what he really means is that her love, her love for him,

should reflexively surpass the way she loved, or claims she loved, the long-forgotten friend,

and with a cold shock, she knows she can’t tell him that, that the betrayal,

and certainly there is one, isn’t his desire to wound, but her thinking that he shouldn’t.

7.

She sits in his lap, she’s feeling lonely, nothing serious, she just wants sympathy, company,