Selected Poems, 1956-1968 Read online

  And when the needle grins bloodlessly in his cheek

  he will come to know how beautiful it is

  to be loved by a madwoman.

  And I do not gladly wait the years

  for the ocean to discover and rust your face

  as it has all of history's beacons

  that have turned their gold and stone to water's onslaught,

  I 9

  for then your letters too rot with ocean's logic

  and my fingernails are long enough

  to tear the stitches from my throat.

  W H E N T H I S A M E R I C A N W O M A N

  When this American woman,

  whose thighs are bound in casual red cloth,

  comes thundering past my sitting-place

  like a forest-burning Mongol tribe,

  the city is ravished

  and brittle buildings of a hundred years

  splash into the street;

  and my eyes are burnt

  for the embroidered Chinese girls,

  already old,

  and so small between the thin pines

  on these enormous landscapes,

  that if you turn your head

  they are lost for hours.

  10 1

  S O N G

  The naked weeping girl

  is thinking of my name

  turning my bronze name

  over and over

  with the thousand fingers

  of her body

  anointing her shoulders

  with the remembered odour

  of my skin

  0 I am the general

  in her history

  over the fields

  driving the great horses

  dressed in gold cloth

  wind on my breastplate

  sun in my belly

  May soft birds

  soft as a story to her eyes

  protect her face

  from my enemies

  and vicious birds

  whose sharp wings

  were forged in metal oceans

  guard her room

  from my assassins

  And night deal gently with her

  high stars maintain the whiteness

  of her uncovered flesh

  I n

  And may my bronze name

  touch always her thousand fingers

  grow brighter with her weeping

  until I am fixed like a galaxy

  and memorized

  in her secret and fragile skies.

  THESE HEROICS

  If I had a shining head

  and people turned to stare at me

  in the streetcars;

  and I could stretch my body

  through the bright water

  and keep abreast of fish and water snakes;

  if I could ruin my feathers

  in flight before the sun;

  do you think that I would remain in this room,

  reciting poems to you,

  and making outrageous dreams

  with the smallest movements of your mouth?

  12 1

  LOVERS

  During the first pogrom they

  Met behind the ruins of their homes­

  Sweet merchants trading: her love

  For a history-full of poems.

  And at the hot ovens they

  Cunningly managed a brief

  Kiss before the soldier came

  To knock out her golden teeth.

  And in the furnace itself

  As the flames flamed higher,

  He tried to kiss her burning breasts

  As she burned in the fire.

  Later he often wondered:

  Was their barter completed?

  While men around him plundered

  And knew he had been cheated.

  I 13

  T H E W A R R I O R B O A T S

  The warrior boats from Portugal

  Strain at piers with ribs exposed

  And seagull generations fall

  Through the wood anatomy

  But in the town, the town

  Their passion unimpaired

  The beautiful dead crewmen

  Go climbing in the lanes

  Boasting poems and bitten coins

  Handsome bastards

  What do they care

  If the Empire has withered

  To half a peninsula

  If the Queen has the King's Adviser

  For her last and seventh lover

  Their maps have not changed

  Thighs still are white and warm

  New boundaries have not altered

  The marvellous landscape of bosoms

  Nor a Congress relegated the red mouth

  To a foreign district

  Then let the ships disintegrate

  At the edge of the land

  The gulls will find another place to die

  Let the home ports put on mourning

  14 I

  And little clerks

  Complete the necessary papers

  But you swagger on, my enemy sailors

  Go climbing in the lanes

  Boasting your poems and bitten coins

  Go knocking on all the windows of the town

  At one place you will find my love

  Asleep and waiting

  And I cannot know how long

  She has dreamed of all of you

  Oh remove my coat gently

  From her shoulders.

  I 15

  L E T T ER.

  How you murdered your family

  means nothing to me

  as your mouth moves across my body

  And I know your dreams

  of crumbling cities and galloping horses

  of the sun coming too close

  and the night never ending

  but these mean nothing to me

  beside your body

  I know that outside a war is raging

  that you issue orders

  that babies are smothered and generals beheaded

  but blood means nothing to me

  it does not disturb your flesh

  tasting blood on your tongue

  does not shock me

  as my arms grow into your hair

  Do not think I do not understand

  what happens

  after the troops have been massacred

  and the harlots put to the sword

  And I write this only to rob you

  16 1

  that when one morning my head

  hangs dripping with the other generals

  from your house gate

  that all this was anticipated

  and so you will know that it meant nothing to me.

  I 17

  P A G A N S

  With all Greek heroes

  swarming around my shoulders,

  I perverted the Golem formula

  and fashioned you from grass,

  using oaths of cruel children

  for my father's chant.

  0 pass by, I challenged you

  and gods in their approval

  rustled my hair with marble hands,

  and you approached slowly

  with all the pain of a thousand-year statue

  breaking into life.

  I thought you perished

  at our first touch

  (for in my hand I held a fragment

  of a French cathedral

  and in the air a man spoke to birds

  and everywhere

  the dangerous smell of old Italian flesh) .

  But yesterday while children

  slew each other in a dozen games,

  I heard you wandering through grass

  and watched you glare (0 Dante)

  where I had stood.

  I know how our coarse grass

  mutilates your feet,

  how the city traffic

  echoes all his sonnets

  !8 I

  and how you lea
n for hours

  at the cemetery gates.

  Dear friend, I have searched all night

  through each burnt paper,

  but I fear I will never find

  the formula to let you die.

  I 1 9

  SONG

  My lover Peterson

  He named me Goldenmouth

  I changed him to a bird

  And he migrated south

  My lover Frederick

  Wrote sonnets to my breast

  I changed him to a horse

  And he galloped west

  My lover Levite

  He named me Biuerfeast

  I changed him to a serpent

  And he wriggled east

  My lover I forget

  He named me Death

  I changed him to a catfish

  And he swam north

  My lover I imagine

  He cannot form a name

  I'll nestle in his fur

  And never be to blame.

  20 1

  P R A Y E R F O R S U N S E T

  The sun is tangled

  in black branches,

  raving like Absalom

  between sky and water,

  struggling through the dark terebinth

  to commit its daily suicide.

  Now, slowly, the sea consumes it,

  leaving a glistening wound

  on the water,

  a red scar on the horizon;

  In darkness

  I set out for home,

  terrified by the clash of wind on grass,

  and the victory cry of weeds and water.

  Is there no Joab for tomorrow night,

  with three darts

  and a great heap of stones?

  1 2 1

  B A L L A D

  He pulled a flower

  out o£ the moss

  and struggled past soldiers

  to stand a t the cross.

  He dipped the flower

  into a wound

  and hoped that a garden

  would grow in his hand.

  The hanging man shivered

  at this gentle thrust

  and ripped his flesh

  from the flower's touch,

  and said in a voice

  they had not heard,

  "Will petals find roots

  in the wounds where I bleed?

  "Will minstrels learn songs

  from a tongue which is torn

  and sick be made whole

  through rents in my skin?"

  The people knew something

  like a god had spoken

  and stared with fear

  at the nails they had driven.

  And they fell on the man

  with spear and knife

  22 1

  to honour the voice

  with a sacrifice.

  0 the hanging man

  had words for the crowd

  but he was tired

  and the prayers were loud.

  He thought of islands

  alone in the sea

  and sea water bathing

  dark roots of each tree;

  of tidal waves lunging

  over the land,

  over these crosses

  these hills and this man.

  He thought of towns

  and fields of wheat,

  of men and this man

  but he could not speak.

  0 they hid two bodies

  behind a stone;

  day became night

  and the crowd went home.

  And men from Golgotha

  assure me that still

  gardeners in vain

  pour blood in that soil.

  1 23

  S A I N T C A T H E R I N E S T R E E T

  Towering black nuns frighten us

  as they come lumbering down the tramway aisle

  amulets and talismans caught in careful fingers

  promising plagues for an imprudent glance

  So we bow our places away

  the price of an indulgence

  How may we be saints and live in golden coffins

  Who will leave on our stone shelves

  pathetic notes for intervention

  How may we be calm marble gods at ocean altars

  Who will murder us for some high reason

  There are no ordeals

  Fire and water have passed from the wizards' hands

  We cannot torture or be tortured

  Our eyes are worthless to an inquisitor's heel

  No prince will waste hot lead

  or build a spiked casket for us

  Once with a flaming belly she danced upon a green road

  Move your hand slowly through a cobweb

  and make drifting strings for puppets

  Now the tambourines are dull

  at her lifted skirt boys study cigarette stubs

  no one is jealous of her body

  We would bathe in a free river

  but the lepers in some spiteful gesture

  have suicided in the water

  24 I

  and all the swollen quiet bodies crowd the other

  prey for a fearless thief or beggar

  How can we love and pray

  when at our lovers' arms

  we hear the damp bells of them

  who once took bitter alms

  but now float quietly away

  Will no one carve from our bodies a white cross

  for a wind-tom mountain

  or was that forsaken man's pain

  enough to end all passion

  Are those dry faces and hands we see

  all the flesh there is of nuns

  Are they really clever non-excreting tapestries

  prepared by skillful eunuchs

  for our trembling friends

  I 25

  B A L L A D

  My lady was found mutilated

  in a Mountain Street boarding house.

  My lady was a tall slender love,

  like one of Tennyson's girls,

  and you always imagined her erect on a thoroughbred

  in someone's private forest.

  But there she was,

  naked on an old bed, knife slashes

  across her breasts, legs badly cut up:

  Dead two days.

  They promised me an early conviction.

  We will eavesdrop on the adolescents

  examining pocket-book covers in drugstores.

  We will note the broadest smiles at torture scenes

  in movie houses.

  We will watch the old men in Dominion Square

  follow with their eyes

  the secretaries from the Sun Life at five-thirty

  Perhaps the tabloids alarmed him.

  Whoever he was the young man came alone

  to see the frightened blonde have her blouse

  ripped away by anonymous hands;

  the person guarded his mouth

  who saw the poker blacken the eyes

  of the Roman prisoner;

  the old man pretended to wind his pocket-watch

  The man was never discovered.

  There are so many cities!

  so many knew of my lady and her beauty.

  26 1

  Perhaps he came fmm Toronto, a half-crazed man

  looking for some Sunday love;

  or a vicious poet stranded too long in Winnipeg;

  or a Nova Scotian fleeing from the rocks and preachers

  Everyone knew my lady

  fmm the movies and art-galleries,

  Body from Goldwyn. Botticelli had drawn her long limbs_

  Rossetti the full mouth.

  Ingres had coloured her skin.

  She should not have walked so bravely

  through the streets.

  After all, that was the Marian year, the year

  the rabbis emerged fmm their desert exile, the year

  the people were inflam
ed by tooth-paste ads

  We buried her in Spring-time.

  The sparrows in the air

  wept that we should hide with earth

  the face of one so fair.

  The flowers they were roses

  and such sweet fragrance gave

  that all my friends were lovers

  and we danced upon her grave_

  I 27

  S U M M E R N I G H T

  The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye

  was bright for my friends bred in close avenues

  of stone, and let us see too much.

  The vast treeless field and huge wounded sky,

  opposing each other like continents,

  made us and our smoking fire quite irrelevant

  between their eternal attitudes.

  We knew we were intruders. Worse. Intruders

  unnoticed and undespised.

  Through orchards of black weeds

  with a sigh the river urged its silver flesh.

  From their damp nests bull-frogs croaked

  warnings, but to each other.

  And occasional birds, in a private grudge,

  flew noiselessly at the moon.

  What could we do? We ran naked into the river,

  but our flesh insulted the thick slow water.

  We tried to sit naked on the stones,

  but they were cold and we soon dressed.

  One squeezed a little human music from his box:

  mostly it was lost in the grass

  where one struggled in an ignorant embrace.

  One argued with the slight old hills

  and the goose-fleshed naked girls, I will not be old.

  One, for his protest, registered a sexual groan.

  And the girl in my arms

  broke suddenly away, and shouted for us all,

  Help! Help! I am alone. But then all subtlety was gone

  and it was stupid to be obvious before the field and sky,

  experts in simplicity. So we fled on the highways,

  in our armoured cars, back to air-conditioned homes.

  T H E F L I E R

  Do not arrange your bright flesh in the sun

  Or shine your limbs, my love, toward this height

  Where basket men and the lame must run, must run

  And grasp at angels in their lovely flight

  With stumps and hooks and artificial skin.

  0 there is nothing in your body's light

  To grow us wings or teach the discipline

  Which starvers know to calm the appetite.

  Understand we might be content to beg

  The clinic of your thighs against the night

  Were there no scars of braces on his leg

  Who sings and wrestles with them in our sight,

  Then climbs the sky, a lover in their band.

  Tell him your warmth, show him your gleaming hand.

  1 29

  P O E M

  I heard of a man

  who says words so beautifully

  that if he only speaks their name

  women give themselves to him.

  If I am dumb beside your body

  while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips

  it is because I hear a man climb stairs