began to live.
My passage grew into that country
like a vine, as if remaining
when I’d gone, responsive to the season’s
change, boding a continuance of eyes;
not the place or the distance
made it known to me,
but the direction so ardently obeyed,
preserving my advance
on the edge of virgin light,
broken by my shadow’s stride;
I wouldn’t recognize the way back.
I approach my death, descend
toward the last fact; it is
not so clear to me now as it once seemed;
when I hunted in the new lands
alone, I could foresee
the skeleton hiding with its wound
after the fear and flesh were gone;
now
it may come as a part of sleep.
In winter the river hides its flowing under the ice
—even then it flows,
bearing interminably down; the black crow flies
into the black night;
the bones of the old dead ache for the house fires.
Death is a conjecture of the seed
and the seasons bear it out;
the wild plum achieves its bloom,
perfects the yellow center of each flower,
submits to violence—
extravagance too grievous for praise;
there are no culminations, no
requitals.
Freed of distances
and dreams, about to die,
the mind turns back to its approaches:
what else have I known?
The search
withholds the joy from what is found,
that has been my sorrow;
love is no more than what remains
of itself.
There are no arrivals.
At the coming of winter
the birds obey the leviathan flock
that moves them south,
a rhythm of the blood that survives the cold
in pursuit of summer;
and the sun, innocent of time
as the blossom is innocent of ripeness,
faithful to solstice, returns—
and the flocks return;
the season recognizes them.
If it were possible now
I’d make myself submissive
to the weather
as an old tree, without retrospect
of winter, blossoming,
grateful for summers hatched from thrushes’ eggs
in the speckled thickets
—obedient
to darkness,
be innocent of my dying.
GREEN AND WHITE
The wind scruffing it, the bay
is like a field of green grass,
and the white seagulls afloat
in the hackling of the green bay
are like white flowers blooming
in the field,
for they are white
and come there, and are still
a while, and leave, and leaving
leave no sign they ever were there.
Green is no memorial to white.
There’s danger in it. They fly
beyond idea till they come back.
A MAN WALKING AND SINGING
for James Baker Hall
1.
It is no longer necessary to sleep
in order to dream of our destruction.
We take form within our death, the figures
emerging like shadows in fire.
Who is it? speaking to me of death’s beauty.
I think it is my own black angel, as near me
as my flesh. I am never divided from his darkness,
his face the black mask of my face. My eyes
live in his black eye-holes. On his black wings
I rise to sing.
His mouthing presences attend
my singing:
Die more lightly than live,
they say. Death is more gay.
There’s no argument
against its certainty, at least, they say.
I know they know as surely as I live my death
exists, and has my shape.
2.
But the man so forcefully walking,
say where he goes,
say what he hears and what he sees
and what he knows
to cause him to stride so merrily.
He goes in spring
through the evening street
to buy bread,
green trees leaning
over the sidewalk,
forsythia yellow
beneath the windows,
birds singing
as birds sing
only in spring,
and he sings, his footsteps
beating the measure of his song.
In an open window
a man and a woman
leaning together
at the room’s center
embrace and kiss
as if they met
in passing,
the spring wind
lifting the curtain.
His footsteps carry him
past the window,
deeper into his song.
His singing becomes conglomerate
of all he sees,
leaving the street behind him
runged as a ladder
or the staff of a song.
3.
To his death? Yes.
He walks and sings to his death.
And winter will equal spring.
And for the lovers, even
while they kiss, even though
it is spring, the day ends.
But to the sound of his passing
he sings. It is a kind of triumph
that he grieves—thinking
of the white lilacs in bloom,
profuse, fragrant, white
in excess of all seasonal need,
and of the mockingbird’s crooked
arrogant notes, hooking him to the sky
as though no flight
or dying could equal him
at his momentary song.
THE COMPANIONS
When he goes out in the morning
and comes back at night
his landlady is there
watching him, leaning
forward in her chair, one hand
holding the curtain back,
simply curious, simply old,
having stashed away her knickknacks
in three commemorative rooms,
stored up a winter’s breathing,
forbidden the cold
to come in. She dreams
she’s dying in her sleep
and wakes up afraid, to breath in
again her breathed-out breath.
Who will outlast?
She waits for him, faithful
to his arrivals and to the place;
he brings back life to her,
what he salvages of himself daily
from the shut-out air.
They don’t speak.
She just observes his homecoming,
lifelike in her chair
as the shell of a wan moth
holding to the lace.
THE ARISTOCRACY
Paradise might have appeared here,
surprising us, a rackle of sublime coordinates
figuring over the trees, surprising us, even
though the look of the place seems not
altogether unexpectant of such an advent,
seems not altogether willing to settle
for something less: the fine light
prepared in the taut statuary of the oaks;
venerable churches of muted brick;
Greek porches presiding at the ends
of approaches; delicate fanlights over doorways
delicate and symmetrical as air, if air
prepared, preened itself for Paradise
to appear, surprisingly, but not very, in this place
—all it needs to be Paradise is populace.
(What has appeared, surprisingly, but not very
—stepping out the door, and down the steps,
groping for each next-lower step
with a left foot her expansive exquisitely garmented
paunch has prevented her seeing for thirty-five
years—is a rich, fat, selfish,
ugly, ignorant, old
bitch, airing her cat.)
THE BIRD KILLER
His enemy, the universe, surrounds him nightly with stars
going nowhere over the cold woods that has grown now,
with nightfall, totally dark, the stars deeper in the sky
than darkness; his thoughts go out alone into the winds
of the woods’ dark. He sits in the doorway and softly
plays the guitar; his fingers are stiff and heavy
and touch the strings, not dextrously, so that he plays
his own song, no true copy of a tune; sometimes the notes
go away from melody, form singly, and die out,
singly, in the hollow of the instrument, like single small
lights in the dark; his music has this passion,
that he plays as he can play. All day he has walked
in the woods with his gun, ruin of summer, iron-rust,
crumpled bronze, under the bare trees, devouring song. Now
the trees of darkness grow tall and wide; nobody’s
silence is in the woods. In the hush of all birds
who love light, he lets go free to die in the broad woods
in the dark the notes of his song.
AN ARCHITECTURE
Like a room, the clear stanza
of birdsong opens among the noises
of motors and breakfasts.
Among the light’s beginnings,
lifting broken gray of the night’s
end, the bird hastens to his song
as to a place, a room commenced
at the end of sleep. Around
him his singing is entire.
CANTICLE
for Robert Hazel
What death means is not this—
the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall,
praising its absence, feeding on music.
If life can’t justify and explain itself,
death can’t justify and explain it.
A creed and a grave never did equal the life
of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts
of ancient stones at the beginning of April.
The black clothes of the priests are turned
against the frail yellow of sunlight and petal;
they wait in their blackness to earn joy
by dying. They trust that nothing holy is free,
and so their lives are paid. Money slots
in the altar rails make a jukebox of the world,
the mind paying its gnawed coins for the safety of ignorance.
SPARROW
A sparrow is
his hunger organized.
Filled, he flies
before he knows he’s going to.
And he dies by the
same movement: filled
with himself, he goes
by the eye-quick
reflex of his flesh
out of sight,
leaving his perfect
absence without a thought.
A MUSIC
I employ the blind mandolin player
in the tunnel of the Métro. I pay him
a coin as hard as his notes,
and maybe he has employed me, and pays me
with his playing to hear him play.
Maybe we’re necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both
—it’s vacant, I mean, of dwellers,
is populated by passages and absences.
By some fate or knack he has chosen
to place his music in this cavity
where there’s nothing to look at
and blindness costs him nothing.
Nothing was here before he came.
His music goes out among the sounds
of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance
and meaning of what he plays.
It’s his music, not the place, I go by.
In this light which is just a fact, like darkness
or the edge or end of what you may be
going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees
and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up
his mandolin, the lantern of his world;
his fingers make their pattern on the wires.
This is not the pursuing rhythm
of a blind cane pecking in the sun,
but is a singing in a dark place.
TO GO BY SINGING
He comes along the street, singing,
a rag of a man, with his game foot and bum’s clothes.
He’s asking for nothing—his hands
aren’t even held out. His song
is the gift of singing, to him
and to all who will listen.
To hear him, you’d think the engines
would all stop, and the flower vendor would stand
with her hands full of flowers and not move.
You’d think somebody would have hired him
and provided him a clean quiet stage to sing on.
But there’s no special occasion or place
for his singing—that’s why it needs
to be strong. His song doesn’t impede the morning
or change it, except by freely adding itself.
THE WILD
In the empty lot—a place
not natural, but wild—among
the trash of human absence,
the slough and shamble
of the city’s seasons, a few
old locusts bloom.
A few woods birds
fly and sing
in the new foliage
—warblers and tanagers, birds
wild as leaves; in a million
each one would be rare,
new to the eyes. A man
couldn’t make a habit
of such color,
such flight and singing.
But they’re the habit of this
wasted place. In them
the ground is wise. They are
its remembrance of what it is.
MAY SONG
there’s a taker.
The living discovers itself
where no preparation
was made for it,
where its only privilege
is to live if it can.
The window flies from the dark
of the subway mouth
into the sunlight
stained with the green
of the spring weeds
that crowd the improbable
black earth
of the embankment,
their stout leaves
like the tongues and bodies
of a herd, feeding
on the new heat,
drinking at the seepage
of the stones:
the freehold of life,
triumphant
even in the waste
of those who possess it.
But it is itself the possessor,
we know at last,
seeing it send out weeds
to take back
whatever is left:
Proprietor, pasturing foliage
on the rubble,
making use
of the useless—a beauty
we have less than not
deserved.
THE FEAR OF DARKNESS
The tall mar
igolds darken.
The baby cries
for better reasons than it knows.
The young wife walks
and walks among the shadows
meshed in the rooms.
And he sits in the doorway,
looking toward the woods,
long after the stars come out.
He feels the slow
sky turn toward him, and wait.
His birthright
is a third-hand Chevrolet,
bought for too much. “I
floorboard the son of a bitch,
and let her go.”
THE PLAN
My old friend, the owner
of a new boat, stops by
to ask me to fish with him,
and I say I will—both of us
knowing that we may never
get around to it, it may be
years before we’re both
idle again on the same day.
But we make a plan, anyhow,
in honor of friendship
and the fine spring weather
and the new boat
and our sudden thought
of the water shining
under the morning fog.
THE GUEST
Washed into the doorway
by the wake of the traffic,
he wears humanity
like a third-hand shirt
—blackened with enough
of Manhattan’s dirt to sprout
a tree, or poison one.
His empty hand has led him
where he has come to.
Our differences claim us.
He holds out his hand,
in need of all that’s mine.
And so we’re joined, as deep
as son and father. His life
is offered me to choose.
Shall I begin servitude
to him? Let this cup pass.
Who am I? But charity must
suppose, knowing no better,
that this is a man fallen
among thieves, or come
to this strait by no fault
—that our difference
is not a judgment,
though I can afford to eat
and am made his judge.
I am, I nearly believe,
the Samaritan who fell
into the ambush of his heart
on the way to another place.
My stranger waits, his hand
held out like something to read,
as though its emptiness
is an accomplishment.
I give him a smoke and the price
of a meal, no more
—not sufficient kindness