You can’ t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’ s not right, that if they really knew you...
So much for self-analysis. Now,
Other-lips whispering between my legs.
What they called black hole not-thing
is really packed full of secrets. A rebel mouth
testifying from the underside. Careful
not to let it speak too loudly. Only hum
demure in polite company — never laugh
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
When I woke the darkness was so thick,
So palpable and black that my eyes
Seemed blind as stone staring into stone.
The blade that I had dreamed, efficient and quick
As it cut into my thigh, cleaning a gangrened
Wound infected to the bone, seemed poised
Above my throat: Close-grained, impenetrable,
The blackness rose before me like a wall.
And then off in the next room, nervous, light,
A soft padding as of an animal
Raced like my heartbeat in my temples
Round and round, trapped, stealthily desperate
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
For near is where you’ ll meet what you have wandered
far to find. And near is where you’ ll very likely see
how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon
the lighted candles lent their gold to give the eye
a more than common sense of what lay flickering
just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely
swoon just shy of apprehension. It was then
that time’ s neat artifice fell in and made for us
a figure for when time would slip free altogether.
I have no sense of what this means to you, so little
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,
And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, come flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Knocks on the door.
Who?
I sweep the dust of my loneliness
under the rug.
I arrange a smile
and open.
