The morns are meeker than they were -
The nuts are getting brown -
The berry’ s cheek is plumper -
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf -
The field a scarlet gown -
Lest I sh'd be old-fashioned
I’ ll put a trinket on.
This may sound queer,
but in 1985 I held the delicate hands
of Dan White:
I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk
was made monument — no, myth — by the years
since he was shot.
I remember when Harvey was shot:
twenty, and I knew I was queer.
Those were the years,
Levi’ s and leather jackets holding hands
on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk —
elected on the same day as Dan White.
It was only important
to smile and hold still,
to lie down beside him
and to rest awhile,
to be folded up together
as if we were silk,
to sink from the eyes of mother
and not to talk.
The black room took us
like a cave or a mouth
or an indoor belly.
I held my breath
and daddy was there,
his thumbs, his fat skull,
his teeth, his hair growing
like a field or a shawl.
I lay by the moss
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Your children grow from you apart,
Afar and still afar;
And yet it should rejoice your heart
To see how glad they are;
In school and sport, in work and play,
And last, in wedded bliss
How others claim with joy to-day
The lips you used to kiss.
Your children distant will become,
And wide the gulf will grow;
The lips of loving will be dumb,
The trust you used to know
Will in another's heart repose,
Another's voice will cheer...
And you will fondle baby clothes
And brush away a tear.
A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beating
down, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering.
A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What he
knows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almost
understand!
I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed with
water reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes.
In each painting, I think, it’ s as if God were giving up on finishing
the world.
Translated from the French
Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,
the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:
that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.
Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ ll never catch your breath,
mind imagines — how not be annihilated by it? — the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,
I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall
Like a calendar in one color.
I wear a torn place on my sleeve.
It isn't as simple as that.
Between no place of mine and no place of yours
You'd have thought I'd know the way by now
Just from thinking it over.
Oh I know
I've no excuse to be stuck here turning
Like a mirror on a string,
Except it's hardly credible how
It all keeps changing.
Loss has a wider choice of directions
Than the other thing.
I’ ve known rivers:
I’ ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
