Collected Poems (51 page)

intestine on my tongue the taste of active

not theoretical not imagined despair.

It wasn’t only the deserts impinging

encroaching devouring nor the fevers

charring the last damp from the rivers

the last lick of sap from the withering wheat.

Nor only the ruins of cities spilled out

on highways like coal like kindling the men

groin to groin bound in their rage and despair

like Siamese twins Siamese hordes.

It wasn’t the women cowled like turbines

howling like turbines and the children

sentried on cliffs with nothing to nourish

their genius but shrapnels of scrub.

It was grasping rather that their desires

were like mine without limit like mine

checked only by vile chance not rational

supply and demand as I’d been taught.

That their fear was so fierce they wanted

to no longer be endowed with matter

so when houses were built they were razed

when food was grown it was despoiled.

We were locusts we were scorpions

husks hooked on thorns seeds without soil

wombs of a world without portal

flesh and dream we breathed and we slept.

The Clause

This entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness,

this wedge of want my mind calls self,

this self which doubts so much and which keeps reaching,

keeps referring, keeps aspiring, longing, towards some state

from which ambiguity would be banished, uncertainty expunged;

this implement my mind and self imagine they might make together,

which would have everything accessible to it,

all our doings and undoings all at once before it,

so it would have at last the right to bless, or blame,

for without everything before you, all at once, how bless, how blame?

this capacity imagination, self and mind conceive might be the “soul,”

which would be able to regard such matters as creation and destruction,

origin and extinction, of species, peoples, even families, even mine,

of equal consequence, and might finally solve the quandary

of this thing of being, and this other thing of not;

these layers, these divisions, these meanings or the lack thereof,

these fissures and abysses beside which I stumble, over which I reel:

is the place, the space, they constitute,

which I never satisfactorily experience but from which the fear

I might be torn away appalls me, me, or what might most be me?

Even mine,
I say, as if I might ever believe such a thing;

bless and blame,
I say, as though I could ever not.

This ramshackle, this unwieldy, this jerry-built assemblage,

this unfelt always felt disarray: is this the sum of me,

is this where I’m meant to end, exactly where I started out?

Leaves

A pair of red leaves spinning on one another

in such wildly erratic patterns over a frozen field

it’s hard to tell one from another and whether

if they were creatures they’d be in combat or courting

or just exalting in the tremendousness of their being.

Humans can be like that, capricious, aswirl,

not often enough in exalting, but courting, yes,

and combat; so often in combat, in rancor, in rage,

we rarely even remember what error or lie

set off this phase of our seeming to have to slaughter.

Not leaves then, which after all in their season

give themselves to the hammer of winter,

become sludge, become muck, become mulch,

while we, still seething, broiling, stay as we are,

vexation and violence, ax, atom, despair.

Night

1.

Somehow a light plane

coming in low at three

in the morning to a local airstrip

hits a complex of tones

in its growl so I hear mingled

with it a peal of church bells,

swelling in and out

of audibility, arrhythmic,

but rich and insistent, then,

though I try to hold them,

they dissolve, fade away;

only that monochrome

drone bores on

alone through the dark.

2.

This is one of our new

winters, dry, windless

and warm, when even

the lightest cover is stifling.

A luxuriant flowering

pear tree used to shelter

the front of our house,

but last August a storm

took it, a bizarrely focused

miniature tornado never

before seen in this climate,

and now the sky outside

the window is raw, the inert

air viscous and sour.

3.

I was ill, and by the merest

chance happened to be

watching as the tree fell,

I saw the branches helplessly

flail, the fork of the trunk

with a great creak split,

and the heavier half start

down, catch on wires,

and hang, lifting and subsiding

in the last barbs of the gale

as though it didn’t know yet

it was dead, then it did,

and slipped slowly sideways

onto its own debris in the gutter.

4.

When Ivan Karamazov

is reciting his wracking disquisition

about the evils perpetrated

on children, opining whether

human salvation would be worth

a single child’s suffering,

you know he’s close to breaking

down, sobbing in shame

and remorse, and I wonder

if he’d imagined our whole planet,

the children with it,

wagered in a mad gamble

of world against wealth,

what would he have done?

5.

What do I do? Fret

mostly, and brood, and lie

awake. Not to sleep

wasn’t always so punishing.

Once, in a train, stalled

in mountains, in snow,

I was roused by the clank

of a trainman’s crowbar

on the undercarriage of my car.

I lifted the leathery shade

and across a moon-dazzled

pine-fringed slope

a fox cut an arc; everything

else was pure light.

6.

I wanted it to last forever,

but I was twenty, and before

I knew it was back in my dream.

Do I ever sleep that way

now, innocent of everything

beyond my ken? No,

others are always with me,

others I love with my life,

yet I’ll leave them scant

evidence of my care, and little

trace of my good intentions,

as little as the solacing shush

the phantom limbs of our slain

tree will leave on the night.

In the Forest

In a book about war, tyranny, oppression, political insanity and corruption,

in a prison camp, in a discussion in which some inmates are trying to contend

with a vision of a world devoid of real significance, of existence being no more

than brute violence, of the human propensity to destroy itself and everything else,

someone, an old man, presumably wise, tells of having once gone to live in a forest,

far in the North, pristine, populated by no one but poor woodsmen and hermits;

he went there, he says, because he thought in that mute, placid domain of the trees,

he might find beyond the predations of animals and men something like the good.

They’d been speaking of their absurd sentences, of the cruelty of so-called civilization,

and the listeners imagine the old man is going to share his innocent rapture,

but No, he says, No, the trees and their seeds and flowers are at war just as we are,

every inch of soil is a battleground, each species of tree relentlessly seeks its own ends;

first the insidious grass and shrubs must be conquered, so a billion seeds are deployed,

hard as bullets, the victorious shoots drive up through the less adaptable weaklings,

the alliances of dominating survivors grow thicker and taller, assembling the canopies

beneath which humans love to loll, yet still new enemies are evolving, with new weapons …

In prison camps, even the worst, in the evening the tormented souls come together

to commune and converse, even those utterly sapped by their meaningless toil,

those afflicted by wounds of the spirit more doleful than any we can imagine,

even there, in that moral murk that promises nothing but extinction, the voices go on.

Does it matter what words are spoken? That the evidence proves one thing or another?

Isn’t the ultimate hope just that we’ll still be addressed, and know others are, too,

that meanings will still be devised and evidence offered of lives having been lived?

“In the North, the trees…” and the wretched page turns, and we listen, and listen.

The Hearth

February 2003

1.

Alone after the news on a bitter

evening in the country, sleet slashing

the stubbled fields, the river ice;

I keep stirring up the recalcitrant fire,

but when I throw my plastic coffee cup

in with new kindling it perches intact

on a log for a strangely long time,

as though uncertain what to do,

until, in a somehow reluctant, almost

creaturely way, it dents, collapses

and decomposes to a dark slime

untwining itself on the stone hearth.

I once knew someone who was caught in a fire

and made it sound something like that.

He’d been loading a bomber and a napalm shell

had gone off; flung from the flames,

at first he felt nothing and thought

he’d been spared, but then came the pain,

then the hideous dark — he’d been blinded,

and so badly charred he spent years

in recovery: agonizing debridements,

grafts, learning to speak through a mouth

without lips, to read Braille with fingers

lavaed with scar, to not want to die —

though that never happened. He swore,

even years later, with a family,

that if he were back there, this time allowed

to put himself out of his misery, he would.

2.

There was dying here tonight, after

dusk, by the road; an owl,

eyes fixed and flared, breast

so winter-white he seemed to shine

a searchlight on himself, helicoptered

near a wire fence, then suddenly

banked, plunged and vanished

into the swallowing dark with his prey.

Such an uncomplicated departure;

no detonation, nothing to mourn;

if the creature being torn from its life

made a sound, I didn’t hear it.

But in fact I wasn’t listening, I was thinking,

as I often do these days, of war;

I was thinking of my children, and their children,

of the more than fear I feel for them,

and then of radar, rockets, shrapnel,

cities razed, soil poisoned

for a thousand generations; of suffering so vast

it nullifies everything else.

I stood in the wind in the raw cold

wondering how those with power over us

can effect such things, and by what

cynical reasoning pardon themselves.

The fire’s ablaze now, its glow

on the windows makes the night even darker,

but it barely keeps the room warm.

I stoke it again, and crouch closer.

Low Relief

They hunted lions, they hunted humans, and enslaved them.

One lion, I recall, had been viciously speared; he vomited blood,

his hindquarters dragged behind him like cement in a sack.

Spirits with wings and the heads of eagles flanked them;

the largest sports a rosette on a band on his wrist, like a watch:

a wristwatch measuring blossomings, measuring lives.

They wore skirts, helmets, their beards were permanent-waved.

Carved in stone, enameled in brick, in chariots, on thrones,

always that resolute, unblinking profile of composure.

Did they as they hunted feel sure of themselves,

did they believe they enacted what their cosmos demanded?

Did a god ring through them like a phone going off on a bus?

On each block, each slab, each surface, a slave,

each bound with a cable of what must feel like steel;

their heads loll: hear them cry pitiably into the stone.

Did they have gods who were evil others, like ours?

Even colder than they, indifferent, more given to fury,

vindictive, venomous, stutteringly stupid, like ours?

Their forearms were striated like Blake’s ghost of a flea’s,

they never savaged themselves in their souls, though;

how lightly they bear the weight of their extinction.

Coherence, things in proper relation, did it fail them?

Was unreason all around, and confusion and depression,

and no coherent, convincing model to explain why?

They move left to right, right to left, like lanes of traffic.

They too, perhaps, found no place to stand still, to judge,

to believe wickedness will never be forgotten nor forgiven.

Also gazelles, beasts of the air, and eyes which contain,

and ears which submit; dew of morn, blaze of noon,

the faces before you wild with the erotics of existence.

And that coming someday to know how foolish,

even confronting the end of one’s world, to think

one might spare oneself by doing away with oneself.

Their palace doors were cedar strapped with stout bronze.