Why, gods in multiples, there’s no one else alive
Recalls what she recalled just some few days ago
When in her bed, remembering, she tuned pianos past
our ken;
She outlived twenty-on-a-thousand better men
And women who shored up their bones
And lived out lives on borrowed blood
And loans of vital stuffs,
While kindling up her dreams with echoings of song
That needle-hissed her mind all midnight long.
She played for Edison!
Old Thomas asked her talent to begin.
So she began and in beginning knew no end.
George Atwood came to find her at Old But Then Young Edison’s request.
Timidly she came, all doubt, and saw the strange machine
In which he would entrap, wind up her trembled soul,
There nest her sound like fragile mail To be delivered in some unfrequented year
She would frequent by song and song alone,
Her body gone, her touch would linger on the sill
And fill the year Two Thousand Ninety-Nine with chords.
Her late rewards?
A tumult of applause broadcast down shoals of stars
And Space
From all the future places where the race
Has gone, will go, to hide and seek,
The billions of them nameless as they go.
But, strange—
The name of Harriet Hadden Atwood they will know.
For Edison she played.
This maid another year did sit her down
In some small glade of time
And place her fingers to the keys
From which sprang old but now-made-new within-the-instant
Melodies.
Her claims were modest, Nor did she take a fee
She removed her gloves and gently kicked the pedals
A trimly perfect mediocrity—
Which means not bad nor yet a hair beyond
The median good;
She was a known commodity in the tuneless humming of bees
That was her green-fern, sharp-thorned summer rose
And cut-grass neighborhood.
All children, with their butterflies like Fates
Caught up in nets, nodded as she passed,
Their fingers aching at remembrance of strict lessons
That she taught;
She baked and bought the simples of her Time.
When in between a lesson or recital
Less than humble are her vital statistics,
Less than a complication the logistics of supply and demand
In her life.
Tom Edison needed a sweet-sour pound of high green summer apples;
George Atwood looked and found: a pianist, then a wife.
Both were gladdened by her sound.
Now that sound will gladden out the hearts of girls unborn
Beyond Poughkeepsie, Saturn, Jupiter,
Far Rockaway, Moon, Mars, or Matterhorn.
In nebulae at present kept beyond our gaze
Harriet Madden Atwood, who played for the now-long-dead
In other days,
Will, in future ages,
Doubtless in Alpha Centauri,
Be counted as one of their new and unpredictable culture rages.
Unknown in her own time,
No titan talent she.
Yet since she was the start of some new thing,
One billion years from tonight
She will bloom in eternal spring.
Five light-years away and away,
Miss Maiden-Lady Madden, later found-and-married Atwood,
Will play and play and play.
Tom Edison asks it!
In seance he sets her task ever on:
More, yes! once more, yes, now, more!
Five presidents heard and sent notes
On her birthdays recalling some raggedy tunes
They’d last heard on some late summer night
Now-gone-forever excursion boats.
Such threadbare keys,
By a passaging of time beyond the lees of every planet
In our basement system of the Void
May well outlive the off-beat hummings of a Freud,
Linger with Beethoven,
Stay with Berlioz.
Made up of humble clay, ?
Harriet Hadden Atwood, a girl whose only Cause
Was to play
Piano
Trapped by Thomas Alva E.,
Now lives Forever!
Give or take a day.
WHAT SEEMS A BALM
IS SALT TO ANCIENT WOUNDS
All things are mixed.
The very flesh of God
Is compound eye which looks upon a world
And cracks the light,
And shades the noon with ghost
And leans the shadow tree
Across the flowered lawn,
And fringes, all serene,
The sea with teeth of carnivore
Which boil in hungry schools beneath the calms;
What seems a balm is salt to ancient wounds;
What seems a death, gone teeming unto worms,
From splendid garbage rouses up new forms;
Beneath the mask of Peace
Old War hones swords and builds
A battlement of scrimshaw bone;
Beneath the battered shield
Soft flesh, gone simple with a summer’s day,
But waits for asking and then, asked, gives yield.
So round-about all goes, now hard, now soft,
Now mild, now mad, the sheep and wolf arun in tandem flocks:
Lost man, found world,
Fused paradox.
HERE ALL BEAUTIFULLY COLLIDES
The sky is inked with blue
The grass, sketched, scribbled, drawn, is green ink, too,
And all about ravines take children to their Deeps;
While from the east at dawn and west at sunset seeps
A color of life’s blood
Where clouds amass
And spread the tincture.
At the airport, dragon-shadows pass
Kites shuttle
Shadow down
Becoming planes
Which
Oh
So
Softly Land On…
…grass.
On rooftops roosters cut from metal
Whine with wind and nose gone-far directions
Where only children with their secret
Gum-chewed mint impacted wisdom go.
The eaves glide-whisper soft of summer nights
Now letting flow
The silk discumberments of dreams:
Remembered snow.
Rivers run here not filled with summer dust
Or sun-crazed rock and idiot stone
But actual water.
At noon the streets are church-nave deep in cool green shade
Across the lawns: battalions of glare,
Sun-dandelions
Clock-light the drifting grin and footpad ease of dog,
The vacuum-cleaner exhaled dust-fluff cat,
The rubber tread of never-silent boy.
Here all beautifully collides
Unfrictioned;
Summer heals all with an oiled and motioned fcase.
Here no disease.
Here health of world in distilled proportion,
Here gyroscope ahum kept spun by bees
Who drowse-drown lusciously entrapped by flowers
Or hummingbirds which fatten forth the hours with pure dripped sound…
In libraries where dry flowers drop
From books of printed flowers
Old clocks run dry of time keep rigid frozen pointed
At never known, so never remembered, so never forgotten, hours.
The librarian has been there forever.
She was never young; But will seem younger as we grow years.
The stamping of the purple inkstamped data in the books
Is like the tread of wisdom in this place;
The lily-pages blow and whisper
Boys go lost and murmuring in the stacks
Where all is mystery of green-mossed well
Where ignorance shouts to hear a learning echo.
These be the granite cliffs and quarries where we swim
In cooling words on summer midnights
And come forth printed o’er with poems
Which toweled from our flesh yet drip from fingertips
And stifle up the eyes with most sad joys.
All, all town, home, shop, Elite Theatre, library: first class.
A first class summer in a first class town.
Where green ink skies make green rains fall, enfilter down.
While at the airport,
Oh, God, look!
How Soft,
How sweet and rolling,
See! They pass! All dragon-shadow!
The kited planes
Strings cut,
Laze….
… drifting…
Down…
To land…
On
Grass.
GOD FOR A CHIMNEY SWEEP
What’s rough is this:
That life, which was a building up of bricks
From which one piped one’s exultations,
Now crusts itself within,
The nested stuff keeps soot,
So every cell upon a cell is darkened
With accumulant small dooms,
Some deft disasters of those lesser morns
Which were forgot by noon
But now in numbers rank themselves
And by their very armies overwhelm.
The spirit suffers at the count,
The soul is smothered by their waves.
One’s laughter is stopped up and jugged
Within the boneyard cage of rib;
One wants to shout these damned molecules away,
With single rear-backed roars and declamation
Give jolt and pound and hammering of chimney bricks
So all the soot falls down, an evil snow,
And life and flesh and soul gust up,
Are cleansed to joy themselves again
And morns are sweet when one wakes up
And feels a boy stir over, hid within
And turned all smiling to hear cries
Of other boys, all juiced with sun and desperate betew
Tossing soft light pebble laughter up to rap
The ice-clear window panes
Till life runs out to meet
Before the body joins
The soul on summer paths to drowning wilderness.
O, God, give strength to those like me
Who in their middle years so dearly wish
To pay with laughs the lurking Dustman
That most strange Chimney Sweep,
So he might knock this hearthing place
This frame of brittling skeleton
And wash all back to rinsed pink brick again,
Restart the fires
And dampen not their ardor
Yet a while.
I would stand baked in my own blood
Warm hands with self’s hid fiery surprise,
A fire in each cell and all cells swarmed
With the vast true sun’s uprise.
But how knock soot, clean dirt away
Which blinds the soul to its own lineaments,
Which tamps the ears so one can miss
The rare teakettle simmer of warm breath
From out one’s grateful mouth?
For Christmas then, O God, kick me a holy kick
Of great outcharged delight.
Gone midnight with too many dusks
And dawns of knowledge,
Knock me white,
O God, yes do!
Strike me with laughter’s downflashed lightning;
Make me Light!
TO PROVE THAT COWARDS DO SPEAK BEST
AND TRUE AND WELL
O, tell me not, dear Will,
That cowards die a thousand deaths;
I know, I know!
Why every breath I take does crack my bones,
Tear my flesh asunder,
Undermine my mask with moans and sighs.
And yet, while full of death and lies,
More full of pomegranate life and truth this coward be;
I am reborn, O Jesus’ nailed and frightened breath, why, hourly.
And with such mirth!
Why, listen,
Even though my shocked eyes burn and glisten
With tears torn free by griefs and mad surprise,
What cries of joy, also!
At the crazed and awful triumph up from Death,
Again and again and again I cull in breath
With equal seizures of fright,
Shout back the night, call in the morn,
Thus being reborn and, O much thanks! reborn.
And all of ye brave
Who die but once?
Get you to the grave.
For you dumb remain, and go all mute to mounds and worms.
My terms for life are better,
For while brother to night and dying each hour,
I, seeded with terror and handsome dread,
Am rebirthed as funeral flower
Which speaks again and, with panics of heart’s lost blood, again.
Your panoply of Will is steel which keeps out pain and thought,
From which you cannot speak.
My life is dearly bought;
I strike from shadows some few flints of light
While strickened is my heart
And flesh so thin to wounds it bleeds me white.
Yours is the bravery of fools
That will not last the night;
Death and the tomb your wit, your law,
Your first and final Rite.
Ride high in pomp, strut, drum, and flutter flags,
And go to Doom all bound up brave.
Your destiny is dumb.
Long after dark, my tongue will writhe
Like sunset snake within my grave
To prove that cowards do speak best and true and well.
And trumpeters and drummers of bravado,they…?
Go to Hell.
Go to Hell.
I, TOM, AND MY ELECTRIC GRAN
At night she came within my room
All breathing out of weather kept from Time…
A summer here, a summer there,
Spent days, warm haze and blue delights,
Remnants of some spun-toy winter nights,
A sound of sleds that rocked the sleep of worlds.
A tinsel cry of icicle on upper tower keep
A sound of wakening
A sound of sleep,
All these, transistorized
Packed in the cells and whorls
And thumbprints of her hum-spun spirit glass
Then caused her Ouija hand to move
And write in quiet motions large my name and Fate
Upon the loving dark over my bed.
Yes! Yes! to all I asked she said,
And firmly No when No was needed.
This woman warm as breast of slumbering fowl,
With wisdom seeded,
Kept safe my years and lanced my most infectious tears
With careful hand or handkerchief,
And held me close to smell her secret whispering
And murmuring machines,
The armory of electric creatures which
With echoings of kites on high March days
Said, “Boy, you’ll live forever. Go in peace…”
Then went I, running,
Tom, from my electric Gran.
And now when grown into
a man
I look me back and see her all aglow in dark,
Her mind a circuitry,
Her veins pale tapestries of spark,
Her hair full panoplied with light
A dim torch wavering of Liberty by night
Electric hive of wisdom from which bees……
Lit forth and stung me to my chores…
A library, a toyshop vault, a keep of wisdom’s spores;
Where centuries of freshly dusted gray philosophers
Wake from sleep
And speak out of her mouth
And from her tongue
Use her for bell and clapper
And there all clung and hung upon a lightning tower
They announce the Past, an amiable present,
And some future hour sung of in banged voices from the bell,
Here Schopenhauer gives shout,
There Dante trudges Hell.
Sweet Gran, electric Grandma of my life
You keep in minuscule a.c.-d.c. dungeons deep
The poets of an Age, a deaf-mute Sage perhaps
Who speaks but from your eyes
And cavemen also from a time of brute surmise
All these are shadow-painted on your brow
And throng your pomegranate soul
In which I burrowed like the monkey-mole
Now leapt akimbo, now thrusting sod
Now nosing Devil and now vaulting God.
O grandmother of years,
O, mother of the mineral soils of Earth,
I see you wandered on the midnight lawn,
A stillness kept, a waiting to begin.
A woman? No. A pageantry of wheels?
Much more.
A tin soul, trapped and mouthed, which felt the Universe
And spoke its mysteries at dawn.
BOYS ARE ALWAYS RUNNING SOMEWHERE:
A POEM
Boys are always running somewhere.
Ask them where, in running, they all go?
They’ll prance around, dance backward,
Answer, puzzled:
They don’t know…
And with a glance that says you’re sad or mad for asking,
On they’ll flow.
They are a river-run of Time;
Theirs not to ask or answer but to fit
The rhyme of circumstance and old beginnings without end;
God sends them forth for His own Reasonings
To south-east-north or why not west?
Whichever’s first is best.
Whichever’s second, well, that’s second-rate,
But better to be second, moved, in motion
Than be late for beckonings of Fate and rare fell plights
That wait beyond horizons, atop hills,
Fired by dawns,