From website gregglory.com
Assembling the Earth
New poems of 2001.
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Assembling the Earth
dark nature poems
"A mouthful of earth to remedy all."
- Edward Thomas
Gregg Glory
Published by BLAST PRESS
http://www.gregglory.com
gregglory@aol.com
C O N T E N T S
To a Summer Hailstorm
Ordinary Things
Wintering by the Atlantic
In a Manger
The Paper Mill
A Blue Perhaps
Water-Break
Rooted Things
Wake
The Ant-Lion
The Willow Bond
The Abandoned Tower
A Death in Woods
The Water-Mirror
Would Not Have
A Wood to Sing Through
A Bronze Creeper
Aims
Existentialist Dilemma
Good and its Opposite
The Mental Garden
Definitely
Chain Chain Chain
Introrse Proportions
Lucid Interval
Evening Argument
Roundabout
Grave Spaces
Wintering by the Atlantic
Late-Flowering Bush
A Winter Eden
Wet Weather Promise
Milk-Weed
The Compass Rose
To a Summer Hailstorm
I have been in existential hail
Since Noah first began to bail;
Hailstorm, shake me till my sadness goes;
Strike me till new blood flows.
Ravish mind with unfettered ice;
Let cold be all of your advice.
Thunder down and dent the car.
Remind us of winter with a faithful scar.
Strip skin to tatters with your kisses,
Only, hailstorm, do not miss us.
Tear the mailbox from off its stick;
Freeze the healthy and the sick;
Fill the chimney with cotton balls;
Catch the walker in a squall.
Rattle buckshot with heaven's force-
I am the target, you the source.
Disappear and vanish in a drought
To all but me, who keeps you caught
Closer than my second thought.
Magnificent blank in skies above me,
Stoop to whisper that you love me;
Like a naked cinder for your use
Seize me, hailstorm and muse.
Ordinary Things
There's a dark deep down in ordinary things
Resists our bringing them into view,
Or else in bringing them what light we bring,
As if to ask the question 'Who are you?'
I do not know what answer I would make
Being myself, and, so, invisible-
Although I know when I give or when I take,
Outfitting my days as I best am able.
There's a dark deep down in ordinary things
Resists us, the way a mirror pushes
Until we're left again with things as things,
Alone among our daylit doubts and guesses.
I am one keeps to himself, and although
I do, I do not keep the dark alone.
Wintering by the Atlantic
[Sonnet Version]
As snow and snow will in snowing meet,
What slid down danced into a wild sleet
And randomly clung, each to each,
Resisting ocean's disassembling touch
That undoes the individual who falls
And in that fall returns to ocean's all.
There was nothing there in what was of sky,
No help of light to help say why,
Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss
That ended each self-formed singleness
Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold.
They did not fall because they had been told.
They fell because there was nothing else to do
But fall, and this the ocean knew.
In a Manger
It lay self-entangled, curled as ramshorns,
-And pushed the belly into being mother-
Who, to be herself, had first to the Other,-
Which looked as if it didn't want being born.
Its sideways was more, and worse, than backwards.
It had to be sawn out to be itself a lamb,
Startle the clover and bleat "I am."
The bowie knife came handy without a word.
A tense scarlet torn sort of giving-in,
A clattering shape cauled on scattered straw,
Ungainly upright legs besides the ewe's,
Shook me wet and bellowed out of pain.
What had come too soon would need a mother's milk.
I pulled all night through wetness with raw silk.
The Paper Mill
I look into the portions of my thought, cold and dull.
Wheel in wheel unsettles the quiet mill asleep
And puts an uneasy harness on all I feel.
The river like a clock runs fast and deep.
Soon there will be paper, deep and white.
Wet slush from the chute, heaps of pulp and dust,
Driven by the living water to be a blank in sight.
A haaing gear gives my cheek a buss.
I pole a belt to the drive shaft, and all begins-
Horses in wheels turn, turn in their dreams;
Floorboards shake with purpose, dark and dim.
The razor nibs of the saw-wheel start a seam.
I weep, weep for sleep and do as I must.
I look into the cold dull portions of my thought.
A Blue Perhaps
The provident power of hurt and harm
The provenance of an eye ingathers,
(Its certain witness of a moment's charm
That lightly changes a life forever),
Bluely demonstrates in this morning glory
That measures us, our smallness and our fear,
With too blue an eye to ever bear
Until a touch of night shuts its story.
Then we dream, with a certain sort of blue rue,
And wonder in sleep's deep wanderment
If the sun will show us what to do
Or if dreaming can tell us what we meant.
An eye perhaps has followed us all day through,
But we do not know the eye's intent.
Water-Break
Having grown long words in fieldgrass daylong,
I stepped into a wooded brook to dip
Ink-worded hands into the snickering quips
Offered up by the silverquick stream;
I wondered just what the water had meant to mean,
Whose loose stones insist the water into song.
Many times I had lost what footing I had felt,
Suddenly cried out, or laughed in despair,
By hard wet things beneath thrown over,
Raw agony raised to the eloquence of a welt;
And, with water in my mouth, I'd often remarked
The sincerer operations of the lark,
Spilling a slippery noise above taciturn rocks
That break bones and never forget.
Rooted Things
Three dark junipers shadow where time stood,
Representative of my brothers and
Myself, from earth and water grown to good
Plain wood on the township's public land.
Huddled under them by the neighboring pond
Fireworks cracked to color July the Fourth;
We then, as I now, beside the dawn-like mud
Stood every year we'd been on earth,
Three stranger brothers our divided folks
Reaped as seedlings from the brick adoption house
Into a home too shy and shamed for such a name.
Now torn away ourselves to spouses
And lives, from rooted things by time unyolked,
I stand between the trees without a name.
Wake
I wake in dark. The air itself seems stained.
The dark appears a darkness self-sustained
By whatever of darkness must remain
Even at whitest noon. But this is not noon.
This is the dark without a shadow, without a moon;
A dark that won't stay shut in rooms;
One that follows even the ripest mood
And rots there, and will not give way to good.
This is the dark wolves build in woods
Who have no hands and whose teeth are sure.
This is the black that cancels the cure;
This the emptiest hour and the deepest hurt.
This lies behind eyes and bottoms every heart.
This it is that makes a faster beating start.
The Ant-Lion
His dusty body goes backwards to be dust.
On dust more frictionless than ice
A frantic slipping ant will make us wince
To see a crucible mind no more than claw;
A mind that harbors no dark thought to appall
But shapes his perpetual falling wall.
He does not jump for justice or to be just.
Summer's first rain-drop rolls in dust a world
Whose wet invites all wetness hints of growth
(Such a world may we recognize in drought).
Silent and dry, he emerges like a roar
And makes the molten tension burst,
And drowns himself with water, nothing more.
And a something unrepeatable is learned.
The Willow Bond
"Let's have a game of truth or dare," she said.
She snapped a longly hanging willow-wand.
We shared the field with no one but ourselves
And the willow that knew us from the play of years
That fountained alone and yellow in the field.
Winter's tears to April dew had yielded.
"The game is played by our both being blind
Until the willow tells true where true love abides."
A hint of mischief's smile filled my closing look.
She offered an antennae-end; I felt and took.
"A willow wand between two lovers' hands
Communicates the tension of love's bond."
The switch, whip-supple, wetly flailed,
Live as a shedding snake held head and tail.
I felt, where dew-bewildered life had broken off,
A sad pull; something, then, lent something soft
To our springtime game of gain and loss.
The wand had left a distance for us to cross
And reared between us a budded arch
Forever flowerless as frozen March.
"My question is: Will you love me all your life?"
"What you mean is: Will we be man and wife?"
I broke into a laughter I did not understand.
The willow sent it on to her own blind hand.
Perhaps this willow, being the duticle thing it is,
Adds a playful pulse to those it passes.
Something about the way the time compressed,
Or how the intercessor willow hissed,
Misgave me to give the game my heart;-
And that too went out along the drying bark.
What we are, I thought, we are by accident.
What happens makes us bend as we are bent.
I kept eyes open now, sure that hers were shut.
A glimmer or a tremor of I knew not what
Laid a furrow clear across her forehead,
As when question answers question as we'd feared
And not as we had hoped. The bond, the branch, snapped
Sudden as two children's hands can clap.
The Abandoned Tower
We drove almost to the mountain-top,
And had no wish leave it when we stopped;
No wish to leave the dew-enhanced, dew-christened air
That pleasured the lungs like a circus scare
When the sure trapeze for once escapes talced fingers
And the mind on sudden emptiness must linger
That had thought to catch a glittered body's twirl.
The thinness of the atmosphere made dull
The closing click of doors when we stood
A moment out of the car and out-of-doors.
Sunset took the higher half of woods
And the tin toy of the Ranger Tower
And showed us how a second Troy would burn.
We smiled to see just what we understood
As we stood together without a word,
Without the cluttered need to speak and yearn
That had made our road-trip Cassandra and the King.
The library had malformed our limbs
To wood, as much as books are wood, by sitting still
To read. We were over-ready to try a climb
Or try our no-words silence or try anything
To stretch out the long day of many knots
Our deep need to know had dearly bought.
The road swirled up away from feet at once
Round the mountain-top as round an ice-cream cone;
The road was rock and mist, the bones of clouds,
Red tatters gone redly under sky's west rim,
Like lashes of an agitated eye grown dim.
We watched small spots of dark swell and bud
And swarm up after us all the way until
At the last powerline we were caught
In a fatal undertow like a single thought.-
We walked on colder, with dark-adjusted eyes,
Still rounding toward the top. Things in nature
Cried out their alphabet of names, but none
Were ours, or reflected back any name we knew.
Our silence stretched between us like a clue.
Footsteps added footnotes one by one
Until we had left lower for higher ground for sure.
The tower sprang into the interrupted skies.
Spray paint through a lettered grid of spaces
Had tiered the artifact with conflicted texts.
We smiled once again to see nature vexed;
To touch where some derelict human trace is.
We grinned, too short of breath this time for speech;
We would have said a word or two this time,
For comfort's or for habit's sake, among pines
Where, in counterfeit of clouds, we saw our breaths
Touch. But we were wordless and rib-sore,
Out of perspective in a piney bowl
Rushing up around us like a garden wall
That aimed to keep in both flesh and soul
Within the clear-burned stone which grayly bore
The bolted tower that rose without a door.
We might as well have been inside a kettle
With the tower for a witch's ladle
For everything additional that we could see.
We scanned the structure for defects, but hurriedly.
What with the talus and its getting late
We knew we didn't have the time we had.
Still we gripped the rungs; they poured a cold
Beyond experience under our skins.
They were put here for a purpose, as a gate
Is put- to propose a boundary and suggest
A sort of going through. Of course, the jest
Is that the gate can't tell who's going out or in.
And we ourselves can't be sure of what we take
With us, in a purpose we call ours.
The sky began to stipple with young stars.
Each strut galvanized chilled hand to sweat,
So that we had to pull rolled sleeves over
Each rung, and get what grip that could make
To hoist ourselves a little more above.
Our collars had been thumbed up since we'd begun;
Our inch-thick sweaters had been left to hang
Like exhausted swimmers over library chairs.
Stars jarred and jumped-no, that was our eyes-
We took two deep sucks in to every one
That before our sojourn had satisfied.
What mist was in us at once would seize
Into ice spider-webs instantly as breath.
I hung halfway up a minute and heard
The charm of deadened church-bells in her tread,
Ringing on the upward steel as cold as death.
I looked around afloat in the tops of trees
Dizzy as masts and yardarms in a racing sea.
Night had come upon all things everywhere.
The trees put on their cassocks black and bare,
But refused to give a redemptive air.
Trees, gathered for prayers, stood devout.
The tower was all exposed angles and no lee.
She was where I couldn't quite make out-
Loudly made the platform on hands and knees.
Something of ice came down in shards.
A keening wind, whetted almost to urging,
Made me wonder darkly at the wooded ring;
The mountain leaned to windward
And snatched my shirt to tell me "Come and see..."
With a knowing note of something up a sleeve.
But this was more than would fit what I believe,
More sleeve and deeper than what I knew of me.
"You should see it up here, you really should.
Come up, Kerry, and hold me by the shoulders.
The world's as small and sharp as in a mirror.
If you shout down the mountain, you can hear
Echoes carry your own voice back, but clearer."
As if Earth were one to put our feelings to
Who never once told us what to do.
A Death in Woods
I kept as solitary as a wood alone
And often walked till all I knew dwindled to rumor
Talked from another country in a half-heard-of humor.
When death gave me up, I could keep the bones.
Today, having at last journeyed past myself,
I looked into a little wayside brook
Which, by caring nothing, all my nothing took.
I left a husk to worry a rocky shelf.
The Water-Mirror
One year all year I kept the pond for mirror,
And tasked water in place of one that broke
And so had run out of looking luck.
The pond re-made me foot to head,- and, nearer,
Showed my face as something like, no clearer.
Flat stones I scalped across what shone for song
Laughed at my distorted self the summer long.
Then one day in the polished lead of water
I saw what my broken mirror showed too often: fear
Of eyes in eyes, a black kept-back glance
Desperate for breakage like a last chance
To be itself something more than a moment's stare.
When autumn came, and I dared again look down,
A reluctant pond as rough as hands hid my face
For days, but not the sense of my disgrace.
Leaves above my pallid blur mocked me with a crown.
Winter's stintless nights full of wishes as a star
Drew ice across my mirror in a frozen sheet
Obscure and cold, and chilled a glance that
Knew me once, and I held back a shiver.
When my breath came back to breathing more at ease-
When pond had been blanched ice long enough-
I thought how roots go down, fathomless and tough
To stretch what stark water offers into trees.
Then I looked again, with midnight thoughts,
At the rowans surrounding.- And then beyond all thought,
Far into the night, and past night to coming dawn.-
I looked into my mirror and hoped Spring again
Would wake it as full of fears as it had been.
Would Not Have
On an uneven roof comes midsummer's chore
To clear the flue that had all winter roared-
A core of darkness with a throat of fire
Soaring to a speech of sparks that suspires-
White-hot fleets into a world of frost,
A second set of constellations we may cross.
I cleaned with broom and water, a working witch
Fouled by the labor black as a sewer ditch,
Like pulling up a fountain by its roots
That has no cleaner wet than velvet soot;
Every swish and lunge bade me be a bear
Until an evening's scrub would wash me clear.
I heard a cry like a baby's squeak.
A bat. Something in me that could not speak,
But saw two eyes like spider's eyes to scare,
Gave the thought: I would not have him here.
Six million years had put him in his cave.
I sought to sweep him with the broom I waved.
We were too much strangers for the bat to fear
Untoward intentions in my coming near;
Our worlds were not close enough to make us foes;
(Hate's a thing of nearness as things go.)
I would not have him there, and thought to undo him
With a startlement of fire out of season.
So I built a fire to double summer,
Stood by the heat-wavered flue, heard it hum,
And waited like a cat for what would come.
In a laugh of wings, in a ring of fire,
What I saw fly out was neither foul nor fair
But a living creature of the living air.
(Face to face, my face was larger.)
I would not have.... I knew I did not want
Such rapid flapping in my fireside thoughts.
When I look to flame, I demand to dream
Upon flame's own ever-changing theme;
Seeing how it prefigures in earnest night
The glare of summer, the stars' own light.
Because altered fire refused to move him,
I called him a black clot devoid of reason.
I used a poison. (I would not have him there.)
Congealing and winging in the summer air-
He fell out indefinite as a spill of inks
Dark enough to make me think.
A Wood to Sing Through
Our daily catbird in the parking lot,
Half-unknowing his danger where he stood,
Sang out eyes-shut atop a cinder block.
A blue abandoned Cougar, its purr removed,
(Haunted all last night by a pregnant stray
Hunkering into home in her birthing mood)
Had a dead crow's feathers like an exploded toy
Puffed from under a moveless wheel hoved tight,
Feeding what must come, at most, in a day.
Obliquely by her belly kept from being quite upright,
In cotton fog half-obscuring our shared world,
The mottled cat sat motionless on one stripe.
The catbird's territory song searched vacant grounds
That should have had a wood to sing through,
Not learned to be inured to all our sounds.
I wondered how I'd feel with the catbird shooed,
Mother-cat nursing uncurled by the curb,
Patched kittens purling dust just where he flew.
Silent in the silence man-made things disturb,
The cat, too quick for me to see, pounced once,-
And the catbird, leapt to asphalt eaves, sang on.
A Bronze Creeper
I had come too long down my own way now
To trouble with what signs dreamed appearing:
The simple-minded purpose of an arrow
An impertinence of trivial clarity
Pointed only to waves of vines that drowned it,
Getting more vine-entangled the more I walked-
Nature's green indifference a match to man's.
Mourning doves cooed the midday shadows soft.
I left all plans behind me and dropped intent
Back with those signs, and leaned my father's valise
Initialed in cursive gold against the last.
I would pick it up when I returned to reasons,
Sagging in voluptuous vines with a leather sigh.
Mourning doves cooed the gathering shadows soft
Under wavery arms of patchwork sycamores
Deep in the broken bounty of the wood
Where no sand-path of man or dog had stepped
To interrupt the easy gloom of leaves;
Indian Pipe and a fungus stump gave
A heavy odor the nose ignored.
The mockingbird with enviable ear
Talked to all his neighbors in their own voice,
As if by their sharing some outward wail
They shared some single mystery at source.
Half a sycamore had blown down dry
Like a thrown blade-switch in an electric storm;
Vines evinced no interest in its half-dead form,
But rode the living half half-way high.
There were whirlpools of vines in those woods,
Shunted hard aside all the time I walked them.
A bronze creeper takes its own time in ascent,
Using a tree's own strength against it,
Snake-slow up to the tree's own lofty end,
Like cloud gone everywhere or like climbing fire;
But more I think like fire than cloud
Or perhaps a fiery cloud come down
To threaten all that grew up from ground.
The wires that fuse back from its leaves
Tighten years against the tree-spine in a grip
To shadow-out leaves that block the creeper's light.
A grip once light as feathers, lighter.-
Yet shows the trick of closing tighter,
Hand over hand, or leaf over leaf
More properly, it makes its imagined height
Match the trunk's achievement grown up right.
They share a center that discernment sees.
But the outline, like a helix spun, begins
To burr and blur like an old old man
Who can't hold even his own old name in mind,
Until all the limbs lay overtaken
By a wilder interposing dark of green
That turns dry birdsnests out to ground
Or catches in an interlace of palms
Small-nippled nuts before the autumn-fall
Drops them to the danger of maturing.
How many years had I grown outbound to here?
I hear my own father laugh and shake his head
At nothing I had thought, or at something
So far back it was plain invisible to me.
Well, now perhaps I can sense the why:
We had been let drop to grow, for reasons not
Our own- chance, or even evil, occurrence
With nothing of our own doing in it.
We're left with nothing else to do but grow;
What better purpose has a laugh than sensing that?
Among a friendly roundelay of fieldgrass,
A sycamore has its life-plan laid out
From the first frond of its setting forth,
Unaware of how its reeled-in corkscrew
Waits to over-awe and overshadow all.
The grasses murmur nothing all day but sun.
Nor does the sycamore seem to posit
How its holding out beneath that summer sun
Provides just the slip of shade the creeper
In all its years of greenly slithering
Has learned to need. Once I came upon a giant
Sycamore sequestered in a neck of wood
Crowded as town, so hazed-over with bronze
Filaments root to crown, it seemed on fire-
The triumphal creeper self-inwound above
Even the crown of the vine-engulfed tree.
All the trees surrounding were backed away
As their live skirts might catch- but the effect
Was only the halo-emptiness of life
The dead tree had claimed in adoration of sun,
The slow outward longing of love's eternal
Intertwine of warmness and warmed being.
Here was a love affair too cruel to countenance
One side all terribly requited want,
The other too reserved to ever push,
And that was another story out of life.
I knew down in that those who would not stand
Oftimes retained the power of hands
And, seeming weak as lace, still could strangle.
This courtship would have no day in court;
A long struggle, and a single end.-
The corpse had a solemness, I'll give it that,
The way a bonfire dies down to ashes
And obedience. But it had no dignity,
Nothing of itself amid the choke and flame.
Bole and limbs still held themselves, riddled through
With spiny roots that cared nothing but to use.
A squirrel confused the leaves for a desperate hour
And then chewed clear. The creeper had no use
For birds, lightest true climbers of the wood,
And to their coming down proffered a net.
The creeper was everywhere and was everything.
We do not know our purpose, but onward creep
As a mood may creep day to day on fire
Behind our walls, knowing nothing but to creep.
These flamy bronzes too, were too desperate
Of their own old man's hairy grip and perch
To hazard seed beyond their flame in flowering;
What flowers came of that flame showed too poor
And too few to drop the match-head seeds.
New life must only smolder here this season,
However wary the trees of renewing smokes,
Thrown scarves to scar and catch the throat,
And envelope a head made blind to its own good.
The creeper, for all its bronze-fire threat,
Had no enemy but itself, -heh, -
And spent its life in extending tendrils
Of itself, all green willfulness and dare
Hurling its shapeless metaphor outbound
To some self-supporting taproot, to be
That tree, that life, if but for a time-
Stretching and warping its bare being
To another's bones, the way any son
Inherits his father's laugh, and in time
Has his humor, right down to the last laugh.
Aims
Bullets 'oft gang awry'
When we squint with lying eye
At the target we had thought
To level with a shot;
Somewhere along the barrel
Our curving expectation falls
And what is becomes a part
Of what we hope to shoot,
Or perhaps an intervening wind
Has changed beginning and the end.
The future always lies
Somewhere in the 'is,'
Or so the marksman's maxim goes
Hunkered in a bush of rose.
The future always lies
Somewhere in the 'is'
Our eyes are scouting now;
Hope and here intermix somehow,
Nor get pulled apart
Unless our killing art
Delivers to the shaping thought
The dead end we had sought.
The philosopher with his carcass
Dispenses with his guesses
- What would be now is,
And this is happiness.
Nor does he as he eats inquire
"What if I had not fired...."
Or if a speck of dust had interposed
Between his sightline and his nose.
All the dedication of his thought
Goes to digestion of what he's brought
From the wild field, as able,
To his domesticated table.
Not until quick hunger comes again
Will his thoughts curve and turn
To all the 'Ifs' of chance
That can cancel out his choice
And send aim or word awry
In the hunted day.
Existentialist Dilemma
The dilemma of doing's to 'have done,'
And by choosing from Many be left with One.
Addition's chief mischief is dubbed a sum;
The unwary mistake it for a total solution.
The wise contend that all is confusion,
Or at best a formal intuition.
To act presumes belief, or so I'm told,
And am pointed onward, backward, or upward to God,
(And reminded not to mind the length of the odds).
The less done the better is my subtractive reaction.
I'm not quite afraid to feel quite forsaken,
(Except that, of course, I might be mistaken).
One thought is left me, with which I'd begun:
"The dilemma of doing's to 'have done.'"
Good and its Opposite
There's a rhyme at the joint point of knowing.
There's a place, a way of saying, that clearly makes
"Good" and it opposite resonate, and even ring
The way a glass cries out when struck-
Sharing its invisible essence like a singer.
Glasses, brim to abyss, display a range
Of interchanging tones to the ringer
Who bangs the magnanimous Strange.
Does a sip sip the Good, or a sip sip the Bad?
Either way the song sways, half-empty, half-full.
The opposite of Good's not Bad, but
Odd, whose disobedient music's beautiful.
What words can we sing, for the Good, for the Odd,
That will make them ring out, spoon-struck, like God?
The Mental Garden
A rambling meadow scenery
Rank with irrigated greenery,
Showed a semi-sawed-off double dozen
Of saplings stretched since Spring, some
Waist-high to heaven, that autumn's
Clear-cut mowing would take care of
(Not much of disordered growth
Survives the park's enforced swath).
Nature's mistakes seed a scene
With a richer oddness than she means.
Plants that harbour high ambitions
Need time and shade for such positions.
Ignore me long enough, and I might
Just get to be something; kids grow at night.
Adults enlarge by thinking through
(So I've heard said, and think it true).
A modest eraser can undo
A millennium's gain by rubbing through.
I bite my new ones down to wood
And trust to cross-outs, understood
Arrows, and wild whole-page insertions.
Erasure's just too much exertion
And never pays for the lost word
That down the line might have proved good.
Human education is a crop
Best harvested without a lop.
Shapely shape the upward trees
By what mind kens, and heart perceives.
The grandest but add leaf to leaf
To make their roundness right-
Just so the round of human life
Requires a necessary height.
Definitely
In the right angle of a fence
Definitions first commence
To lock us into making sense.
By running round and round a thing
With a tape measure for a string
We hobble it to give us wings.
Its only from our having tried
To live without a why inside,
Or, like a mystic pray tongue-tied,
That we have ever given thought
To holding in what we have got
To see what we've done without.
Chain Chain Chain
Once upon a time, I had slightly
Bruised my fingerend in tying
Unneedful knots too brutally.
The knots were sonnets, gracefully
Losing bout by bout in rhyming,
Despite my careful scratching
That annulled no spot of itching.
I had not thought that writing
Was so much like fighting
Or two witches bitching
So under-epidermally.
I stayed at it relentlessly
Tying tying tying
Every
Musing,
Bruising
Blossom stylistically.
The daisy-
Chain was for no one particularly
(Or perhaps I am lying)
You know how things get tangly
When we practice firstly....
The lengthening
String of words got too stringy
And self-involved in singing
That should have taken flight more singly
By whistling
Unconcernedly
And not too self-consciously,
The way
A clumsy
Kite, so sprightly
Can climb all day
By dodging
More effortful breezes, never too longly
Lodging,
Never aloft too lingeringly
Until the crisis of a knot too thoughtfully
Unthoughtful cripples the so skyey
Thingy
Into a crooked tree.
Introrse Proportions
A clouded day in a warm week
Is little, in a whole month a week
Of rain, sans weekends, is OK;
A covered month of storm and soak
Is welcome in a year of weather
That puts sunburns and hurricanes together.
So when an inner barometer
Flails
from hails and rain
to shine and sweeter
And darkly back again
To damnably, darkly fail.... whatever.
Lucid Interval
You are the thing I love, no lie.
You have given me despair.
I don't know how, I don't know why,
But my faith has come from there.
I key my verse on my hearse's side:
"All our knowing burns down to 'Why?'"
-Nor give a fuck about my verses' pride
That they may live, and I must die.
Evening Argument
i. She
A slippery sense of mental decay
sharpens the knives
and the wits of the wives
In drawers long locked away.
The sunset casts a spurious look
to calm the unmentionable ache
in my unmentionable place
With a Hallmark sort of trick.
But the hidden hurt must out;
the curse must make its choice,
match inner and outer voice,
And let the quiet heart once shout.
ii. He
Why are you so quiet?
What have I done?
Silence mounts the table
urgent as a gun.
All night we've argued mazes
and all night the night before:
We see ourselves in the window glazing
dart glances at the door.
You'd glad be shut of me-
I'll be quit of you, I swear-
And in the going horse of voice and voice
we bed each other on a dare.
Roundabout
I had stopped myself at noon, amused
On an abandoned track that moved
Through a wood no longer used,
Through waste acres of a watershed
Cloven by a regular runoff where
Clarity was wildered by wild briars.
Until a hidden water's hissing
Showed that something else was missing,
One never would have wondered
That anything there had harkened
At the juncture where briars darkened
As if by deepness of the angle
At the midmost of their tangle.
Something moved beneath the plane
Where the interrupted track regains
The far oasis of the wood,
Something going crossways where I stood,
Crossways to my onward motion.
I stood without a blessed notion.
At the very precipice I paused,
And waited to see if what had caused
Me to arrive there once
Would cause me to hurry further on.
I listened to what I could not see,
Water in the dirt continuously
Spattering against such hazards
As its pattering traversed.
I spied the farther side, which seemed
Indifferently like where I was indeed,
A wood moving on to wood,
A leafy dark neither bad nor good.
A tree, once proud upon its ridge,
Lay translated into a bridge
At my left, and the track repeated
Its pattern as it retreated
Past the tree's, an oak's, fallen crown
Stripped to wires on the farther ground.
I put my foot, and it seemed
To hold upon a mossy cloud
With just a warning creak or two
That subsided like morning dew.
Another step, another crack
And I was airbourne along my track,
And the whispered waters loudened
To an almost-roar unshrouded.
This was something, then, a place
Unusual in the closed-in space
That gives woods a closet feel
Of uncomfort, of bodies real
But mentally disposed of,
The way we take our clothes off
And refuse to see them wrinkle
Any longer as real people.
Had the slope been undermined,
Had the tree been dealt an ill-timed
Blow by lightning an age before
My feet had brought me to this shore?
Whatever the history, I took
A naturalist's close firsthand look
At the detail that feeds the mind
When mind's to thinking first inclined
And all the world's a wonder
As perpetual as thunder.
There's an art, a large art, of course,
Comprehended in just looking close.
The moss had browned to gold, it seemed
Unfed by any mist or stream
Despite the pounding of the sound
That made a pulsing all around
Centered in my ears. Still firm,-
So then, just a dry summer's harm,
No more, curable by summer storm
Soaking live roots back to greenness,
The dieback of a season's meanness.
An ant with an aphid hat hurried by
Anxious of her fresh supply.
Another step, another, and hushed
Came the crumble where foot had crushed
The intradose of a termite arch
(Found more often in a fallen larch);
A colony of teeth in such bone-hard wood!
Whether bored, or because they could,
I could not know, and understood
That even in a thing so small
I myself could not measure all
By limits of my comprehension.
But now, done with desecration,
(Or, more optimistically,
Aeration of the tree)
They left to found another nation
With colonists from this way-station
Who pack up their idea of home
And take it with them where they roam.
And now the whole tree was hollow,
And houseless hoot owls inward followed.
Also into this interesting
Emptiness, came bees without a sting,
Carpenter bees who hustled and tore
Termite tunnels to a larger bore
For their solitary parlors
Conveniently near both briars
And water. Who'd've thought there'd be
So much of life in so dead a tree?
I had gone down upon my knees
In my investigation, pleased
To spend my day in something other
Than myself. I wondered whether,
As I stood again on what stood
No more, if I should include
What was father on out there
Now I had come thus far to stare;
My thoughts surrounded me like fog
In the middle of the ruined log,
As unsteady of my footing there
As unsure of my going.... Where?
I peered a step just past my place
And conjectured farther on a pace;
The path behind was twice the gauge
As the dwindled path on the next stage.
It seemed that most upon this track
Had come this far to double back.
Well, I never have had more regard
For that stepper Kiekegaard
Than for my other walkers in the wood,
Intending to walk on as they should,
Instead walking only as they do.
I kicked a little nothing from my shoe
And made my balance come and go,
Unsteady and unstable how to go,
Uncertain and unsure how to know,
Kicked a something from my other shoe,
And in the end continued onward, too,
As few had chosen here to do,
As all who are not only bones may do.
To keep unlost, as doubt to doubt
You wander roundabout your route,
Simply do not doubt your doubt.
Grave Spaces
The town blind behind, blind woods ahead,
And a whitened graveyard here.
I stood alone with my luminous dread
In the dying of the year.
From the midnight hill I'd seen below
Huddled graves, yet each alone.
And here and there in the hollow, low,
A dent in snow without a stone.
Poplars dropped odd shadows, the moon
Dropped a mood. Whatever talk may tell
In me had talked-out too soon.
I brushed a small glow from where it fell.
The stony concentration of a face
Shone angel no longer- here the snow
Wears his worn-out years of grace
To the blankness of his soul.
His name's gone out like shopfront lights,
His verse survives by guesses.
What had brought me here was what night
Had done with my distress.
I walked out from being
And walked to having been;
Living was only seeing,
Death's just having seen.
The bell was black and the time that tolled
Was an absence in my heart.
Into those bleak letter-gaps, I had rolled
For all my part.
Wintering by the Atlantic
A midnight ocean and a stippled snow
Greyly perceived from a rail I know
Shared the grainy dark of here and nearer.
What water was above me seemed uncertainer.
What rolled in mist below rolled solider.
As snow and snow will in snowing meet,
What slid down danced into a wild sleet
And randomly clung, each to each,
Resisting ocean's disassembling touch
That undoes the individual who falls
And in that fall returns to ocean's all.
I could not tell just what my seeing meant
Nor how long soundless darkness had been lent;
There was nothing there in what was of sky,
No help of light to help say why,
Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss
That ended each self-formed singleness
Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold.
They did not fall because they had been told.
They fell because there was nothing else to do
But fall, and this the ocean knew.
Late-Flowering Bush
Beyond the serious torches of several cypress trees,
The dusty chirrup chirrup of militant cicadas,
The noble solitude of a solid lonely oak
Clattering his leaves at the sun over a bleached field
That balanced his high growth by spreading out,
Desert-like and hot at noon, and all afternoon
Until the evening made them equal sharers
Of one shade, a blackness welled up from the root.
Beyond all this, beyond the blushing bluish grasses
And inner darkness of some evergreens out right,
I thought to see what seemed from the county road
A sweet hilarious patch of beech, tittering
Among more sober rowans, and walked on
Farther than I had thought at first to do.
A forest darkness hustled, a coat atop my coat.
And so I came upon a late-flowering bush
Hidden deeper in among more doubtful darks,
Taller and elder, more august and up high.
It was way out of season, much too too late,
Yet full of hopeful blossom regardless
Of the season's clock; it kept its time its own-
Before the long sharpness of the frost that tapered
In shadows till midday, it held its whites aloft.
The flowering bush was a thing itself, alone,
Clotted with milky flowers as large as fists
As if to claim a space among the harder barks,
As a child will feel more brave at midnight,
Startled from a nightmare, to smile in the dark,
Or as a father walks twice round and round
A house, for proof he really has a home.
The flowers asked for bees that would not come
To so shaded an interior, whose buzzed instincts
Could not guess to lead them there, too far
From the sugary buttercups and tigerlilies of the field;
The bees were busy with their honeys and their hives,
Too industrious to bother with this thing alone.
I wondered what had made the seed drop here
All those years ago when this bush first pipped.
Had some panicked thrush raced bewildered through the thick,
Or been carried dead by some hawk, and dropped?
How had the seed, which loved the sun, found
Filtered light to endure, in the coolness all about?
Had some tree burned out and a dormant seed
Been sprung, hot from its casing, into germination?
I'd known an odd old fellow who had not
Half begun to sing until he was half past eighty,
And his voice as awful as an old phonograph;
But still he sung, and mostly pleased himself of late,
And showed the lyric shavings of sharpened wit
To any too-curious; those words were his fists.
Above us all in the little clearing, the dull touch
Of a near cloud's inner-lighted immanence
Broadened into mystery over man and bush.
Something happened then, I did not know
How much until years afterward had stretched
My roots into some new dark flowing underneath.
But then, I did not know what I would become,
And, never having intended to be there once at all,
And having forgotten all about the patch of beech
That had first sent me off into the dark,
I shook my head at the flowering bush and took off.
A Winter Eden
A soft possible snow had descended
And let the moon climb down from the sky.
The world lay in whiteness without witness or end.
Snow lay on the tree-limbs like ladder-rungs rounded
And softened my cold need for why.
Not a blank footstep, not a note of sound
Intruded on the marvelous sight.
All creatures, all creation slept like the ground,
As though no other dark did our dark surround.
A winter Eden and a winter night.
And then I thought: It is as if some other than
The snow had snowed down or in,
Coldly immune to storm or reason.
Each hour I held that thought held only harm.
I searched the moon-snow transfigured farm.
The fallen night I found, I found no ease in.
Wet Weather Promise
Breathing close, I notice our airs
Have lately come as close to tears
As any injured feeling bears
A human made alone by fear.
Already this mist's been here three days,
Immune to our creator's rays;
Where it came from it did not say.
It has not gone again today.
Heaviness lingers on every bush,
Limned in weak whiteness near as touch;
All that moves, moves only to hush.
And, as I said, it makes my breathing close.
Once I was unsure of whether
Eyes and earth could share a weather,
Despite our eons so close together;
Now I know, I should feel it better.
Milk-Weed
A milkweed has it in it to become
Something, and challenges the field
With myriad pods above the other stalks,
And then there's the whiteness, all that whiteness,
Clumped and disparate with the wind slow,
A slow diaspora that struggles mostly
Into our reservoir just there, or plants its flag
In the same field that served as home.
There's that in us as well that never waits,
That wants out,- and gets out too,- past fields
It blows out onward always in the mind,
Same as the milkweed taken root and risen
To spurn its soil, and dies in seeding out its thought;
Just so, our light cares, light temptations
Lift out and abandon us, and we wish it so.
Some other valley's always more our sort,
Some other sunset igniting through the gorse.
Hand me that dead milkweed stem you've
Yanked up there- thanks. See how the lips
Have gone to beaks with vomiting dreams
All day long and under the August sun?
Here's one deep-in hasn't the heart for escape,
For leaving the only home its ever known;
No matter if that home is dead or soon to die,
Home is home. There's a reach in the design,
Wispy almost-nothing pulled to this seed
Soft as a moth, perfect for an escape
Once the pod's blown out, hardened to scrap-
Necessary for these feathers to move on
Into the endless. Rise after rise
Lies past this embankment of peaches, straight on
To the sea out somewhere, toward the Pacific perhaps
To judge by the wind. Never thought of it,
Although I suppose we all crawled from there,
But that's one home not hardened yet,
Not the sea, not yet, or if it had,
Something else has troubled it back to life.
The Compass Rose
I ride the night-yard's rose bush like a saddle,
Burning to be nearer what shines afar,
And visit all the dreaming stars for marvel,
My rose and I still waking where we are.
All below is lost, I believe in what's above.
Unburied from sleep, I and my heart arose-
As full of feeling as empty of self, they say.
But knowing myself as I know my yard and rose,
I say, "Losing finds all again; there is a way."
Twenty years about both house and bush I've spent;
Twenty years dreaming to the rose-soft summit
Where the sun arises a rose and sets a rose.
Having gone round in love, I return to love;
I wake to see where my rose-dreaming goes.
My compass rose is cunning, her roots are deep.
I dream the dream I need when I dream of sleep.
The self is buried, and its roots are mossed.
Roots are what come of being lost.
finis
This quick collection saved my life.
June 11th - June 28th 2001
