The Collected Poems (17 page)

At the outset it didn't look so bad, just a nuisance, no more; but after a time the heel appeared in his field of consciousness, and this at the moment when the young Cogito was laboriously trying to grasp the professor's train of thought elaborating Plato's concept of the Idea. The heel grew; swelled, pulsed, turned pale pink to sunset purple, and drove from his mind not only Plato's idea but all other ideas as well.

In the evening before going to bed he shook the foreign body from his sock. It was a small, cold, yellow grain of sand. The heel on the other hand was swollen, hot, and dark with pain.

 

If he had any sense of identity it was with a stone
a sandstone not too porous a light luminous gray
with a thousand eyes of flint
(an absurd comparison a stone sees with its skin)
if he felt any deep relation then it was to a stone

it was not at all the idea of immutability the stone
changed lazy in the sun it took on light like a moon
when a storm built it darkened to blue like a cloud
then drank rain thirstily those fisticuffs with water
sweet destruction a war of elements clash of forces
casting off of its own nature this drunken stability
were both beautiful and humbling

so in the end it sobered in air cleansed by lightning
bashful sweat the transient cloud of erotic passion

 

If I went back there
I would probably not find
a single shadow of my old home
nor the trees of childhood
nor a cross with an iron plaque
a bench on which I murmured incantations
nor a single thing that belongs to us

all that survived
is a flagstone
with a chalk circle
I stand in the middle
on one leg
the moment before jumping

I cannot grow up
though years pass
and planets and wars
clamor overhead

I stand in the middle
still as a monument
on one leg
before a jump into finality

the chalk circle rusts
like old blood
around it grow mounds
of ash
up to the arms
up to the mouth

 

All attempts to avert
the so-called cup of bitterness—
by mental effort
frenzied campaigns on behalf of stray cats
breathing exercises
religion—
let you down

you have to consent
gently bow your head
not wring your hands
use suffering mildly with moderation
like a prosthetic limb
without false shame
but without pride also

don't brandish your stump
over other people's heads
don't knock your white cane
on the panes of the well-fed

drink an extract of bitter herbs
but not to the dregs
be careful to leave
a few gulps for the future

accept it
but at the same time
isolate it in yourself
and if it is possible
make from the stuff of suffering
a thing or a person

play
with it
of course
play

joke around with it
very solicitously
as with a sick child
cajoling in the end
with silly tricks
a wan
smile

 

At home it's always safe

but just over the threshold
when Mr Cogito goes out
on his morning stroll
he meets—the abyss

this is not the abyss of Pascal
this is not the abyss of Dostoevsky
this is an abyss
to Mr Cogito's size

fathomless days
fear-fraught days

it follows him like a shadow
waits in front of the bakery
in the park it reads the paper
over Mr Cogito's shoulder

irksome as eczema
affectionate as a dog
too shallow to swallow
his head arms and legs

maybe one day
the abyss will fill out
the abyss will mature
and be serious

if only he knew
what water it drank
what grain to feed it
now
Mr Cogito
could pick up
a few fistfuls of sand
and fill it up
but he doesn't

and so when
he goes home
he leaves the abyss
at the threshold
covering it deliberately
with a scrap of old cloth

 

Mr Cogito attempts
to achieve pure thought
at least before sleep

the attempt in itself bears
the seed of its own defeat

so when he is nearing
the state in which thought is like water
the vast and pure water
on an indifferent shore

the water suddenly wrinkles
and a wave throws up
tin cans
driftwood
a wisp of someone's hair

if truth be told Mr Cogito
isn't wholly without fault
he couldn't tear
his inner eye
from the mail box
his nostrils could smell the sea
crickets tickled his ear
and he felt her absent hand under his belt

he was ordinary like the rest
his thoughts were furnished
the softness of a hand on an armrest
the furrow of tenderness
on a cheek

someday
some other day
when he is cold
he will attain the state of satori

and he will be as the masters recommend
vacant and
astonishing

 

The front page reports
120 soliders were killed

the war was long
you get used to it

 

Thoughts cross the mind
a common idiom has it

the common idiom
overestimates thoughts' mobility

a majority of them
stand motionless
in a dull landscape
of bleak hillocks
and withered trees

sometimes they reach
the rushing river of someone else's thoughts
they stand on the bank
on one leg
like hungry herons

mournfully
they recall dried-up springs

they circle around
looking for grains

they don't cross
because they won't get anywhere
they don't cross
because there's nowhere to get to

they sit on the rocks
wringing their hands

under the low
overcast
firmament
of the skull

 

Houses on the outskirts with rings under your windows
houses which quietly cough up
shivers of plaster
houses with thinning hair
and a sickly complexion

only chimneys are dreaming
their tapering lamentation
reaches the edge of a forest
the shore of the great water

houses on the outskirts with sunken temples
houses chewing on crusts of bread
cold as the sleep of a crippled man
your stairs are palm trees of dust

houses forever for sale
bad luck motels
houses who never saw a show

 

Mr Cogito holds in his arms
the warm amphora of a head

the rest of the body is hidden
seen only by touch

he gazes at the sleeping head
strange but full of tenderness

yet again
he ascertains with amazement
that one apart from him exists
impenetrable
as a stone

with borders
which open
for just a moment
before a sea casts it
onto a rocky shore

with its own blood
its stranger's dreams
fitted out with its own skin

Mr Cogito lays
the sleeping head
delicately aside
so as not to leave
any fingerprints
on the cheeks

and turns away
lonely
into the whitewashed sheets

 

He was breathing heavily

the crisis was supposed to come at night
it was twelve noon
Mr Cogito stepped out into the corridor
to smoke a cigarette

first he shifted the pillow
and smiled at his friend

he was breathing heavily

his fingers
moved
on the quilt

when he came back
his friend was gone
in his place
lay something else
with its head tilted
its eyes bulging

Mr Cogito
waited a moment longer
staring at what remained

it was empty
like a sack
it was shrinking
more and more
squeezed by unseen tongs
crushed by a different time

if he had turned to stone
a heavy marble sculpture
impassive and dignified
what a relief it would be

he lay on a narrow islet
of annihilation
torn from the trunk
shed like a cocoon

The Upanishads consoled

when his word
enters thought
thought breath
breath fire
fire the highest divinity
then he can no longer
know

so he could not know
he stood impenetrable
with a bundle of stark mystery
at the gates of the valley

 

In the morning mice scamper
around the head
on the floor of the head
scraps of conversations
detritus of an epic

enter
the room's muse
in a blue apron
sweeping

my master
receives better guests
Heraclitus of Ephesus let's say
or the prophet Isaiah

today no one is calling

my master paces nervously
talking to himself
ripping up innocent papers

in the evening he goes out his destination unknown

the muse undoes her blue apron
leans an elbow on the sill
stretches her neck
waits
for the gendarme
with the red whiskers

 

Season of falling apples the stubborn defense of leaves
mist grows thick in the morning and the air is balding
the last grains of honey the first red of the maple trees
a fox killed in a field space reverberates with shooting

apples sink into earth tree stumps come up to sight
leaves will be locked up in chests and wood reply
now you can hear very clearly the planets in orbit
a high moon is rising let the scales cover your eyes

 

To extract objects from their majestic silence takes either a ploy or a crime.
A door's icy surface can be unfrozen by a traitor's knock, a glass dropped on the floorboards shrieks like a wounded bird, and a house set aflame chatters in the loquacious language of fire, the language of a stifled epic, about everything the bed, the chests, the curtains kept to themselves for so long.

 

yet I gathered so many words into one line
one longer than all the lines on the palm
and therefore longer than fate
into a line directed beyond
a line blossoming
as straight as courage an ultimate line
but it was barely a miniature of the horizon
and the lightning of flowers rolls onward
oratio
of grass
oratio
of clouds
choirs of trees murmur a rock burns slowly
the ocean snuffs out the west day swallows night and in the pass of winds
a new light is rising

 

Gothic towers of needles in the valley of a stream
by Mount Tamalpais where mornings and evenings
darkness is thick as an ocean's anger and ecstasy

in this reservation of giants they show a cross section of a tree
        the copper trunk of the West
with immeasurably regular rings like circles on the water
and a cross-grained fool wrote in the dates of human history
an inch from the center the fire of Nero's distant Rome
halfway the Battle of Hastings a night boarding of drakkars
the stampede of the Anglo-Saxons unhappy Harold's death
is told by a compass
finally right on the bark's shore the Normandy landings

The tree's Tacitus was a surveyor he had no adjectives
no syntax expressive of terror he knew no words at all
so he counted added years and centuries as if to say it's
nothing but birth and death nothing just birth and death
and inside the bloody pulp of the sequoia

 

They who lost now dance with bells on their ankles
fettered in funny clothes in feathers of a dead eagle
the dust of compassion rises up from a little square
and a movie shotgun shoots benignly and on target