Honey and Salt (3 page)

and a box-shaped world has comers

and a bag-shaped world is either open or closed,

and Somebody holds the bag.

 

Now whether the world is oblong, square or rhomboid

or whether the world is a series of circles,

rings twisted into each other's eternal grooves,

or whether the world keeps changing from box to bag,

from corners to circles and back to corners,

from rings to oblongs and back to rings

and repeating the twist into the groove

and practicing that twist over again

from box to bag and bag again to box—

this was what we were talking about

when the first thunder crashed

and lightning forked across a black rain.

 

We decided the earth itself isn't much.

It is mapped and measured now

And we fly around it in just a few breakfasts.

And the strong man they named Atlas

Should have had that very name of Atlas

If he had stood under the earth ball

And held it on his big shoulders;

Atlas, you were made as a make-believe

And we give you a make-believe salute.

We say: Atlas, how are you doing,

        how have you been?

 

Beyond the ball of earth are other balls,

also double balls, triple balls, series of balls,

and balloons, drums, cylinders, triangles, jugs,

some with handles identified and signed,

others with anonymous sprockets and axles—

and we decided amid the sheet lightning—

the whole works is held either in a box or a bag,

afterwards asking ourselves:

what is outside the box, what props up the bag?

these are big questions, we told each other

while sprags of lightning dropped from the sky—

clutches and magnets, clocks and wheels

made of a mud and air beyond our dreams,

ordered in verbs beyond our doorways.

 

We decided at last

the world might be a box when awake

and a bag when asleep

and while we slept

it changed from box to bag

and back from bag to box

and the forgetfulness of our own sleep

is strange and beautiful by itself

and sometimes in its shifting shapes

the world is a cradle dedicated to sleep

and what would you rather have than sleep?

The laws of the bronze gods

are irrevocable.

 

And yet—in the statue of

General Grant astride a horse

on rolling prairie, on little

hills looking from Lincoln

Park at Lake Michigan—

here the sparrows have a nest

in General Grant's spy glass—

here the sparrows have rented

a flat in General Grant's

right stirrup—

 

It is true? The laws of the

bronze gods are irrevocable?

Elm buds are out.

Yesterday morning, last night,

they crept out.

They are the mice of early

spring air.

 

To the north is the gray sky.

Winter hung it gray for the gray

elm to stand dark against.

Now the branches all end with the

yellow and gold mice of early

spring air.

They are moving mice creeping out

with leaf and leaf.

There are lips as strange and soft

As a rim of moon many miles off.

White on a fading purple sea.

“Was it there, far-off, real,

Or did my eyes play me a trick?”

 

A finger can be laid across it,

Laid on a little mouth's white yearning,

Only as a white rim of moon

Can be picked off a blue sea

And sent in a love letter.

 

Once a child face lay in the moonight

Of an early spring night.

Birth is the starting point of passion.

Passion is the beginning of death.

How can you turn back from birth?

How can you say no to passion?

How can you bid death hold off?

And if thoughts come and hold you

And if dreams step in and shake your bones

What can you do but take them and make them

more your own?

 

Of course, a nickel is a nickel,

and a dime is a dime—sure—

we learned that—

why mention it now?

of course, steel is steel;

and a hammer is a hammer;

And a thought, a dream, is more than a name,

a number, a fixed point.

 

***

 

Walk in a midnight fog now and say to it: Tell

me your number and I'll tell mine.

Salute one morning sun falling on a river ribbon

of mist and tell it: My number is such-and-

such—what's yours?

 

Of what is fog the starting point?

Of what is the red sun the beginning?

Long ago—as now—little men and women knew in

their bones the singing and the aching of

these stumbling questions.

The swath of light climbs up the skyscraper

Around the corners of white prisms and spikes.

The inside torso stands up in a plug of gun-metal.

The shadow struggles to get loose from the light.

Shall I say I'm through and it's no use?

Or have I got another good fight in me?

What is there for us two

to split fifty-fifty,

to go halvers on?

A Bible, a deck of cards?

a farm, a frying pan?

a porch, front steps to sit on?

How can we be pals

when you speak English

and I speak English

and you never understand me

and I never understand you?

A molten gold flows away from the sun

to fall as a shingle of gold and glass

on waters holding five ships, a quintet,

five, no less, five sheathed in brass haze.

On a bronze and copper path just over

comes a maroon, comes a dusk of gun-metal.

A white horse shape of a moving cloud

meets a wind changing it to a small lamb,

meets a wind smoothing what it meets,

smoothing the lamb into six white snakes,

smoothing the snakes to a ball of wool.

The sungold shingle, ships in brass haze

fade into walls of umber, pools of ink

and there is abbadabra and abracadabra.

Two smoke rings, two nightmist bracelets

seem to be telling us and themselves:

      “We blend and go, then again

        blend and go.”

Be loose. Be easy. Be ready.

Forget the last war.

Forget the one before.

Forget the one yet to come.

 

Be loose and easy about the wars

whether they have been fought

or whether yet to be fought—

be ready to forget them.

 

Who was saying at high noon today:

“Is not each of them a forgotten war

after it is fought and over?

how and why it came forgotten?

how and what it cost forgotten?”

and was he there at Iwo Jima, Okinawa

or places named Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge?

and saying now:

 

“Let the next war before it comes

and before it gets under way

and five or six days sees its finish

or fifty years sees it still going strong

—let it be now a forgotten war.

Be ready now to forget it.

Be loose, be easy now.

The next war goes over in a flash—or runs long.”

God gets up in the morning

and says, “Another day?”

God goes to work every day

at regular hours.

God is no gentleman for God

puts on overalls and gets

dirty running the universe we know

about and several other universes

nobody knows about but Him.

Hunger long gone holds little heroic

to the hungering.

 

You don't eat and you get so you don't

care to eat nor ever remember eating—

and hearing of people who eat or don't

eat is all the same to you when you've

learned to keep your mind off eating

and eaters.

 

You become with enough hunger

the same as a tree with sap long gone

        or a dry leaf ready to fall.

 

Cold is cold and too cold is too cold.

 

The colder you get the more numb you get

and when you get numb enough you begin

to feel snug and cozy with warmth.

 

When the final numb glow of comfort goes

through you, then comes your slow smooth

slide into being frozen stiff and stark.

 

Then comes your easy entry at the tall

gates beyond which you are proof against

        ice or fire

        or tongues of malice

        or itch of ambition

or any phase of the peculiar torment known

        as unrequited love.

Your heart was handed over

to the foxgloves one hot summer afternoon.

The snowsilk buds nodded and hung drowsy.

So the stalks believed

As they held those buds above.

In deep wells of white

The dark fox fingers go in these gloves.

In a slow fold of summer

Your heart was handed over in a curve

from bud to bloom.

When the corn stands yellow in September,

A red flower ripens and shines among the stalks

And a red silk creeps among the broad ears

And tall tassels lift over all else

                                and keep a singing

                                to the prairies

                                and the wind.

 

                    They are the grand lone ones

                    For they are never saved

                                along with the corn:

 

                                They are cut down

                                and piled high

                                and burned.

 

                                Their fire

                                lights the west in November.

A half-dollar in the hand of a gypsy

tells me this and more:

You shall go broken on the wheel,

lashed to the bars and fates of steel,

a nickel's worth of nothing,

a vaudeville gag,

a child's busted rubber balloon kicked

        amid dirty bunting and empty popcorn

        bags at a summer park.

Yet cigarmakers shall name choice Havanas and

paste your picture on the box,

Racehorses foaming under scarlet and ochre jockeys

shall wear your name,

And policemen direct strangers to parks and schools

remembered after you.

Bring on a pail of smoke.

Bring on a sieve of coffee.

Bring on shovels speaking Javanese.

Open your newest, latest handkerchief

And let down a red-mouthed hankering hippopotamus.

Perform for us these offertories in blue.

Tell us again: Nothing is impossible.

We listen while you tell us.

Apes, may I speak to you a moment?

Chimpanzees, come hither for words.

Orangoutangs, let's get into a huddle.

Baboons, lemme whisper in your ears.

Gorillas, do yuh hear me hollerin' to yuh?

And monkeys! monkeys! get this chatter—

 

For a long time men have plucked letters