I saw I dreamt
Two men hoisted hung up not American the rope
Not closed on their breathing
But this rope tied them spine to spine somehow
Suspended
From the mood of a tree not American they were
African Ugandan Nigerian
Without a license a right to touch
The sin their touching incites
And I heard their names called out Revision
Or Die and You Must Repent
And Forget the Lie you Lily-Boys you Faggots
Called up from the mob
Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark, compose
The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear
One by one, above the schoolyard.
If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened:
A bird would still be riding the back of a horse,
And the horse would go on grazing in a field, & the gleaners,
At nights birds hammered my unborn
child’ s heart to strength, each strike bringing
bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone
among women who cursed their hearts
out, soured themselves, never-brides,
into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened
their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.
Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled
from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken
1
I now release from my blood the bird of thirty she wasted
that’ s how wars crumble us
I now tell those who are exhausted from the expense
of children the secret of happiness and happiness itself
When we talk about when to tell the kids,
we are so together, so concentrated.
I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’ m
the killer” — taking my wrist — he says,
holding it. He is sitting on the couch,
the old indigo chintz around him,
rich as a night sea with jellies,
I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him,
as if within some chamber of matedness,
some dust I carry around me. Tonight,
to breathe its Magellanic field is less
painful, maybe because he is drinking
a wine grown where I was born — fog,
In the hallway of life
you were a rose with no stem
and I, the janitor sweeping
away the fallen petals.
You said the world revolves
while we ourselves remain
in the darkness of the never-
ending, never-beginning never.
I say that the man who
was humiliated in the second act
and shot himself in the fifth,
stands up, smiles, bows.
The lamp asks,
is it the shadow writing this,
the pen, or their converging?
The paper asks nothing.
Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day
May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes.
Burn, glare, old sun, so long unseen,
That time may find its sound again, and cleanse
Whatever it is that a wound remembers
After the healing ends.
Originally appeared in the October 1947 issue of Poetry magazine.
We set great wreaths of brightness on the graves of the passionate
who required tribute of hot July flowers —
for you, O brittle-hearted, we bring offering
remembering how your wrists were thin and your delicate bones
not yet braced for conquering.
The sharp cries of ghost-boys are keen above the meadows,
and little girls continue graceful and wondering.
Flickering evening on the lakes recalls those young
heirs whose developing years have sunk to earth,
their strength not tested, their praise unsung.
On the Gilfillan burial day,
In the Hill o’ Balgay,
It was a most solemn sight to see,
Not fewer than thirty thousand people assembled in Dundee,
All watching the funeral procession of Gilfillan that day,
That death had suddenly taken away,
And was going to be buried in the Hill o’ Balgay.
There were about three thousand people in the procession alone,
And many were shedding tears, and several did moan,
And their bosoms heaved with pain,
Because they knew they would never look upon his like again.
Blood-drop, lung of fire setting past
the sea bell and wave; why am I separate
from that giant burrowing into further life?
The body breathes and rides
a heavy-netted ocean swollen
by the tide. Under the half-moon
it’ s the lighthouse light that turns
the rest of me to early nightfall,
headland, home. I send it back,
a mirrored flickering across cold waters.
We allow ourselves the crest that breaks
above the surface then re-forms.
