Honey and Salt (4 page)

Out of the air and shaped syllables.

And out of the syllables came words

And from the words came phrases, clauses.

Sentences were born—and languages.

(The Tower of Babel didn't work out—

it came down quicker than it went up.)

Misunderstandings followed the languages,

Arguments, epithets, maledictions, curses,

Gossip, backbiting, the buzz of the bazoo,

Chit chat, blah blah, talk just to be talking,

Monologues of members telling other members

How good they are now and were yesterday,

Conversations missing the point,

Dialogues seldom as beautiful as soliloquies,

Seldom as fine as a man alone, a woman by herself

Telling a clock, “I'm a plain damn fool.”

 

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.

Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.

See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

Now we shall open boxes and look.

In this one a storm was locked up, hoarse

from long howling.

In this one lay fair weather, a blue sky

manuscript.

In this one unfolded a gray monotone of

a fog afternoon.

In each box was a day and its story of

air and wind.

Sometimes one shook with confusions,

processionals of weather.

“One day may be too much to gather, consider,

and look among keepsakes.”

 

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***

He saw a fire dancer take two flambeaus

And do red shadows with her shoulders.

And he met two fools looking on and saying

Horsefeathers horsefeathers, and he said

I must bethink myself, I must throw seven

Eleven, O God am I a two-spot or what am

I? a who or a what or a which am I?

        And the next day it rained,

        the next day was something

        else again.

 

Well, hibiscus, what would you?

The flambeau dancer did it,

she and the red shadows she threw.

Twilight and little mountain

towns along the Lehigh, sundown

and grey lavender flush.

 

Miners with dinner buckets and

headlamps, state constabulary on

horses, guns in holsters, Scranton,

Wilkesbarre, the Lackawanna Trail.

 

Twilight and the blessed armistice

of late afternoon and early evening.

 

Twilight and the sport sheets, movies,

chain programs, magazines, comics,

revival meetings.

Twilight and headlights on the new

hard roads, boy friend and girl friend,

dreams, romance, bread, wages, babies,

homes.

Be somber with those in smoke garments.

Laugh with those eating bitter weeds.

Burn your love with bold flame blossoms,

        if so hap may be.

Leave him with a soft snowfall memory,

        if so hap may be.

 

***

 

        Never came winter stars more clear

        yet the stars lost themselves

        midnight came snow-wrought snow-blown.

 

***

 

If we ask you to gleam through the tears,

Kisses, can you came back like ghosts?

 

Today, tomorrow, the gateways take them.

“Always some door eats my shadow.”

 

Love is a clock and the works wear out.

Love is a violin and the wood rots.

Love is a day with night at the end.

Love is a summer with falltime after.

Love dies always and when it dies it is dead

And when it is dead there is nothing more to it

And when there is nothing more to it then we say

This is the end, it comes always, it came to us.

And now we will bury it and put it away

Beautifully and decently, like a clock or a violin,

Like a summer day near fall time,

Like any lovely thing brought to the expected end.

 

Yes, let it go at that.

The clock rang and we answered.

The moon swept an old valley.

And we counted all of its rings.

The water-birds flipped in the river

And flicked their wing-points in sunset gold.

To the moon and the river water-birds,

To these we answered as the high calls rang.

And now? Now we take the clock and put it away.

Now we count again the rings of the valley moon

and put them away as keepsakes.

Now we count the river-birds once more and let

them slip loose and slip up the valley curve.

This is the end, there is always an end.

 

Kisses, can you

come back

              like ghosts?

Blue and white came out,

Riders of an early fall morning,

The blue by itself, the white by itself.

 

A young lamb white

crossed on a clear water blue.

Blue rollers talked on a beach white sand.

Water blown from snowwhite mountains

met the blue rise of lowland waters.

 

This was an early morning of high price.

Blue bowls of white water

Poured themselves into white bowls of blue water.

There was a back-and-forth and a kiss-me kill-me

washing and weaving.

Mist came up as a man's hand.

Fog lifted as a woman's shawl.

Fair weather rode in with a blue oath.

One large cloud bellied in a white wind.

Two new winds joined for weather.

Splinters of rain broke out of the west.

Blue rains soaked in a lowland loam.

The dahlia leaves are points of red.

Bees roam singing in the buckwheat.

Russet and gold are the wheatstraws.

Forgotten bells fade and change.

Forgetful bells fill the air.

Fog shawls and mist hands come again.

New weather weaves new garments.

In early April the trees

end their winter waiting

with a creep of green on branches.

 

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***

 

  In early October the trees

  listen for a wind crying,

  for leaves whirling.

 

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    The face of the river by night

    holds a scatter of stars

    and the silence of summer blossoms

    falling to the moving water.

 

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***

 

        Come clean with a child heart.

        Laugh as peaches in the summer wind.

        Let rain on a house roof be a song.

        Let the writing on your face

           be a smell of apple orchards in late June.

When water turns ice does it remember

one time it was water?

When ice turns back into water does it

remember it was ice?

        She had a box

with a million red silk bandannas for him.

        She gave them to him

        one by one or by thousands,

        saying then she had not enough for him.

 

She had languages and landscapes

on her lips and the end of her tongue,

landscapes of sunny hills and changing fogs,

of houses falling and people within falling,

of a left-handed man

who died for a woman who went out of her mind,

of a guitar player

who died with fingers reaching for strings,

of a man whose heart stopped

as his hand went out to put a pawn forward

on the fifth day of one game of chess,

        of five gay women

        stricken and lost

        amid the javelins and chants

        of love beyond keeping.

The same gold of summer was on the winter hills,

the oat straw gold, the gold of slow sun change.

 

The stubble was chilly and lonesome,

the stub feet clomb up the hills and stood.

 

The flat cry of one wheeling crow faded and came,

ran on the stub gold flats and faded and came.

 

Fade-me, find-me, slow lights rang their changes

on the flats of oat straw gold on winter hills.

 

***

 

***

 

Use your skypiece.

Let the works of your noggin run.

Try one way, try another, throw away

and throw away, junk your first,

your second, junk sixty-six.

Keep your skypiece going, your noggin

running, sit with your eyes shut

and your thumbs quiet as two

sleeping mice.

“Love is a door we shall open together.”

So they told each other under the moon

One evening when the smell of leaf mould

And the beginnings of roses and potatoes

Came on a wind.

 

Late in the hours of that evening

They looked long at the moon and called it

A silver button, a copper coin, a bronze wafer,

A plaque of gold, a vanished diadem,

A brass hat dripping from deep waters.

 

        “People like us,

              us two,

        We own the moon.”

Love, is it a cat with claws and wild mate screams

in the black night?

Love, is it a bird—a goldfinch with a burnish

on its wingtips or a little gray sparrow

picking crumbs, hunting crumbs?

Love, is it a tug at the heart that comes high and

costs, always costs, as long as you have it?

Love, is it a free glad spender, ready to spend to

the limit, and then go head over heels in debt?

Love, can it hit one without hitting two and leave

the one lost and groping?

Love, can you pick it up like a mouse and put it in

your pocket and take it to your room and bring it

out of your pocket and say,

        O here is my love,

        my little pretty mousey love?

 

***

 

***

 

Yes—love, this little word you hear about,

is love an elephant and you step out of the way

where the elephant comes trampling, tromping,

traveling with big feet and long flaps of

drooping ears and straight white ivory tusks—

and you step out of the way with respect,

with high respect, and surprise near to shock

as you say,

        Dear God, he's big,

        big like stupendous is big,

        heavy and elephantine and funny,

        immense and slow and easy.

I'm asking, is love an elephant?

Or could it be love is a snake—like a rattlesnake,

like a creeping winding slithering rattlesnake

with fangs—poison fangs they tell me,

and when the bite of it gets you

then you run crying for help

if you don't fall cold and dead on the way.

Can love be a snake?