Halfway to Silence (4 page)

It means going naked

No refuge but rue,

Admitting stark need—

Eden after the fall.

III

The Turning of the Wind

Love waits for a turning of the wind.

Elusive, patient, every early morning,

Although the humid heat has not been kind,

Love waits for clear air, an end to mourning.

There is a wall. What wind to blow it down?

What power cleanse the awful fetid air

And burn the haze away, what brilliant sun

To show us the rich landscape is still there?

We cannot hear each other. Truth gets lost.

Lack of rapport has damaged the whole range

Of what we might redeem that pain has cost.

So love waits for the wind to change.

After the Storm

The roar of big surf and above it all night

The peepers singing out so sweet and frail!

Above the pounding roar that wears down rock

They dare, they try to connect through the gale.

And if that relentless boom might seem to mock

Those who still risk their hope before daylight,

That song suggests something is going right.

Whatever locked love cannot bear to do,

The tree frogs can, and spring is breaking through.

Love

Fragile as a spider’s web

Hanging in space

Between tall grasses,

It is torn again and again.

A passing dog

Or simply the wind can do it.

Several times a day

I gather myself together

And spin it again.

Spiders are patient weavers.

They never give up.

And who knows

What keeps them at it?

Hunger, no doubt,

And hope.

Of Molluscs

As the tide rises, the closed mollusc

Opens a fraction to the ocean’s food,

Bathed in its riches. Do not ask

What force would do, or if force could.

A knife is of no use against a fortress.

You might break it to pieces as gulls do.

No, only the rising tide and its slow progress

Opens the shell. Lovers, I tell you true.

You who have held yourselves closed hard

Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears

And hostile to a touch or tender word—

The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.

Now you are floated on this gentle flood

That cannot force or be forced, welcome food

Salt as your tears, the rich ocean’s blood,

Eat, rest, be nourished on the tide of love.

June Wind

I watched wind ripple the field’s supple grasses.

For once earth is alive while restless ocean

Lies still beyond it like a flat blue screen.

I watch the wind burnishing as it passes,

Lifting soft waves, an ecstasy of motion,

A long glissando through the static green.

These waves crash on no rock; rooted, they stay,

As restless love, that ocean, changes over

And comes to land, alive, a shining field

Caught in wind’s captivating gentle play

As though a harp played by a subtle lover—

And the tormented ocean has been stilled.

The Summer Tree

In all the summer glut of green,

Serrated leaves, a dark and shifty screen,

Catalpa flowers, unseasonal surprise,

To tense the landscape up for drowsy eyes.

We come alive beholding points of white,

Among the leaves, immense rosettes alight.

The blessing of pure form that opens space

And makes us stop and look in sudden peace.

Late Autumn

On random wires the rows of summer swallows

Wait for their lift-off. They will soon be gone

Before All Saints and before All Hallows,

The changing time when we are most alone.

Disarmed, too vulnerable, full of dread,

And once again as naked as the trees

Before the dark, precarious days ahead,

And troubled skies over tumultuous seas.

When we are so transparent to the dead

There is no wall. We hear their voices speak,

And as the small birds wheel off overhead

We bend toward the earth suddenly weak.

How to believe that all will not be lost?

Our flowers, too, not perish in the blight?

Love, leave me your South against the frost.

Say “hush” to my fears, and warm the night.

The Geese

The geese honked overhead.

I ran to catch the skein

To watch them as they fled

In a long wavering line.

I caught my breath, alone,

Abandoned like a lover

With winter at the bone

To see the geese go over.

It happens every year

And every year some woman

Haunted by loss and fear

Must take it as an omen,

Must shiver as she stands

Watching the wild geese go,

With sudden empty hands

Before the cruel snow.

Some woman every year

Must catch her breath and weep

With so much wildness near

At all she cannot keep.

Autumn Sonnets

How can we name it “fall,” this slow ascent

From dawn to dawn, each purer than the last,

As structure comes back through the golden tent

And shimmering color floats down to be lost?

How can we name it “fall,” this elevation

As all our earthly shelter drops away

And we stand poised as if for revelation

On the brink of another startling day,

And still must live with ever greater height,

And skies more huge and luminous at dusk,

Till we are strained by light and still more light

As if this progress were an imposed task

Demanding of love supreme clarity,

Impersonal, stark as the winter sky.

Everywhere, in my garden, in my thought

I batten down, shore up, and prune severely.

All tender plants are cut down to the root.

My gentle earth is barren now, or nearly.

Harden it well against the loss and change;

Prepare to hold the fastness, since I know

This open self must grow more harsh and strange

Before it meets the softness of the snow.

Withstand, endure, the worst is still to come.

Wild animals seek shelter from the cold,

But I am as exposed here safe at home

As the wild fox running outside the fold:

He burns his brightness for mere food or bed.

I contain love as if it were a warhead.

Pruning the Orchard

Out there in the orchard they have come

To prune the overgrowth, cut back and free

The crisscrossed branches of apple and plum,

Shaping the formless back to symmetry.

They do not work for beauty’s sake

But to improve the harvest come next year.

Each tough lopsided branch they choose to break

Is broken toward fruit more crisp and rare.

I watch them, full of wonder and dismay,

Feeling the need to shape my life, be calm,

Like the untroubled pruners who, all day,

Cut back, are ruthless, and without a qualm.

While I, beleaguered, always conscience-torn,

Have let the thickets stifle peaceful growth,

Spontaneous flow stopped, poems stillborn,

Imagined duties, pebbles in my mouth.

Muse, pour strength into my pruning wrist

That I may cut the way toward open space,

A timeless orchard, poetry-possessed,

There without guilt to contemplate your face.

Old Lovers at the Ballet

In the dark theatre lovers sit

Watching the supple dancers weave

A fugue, motion and music melded.

There on the stage below, brilliantly lit

No dancer stumbles or may grieve;

Their very smiles are disciplined and moulded.

And in the dark old lovers feel dismay

Watching the ardent bodies leap and freeze,

Thinking how age has changed them and has mocked.

Once they were light and bold in lissome play,

Limber as willows that could bend with ease—

But as they watch a vision is unlocked.

Imagination springs the trap of youth.

And in the dark motionless, as they stare,

Old lovers reach new wonders and new answers

As in the mind they leap to catch the truth,

For young the soul was awkward, unaware,

That claps its hands now with the supple dancers.

And in the flesh those dancers cannot spare

What the old lovers have had time to learn,

That the soul is a lithe and serene athlete

That deepens touch upon the darkening air.

It is not energy but light they burn,

The radiant powers of the Paraclete.

IV

Sark

The isle is for islanders, some born—

They like being surrounded by

And anchored in the ever-changing sea,

For it is just this being enclosed

In a small space within a huge space

That makes them feel both safe and free,

Tilling small fields under a huge sky.

The isle is for islanders, some made—

They are drawn here, the two-in-one,

To be alone together, hand in hand,

Walking the silence of the high plateau

Where bees and heather marry well,

Or down long flights of stairs to caves.

Love is the summer island, safe and wild.

Islands are for people who are islands,

Who have always been detached from the main

For a purpose, or because they crave

The free within the framed as poets do,

The solitary for whom being alone

Is not a loneliness but fertile good.

Here on this island I feel myself at home.

And because I am here, happy among the bees,

A donkey in the field, the crooked paths

That lead me always to some precipitous fall

And the sudden opening out of blue below,

Hope flows back into my crannies now.

I am ready to begin the long journey

Toward love, the mainland, perhaps not alone.

In Suffolk

Mourning my old ways, guilt fills the mind,

As memories well up from ripening gold

And I look far away over tilted land