A Grain of Mustard Seed (4 page)

To bring into this house her glowing ’cello

As if some silent, magic animal.

She sat, head bent, her long hair all a-spill

Over the breathing wood, and drew the bow.

There had been no such music here until

A girl came in from falling dark and snow.

And she drew out that sound so like a wail,

A rich dark suffering joy, as if to show

All that a wrist holds and that fingers know

When they caress a magic animal.

There had been no such music here until

A girl came in from falling dark and snow.

An Intruder

The other day a witch came to call.

She brought a basket full of woe and gall

And left it there for me in my front hall.

But it was empty when I found it there

And she herself had gone back to her lair

Leaving the bats of rage to fly my air.

Out of ambivalence this witch was born;

All that she gives is subtly smeared and torn

Or slightly withered by her love and scorn.

The furies sit and watch me as I write;

The bats fly silently about all night

And a black mist obscures the kindest light.

But I shall find the magic note to play,

Or, like a donkey, learn the wild flat bray

That sends all furies howling on their way.

The note is laughter. No witch could withstand

The frightful joke all witches understand

When they are given all that they demand.

The word can neither bless nor curse, of course.

It must bewitch a witch and leave her worse.

Perhaps I’ll call her just a failed old nurse.

Love cannot exorcize the gifts of hate.

Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight,

But laughter we can never over-rate.

The Muse As Medusa

I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone.

I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold.

I was not punished, was not turned to stone—

How to believe the legends I am told?

I came as naked as any little fish,

Prepared to be hooked, gutted, caught;

But I saw you, Medusa, made my wish,

And when I left you I was clothed in thought…

Being allowed, perhaps, to swim my way

Through the great deep and on the rising tide,

Flashing wild streams, as free and rich as they,

Though you had power marshalled on your side.

The fish escaped to many a magic reef;

The fish explored many a dangerous sea—

The fish, Medusa, did not come to grief,

But swims still in a fluid mystery.

Forget the image: your silence is my ocean,

And even now it teems with life. You chose

To abdicate by total lack of motion,

But did it work, for nothing really froze?

It is all fluid still, that world of feeling

Where thoughts, those fishes, silent, feed and rove;

And, fluid, it is also full of healing,

For love is healing, even rootless love.

I turn your face around! It is my face.

That frozen rage is what I must explore—

Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!

This is the gift I thank Medusa for.

For Rosalind

On Her Seventy-fifth Birthday

Tonight we come to praise

Her splendor, not her years,

Pure form and what it burns—

Who teaches this or learns?—

Intrinsic, beyond tears,

Splendor that has no age.

Take your new-fangled beauties off the stage!

The high poise of the throat

That dazzled every heart—

Who was not young and awed

By beauty so unflawed

It seemed not life, but art?—

Terrible as a swan

Young children, deeply moved, might look upon.

The blazing sapphire eyes—

They looked out from a queen.

Yet there was wildness near;

She glimmered like a deer

No hunter could bring down.

So warm, so wild, so proud,

She moved among us like a light-brimmed cloud.

The way her dresses flowed!

So once in Greece, so once…

Passion and its control.

She drew many a soul

To join her in the dance.

Give homage fierce as rage.

Take your new-fangled beauties off the stage!

The Great Transparencies

Lately I have been thinking much of those,

The open ones, the great transparencies,

Through whom life—is it wind or water?—flows

Unstinted, who have learned the sovereign ease.

They are not young; they are not ever young.

Youth is too vulnerable to bear the tide,

And let it rise, and never hold it back,

Then let it ebb, not suffering from pride,

Nor thinking it must ebb from private lack.

The elders yield because they are so strong—

Seized by the great wind like a ripening field,

All rippled over in a sensuous sweep,

Wave after wave, lifted and glad to yield,

But whether wind or water, never keep

The tide from flowing or hold it back for long.

Lately I have been thinking much of these,

The unafraid although still vulnerable,

Through whom life flows, the great transparencies,

The old and open, brave and beautiful…

They are not young; they are not ever young.

Friendship: The Storms

How much you have endured of storm

Among sweet summer flowers!

The black hail falls so hard to do us harm

In my dark hours.

Though friendship is not quick to burn,

It is explosive stuff;

The edge of our awareness is so keen

A word is enough.

Clouds rise up from the blue

And darken the sky,

And we are tossed about from false to true

Not knowing why.

After this violence is over

I turn my life, my art,

Round and around to discover

The fault in my heart—

What breeds this cruel weather,

Why tensions grow;

And when we have achieved so much together,

What breaks the flow.

God help us, friendship is aware

That where we fail we learn;

Tossed on a temperament, I meet you there

At every turn.

In this kaleidoscope

Of work and complex living,

For years you buttressed and enlivened hope,

Laid balm on grieving.

After the angry cloud has broken

I know what you are—

How love renews itself, spoken, unspoken,

Cool as the morning star.

Evening Walk In France

When twilight comes, before it gets too late,

We swing behind us the heavy iron gate,

And as it clangs shut, stand a moment there

To taste the world, the larger open air,

And walk among the grandeur of the vines,

Those long rows written in imperfect lines,

Low massive trunks that bear the delicate

Insignia of leaves where grapes are set;

And here the sky is a great roofless room

Where late bees and late people wander home,

And here we walk on slowly through the dusk

And watch the long waves of the dark that mask

Black cypresses far off, and gently take

The sumptuous clouds and roofs within their wake,

Until the solid nearer haystacks seem

Like shadows looming ghostly out of dream,

And the stone farm becomes an ancient lair,

Dissolving into dusk—and is not there.

A dog barks, and a single lamp is lit.

We are two silent shadows crossing it.

Under the lamp a woman stands at rest,

Cutting a loaf of bread across her breast.

Dutch Interior

Pieter de Hooch (1629-1682)

I recognize the quiet and the charm,

This safe enclosed room where a woman sews

And life is tempered, orderly, and calm.

Through the Dutch door, half open, sunlight streams

And throws a pale square down on the red tiles.

The cosy black dog suns himself and dreams.

Even the bed is sheltered, it encloses,

A cupboard to keep people safe from harm,

Where copper glows with the warm flush of roses.

The atmosphere is all domestic, human,

Chaos subdued by the sheer power of need.

This is a room where I have lived as woman,

Lived too what the Dutch painter does not tell—

The wild skies overhead, dissolving, breaking,

And how that broken light is never still,

And how the roar of waves is always near,

What bitter tumult, treacherous and cold,

Attacks the solemn charm year after year!

It must be felt as peace won and maintained

Against those terrible antagonists—

How many from this quiet room have drowned?

How many left to go, drunk on the wind,

And take their ships into heartbreaking seas;

How many whom no woman’s peace could bind?

Bent to her sewing, she looks drenched in calm.

Raw grief is disciplined to the fine thread.

But in her heart this woman is the storm;

Alive, deep in herself, holds wind and rain,

Remaking chaos into an intimate order

Where sometimes light flows through a windowpane.

A Vision of Holland

The marriage of this horizontal land

Lying so low, so open and exposed,

Flat as an open palm, and never closed

To restless storm and the relentless wind,

This marriage of low land and towering air—

It took my breath away. I am still crazed

Here a month later, in my uplands, dazed

By so much light, so close to despair.

Infinite vertical! Who climbs to Heaven?

Who can assault the cloud’s shimmering peak?

Here the intangible is the mystique,

No rock to conquer and no magic mountain,

Only the horizontal infinite

Stretched there below to polarize

The rush of height itself, where this land lies

Immense and still, covered by changing light.

Those troubling clouds pour through the mind.

An earthquake of pure atmosphere

Cracks open every elemental fear.

The light is passionate, but not defined.

So we are racked as by a psychic fault,

Stormed and illuminated. “Oh sky, sky,

Earth, earth, and nothing else,” we cry,

Knowing once more how absolutes exalt.

Slowly the eye comes back again to rest

There on a house, canal, cows in a field.

The visionary moment has to yield,

But the defining eye is newly blest.

Come back from that cracked-open psychic place,

It is alive to wonders freshly seen:

After the earthquake, gentle pastures green,

And that great miracle, a human face.

Bears and Waterfalls

Kind kinderpark

For bear buffoons

And fluid graces—

Who dreamed this lark

Of spouts, lagoons,

And huge fur faces?

For bears designed

Small nooks, great crags,

And Gothic mountains?

For bears refined

Delightful snags,

Waterfalls, fountains?

Who had the wit to root

A forked tree where a sack

Of honey plumps on end,

A rich-bottomed fruit

To rouse a hearty whack

From passing friend?

Who ever did imagine

A waterspout as stool,

Or was black bear the wiser

Who sat down on this engine

To keep a vast rump cool,

Then, cooled, set free a geyser?

Who dreamed a great brown queen

Sleeked down in her rough silk

Flirting with her huge lord,

Breast-high in her tureen?—

“Splash me, delightful hulk!”

So happy and absurd.

Bear upside-down, white splendor,

All creamy, foaming fur,

And childhood’s rug come true,

All nonchalance and candor,

Black pads your signature—

Who, above all, dreamed you?

When natural and formal

Are seen to mate so well,

Where bears and fountains play,

Who would return to normal?

Go back to human Hell?

Not I. I mean to stay,

To hold this happy chance

Forever in the mind,

To be where waters fall

And archetypes still dance,

As they were once designed

In Eden for us all.

A Parrot

My parrot is emerald green,

His tail feathers, marine.

He bears an orange half-moon

Over his ivory beak.

He must be believed to be seen,

This bird from a Rousseau wood.

When the urge is on him to speak,

He becomes too true to be good.

He uses his beak like a hook

To lift himself up with or break

Open a sunflower seed,

And his eye, in a bold white ring,

Has a lapidary look.

What a most astonishing bird,

Whose voice when he chooses to sing

Must be believed to be heard.

That stuttered staccato scream

Must be believed not to seem

The shriek of a witch in the room.

But he murmurs some muffled words

(Like someone who talks through a dream)

When he sits in the window and sees

The to-and-fro wings of wild birds

In the leafless improbable trees.

Frogs and Photographers

The temperamental frog,

A loving expert says,

Exhibits stimulation

By rolling of bright eyes

(This is true frog-elation);

But in a different mood