The motion of gathering loops of water
Must either burst or remain in a moment.
The violet colors through the glass
Throw up little swellings that appear
And spatter as soon as another strikes
And is born; so pure are they of colored
Hues, that we feel the absent strength
Of its power. When they begin they gather
Like sand on the beach: each bubble
Contains a complete eye of water.
Sent in after new ground was taken,
my father ducked from ditch to shell-hole,
unwinding the telephone cable behind him,
a pfc. cast as Mercury, connecting
the gods with the lesser gods.
Funny to think of him trailing
the complex filament of speech,
that man, neither shy nor sullen,
who answered only “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,”
and never volunteered a private thought.
Now that I know
That passion warms little
Of flesh in the mold,
And treasure is brittle,
I’ ll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.
August 1922
This poem originally appeared in the September 1988 issue of Poetry. See it in its original context.
Beneath her nest,
a shrew's head,
a finch's beak
and the bones
of a quail attest
the owl devours
the hour,
and disregards
the rest.
Love is the kindest
expression
of absence —
Or else
is a day
by the river,
in which by
motion
it becomes clear —
there have been
in an hour an
infinite train
of rivers, & which
did you want
to see? One
comes slowly
to realize
there is no evading things
(the heart will have
its way, though
its will go
unfulfilled),
& there is no shame
in this.
The pleasures in this world —
soft breeze, soft
thighs, a bit of music,
1
Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.
I wiped the dust from my mother’ s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery.
You’ re stepping on your father, my mother said,
and indeed I was standing exactly in the center
of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been
my father’ s grave, although there was no stone saying so.
You’ re stepping on your father, she repeated,
louder this time, which began to be strange to me,
since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it.
I moved slightly to the side, to where
my father ended and my mother began.
Defier of closed space, such as the head, opener
Of the sealed passageways, so that
Sunlight entering the nose can once again
Exit the ear, vaporizer, mist machine, whose
Soft hiss sounds like another human being
But less erratic, more stable, or, if not like a human being,
Carried by one, by my mother to the sick chamber
Of my childhood as Freud said,
Why are you always sick, Louise? his cigar
Confusing mist with smoke, interfering
With healingEmbodied
Mother died last night,
Mother who never dies.
Winter was in the air,
many months away
but in the air nevertheless.
It was the tenth of May.
Hyacinth and apple blossom
bloomed in the back garden.
We could hear
Maria singing songs from Czechoslovakia —
How alone I am —
songs of that kind.
How alone I am,
no mother, no father —
my brain seems so empty without them.
Aromas drifted out of the earth;
the dishes were in the sink,
rinsed but not stacked.
