Collected Poems (45 page)

then she’d fill her cup and navigate her way across the kitchen.

At the table, she’d set the cup down in its saucer, pour in milk, sit,

let out a breath charged with some onerous responsibility I never understood,

and lift the cup again.

There’d be a tiny pause as though she had consciously to synchronize her mouth and hand,

then her lips would lengthen and reach out, prehensile as a primate’s tail,

and seem to
grasp
the liquid with the sputtering suctioning of gravity imperfectly annulled.

Then, grimacing as though it were a molten metal she was bringing into herself —

always
grimacing, I’d think: did she never know what temperature the stuff would be? —

she’d hold about a spoonful just behind her teeth before she’d slide it thickly down.

Thickly,
much too thickly:

she must have changed its gravity in there to some still more viscous, lavalike elixir.

Then there’d be a grateful lowering of her shoulders.

Also then her eyes would lift to focus on a point beyond my head

as though always then a thought had come to her that needed rarer ranges of reflection.

She’d do that twice, all that always twice, and put the coffee down.

In its porcelain cauldron, the military-brownish broth would sway —

was her passion for it going to make it boil again? — and finally come to rest.

… As
I
never came to rest, as I had to watch, I knew the interval by heart,

her hand come down to it again, her head lower to it again,

that excruciating suction sound again, her gaze loosening again.

I’d be desperate, wild, my heart would pound.

There was an expression then, “to tell on someone”: that was what I craved, to
tell
on her,

to have someone bear witness with me to her awful wrong.

What was I doing to myself? Or she to me?

Oh, surely she to me!

Lost Wax

My love gives me some wax,

so for once instead of words

I work at something real:

I knead until I see emerge

a person, a protagonist;

but I must overwork my wax,

it loses its resiliency,

comes apart in crumbs.

I take another block:

this work, I think, will be a self;

I can feel it forming, brow

and brain; perhaps it will be me,

perhaps, if I can create myself,

I’ll be able to amend myself;

my wax, though, freezes

this time, fissures, splits.

Words or wax, no end

to our self-shaping, our forlorn

awareness at the end of which

is only more awareness.

Was ever truth so malleable?

Arid, inadhesive bits of matter.

What might heal you? Love.

What make you whole? Love. My love.

Space

The space within me, within which I partly, or possibly mostly exist:

so familiar it is yet how little I know it, I’m not even sure of its volume;

sometimes it expands behind me like a wing, sometimes it contracts,

and while the world is often in it, it’s rarely wholly congruent with it.

I’m not even certain when or why the world happens to appear there,

in a way that means something, brings with it more than my perceptions

at that instant, something that arrives with an insistence, a
friction,

so that I have to move myself aside within myself to make a place for it.

If this space, at any rate, were a room, its color would be beige, or umber,

with fleetings of gold, not the gold of icons, but paler, less emphatic:

when my eyes first close there’s a momentary darkening there as well,

sometimes the dimness smolders more intensely, almost to blood red.

Reestablishing myself in myself like this always comes to pass,

it seems it can’t not come to pass, but an effort is needed, too,

something like faith: my vision rolls back through the bell of the skull,

all my ordinary thoughts are deferred, time becomes purely potential,

then clumps of light, glowing, pulsing patterns stutter in, then images,

usually of where I am just then, then others, then I hear my breath,

feel my body, become aware of thoughts and language; but even then,

the unexpected can occur: right now, a sharp, rolling, planetary horizon.

Such a strange interval: I wonder if this is what the last, indivisible instant

before death might be, before the absolutely unluminous absence.

To open one’s tangible eyes just then, as I do now: light, shapes, color!

Close again; darkness without end, but wait, still glow, still sentience: bliss.

Tantrum

A child’s cry out in the street, not of pain or fear,

rather one of those vividly inarticulate

yet perfectly expressive trumpet thumps of indignation:

something wished for has been denied,

something wanted
now
delayed.

So useful it would be to carry that preemptive howl

always with you; all the functions it performs,

its equivalents in words are so unwieldy,

take up so much emotive time,

entail such muffling, qualifying, attenuation.

And in our cries out to the cosmos, our exasperation

with imperfection, our theodicies, betrayed ideals:

to keep that rocky core of rage within one’s rage

with which to blame, confront, accuse, bewail

all that needs retaliation for our absurdly thwarted wants.

Not Soul

Not soul,

not that tired tale anyway about preliterate

people believing cameras would extract

their spiritual essence, nothing so obvious,

but what is it I feel has been stripped,

stolen, negated, when I look out across

this valley of old farms, mist, trees,

a narrow, steep-banked brook,

and have the thought take me that all this

is a kind of reservation, a museum,

of land, plants, houses, even people —

a woman now, crossing a field —

that it all endures only by the happenstance

of no one having decided to “develop” it,

bring in a highway from the turnpike,

construct subdivisions, parking lots, malls?

Not soul,

soul is what religions believed subsumes

experience and will, what philosophers

surmised compels us to beauty and virtue,

is what even the most skeptical still save

for any resolving description of inner life,

this intricately knotted compound

which resists any less ambiguous locution.

How imagine so purely human a term

applying to things, to the rushing brook

which follows the slant of soil beneath it,

the mist functioned by the warmth of air,

even the houses to be torn down or crowded

into anonymity according to patterns

which have no discernible logic, certainly

nothing one mind might consider sufficient?

Not soul,

but still, anthropomorphism or not,

the very shape and hue and texture of reality,

the sheen of surface, depth of shadow,

seem unfocused now, hollowed out,

as though the pact between ourselves and world

that lets the world stand for more than itself

were violated, so that everything I see,

the lowering clouds, the tempered light,

and even all I only bring to mind, is dulled,

despoiled, as though consciousness no longer

could distill such truths within itself,

as though a gel of sadness had been interposed

between me and so much loveliness

so much at risk, as though a tear

had ineradicably fixed upon the eye.

Depths

I’m on a parapet looking down

into a deep cleft in the earth

at minuscule people and cars

moving along its narrow bottom.

Though my father’s arms are around me

I feel how far it would be to fall,

how perilous: I cringe back,

my father holds me more tightly.

Was there ever such a crevice?

No, I realized much, much later

we were on an ordinary building

looking down into a city street.

A picture book: desert sunlight,

a man and woman clad in sandals,

pastel robes, loose burnooses,

plying a material like dough,

the man kneading in a trough,

the woman throwing at a wheel.

Somehow I come to think they’re angels,

in heaven, fashioning human beings.

Was there ever such a story?

No, the book, at Sunday school,

showed daily life in the Bible,

the people were just making jars.

Just jars, and yet those coils of clay,

tinted light to dark like skin,

swelled beneath the woman’s hands

as I knew already flesh should swell,

and as I’d know it later, when,

alone with someone in the dark,

I’d close my eyes, move my hands

across her, and my mouth across her,

trying to experience an ideal,

to participate in radiances

I passionately believed existed,

and not only in imagination.

Or, with love itself, the love

that came to me so readily, so

intensely, so convincingly each time,

and each time ravaged me

when it spoiled and failed, and left

me only memories of its promise.

Could real love ever come to me?

Would I distort it if it did?

Even now I feel a frost of fear

to think I might not have found you,

my love, or not believed in you,

and still be reeling on another roof.

Tree

One vast segment of the tree, the very topmost, bows ceremoniously against a breath of breeze,

patient, sagacious, apparently possessing the wisdom such a union of space, light and matter should.

Just beneath, though grazed by the same barely perceptible zephyr, a knot of leaves quakes hectically,

as though trying to convince that more pacific presence above it of its anxieties, its dire forebodings.

Now some of the individual spreads that make up the higher, ponderous, stoic portion are caught, too,

by a more insistent pressure: their unity disrupted, they sway irrationally; do they, too, sense danger?

Harried, quaking, they seem to wonder whether some untoward response will be demanded of them,

whether they’ll ever graze again upon the ichor with which such benign existences sustain themselves.

A calming now, a more solid, gel-like weight of heat in the air, in the tree a tense, tremulous subsiding;

the last swelling and flattening of the thousand glittering armadas of sunlight passing through the branches.

The tree’s negative volume defines it now; the space it contains contained in turn by the unmoving warmth,

by duration breathlessly suspended, and, for me, by a languorous sense of being all at once pacified, quelled.

King

1.

A tall, handsome black man, bearded, an artist, in nineteen sixty-eight, in Philadelphia,

you’re walking down Market Street two days after Martin Luther King’s murder

on your way to the memorial service scheduled that morning near the Liberty Bell.

Thirty years later, and I can still picture you there: you’re walking fast, preoccupied,

when suddenly a police car swerves over the curb in front of you, blocking your way.

And I can see the two policemen, both white, cold, expressionless, glaring at you:

a long moment passes, then I see you looking over your shoulder, turning away,

moving towards the street, to the back of the squad car, passing behind it off the curb,

around it to the sidewalk on the other side and continuing down Market again,

to Nineteenth, then right to Rittenhouse Square where someone’s waiting for you.

When you see the person (he’s white, like the policemen), you don’t say anything;

though you’d made an appointment not an hour ago to go to the service together,

you don’t even glance at him again until he runs after you, calling for you to wait.

You stop to talk to him then, but only long enough to tell him in a harsh, low voice

everything that had happened with the policemen, then a few hard sentences more.

2.

Maybe my trying to relive this with you should stop there; this after all is your story,

but something still feels unresolved between us, as so much does in our culture.

I’ve heard black friends say that in some ways race matters were easier then,

at least then the prejudice was out in the open, you knew where you were:

even the police were only the most visible edge of a hardly covert white racism.

But if the police were a symbol of something else, they were brutal enough at it.

You could, if you were black, man or woman, be beaten to death by policemen.

You could, at a cop’s whim, be arrested for “disturbing the peace,” or “resisting arrest,”

which meant you’d done nothing, but had been battered badly enough for it to show,

necessitating if not an excuse then a reason, which incidentally added to your sentence.

Back then, too, even if you could afford a good lawyer, who might get you off,

if the police were angry enough, you had reason to fear that in the bus from jail

to the courtroom, you’d be raped, gang-raped, and no one would dare say a thing.

All that had to have come to your mind as you stood, that idling squad car before you,

the cops inside it with their clubs and guns, impassive, their eyes challenging, hard.

3.

They’d have known when they’d spotted you where you were going; everyone was.