New and Selected Poems (12 page)

 

Did her hand tremble? By the first faint
Hint of night coming, how all lay
Still, except for the memory of that voice:
Him whom the wild life hurried away . . .

 

Long stretches of silence in between.
Clock talking to a clock.
Dogs lying on their paws with ears cocked.
You and me afraid to breathe.

 

Finally, she went to peek. Someone covered
With a newspaper on the sidewalk.
Otherwise, no one about. The street empty.
The sky full of homeless clouds.

God's refuted but the devil's not.

 

This year's tomatoes are something to see.
Bite into them, Martha,
As you would into a ripe apple.
After each bite add a little salt.

 

If the juices run down your chin
Onto your bare breasts,
Bend over the kitchen sink.

 

From there you can see your husband
Come to a dead stop in the empty field
Before one of his bleakest thoughts
Spreading its arms like a scarecrow.

This old world needs propping up
When it gets this cold and windy.
The cleverly painted sets,
Oh, they're shaking badly!
They're about to come down.

 

There'll be nothing but infinite space then.
The silence supreme. Almighty silence.
Egyptian sky. Stars like torches
Of grave robbers entering the crypts of the kings.
Even the wind pausing, waiting to see.

 

Better grab hold of that tree, Lucille.
Its shape crazed, terror-stricken.
I'll hold the barn.
The chickens in it uneasy.
Smart chickens, rickety world.

 

 

 

V

 

The Black Queen raised high
In my father's angry hand.

At least one crucified at every corner.
The eyes of a mystic, madman, murderer.
They know it's truly for nothing.
The eyes do. All the martyr's sufferings
On parade. Exalted mother of us all
Tending her bundles on the sidewalk,
Speaking to each as if it were a holy child.

 

There were many who saw none of this.
A couple lingered on kissing lustily
Right where someone lay under a newspaper.
His bloody feet, swollen twice their size,
Jutted out into the cold of the day,
Grim proofs of a new doctrine.

 

I tell you, I was afraid. A man screamed
And continued walking as if nothing had happened.
Everyone whose eyes I sought avoided mine.
Was I beginning to resemble him a little?
I had no answer to any of these questions.
Neither did the crucified on the next corner.

You were sharpened to a fine point
With a rusty razor blade.
Then the unknown hand swept the shavings
Into its moist palm
And disappeared from view.

 

You lay on the desk next to
The official-looking document
With a long list of names.
It was up to us to imagine the rest:
The high ceiling with its cracks
And odd-shaped water stains;
The window with its view
Of roofs covered with snow.

 

An inconceivable, varied world
Surrounding your severe presence
On every side,
Stub of a red pencil.

Dark morning rain
Meant to fall
On a prison and a schoolyard,
Falling meanwhile
On my mother and her old dog.

 

How slow she shuffles now
In my father's Sunday shoes.
The dog by her side
Trembling with each step
As he tries to keep up.

 

I am on another corner waiting
With my head shaved.
My mind hops like a sparrow
In the rain.
I'm always watching and worrying about her.

 

Everything is a magic ritual,
A secret cinema,
The way she appears in a window hours later
To set the empty bowl
And spoon on the table,
And then exits
So that the day may pass,
And the night may fall
Into the empty bowl,
Empty room, empty house,
While the rain keeps
Knocking at the front door.

I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.
Next door there was a piano.
A few evenings a month
A crippled old man came to play
“My Blue Heaven.”

 

Mostly, though, it was quiet.
Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat
Catching his fly with a web
Of cigarette smoke and revery.
So dark,
I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.

 

At 5
A.M.
the sound of bare feet upstairs.
The “Gypsy” fortuneteller,
Whose storefront is on the corner,
Going to pee after a night of love.
Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.

In my long late-night talks with the jailers, I raised again the question of the object: Does it remain indifferent whether it is perceived or not? (I had in mind the one concealed and found posthumously while the newly vacated cell was fumigated and swept.)

“Like a carved-wood demon of some nightmarish species,” said one. “In cipher writ,” said another. We were drinking a homemade brew that made our heads spin. “When a neck button falls on the floor and hardly makes a sound,” said the third with a smile, but I said nothing.

“If only one could leave behind a little something to make others stop and think,” I thought to myself.

In the meantime, there was my piece of broken bottle to worry about. It was green and had a deadly cutting edge. I no longer remembered its hiding place, unless I had only dreamed of it, or this was another cell, another prison in an infinite series of prisons and long night talks with my jailers.

Three old women sat knitting
On the sidewalk
Every time I walked by.
Good evening, ladies,
I would say to them.
Good morning, too.
What a lovely time of year
To be alive!

 

While they stared at me,
The way house cats stare at a TV
When their owner is at work,
Two of them resuming their knitting,
The third watching me
Go my way
With her mouth hanging open.

 

And that was all.
I left the neighborhood and they stayed
Knitting away.
They could be still there today
For it's that kind of day,
Sweet and mild,
It made me think of them again
After a long, long while.

in memory of George Oppen

 

In San Francisco, that winter,
There was a dark little store
Full of sleepy Buddhas.
The afternoon I walked in,
No one came out to greet me.
I stood among the sages
As if trying to read their thoughts.

 

One was huge and made of stone.
A few were the size of a child's head
And had stains the color of dried blood.
There were even some no bigger than mice,
And they appeared to be listening.

 

“The winds of March, black winds,
The gritty winds,” the dead poet wrote.

 

At sundown his street was empty
Except for my long shadow
Open before me like scissors.
There was his house where I told the story
Of the Russian soldier,
The one who looked Chinese.

 

He lay wounded in my father's bed,
And I brought him water and matches.
For that he gave me a little tiger
Made of ivory. Its mouth was open in anger,
But it had no stripes left.

 

There was the night when I colored
Its eyes black, its tongue red.
My mother held the lamp for me,
While worrying about the kind of luck
This beast might bring us.

 

The tiger in my hand growled faintly
When we were alone in the dark,
But when I put my ear to the poet's door
That afternoon, I heard nothing.

 

“The winds of March, black winds,
The gritty winds,” he once wrote.

It seemed the kind of life we wanted.
Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.
Sunlight in every room.
The two of us walking by the sea naked.

 

Some evenings, however, we found ourselves
Unsure of what comes next.
Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,
With birds circling over our heads,
The dark pines strangely still,
Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

 

We were back on our terrace sipping wine.
Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?
Clouds of almost human appearance

Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely
With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.

 

The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.
You lighting a candle, carrying it naked
Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.
The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

Sausage makers of History,
The bloody kind,
You all hail from a village
Where the dog barking at the moon
Is the only poet.

 

•

 

O King Oedipus, O Hamlet,
Fallen like flies
In the pot of cabbage soup,
No use beating with your fists,
Or sticking your tongues out.

 

•

 

Christ-faced spider on the wall
Darkened by evening shadows,
I spent my childhood on a cross
In a yard full of weeds,
White butterflies, and white chickens.

The trembling finger of a woman
Goes down the list of casualties
On the evening of the first snow.

 

The house is cold and the list is long.

 

All our names are included.

Father studied theology through the mail
And this was exam time.
Mother knitted. I sat quietly with a book
Full of pictures. Night fell.
My hands grew cold touching the faces
Of dead kings and queens.

 

There was a black raincoat
        in the upstairs bedroom
Swaying from the ceiling,
But what was it doing there?
Mother's long needles made quick crosses.
They were black
Like the inside of my head just then.

 

The pages I turned sounded like wings.
“The soul is a bird,” he once said.
In my book full of pictures

A battle raged: lances and swords
Made a kind of wintry forest
With my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches.

You give the appearance of listening
To my thoughts, O trees,
Bent over the road I am walking
On a late-summer evening
When every one of you is a steep staircase
The night is slowly descending.

 

The high leaves like my mother's lips
Forever trembling, unable to decide,
For there's a bit of wind,
And it's like hearing voices,
Or a mouth full of muffled laughter,
A huge dark mouth we can all fit in
Suddenly covered by a hand.

 

Everything quiet. Light
Of some other evening strolling ahead,
Long-ago evening of silk dresses,
Bare feet, hair unpinned and falling.
Happy heart, what heavy steps you take
As you follow after them in the shadows.

 

The sky at the road's end cloudless and blue.
The night birds like children
Who won't come to dinner.
Lost children in the darkening woods.

Millions of empty rooms with TV sets turned on.
I wasn't there, but I saw everything.
Titanic
sinking like a birthday cake on the screen.
Poseidon, the night clerk, blowing out the candles
   one by one.