Selected Poems, 1956-1968 Read online

  and clear his throat outside our door.

  T H E F L Y

  I n his black armour

  the house.fty marched the field

  of Freia's sleeping thighs,

  undisturbed by the soft hand

  which vaguely moved

  to end his exercise.

  And it ruined my day-

  this fly which never planned

  to charm her or to please

  should walk boldly on that ground

  I tried so hard

  to lay my trembling knees.

  W A R N I N G

  If your neighbour disappears

  0 if your neighbour disappears

  The quiet man who raked his lawn

  The girl who always took the sun

  Never mention it to your wife

  Never say at dinner time

  Whatever happened to that man

  Who used to rake his lawn

  Never say to your daughter

  As you're walking home from church

  Funny thing about that girl

  I haven't seen her for a month

  And if your son says to you

  Nobody lives next door

  They've all gone away

  Send him to bed with no supper

  Because it can spread, it can spread

  And one fine evening coming home

  Your wife and daughter and son

  They'll have caught the idea and will be gone.

  S T O R Y

  She tells me a child built her house

  one Spring afternoon,

  but that the child was killed

  crossing the street.

  She says she read it in the newspaper,

  that at the corner of this and this avenue

  a child was run down by an automobile.

  Of course I do not believe her.

  She has built the house herself,

  hung the oranges and coloured beads in the doorways,

  crayoned flowers on the walls.

  She has made the paper things for the wind,

  collected crooked stones for their shadows in the sun,

  fastened yellow and dark balloons to the ceiling.

  Each time I visit her

  she repeats the story of the child to me,

  I never question her. It is important

  to understand one's part in a legend.

  I take my place

  among the paper fish and make-believe docks,

  naming the flowers she has drawn,

  smiling while she paints my head on large clay coins,

  and making a sort of courtly love to her

  when she contemplates her own traffic death.

  3 2 I

  B E S I D E T H E S H E P H E R D

  Beside the shepherd dreams the beast

  Of laying down with lions.

  The youth puts away his singing reed

  And strokes the consecrated flesh.

  Glory, Glory, shouts the grass,

  Shouts the brick, as from the cliff

  The gorgeous fallen sun

  Rolls slowly on the promised city.

  Naked running through the mansion

  The boy with news of the Messiah

  Forgets the message for his father,

  Enjoying the marble against his feet.

  Well finally it has happened,

  Imagines someone in another house,

  Staring one more minute out his window

  Before waking up his wife.

  I 33

  II / The Spice-Box of Earth

  A K I T E I S A V I C T I M

  A kite is a victim you are sure of.

  You Jove it became it pulls

  gentle enough to call you master,

  strong enough to call you fool;

  because it lives

  like a desperate trained falcon

  in the high sweet air,

  and you can always haul it down

  to tame it in your drawer.

  A kite is a fish you have already caught

  in a pool where no fish come,

  so you play him carefully and long,

  and hope he won't give up,

  or the wind die down.

  A kite is the last poem you've written,

  so you give it to the wind,

  but you don't let it go

  until someone finds you

  something else to do.

  A kite is a contract of glory

  that must be made with the sun,

  so you make friends with the field

  the river and the wind,

  then you pray the whole cold night before,

  under the travelling cordless moon,

  to make you worthy and lyric and pure.

  I 37

  T H E F L O W E R S T H A T I L E F T

  I N T H E G R O U N D

  The flowers that I left in the ground,

  that I did not gather for you,

  today I bring them all back,

  to let them grow forever,

  not in poems or marble,

  but where they fell and rotted.

  And the ships in their great stalls,

  huge and transitory as heroes,

  ships I could not captain,

  today I bring them back

  to let them sail forever,

  not in model or ballad,

  but where they were wrecked and scuttled.

  And the child on whose shoulders I stand,

  whose longing I purged

  with public, kingly discipline,

  today I bring him back

  to languish forever,

  not in confession or biography,

  but where he flourished,

  growing sly and hairy.

  It is not malice that draws me away,

  draws me to renunciation, betrayal:

  it is weariness, I go for weariness of thee.

  Gold, ivory, flesh, love, God, blood, moon-

  1 have become the expert of the catalogue.

  My body once so familiar with glory,

  my body has become a museum:

  this part remembered because of o;omeone's mouth,

  this because of a hand,

  this of wetness, this of heat.

  Who owns anything he has not made?

  With your beauty I am as uninvolved

  as with horses' manes and waterfalls.

  This is my last catalogue.

  I breathe the breathless

  I love you, I love you-

  and let you move forever.

  G I F T

  You tell me that silence

  is nearer to peace than poems

  but if for my gift

  I brought you silence

  (for I know silence)

  you would say

  This is not silence

  this is another poem

  and you would hand it back to me.

  I 39

  T H E R E A R E S O M E M E N

  There are some men

  who should have mountains

  to bear their names to time.

  Grave-markers are not high enough

  or green,

  and sons go far away

  to lose the fist

  their father's hand will always seem.

  I had a friend:

  he lived and died in mighty silence

  and with dignity,

  left no book, son, or lover to mourn.

  Nor is this a mourning-song

  but only a naming of this mountain

  on which I walk,

  fragrant, dark, and softly white

  under the pale of mist.

  I name this mountain after him.

  Y O U A L L I N W H I T E

  Whatever cities are brought down,

  I will always bring you poems,

  and the fruit of orchards

  I pass by.

  Strangers in your bed,

  excluded by our grief,r />
  listening to sleep-whispering,

  will hear their passion beautifully explained,

  and weep because they cannot kiss

  your distant face.

  Lovers of my beloved,

  watch how my words put on her lips like clothes,

  how they wear her body like a rare shawl.

  Fruit is pyramided on the window-sill,

  songs flutter against the disappearing wall.

  The sky of the city

  is washed in the fire

  of Lebanese cedar and gold.

  In smoky filigree cages

  the apes and peacocks fret.

  Now the cages do not hold,

  in the burning street man and animal

  perish in each other's arms,

  peacocks drown around the melting throne.

  Is it the king

  who lies beside you listening?

  Is it Solomon or David

  or stuttering Charlemagne?

  I 41

  Is that his crown

  in the suitcase beside your bed?

  When we meet again,

  you all in white,

  I smelling of orchards,

  when we meet-

  But now you awaken,

  and you are tired of this dream.

  Turn toward the sad-eyed man.

  He stayed by you all the night.

  You will have something

  to say to him.

  I W O N D E R H O W M A N Y P E O P L E

  I N T H I S C I T Y

  I wonder how many people in this city

  live in furnished rooms.

  Late at night when I look out at the buildings

  I swear I see a face in every window

  looking back at me,

  and when I turn away

  I wonder how many go back to their desks

  and write this down.

  42 1

  G O B Y B R O O K S

  Go by brooks, love,

  Where fish stare,

  Go by brooks,

  I will pass there.

  Go by rivers,

  Where eels throng,

  Rivers, love,

  I won't be long.

  Go by oceans,

  Where whales sail,

  Oceans, love,

  I will not fail.

  I 43

  T O A T E A C H E R

  Hurt once and for all into silence.

  A long pain ending without a song to prove it.

  Who could stand beside you so close to Eden,

  when you glinted in every eye the held-high razor,

  shivering every ram and son?

  And now the silent loony-bin,

  where the shadows live in the rafters

  like day-weary bats,

  until the turning mind, a radar signal,

  lures them to exaggerate mountain-size

  on the white stone wall

  your tiny limp.

  How can I leave you in such a house?

  Are there no more saints and wizards

  to praise their ways with pupils,

  no more evil to stun with the slap

  of a wet red tongue?

  Did you confuse the Messiah in a mirror

  and rest because he had finally come?

  Let me cry Help beside you, Teacher.

  I have entered under this dark roof

  as fearlessly as an honoured son

  enters his father's house.

  44 I

  I H A V E N O T L I N G E R E D I N

  E U R O P E A N M O N A S T E R I E S

  I have not lingered in European monasteries

  and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights

  who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell;

  I have not parted the grasses

  or purposefully left them thatched.

  I have not released my mind to wander and wait

  in those great distances

  between the snowy mountains and the fishermen,

  like a moon,

  or a shell beneath the moving water.

  I have not held my breath

  so that I might hear the breathing of God,

  or tamed my heartbeat with an exercise,

  or starved for visions.

  Although I have watched him often

  I have not become the heron,

  leaving my body on the shore,

  and I have not become the luminous trout,

  leaving my body in the air.

  I have not worshipped wounds and relics,

  or combs of iron,

  or bodies wrapped and burnt in scrolls.

  I have not been unhappy for ten thousand years.

  During the day I laugh and during the night I sleep.

  My favourite cooks prepare my meals,

  my body cleans and repairs itself,

  and all my work goes well.

  I 45

  I T S W I N G S , JOCKO

  It swings, Jocko,

  but we do not want too much flesh in it.

  Make it like fifteenth-century prayers,

  love with no climax,

  constant love,

  and passion without flesh.

  (Draw those out, Jocko,

  like the long snake from Moses' arm;

  how he must have screamed

  to see a snake come out of him;

  no wonder he never felt holy:

  We want that scream tonight.)

  Lightly, lightly,

  I want to be hungry,

  hungry for food,

  for love, for flesh;

  I want my dreams to be of deprivation,

  gold thorns being drawn from my temples.

  If I am hungry

  then I am great,

  and I love like the passionate scientist

  who knows the sky

  is made only of wave-lengths.

  Now if you want to stand up,

  stand up lightly,

  we'll lightly march around the city.

  I'm behind you, man,

  and the streets are spread with chicks and palms,

  white branches and summer arms.

  We're going through on tiptoe,

  like monks before the Virgin's statue.

  We built the city,

  we drew the water through,

  we hang around the rinks,

  the bars, the festive halls,

  like Brueghel's men.

  Hungry, hungry.

  Come back, Jocko,

  bring it all back for the people here,

  it's your turn now.

  I 47

  C R E D O

  A cloud of grasshoppers

  rose from where we loved

  and passed before the sun.

  I wondered what farms

  they would devour,

  what slave people would go free

  because of them.

  I thought of pyramids overturned,

  of Pharaoh hanging by the feet,

  his body smeared-

  Then my love drew me down

  to conclude what I had begun.

  Later, clusters of fern apart,

  we lay.

  A cloud of grasshoppers

  passed between us and the moon,

  going the other way,

  each one fat and flying slow,

  not hungry for the leaves and ferns

  we rested on below.

  The smell that burning cities give

  was in the air.

  Battalions of the wretched,

  wild with holy promises,

  soon passed our sleeping place;

  they ran among

  the ferns and grass.

  I had two thoughts:

  to leave my love

  and join their wandering,

  join their holiness;

  or take my love

  to the city they had fled:

  That impoverished world

&nb
sp; of boil-afflicted flesh

  and rotting fields

  could not tempt us from each other.

  Our ordinary morning lust

  claimed my body first

  and made me sane.

  I must not betray

  the small oasis where we lie,

  though only for a time.

  It is good to live between

  a ruined house of bondage

  and a holy promised land.

  A cloud of grasshoppers

  will turn another Pharaoh upside-down;

  slaves will build cathedrals

  for other slaves to burn.

  It is good to hear

  the larvae rumbling underground,

  good to learn

  the feet of fierce or humble priests

  trample out the green.

  I 49

  Y O U H A V E T H E L O V E R S

  You have the lovers,

  they are nameless, their histories only for each other,

  and you have the room, the bed and the windows.

  Pretend it is a ritual.

  Unfurl the bed, bury the lovers, blacken the windows,

  let them live in that house for a generation or two.

  No one dares disturb them.

  Visitors in the corridor tip-toe past the long closed door,

  they listen for sounds, for a moan, for a song:

  nothing is heard, not even breathing.

  You know they are not dead,

  you can feel the presence of their intense love.

  Your children grow up, they leave you,

  they have become soldiers and riders.

  Your mate dies after a life of service.

  Who knows you? Who remembers you?

  But in your house a ritual is in progress:

  it is not finished: it needs more people.

  One day the door is opened to the lover's chamber.

  The room has become a dense garden,

  full of colours, smells, sounds you have never known.

  The bed is smooth as a wafer of sunlight,

  in the midst of the garden it stands alone.

  In the bed the lovers, slowly and deliberately and silently,

  perform the act of love.

  Their eyes are closed,

  as tightly as if heavy coins of flesh lay on them.

  Their lips are bruised with new and old bruises.

  Her hair and his beard are hopelessly tangled.

  When he puts his mouth against her shoulder

  she is uncertain whether her shoulder

  has given or received the kiss.

  5° I

  All her flesh is like a mouth.

  He carries his fingers along her waist

  and feels his own waist caressed.

  She holds him closer and his own arms tighten around her.

  She kisses the hand beside her mouth.

  It is his hand or her hand, it hardly matters,

  there are so many more kisses.

  You stand beside the bed, weeping with happiness,

  you carefully peel away the sheets

  from the slow-moving bodies.

  Your eyes are filled with tears, you barely make out the

  lovers.