No different from cloud, among the other
See-through images, as you are flawingly
Thought of,
but purely, somewhere,
Somewhere in all thought.
Page 9
Two Women
I
Alone here. Beach, drum out
What you want to say: a dolphin,
Sockets, sword-flats. Seething landscape of hilts, no limits are set
In you. Sand, sand,
Hear me out: Hear me out with wind
Going over, past
All sound but sand. Listen,
Clean vastness, I am alone here.
I should be, for I have
No mark.
Woman, because I don't love you,
Draw back the first
Of your feet, for the other will fall
After it, and keep on coming. Hold back
A little, your printed pursuit, your
Unstemming impurity.
Page 10
II
Early light: light less
Than other light. Sandal without power
To mark sand. Softly,
Her hair downward-burning, she walks here, her foot-touch
The place itself,
Like sand-grains, unintended,
Born infinite.
Page 11
Immortals
Earth
Always as it holds us in one place, the earth
Grows as it moves, exhaling
Its rooted joy. I stand in tracks
Where nothing starves. Vegetation, green blush,
You and I sail today
Through newly infinite
Space on this surfeited hillside. Complacency has its own force
Leafed-out with renewal. I cannot be anything
But alive, in a place as far
From the blank and the stark, as this.
Page 12
Air
Air, much greater than the sea
More basic, more human than the sea: all thát air
Is calm:
unpeopled, wearing the high lucidity
Of vigil. Maybe one day the mere surface
Of the earth will feel you. But the air
You can never keep doesn't know
When it lived in your chest:
Mindless, nerveless, breathless,
The air glitters
All the outside, and keeps carrying
You from within.
Page 13
Sea
Who told you that the sea said something,
Something toward the beaches?
Let it spread more, belligerent with light,
Saying one thing, resounding,
Up front for all of us!
Page 14
To The Butterflies
homage, Central America
Open windows; we always have them, háve
To have them. We widen
Them all, and butterflies come in, and come
To rest on our mirrors, breathing with their wings
Almost like light,
Or better, almost like flight,
And then leave. Others come,
Háve to come, and some of the time this happens
We are singing, trying hard,
But it comes out a croak
From dryness, and when we move it is like
Moving muscles of powder, but
Really no muscles are on us; they are all gone
Into sweat. Every light the hand turns on
Hurts the eyes, and there is nowhere on earth
That the heels of the feet
Are so hot, and they cannot be cooled.
I love to know nothing
Of the sun; I love to feel
That I float, forgotten,
with two warm rivers
That cannot touch me, on a stream come down
Between them from a mountain
Of frozen rain. We all have wanted,
Page 15
Too long, not to have our tears,
Our salt-showing tears, dry before anyone
Can see them, dry
Before we can feel them,
Or find out what they really have
To do with grief. To say that I am not true
To fever is to say I am not
Loyal to my green country,
not true, not real
Myself,
so I say it in secret
In steam: Forgive me, butterflies:
I know you have to have
All this heat for your colors,
but you are breathless, too,
In spite of your breathing
Wings and God help me I must say it before I melt
Into the sugar-sick ground:
If we could do it
Without dimming the butterflies, we should find some way
To get on the good side of North: Yes North and enough
Cold: Yes cold
And snow! I've heard of it! Flakes lilting onto us!
Life light on the common grave
Shapeless with swelter! Every tongue of us out
Page 16
To be new to that taste! Mountains of rain
Gone into feather-fall
Floating us out of it! But not dimming not fading
The butterflies
or the hats and handkerchiefs.
Let the wings on our mirrors
In whatever falls
Keep breathing Keep burning
and us, Lord, please
And us in the dresses and shirts.
Page 17
The One
No barometer but yellow
Forecast of wide fields that they give out
Themselves, giving out they stand
In total freedom,
And wíll stand and day is down all of it
On an ear of corn. One. The color one:
One, nearly transparent
With existence. The tree at the fence must be kept
Outside, between winds; let it wait. Its movement,
Any movement, is not
In the distillation. Block it there. Let everything bring it
To an all-time stop just short of new
Wind just short
Of its leaves;
its other leaves.
One.
Inside.
Yellow.
All others not.
One.
One.
Page 18
The Three
I alone, solemn land
clear, clean land,
See your change, just as you give up part
Of your reality:
a scythe-sighing flight of low birds
Now being gone:
I, oversouling for an instant
With them,
I alone
See you as more than you would have
Bé seen, yourself:
grassland,
Dark grassland, with three birds higher
Than those that have left.
They are up * there
With great power:
so high they take this evening for good
Into their force-lines. I alone move
Where the other birds were, the low ones,
Still swaying in the unreal direction
Flocking with them. They are gone
And will always be gone; even where they believe
They were is disappearing. But thése three
Have the height to power-line all
Land: land this* clear. Any three birds hanging high enough
From you trace the same paths
As strong horses circling
for a man alone, born level-eyed
Page 19
As a pasture, but like the land
Tilting, looking up.
This may be it, too.
Page 20
The Six
When you think strong enough, you get somethi
ng
You don't mean
And you dó: something prized-out,
Splintered, like a rock quarry going
Through you and over you
Like love, and past and on
Like love: whatever arms, legs, head,
Breastbone, whatever feet and hands you love most,
Most want to live
And die with, are given out as flying
Related rock; are charged
With the life that lives
By means of stone. The body of your lover tries to form and be
Those six stones. For some reason
They are hurtling, and if you meet them head-on
You will know something nobody means
But her. She is moving at the speed of light
Some place else, and though she passes
Through you like rock-salt, she is still six
And not one.
But neither is the rain
Single, blotting number and stone
With vibrancy; neither is the rain, I tell you,
Man riddled with rocks
And lust:
Page 21
the rain putting out
Your wretched, sympathetic
Stone-jawed poetic head, its allotted
Fresh bodies falling as you stand
In amongst, falling and more
Than falling falling more
Falling now falling
More than now.
Page 22
Weeds
Stars and grass
Have between them a connection I'd like to make
More offind some way to bring them
To one level any way I can,
And put many weeds in amongst. O woman, now that I'm thinking,
Be in * there somewhere! Until now, of the things I made up
Only the weeds are any good: Between them,
Nondescript and tough, I peer,
The backs of my hands
At the sides of my face, parting the stringy stalks.
Tangible, distant woman, here the earth waits for you
With what it does not need
To guess: with what it truly has
In its hands. Through pigweed and sawgrass
Move; move sharply; move in
Through anything,
and hurt, if you have to. Don't come down;
Come forward. A man loves you.
Page 23
Spring-Shock
All bubbles travelling
In tubes, and being lights: up down and around
They were: blue, red and every man uncaught
And guilty. Prison-paleness
Over the street between strobes
Unfailingly. But no light
On top of anything moving, until
The last, one:
one. Whoever it was switched it
Dead when he saw me. Winter; not dreamlike but a dream and cars
Of that. I took my stand where they were called
By absent law to stop, obstructedly raging
And I could not get in. All their windows
Were sealed and throbbing
With strobe, red and blue, red and blue
And go. One pulled out of the flight
Of others; pulled up and may have had back-road
Dust on it red dust in a last shot
Of blue. A man in a cowboy hat rolled down
The window on my side. His voice
Was home-born Southern; Oklahoma, Texas,
Could have been. Manhandling my overcoat, I slid
In * there with him. Central Park South, I said,
A war-safety zone; the St. Moritz.
He turned up
One of the streets with no lights. Into the seat
I settled; black buildings thickened
Around us, high tenements flattening
Into squares; warehouses now,
Page 24
They were; maybe docks. I watched. No birds.
No trash-cans. The car died
Between two alley walls
And froze, and a voice at last, still
Out of Oklahoma, said ''I want your money."
We were present
In silence. A brought-on up-backward thock
Took place, and on the fresh blade
A light alive in the hand
New-born with spring-shock. It was mine
At sixty. "I want your car," I said.
Page 25
The Eagle'S Mile
for Justice William Douglas
The Emmet's Inch & Eagle's Mile
Blake
Unwarned, catch into this
With everything you have:
the trout streaming with all its quick
In the strong curve all things on all sides
In motion the soul strenuous
And still
in time-flow as in water blowing
Fresh and for a long time
Downhill something like air it is
Also and it is dawn
There in merciless look-down
As though an eagle or Adam
In lightning, or both, were watching uncontrollably
For meat, among the leaves. Douglas, with you
The soul tries it one-eyed, half your sight left hanging in a river
In England, long before you died,
And now thát one, that and the new one
Struck from death's instant
Lightning's: like mankind on impulse blind-
siding Godtrue-up together and ride
On silence, enraptured surveillance,
The eagle's mile. Catch into this, and broaden
Into and over
The mountain rivers, over the leaf-tunnel path:
Appalachia, where the trail lies always hidden
Page 26
Like prey, through the trembling south-north of the forest
Continent, from Springer Mountain to Maine,
And you may walk
Using not surpassing
The trout's hoisted stand-off with the channel,
Or power-hang the same in the shattered nerves
Of lightning: like Adam find yourself splintering out
Somewhere on the eagle's mile, on peerless, barbaric distance
Clairvoyant with hunger,
Or can begin can be begin to be
What out-gentles, and may evade:
This second of the second year
Of death, it would be best for the living
If it were your impulse to step out of grass-bed sleep
As valuably as cautiously
As a spike-buck, head humming with the first male split
Of the brain-bone, as it tunes to the forked twigs
Of the long trail
Where Douglas you once walked in a white shirt as a man