My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way — the stone lets me go.
It is the right time for hallucinations.
Drowning in a sty, the sailor
feels the ocean’ s buoyancy.
Dying in a web, the moth
discards its wings and falls free.
I wish something would put its hands on me,
give me stronger poison and then stronger.
The beautiful flotillas do not stop.
Undying love drifts and delays.
I am capsizing.
Great joy lingers still.
Nothing can be said for suffering.
It is legible only to strangers
and at great distances. It detests
survivors. It drapes gun-carriages
Linoleum and half a dozen eggs
In 1960
Many towered Ilium
A brand name and a shopping list too
Memory distinguishes all things from
Only nothing
I was born and grew
Rooms stacked up into houses
A few trees (maples) welted in their seasons
Wildly like sea birds in crude oil
What amazes
Me now amazed me always but never
Often eyesight is prophetic instantly
I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar
In a war movie on the arm
Of a young actor. He has just swum
Across a river somewhere in Normandy
Into the waiting arms of his rejoicing comrades.
In three directions
are two storms.
I instruct the edges
of my hands to become
irises, to shatter
in that way,
in three directions.
There's nothing behind me.
Viols
claw beneath our fences
at the elevation
of sound to pure
unsanctity, the moment
of simultaneity:
airplanes seeming to collide and not colliding, the crow alighting
in the manner of a seabird, the carbomb a more than momentary poppy.
It doesn’ t matter
A damn what’ s playing —
In the dead of winter
You go, days of 1978 —
79, and we went
Because the soldiers were beautiful
And doomed as Asian jungles
Kept afire Christ-like
In the hopeless war
I did not go to in the end
Because it ended.
Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.
A man’ s imagining
Suddenly may inherit
The handclapping centuries
Of his one minute on earth.
And hear the virgin juries
Talk with his own breath
To the corner boys of his street.
And hear the Black Maria
Searching the town at night.
And hear the playropes caa
The sister Mary in.
And hear Willie and Davie
Among bracken of Narnain
Sing in a mist heavy
With myrtle and listeners.
And hear the higher town
Weep a petition of fears
Unmet at Euston in a dream
Of London under Turner’ s steam
Misting the iron gantries, I
Found myself running away
From Scotland into the golden city.
I ran down Gray’ s Inn Road and ran
Till I was under a black bridge.
This was me at nineteen
Late at night arriving between
The buildings of the City of London.
And the I (O I have fallen down)
Fell in my dream beside the Bank
Of England’ s wall to be, me
With my money belt of Northern ice.
I found Eliot and he said yes
I
Once I had 1000 roses.
Literally 1000 roses.
I was working for a florist
back in the shambling ‘Thirties
when iced skids of 250 roses
sold for $2 at Faneuil Hall.
So for $8 I bought
1000 roses, 500
white and 500 red,
for Connie’ s wedding to steadiness.
There are diagrams on stilts all wired together
Over the hill and the wind and out of sight.
There is a scar in the trees where they walk away
Beyond me. There are signs of something
Nearly God (or at least most curious)
About them. I think those diagrams are not
At rest.
I think they are a way of ciphering God:
