Part 2

The needle between her fingers came to a pause as she smoothed the seams of her life and lingered over old threads of truth she had stitched with her own hands and bitten off her with her own mouth, noticing how these had blended with and become part of the cloth, until her dimmed eyes could not tell in the fading light which was which.

There was not much of the garment left to mend, although the remembering hid what there was and changed the facts of dark wool to the brighter silk of summers past, when she had matched her wardrobe to her hopes and risked the need for later alterations, unmindful how both would grow outstyled and she herself become a pattern of an age more pitied than admired.

Again the needle swayed and she sighed at its impatience, as though it cared that wool wear a rocking-chair pride with dignity, as though an air of mutual warmth existed between her and the winter which would help them keep what little vanity remained, and the thread grew taut again, leaving the stitches along the seam smooth and even as her last defense.

THE COAT

Joseph had his coat, a different color for each brother, and it was bright.

What happened, we note, was seventy times seven their debts were forgiven till his coat turned white.

Jesus, for his part, preferred to begin in the newborn skin of a lamb, instead.

We know that his heart devoured all sin like a lion, then spilled and bled.

ON A ROCK OF ATLANTIS

Five. Between each the ages that separate, yet unite the pillared span.

The oldest leads and guides as the short, crooked thumb of long experience.

The others follow. Up and down to the last small boy trailing behind.

Unevenly they stride through the gray, silent dawn toward the sea

where the waves still breathe of sleep, and empty miles unwind the shoreline.

Five figures probe the wind, the tide. They pace their length along the sand

and pause. No light breaks. The stillness keeps, as though the current

deserted, had suddenly ceased. With poles, hooks, bait in hand, the five move on.

Heavy with clouds, the sky broods behind a mist, leans on cliffs

and frightened by its dream of a dead world's beach, begins to slip.

Until five fingers rise on the promontory's tip and lift their poles.

Upheld, the morning wakes, pours gold! Fish leap! The land's alive!

EVEN IF WE DID

If we could unwind that brain, discover its world, the response of sense from A to Z, the place, time, weather, and human condition

If we could trace the course of its myriad streams to the first rain, the slow gathering of waters in pools and springs

If we could collect the whole evidence grain by grain, the words, numbers, symbols that shaped the color and sound of mountains

If we could record the dreams, the chain of centuries from dusk to dawn, those testings of beliefs that broke the link and shook sparks from the sun

If we could model its twin as a lasting monument, a brain with all our findings, long after men, their myths, wonders, gifts

SELF-EVIDENT

Some birds there are that do not like a cage, that want the whole world free to come and go as seasons do, despite drought, heat or snow; that feel their liberty a heritage no bars can shut in or no masters assuage with pretty bribes and warning threats of foe; the wilder ways of chance they choose to know with wings against the wind as surest gauge.

Eagle, crow, skylark, jay--no matter what the size of beak, how sharp the claw or small-- each finds his own nest feathered best for him alone, on tree, rock, shore or grassy plot; there he can hear his own answered call, aware of baits that snare, of shears that trim!

THE SACRAMENT

All the breadlong day she moved about the house and nibbled at its crust, until she saw Carl walking griefwards with his shadow to the barn, whereless in his step and heedless of the cows, and she wondered how he could be so thoughtbound. What sad, whyful thing could make a man so lost within his world that he had no fisthold on it to demand a moreness for his account?

She turned from that window to the hopeside one where she had reseeded a world of her own, a garden like the days of her truthhood--green, and fenced in its innocence, flowering trust, where flowers became their dreams when they woke up. Reminded by the sky hanging out the moon, she hung hers in the doorway, then lit the room and hurried to her oven's tomorrow crumbs.

He came in quietly and guilt-rubbed his face, seeing Jen's waiting at the table. "Ev'ning," he said and heard her reply creak underneath as he woodenly walked to the sink and draped a towel around his neck, unwishing the blame. If soap and water clean could make a man feel holy, what use would the devil's mirror be? He felt no such deception while she said grace.

They ate their silence from faithworn plates and spoons, swallowing the forgiven coffee used twice each day and aware of the greater trespass they shared in this house which was their staybetween. Cracked like their hands and cups, who knew when its seams would give? In the fearwhile, the question unasked kept their lips still, as though words tempted a risk beyond their strength to mend should the seams be loosed.

The meal done, she freed the table from its chore and brought him the county's weekly paper, their footnotes to other people's answers and prayers, then bent to her needlework, seeking accord. Lost by, he stared unseeing at the words poured through his eyes as though, shuttered against exposure, the negative in his mind could be immured in its acid and yet bring some meaning forth.

For a hurt away and far as a man might walk on a friendly day to a neighbor's door, lay Nielsen's farm, a credit to God had He made it with His hands, but none to the man whose straw grew luckside up as though his plow left a spore of gold in every furrow. It was a trade so many seasons back, the reasons became changestricken at this stranger who sat absorbed.

Touched to the slow, Carl paused and tested the bowl of his pipe, needing a valid doubt to prod. Had he pawned his soul to find refuge in rocks and let a waterfall drain in a sinkhole? Through the smoke, he traced the wry and twisted road down whenless years that had plunged him here to rot-- and yet, of Nielson he had required no bond of hate, for this neither one had bought or sold.

Torrent to trickle, not friendship had reversed the law, but an unnatural love of worm for bird, of plant for weed, of a sterile man for Merle, a woman he could not wed and mark as cursed without destroying the very universe that had mothered her and which she owed rebirth. "You take the farm and Merle. I'll make my own world over." The words had been all too well observed.

He had not known how close hell was to heaven, not then and not while he lived in it alone, watching Merle's seed grow beyond his graveyard slope from buried dreams she never guessed were even there, living as she did within her children's-- not until another came to share his ghost and made him see that death was not like a coat one wore and had mended by a wife named Jen.

All the thought round, he gnawed on the bitter rind, hungerwhelmed for a taste of Nielsen's larder, that orchard whose fruitening he had bartered for peelings, and dry angered at the two mice who squeaked in their chairs, each resigned to his own corner of an empty cupboard, but mostly ashamed because he could not convert thorns into leaves, grapes from stones, thirst into wine.

He cleaned his parched pipe from its ashes and stood to wind a watch with broken springs, setting it for tomorrow when his shadow would be hitched. "I'm turning in, Jen. You come before you cool." His footsteps made the attic cling to the roof as she folded her needlework's piece of silk in a sewing box made like an infant's crib, then raised herself and blew its darkness on the room.

PROLOGUE TO OLD AGE

Not the mirror ages our reflection but the other faces that we see looking at us

Not the calendar changes our season but the other voices that we hear speaking to us

Not the memory troubles our silence but the other sleepers whom we meet dreaming of us

Not our living suffers the violence but the other beings whom we feel dying in us

ALL THIS, BEFORE

I raced, I rushed, I ran, to catch the empty hand of time, before the wind, the blowing wind-- this breathless gift.

I willed, I worked, I wept, to melt the frozen face of time, before the sun, the burning sun-- this frenzied bone.

I drank, I danced, I dared, to tempt the stony foot of time, before the rain, the driving rain-- this raptured flame.

I leaped, I laughed, I loved, to ease the burdened heart of time, before the dust, the settling dust-- this flesh, this blood.

THE EARTH AGE

On the caves of time again they draw their lines and circles. Earthmen. Born to prove that they can reason and compute a way to survive.

Now primitives in space, they hunt with atom spears the bright eye targets of the night, and cry their mammoth victories across the cosmic waste.

There they create anew high mysteries and truths, with satellites as shrines, and wire the electronic brain they use to command the light.

NEGATIVE ABSOLUTE

Any day now you can expect the age to come together in its own fixed image.

There will be no broken glass. The jigsaw cracks, painted black, will make a Roualt mirror.

Then we will truly see ourselves as the headlines say we are, creatures of disaster.

The No. 1 Song in the Hit Parade will be _I Hate You_, and _ugly_ the keyword in fashion ads.

Children will hug their witch dolls, blow atom bubbles in glee and play the most exciting games.

Punishment will be their only reward and all the villains heroes in their goblin tales.

Every man will be Satan of his own dungeon and no place like hell.

Machines pretending to be human will evoke what's left of our pity and laughter.

Manquakes, nightmares and fallout will lead to our final triumph. Only the worst will survive.

To prevent immunity strict controls will be enforced against pure food and drink.

Anyone caught sober or happy will be exiled to the upper air and banished from darkness.

Mentally accelerated ones will be confined to wards in quarantine hospitals.

Our most ardent wishes will be for illness, failure and misery. We will wear bad luck charms.

There will be more solutions than problems in the race for non-existence.

Traffic will be by tunnel and invariably fatal to minimize upkeep.

All-risk benefits will be socialized on a single pay-as-you-go tax plan.

To save time and expense cemeteries will provide one-room efficiencies.

Everything will be reduced to simple essentials. We will need very little.

Books will be easy to read backwards or upside down and even without looking.

Music will be produced by noise in various degrees and ingenious combinations.

A few zoos and museums will be allowed to preserve some relics of art and nature.

As a change from monotony, schools and churches will be open on special anniversaries.

We will be too busy dying the rest of the time to think or believe in anything else.

We can hardly wait for that day. It should be coming soon. The news is getting worse and worse.

TIME WILL TELL

Where fireflies are stars and the evening sky a sea, there you will find me, far from the leveling demands that leveled you and me.

When distant mountains bend like deep swells toward the shore, then you will see the ends for which I built my dikes against the lowly roar.

Though breath was all I owned to force my heart to climb, though words were all the stones I had to seal my mind, you will know why, in time.

THE TEST

He who would climb the heights of tone and scale the peaks beyond the listening ear must first walk over water and learn to stand on air, alone.

He who would swim the waves of light and dive past shores into a sunless glow must first merge with his shadow and melt through solid glass, like night.

Where eyes are fins and sound is leap, the rhythmic force performs its own ballet; when dreams are fired in clay, they burn a path through timeless sleep.

DIARY

Returning miles of space, can you find the precise hour, travel through that day, locate the very moment ago, there?

The mind goes back and forth, stops at what time stations, Monday morning, January 7th, winter, and ten years after then.

The trunk arrives, departs: hotel, depot, airport, pier, with sticker seals to mark the sights and tag the route, remember where?

With tickets, menus, souvenirs, a life's receipts in black and white to trace the course of wind and tide, the way back home from why and when.

And buses, taxis, subways, cars, for how-long, how-far conversations, so much, so many, who and what, with love, regards and yes, again, name, place, date, pen.

ITEM: BODY FOUND

It was a silent evening, I remember, through the river's mist it comes to me-- a star pierced the air; white with speed it leaped across the sky, slipped and fell; I heard its cry, it echoed in the sea, the swift wild cry of the scornful ember.

Alone I stood there, never had I need of fellow rebel more, I, a rebel.

Down the dark beach I ran, I stripped; time was an eyeless reach across immensity and I plunged deeply. They blamed it on the tide, the night; they had not seen infinity like a vast unchanging vista wide before me. If you go too far you'll drown, they said. Ah no, only those grasp the sublime who challenge the dream, before going down!

LANDSCAPE: WITH BREAD

Let us admit it is attractive and represents something we think we need: to live beautifully and find goodness in it. Everything points in that direction: from beelines to star routes, our dreams flower in the cells of night, our days are joined to the sun. Open or closed, our eyes possess the world: all that appears fulfills the desert gardens and the glitter of gold. Yet, whether we ever can reach the source where image and reality meet, or survive the force of fire turning to ecstasy-- the immediate need we can not deny is, simply, to exist... meanwhile, perfecting the wish for astral honey and blossoms of light.

O TO BE AN OSTRICH

The ostrich like Shakespeare believes there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.

All problems he has found by taking his head out of the ground and looking for them.

The solving obviously is a matter of foot going faster than thought to avoid being caught.

Such logic of conscience may well be envied-- for who can dispute what can not be questioned or proved?

THE BARREN FIG TREE

In these long years of war I have seen drought, and the truth is, Father, that I am sick to death of it. Can a man set his house in order just to die? You speak of hope and honor in our day and I say hurrah for those not born, for there won't be enough fig leaves saved to cover their nakedness, or corn to stop their cries. There is no water and no sign of rain, only briar and thorn, dunghill and dust, while the poor groan like beasts on a desolate moor.

You should have seen it, Father, the day they attacked, a day as dark as night, with clouds of fire both front and rear. They ran like horses, climbed walls, broke ranks, spied out of windows, their faces pained, black, while the earth bled till the moon shone red. Well, old men have their dreams, and young men their visions, but that day won't come back until the mountains fall and the hills cover us, if those are here still. I've seen green land turn to salt, and worms rot under clods, while men talk peace terms.

THE SOWER

Sixty seasons I have sowed, man and boy, and I tell you, Matthew, that a seed can not grow in the heart. No, one may as well throw it away or feed the chickens with it. For a fact, love is something that only the devil understands. I'd rather put my trust in stones and reap a quick crop, for ill or good. That way, you have no roots and get what you can in a few short suns. Or take cactus plants, at least a man sees the thorns and expects to be stuck, unless he's a fool--some choke on wool. As for good ground, Matthew, that's just luck; I've seen other fellows' orchards full, year after year, where no one's lifted a hand or a hoe except to pull the ripe fruits down. Some men are gifted.

INTERVIEW

_Poet, who are you?_

Janus, god of gates and doors and all beginnings

A weather cock facing in every direction

A festive singer who can wear goatskins and bleat

_Are you not made like other men?_

Twin of their image and echo fired in one clay

Shadow of young men's mornings and ghost of old men's nights

Parabola and paranymph of lovers only

_By what signs can a poet he known?_

For whom zero is an opening or a hole to be filled

Who can measure the earth with a piece of rope

And place the sun on a disc of paper under a cracked roof

_How does a poet live?_

As alchemist and archimage of twenty-six letters

In constant employment to nature

Free in every sense and word except for treason

_Of what value is such work?_

To dip the pen of time in dew and smoke and blood

To distinguish the creak of a cradle from a coffin

To demonstrate that life is the abscissa of eternity

_Does a poet have any faith?_

Whose only criterion is self-corroboration

Who can find God in a barrel of wine

And with the hands of a spider pilot a path to the stars

THIS SIDE THE FOG

1

Windless season without rain, you bring the sea up from the rocks across the cliffs, drifting clouds...

Gray weaves the night as day and everything moves like sleep.

Trees climb a hill, lights swing upon circles of darkness, walls bend a road where you trespass.

You are the mover, the essence of all things seen and unseen.

Windless you go and rainless, without form, color, or motion-- in you, all time is one.

Fog or shadow of God maybe, who walks and whispers so close to me?

2

Here on the shore's last link against the landscape dream I stand listening.

Intangible as air and yet like mesh, a web winds strands about my head.

I can not see or hear beyond the moment's rim that holds me to this pier.

Only a sixth sense of faith or fear, whichever's meant, sways in the balance.

3

Through the porthole of my mind memory ships oars and glides upon the sea outside.

Whose hand was on the tiller, what buoy marked the shoals or whether there was another

I do not know. A hazy twilight lay over the gray water, and I heard the distant horn of time

blow once or twice in warning, while seagulls squatted on the beach, windless without wings.

And I thought, will it be like that on the coast of my setting, mast and sun obscured by fact?

4

Beyond the eye's threshold a light swings in the door, blurred by the wind and blown

like smoke across the dunes for ghosts who wander through in search of missing clues.

Dimly they turn and return, gathering broken sherds they reefed against the world,

each sorting out his own to piece the shells into a whole and find the echo lode.

5

Blind as a crab in the sand, waiting for the tide to slack, I feel through my hands blank,

knowing nothing that they can not reach, yet groping to believe these signs of emptiness real.

Ground, sea, sky, all are merged in the surrounding surf, where everything's reversed,

where breath is radar to itself, antennaed to gray silence, and only I move, nothing else.

6

Along the coast a lone train tolls the night, slowing its race to a throttled brake

as a hand plows the mist to draw a moving bridge across the mainland's tip.

O magnetic eye that signals when human daylight fails and all's invisible,

who guides the current, the flow of water, air and pole, what dragon's head node?

CIVILIZED SPRING

His fists smash against the violet air: the doors of evening must not close, locking him out! Why, is his youth a beggar, crippled and blind, or reduced so low that he should drink spit from the cup of pity? Snarling, he wipes his feet on the mocking tongue that carpets the front of a swank hotel, before the doorman beams him with a eunuch eye. O.K., beat it! And he warms his hands with his breath, then slouches off, his feline hips rolling smoothly under bluejean pockets.

An expensive whore, desire taunts him down through the city's bright bazaar, like the cool white tone of a saxophone caught in the jewelrich stream of cars. Shop windows hive the honey on his lips, the perfume of live mannequins clings, while towers squat like pyramids behind a desert moon now green.

Smolders the coal in his chest, burns the hole in his shoe through the pavement, as he turns up alleys where rattling cans overflow their Nile. Thickly, he quickens his course, begins to run ... till breathless and unspent, he whirls and twists and crashes beyond the guarded walls, the harem tents of night ... a purple fugitive, who gasps.

REPLY TO CRITICS

Tell them who scorn my ways I lived without their praise and will until I die.

Let them be cynical, I have my own faith still to question and deny.

The proud and stiff of neck, the small who grub and peck, both look too low or high,

while I but seek to know the feel of things that grow and, by my living, why.

INSOMNIA IN THE CITY

Three a.m. along the river between the footfall and the snow, watching the stars leap out and quiver against the desolate scene below, the flare of match one's beacon fire, one's inner tower of warmth and cheer, to keep night safe from its desire and blow away the smoke of fear.

WHEN YESTERDAY COMES

I have not always been blind. My eyes opened to the sun like any child's, and I ran and played in my waking hours like schoolboys everywhere. Night was my sleep and the dark powers I knew from childhood on.

I do not speak of the mind's; the others came later, when natural fears gave way to man's and I saw darker things still, things beyond the wildest flight of a boy's fancies. Who will deny there are worse dragons?

But I did not see the sign of what was to come until I was blind as Samson. With one stroke, I lost all desire, hope, strength--for who needs his sight when cold age pokes the heart's fire with only a broken stick?

Now at my feet a dog whines even in slumber; he sniffs another's bone as he shifts in his own darkness, hungry for gain that requires no fight, and in his dreams grows angry at dream's inconsequent wish.

How can I reproach him, I who am shepherd and watchman, and as ignorant and dumb? Both of us strain at a gnat and swallow camels, the spite of those who may look at but not touch the other's ration.

Yet I make no mourn or cry I have no tears to defend. By now my shoes understand how to find the door, the latch and go without any fright of stumbling up crooked paths since all paths lead to the one.