1
The dull days of late October
will not depress me,
although the day's breath shifts
from mild to chill,
although the day's light is sober
as God's judgment,
and my mind is clear and still.
Before this, I have seen
my image shudder when I dipped my hand
into this pool of light. No more.
I have discovered
the unpolluted source of sight.
2
In autumn when the world is golden
under a pewter sky,
I take my Jover riding
once the day's gone by.
I part my legs to hold him
as my arms circle him round
and we ride through the crack of night
rocked to love's harsh sound.
And in morning we awaken
(skin on smooth skin in the honeyed light)
sexed and made ready for the world
by our delight.
3
The man who understood change
read Kafka and got the joke,
heard the laughter of Jesus rising
loud and white as the sun,
felt the sudden chuckle of his fetal child
in his wife's tight ripe womb
and saw the dawn of God
burst a blessing on a parched
and soured world.
He wanted
uncontrollably to shout
but his voice was small,
one mother's child and she no virgin.
He wanted the power to turn heads
like a stripper or a woman
with a snappy stand-up line
but he lacked wisdom.
He lacked wisdom
but he had joy and boy
o boy was it a bubbly
fruit round o in his
singing o my lord
I love what grass and flesh
have made, sang the man
who knew that he
like everything must change.
Accord
The man who understood change
in autumn read Kafka
when the world is golden and
got the joke under a pewter
sky I heard the laughter
of Jesus riding rising once the
day's gone by loud and white
as the sun I part my legs
to hold him felt the tingling
chuckle as my arms circle
him round of his fetal child
and we ride in his wife's
tight ripe womb through
the crack of night and saw the
dawn of God rocked to love's
harsh sound and in morning
burst a blessing on a parched
and we awaken soured world
skin on smooth skin he wanted
uncontrollably to shout in the
honeyed light but his voice
was small sexed and made ready
one mother's child and she
no virgin by our delight.
Figure 1
Take the poem III: Snapshots
and the poem IV: Slapped Awakening
and the poem IV: The Man With Bushy Eyebrows
and the poem V: For Grace Paely.
Combine, shift, spin, and register
the plangent and discordant tones
they make as words and images scrape
and glance. Imagine an iron fence--
plain iron slats painted black--
bend it round the corner of a lawn.
Get in your car or on foot go slowly by.
The movement and the animal
persistence of your eye
will shimmer dead metal into
moire patterns, the continuous
turbulence that makes light dance
in silk. This conjunction
of movement and chance makes ideas
real and that old sot Plato
perpetually redeemable.
It is so very Mallarme that words
should be laid and spun one on
one on one on one this way.
I: Aeneas, Driven and Vitiated by the Bitterness of Juno, Begins his Descent Fin de Siecle
Where is the beauty I was promised?
Has it died too? A flower too delicate for looking?
It died of touch, too much like you,
a poet who insists on being frail,
and now there's only fragrance,
urging us to sail,
a fleeting odour drawing us
reluctantly through water,
across the shadow line and into darkness
to where we enter, all bejewelled,
in shapes by Moreau, oils by Klimt,
and Virgil is our guide,
as wearily we put to port again, again,
and feel in that fifth book the subtle strain
of the mind's unanchored siren music
and the boat's unyielding weight
and the sand's throat grate against the hull.
Ah rest bruised backs and buttocks here
upon the soft breast of the moss-hemmed beach
where headlands send out hard enfolding arms,
away from traffic, strife, and all alarms,
far far from the cold sea's slow consuming reach.
II: He Emerges into the Twentieth Century; T. S. Eliot Possesses Him
He set his foot upon the sand again,
the sybil beside him was half dead,
her mind still powerful.
The sea had calmed and he remembered Dido.
Regret? Confusion?
In the cooling light,
in the stinging clarity of southern colours,
his eyes more used to darkness,
at first he had no words.
And then he heard a gull or curlew crying,
and thought, The earth goes on, and we
alone are dying.
III: Caravaggio Recalls Everything
Sometimes I think that dreams of yesterday
planted a manic bent within my soul,
a thirst for roots and the obscurer way
to foist me into Adam's secret role.
Cracked frescoed walls reveal the craggy face
Francesca saw. So it was thus I died.
No mourning nations gathered at the place.
Only my sons and she stood by my side.
So simple was his fall it tears my heart
and almost makes me think. . . but I was there.
Her hand upon my neck, I broke apart
the white-fleshed, seeded fruit and we lay bare
in the innocent sun. The evening brought a breeze,
a terror walked the garden, and heart's ease.
Hear how he calls.
The breeze from Pishon bears
his voice across the trees
like precious scent. I feel myself resist, reach out,
and finally relent.
I: Memory
The sunlight on the concrete glistens.
The leads are already dry.
The clouds are white, immobile, scattered
in a blue and perfect sky.
We walk down Downshire Hill past Keats's House
and on the heath we find a gravelled path that
winds through winter trees washed by a paling sun,
white winter bones so chalky that it seems they
never could have lived. We cherish the loneliness
and freedom the winter heath can give, talking
and distracted, one with one, cheating the hungry
night in this bright, bone-brittle ghost of spring.
We always have been wanderers, lovers of walls
and carefully built up places that with the
records of long centuries can penetrate our dreams
and keep our perishing at bay. Through all our
cities--London, Toledo, Florence--there runs
a net, fine interlaces of lonely plazas bleached
by sun, arched bridges, coffee, bustling streets,
lush parks and public gardens. Such entertainments
seize the mind and save the soul from ordinary time,
the dull disease that registers decay.
Where Thames and Tagus and the Arno flow
and make a Europe of a single soul, where
on vistas of the city the late sun washes
recent buildings white, or small bats, more
delicate than birds, greet evening with their
twittering, lives all that ancient pain which
art and history have given the illusion of delight.
The sun this afternoon calms us, teasing
our sluggish bodies into ripeness.
Dulled by winter rain, they seem about
to crack, like fall-set buds, into blossom.
II: Daguerrotype
When I was young, oh, I loved sex.
I walked the streets swollen with passion
and I could find those
who would give me satisfaction.
My body had some beauty
when I was young.
But now that's done.
I walk to work struggling against time
and all my passion's in my mind.
Oh heart you are nested in darkness somewhere
for I can feel warm liquid pulses beating there.
Not you not you but the young
shall inherit the earth.
Their unregarding will engender
giant passions and monstrous dreams
that bear forth is and seems
into a devouring, beautiful, one must be.
Yield, yield and play your part
and make, old son of time,
an understanding heart.
III: After Memory
Why does spring always remind me of
pain? Is it the garbage that people
in the city always layer in the snow
(so that these are the secrets spring unlocks)?
I'll make a snap decision--
abandon the conventionally desperate pose
to tell instead some anecdotes.
A boy lies in the schoolyard
with his smooth cheek pressed on
the gravel pavement and another boy
on his head, the second crowing.
The first cannot believe his weakness
and wishes he were home instead but
there is no pulling loose. Tears of
anger uncontrollably deepen shame and
shut this boy irrevocably out from all
male victories. You reader, tell
his name.
When I turned eleven and began
to ripen (she said) into softly
fruitful curves a thin prick
of a boy called me a fat ass
and when I announced it was
International Women's Day the yawp
was simian. Boys will be boys but
when I was three and watching Dr. Who
my father told me I too had the power.
Amazing how well and long a child believes.
No word ever deceives the speaker. Beneath
the apparent lies the revenant truth that
melting spring unlocks, unblocks, and thereby
(my child)
defeats.
I: Fragrance
What ties us two, child,
is mystery.
I have hurt you,
that I know,
and never can forget.
The soul is a narrow flame
and all too easily bent.
Love's not my element
but is to me as song to breath.
When you do something I resent,
touch turns electric
and each look inflicts a little death.
Yet if I die in every stroke I take,
I die a double death
in every hurt I make.
You have drawn in me
from springs so deep
that light can't touch such waters
without tears.
Who knows what moist fears sleep
beneath the rich soil of our dreams?
Our brains are fertile with a quick green fire,
and where the roots of fear and longing
are truly set,
I will not forget, I will not forget,
and the sun will take up such desire
in blazing arms
and his fierce Love
will transfigure all our harms.
II: For My Daughter
We have made here a little world,
perfect in every part.
And you will leave too soon my dear,
and break my heart.
I see the fire of your mind
arise like another sun.
Your eyes beam joy and brightness.
Your new day has begun.
If I am soil,
my love, let new growth come.
III: Morphosis
Out of the past
with the spoor of a hunting animal,
its mind on death
its senses on the trail,
comes what my parents' parents gave them,
as powerful and vicious
as love seems frail.
Love stalks with naked foot among the bedrooms,
hearing helplessly the baby souls
of my mother and my father wail.
What cataclysm brings us down to this
that you, my father, swollen with age and drink,
are lying on my couch
blistering with sweat
and cursing the heat?
Youth let you be blind
and age seemed equally unkind
until Susannah saw your face.
As purity embraces scars
as life rebounds from the most savage wars
as dark's cold death yields to the birth of stars
so unconsidered love flowed from her
heart and yours
and gulled the beast.
Out of our past
there is little we can save
and yet my child, my father,
what you have made!
I: Boys
When I was just a bit of a boy,
when my sex was short and my memory,
there was for me no brighter joy
than when--my god--my father
stooped to play with me.
His laughing voice roared like a torrent
through the bed's soft hills,
a roar that made mere mothers run.
Oh my delight! I glow, I glow,
in heart, in head, in every limb.
A boy, a sun, a very god with him,
I danced on the joy
that playful finger could ignite.
O father,
your cold world has been fed by
a dwindling rage.
How far you have been! How long!
Your flesh seems melting now with age
and the strength I feared once as a child
now seems no longer strong.
It seems that as I rise you set,
but with the abiding warmth
of a mellowed glory.
I am puzzled, father; I know so little
of your life, and yet
with every boy I see
my sex rehearses and returns to me
your story.
II: Dad
The inevitable arithmetic of income and of chance
was my father's father's lust.
He had hands like hubcaps
that could engulf your hands
and a narrow-eyed East European smile
no one would trust.
I've never seen my father naked
but once when I was sitting at the cottage table
my grandfather walked through
behind my back.
Now my imagination returns repeatedly
like a steady mindless stream
to break around the rock of what I didn't see:
my grandfather firm with age
browned by a Florida sun
standing on a northern summer dock
fishing naked,
a vision centred on a spacious dream.
A cunning rapist of experience,
he had money, advantage, and
women at every door.
Dying of a hospital disease,
he willed my father drink and a sordid confusion
and left him crying in his love
you damned old bugger
and feeling the soft brown rottenness
at life's core.