Atlantic Wall and Other Poems 9781400867868

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Atlantic Wall and other poems

Atlantic Wall and other poems

Rosalie L. Colie

Princeton University Press

Copyright

© 1974 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press Princeton and London All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book. The publisher and the estate of the late Rosalie L. Colie wish to thank The United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa for permission to reprint "Atlantic Wall," which originally appeared in The American Scholar. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Louis A. Robb Fund of Princeton University Press. This book has been composed in Linotype Granjon. Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

Foreword

After Rosalie Colie's death in the summer of 1972 her father sent to Mr. George Robinson, her friend and editor at Princeton University Press, a collection of her poems, all but "Atlantic Wall" previously unpublished. Although Judge Colie sent them as a gesture of friendship and with no thought of publication, with his permission we offer a selection of them here. They bear witness to the tuning of her imagination and spirit by the depth and variety of her learning and her life. As a scholar Miss Colie, Profes,sor of English at Brown University, was known for her contributions to the study of the literature of the English Renaissance. We had the privilege of publishing Paradoxia Epidemica (1966), a study of paradox as a literary device in seventeenth-century poetry, and My Ecchoing Song (1970), a deep and perceptive study of the poetry of Andrew Marvell. Shortly before her death in June of 1972, she delivered to us the manuscript of Shakespeare's Living Art, published in March of 1974. To those who knew her only through her scholarship these poems will demonstrate her thoughts and reconciliations, her acute pleasures and her pains, her intellectual discipline and the liveliness of her senses. We also believe that they show how a life of dedicated scholarship can produce an "ecchoing song," a reverberation between the passions of daily life and a deeply felt and fully assimilated knowledge of the past. The Publishers

v

Contents

Foreword - - v Atlantic Wall - - 3 Farmstead - - 41 A Divination in October for Spring - - 43 Meadow in Spring - - 44 Petrarch's Vaucluse - - 45 Homo Faber on his Birthday - - 46 Timepiece - - 48 Desiderius Eramus Roterodamus - - 49 Cordelia - - 50 Views of Delft - - 51 Eve to Adam - - 54 The Shortest Distance - - 55 Leda-- 59 We inherit original sin - - 60 State of Nature - - 61 Earth's Sonnet - - 62 Eurydice - - 63 A Valediction Forbidding Mourning - - 64 A Valediction of the Imagination - - 66

Vll

Sonnets I.

Through Judgment's brazen bray - - 68

II.

At that fanfaronade - - 69

III.

Met at this instant - - 70

IV.

Our shoulders sore from shoving up the earth - - 71

V.

The untold time we line up for our turn --72

VI.

The angel, poised with scales - - 73

VII. If Judgment were - - 74 VIII. What human dignity may be --75 The End-76 Night Animals - - 77 Amour Propre - - 78 Falling Out --79 My love is neat - - 80 Your hurt is only in my mind - - 81 Where I Lie - - 82 My peregrine slipped her jesses - - 83 Pastoral-- 84 Most memorable pains we manage to forget - - 85

VBl

Atlantic Wall and other poems

Atlantic Wall (To f.-this cock for Asclepias)

One

I At the low edge between the land and sea, The reaching sea past sight and past the past, We sit, a lack land king and queen, and stare Into the salt seawind. Each night the sun Puts on her western show, each night goes down A golden hole from this world to the next. o I come backward from the last new world To the last-but-one. You came back tooA mole impaled upon a giant prong Brought wriggling from the chilly underworld, Or silent Orpheus harrowed out of hell, A cinder from a burnt -off garden raked Back where light makes love and gardens grow. I bicycled to meet you, past An avenue where sphinxes keep Their stone eyes shut and lips drawn up Contented in their sleep.

(! asked them no questions. They told me no lies.) The pictures in their seven heads Were identical, it seems. This continent is safe in The sphinxes' secret dreams. Our century is half a century old. I know in part the things I can be told. I passed the war in worry and in ease. Believe me, love: protection is not peace. 3

Like Venus, I was born upon the water; On Charon's wayward ferry into life I came to life (naked, crying hither), Drew my first breath afloat between the lands. Now, borne across the sea to you, like Venus Thus I came-and there the likeness ends. If democrats descend from goddesses, Why then, a sterner lady blessed my birth: Strange birds have drawn me here and there, but not Alassing turtledoves. The saw-whet owl Sat on my childhood's shoulder, blinked her eyes At all the books I read. In our barn The barn owls turned their vast eternal heads Entirely around, entirely quiet. The wisest bird, my darling, knows no more Than we can read from books. Back from the wars A blindfold Mars, you lean against the wall Listening for the curlew and the cricket, Hearing the snail, his house upon his back, Slick his whispering trail to where each night He stops and pitches camp. The snail is all A snail really needs; hermaphrodite, Complex and implicate, how hard it was To draw the snail, dissected, for the class! Inside and out, he was too beautiful And baffling to draw. I know I never, Even then, dared comprehend a snail. Today I think he is his art and craft. He satisfies himself, he takes his life Exactly where he finds himself, and dies Beneath his own eccentric monument. A creature's concentration is himself; What he is, is his whole occupation.

4

Across this watershed of dunes that net The water for the land, the wind carves webs; The waves set featherstitchings in the sand, Leave lace of runback water, openwork Trimming the ragged selvage of this world. The nets are spread to dry beside the harbor Where skippers' wives complain and cackle as Their shuttles weave the multitudinous haul. The lenses raised the snail's veins to such A basketry as you would not believe! A net of blood confirms the snail's life. Caught in our net of nerves, we come awake To just such mockery as Vulcan cast Across his pretty wife and Mars, enmeshed Sufficiently in one another's sense. The lo~es of gods and snails are poor exemplars. Hephaistos forged that final net of goldThin as his wife's fair hair, but strong enough To hold all warfare with all cause for war. Quite a catch to trawl for and bring home! What if Plato's fantasy were true? If the lame smith stumbled on us here, Dare we ask his art? Could we prove Sufficiently entangled in each other To warrant welding our two nets to one? Are we to piece each other out? to join Our empty diamonds in knots? If so, And if not just a fantasy of love, For Vulcan's forge our metal must be true. When Orpheus took his fiddle down to hell, He went to find his concentrated love. At the gatehouse, all his gear was taken,

5

Marked with his name, and tumbled in a bag. Eurydice, with others in a boxcar, Had been resettled in another place. Young Orpheus was not put in the band. No brambles came to bloom that spring. The rose At Christmas failed. The squirrels went away. Angels of death stood at the chimney-corners, Folded tight their lips and arms, and spread Enormous wings against the winter sky. The emptied skulls on sticks drilled every day, Swilled their soup, gnawed their twigs and roots, Ate grass like Chrysostom and other men Flung on all fours. The long-haired angels posted Here and there with urgent messages From their absconded God. 0 God how longI do not ask how long this flesh and blood Can stand it: only, how long must it stand? Italian farmers, slow behind slow oxen, Have always turned up legs and arms and headsOne sandaled foot, broken at the ankle, Is worth three harvests. Buried Aphrodite Petrified comes back to light all maimed. The scholar's stonegraft on her teaches us What we already know: a rebuilt love Will never cause a man to catch his breath. Under the owl's nest the skulls of mice, The bones of birds, the snail shells fall in heaps. More than once, I have reeled in a fish Whose crimson gills still worked, although just forward Of his tail, the pirate barracuda Had bitten him clean off. When Grendel died, The salmon pool turneq red; the shearing fish Pursued each other and consumed themselves.

6

Our net of blood confirms our human life. Christ the trawler, braced against the mast, Draws up His net and all our tumbling lives. I used to watch the tuna, mossbunker, The mullet, mackerel, and the close-mouthed shark Lunge in the seine-all beauty and all blood Turned out upon the beach. The fish-pound hand -because I was so small, and terrified That all the fish still lived-gave me, to have, A sea horse skeleton. In any haul We mortals make, there is a little love.

II Though walls give warranty from harms The cities yield like helpless farms And one by one, as drummer boy Goes grey, the towns go down like Troy. At Hexham winter frost and snow Breached the Wall and laid it low; Beneath the vines at Carcassonne The walls were stone by stone undone. The stalwart walls put up to save Ghent lie buried in their grave. Strassburg gave, and only God Can count the stones at Novgorod. All Europe was a fortress when This wall was raised by inland men In herds, who built above the tide A prison with themselves inside. The Frisians stared into the eyes In Tartar faces; their Jurprise Those Tartars shared, that women should Be so fair, yet run red blood.

7

Their fellows saw the masons fall. The blood ran out beneath the wall. From Norway to the hills of Spain The wall went up in snow and rain A dungeon for the discontent Of this rigid continent, Immuring behind cliffs of flame Speckled sorrow, shrewder shame Than men can pack upon their backs. Now the turret heels and cracks Above our picnic in its shade. Our presence is a panic raid Against the curlew overhead Who goes and comes in mother's dread For curlew chicks. The cricket calls And calls again as evening falls; At home, the katydids' refrain Sings evensong. How close the crane Has come to death! The fat heath hen To the last bird went down to men; The names our towns and rivers have Intone the Algonquins' epitaph. When men are occupied with war On men, wild habits change no more Than any salmon's run can change Or Arctic tern curtail his range. But from the pair that found all day Encyclopedias to say We have altered slightly still; Have learned, behind this sandy hill, To shift our packs of guilt. Older By a day today and colder Now than in the noonday sun, We feel how far the salmon run,

8

The distances from pole to pole The tern must cover. The world is whole For every fish and bird. Two sparrows Collect our picnic crumbs; space narrows Life to what it is-the name We give our ocean is the same, My love. The wheeling curlew's cry Forgives us both. One expiation Left is love, for lives carved by The cutting edge of occupation. III Adam one primeval spring Christened plant and brute. We hope the Babel names we bring Can recompose our Eden whole: The wielewaal is oriole, The diving grebe the fuut. Our lips repeat responses to Love's Linnaean creed; The canticles we sing are due To words' irregularity. (From the sixteenth century My ancestors could read.) Oak and spruce have never flourished In gardens built on sand. The gingham land where you were nourished Affords me insufficient cover: My forebears logged my birthright over My logged-over land.

9

I am a protestant like you And come of rebel stock. For us, no language translates true, No common currency is coined, But still we trust the counterpoint When we whistle Bach. The cool conjunctions of our breath Reconstruct the passion. All dwellers in these dunes know death Which shows up sharp against the sky. Later, we'll stand up, who lie Composed beside the ocean. From my heart's huge surge and hurl I learn I must believe What every mother tells her girl, The grief that every daughter knowsThis tinker's pack of troubles goes Back to mother Eve. Lullay, my liking, my dear, my love, How can your bone and blood, Your bitter breath and heartbeat move So softly, afterwards, in rest? Adam, like the robin's nest, Was built of sticks and mud.

IV From then to now there is no bridge. From there to here we laid no road. The wind upon this seaward ridge About the turning world has blown; The same seaweed has ebbed and flowed, Flowed and ebbed, and all alone

10

One oystercatcher hunts the rocks. The ghosts of homesick soldiers haunt This fortress, where the gulls in flocks Formed their strict societies Throughout the war, as if to flaunt The rights of aborigines. I know the sun sets in the west, Am reconciled to watch it fall At sea. The beams the beacons cast Come, go black, and come again. Light and dark by turns is all Vicissitude reserved to men. This is you. I know your name, My darling, though the days and nights Never quite come back the same. The fishing fleets far out to sea Cast wide their nets. The lighthouse lights Each time a different person: me. Two

I (For E.T.C.)

The hoodwinked sons fly up and lean to look. The earth turns every day. The cities tilt Amazingly, when sudden secrets shook The labyrinths their fathers' fathers built. They saw no answers. Mazes are designed For insight only. At Chartres and other places The labyrinths to paradise are blind. The maps we cannot read are always mazes.

11

When you were two, racing in the dapples Under the orchard, twenty years from harms, You skidded in the plushy windfall apples, Slewed into a laughing lady's arms. At ten you fell from higher-from the sky, Or from the birch. You built a Dido's pyre In the haybarn. Lad, you flew so high! -You told the tallest tales!-You played with fire. Your stars whirl in the stereopticon Of space. Your rivers run in water mains. The wrinkled mountain ranges pivot on Their axes. Winds uproot the citied plains. The ladybugs all check and veer toward home: The raiders come like swarms of silver bees: The molten bronzefalls down the gilded dome Bowl catherine wheels around the chestnut trees. Imperial crowns of fire come tumbling down Upon the ferris wheel. The children's laughter Rolls hoops around the somersaulting town; Jack with Jill comes tumbling, tumbling after. The angels' trumpets blown to raise the dead Scatter the quick like chipmunks to their holes. The blind play leapfrog. The sick man takes his bed And runs a mile. Madmen swim in shoals. The bridges blow like clematis, and ashes Hang rambler roses on the falling spires. All bushes burn. The campanile crashes. No curfew tolls to cover these wild fires. The beams achieve their cross. The long knives spray Their fountains on the sky.-My bare foot learned Upon a sparkler, the pain in such display: On every Glorious Fourth, a child is burned.

12

You burnt your hand on matches, child, which proves How hard you fired your clay in your desire. Lord Vulcan is the god of fire. Who loves War is married to the god of fire. In Central Park, I saw a phoenix onceReally a pheasant, but a bird of gold Self-burnt, self-burnished, whose extravagance Kindled the young and made the old look old. The tongue-tied fathers see their sons come down Like phoenixes, like lightning, from the sky. No lightning ever forks up from the ground And grounded phoenixes, like pheasants, die. Now Icarus who fell from pride of place Lies in the hay like any fallen boy. o rider on the stallion-winded space, o burning haycock harvester, my joy, Lie still at last! When you left, the drenched Meadow winked a million fireflies' warning That fall must come when summer's fires are quenched. Their valediction zeroed in on mourning. The boys lost in the clouds have all come back To walk this world like revenants from another. o younger sons who burnt the summers black, Remember that high flier, that firefly brother! II Architects all play in scale. By duplicity Inigo the nonpareil Solved Apollo's puzzle. He simply made the pure cube double Quite domestically.

13

Bronze and marble monuments Are guaranteed by rhyme. In Delft, the silence is immense Where the princes sleep; The clockwork stones at Stonehenge keep Still, and tell no time. The fire that made a day of night Made room for Wren's clean town. Good and beautiful and bright, He stayed the endless knell To raise his city, knowing well How cities are brought down. Quiet children used to play Marbles by the wall. The children's voices blow away Today across the rubble; Our children hide and seek in trouble, Pretend to fall, and fall. Bruegel's solemn children never Turn to tell their names; Squatting on the grass forever Or always on the run, They pursue as if in fun Purgatorial games. Deprived of sex, the "It" must tag The weakest it can see: Finders cannot keep: the bag Of pureys is a dream: At suppertime, the children scream That all may come in free.

14

The baby builds a house of blocks Higher than its head. At Avebury, one of the rocks (Called Adam) fell alone, And like a grub beneath that stone, A perfect man lay dead. Wren built modestly, and yet To make his meaning clear On his cathedral altar set This message from his hand, "If you seek my monument, Look about you here." Man constructs his history by His stubborn sublimation. At Uppsala the dead lie high However low their act: Stonehenge is a mortal fact Of prestidigitation. Across the bombsite of my fears Upon a wall, I found Marked off the inches of our yearsThe measurements of skilled Architects engaged to build Ourselves up from the ground. III The roof blew off one night, and daisies have Seeded the choir and nave. Scarlet and blue Bloom on the buttress. -How Piranesi knew The extra pain haphazard planting gave

15

To ruins! This was the poet Milton's grave Who hammered till his handiwork rang true, Who clamored through his busy days and through The dark: braving ruin makes men brave. Though Milton's monument is gone, and gone His church, of gentle Giles who tamed the deer, Gardens grow to regain ground once lost: From ruin this ragged paradise has grown; This eyebright in the fallen stones can clear Our blindness from these tears, from our own dust. IV

The century's sixtieth birthday is todayOld beaten warrior century, time to quit Your tricks! I saw your light of love just now As I ducked by. I saw that old camp follower, That skipping witch named for her nubile youth, The crone Europa. She winked as I went by, Bunched up her skirt and scratched her scrawny shank With the switch she uses on her skinny cows To keep them from the public highway. She winked, I tell you. She did. She jerked her thumb and laughed. Her teeth are gone, all right, but that old girl Gives better than she got, even today: She grinned. Your birthday! She remembers better Your better, older days. Europe, Europe You had your great times then! Slide your hand Under my elbow; tell me how it wasDemure fourteen, you rode your cock-and-bull Cock horse out of your father's house, and rode Your course to this old age. 0 parse for me The verb that is the story of your life:

16

All the randy cocks and bulls, All the hobby horses raced From sunup to sundown. We raced to place our bets. All our horses lost. I lost; you lost; He, she, it lost. Even they lost (0 h, they lost the lot!). And we lost, girl. Good God, girl, how we lost!

Three I

Northern summer days are long; From earth's underside Slant light keeps coming on Into the night. Down the long hall's endless dimness To your room of glass I wheel the full forgiveness You never ask. Once upon a glassy mountain A princess sat Holding her breath and counting The horsemen on the flat. One, then the next came off their marks, Set their steeds to it. The iron shoes struck sparks; Couldn't do it.

17

I forget how one of them succeeded, Or by what trick One smart young man stampeded Up that hill to its tip. He thawed the lady by his kissing, Tobogganed with her down. They knelt for parents' blessing Then left town. At your lintel of light, I stumble Blinded by the glass, Meet your eyes and mumble One word to pass. II In the late sun's level rays Between your knees your hands hang down. The spectacles through which you gaze Mirror all this glass around: You stare at nothing, while your mind Makes something of the things you find. The slides in boxes and the jars Filled with mortal bits of selves, Labeled, polished up like stars, Shine and glitter on the shelves. It seems as if we see straight through All substance to what must be true. What else does light shine through like this? The darningneedles' double flight, Doubled in the water, gives Such transparency to sight. I see that life is what I seeThe lighthouse used to turn on me.

18

The sunlight lances what floats free, Transforms the jellies rigged for death To rainbows and to radiancy. On the beach, we held our breath And watched the living wafers run Away to nothing to the sun. You do not know the thing you seek. Lives that claim to live, are lies: They're dying-O I cannot speak The secret I cannot surprise! Your eyes are huge behind your lenses. Your white coat buttons in your senses. We thought we saw each other's core: Each other. Now we keep quite clear Of candor, but work all the more Inside ourselves to clean out fear. Dear, no technician's term of art Describes one secret of the heart. Sometimes all that love can show Is that all our loves displease. Certainly we never know What ease is, or what disease; If you or I should want to climb That hill of glass, there'd be no time. In reason's low cathedral here All the glass is also stained With every cross our bodies bear. By death our lives may be explained. Your eyes fixed on the microscope . Can see, perhaps, some hope for hope.

19

III Through autumn's arbors, laces for dry vines, The brown, the brittle trellises of mist, Thin birds fly south upon their empty bones On empty air, in elegiac quest. Between the fractures, slits, and vacancies Of saying and unsaying, odds and ends, Taking our unintentional holidays Off-season, lonely, at our own expense, We live in the vacations of ourselvesHoles where our hearts have hammered through our lives, Our ribs split wicker baskets, our thin skulls Oiled-paper lamps to hold our lightless eyes. Our mouths are now unclappered bells that last Summer sang all day; of all their sweet Our honeycombs of sense are emptied. We cast The shadow of an insect's shell; we meet As ghosts do ghosts, slip like light through glass, Like birds through leaves, like fingerlings through nets, Like water through the weir; like nothing pass Through nothing. Each chink, knot, lattice lets Us out and through. Each loop marks off how free Our passage is: as empty air meets air Or dark the dark: as lost Eurydice Meets Lazarus gladly dead upon the stair.

IV In Mantua the duke and duchess go On as always. Their schools of servants move Up and down the steps. The children know The classic horses are afoot, to prove

20

This pageantry is real. Above the show The peacock shines upon the palace roof. -And could these profiles, if the bird should cry, Look up into the perfect painted sky? This household has survived five hundred years Locked in one room. The daughter's long daydreams, The dwarf's resentment and the parents' fears Domesticate with grace. The peacock's screams Swell his long throat, but not a person hears, Such order has been laid upon extremes. The painter drew the children's steady look, But not their names, nor the privacies they took. The children put away their tinsel things To mime in stately cloth-of-gold charades; Off-stage and silently, the poet sings Eclogues from the ruined colonnades, Preoccupied with old imaginings. For the philippic children, cavalcades Of pinioned stallions swept across the rise, To snatch them up and break through mackerel skies. The hobbyhorse entangled in his reins Lies in the dust: the toothless grooms are gone Mumbling down to dark: the horses' manes About their brittle skeletons are wound. After the bombs, the painted room remains. The stricken duchess stares the future down; The yearning nurse foresees the frost, and sees The milkweed on the wind, the falling leaves. Who knows the day creation first began? The games that God played as a little child? The thoughtful man in glasses once outran Long trolley cars of pain. Mantegna spoiled

21

His mother's wall with scribbling; verses can Impose some measure on the broken world. A round song is the poet's lonely game, And Pegasus his rocking horse again. Four

I Rain: the river brims to overflow. Cock robin tuning up his strings for spring Takes higher ground. Geese gabble, tramp, take wing, The seven swans stretch seven necks to go, And go. They leave us here: the snow With water falls in jabots, and Makes midland seas of this plowed, quilted land. By night, the rutting river spreads and spills Huge boulders chopping, ending up and down A stonehenge in each field. Around, around The stream stones mill themselves to dust. The hills Lodge mole and weasel, and none kills Another as their Lebensraum Goes underneath the combers and the foam. The birds and creatures have no time for prayers. Each hedgerow, dike, and tree becomes an ark Beleaguered by the flood, the foundering dark. All night they come and come, told off in pairs. Astounded shrews and dormice, hares With paper ears and eyes of glass Stare through the stubble at the pike and bass. The final freeze: then utmost morning broke To find the otters sledding on the ice, Emigres from chocked-up holes. Like dice

22

Twigs rattled on the wind. Higher than hope The coasting buzzards cruised and spoke Their tuneless lines across the sky Waiting for the refugees to die. Beneath the mud the frogs and lizards slept Intact inside their democratic graves. The freckled trout, the pickerel in the waves Above the plowland stopped quite dead, were kept On ice and under glass. Frost set The scene with brush and palette knife, Blew on it, froze it stiff to this still life. Huddled in our overcoats, we stand Abridged upon the dike, the molten sun A ricecake circle rounder than that drawn By the shepherd boy. This reach of land That was the anchored ark we manned Alone, dear love, has closed us out And closed upon the lizard and the trout. From a cottage suddenly, a clock Alarmed the icebound animals and birds. The folded sheep all show their teeth; the herds Of horses steam and whinny, while a flock Of sparrows spins from rock to rock. The widow who lives here alone Set off in flight, two days ago, by train, Leaving this lifeless world to cold and us. From our glass hill, as far as eyes can see, Our landscape is all glass, all verity. Just as Japan, just as the desert was Simplified to sheets of glass, So have our stopped-up hearts, our blood Gone hard to ice, and vitrified from flood. 23

The cold conclusion of it all, is this: The world is fixed for life and for our death -And 0 my love, my love, our human breath Perhaps may fire our crystal hearts; this kiss Crack the universe of ice Across, until it deliquesce, Transmute, transform, reverberate to glass.

II Pieter Bruegel's dandy lancers Elegant in hose And doublet killed like ballet dancers. The villagers bereft Watched these men dispose Like partridges of children left Skewered in the snows. Why is this picture terrible? It surely makes the best It can of things unbearable. No wauling from the boys, Nor from one mother's breast A single howl of grief destroys Its absolute arrest. I knew, just short of ten years old, All Traherne had known: The emptiness this world can hold. Shod like whitefoot mouse In sneakers, thin, ungrown, I stood inside my parents' house Terribly alone.

24

Europe's dark-eyed children all Received their elders' ration. Their skins and twisted bones appallo whose consciences, For this, escape a lashing? Scholars know the mousetrap is An instrument of passion. Even Swift, whose family life Left him less than sweet, For children sharpened up his knife On words to cure or kill. The starvelings in the street Stare, while at Thyestes' meal We sit down and eat. From the second that they come Into this jurisdiction Children cannot slide safe home. Where rule of law is wild No child escapes convictionNot one, for heaven's sake! God's child Was spared for crucifixion. III How can we predict our pose? When an end had come to sense My darling laughed and blew his nose. I lived to learn I nearly died; My darling very nearly cried. We play the parts our childhoods chose To unromantic bitter ends. When I went birding on the marsh, the wrens Had hysterics, but the bitterns froze.

25

The actor in you always tried To do the very best he knew And genuinely is surprised When noble gestures he intends Become the means to meaner ends. I told the truth and knew I lied: Your lying turned out to be true. The secret you taught me I leave to you: What is meant is never what's implied. My knowledge threatens all I knew. The angles of the light decide That buntings shall be black or blue. The noon makes prisms of the crows; Thin soil fades the deepest rose. The beautiful is good, it's true, But seldom true. A poet's pride Lies in his throat: the image you denied Is the best that I can make of you. Riddle this: on what depends Our choice of speech in verse or prose? My message to you always sends My love: the day the shad run through The anglers must stand ready too. All poets share the salmon's sense Of time. The banded snow goose shows Where love has wintered; our metaphors expose Us where our loneliness is most intense. Against the chipmunks, walls are no defense. Like poems, the shad run up, the river flows. Poets, fishermen, and lovers bide Their luck. Time and again the best we do Undoes the bridegroom and his alien bride Till love flows in, and makes our language true.

26

IV

In the mountains, smugglers' goods are lives. Styles are packed in knapsacks. The gentian pays No custom and ignores the pass. Le roi soleil Stayed gallican by virtue of his hills. England is an island. In her sea Thin swimmers churn their paddle wheels and puff; Each dawn the squidding quixotes cast their lots To hook deep into fear. Up the estuary The vikings came like skuas, drove the gulls Into a narrower valley. The greenest trout Take the same flies on both sides of the Alps. The mountains last and send their rivers downThe towering Mont Ventoux of love still pours Out of her secret cellarage to fill The poet's brook that bears the heart away, That carries off our loves into the sea. The saxifrage puts down its roots in rock To split the mountain sheer. This grim pen drops Blind down, where magic crampons cannot hold. Men are not nailed to mountains any more. Released, Prometheus stretched his wrists and thighs, Then knelt to warm his hands at the campfire. o crevecoeur Christ upon your seasoned cross! o rock-ribbed Adam! both your stony sides Split open in the labor of my birth. Adam issued in his birthday Eve, And Eve came to her term at census-time: All the Eves born to their mothers since Have split their sides on love. There is no ark For Eve. In the canoe of her own skin She rides the shoals, the knifing reefs, she rides The rapids, runs, the springs and falls of love.

27

v Our eyes at last close out the light: This bed lapped by the dark Rocked you to sleep, a steady ark Empty of every pair but us. I, quite Empty of all but you, Observe the figured dark the ghosts walk through, Take bearings as I need not do If I could see beyond you, love. The night Havens my landless heart against the light. How long can mortals bear the dark? On Plato's cave the light Threw moving counterfeits of sight As thick as hidebound primitives could mark. Still, in his limestone cave Some browless Pyrenean Noah gave The lie to Greece: his murals save Whole herds of nameless beasts. Let me embark With him upon the density of dark! The ghosts that shine inside the dark Are far too fine for lightEven the glimmer from the white Of my black eye alarms: the log's last spark, The pigmy constellations Upon the chimney-back exhaust their patience. Ghosts die in light's reticulations. o shifting light beneath the bridge's are, How light your light makes light, how dark the dark! The looking glass by day or dark Reverses life. By light The mirrored mirror gives insight To endlessness where ends are stark;

28

The camera obscura Projects us upside down and backward, purer Than our purest fault. Now surer Every night, the truth we live cuts sharpThe more the light, the darker is the dark. We sleep from curfew through to light Together in the dark, Then quicken and must draw apart As day floods in with all its flotsam fright: From fears, from perils of The thronging night where love has lain, we move To open sight and seas of love. By light of love, dear love, we bear down night. It is the dark, the dark, that makes the light! Five (For two children: D.P. W. and ,.MH.)

All this is left behind-the fair-haired child Calling from the quay, the child who shrills Tonight across the waters widening now Between himself and me, the child I lugged Halfway to health, whose eye my elbow blacked Playing a private game; the child who talked Whole days I tried to write my will, who knew Himself from me, from whom I knew myself: This golden child I leave behind again. The bridges on the Rhine are blown And London Bridge is fallen down: On the broken bridge at Avignon, Elle fait comme raJ toujours comme ra! o ladybug, ladybug, flyaway home! My heart is afire, your children will burn!

29

And sing, my love, my love, my love, Tomorrow has been our dancing day! Listen, dear child, to what I say: All fair ladies always go away. What legacy is left this child? He's got A lot-Val d'Orcia timeless in the haze, The hills Duke Frederick jingled through in thought, Verona's high-school lovers and her bridge. The winter-spell at N~mes of water gardens And Basel with all learning in one grave Are his. The hedgehog, badger, lark, and blackbird Come out by night, sing through his summer dawns: For them this water is too wide to cross. o crystal childheart, clearer than the Lamb Of God at Passiontide, how can I know, When I am gone, just who you shall become? Who else might you become if I could stay? Old men at Troy were somehow boys like youThis man who grew into a man, full grown Through love and wars into himself, once looked Upon the glass when his grey head was dark: And I was never by for all that change, Nor shall I know you when you comb white hair. What lovers love, can any lover know? o love upon your ultimate green island, I know your habitat by heart! a dome, A booming clock, a ring of stones, a wall, A Publick Library where each book is verse Scribbled by some lover's golden hand! How can I leave thee, love, how leave that child Whose legs I was, whose spindleshanks have stretched His stride to twice my own?

30

The gulls cree-cree Above this ship as every time they do, But they come home to roost at home. At sea The petrels are ironic company. We take our daily walks in rain and shine. We eat and drink too much. At night, incline To hear each other's secrets, true and false, We sleep in the sun, play shuffleboard, and waltz. I spend a lot of time, always, alone, Glaring till the trespassers are gone, Then sit and chew my pencil, changing words About in rhymes, and waiting for the birds. My head aches in the Gulf Stream from the fog. A sailor walks a Pyrenean dog. We pass the Banks. The sun goes down behind The land at last; the homing gulls all find The cove that harbors everlasting love And mew from pilings, sheds, and masts. I move Across the deck, my back to the New World Upon whose shores the sequent waves have hurled Since time was made, and since have driven wild With northeast storms the immigrant's dumb child. America! dear Never-never-land! My scalding tears sting my sunburnt hand Closed on the rail. The wind is in the east: I know the hawks from herons now, at least. After the hurricane, in bare November, The blossom on the Island bloomed. Remember, The robins here are huge. Off Nantucket Light The spouting whale we thought we saw was white.

31

All souls blow blindly in the mountain mist. The bells toll through the hallowed day. We kissed Halfway up the hill, halfway between Salvation and those places where we've been Journeymen to love. On Halloween I used to go disguised. This weather's shroud Blots me from myself, and blunts the loud Cathedral bell that tells all Christian souls The naked truth, their naked selves. It tolls For life and for all deaths; for you and me Together now and, later, separately. -Not all the saints; a stricter calendar Mine is-with Jerome, special messenger Charged to deliver God Almighty's Word, Who dwelt in peace with lion, fox, and gourd, And fed God's creatures, took them for their walk; There's Chrysostom, whose golden bell of talk, Transformed all words back to his single God. I'd cast out Dominic, the toothed dog, But Benedict, that gardener and student, I'd have to have; and freckled Bridget, prudent Irish girl whose watchdog was a wolf. I'd claim a few who gave the Church a rough And tumble going-over-Arius, for one (For one indeed), and proud Tertullian With Origen, whose multiple mistakes Wrote poems for centuries. St. Francis makes My peaceful zoo; Hubert, with his hounds More elegant than mermaids, sees God's wounds Blossom from the stag. Each year's midnight Comes Lucy, blind, to set the dark alight. Cecilia leads all griefs to equipoise And surcease in one mortal alto voice. How can we tell the saint upon the street? The wisest man you'd ever hope to meet

32

Looks like the village idiot at best. My black and comely love went to his test And failed it flat. At his own expense Spinoza ground his life out on the lens That looked on God. A hip less girl in pants Cropped her head, rode out to rescue France, And after sampling all the sins he could, Augustine got around to being good. Peter bought his reputation dearThe rock that he became was split by fear. Prince Lucifer was tall and fair of face, And Judas the last instrument of grace. Rivers never turn up stones to touch For truth, and mirrors cannot tell us much. Our faces look the same in love and lust: All souls, all saints misspent their lives like us. From Michaelmas to Christmas The daisies died and snow Snuffed the burning asters, Quenched the long hedgerow. The holly and the ivy, The boar's head and the bells Cultivate a Christmas Where cultivation tells: The mistletoe is neutral, The carols sweet and mildAlt's welt, tilt smelt of pine Resurrects the child Swaddled, shrouded, buried, In the scholar singing here Who once, on Christmas morning, Wept from greed, from fear.

33

This Christmas Eve I stumbled through the snow (jinglebells and juggling all I know) Bringing-since I am every ritual inch Habit's handmaid-another china finch To join the finches on my father's shelf, The only thing I give him of myself. God bless the master of this house, The mistress also; All the little children Who round the table go Are the solemn grownups who sit here and smoke After the feast, revise the past, and joke. Glazed and gleaming as their fat breasts caught The candles on the tree, the birds I broughtThe foreign goldfinch and the foreign linnetGaze at our garden and the wild birds in it. Like Christmas decorations on the tree The crossbills, grosbeaks, siskins all make free With pine cones and such seeds my mother set Extra for Christmas; take all they can get, Those feather balls, those pillagers, and give Us notice: only living birds can live. We walked from Christmas halfway out across Our two lives, boy's and woman's, deep in snows. Night falls at half-past four, But in the frozen Midgard where we are No northern lights tell north, no newborn star, Nor lantern tells the door. Black dwarfs in all this darkling white, we share The fear of snow upon the iron air. In evening's dialectic The spectrum speaks extremes. The solid boy Trudging here shall sweat through terms of joy, Though cold is antiseptic. 34

Eased of their last disease, the dead below The ridge of barrows heaped up by the snow Sleep hard, sleep soft. Each mound Chalks up its sum, addition and subtraction Of fevergriefs and joys, preserved in traction, In this obdurate ground. Under snow, or when the planet's sheathed In glass, the fact that you and I have breathed, Dear love, our fill of air, Makes an unlettered mark. Old Wodd or New, It's hazard: Vermont was named for Eden too. Now is everywhere. Midwinter strikes its claws deep into sorrow. How can our dancing day dance in tomorrow? The valentines are sent. We watch our boxes till the post is sorted, Then, our glasses from the frost distorted, Watch Carnival meet Lent. You, lion-hearted child, shall eat, I know, Your chocolate valentines, and you shall grow By turns both fat and lean. Our skeletons come into fashion by The winter. Men prepare for passion by A bitter quarantine. The cocks crow in each day of my denial. They veer to mark me down: I come to trial Guilty by decree. o from my homesick heart from me exiled, From my sack of stones, my stillborn child, Good Lord, deliver me!

35

Too frail to make a jailbreak through the wall I mortared stone by stone myself, I call My turn, my crooked part And win-in the square dance of my death A great imposthume burst inside my breast, The wineskin of my heart. By the steaming scarlet blood shed fresh Upon the snow, within their starving flesh, The hearts of men are mended. Some miracles no reason can denyWhen chocolates fell, in spring, out of the sky, The long war ended. Lying awake at night, a sea apart From my true love, I listened to my heart Pound out iambics and my true love's name Till nearly dawn. The wind changed, and there came Straight through the roof of my apartment house, Straight through six neighbors' ceilings, to arouse Me from my single counting game, the cry Of breeding geese. Our northbound geese fly highThose waveys honked a fogbound mile above The bed I lay in measuring my love. The goose's voice is measured too, but harsh. Once, in the churchyard of a fenland marsh, I saw among the names of men who fell In France, an Edward Greygoose; turned to tell The recollection that popped in my head: "Geese mate for life, my dear," was what I said. A pause. Your steady voice came in on cue Exactly. "Is that the rule for ganders, too?" It's taken my whole life to learn one thingFor geese, only the ganders make the spring.

36

Now faint arbutus scrolled along the coast Crawls northward, with the fat colonial ghost, The Indian pipe. Skunk cabbage, sassy jackin-the-pulpit, and the dogwood, all come back Each cold baptismal Appalachian spring. The coon and possum, skunk and chipmunk bring Their rebel life to life, but not to me: o gentle Shenandoahl narrow Wild Ammonoosuc, you have lost your childl On the sandspit, in the sand dune's lee, I see the lighthouse light go out as dawn Begins at sea, and day comes slowly on. My china eyes out of my brittle skull Stare at the godwit, stare at the staring gull. Thin as first light, thin as the cock's first crow, Do I deny myself, or what I know? Is what I am now what I am or do? Or sayar know? or what I was or knew? Is my word for Word a noun or verb? God knows, I know the heal-all is an herb And herb of grace another name for rue. The heartsease blooms to prove that thoughts come true. What is spring? the treble peeper In the swamp or Succor Brook; Wake-robin waking all the leaves, Lords-and-Iadies, lady's slipper, Ladies' tresses, lady's smockAll the plants put on green sleeves: Every spring, seed catalogues Project their green content; Man and wife, from gardeners We trace our long descent.

37

Gardens take their titles from What we most believe: In Sweden, a spring orchid's named For Adam and for Eve. Though caterpillars pitch their tents In our apple trees And neighbors' children trample flat The scarce fritil~aries, Still we persist in making plots Where all our roses prick usJohn Locke, a man with no green thumb, Arranged a hortus siccus. Underneath the leaves of life We plant our narrow bed. In the still terrarium I found my lizard dead. At Jamestown, settlers planted men Perforce inside the fort; All garden-views look out upon Another nature morte. Behind the headstones boys and girls Consort and disagree. o every truant man and maid Hither comes home free! Wars in books were waged for spice, For tea, for cochineal; Uccello's careful measurements Make every bone yard real. Across our borders and at home The bonfires hiss and snap. By Guy Fawkes' Night most gardens show A black burnt-over map.

38

(0 gardens take their titles from The things we must believe: Adam in the passion-play Learnt his lines from Eve.) The fires fell on Tivoli Where gardens fall in more Onomatopoeias than Poets find words for. We construct and reconstruct Mazes to confuse us, But each man meets his unicorn In his hortus conclusus. Selected ruins, temples, follies, Old statues free of scar Do not affect the crop we raise: We harvest what we are. Among the lords-and-Iadies lying In the apple's shade, Escapes from Eden's garden, love, We sleep in the bed we made. My land alive is sick and dies away Until the trumpets sound this day in May: The resurrected world turns light from dark And every fledgling leaf in the whole park Becomes a bird. Here on this quickening shelf I come among the warblers to myself; With my own eyes I see the things I seeMy childhood's nature, the nature still of me. What is the legend of this livelong play? End over end, like kites, days blow away, But now and then, today's a dancing day When lovers dance the blessed world entire, All subjects are all o?jects of desire. 39

The world is round! Your sea breaks on this coast; The current flows back warm. We season most Apart, in most unseasonable weather. We saw the chestnut chandeliers together, Sa w their petals fall in persian patterns Where shrieking peacocks posed in damask satins. Who can believe, where boxwood smell is crossed With bay, that paradise was ever lost? Today the warblers flicker through the air: Atlantis is a state of mind we share. In Eden children's games were all begun, The asphodel and daffodil were one. Now everywhere the ocean is the sameSuccor Brook is just its local name. o my America! my new-found land! I am come home again, and understand How far away all children go to come Upon the place that prodigals call home.

40

Farmstead Back in the Catskill woods, back where I had not walked before, there I came upon a fieldstone square, The cellar of a quite-gone homestead. By it a thickened gardenbed Of rough fieldflowers fed From farmer's old manured ground To bloom a little bigger roundNickel to quartersize-and crowned With beebalm still imperial, Still breathing spice and gathering all Sugar-seekers into thrall. They come, the sugar-seekers, here: Wasps, bees, yellowjackets; sheer And shining unbelief, that queer Hatching of emerald balancings, Needlebeak and fizzing wings, The hummingbird, who never sings. Spikes of spice and wasps and bird Said nothing, but the silence whirred, Air buzzed, wings stirred to sounds I heard. Beyond their almost silences, Ragged panic flourishesRabble, prickle, wilderness Of undergrowth and thorns and litter (Catbriar, bramble, dodder, creeper) Crawling up a black and bitter

41

Orchard from whose roots the rot Of apples steams into this hot Noontime of bees and bergamot. From orchard set and garden sown Fruit and nectared flower have grown Rank and crooked, but grown alone After house has gone and under stone Farmer and wife have laid their bones In graves I found in the briars and leaves With their squatters' names: Adam. Eve.

42

A Divination in October for Spring These daffodils are hieroglyphs for him. The bulbs I plant, that people I knew ate Once, in a war, were Herrick's hieroglyphs For all our lives and deaths. Now Herrick's dead. I'm not: my hands are cracked, and earth is in My blood to stay. When I scrub my nails, I break them off. From gardening, Eve's game With Eve's specific prizes, life and death. That's what I'm doing now: I spend my life Putting an autumn promise in this ground, As if to plant in all this susurrus, This surreptitiousness of falling leaves, Would hedge my human bet; as if I could Come up myself among the paper Bowers. When all the bulbs are in and I stand up, My head spins from this mortal concentration, From sun and squatting, from my middle age. Until the resurrection of these bulbs, o let there be an armistice for Bowers! In spring, they weep to see you haste Away to death so soon -0 bell-voiced children gone to waste Before the sun's reached noon, Contrive your games among these Bowers Shivering by the stream, For one by one the telling hours Will strike to end your dream: Then speak his rhyme now spring is on us; Mark now what each spring kills, But praise the frailties of promiseo praise these daffodils!

43

Meadow in Spring The wind and we move here between The moving meadow and the moving sky, The blue and green of fifteenth-century prayers, Where daffodils gossip like girls come out from school. Between the water and the wall, between the bells Clattering, cracked, competing, singing parts Superior and alto, between the bob Of bells above and daffodils below We go with all our lives about us. In the cool Between the branches and the stream The mayflies meet their deaths, the rounded mouths Of spawning trout who walk on water, Of chaffinches like moths who walk on water. Between the hawk and fox, the mouse and shrew Move the grass: and move: and move again: And disappear. Between us walk our children And their ghosts, all out of school together Gossiping as if we were not here. Their epics deal with mighty children Huge in strategy, whom we do not know, Although we know their parents and their names. Knee-high, waist-high, in the daffodils And in themselves, our children move who are Each others' troubles now, a family of Five sweet selfish selves, long-lived Past the eye's stretch, the river's stretch, to lives And troubles of conjunction and partition, To children whom we do not know, although We know their parents and their Christian names.

44

Petrarch's Vaucluse All our moment is all. There is no more To us than that. That is all we are, And all that is, is all. The deepest store We have of love laid down in heart's deep core, Love's armed and arming cry to total war, Love's signature to triumph, truce before, After, and at its end-all this great roar And cataract of stillest love we pour To one another. This is all we do, Or can do, undo, try to do again: Act on each other anticipated pain Of love, act it, react, and act it anew. No more: this little: all we have to forestall Our vast subtraction. All it is, is all.

45

Homo Faber on His Birthday Birthdays mark the simplest thing A man can make: his human being. Once man only took his birth Not from woman, but from God's earth. God gave him what to God seemed good, Provided rooftree, drink, and food, Wife and garden, pets and five Senses keeping him alive. God gave him labyrinthine ears For balance, and to hear the spheres; Granted him his nose to know The hawthorn, badger, and haymow; Endowed his black longsighted eyes The strength to see looped in the skies Geese and galaxies in skeins; Cut out, most sparing of expense, From five square yards his touching skin To hold his folded self therein; Gave him taste and speech on tongue And forever to be young. Adam fell in spite of this: And we have fallen ever since To see, once knotted in its rage, Our youth unravel into age. Undo the knots, the weave, the braidBy undoing man is made.

o man that is of woman born, From woman falls, and falls alone, You fall to rise again, remade In your own image, unafraid.

46

Adam envies his each son Creation in the Fall begun, Envies you who on this day And every other, make your way Recalcitrant, as best you can, Making yourself into a man.

47

Timepiece Clocks tick time away: in time hearts break, In time may mend. We tell this passing time That counts us out, that tells our end: each chime, One, then the next, of this belled town rings bleak Descant and tally. The year is done, month, week, Day, minute, flow: now: language mutes to mime Timed to the tolling valediction; rhyme Is dumb in dialects the bells' tongues speak. Their bawling brawling mouths din down the loud Quick tick and tock of hearts that clock as true The time we keep to death. When death shall keep Our bodies gravely in one seamless shroud, Then shall we dream this dream unending through That timeless night in which we only sleep.

48

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus His journeys set the world about his ears. Comfort was what he thought he wanted, In spite of which with all God-fearing fears He tinkered, more than grace was granted. Save one, the towns in which he laid his head Knew this ear-muffed Christian not their kind: Clasped to his chafing pommel, fled That timorous knight-errant of the mind. On palimpsest and word of God he practiced His fiery celibate half-frocked pride. Love took him still: the sophomoric fact is That Folly chose herself to be his bride. Honed thin by her, Erasmus died in bed, His nose as pointed as his pen, And praised up to the moment he was dead Folly's substantial golden gifts to men. He prayed in Latin to his learned Lord, But with his breath's last susurrus He died in Dutch, expecting childhood's God. o sainted Socrates, now pray for us!

49

Cordelia She that was truth could not tell truth, Equivocated though she would not lie. Fools, not daughters, indulge in saying sooth, For truth is what daughters lose too much by. Cordelia went unretinued abroad, Took time to think her situation over, Ordered her household, entertained the horde Of ordinary guests, who brought some news from Dover Of swarming wars and storming hunted king Pursued by his infuriated past Who lately hunted truth in every thing. Cordelia stiffened, went, and told it all at last.

50

Views of Delft The painter stood to paint where we stand now, Just here: the town he made himself, is this. He drew from this tall cumulus, this stillness His proof, his double demonstration how Time's images persist and pictures live, Forgiving time and giving us time's fulness. He stood up to his ankles in this pasture, The Asses' Meadow called; here sat his easel (Dutch ezel is both easel and the ass); Here set himself against his town to master Its sharpness, strictness, thickness, softness, dazzleAnd brought that modest miracle to pass. Delft: delved out of Holland's spongy marsh, The home-made art of thickset thriving men; Delft: dug and drained and shored and lined; Ringed with canals to carry off the wash Of rain and leaching sea; Delft once again Made perfect with his picture in our mind. His Sunday city, islanded in peace Beneath the endless meadows of the sky, Holds at its steady heart the metaphor For civil settlement and art's increase To life's short lease we are indentured by: This Delft is what we came together for. Though the foundries and the blocks of flats Obstruct our centered sight of what he saw, Progressively cut off our pious view, His city lives between these iron facts In spite somehow of history's hardest lawThe town we look at now is also true.

51

Empiric time builds brick by brick her truth, Leaving her carpenter's level always home; Building true at all, is all her merit. She shuts the landscape out and shuts in youth, Accumulates our doing and our done, Cuts off the meadow from the donkey's spirit. Time's Delft by all-unsparing war was spared To suffer ruin far more casual, Yet keeps her history's passing truth exact: You, in the selfsame ironies prepared, Whose bramble nightmares all turned actual, Keep too the center of yourself intact. All truth is always true: your history is you, Squinting at Delft through your enlarging lenses. You were before I ever came: I came So separately, so far, to make more true The history that we are, extend the senses In which, like Delft, we change and stay the same. You stare at Delft this Sunday in the sun And stare at me, deep in the donkey's grass: Deeper in your speculum, I see M yse1£, the painting, and the town become Involved with private views of all your past Foreseen in your foreshadowed memory. The pictures of these pictures shall be stored Turned to the cellar wall, wrapped in the dense Comforters of all my days of being: Remembrance's canal is ever shored To carryall the brimful ruthful sense Committed by this compromise of seeing.

52

Time's tenses are imperfect, even hereEach brick, each slate, the kestrel in the tower, The red and grey of all mortality, Exists to change, as if we never were Who are-dear God, my love, we are!-this hour Contracts the radials of two lifetimes' memory. Today is what experience only is: To see, to be the thing we see; to prove In our good time time's chanciest revelation. Today this common sight, these images Betrothed us to our risky truth, and love Drove us on our dangerous salvation.

53

Eve to Adam All mornings were for her that first day's waking In morning's promise of unequaled Eden And bliss too large for words to comprehend. Her day was joy, the doing and the done: She saw her separate hands move in the sun Dibbling, tamping down, tying up and pruning, Felt Eden's earth beneath her fingernails. That earth smelled deepest of its glorious self, In noon's full sun gave promise to push up The world's whole growth forever; in her hair The youngest greengrass smell dried sweetly out When she lay down to him. As she slipped Into her dreaming heaviest sleep she knew The once more morning and the waking And woke, into the steady repetition Of day and day and gardening and night And night of love. Her garden grew More than all gardens since miraculous: Her cockle shells turned silver bells, Her dogrose barked its summer's joy and blew In winter snow; her love returned, From no leave-taking journey, but returned, Returned forever. Her gifts of love Were giving, given, and unmeasured till She thought to give him more, and thought and thought, Fretted almost, grew thinner, lay awake Moments past Adam's sleep; then came upon The garden's loveliest plain invention, Almost enough for him, almost the measure of Her urgency to give her ever-love, Her selfness and her selflessness To him: Eve, that was rest and restlessness.

54

The Shortest Distance Thirty years ago, a friend of mine Named Robert, together with a friend of his Whom he'd not seen since just before the war, Sat tight for one whole summer, six feet under: In the deep end of the local pool, Their bottoms gridded by the tiles, Their fingers Buted like the scallop-shells, And breathing through a tube. There they sat, On their light bones, one thin, the other not, Two Boaters weighted by their natural fears And packed in their invention-garden hose, A pail, some lead, a lot of pans, The local children splayed the pool, In and out like dolphins, grinning; At lunch, they left all quietness behind (Still pond, and no more moving), left those two Squatting on the tiles. Light honeycombed The lapping noons above, and underneath They sat, those two, squatting, breathing through a hose. Men take their measure from the world they see. Some lurch by choice through splintered polar nights. (-Can dogs? -can ponies? -can his diet Bring the grown man to his heart's desire?) Wives will always worry. Uccello never Came to bed, though worn through to his bones With following the lying lines That always lead away: "Give me any Place to stand, and I will make the world."

55

Our lines cut short From where we wereThose pleasant places, Highchair, bed, or gardenTo what we hoped we might become. At every birth, the light Is lightyears old; the blazing star At Bethlehem had died That lit up all the straw. On principle, I take the low road every time (More chance of ruins, birds, or rising fish); If we ever meet again, My darling, in some pub, or after A hard day in the archives, or Buying each a day-return To somewhere else, it's accident. Lines foreshorten lives to where They only seem to meet: all hearts Must thump a while before We realize whose they are. Or how we got there. Robert spent that summer Hugging his heavy heart And breathing through a hose. Spent it, breathing: His breath: that summer: gone. Robert's still not thin: big men lose Their weight entirely these days. Real space outweighs a man, it seems. The newsreels show them coming back Right where they used to be beforeDid someone say Achilles on the screen,

56

Running behind some kind of turtle? Oh, no one ever gets there! Even the crows can't do itThe shortest way from point to point Is still the long way round. Boys who pot-shot all their youth at crows Are six feet under, too-men and crows Should keep their distance from the rifles, Though crows, God knows, all seem to finish first. A half-life back, a wit and friend of mine Named Robert-but I've said all this before. Any life has walked us many crooked miles. Balance is that moment just -oh, just-before it happens. It will, my love. It has. h might at any time: crows and rifles Know no special season, and All seasons are the time for bearing. Water is for balance, water is The gift of levity. When I was small, Too thin to swim, I overstepped and felt My toes-treetoad's toes, enormous on my bonesMy very toes: myself: touch bottom. My eyes, at quite the other end of me, Looked out to see the nursemaid row away. Her oars went in, came out (like glass), went in; That rowboat towered, a galleon! But water outweighed me. My treetoad toes Bubbled the stick-child back where I could stand. Let balance be the moment when We stand there afterwards, to watch The snipe snap over, light from dark, To watch the light arrange and rearrange

57

Reticulations on the bay, hear the boats Creak up and back, as the breathing bay Bears and lets them down. The total weight Of loving is all anyone can bear. Touch bottom: reach an end: Edgehill and Missionary Ridge Drew their lines in To focus in the fire; la Voie Sacree Led crookedly but always into fire. After all the frozen ships and men Drowned in stupendous cold-for ponies too Can catch pneumonia in cold-the maps Record a fact that no one wants to know. There never was, nor ever is A crow's flight for a man or crow, Or Northwest Passage anywhere To where we really want to be.

58

Leda To get that girl the big cob killed a boy Sixteen years old, who came along the bank Evenings to look at her, who kissed her, sank Into the deep grass and held her down. Joy Was simple enough: evening streamside dream For lad with no name, curls, and strong Greek back Whom Leda loved. The swan's surprise attack Broke that boy's back and threw him in the stream And raging threw down Leda in a clump Of yellow iris slicing her girl's flesh. Huge heart on hers beats out her taken breath In tiny sigh; tremendous pinions thump Against her everywhere; victorious thresh Of swan reaches her, teaches all life, all death.

S9

We inherit original sin whatever we say We believe; we inherit clumsiness in love. If young, or lucky, or blessed, we may learn to move Less gracelessly, take more easily, and pay Out ourselves as well as the cost. We prove Ourselves, alas, on love; our tempering Rarely results, for our self-centering Is off; our love rather rubs rough than smooth. Adam's prompt legacy, our consciences, Instructs us to give sentence on ourselves Which serving, we enjoy, and thus endure Another day, another love. Guilt is One substitute for love; it overwhelms, It supports us, and is our awful cure.

60

State of Nature Walking back together in the quiet, Better than halfway home, we saw our landscape change. The lion charged the antelope and struck, The sharpshin took the sparrow, and the snake Absorbed the hare, who kept in lump His stubborn own integrity inside that leather snake. In my breath's tube lodged Hobbes' hypothesis To take my breath away; in your belly The bobcat jumped his deer; across our minds Thundered the hoofs of buffalo; giraffes Raced in their undeniable flickering fear. Running beneath the orchard we two fled Amidst the animals and from each other Till suddenly the creatures all lay down, and laid Their heads against each others' flanks, and slept: The hare emerged, his ears intact; the snake Became just snake, closed all his lids, and slept; And we as still as they lay down together, Forever under fruiting apple tree.

61

Earth's Sonnet

o round world turning, shining in the night, An ordinary planet among the blinking stars, What wayward angel, passing on his flight To his assignment in celestial wars, Could guess the sense of that minutest plot, That river-rounded and un neighbored vale, Where man and woman share their lyric lot With honeysuckle and with nightingale? Angels sing in circles of invention Or raise their standard with enormous cry, Lightly post to do God's dark intention Through laws of gravity all worlds move by: These tiny two, unseen from space, know all The law and rapturous gravity of fall.

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Eurydice She knew each tendon of his buttocks and his back, His elbow's bend as he tucked in his lyre, Each curl particular against his neck: All these she knew again upon the stair Walking up, and up, and up behind him. She knew them: they were the very he, The miracle of her husband in the spring, When hers had been the world's great lord of melody. In the affrighting competition Between his song and the hold of hell, She dared not look upon his strained tuition Nor hearken the sufficiency of his spell. He won. She was excused, allowed to follow Him; her memoried sense commenced to feel Entranced by his, for her, reality: the hollows Of that neck, of knee and sculptured heel. And seeing so intently him, she that second saw The muscles shorten in his neck, and knew The all-foreshortened terror of irrevocable law, Knew how he loved her, what love cannot do.

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A Valediction Forbidding Mourning I go again, for good; for better You stay rooted in this place. No sense, agreed, to gift or letter Or photograph of either's face. What we say, who overhears Hears what anyone would say Parting from anyone; no tears From us this ordinary day. Nothing alters that I go Save my altered heart and mind, Since language leaves me now, I know, No way to leave myself behind. My true love, keep your heart! My breast Keeps mine. Weare not one but two: That we once seemed one is the best That rhetoric or love can do. No worlds are ever flooded out By tears that you or I can shed; Those lively spheres that turned about For love have canted, failed, are dead: Eternity has died for us. Not even virtuous dying men However eager to be dust Look forward to the moment when Stripling saints cantatas sing To couples crossed in love on earth, And named for them, the Lord shall bring Two by two new stars to birth.

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Our remembered paradise Shall never fill the vacant sky. Hyperbole comes just to this: That we stand here and say goodbye. These leveling literal latter days Have set the limits to love's art; Nor gold nor compasses can praise Our once so undivided heart. The lines we take today in pain No metaphor can really bend To circles that begin again: In journeys love must meet its end.

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A Valediction of the Imagination Could I once lie down in sleep Subjunctive to my only love, From ocean's floor the whales would keep Tune with tanagers above. Every sense must now admit Absence and what absence is, Since soul and body know by it My love, and that I still am his: Contrary to established fact Separate souls do not divide Because not called upon to act On bodies lying side by side. From my body's and my mind's Unwilling singularity I find the reasons reason finds Riddles in duplicity. For two are one as long as one And one decline to make up two: By saying it, my will is done. Poets choose which truth is true. Poets are of all the world Most radical conservatives Who underneath their tongues keep curled Hyperbole by which love lives. Hyperbole assigns true names To names' legitimate descent. Legitimizes bastard claims In love according to intent;

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Calls negation into being, Creates of absence and of death Nothing too awful for our seeing, Nothing too taking for our breath. Like goldfinches its dolphins fly, Its pyramids like egrets dance, Its suns shall plunge about the sky In a Democritan mischance; Acacia and gorse shall bloom Through the Christmas holidays, And fox for rabbit shall make room Tunneling in their common maze. Though skewered through my witch's heart My restless self be kept from you, This merry-go-round that I start Shall spin the silly centuries through Till Judgment's noisy morning break And shake me from my five-foot floor And I arrive at that earthquake Enlarged, to hear in the uproar The earth ring like a wedding bell Coupling lovers long removed, That we locked in our private spell May lie in conjugated love.

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I Through Judgment's brazen bray, how could I sleep? Obedient, I should unbelieving rise With all the swarming multitudes, to keep Death's second bitter day when dying dies. If Judgment were to summon, we should break Through the crusted earth, as that Fifth Day The creatures' heads came thrusting up, to take Possession of creation, breed, and play: But lying so long flattened under stones With lying phrases cut into their faces We stand up guilty, stiff, and cold, our bones Bringing us barely to our fearful places, Where standing hand in hand and thin as shadows, We see the creatures standing in God's meadows.

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II

At that fanfaronade, I knew I must Somehow get up, somehow recollect My scattered self, packed in this box of dust. Remembering I had something to expect, I stretched, sat up too soon, and cracked my head Silly against the planet's inner curve, To step, with thousands more, dizzy from bed Into the blazing stars. Some reserveLike coming virgin on that only nightConfirmed me to myself in all the stir Of pushing people pushing up to light, All Eden's planting gathered for gathering here. Now, suddenly, alone in this great garden, I know you still, my love, and ask your pardon.

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III Met at this instant, at this seam of time And timelessness, between the light and dark, Between forever and ever, the paradigm Of terror now we learn at last; this stark Strict second's lesson wholly know, and know Against the flat of nothing, at the edge Of senses and the end of things, the so Sweet deepest stab of love and iron wedge Driving deep and deeper than before. a love grown greyer all these senseless years, How can I love you now so much the more Contracted duly to this moment's fears? In debt to death, with love how dare I shake? Except my love be fear for my love's sake.

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IV Our shoulders sore from shoving up the earth And our grey hair grown longer on our necks, We stand confounded at our own rebirth Stockstill among the busy crowds, the wrecks Of beauty, love, and valor bustling here. A raddled Helen elbows past, and Hector Stained with the dust and sullen; private fear Writes on the face even of Augustus Victor. Girls snatch at passing boys; in twos and threes Tense saints withdraw; huddled on stones alone Great scholars sit and stare; with dirty sneeze And mumbling, Leda comes, become a crone. All human hearts bear in their hearts their heart: We too withal, and, worse, again to part.

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v The untold time we line up for our turn Is still not time enough, is still too brief: Time has no day to which we might adjourn; There is no other way to seek relief. Once our tongues could find sufficient reason And cause enough for action when we loved. But cause being just, mere reason was but treason Committed on ourselves and on us proved. Neither of us, trained in love's quick trials, Assumes the right to pJead before this bar, To argue, offer precedents, denials, That we are not defendants that we are. Summoned to Judgment, we could only plead Extenuating facts of love, and need.

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VI

The angel, poised with scales and lifted sword, Weighs out the scruples of each hoarded soul, Enquires of each with deferential word His preference, of going halved or whole To hell or heaven; takes each hard decision Reached by each whispering conscience, and lets go Each soul to rest upon his own submission In spaces of his choice above, below. At last we come, the smallest of the lot, Our virtue slight as dandelion down, To blurt out at his ankle we have not The slightest case for any heavenly crown. Then leaning on his sword, great Michael tells Weare forgiven, as we forgive ourselves.

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VII If Judgment were, perhaps we might escape From judgment through the generous sieve of grace, Restored to Eden, find each other's shape Filled out and young, each other's perfect face. We might, among the gentle innocent beasts Beneath the orchard blossoming anew, Entertain as gentlefolk at feasts The angels one by one or two by two; But since we dare not count on Doomsday now, We reckon up against ourselves the sum Of all our sins, demand full costs, allow Ourselves no credit, strike us pleading dumb. o let us, love, for our humanity Undoing doom, with human grace be free!

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VIII What human dignity may be we can, I think, my love, with love and luck discover, Learning as simple woman, simple man Submission to ourselves and to each other. Each of us sleeps each night with one who has Under some pressure, told the enemy all; And each of us knows, God knows, how sudden was The moment splitting innocence from fall. All the same, we are the sum of more Than failures told, more than our nothingness: The sums we make, we made us ready for. Mistaking makes us perfect, nothing less. We stand up stripped, prepared for Judgment's proof, Our human fear cast out by human love.

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The End Falling, unseeing, out of the sun Into the greatest wind-tunnel man devised For his last test-up and down In spiral sometimes, sometimes as plumb Jarred to th~ bottom of the desert world, Sent sailing out before the wind across Acres of streaked and shadowed fields, we spun Embraced, each head against the other's neck, And terrified with flight and terrified with fall. Bodies also locked in night's long kiss, Or latched white-knuckled to themselves, Or with a prudish passion twisting down alone, Glared at large-eyed unseeing us, Knocked, brushed, whispered, struck us in the dark. The vast electric wind blew once at last, Blew my head off and blew out your heart, And left, in the Queen-Anne's-lace and the gorse, The carcasses of us tested, far from whole.

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Night Animals Your ribcage holds a violent animal in That at its gentlest knocks the livelong night To be let out, to be let out to fly: He roared a while of centuries his dissent, and Two nights back he tapped all night against my ear. Fed fat on you, too large for his curved cage, He pounds his way out to your end of days: With sweat his wings are wet at his shoulderblades, His feathers snapped with beating. Growing, Growing, growing, he fills up the space Of every taken breath, and stops each breath Giving upon the air. I hear his pinions scrape As he turns over now, full fed with time, To knock all night and whine: to ask, to ask, to ask. Sprung from one rib of that strong cage I came ungently once myself: I left a weakness there That he will one day find. I came stinging out, Spring held in let out, bent tight, unbent; Strung and now stretched out, 1 am become This stiff-necked skeleton myself, the cage And keeper of an animal locked up in me, An animal trussed up that thumps his heels, His stumps of wings: an animal that asks, That asks to be let out, to fly. Like yours, my creature wars on me. Like you, My love, I cramp all wildness in; I am, Like you, my love, the ribbed, the crooked, The living, living cage of living love.

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Amour Propre Pride is odd. Eve when created first Looked longer in the mirror of a pool Than Eden, even, quite approved. A fool Her Adam was, we say, who so athirst For her at noontime, stood to watch her burst Against her teeth the apple's skin; coolBrained his option seemed against God's rule, For one white body to enter life accursed. Proper love never quite knows its place. We love ourselves only, but we only see Ourselves reflected on a dearer face And thus we forfeit our propriety. Pride is odd. And as the peahen proud I squawk my miserable love aloud.

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Falling Out Falling in is fearful rapture, Driven to a common end: Falling in is willing capture. Accidental hand on hand, Less accidental mouth on mouth Unfreeze heart and giddy loins To geography for south Of here: all our quirky quoins Turn to each other inside out, o the ecstasy! 0 the bliss Of what we mutually are about! o joy un word able of this! Your disarming body's wonder Disbodies me to farthest star Till reason winkles out from under. My darling, what a bore you are!

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My love is neat. He spends much time choosing His ties, his pen. I am always losing Notes and books and papers in typhoon Of papers that fill up my room. My love puts all his sins into one tiny case And sallies forth with his composed face On his unsettling errands. I run here and there, For this and that, and more; fuss; tear my hair; Think I can never find; am never done; And live untidily alone. My love loves me and several other ladies Whom on his shelves with proper labels ranges.

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Your hurt is only in my mind. Where You sit, surrounded by a thousand tears, Where your plain name weeps inside my ears, Your curved mouth shakes in grief, is only there; Really you go about your usual day, Lift your head to laugh as you always do, Say what you always say in the usual way To the usual people. You remain quite you. What.was it then that seemed to make such pain, Sent your eyes in, turned your mouth's edge down? That you enthusiastically tried out again, Enjoying it, I gather, down to the ground? It was, my love, your fictive picture seen, Posed at its prettiest, on my mind's screen.

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Where I Lie Your talent, darling, is the gift of love;

o if you bury it, bury it in me! Your delicate long mouth, your hands that move At large, so delicately large, your free Flanks closing, and your flesh alive Turn all this night to present-future tense. Your gifts of love ravish as they give, Your giving taking of the aching sense; Your giving-taking takes my only gift, To give me back again myself, who lie Beneath your thin gift willing, and can lift Your taking, taking you, to turning sky; Turning sky and time and tumbled bed Turn all to you, 0 love, 0 talented.

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My peregrine slipped her jesses, flew Straight out across the rimy fields and rose Over the river to take a duck; they froze On rocky jut, dead duck, its breast bent back And falcon's heraldry. Northwind blew Breath's blade into my throat; I saw you Setting each foot into the tall cliff's crack To climb to her, you fool; but you knew best As always what was worst; imaginings' Hooked beak put out my eyes. She readied wings To wind, launched her falling fiercest start, Brought down like duck you to all stricken things. The peregrine pecked through your bony chest And ate your fool's and unprotected heart.

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Pastoral Today upon this English hill We lie beneath the wind as still As you must lie, not far from here, When death, not I, shall hold you dear. And I, who would sleep near to hand, Must lie beneath my mapled land. Now still within our skins we hold Each other's bones against the cold And print upon each other's mouth Such warmth as only winding-cloth, Not time nor winter wind, shall cool. The seasons' fair and graceless rule Relaxes with us on this slope, Suspends our tendencies to hope, Cancels hopelessness, despair, Persuades one world-rejecting pair Of grownups wrapped in overcoats To some belief in bliss; provokes Giddy ghosts to bless us with Sixteen-year-olds who in us live. Past your head I see a hawk Ellipsing high above the chalk; You staring past my shoulder see The grassblades growing under me; The hawk's unblinking eye sees here Mortals denying mortal fear, Ignoring that all grass that grows Grows up all mortals to enclose: Embraced against ourselves we lie Who shortly must stand up to die.

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Most memorable pains we manage to forget As if they had not been: recurrence sends Us deep into our painfilled past. Sweat Breaks out in freshet when the second child Begins her coming; as her pain ascends To brain, descends again, brain unbeguiled Remembers: that is how it was! Just that. Recognition of new lover's loins Recalls, calls out to, wildest and exact Remembered youth. Life its own self rejoins To thicken life and quicken self-conviction At junction of pain's real and fatal fiction; And life, in spite of memory's indirection, Defenseless self surrenders to self's total recollection.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Co lie, Rosalie L Atlantic Wall, and other poems.

1. Title. PS3553·04746A85 81I'·5'4 ISBN 0-691-06273-0 ISBN 0-691-01314-4 (pbk.)