The Cat
While you read
the sleepmoth begins
to circle your eyes
and then—
a hail of claws
lands the cat
in your lap.
The little motor
in his throat
is how a cat says
Me. He rasps the soft
file of his tongue
along the inside
of your wrist.
He licks himself.
He's building
a pebble of fur
in his stomach.
And now he pulls
his body in a circle
around the fire of sleep.
This is the weta
sweater with legs
that shakes in
from the rain,
split-ear the sex burglar,
Fish-breath, Wind-
minion, paw-poker
of dust
tumbleweeds,
the cat that kisses
with the wet
flame of his tongue
each of your eyelids
as if sealing
a letter.
One afternoon
napping under the light-
ladder
let down by the window,
there are two of them:
cat and cat-
shadow, sleep.
One night you lay your book
down like the clothes
your mother wanted
you to wear tomorrow.
You yawn.
The cat exhales a moon.
Opening a moon,
you dream of cats.
One of them strokes you
the wrong way. Still,
you sleep well.
This is the same cat
Plunder.
This is the old cat
Milk-whiskers.
This is the cat
eating one of its lives.
This is the first cat
Fire-fur.
This is the next cat
St. Sorrow.
This is the cat with its claws
furled, like sleep's flag.
This is the lust cat
trying to sleep with its shadow.
This is the only cat
I have ever loved.
This cat has written
in tongue-ink
the poem you are reading now,
the poem scratching
at the gate of silence,
the poem
that forgives
itself
for its used-up lives,
the poem
of the cat waking,
running a long shudder
through his body,
stretching again,
following the moist bell
into the world
again.
Talk
The body is never silent. Aristotle said that we can't hear the music of the spheres because it is the first thing that we hear, blood at the ear. Also the body is brewing its fluids. It is braiding the rope of food that moors us to the dead. Because it sniffles and farts, we love the unpredictable. Because breath goes in and out, there are two of each of us and they distrust each other. The body's reassuring slurps and creaks are like a dial tone: we can always call up the universe. And so we are always talking. My body and I sit up late, telling each other our troubles. And when two bodies are near each other, they begin talking in body-sonar. The art of conversation is not dead! Still, for long periods, it is comatose. For example, suppose my body doesn't get near enough to yours for a long time. It is disconsolate. Normally it talks to me all night: listening is how I sleep. Now it is truculent. It wants to speak directly to your body. The next voice you hear will be my body's. It sounds the same way blood sounds at your ear. It is saying Ssshhh, now that we, at last, are silent.
La Tâche 1962
for Michael Cuddihy
Pulling the long cork, I shiver with a greed so pure it is curiosity. I feel like the long muscles in a sprinter's thighs when he's in the blocks, like a Monarch butterfly the second before it begins migrating to Venezuela for the winter—I feel as if I were about to seduce somebody famous. Pop. The first fumes swirl up. In a good year the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti gets maybe 20,000 bottles of La Tâche; this is number 4,189 for 1962. In the glass the color is intense as if from use or love, like a bookbinding burnished by palm oil. The bouquet billows the sail of the nose: it is a wind of loam and violets. "La tâche" means "the task." The word has implications of piecework; perhaps the vineyard workers were once paid by the chore rather than by the day. In a good year there would be no hail in September. Work every day. Finally, the first pressing of sleep. Stems, skins, a few spiders, yeast-bloom and dust-bloom on the skins.... Now the only work is waiting. On the tongue, under the tongue, with a slow breath drawn over it like a cloud's shadow—, the wine holds and lives by whatever it has learned from 3½ acres of earth. What I taste isn't the wine itself, but its secrets. I taste the secret of thirst, the longing of matter to be energy, the sloth of energy to lie down in the trenches of sleep, in the canals and fibres of the grape. The day breaks into cells living out their secrets. Marie agrees with me: this empty bottle number 4,189 of La Tâche 1962 held the best wine we have ever drunk. It is the emblem of what we never really taste or know, the silence all poems are unfaithful to. Michael, suppose the task is to look on until our lives have given themselves away? Amigo, Marie and I send you our love and this poem.
Snow
The dog's spine, like a dolphin's,
sews a path
through the smaller drifts.
These graying roadside lumps,
like sheets waiting to be washed....
You have to press 4,000 snowgrapes
for one bottle of this winter light.
A white moss girdles
every tree.
All the erased
roads lead north, into the wind.
The house is a sack of sour breath
on the earth's back.
Glass drumskins
in the windows quiver.
I stare in a stupor of will,
fleck-faced, bearing my cow of a body
easily on the earth.
Intricate adjustments in my inner ears
and the gravitational habits of planets
keep me steady.
It's nothing personal, I know,
but so much basic work is being done for me
I ought to stop whining.
Sky shreds,
woods fade
like an old grainy photograph.
Slick white gearwheels mesh
and turn:
which is what makes the hiss.
It is the suck and sigh
of shattered air
hoping to be ocean.
It is the glut of snow that I love.
A snowpelt
grows on the mailbox, the Volvo, the dog.
When I turn up
my eyes, my snow
rises to meet the snow.
Sleep
Last cough,
lungcells six hours safe from cigarettes.
The testicles drone
in their hammocks,
making sperm.
Glut and waste
and then the beach invasion,
people
everywhere, the earth in its regular
whirl slurring to silence
like a record at the onset
of a power failure.
I'm burning ferns to heat my house.
I am
The Population Bomb, no,
not a thing but a process:
fire: fire.
Ashes and seeds.
Now in my drowse I want to spend,
spend before the end.
Sleep with a snowflake,
wake with a wet wife.
Th
is is the dream in which the word "pride"
appears as a comet.
Its tail is the whole language
you tried as a child to learn.
Difficult and flashy dreams!
But they're all
allegory, like that comet.
You can turn your head fast
and make the light smear,
and you wake to watch it
staining the windows, good
stunned morning, people
everywhere, all of us
unraveling, it's so good
to be alive.
Letter to Russell Banks
Ithaca
January thaw 1971
Dear Russ,
Another daughter! Old friend
you are indeed pillowed
by love of women. As I walk
all the woodlands for sale
near Ithaca, trolling for the land
that will lure me
down like a dowser's wand,
I feel the fist in all of us
opening. On the palm—
a tiny fist like a pink lettuce-head.
Our children are the only message
we can leave them.
Solstice, pivot of faded light.
But now it's ooze and spreading edges,
40° and down to 10° at night,
cars slurring lanes on the slick
morning roads, the day-long
drip from the eaves. The stiff
shriveled berries of the yew
burn free from the snow.
My greed for land swells
like a tick. Creek water leaks
to the surface.
Spiked by a slim maple:
a huge hornet's nest,
serene, a blank face
waiting to be minted.
Thinking of a new house means
redefining love.
Nobody knows how deep
we'll have to drill the well.
Stepping into woods, I think
of my ancestors and how Wales
and Norway are slivers in the globe.
I dwindle into the woods
and know why they were terrified.
Nobody knew Jamestown
stretched to the Pacific Ocean.
So you cut down a tree,
made a stake, beat it
into the earth and
hung on as a flag.
The wilderness was
too large then for us to love,
as is the city now.
Wilderness, here we come
again, ants dragging
a bulldozer, a sewer
like a gut straightened out.
Deep in the woods now
I spin suddenly to surprise
and see whatever follows me.
It is the memory of a tail,
the thrash of its absence.
Fish-in-the-wrist,
cloud-in-the-mouth,
go home.
I explain I'm looking for a home.
Stone-in-the-throat,
fern-foot,
fire burns wherever it goes.
All those dough-flecked hands
cupping one flame of solitude!
Mothers, girlfriends, wives
and daughters.
The spine like a lodgepole of fire.
yrs, burning outward,
Bill
Sticks & Stones (1975)
The Portrait
Before the shutter blinks
the bored photographer can feel
the engaged couple stiffen—
lapse between a lightning bolt
and thunder. It's easy.
A train of light streaks into the tunnel
of his lens and comes out
changed. He loves his darkroom
trance, air in an inky lung.
And in the hall
outside: bell-shaped, its lipped rim
pressed to the ceiling, a cream-
colored glass lampshade
is rung by ricocheting moths.
Mud Chokes No Eels
Sceptors and suitors hate competitors. Who may be trusted with a houseful of millstones? When the shepherd is angry with his sheep, he sends them a blind guide. Imagine a wisdom better than grace. Time is a file that wears and makes no noise. Imagine me living alone, watering the German ivy and cleaning out the three-quart blue-and-white-striped bowl and washing the Mouli grater & some knives & forks & spoons & the big chipped mug I use for coffee & a slotted spoon. Imagine me feeling sorry for myself.
Flight toward preferment will be but slow without some golden feathers. The morning lumps along. Bells call others to church, but go not themselves. Imagine an August day: the fields steam bugs, dogs follow their tongues to the nearest thirst. Fields have eyes, and hedges ears. Grass creaks in the heat. Nature draws more than ten oxen, and why not? Do large trees give more shade than fruit? Outside this house, and outside your new apartment without kitchen windows—who can imagine a kitchen without windows?—the summer is going to seed and so are we, are we. Land was never lost for want of an heir. Fall distills in the trees. There's no more truth in the plot of a story than gold in an owl's claws. Wisdom is just another failure of love. Love sleeps in its own puddle. Imagine a better reason for being where you are. I have a good cloak, but it is in France.
Beer after Tennis, 22 August 1972
The Palms is dank with air-conditioning and Dave and I go in. On its high perch the TV shrills like a parrot. Steve and Vicky are worried because Vicky's first husband, declared legally dead, is back, and he's the one who gave the police the evidence to clear Steve of that murder charge. Another beer. Some laundry. Pinball. When you served from the west side of the court the tossed ball grew black and disappeared into the sun and you hit it where you guessed it would come out. Another beer. Nixon gets out of a plane. 1,500 young people, as the TV calls them, cheer and wave signs. Praising his wife, he tells them, "If you want to get ahead in politics, marry above yourself." On cue they chant, "We want Pat, we want Pat." "You can't have her," he says. Farther down the bar a young people pours his beer and stares at Nixon. He turns toward us: "Hey man, is this live?" It's live. Dave and I play three games of pinball. We walk out into the lowered sun and the chilled sweat is on our bodies like a moss. I let Dave off by Sonia's house and drive on home to feed my dog. As the earth turns, the sun appears to fall.
Bring the War Home
In its tenth year we realize
the war will always live with us,
some drooling Uncle Cockroach
who won't die.
Why should he? We don't want to.
He's our obvious secret,
an insect in amber,
a bad marriage the kids
won't believe we fought
for their sakes.
It's too late for them to take
their country back, its three-legged
dogs and seedlings and medical
techniques you couldn't learn
in three decades of peace.
They're ours—didn't we
save their lives?
And we are theirs.
Our guilt is the heroin of Vietnam,
the best smack on the streets.
The Waste Carpet
God pity the many who will die of soap foam.
—David Ignatow
No day is right for the apocalypse,
if you ask
a housewife in Talking Rock, Georgia,
or maybe Hop River, Connecticut.
She is opening a plastic bag.
A grotesque parody of the primeval muck
starts oozing out. And behold
the plastic bag is magic,
there is no closing it.
Soap in unsoftened water, sewage, Masonite shavings,
a liquefied lifetime subscription to The New York Times
delivered all at once.
Empty body stockings, limp,
forlorn, like collapsed lungs.
A slithering sludge of face cream,
an army of Xerox copies
traveling on its stomach of interoffice memos,
toothpaste tubes as wrung as a widow's hands.
Also,
two hundred and one tons of crumpled bumpers
wrapped in claim reports,
liquid slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings,
industrial excrementa.
Lake Erie is returning our gifts.
At first she thought she had won something.
Now it slithers through the house,
out windows, down the street,
spreading everywhere but heading, mostly, west.
Maybe heading is the wrong word,
implying shape, and choice.
It took the shape of the land
it rippled across like the last blanket.
And it went west because the way lay open.
Outside Ravenswood, West Virginia,
abandoned cars shine in the sun like beetlebacks.
The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture.
Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner,
a trio of ironical bishops.
There are Fords & Dodges,
a Mercury on blocks,
four Darts & a Pierce-Arrow,
a choir of silenced Chevrolets.
And, showing their absurd grills
and trademarks to a new westward expansion,
two Hudsons, a LaSalle, and a DeSoto.
I was hoping to describe the colors
of this industrial autumn—
rust, a faded purple like the skin
of a dusty Concord grape,
moss green, fern green, a deeper green
the diver sees beneath him when he reaches 30 feet—
but now they are all covered,