Honey and Salt (7 page)

        into a crimson target?”

 

***

 

***

 

Daybreak creeps

in a first thin shimmering.

Neither is the day come

nor the night gone.

 

***

 

***

 

Be shabbawobba now

before this pool of day to come.

        Speak and be still.

        Listen and be still.

A ring of topaz floats in rose-light.

Handles of moongold go in a hush.

The pool welcomes a pair of orange slippers,

the gauze of them winking out and coming back.

Come passwords, come numerals,

                                come changing altar lights.

Fingers, be cool, strum only half-heard chords.

Let your words be softer than

a slow south wind blowing thistledown.

“Thou art like a flower,”

Ran an old song line.

What flower did he mean?

She might have been a quiet blue flower.

She wore crimson carnations perhaps.

She may have planted tall sunflowers

Stooping with hollyhocks around a kitchen doorstep.

They may have picked bluebells together

Or talked about wild arbutus they found.

Perhaps she knew what he meant by telling her:

“Thou art like a flower.”

Time was. Time is. Time shall be.

Man invented time to be used.

Love was. Love is. Love shall be.

Yet man never invented love

Nor is love to be used like time.

A clock wears numbers one to twelve

And you look and read its face

And tell the time pre-cise-ly ex-act-ly.

Yet who reads the face of love?

Who tells love numbers pre-cisely ex-act-ly?

Holding love in a tight hold for keeps.

Fastening love down and saying

“It's here now and here for always.”

You don't do this offhand, careless-like.

Love costs. Love is not so easy

Nor is the shimmering of star dust

Nor the smooth flow of new blossoms

Nor the drag of a heavy hungering for someone,

Love is a white horse you ride

or wheels and hammers leaving you lonely

or a rock in the moonlight for rest

or a sea where phantom ships cross always

or a tall shadow always whispering

or a circle of spray and prisms—

maybe a rainbow round your shoulder.

        Heavy heavy is love to carry

        and light as one rose petal,

        light as a bubble, a blossom,

        a remembering bar of music

        or a finger or a wisp of hair

        never forgotten.

She believed herself to have gone through tall gateways and to have marched triumphant across fire and thorn. She sat in front of a county building, under a mulberry, and once she mumbled to an invisible Irish sweetheart, “All the knocking of the tumblers of the sea is in my knee bones.”

 

When the chariots of thunder drove and rolled overhead, she mumbled, “When the water comes through the sieve of the sky, that makes the rain—God does it easy—God does all things easy.”

 

Memories swept over her like a strong wind on dark waters. She half-whispered, “When the moongold came on the water afterward it was too much money—too much by far—more than we wanted.”

There was

what we call “words,”

a lot of language,

syllables,

each syllable made of air.

 

Then there was

s i l e n c e ,

no talk at all,

no more syllables

shaped by living tongues

out of wandering air.

 

Thus all tongues

slowly talk themselves

into s i l e n c e .

The smoke of these landscapes has gone God knows

where.

The sun touches them off with shot gold of an evening,

with a mother's grey eyes singing to her children.

The blue smudge on a haystack a mile off is gone God

knows where.

The yellow dust of a sheet over Emil Hawkinson's

cornfield,

The ribbons of red picked at by the high-flying

hard-crying crows,

These too are in the pits of the west God knows where.

 

A delphinium flings a shadow

with a rooted stalk—

a personal shadow.

Each silhouette documents

designs and dooms woven

between shape and shadowshape.

 

You may add two delphiniums

with seeds lighted in soil

with stalks prepared in loam

toward the upheave into bloom

when stalk and leaves find a path

hold a rocketform of blue

hold it in a velvet stillstand.

 

In a summer daybreak rain

a huddle of delphiniums

across spikes of fogblue leaves

out of little mistblue cups

trade meditations on being

shapes and shadowshapes.

 

Cups and bells nod in the sun,

in the fine dust of the wind:

one newborn delphinium laughing

at the long scroll of marriages

whereby she is the latest child

bringing to the bright air her shape,

to the dark earth her shadow.

 

Shaded out of seven prisms

in choices by living fingers

out of the rainbow end?

Yes and the winds

of many evenings came:

dawns drew in with dew and mist

and the bells of many rains rang.

        Soft and lovely

        these transients go yet stay

        Even their violence goes in velvet.

Spider, you have long silver legs.

You may spin diagrams of doom.

Your patterns may throw fine glints

Festooned from wandering silk.

It may be neither art nor money

Nor calisthenics nor engineering.

No man trusts any woman and vice versa.

All men love all women and vice versa.

And all friends cherish each other.

And there are triflers who flirt with death.

Spider, you have long silver legs.

A blue shot dawn,

A white shot dawn,

And she went out.

 

Into the dawn water

Until the dawn water

Came over her head.

 

And she came back

Out of the water

Into a blue shot dawn,

Into a white shot dawn.

 

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***

 

The trucks and the cavalry came,

The shoes and the wheels, the tarpaulins

dripping.

And the shadows of the grain elevators

In the hump of the blown white moon,

And the breathing of the tugs and barges

In the change of the fog river gray—

These all crossed over; the day after they

stood up; the day after was something

else again.

when the two fish spoke

their speech was scarlet

 

they met in a bowl

of molten gold air

 

they swung in an arch

of seven rainbow sheens

 

they swam in a grotto

one of a thousand grottoes

 

they shook their fins

in a green feather dust

Egg Faces

 

Lights of egg faces, lights of monkey skulls,

meet each other, meet yourselves.

Lights of the morning sun warming the night-

wet wood, fires of far-back mornings fixing

your caldrons cooling to firestone,

meet each other, meet yourselves.

Sheet white egg faces, strong and sad gorilla

mugs, meet yourselves, meet each other.

 

Long Heads

 

Sleep, long-face of the long-head family.

Go back to the inside of the ten thousandth

mountain you came from.

Out of sleep you came; back to sleep you go.

 

Eyes out of morning twilights, how now it is easy

to join up with evening twilights.

Nose cut from the spear handle of a morning star

finding its mirror-slant in a mountain rock nose,

how now it is easy to sit next and alongside an

evening star spear handle.

Yearn, too; you might as well yearn; yearners or

not, out of sleep, back to sleep; this is put on

the mouth.

Sleep, long-face, back now to the inside of the

ten thousandth mountain.

Three shrines a woman has for a man.

She loves him for what he is out in the world.

She loves him for what he seems to her of which

the world knows nothing.

She loves him for the touch of his personal

magnets.

Thus we might frame these three declarations and

listen to bystanders:

        Is that so?

        Who told you—a little bird?

        What are these personal magnets?

        What is a shrine?

        You mean she never opened

          a barrel of snakes for him?

She was given crystal flesh for a home.

And her windows were tremulous to visions.

Love me, love me, was her often cry.

She put lover higher than all else.

She carried series of love-birds and gave away.

 

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                                Pour love deep into me.

                                Thus ran her cry.

                                Let me have all love.

                                She murmured this want.

                                Love may be toil, waste, death

                                Yet come pour love deep into me.

                                Thus her years ran to one theme.

I was born in the morning of the world,

So I know how morning looks,

morning in the valley wanting,

morning on a mountain wanting.

Morning looks like people look,

like a cornfield wanting corn,

like a sea wanting ships.

Tell me about any strong beautiful wanting

And there is your morning, my morning,

        everybody's morning.

 

Makers and givers may be moon shaken,

                                may be star lost,

Knowing themselves as sea-deep seekers,

                                both seeking and sought,

Knowing love is a ring and the ring endless,

Seeing love as a wheel and the wheel endless.

 

Love may be a hard flesh crying its want.

Love may be a thin horizon air,

thinner than snowwhite wool finespun,

finer than any faint blue mist

blown away and gone on yesterday's wind.

 

        There are hungers

        for a nameless bread

        out of the dust

        of the hard earth,

        out of the blaze

        of the calm sun.

 

Blow now, winds, you so old at blowing.

Oat at the river, pine at the rocks,