Earlier Poems (2 page)

In the loose-fitting hospital gown,
holding a juglike container of blood
like a lantern,
the vein of a clear plastic tube running out of it
up one baggy sleeve, disheveled and pale, you approached
down the aisle: on the night Greyhound
somewhere between New York City and Cleveland,
I abruptly woke up
with the distinct impression I'd screamed,

the one seated next to me still
fast asleep—I am walking
alone down Third Avenue now—those around me
all still fast asleep.

I find the address—it is on one
of those unlighted, unfrequented side streets
that are like passages
marked in a book
for undiscernible reasons.

The light is on.

I look up in the dark
faintly luminous blue hall of sky

between the walls
of locked warehouses.
Incontrovertibly,
the light is on.

I look up in the moon,
bathing the bones of my face in the cold
of that gray immaterial city
inhabited by eyeless millions, gazing
interminably at the world.

To quiet you the poet
Places to his lips
A finger
Whose nail is torn off

*

Often I speak
Only to you
So the earth
Will forget me

*

The peace of dusk
Moves over each stone
Dropping
The anchor of grief

*

With complete sobriety I remain
The mother
Of distant cradles

*

Lightning and blood
I learned
Are one

I
Who never walk
But swim and soar
Inside you

*

My future life
Is your face when you sleep

If I looked long enough at my hand,
in time
I might picture fine hairlike roots
twining around its fingers. If
I stared long enough,
I could see to the bones—
or with a cold incandescence the bones would start shining.
But I have looked up,
my face ten years older
since I first spent the night here,
and nothing has changed:
over the forehead of Mount Konocti
the last stars are already fading, forgotten.
The hawks' wings catch light, miles above, from the edge
of this world's personal star
minutes before
it reaches my eyelids, which I want closed now
in the chilly wind
that comes as the moon sets.
There is still time.
There is time, and I can still open them
if I wish.

Down empty roads gray with rain;
through branches
of new leaves then still
more light than leaf;
from turning alone, unperceived, with its sleeping, the wind
the transfiguring wind
in their leaves …
from turning, slowly
turning, turning
green
when everyone is gone.

Seeing alone
was a door
I walked through
into a higher
and more affectionate
world, dim trees I come upon walking here
presenceless
rustling invisibly
rustling

My blood sits upright in a chair
its only thought, breath.

Though I walk around vacant,
inconsolable,
somebody's still breathing in me.

Mute, deaf, and blind
yes—but someone
is still breathing
in me: the blood

which rustles and sleeps.
The suicide in me
(the murderer).
The dreamer, the unborn.

But when I cut myself
I have to say:
This is my blood shed
for no one in particular.

If I get a nosebleed
I lie down on the cot, lie
there still, suspended
between ceiling and floor

as though the bleeding
had nothing to do with me,

as though I'd been in an accident
but died one second before the collision.

In a hospital room
I have to turn my face
from the bright needle;
I see it, nevertheless,

and I see the blood,

and I see the test tube
in which my nurse carries it
obliviously, like a candle
in a sleepwalker's hand.

It is still more light
than glass.

*

Though it leans halfway
into the invisible
it has a seam,

like a dress;
it sings
when you blow into its lips.

*

Since it is so empty and clear
it fills up the imagination,
makes me want to bring some well water
in a sieve
after setting fire to the barn
with a magnifying glass in the moon.

Holding a knife, or imagining it holds a knife, my blood goes to sleep in my fist. If I stare into it long enough, inevitably the moment when I no longer recognize it arrives. This is the moment when the blood unknowingly offers itself to be slaughtered; when cuts can occur like a slip of the tongue; when a little blood could billow in a glass of water and impart to it the disappearing taste of my own life.

Playing your trumpets
thin as a needle
in my ear,
standing on my finger

or on the back
of my neck like the best arguments
against pity I know.
You insignificant vampires

who sip my life
through a straw;
you drops of blood
with wings;

carriers
of insomnia
I search for
with a lit match.

I had a job once
driving around in a truck
to look for your eggs.
They can be found

in ditches, near
train tracks, outside
of a barn
in an upright piano filled with rainwater.

It is impossible to kill
all of you,
invisible in the uncut grass
at the edges of the cemetery:

when the dogs go down there it
looks like they've gotten into birds.

It is November 1914. I am not very old
yet. Now I almost feel you
place the needle in your arm, dreaming
of the lightvessel in Mary's right wrist,

the wheatfields, the blond cemeteries,
the wind shepherding the dead leaves.
Now I am you walking among trees.
I have walked a long way from my army. I am dead.

I have already slept through the twentieth century,
I've slept through my clothes, through my body,
and nothing remains. I am a blind man who's
sitting with photographic absence in a park

in Vienna, which at twilight is utterly silent
and vacant as only a city I have never
visited can be. Now I am in a small bed,
I can hear myself breathing. I haven't learned to talk.

… stopping to light a cigarette
in a crowded street
it suddenly happens,
I'm able to feel

the crosshairs
of a high-powered rifle
randomly focused
on my forehead or chest.

Oblivious to the lit match
in my fingers, I raise
the other hand
to my face

and instantly see myself
through the sights
of the imagined weapon
equipped with a silencer.

It's then I begin to envision
my own thoughts: a black rainbow—,
a hearse filled with water
and driven by men wearing diving suits,

goggles, oxygen tanks. The deceased
allowed to float aimlessly
inside this womblike compartment,

inside this immense tear
lit by the candle
a mourner holds
in her thin rubber hand.

Far from people right around me
I strike another match,

something like a man waiting
in front of a firing squad.
Something like a man waiting
for his photograph to be taken,

in his fingers the seed
of a tree
from which he'll be hanged
in another life.

The photograph's crowded with the dim figures of dimmingly remembered people. People without childhoods. Children dressed in stiff clothes as in grave clothes, for appearance's sake. Trees. It is one of my mother's weddings. There I am, eight years old, already wearing that resignedly griefstricken expression of someone whose life is behind him. In the crowd, my mother and I are still not separated, but it is startling clear that we are now both citizens of another past and that nothing is going to diminish our sense of for-eignness in this one. The photograph fades ineluctably; two thousand miles from here my mother's hair turns gray as she combs it… Now she looks out at me through years. She sees how I long to torture her white dress. And I turn my face from that awful forgiveness.

Almost always, it's just getting dark
when you come back, when you arrive
on this street;
dark
and perhaps just beginning to rain,

as it is, lightly, now.

Lightning
along the perimeter of the black cornfields past N. Professor,
and out back from the nursing home,
where they're putting people
to sleep.

Almost always, it's just getting dark
when I realize you are gone;
when you come here
and lie down beside me, without any clothes on
and without a body.

From where I am
I can hear the rain on the telephone
and voices of nuns singing
in a green church in Brugge three years ago.

I can still see the hill,
the limestone fragment of an angel,
its mouth which has healed with
the illegible names in the cemetery,

the braillelike names—
the names of children, lovers, and the rest.
The names of people
buried with their watches running.

They are not sleeping, don't lie.

But it's true that once
every year of their death
it is spring.

To be able to say it: rose, oak, the stars.
And not to be blind!
Just to be here
for one day, only
to breathe and know when you lie down
you will keep on breathing;
to cast a reflection—,
oh, to have hands
even if they are a little damaged,
even if the fingers
leave no prints.

I'm tired of listening to these
conflicting whispers
before sleep;
I'm tired of this
huge, misshapen body.
I need another: and what could be prettier
than the wolf spider's, with its small
hood of gray fur.
I'm told it can see in the dark;
I'm told how its children
spill from a transparent sack
it secretes, like a tear.
I'm told about its solitude,
ferocious and nocturnal.
I want to speak with this being.
I want it
to weave me a bridge.

Striking the table it seems to impose
silence on all metaphysics.
Yet touching the word
sun
in braille
or switching on a lamp, the hand
is clearly the mind's glove,
its sister, its ghostly machine.
You'd hardly call what I feel pity
as I watch it
light this match.
Yet it is the hand of the child
and the corpse in me—
the sleeper's hand, buried apart
in its small grave of unconsciousness;
the hand that's been placed in handcuffs by police;
the hand I used to touch you, once;
the cool hand on my forehead.

You're thinking of the pilot
in his glass cockpit
40,000 feet above the street
you live on
unseen
except for the white line
traced halfway across the darkening sky
all at once it dawns on you
the telephone is ringing
for the first time in weeks
and with equal suddenness
it ceases
as your hand goes to lift the receiver
in the next room
so that when you return to your window
the sky has grown empty the first star

{for C.P.}

I have had a strange thought: I see a young woman wearing a bridal dress stretched out asleep on her back in some grass. In an immense field. The sky darkening in another century… The sleeper's right hand floats an inch or so above the earth, the string of a kite—too high to be seen—tied around her wrist. There is no one else in sight. I stand looking on at what seems to be a great distance; yet the slightest movements of her lashes, the most insignificant alteration in her breathing, are as clear to me as they would be to somebody kneeling beside her and peering into her troubled, unrecognizable face. I don't approach. I am in no position to touch the alone. I move in and out of their fragile worlds erratically and by complete accident… I make one more attempt to place her; but now it's like trying to detect the motion of the minute hand, or watch yourself grow old in a mirror … Churchbells. The moon a mile off.

A girl comes out
of the barn, holding
a lantern
like a bucket of milk

or like a lantern.
Her shadow's there.
They pump a bucket of water
and loosen their blouses,

they lead the mare out
from the field
their thin legs
blending with the wheat.

Crack a green kernel
in your teeth. Mist
in the fields,
along the clay road

the mare's footsteps
fill up with milk.

I see the one walking this road
I see the one whose coat is thin whose shoes need mending
who is cold it's a very cold day
for stopping beside this dead cornfield
and basking one's face in those gray Rorschach clouds
I see the one whose lips say nothing
I see through his eyes I see the buried radiance in things
the one who isn't there

{for B.W.}

You are one of those
who came back miraculously
whole. And yet
if someone shakes your hand,
if he welcomes you
into his home, without knowing it
he also welcomes in those who did not:
those who came back with hooks
protruding from their sleeves,
who came back in wheelchairs
and boxes.
They fill the house,
those who came back
with empty pant legs
or black glasses; those who
came back with no voice; those
who come back in the night
to ask you their name.

Their fingernails and hair continue to grow.
The bandaged eggs of their skulls
are frequently combed by the attendants
and friends no one has mentioned are dead.

A few of them wander around in the hallway,
waiting to be led off to the bathroom.
And these move as if underwater, as if
they were children in big people's shoes,

exploring each thing in their own rooms
for the first time:
mirror, glasses, a vial of pills
with a name typed microscopically on it,

impossible to make out.