the pump arm of an oil well,
the chop and whir of a combine in the sun.
From my ancestors, the Swedes,
I suppose I inherit the love of rainy woods,
kegs of herring and neat whiskey –
I remember long nights of pinochle,
the bulge of Redman in my grandpa’s cheek;
the rug smelled of manure and kerosene.
They laughed loudly and didn’t speak for days.
(But on the other side, from the German Mennonites,
their rag-smoke prayers and porky daughters
I got intolerance, and aimless diligence.)
In ’51 during a revival I was saved:
I prayed on a cold register for hours
and woke up lame. I was baptized
by immersion in the tank at Williamston –
the rusty water stung my eyes.
I left off the old things of the flesh
but not for long – one night beside a pond
she dried my feet with her yellow hair.
O actual event dead quotient
cross become green
I still love Jubal but pity Hagar.
(Now self is the first sacrament
who loves not the misery and taint
of the present tense is lost.
I strain for a lunar arrogance.
Light macerates
the lamp infects
warmth, more warmth, I cry.)
DAVID
He is young. The father is dead.
Outside, a cold November night,
the mourners’ cars are parked upon the lawn;
beneath the porch light three
brothers talk to three sons
and shiver without knowing it.
His mind’s all black thickets
and blood; he knows
flesh slips quietly off the bone,
he knows no last looks,
that among the profusion of flowers
the lid is closed to hide
what no one could bear –
that metal rends the flesh,
he knows beneath the white-pointed
creatures, stars,
that in the distant talk of brothers,
the father is dead.
EXERCISE
Hear this touch: grass parts
for the snake,
in furrows
soil curves around itself,
a rock topples into a lake,
roused organs,
fur against cloth,
arms unfold,
at the edge of a clearing
fire selects new wood.
A SEQUENCE OF WOMEN
I
I’ve known her too long:
we devour as two mirrors,
opposed,
swallow each other a thousand
times at midpoints,
lost in the black center
of the other.
II
She sits on the bed,
breasts slack,
watching a curl of dust
float through a ray of sun,
drift down to a corner.
So brief this meeting
with a strange child –
Do I want to be remembered?
Only as a mare might know
the body of her rider,
the pressure of legs
unlike any other.
III
The girl who was once my mistress
is dead now, I learn, in childbirth.
I thought that long ago women ceased
dying this way.
To set records straight, our enmity
relaxes, I wrote a verse for her –
to dole her by pieces, ring finger
and lock of hair.
But I’m a poor Midas to turn her golden,
to make a Helen, grand whore, of this graceless
girl; the sparrow that died was only
a sparrow:
Though in the dark, she doesn’t sleep.
On cushions, embraced by silk, no lover
comes to her. In the first light when birds
stir she does not stir or sing. Oh eyes can’t
focus to this dark.
NORTHERN MICHIGAN
On this back road the land
has the juice taken out of it:
stump fences surround nothing
worth their tearing down
by a deserted filling station
a Veedol sign, the rusted hulk
of a Frazer, “live bait”
on battered tin.
A barn
with half a tobacco ad
owns the greenness of a manure
pile
a half-moon on a privy door
a rope swinging from an elm. A
collapsed henhouse, a pump
with the handle up
the orchard with wild tangled branches.
In the far corner of the pasture,
in the shadow of the woodlot
a herd of twenty deer:
three bucks
are showing off –
they jump in turn across the fence,
flanks arch and twist to get higher
in the twilight
as the last light filters
through the woods.
RETURNING AT NIGHT
Returning at night
there’s a catalpa moth
in the barberry
on the table the flowers
left alone turned black
in the root cellar
the potato sprouts
creeping through the door
glisten white and tubular
in the third phase
of the moon.
FAIR/BOY CHRISTIAN TAKES A BREAK
This other speaks of bones, blood-wet
and limber, the rock in bodies. He takes
me to the slaughterhouse, where lying
sprawled, as a giant coil of rope,
the bowels of cattle. At the county fair
we pay an extra quarter to see the her-
maphrodite. We watch the secret air tube
blow up the skirts of the farm girls,
tanned to the knees then strangely white.
We eat spareribs and pickled eggs,
the horses tear the ground to pull a load
of stone; in a burning tent we see
Fantasia do her Love Dance with the
Spaniard – they glisten with sweat, their
limbs knot together while below them farm
boys twitter like birds. Then the breasts
of a huge Negress rotate to a march in
opposing directions, and everyone stamps
and cheers, the udders shine in blurring
speed. Out of the tent we pass produce
stalls, some hung with ribbons, squash
and potatoes stacked in pyramids. A buck-
toothed girl cuts her honorable-mention
cake; when she leans to get me water
from a milk pail her breasts are chaste.
Through the evening I sit in the car (the
other is gone) while my father watches
the harness race, the 4-H talent show.
I think of St. Paul’s Epistles and pray
the removal of what my troubled eyes have seen.
MORNING
The mirror tastes him
breath clouds
hands pressed against glass
in yellow morning light
a jay
flutters in unaccustomed
silence
from bush to limb of elm
a cow at breakfast
pauses
her jaws lax in momentary stillness
far off a milk truck
rattles
on the section road
light low mist
floats
over the buckwheat
through the orchard
t
he neighbor’s dogs bark
then four roosters announce
day.
KINSHIP
Great-uncle Wilhelm, Mennonite, patriarch,
eater of blood sausage, leeks,
headcheese, salt pork,
you are led into church
by that wisp you plundered for nine children.
Your brain has sugared now,
your white beard is limp,
you talk of acres of corn
where there is only snow.
Your sister, a witch, old as a stump,
says you are punished now for the unspeakable
sin that barred you from the table for seven years.
They feed you cake to hasten your death.
Your land is divided.
Curse them but don’t die.
FEBRUARY SUITE
angry bush
with the thrust of your roots
deep in this icy ground,
is there a polar sun?
Month of the frozen
goat –
La Roberta says cultivate
new friends,
profit will
be yours with patience.
Not that stars are crossed
or light to be restored –
we die from want of velocity.
And you, longest of months
with your false springs,
you don’t help or care about helping,
so splendidly ignorant of us.
Today icicles fell
but they will build downward again.
Who has a “fate”?
This fig tree
talks
about bad weather.
Here is a man drunk –
in the glass
his blurred innocence renewed.
The Great Leitzel
before falling to her death
did 249 flanges on the Roman rings –
her wrist was often raw
and bloody
but she kept it hidden.
He remembers Memorial Day –
the mother’s hymn to Generals.
The American Legion fires blanks
out over the lassitude of the cemetery
in memory of sons who broke
like lightbulbs in a hoarse cry
of dust.
Now
behind bone
in the perfect dark
the dream of animals.
To remember
the soft bellies of fish
the furred animals that were part of your youth
not for their novelty
but as fellow creatures.
I look at the rifles
in their rack upon the wall:
though I know the Wars
only as history
some cellar in Europe might still
owe some of its moistness to blood.
With my head on the table
I write,
my arm outstretched, in another field
of richer grain.
A red-haired doll stares
at me from a highchair,
her small pink limbs twisted about
her neck.
I salute the postures of women.
This hammer of joy,
this is no fist
but a wonderment got by cunning.
The first thunderstorm
of March came last night
and when I awoke the snow had passed
away, the brown grass
lay matted and pubic.
Between the snow and grass,
somewhere into the ground with the rain
a long year has gone.
TRAVERSE CITY ZOO
Once I saw a wolf tread a circle in his cage
amid the stench of monkeys, the noise of musty
jungle birds. We threw him bits of doughy
bread but he didn’t see us, padding on through
some imagined forest, his nose on blood.
We began to move on in boredom when he jumped
against the bars, snarled, then howled
in rage that long shrill howl that must remind
us of another life. Children screamed and ran,
their parents passing them in terror – the summer
day became hard and brittle. I stooped there
and watched his anger until the keeper
came with a Flash Gordon gun and shot him full
of dope. He grew smaller and sputtered into sleep.
REVERIE
He thinks of the dead. But they
appear as dead – beef-colored and torn.
There is a great dull music
in the ocean that lapses into seascape.
The girl bends slowly
from the waist. Then stoops.
In high school Brutus
died upon a rubber knife.
Lift the smock. The sun
light stripes her back. A fado wails.
In an alley in Cambridge. Beneath
a party’s noise. Bottle caps stuck to them.
FOX FARM
In the pasture a shire
drew a hayrake,
a plough,
can’t hold the weight of his great
head and neck –
he will be fed to the foxes.
And the Clydesdales and saddle nags
that stray along the fence
with limps and sagging bellies,
with rheumy eyes (one
has no tail).
But the foxes
not having known field
or woods,
bred, born in long rows of hutches,
will die to adorn some
woman’s neck.
NIGHTMARE
Through the blinds
a white arm caresses a vase of zinnias
beneath the skin
of a pond the laughter of an eye
in the loft
the hot straw suffocates
the rafters become snakes
through the mow door
three deer in a cool pasture
nibbling at the grass
mercurous in the moon.
CREDO, AFTER E.P.
Go, my songs
to the young and insolent,
speak the love of final things –
do not betray me
as a dancer, drunk,
is dumb to his clumsiness.
DUSK
Dusk over the lake,
clouds floating
heat lightning
a nightmare behind branches;
from the swamp
the odor of cedar and fern,
the long circular
wail of the loon –
the plump bird aches for fish
for night to come down.
Then it becomes so dark
and still
that I shatter the moon with an oar.
LISLE’S RIVER
Dust followed our car like a dry brown cloud.
At the river we swam, then in the canoe passed
downstream toward Manton; the current carried us
through cedar swamps, hot fields of marsh grass
where deer watched us and the killdeer shrieked.
We were at home in a thing that passes.
And that night, camped on a bluff, we ate eggs
and ham and three small trout; we drank too much
whiskey and pushed a burning stump down the bank –
it cast hurling shadows, leaves silvered and darkened,
the crash and hiss woke up a thousand birds.
Now, tell me, other than lying between some woman’s legs,
what joy have you had since, that equaled this?
THREE NIGHT SONGS
I
He waits to happen with the clear
reality of what he thinks about –
to be a child who wakes beau
tifully,
a man always in the state of waking
to a new room, or at night, waking
to a strange room with snow outside,
and the moon beyond glass,
in a net of branches,
so bright and clear and cold.
II
Moving in liquid dark,
night’s water,
a flat stone sinking,
wobbling toward bottom;
and not to wait there for morning,
to see the sun up through the water,
but to freeze until another glacier comes.
III
The mask riddles itself,
there’s heat through the eye slits,
a noise of breathing,
the plaster around the mouth is wet;
and the dark takes no effort,
dark against deeper dark,
the mask dissembles,
a music comes to the point of horror.
CARDINAL
That great tree covered with snow
until its branches droop,
the oak, that keeps its leaves through winter
(in spring a bud breaks the stem),
has in its utmost branch
a cardinal,
who brushing snow aside, pauses for an instant
then plummets toward earth
until just above a drift he opens his wings