Fastens onto like clothespins. Lie still, though,
We're not hanging. You are always covered
By your smooth forehead and your eyelids;
You are grazed by no tissued humming
Of razor wire, or by the shadows that come out
Framing, scraping, hosing-down sides of glass,
And leave for a specified time
The sides of their heads against banks.
Page 56
Farmers
a fragment
with André Frénaud
There are not many meteors over the flat country
Of the old; not one metaphor between the ploughblade
And the dirt
not much for the spirit: not enough
To raise the eyes past the horizon-line
Even to the Lord, even with neck-muscles like a bull's
For the up-toss. The modest face has no fear
Of following a center-split swaying track
Through grain and straw
To the grave, or of the honor of work
With muck and animals, as a man born reconciled
With his dead kin:
When love gives him back the rough red of his face he dares
To true-up the seasons of life with the raggedness of earth,
With the underground stream as it turns its water
Into the free stand of the well: a language takes hold
And keeps on, barely making it, made
By pain: the pain that's had him ever since school,
At the same time the indivisible common good
Being shared among the family
Came clear to him: he disappears into fog
He reappears he forces out his voice
Over the field he extends his figures
With a dead-right clumsiness,
And the blazon that changes every year
Its yellow and green squares, announces at each moment
Page 57
What must be said: the justice that the power of man installs
In exhausted fresh-air coupling with the earth:
Slogger
Figure of glory
Less and more than real, fooled always
By the unforeseeable: so nailed by your steps
Into the same steps so marked by wisdom calamitously come by,
And always uncertain, valiantly balancing,
So stripped, so hog-poor still, after a long day
In the immemorial, that I cannot say to you
Where you will hear me,
Farmer, there will be no end to your knowing
The pastures drawn breathless by the furrow,
The fields, heartsick, unquenchable arid
avid,
The forgivable slowness, the whispered prophecies of weather:
Winter spring, the season that always comes through
For you, and never enough,
But only dies, turning out
In its fragile green, its rich greens,
To be nothing but the great stain of blankness
Changing again
Gravedigger
On Sunday, you come back Monday to the laying-out
In squares, of your infinite land
the furs of snow do not reach us
When they should
the moon has troubled the sown seed . . .
Page 58
Craters
with Michel Leiris
Roots out of the ground and ongoing
The way we * are, some of them
Spokes earth-slats a raft made of humped planks
Slung down and that's right: wired together
By the horizon: it's what these roads
Are growing through: fatal roads,
No encounters, the hacked grass burning with battle-song
Then when we get our voices together,
When we mix in that savage way, in the gully of throats
Where the fog piles up, and we turn our long cadences loose
Over the grooved pasture, the running fence of song
Will flap and mount straight up for miles
Very high, all staring stridulation,
Softer than beer-hops:
one of the days when the wind breathes slackly,
Making the lightest perches tremble
Like hostile stems interlacing,
As in the heart a lock of blond hair knots on itself
Suicidally, insolubly
someone will plough-out a door,
A staircase will dig itself down, its haunted spiral
Will blacken and come out
Where the ashes of those who were once turned to Pompeian lava
Will abandon their smouldering silkworks,
Their velvet slags, and take on the courtliness
Of ghosts: then, then the sky will be gone from us
Page 59
Forever, we wretched ones who can love nothing
But light.
Such will the craters tell youany crater
Will tell you, dry-heaving and crouching:
will tell us we've stumbled
Onto one:
we're in * one, dry-heaving and crouching.
Page 60
Attempted Departure
with André du Bouchet
I come back
hoping to leave
From these planks; for farewell and for lift-off I am lighting
Four walls of a fire, here. Blank plaster comes alive
On me in square gold: my shadow goes giddy with dimension, dropping off
The outflanked pious hunger of the flat;
The damn thing can come at me now
Like death, from anywhere
but while I stand
No side protected, at home, play-penned
With holocaust
the slashes disappear from this flayed back, like
My step on the rammed road,
the only thing fleeing.
Page 61
Poem
through a French poet, Roland Bouhéret, and my running father
For having left the birds that left me
Better streaks on my eyes than they can make
On any sky alive:
for having broken loose new stars
By opening to the storm a deaf window
At the moment the summer park closed:
for having rubbed out,
From cliffs not dangerous enough, or cold enough
For you,
the name of the dead,
I hear the sound of fresh steps seeding toward me,
Steps I could take.
Gene,
Dead in the full of July
Ten years ago, I have learned all the tracks
Of the stars of that month: they give me more body-authority
Than a beast-birth in straw. Believe me I have kept
The old river that ran like something from a crock,
Through the cow-battered weeds: that runs over us
As baptismal water always;
I believe I could be walking there
Like high valleys crossing,
In the long laconic open-striding fullness
Of your muscular death. In whole air your form
Takes up with me best, giving more than it could
In the hospital's mirror-blanked room
Where you leaned toward the grim parks under you
Before they closed,
and out of the rattling rails
Page 62
Of your cocked bed, talked about mowing, nothing
But mowing, of all weird, unearthly
Earthly things: like a shower of grassblades
Talked, tilted and talked,
and shivered, down past you, the gaunt
Traffic-islands into green; from that time on, I saw them
As blocked fields, part of elsewhere.
But we are advancing
By steps that grew back to my d
oor,
And if I set your long name in the wind
And it comes back spelling out
The name of a far port-of-call,
the place we never got to,
That is all right.
And yet, with the ashy river
Running like a soul where I'm headed,
Even with the names of harbors that swarmed all over me
When I hit the open, when I paced myself exactly
With the currentthese and the birds, the old cows,
Have stubborned here
stalled no matter how I increase
My leg-beat, or stretch and find myself
Calling out in mid-stride. You are motionless, you are in the middle
Of elsewhere, breathing the herd-breath
Of the deadsingled and in-line breathing
Among so manylooking in the same direction
As the rest of them, your long legs covered with burrs
And bent weeds, splinters of grassblades:
Squared-off, power-bodied, pollen-lidded
You are: green-leggèd, but nailed there.
Page 63
Purgation
homage, Po Chü-yi
Before and after the eye, grasses go over the long fields.
Every season they walk on
by us, as thoughno; I and you,
Dear frienddecreed it. One time or another
They are here. Grass season . . . yet we are no longer the best
Of us.
Lie stiller, closer; in the April I love
For its juices, there is too much green for your grave.
I feel that the Spring should ignite with what is
Unnatural as we; ours, but God-suspected. It should come in one furious step, and leave
Somea littlegreen for us; never quite get every one of the hummocks tremoring vaguely
Tall in the passed-through air. They'd make the old road be
The road for old men, where you and I used to wander toward
The beetle-eaten city gate, as the year leaned into us.
Oh fire, come on! I trust you!
My ancient human friend, you are dead, as we both know.
But I remember, and I call for something serious, uncalled-for
By anyone else, to sweep, to use
the dryness we've caused to become us! Like the grasshopper
I speak, nearly covered with dust, from the footprint and ask
Not for the line-squall lightning:
the cloud's faking veinsYes! I catch myself:
No; not the ripped cloud's open touch the fireball hay
Of August
but for flame too old to live
Or die, to travel like a wide wild contrary
Single-minded brow over the year's right growing
In April
over us for us as we sway stubbornly near death
From both sides age-gazing
Both sighing like grass and fire.
Page 64
Basics
I
Level
Who has told you what discoveries
There are, along the stressed blank
Of a median line? From it, nothing
Can finally fall. Like a spellbinder's pass
A tense placid principle continues
Over it, and when you follow you have the drift,
The balance of many compass needles
Verging to the pole. Bring down your arms, voyager,
And the soul goes out
Surrounding, humming
standing by means
Of the match-up in long arm-bones
Dropped:
held out and drawn back back in *
Out of the open
compass-quivering and verging
At your sides, as median movement
Lays itself bare: a closed vein of bisected marble, where
Along the hairline stem
Of the continuum, you progress, trembling
With the plumb-bob quiver of mid-earth,
with others in joy
Moving also, in line,
Equalling, armlessing.
Page 65
II
Simplex
Comes a single thread
monofilament coming
Strengthening engrossing and slitting
Into the fine-spun life
To come, foretold in whatever
Ecstasy there's been, but never suspected, never included
In what was believed. The balance of the spiral
Had been waiting, and could take
What was given it: the single upthrust through
The hanging acid, the helix spun and spellbound
By the God-set of chemistry, the twine much deeper
Than any two bodies imagined
They could die for: insinuate, woven
Single strand, third serpent
Of the medical wood, circling the staff of life
Into the very body
Of the future, deadly
But family, having known from the beginning
Of the sun, what will take it on.
Page 66
III
Word
Heat makes this, heat makes any
Word: human lungs,
Human lips. Not like eternity, which, naked, every time
Will call on lightning
To say it all: No after
Or before. We try for that
And fail. Our voice
Fails, but for an instant
Is like the other; breath alone
That came as though humanly panting
From far back, in unspeakably beautiful
Empty space
And struck: at just this moment
Found the word ''golden."
James Dickey, The Eagle's Mile
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