Across such arabesques as these once walked Victoria.
Now in the lost great animal boneyard these lively skins are stretched,
Unravel, fall to pollen and to rust.Sic transit gloria.
All this has passed, is dim as ill-recalled rococo
But in my youth I stomped out cinnamons from these
God-awful paths and raised up such a flour of scents
As would reel down kings and make rise up to kingship
Lunatic lepers and foul penitents.
Old creatures, slung upon a wire in wind and light
And years’ ebbtide
I beat you gently with my howdah wire-racket beater,
Search tigers in the shade of your deep hills
And stand, a monarch made, along your blind impatient old
And slumbrous side,
And know that modern carpetings and rugs, so bland, so broad
So nothing, and so shallow
Were made for snails
And men who breakfast, lunch, and dine
Upon the safe, sure, ever-recurring marshmallow.
Still somewhere in this world
Do elephants graze yards?
In far towns toward the East and North toward Michigan
Do grandmothers and boys go forth to lawns,
And lines strummed there ‘twixt oak or elm and porch,
And tie thereon great beasts of Indian grace
Loomed taller than their heads?
Still on such days do heartbeats throng the town
Where elderwitch and tads,
Where toms and great-grand-crones gone feverish with sweat
Goad Time out of the warp and weave,
The tapestry of treaded hearthwarm woolen flesh,
Beat Time into the breeze and watch the billion footfalls
Sift clouds into the greening insufferable beauty of young trees?
Do old and young still tend a common ground?
Vast panoply and firewalk spread of God’s most patient brute
Whose firecoal eyes observe and well-worn hide
Now feels the woman tire, so Boy takes up the beat:
Where one thump dies, another heart begins.
Along the cliff of dusty hide
From either end, with centuries between as well as miles,
Old looks to young, young looks to old
And, pausing with their wands,
Trade similar smiles.
DARWIN, THE CURIOUS
Old Curious Charlie
He stood for hours
Benumbed,
Astonished,
Amidst the flowers;
Waiting for silence,
Waiting for motions
In seas of rye
Or oceans of weeds—
The stuff on which true astonishment feeds—
And the weeds that fed and filled his silo
With a country spread
By the pound or kilo,
Of miracles vast or microscopic,
For them, by night, was he the topic?
In conversations of rye and barley,
Didthey stand astonished
By Curious Charlie?
DARWIN, IN THE FIELDS
Darwin, in the fields, stood still as time
And waited for the world to now exhale and now
Take in a breath of wind from off the yield and swell
Of sea where fill the clouds with sighs;
His eyes knew what they saw but took their time to tell
This truth to him; he waited on their favor.
His nose kept worlds far larger than a goodly nose might savor
And waited for the proper place to fit the flavor in.
So eye and nose and ear and hand told mouth
What it must say;
And after a while and many and many a day
His mouth,
So full of Nature’s gifts, it trembled to express,
Began to move.
No more a statue in the field,
A honeybee come home to fill the comb,
Here Darwin hies.
Though to ordinary eyes it might appear he plods,
Victorian statue in a misty lane;
All that is lies. Listen to the gods:
“The man flies, I tell you. The man flies!”
DARWIN, WANDERING HOME AT DAWN
Darwin, wandering home at dawn,
Met foxes trotting to their lairs,
Their tattered litters following,
The first light of the blood-red sun adrip
Among their hairs.
What must they’ve thought,
The man of fox,
The fox of man found there in dusky lane;
And which had right-of-way?
Did he or they move toward or in or
On away from night?
And his
Put weights to hidden scales
In mutual assize,
In simple search all stunned
And amiable apprize.
Darwin, the rummage collector,
Longing for wisdom to clap in a box,
Such lore as already learned and put by
A billion years back in his blood by the fox.
Old summer days now gone to flies
Bestir themselves alert in vixen eyes;
Some primal cause
Twitches the old man’s human-seeming paws.
An ancient sharp surmise is melded here
And shapes all Dooms
Which look on Death and know it.
Darwin all this knows.
The fox knows he knows.
But knowing is wise not to show it.
They stand a moment more upon the uncut lawn.
Then as if by sign, quit watchfulness;
Each imitates the other’s careless yawn.
And with no wave save pluming tail of fox and kin
Away the creatures go to sleep the day,
Leaving old Charlie there in curious disarray,
His hair combed this, his wits the other way.
So off he ambles, walks, and wanders on,
Leaving an empty meadow,
A place
Where strange lives passed…
And dawn.
EVIDENCE
Basking in sun,
Age 37, mid-Atlantic, on a ship,
And the ship sailing west,
Quite suddenly I saw it there
Upon my chest, the single one,
The lonely hair.
The ship was sailing into night.
The hair waswhite…
The sun had set beyond the sky;
The ship was sailing west,
And suddenly, O God, why, yes,
I felt, I knew…
So was I.
TELLING WHERE THE SWEET GUMS ARE
Even before you opened your eyes
You knew it would be one of those days.
Tell the sky what color it must be,
And it was indeed.
Tell the sun how to crochet its way,
Pick and choose among leaves
To lay out carpetings of bright and dark
On the fresh lawn,
And pick and choose it did.
The bees have been up earliest of all;
They have already come and gone
and come and gone again
to the meadow fields
and returned
all golden fuzz upon the air
all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full,
nectar-dripping.
Don’t you hear them pass?
hover?
dance their language?
telling where the sweet gums are,
The syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies,
That make boys squirm with unpronounced juices,
That make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes
Their dolph
in selves naked
aflash
on the warm air
Poised forever in one
Eternal
Glass
Wave.
EMILY DICKINSON, WHERE ARE YOU?
HERMAN MELVILLE CALLED YOUR NAME
LAST NIGHT IN HIS SLEEP!
What did he call, and what was said?
From the sleep of the dead, from the lone white
Arctic midnight of his soul
What shy albino mole peered forth and gave a cry?
Or was it just the wind asifting through the winter screens
Upon the attic windows
Where the dust looks out at dew on empty lawns?
Or did the dawn mist find a tongue
And issue like his mystic seaport tides
From out his mouth while, all-unknowing, drowned, he slept
And dreamed on… Emily?
O what a shame, that these two wanderers
Of threeA.M. did not somehow contrive
To knock each other’s elbows drifting late
On sidewalks-vast inhabited by only leaves
And mice and tracks of silver from lost hieroglyphic snails.
How sad that from a long way off these two
Did not surprise each other’s ghosts,
One sailing lawns, the other ocean storms,
Strike up a conversation out of single simple words,
Alarms repeated and re-echoed, and so make up a life
From halves which separated long before the oceans rolled
Still sought each other, but in different towns.
Un-met and doomed they went their ways
To never greet or make mere summer comment
On her attic mothball or his sea-dog days.
Death would not stop for her,
Yet White graves yawned for him,
Each loved one half of that which, grim, enticed and beckoned,
Yet neither reckoned it as half a life for each;
With sudden reach they might have found
Each other and in meld and fuse and fusion
Then beheld between the two, two halves of loving Life,
And so made one!
Two halves of sun
To burn away two halves of misery and night,
Two souls with sight instead of tapping
Long after midnight souls skinned blind with frost,
Lost minds turned round-about to flesh,
Instead of lonely flesh, for lack of company,
Alone with mind.
But, then, imagine, whatdoes happen when some ghost
Of quiet passes and in passing nudges silence?
Does his silence know her vibrant quiet there
All drifting on the walk with leaves and dust?
It must. Or so the old religions say.
Thus forests know themselves and know the fall
Of their own timbers dropping in the unseen,
And so non-existent, wood;
Such things should hear themselves
And feel, record, and ridge them in their souls—
And yet…?
I really wonder if some night by chance
Old Herman and that lost and somehow always old dear Emily
Out late and walked five hundred miles in dreams
Might not have made some lone collision
At a crossroads where the moon was lamp
And trees were winter sentry to their soft encounter there.
One pale gaze finds the other,
One blind hand stutters forth to reach and touch the air,
His wry hand comes the other way,
So frail the night wind trembles it,
Both shake as candles shake their fires
When old time turns ashuttle in its sleep.
The houses keep their shutters down.
The moon expires. The sidewalk ghosts remain
And, touching palms, at last walk almost but not quite
Arm in arm, soul hungering soul, away, away
Toward loss of midnight, toward gain of fog and mist
And day.
So walk they round the buried town all night.
Seeing their spectral shadows in the cold shop window glass,
Bleak mariner and odd mothball closet attic maiden lass.
No word they speak, nor whisper, nor does breath
Escape their nostrils, but they share
A strange new sense of being, everywhere they wander, go.
No thought, no word is said of dining,
Yet in the middle of a midnight pond of grass they do
Toss down their souls
And bring some wild thing up that writhes and gasps
And dances in their arms and is all shining.
Then on through night the love-drunk strangers browse
And in conniption clovers do their fevers douse.
Thus round the courthouse square
Where Civil cannons boom beneath their breath
And on to country lanes where ancient death
Keeps syllables on stones, those unseen words
That only sound from graveyard birds.
And stop at some sweet dark orchard yard
Where, panics stifled, ancient Melville skins on up
With gouty reach
To bring and offer, peel and eat
Some last lone sexual-pectin-covered farewell summer peach.
So nibbling in silence, mouths covered with gums,
Hands counting and touching and softly adding odd sums
Of affections —hips on occasion nudged in soft collisions,
They go cupping and hugging and surprised by derisions
And calamities of love, which in marrow and blood
Fix secret alarms set to waken wild needs.
And behind on the pavement leave trackings
Of seeds from apple and pear and apricot and cherry,
Wherever a farm offered food, their merry cries rose
As Emily chose and advised and sent old Ahab ashore
To come forth with his hands full of loot;
The smell from his nostrils and mouth
A whole summer of fruit.
Then at the far end of the town
They turn them round and make ready to depart forever,
She on meadow concretes where no grass
Obtrudes, seethes through,
And he upon an ocean sea of rye and late-mown hay
That takes him rudderless to break of day;
He walks out in the tides, the grass foams round his feet,
She with her skirts now glides and calmly cleans
The leaves straight down the middle of this cold town’s street.
Both turn but do not wave, look with their eyes,
A look of love, a look of mad surmise?
They cannot tell, they mirror each the other’s
Lonely statue, one in fallow moonlake meadow lost,
One like female dog who trots the night
A thing of frost and mildewed echoes
Where her feet set up a ricochet of battles
Fought for no gain from both sides of the street.
She dwindles, goes, is gone.
He slowly sinks from sight in weed and briar
And toadstool silages and dew.
All silence is.
All emptiness.
And now:
The dawn.
O GIVE A FIG FOR NEWTON,
PRAISE FOR HIM!
Mad Isaac, snoozed beneath a tree,
Was shaken by surprise;
A sneeze of happenstance and fruit
Knocked wide his eyes and sprang his wild thoughts free
To watch the Force Invisible pluck apples down.
From there, informed, he jogged about the town
And told what he was bold to tell:
Apples fall gladly, held in the spell of Force,
With neither hesitation nor remorse.
The Truth
is this: They Fall.
Friends listened, looked, and they themselves saw All.
Glad Isaac, back beneath his tree
Pressing old truths to new cider myth or scientific sauce,
Hauled off and kicked to help the Yield, the Unseen Source.
That last kick shook a billion seeds to fall;
Thus Gravity, invisible till now, was found, revealed.
Within the hour, ten thousand nimble scientists
Dodged out to scowl beneath strange trees,
Through orchard field they loped to sprawl,
Waiting for ripe fruit or o’er-ripe Theory to fall.
Apple or Isaac?
Which did it matter?
But in their secret, unscientific hearts—
Preferably the latter.
I WAS THE LAST, THE VERY LAST
I was the last,
The very last;
You understand?
No one else in all the land saw him as then I saw.
They opened up the tomb a final time
When I was nine
And held me there and said:
Look on him dead, boy, look, oh, look you well,
So some day later on you then can tell,
Describe, remember how it was.
That’s Lincoln there,
His face, his withered jackstraw bones;
Within this case from which we lift the lid
Is that beloved man.
You be the final one,
You young and fresh
To see and memorize his ghosted flesh.
So, look, ah sweet Christ, look,
And print the backwall of your gaze
With photographs to be immersed in fluid memory,
Developed in your ancient days.
I was the last!
The very last to see him!
There in Springfield’s keep
One summer day
They tacked and hammered, grunted, groaned
To summon Lincoln from his sleep.
So many robbers had come round
To sack his soul;
Many an odd and evil mole had burrowed hard
To ransom forth his brow and beard and hand,
And kidnap him who died so long before.
So now upon this final day
Before they locked and poured the concrete round
And kept him really buried deep
In his home farm and land
A crowd had gathered to unpry his secret box of bones
And look a lingering while on greatness gone to farewell summer,
April’s promise lost in snow.
All came, all gazed, to see, to know.
I was the last to go.
They held me high, a boy, they turned my head.
I saw the man strewn lonely in his crypt.
That’s him, they whispered, he who was shot,
Old Gettysburg man, and Grant’s night-camp,
Dawn damps at Shiloh,
Gentle playmate of Tad;