Some Trees: Poems (4 page)

That their merely being there

Means something; that soon

We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented

Such comeliness, we are surrounded:

A silence already filled with noises,

A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.

Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,

Our days put on such reticence

These accents seem their own defense.

It was not something identical with my carnation-world

But its smallest possession—a hair or a sneeze—

I wanted. I remember

Dreaming on tan plush the wrong dreams

Of asking fortunes, now lost

In what snows? Is there anything

We dare credit? And we get along.

The soul resumes its teachings. Winter boats

Are visible in the harbor. A child writes

“La pluie.” All noise is engendered

As we sit listening. I lose myself

In others’ dreams.

Why no vacation from these fortunes, from the white hair

Of the old? These dreams of tennis?

Fortunately, the snow, cutting like a knife,

Protects too itself from us.

Not so with this rouge I send to you

At old Christmas. Here the mysteries

And the color of holly are embezzled—

Poor form, poor watchman for my holidays,

My days of name-calling and blood-letting.

Do not fear the exasperation of death

(Whichever way I go is solitary)

Or the candles blown out by your passing.

It breathes a proper farewell, the panic

Under sleep like grave under stone,

Warning of sad renewals of the spirit.

In cheap gardens, fortunes. Or we might never depart.

Sitting between the sea and the buildings

He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.

But just as children imagine a prayer

Is merely silence, he expected his subject

To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,

Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

So there was never any paint on his canvas

Until the people who lived in the buildings

Put him to work: “Try using the brush

As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,

Something less angry and large, and more subject

To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

How could he explain to them his prayer

That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?

He chose his wife for a new subject,

Making her vast, like ruined buildings,

As if, forgetting itself, the portrait

Had expressed itself without a brush.

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush

In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:

“My soul, when I paint this next portrait

Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”

The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:

He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

Too exhausted even to lift his brush,

He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings

To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer

Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,

Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

Others declared it a self-portrait.

Finally all indications of a subject

Began to fade, leaving the canvas

Perfectly white. He put down the brush.

At once a howl, that was also a prayer,

Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;

And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush

As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

The girls, protected by gold wire from the gaze

Of the onrushing students, live in an atmosphere of vacuum

In the old schoolhouse covered with nasturtiums.

At night, comets, shooting stars, twirling planets,

Suns, bits of illuminated pumice, and spooks hang over the old place;

The atmosphere is breathless. Some find the summer light

Nauseous and damp, but there are those

Who are charmed by it, going out into the morning.

We must rest here, for this is where the teacher comes.

On his desk stands a vase of tears.

A quiet feeling pervades the playroom. His voice clears

Through the interminable afternoon: “I was a child once

Under the spangled sun. Now I do what must be done.

I teach reading and writing and flaming arithmetic. Those

In my home come to me anxiously at night, asking how it goes.

My door is always open. I never lie, and the great heat warms me.”

His door is always open, the fond schoolmaster!

We ought to imitate him in our lives,

For as a man lives, he dies. To pass away

In the afternoon, on the vast vapid bank

You think is coming to crown you with hollyhocks and lilacs, or in gold at the opera,

Requires that one shall have lived so much! And not merely

Asking questions and giving answers, but grandly sitting,

Like a great rock, through many years.

It is the erratic path of time we trace

On the globe, with moist fingertip, and surely, the globe stops;

We are pointing to England, to Africa, to Nigeria;

And we shall visit these places, you and I, and other places,

Including heavenly Naples, queen of the sea, where I shall be king and you will be queen,

And all the places around Naples.

So the good old teacher is right, to stop with his finger on Naples, gazing out into the mild December afternoon

As his star pupil enters the classroom in that elaborate black and yellow creation.

He is thinking of her flounces, and is caught in them as if they were made of iron, they will crush him to death!

Goodbye, old teacher, we must travel on, not to a better land, perhaps,

But to the England of the sonnets, Paris, Colombia, and Switzerland

And all the places with names, that we wish to visit—

Strasbourg, Albania,

The coast of Holland, Madrid, Singapore, Naples, Salonika, Liberia, and Turkey.

So we leave you behind with her of the black and yellow flounces.

You were always a good friend, but a special one.

Now as we brush through the clinging leaves we seem to hear you crying;

You want us to come back, but it is too late to come back, isn’t it?

It is too late to go to the places with the names (what were they, anyway? just names).

It is too late to go anywhere but to the nearest star, that one, that hangs just over the hill, beckoning

Like a hand of which the arm is not visible. Goodbye, Father! Goodbye, pupils. Goodbye, my master and my dame.

We fly to the nearest star, whether it be red like a furnace, or yellow,

And we carry your lessons in our hearts (the lessons and our hearts are the same)

Out of the humid classroom, into the forever. Goodbye, Old Dog Tray.

And so they have left us feeling tired and old.

They never cared for school anyway.

And they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board,

And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.

He cuts down the lakes so they appear straight

He smiles at his feet in their tired mules.

He turns up the music much louder.

He takes down the vaseline from the pantry shelf.

He is the capricious smile behind the colored bottles.

He eats not lest the poor want some.

He breathes of attitudes the piney altitudes.

He indeed is the White Cliffs of Dover.

He knows that his neck is frozen.

He snorts in the vale of dim wolves.

He writes to say, “If ever you visit this island,

He’ll grow you back to your childhood.

“He is the liar behind the hedge

He grew one morning out of candor.

He is his own consolation prize.

He has had his eye on you from the beginning.”

He hears the weak cut down with a smile.

He waltzes tragically on the spitting housetops.

He is never near. What you need

He cancels with the air of one making a salad.

He is always the last to know.

He is strength you once said was your bonnet.

He has appeared in “Carmen.”

He is after us. If you decide

He is important, it will get you nowhere.

He is the source of much bitter reflection.

He used to be pretty for a rat.

He is now over-proud of his Etruscan appearance.

He walks in his sleep into your life.

He is worth knowing only for the children

He has reared as savages in Utah.

He helps his mother take in the clothes-line.

He is unforgettable as a shooting star.

He is known as “Liverlips.”

He will tell you he has had a bad time of it.

He will try to pretend his pressagent is a temptress.

He looks terrible on the stairs.

He cuts himself on what he eats.

He was last seen flying to New York.

He was handing out cards which read:

“He wears a question in his left eye.

He dislikes the police but will associate with them.

He will demand something not on the menu.

He is invisible to the eyes of beauty and culture.

“He prevented the murder of Mistinguett in Mexico.

He has a knack for abortions. If you see

He is following you, forget him immediately:

He is dangerous even though asleep and unarmed.”

Oh the rocks and the thimble

The oasis and the bed

Oh the jacket and the roses.

All sweetly stood up the sea to me

Like blue cornflakes in a white bowl.

The girl said, “Watch this.”

I come from Spain, I said.

I was purchased at a fair.

She said, “None of us know.

“There was a house once

Of dazzling canopies

And halls like a keyboard.

“These the waves tore in pieces.”

(His old wound—

And all day: Robin Hood! Robin Hood!)

The barber at his chair

Clips me. He does as he goes.

He clips the hairs outside the nose.

Too many preparations, nose!

I see the raincoat this Saturday.

A building is against the sky—

The result is more sky.

Something gathers in painfully.

To be the razor—how would you like to be

The razor, blue with ire,

That presses me? This is the wrong way.

The canoe speeds toward a waterfall.

Something, prince, in our backward manners—

You guessed the reason for the storm.

What will his crimes become, now that her hands

Have gone to sleep? He gathers deeds

In the pure air, the agent

Of their factual excesses. He laughs as she inhales.

If it could have ended before

It began—the sorrow, the snow

Dropping, dropping its fine regrets.

The myrtle dries about his lavish brow.

He stands quieter than the day, a breath

In which all evils are one.

He is the purest air. But her patience,

The imperative Become, trembles

Where hands have been before. In the foul air

Each snowflake seems a Piranesi

Dropping in the past; his words are heavy

With their final meaning. Milady! Mimosa! So the end

Was the same: the discharge of spittle

Into frozen air. Except that, in a new

Humorous landscape, without music,

Written by music, he knew he was a saint,

While she touched all goodness

As golden hair, knowing its goodness

Impossible, and waking and waking

As it grew in the eyes of the beloved.

The green bars on you grew soberer

As I petted the lock, a crank

In my specially built shoes.

We hedged about leisure, feeling, walking

That day, that night. The day

Came up. The heads borne in peach vessels

Out of asking that afternoon droned.

You saw the look of some other people,

Huge husks of chattering boys

And girls unfathomable in lovely dresses

And remorseful and on the edge of darkness.

No firmness in that safe smile ebbing.

Tinkling sadness. The sun pissed on a rock.

That is how I came nearer

To what was on my shoulder. One day you were lunching

With a friend’s mother; I thought how plebeian all this testimony,

That you might care to crave that, somehow

Before I would decide. Just think,

But I know now how romantic, how they whispered

Behind the lace of their aspiring

Opinions. And heaven will not care,

To raise our love

In scathing hymns. So beware and

Bye now. The jewels are for luck.

Under the day’s crust a half-eaten child

And further sores which eyesight shall reveal

And they live. But what of dark elders

Whose touch at nightfall must now be

To keep their promise? Misery

Starches the host’s one bed, his hand

Falls like an axe on her curls:

“Come in, come in! Better that the winter

Blaze unseen, than we two sleep apart!”

Who in old age will often part

From single sleep at the murmur

Of acerb revels under the hill;

Whose children couple as the earth crumbles

In vanity forever going down

A sunlit road, for his love was strongest

Who never loved them at all, and his notes

Most civil, laughing not to return.