Late in the Day (2 page)

of growing on serpentine and hardpan

with little or no water but what you steal

from your nextdoor neighbors,

so that nothing else grows here

I celebrate the gnarled cranky stem,

grey-green pungent leaf or scaly needle,

heavy cone, bitter berry, tiny blossom,

and the grand, rank smell of cat-spray,

since nothing else grows here.

Citizens of a hard and somewhat toxic land,

unsociable, undocile, willful,

they share nothing, yet they clothe

a naked indigent soil with life,

growing where nothing else grows, here.

We know how to know and how to think,

how to exhibit what is known

to heaven's bright ignorant eye,

how to be busy and to multiply.

He knows how to walk

into the trees alone not looking back,

so light on his soft feet he does not sink

into the snow. How to leave no track,

no sound, no shadow. How to be gone.

Finally the fireflies came across the Rockies, drifting

on damp, soft breezes blowing westward

that lifted them over the salt and poisoned deserts

and the terrible white-toothed Sierra

to the quietness of California valleys

where I saw them in a dream from the verandah

of Kishamish, all the little airy fires

coming and going in the summer dusk nearby

and farther in the forests toward the mountain

glimmering in the darkness ever finer, fainter,

meadows of innumerable motes of silver.

Across the creek stood a tall complex screen

of walnut and honey-locust branch and leaf.

In a soft autumn sunrise without wind

my daughter in meditation on the deck

above the quietly loquacious creek

observed a multitude of small

yellow birds among the many leaves

coming and going quick as quick

into sight and out of sight again.

She said to me, they were

like thoughts moving in a mind,

the little birds among the many leaves.

I have built a house in Time,

my home province. Up in the hills

not far from the city, it looks west

over fields, vineyards, wild lands

to the shore of the Eternal. Many years

went to building it as I wanted it to be,

the sleeping porches, the shady rooms,

the inner gardens with their fountains.

Above the front door, a word in a language

as yet unknown may perhaps mean Praise.

Windows are open to the summer air.

In winter rain patters in the courtyards

and in the basins of the fountains

and gathers to drip from the deep eaves.

Seeking the sense within the word, I guessed:

To be there in the sacred place,

the temple. To witness fully, and be thus

the altar of the thing witnessed.

In shade beside the creek I contemplate

how the great waters coming from the heights

early this summer changed the watercourse.

The four big midstream boulders stayed in place.

The willows are some thriving and some dead,

rooted in, uprooted by the flood.

Over the valley in the radiant light

a raven takes its way from east to west;

shadow wings across the rimrock pass

as silent as the raven. Contemplation

shows me nothing discontinuous.

When I looked in the book I found:

Time is the temple—Time itself and Space—

observed, marked out, to make the sacred place

on the four-quartered sky, the inwalled ground.

To join in continuity, the mind

follows the water, shadows the birds,

observes the unmoved rock, the subtle flight.

Slowly, in silence, without words,

the altar of the place and hour is raised.

Self is lost, a sacrifice to praise,

and praise itself sinks into quietness.

Mind draws the lines between the stars

that let the Eagle and the Swan

fly vast and bright and far

above the dark before the dawn.

Between two solitary minds

as far as Deneb from Altair,

love flings the unimaginable line

that marries fire to fire.

Time says “Let there be”

every moment and instantly

there is space and the radiance

of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.

And the gnats' flickering dance.

And the seas' expanse.

And death, and chance.

Time makes room

for going and coming home

and in time's womb

begins all ending.

Time is being and being

time, it is all one thing,

the shining, the seeing,

the dark abounding.

Meditations for Melville

i

Whiteness crossed the continent

a poison fog and where it went

villages were vacant

hearths and ways forsaken

Whiteness with greed and iron

makes the deep seas barren

Great migrations fly daylong

into whiteness and are gone

ii

Whiteness in its righteousness

bleaches creatures colorless

tolerates no

shadow

iii

People walk unseeing unseen

staring at a little screen

where the whiteness plays

an imitation of their days

Plugged in their ears white noise

drowns an ancient voice

murmuring to bless

darkness

The little towns, the driftwood fires

all down the beaches burning …

It will be dark in that night when

the deep basalt shifts and sighs,

headlands collapse, cliffs fail.

Then

the tumult of the sea returning.

And silence.

The slow drift of stars.

We want it to be a sentence on our sin,

our greed, our thriftless wars,

we claim the fault as warning.

But what to them is any act of ours,

the new shores at the dark night's end,

the beautiful, remorseless morning?

Venus solis occasus orientisque, Dea pacifica,

foam-borne, implacable, tender:

war and storm serve you, and you wear

the fiery tiara of the volcanoes.

Young salmon swimming downriver

and the old upstream to breed and die

are yours, and the fog-drinking forests.

Yours are the scattered emerald half-circles

of islands, the lost islands. Yours

are the sunken warships of the Emperor

and the slow swirl of pelagic polymers.

The moon is your hand-mirror.

Mother of Time and daughter of Destruction,

your feet are light upon the waters.

Death your dog follows you down the beaches

whining to see the breakers break

into blossom, into immortal

foam-flowers, where you have left

the bright track of your passing.

Pity your fearful, foolish children,

O Aphrodite of Fukushima.

Shifty, elegant Hermes, guide of the traveler,

god of the stockbroker, dealer in margins,

thief and errand-boy, heel-wing'd, swiftest of messengers,

trusted with truth, yet lord of the liars:

Hermes, holding the snake-wreathed staff of the healer,

beautiful poisonous quicksilver element,

silent Mercury, moving lightly, implacably

ahead of us, showing the way into darkness:

peaceful and clear are your eyes, O kindest of con-men.

It's just part of a story, actually quite a lot of stories,

the part where the third son or the stepdaughter

sent on the impossible errand through the uncanny forest

comes across a fox with its paw caught in a trap

or little sparrows fallen from the nest

or some ants in trouble in a puddle of water.

He frees the fox, she puts the fledglings in the nest,

they get the ants safe to their ant-hill.

The little fox will come back later

and lead him to the castle where the princess is imprisoned,

the sparrow will fly before her to where the golden egg is hidden,

the ants will sort out every poppyseed for them

from the heap of sand before the fatal morning,

and I don't think I can add much to this story.

All my life it's been telling me

if I'll only listen who the hero is

and how to live happily ever after.

Arion, my dark-crowned guide

through the long dream, your name

I knew when I was waking

in the dark today before dawn.

Through dark seas the dolphins glide.

Dreams are and are not what they seem.

All that's made is in the making:

achieved, completed, gone.

Kind, silent presence at my side,

was our way away, or home?

Am I forsaken or forsaking,

brother, lover, stranger, Arion?

The Serrano Indians knew that earthquakes in high valleys of the Sierra Nevada caused changes in the level of the pools of the Oasis of Mara, far down in the Joshua Tree Desert
.

The waters of these quiet pools are troubled

suddenly, sink away into the ground,

shrink down to mud, and then flood upward, turbid,

disturbed; the desert palms all round

shiver in the hot silent air. A hundred

miles away in hills a mile higher,

a valley shudders with subsonic thunder,

an impulse of the earth's intrinsic fire

moving through lightless arteries to bear

the message of the abyss, the underplaces,

to those far ranges shining high in air

and desert Mara's shadowy oasis.

The shadowy springs of thought sink down or flow

obeying impulses as deep and strange

from the body's inwardness, and shaken, we know

the imminence of mystery and change.

Seeking the knowledge I only know I lost,

I take the intangible into my hand

to pay the price of what is past all cost.

It is a grey stone lying on my palm.

Its even substance deepens to a mist

and in it moves a fire, contained and calm,

as in a cloudy opal or a hummingbird's

rose-turquoise breast. These soft, colored flames

speak in their motion without sound or words,

to tell me what it was I knew and lost.

By this remembrance blest, I understand

that I am free, and have come home at last.

I wake to find that I have paid the cost.

I wake to look into my empty hand.

hommage à R.M.R.

When a god grieves

the deep stones

at the four corners

of the world tremble.

Of all gods, that one!

Lighter than Iris even,

airy, jaunty—the feathered

flutter at cap and ankle,

the quick eyes, the acumen,

the cool aplomb—equally

at home in mid-air,

Olympus, or the underworld—

fleetest of messengers,

wheelerdealer, thief

when a thief was needed,

persuader, trickster.

His greatest charge

was to meet the mortals

who stood bewildered

on the doorstep of their death,

and, silent, reassuring them

with his quicksilver smile,

gently to guide them

on the only way,

the way down

to the long fields of shadow.

And to this task, this trust,

he was always faithful.

Holding his slender wand

with the thin playful snakes

curling round it, he led

his flock like any shepherd.

He never missed a soul.

Always he took them all

into the darkness,

on the one path, down.

Once, once only, was his task

allowed to change,

wonderfully reversed.

That once, a girl's hand

in his hand, he could follow,

not lead; could go up,

not down; up to the light.

And his heart was light.

The burden of his deathlessness

weighed ever less

at every step of that

brightening way with her.

And then the fool,

the poet he followed,

broke the promise, betrayed her,

betrayed him—turned.

The only time

in all his endless being

that he might learn

what being mortal was:

and it was gone,

the one chance

stolen from him by one

who didn't even need it.

His hand was empty,

the girl already

gone into shadow.

She knew the way down.

He would not grieve.

He leapt up to the light,

airborne and airy.

But the deep stones shook.

para Gabriela

The salt in the small bowl looks up at me

with all its little glittering eyes and says:

I am the dry sea.

Your blood tastes of me.