Drought-Adapted Vine Read online

A constellation. The swift stag from

  Under ground bears up his branching head.

  Too soon. Other animals must come before.

  A change of address, from Arden to Paradise.

  White-gold moonset, seraph of infinite

  Compassion comes closest to me now:

  At perigee, in white-gold May time, Taurus

  Prevailing. At birth, the transparent

  Scorpion feeds upon its mother.

  The entire earth darkens to conceal

  The terror. And still the seraph moon,

  Though weary of me, weary of desert

  Mountains that return no color, lingers

  A sweet while. Swete whilom. Sweet William.

  Stinking Billy, I heard the sound

  Of a baseball falling into outstretched

  Little hands. Here comes an animal.

  Here comes the atomic bomb to old New York.

  The day of my mother’s funeral

  The limousines were wild spiders

  Trapped on a hillside, and we were inside

  Them, waiting, waiting, only forsythia

  Starry for hopeful, root and branch. Somehow the church,

  In beautiful disrepair, appeared

  Out of nowhere. I had chosen the wrong

  Hymns, yet the sweet-faced Jamaican

  Second-generation New Yorker

  Priest officiating smiled and sang.

  Outside, strangers filled the spiders

  With yellow flowers. What is the use

  Of cities, dead or alive? Simply,

  That flowers are never out of place,

  Never wrong. I have changed the address.

  Redress. The priest deserves a better parish.

  The bitter parish, Bemerton. And too,

  The moon has seen enough. Of gullies,

  Of loose dogs and walking bicycles,

  Enough. Let everything fly. Let all

  Angels become the angels of themselves.

  Choosing the wrong hymns, choosing the right ones,

  All on the color wheel for birthdays, one through five.

  Geminiani selected five. With brides invisible, innumerable

  In their bright ranks, the seraph of the evening sky

  Welcomes my disrepair. Embarrassed by

  The knowing smile of a sweet Jamaican,

  I tell at last for the mean time my

  Heart’s truth. Eden is innumerable to me.

  My eyes have been empty since childhood.

  Care to try? Say that you were blind

  And broke-necked, a city on the outskirts

  With pears, with traffic, coffee regular sweet

  Spittle on the pillow beside and underneath.

  The pears are stranded, red and green. In Eden,

  It was a yellow pear, with little windows

  Cut into the flesh, too soon, too soon,

  Flesh so bitter the wounds could not weep,

  And so became windows. If I could turn

  My head, I would see the heavy mourners

  Holding coffee, stranded on the median,

  In traffic. Lost to me now. Care to try?

  One Chinese daughter. One imaginary boyfriend.

  In the unfinished story, they live

  Above a toy shop, one consummate lovely smile.

  Of Satan and his dark materials,

  Pandemonium of the colors, I

  Can only say the human eye. Again,

  As if I could lie beside my mother in the ground,

  I say God made her eyes and mine to be

  Travellers. We have garments. We have time.

  And to every animal I now confide

  An array of hours, a splendid vestment

  Of hours, Alpha and Omega woven together.

  You cannot tear me from my mother.

  The stag bore up his branching head to travel

  The universe, which is all forest, all earth,

  All green with my mother’s eyes. Where once

  Constellations prowled menace and futurity,

  Twin scorpions, I see a groundswell

  Of time in the new birth, belling happiness.

  You taught the book of life my name. Come, walk.

  In the snow, it is 1978, on

  Hertel Avenue, Buffalo, waiting

  For you. Come. In the sunshine, earlier,

  Pocket Shakespeare, Fort Tryon Park, New York,

  On to the tree, onto the Trie Cloister.

  Grandchild throws herself from the window

  Only a little way to fall, rolling

  Most of the way through the tall grass and down

  Into Jewish flowers. I was reading.

  I waited. It was Eden’s reality

  Proved unendurable. Flee, or be expelled.

  The apple, Gemini, dreams likewise a Jew,

  Before and after. Childhood is health,

  Nature the white fiction we told ourselves.

  Hurry so many animals. I must ask, while

  The mornings are capable, while the grass

  Is not ablaze or turned to black tailings.

  Why is the chapel red? Why are the con-

  Stellations, God’s balloonists in the void,

  Down to three? The color wheel, when

  Did it become the destroyer of cities,

  Mine especially, New York of the passengers?

  Little enough to ride for free, little

  Enough to ride your knee. Mother. Ruth

  Amidst the alien pornography.

  20 John 13—They have taken away

  My Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

  Racist, greed-sick stalks of putrefaction,

  They. My Pocket Shakespeare concedes the election.

  I am the bird of the least morsel

  Of your best memory. Speak to me,

  Speak on behalf of me and to no one else.

  I am the stag in the ruins. The great cities

  Were dreams, red chapels of aberration

  And the heartfelt error. The stag before,

  The stag after, lifts up his branching head.

  Creation considered of starlight long before,

  When God had not yet made the world. As of today,

  God has not yet made the world. Countless colors,

  Countless colors, all of them eyes and eyebeams

  Just now in your mouth at the point of sleep,

  Catch fire. They have considered of starlight.

  I see the lark not yet alighted upon

  The animal, the soul before mine. Love.

  III

  I have drunk, and seen the spider.

  —The Winter’s Tale

  To Shakespeare

  He made a statue of the east wind

  Reconciled never too late, in

  Silhouette, never too late as these

  First days of March turn backwards,

  Facing the full of winter in

  Enduring love, full jollity

  Of winter’s face to reconcilement,

  In silhouette.

  He did not forget

  Who lost his life to remember it.

  Step down. Do not be proud.

  There is a double heart behind

  The breastbone. Bare it. Beat it.

  Begin to eat it in full view,

  Who loves you every inch of the wind.

  First days of March, lords of jollity.

  Debris

  Antiquity shivers in the unbuilt tree.

  She laments (antiquity is a widow, braided

  Into the rained-upon color of desert trees

  After a windstorm) her perfected dead.

  The sound is keen, as though it were somehow calling

  The windstorm back into its own debris.

  Just so, it reaches me this Sunday morning,

  Second of May, a day with no future but driving

  Farther into the desert, into no mind

  For anything but driving to the end


  Of present days. The future is all fences,

  Stray cats, and heroes walking backwards.

  Antiquity shivers at the sight of me.

  The Library

  The library walks over fallen olives,

  The tall library. Even as their shadows

  Move, still leaves remain still. The passage

  Of time is indescribable. Beloved

  Songbirds are never far, but I forget them.

  Stones stained by olives become white overnight.

  Hearts stained by forgetfulness become white overnight.

  Howling seven days in succession, the wind

  Cannot stir a leaf. I believe in Heaven

  Simply because there must be someone at one

  O’clock in the morning who answers the phone.

  The iron leaf of origin answers me.

  They Are Not Making Anything. They Are Working.

  (Homage to Pierre Michon)

  French for hatred, English for anger,

  Black pony blinded, slender,

  My secret Chaucer,

  As for 60 years I’ve managed a lost river,

  Water-jets over the lawns

  In the last cool of a summer morning:

  Cressid animal aube my daughter.

  A cloud of thorns, acacia,

  All that stands between us and bad Asia

  Poised to kill with summer heat

  Is the language, hatred and anger,

  Blind caul of the vocables, lost river

  To rhyme Daughter, Slender, Loire.

  My secret Chaucer is a fatal mud, her new basilica.

  Pitty-Pat

  Oleander to the death of horses

  Odilon Redon was mother’s martyr

  Ruined no mounted with true love but askew

  How it is these sounds reach back in time

  A first beloved smelling of milk and tar

  In time to find first poets grassy

  Churning the ice cream blossoming

  Philosopher it makes sense it screams

  Joy beloved joy and bees in the bedrooms

  These sounds reach back in time I feel like an Indian

  Like cut grass blown against the base of a mountain

  I cannot share a dream we die alone

  Born into such beautiful company

  Foals find grass earth’s countless eyes

  Mountain’s Edge

  Misted sunlight, a scorpion

  Fallen out of the sun

  Covers the ground, all of it.

  There is a rhythm to things,

  But no help. So

  Says the ruined poisoner.

  We are here, here.

  Sunlight answers to the call, and so too,

  But tenderly, does Mr. Hart Crane.

  Wasp-waisted scorpion

  Fallen out of the sun

  Must be grass, or otherwise

  Be insane, building such a nest

  In autumn, making God cruel.

  France

  France so small and awnings weeping

  Carousel of crows my dear son

  No suicide it is not church

  It is home a happy brother

  I had no brother until you

  We found a pistol in the cornfield

  You lifted it I lifted it

  The sky became a tumult sky

  God’s broken eye I nearly said

  Because it was weeping old souls

  There are blue trains that go to France

  When first I saw a yellow house

  I lived in it begot a son

  With nothing to sell I sold him

  After Clare

  Ball or balloon, beetle having torn

  The wings from a fallen moth and called

  Her kinsmen to the feast, so much

  To be said is said in childhood, like

  A pet name never to be heard again.

  She left suddenly, with no explanation,

  Never to be seen again.

  I was away. I shall not forget,

  But I shall surely be forgotten.

  Love may come in its many disguises—

  Son and daughter, dog and Beloved—

  All the lost childhood without its tender name.

  Ask me at Sunday School, as she did, about life,

  And I will tell you again there is no such thing.

  Borodin

  When the world was loveliness I was

  A composer, Borodin, my left eye

  Level with the floor beside toy men.

  Wild work and havoc they made

  Being glad. I could draw a line

  Would run straight through the minds of men

  Being a sociable angel,

  Music before and after, blushing.

  Heaven is a nonsense entirely sensible.

  I was a child on the floor beside you,

  Making music, becoming small in the rosy

  Embrace of God’s best messenger.

  I loved your havoc and your hair.

  New Colors

  The tree alive with invisible birds in no leaves

  Is the soul of winter and says with Yeats

  We wither into the truth whose truth is simply

  That we die yet behind us the sky deepens

  Into the deepest blue I mean to say that I

  Could reach my hand forever into it

  My hand would be covered with leaves and then

  The birds would come in colors new colors

  To robe archangels ruined back to life

  We wither so to bear the weight of the invisible

  Tell me shall I sing another cold day

  Or is this merely the ruin before ruin

  The shallow breath before no breath at all

  Tell me is the sky behind me still

  Tantivy

  The late empurpl’d and dog’s nostalgia

  Ancient of days, only yesterday I had a

  New sister. Kneel to crib, to chapel, a trip

  To the moon. Sic semper my very first. Osip

  Is older than he was. He died. He lay

  Very close to a heap of goldfinches. Today

  You spoke of my sister twice. Too far to go

  Toys, reaching the bedroom toys like alto,

  Almost, rhapsody of Brahms: never

  Newly again in the late flowers, note of air.

  Things breathe where I kneel. No matter whether

  It rains or the chapel vanishes, they breathe.

  Violets are the anniversary of something

  Youthful covers the next hill hurrying.

  Graves Variations

  In Eden’s garment, farthest heat and mistake,

  We have reached the end of pastime, for always.

  Single-minded midnight and noon agree:

  No second chances. An epochal sun sees

  Mountain ranges, and the mountains melt away.

  In dreams, I return to mother’s trellises and sex.

  No flowers to be found, nor any angels

  Barring the narrow path. Gladdest is

  The garden that never was. Genesis

  Makes nonsense of our Christmases.

  Gladys is. Doris was. Leggy girls look up.

  The mountains melt into a loving cup.

  This morning, red racer or rattler

  I cannot say, a beautiful serpent

  Died where I wasn’t looking, in the yellow

  Doorway. Had it followed me? Hunted me?

  These questions, bird, are not rhetorical.

  It was crushed below the heart and died slowly.

  Yellowhammer, you saw it all and kept

  The flicker of your dull song aloft.

  Serpent Beethoven. Yellowhammer late quartet.

  I would add “etcetera,” but this is not

  Rhetorical. It reeks pure mystery, the only

  One of its kind, poor beast of next and nil.

  Look forward, truant, to your second childhood.

  Meanwhile,
left behind, I am left to sell

  A ragtag legend of Creation to the remnant.

  Try the door handle. Try it. If it opens at all,

  There is only smoke and the apparition

  Of mother or of Anticlea or boys

  Nodding off into the sleep which hates sleep.

  Cain slew Abel with a Christmas tree.

  Odysseus died en route. As for me,

  A serpent is my bicycle and mother.

  Factor into Paradise the nil

  Of kisses. It opens briefly, if it opens at all.

  I have a calling to marry children, myself

  Among them. And why set miracles apart?

  Attentions, as if with sweets and cutlasses,

  Climb the sky. Out of their little houses

  Clamber the green kids. Fleeting brushstroke

  Heads, fleeting brushstroke arms and legs,

  They climb the sky. Not enchanted but faithful

  To a tree that God forbade and planted in them,

  They marry in the leaves. They marry in thunderheads

  And in pinpricks of starlight. The painter

  Finds them heaped in one body, his and mine.

  The very next Cadillac is candy red.

  Clothed in Eden’s garments, I find candy

  Easy to come by. Immortality

  Without flowers is a better sleep

  Than madcap syllables, than the kissing bijou.

  God, at last, has taken me at my word.

  He has taken the green jewels out of my eyes,

  And they are eyes once more. He has bound my mind

  Onto a wheel—wheeeeeee! Ixion or Gladys

  Gladdest is. To die with a forlorn hope,

  But soon to be raised, reeks pure mystery