Part 3

Yes, yes, the words of the wise, but I do not eat their bread or cover my lips to swear by the debts of the guilty, for I can not see the light that moves men to take pity and neither can I forget.

When harvest is past, the ties with summer are ended. Even the flies know better than to sit at a table where vinegar and gall blight the sense--their comfort, the chill presaging winter's opiate.

I ask, who can see God's eye? Then let him be sure to scour both inside his cup and out, for though the temple is lit like gold and the altar white, the heart of the hypocrite shall betray his hands and mouth.

I sleep the sleep of death, ai! An old man, I have no rod, no plague to command, no cloud to conceal my nakedness-- nothing but a toothless bite as I wander in silence, a harmless ghost walked by his dog.

FULL CIRCLE

The old tree weeps for its blossom, the blossom for its fruit, forgetting, when the frosts come, the seed will weep for its root.

CONVERT

An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth-- this you taught me, this was truth.

Now that I am wise, you turn my cheek-- and leave me eyes with which to weep.

NOT JUST ONCE

Sand and stars are not enough, there must be proof, such as stones capable of love to raise up children.

A test beyond reason, in order to move the incredible mountain and bring down the sun.

Something uncommon, a sign of God in man, not just once, but as many times as the times demand.

Still nothing satisfies, human or divine: the hand that stopped Abraham drove the nail through Christ's.

NOTES FOR THE FUTURE

Light destroyed in minds only the stars

Strength reduced to hands only the stones

no other language but signs no other knowledge but chance

Time returned to fear only the hurt

Space defined by food only the hunt

each one yoked from head to foot each one racked by claw and tooth

Ears inured to hope only the drum

Eyes condemned to ape only the dream

THE SLEEPWALKERS

With wide eyes open they walk into a morning where darkness shines, their feet descending a marble stairway in the mountain flanked by stone lions.

Holding hands, they cross a sudden bridge, and pause to view the clouds below them. Silence spills from frozen waterfalls to stay the river's course.

Farther on, they come to a garden whose golden stem lifts her and him in its calyx palm and bursts the lovesweet dram from their summer's bloom.

Now winged, they cruise between glass walls to gaze inside the zoo of human cages, those illusions of space and size multiplied in mirrors.

Not to be deceived, they glide down vertical waves of light, where love, having slipped time's gyve, can happily ever after live in the sea's bright grove.

Voices in the ear form a separate soundtrack, images blur on a shifting screen, while they uphold their safe dream world on secret tides of air.

MEXICAN PROFILE

Buzzards in the air and flies peasants everywhere earth size

Jungles by the sea and sands at each extremity bare hands

Volcanos over towns and hills traditioned in the browns the wills

Corn and bean for breath and bones remembered after death the stones

Dark feet on the roads and wheels heavy are the loads the heels

Burros led by whips and shouts in answer to the lips and clouts

Adobes out of earth and cathedrals attendant on the birth of eagles

DRY SANCTUARY

Even the desert has learned to protect itself, to keep its inch of rain in stored defense; against the mountain's strength and pressured air, it does not stand, but daily creeps, aware.

Upon its needled hands and thorny feet, it crouches, head bent, with lizard eyes alert to scorching light and sand, then seeks the deepened shadows against the coming of night.

Here kangaroo rat and road runner thrive; the rattler coils his tail in sleepful ease, while bayonet and dagger guard the hive left by Indian and Spaniard in retreat.

Shrewdly, the yucca's panicle of white is thrust above the ground, fully equipped to meet the world on friendly terms that hide poisoned stings, barbed walls, fists.

One could do worse than put out cactus leaves: when harsh winds blow the wrong way and sleep consumes itself, from inner wells they cool their fruit and, even after a century, bloom.

RETURN TRIP

The recognition comes as it always does-- slowly. One feels a sense of surprise to find not all has changed: the blue of miles above the snow-rimmed clouds of old volcanoes, the tireless browns still ploughed to greening fields, the red tiled roofs that accent time between.

The twenty years move slowly into place. With eye as brush and sun as palette, a full perspective emerges: as long ago today, as near to far. The wish reflects a view almost transparent. Past and distance blaze, caught in a foreground of light, then shift. The darkness grays, thickens. One tastes salt rain on the wind that blows through the mist.

THE CAVE

Drop by drop the earth is born, a billion years from dark to dawn

Drop by drop as rivers flow past sunless cliffs no wind has known

Where no grass blows and no birds sing there time drips slow and patient, clings

Drop by drop till waterfalls are turned to stone

Here new stars form and mountains rise clear of the storms that twist the sky

Drop by drop while caverns tall carve crystal bones

What dream lies walled within this night, what shape shall crawl up to the light

Drop by drop as silence grows inside its vault of carbon snow

When glaciers halt before no zones, when both the poles at last are one

Drop by drop the dawn shall come, a billion years from cave to sun

DARK ANGEL

Dark angel of the night, you come on folded wings secret and silent, bringing sleep. To you belong the rosemary and poppy, the final dream from which the road turned in its lost beginning.

You have seen the frightened eyes of the city glow upon bridges, along streets, behind roofed windows, and you know how small a kilowatt burns in each single, separate room, and how each one reaches at last a diminishing point beyond which none can see but you. Night is your hour and with it comes

the inevitable surrender, peaceful or with clash of arms, with unfulfilled hopes, terrors, the fingers still clutching at the vanishing day, the throat strangled by the unuttered word it says, the ear straining for the unheard response, the thought immense in the dark. Only you, dark angel, born

of our love and pity, can see night's passing feet around the earth, on rotating centuries across the stars, journeying over the ruins of forgotten time since we first left that home, where the dream began, where the road turned, and the sun swung in its orbit, bringing you, dark angel, down.

FUGITIVE

I need to live where it is cold enough to seek the sun

More like that tree well seasoned to the rough of snow and ice

That keeps its fire inside of root and bark till heat is done

O fugitive from winter and the dark see the moon rise

THE TRAP

Of memory and hope I made my rope and swung

not knowing its length or how much strength there hung.

Backward and forward past into future I climbed

higher and higher despair and desire combined.

Farther and farther no present to bother my flight

above now and here beyond loss and fear upright.

Ah, this was the way to trap time and stay its dread

yes, twisted inside then knotted and tied instead!

For being was this both height and abyss outflung

the head free of reason the heart without season full sprung.

Not creeping by squirm an inch measured worm begrimed

with darkening age to a burnt out rage consigned.

But swept on an ocean of tides set in motion by light

in a brilliance of air with clear eyes aware of sight.

Until the strands between my hands were red

and I came to a stop to let time drop down dead.

THE RUIN OF THAT HOUSE

I speak of the ruin of that house as the worst, for in it lived two blind creatures, blind husband and blind wife, each trying to lead the other out, and finding a ditch by the door.

If there were trees, they heard them crash, when the ground split under their hands and knees. But it was not of the storm or quake they thought, or of themselves-- but of the fruit, and how to avoid both barb and thorn, each terrified in his heart at his own helplessness to save the best.

Except in their speech where they bitterly laid the blame on one another for the loss and waste, since neither had fulfilled the need for a house that was deep and broad, founded on rock; secure and strong against fire and flood, rust and moth; a house uncorrupt by thief or sword, yet so full of treasure that it gleamed, with light enough to see, mote and beam, the hypocrites of their common doom.

I speak in pity of the ruin.

THEIR FIRST HUNT

I am afraid of that woman. I have seen the scorpion tip of her soft red mood and felt the feathered grip beneath the jess, the hood.

I am afraid of that man, I have smelled the oestrous rut that enjoys the sting and heard the gun click shut at the lift of the wing.

I am afraid, life, of your poison and passion. I am afraid, death, of your sureness and speed.

WOLF!

As children we played "Wolf" and howled its hot pursuit along the canyons of our street, wailing the bushy tail that followed at our feet, sidewalk to cellar, lamp-post to door, feeling the murderous paws and ravenous breath tingling the skin of our necks, setting hair on end, and circling each eye. Wolf, are you ready? Steady on the first floor, he's coming up the stairs... second floor, third floor, he's stopping for some air... top floor, roof, and now beware! Rough coat, claws and jaws and tooth will catch _you_ and _you_ and _you_ and _YOU!_ Oh run-run-run from the WOLF!

That was spring... the taste of first free days outdoors.

Wasting no time, in haste and thirst we came to summer, swinging... making our own kind of hay and playing a new kind of game, with dizzy drinks, jazzy music, hazy-crazy cigarettes and kisses, and aware of other dangers, the wolfish ways of friends turned strangers...

love, as fierce, as rapacious, in spite of all the shoutings and the warnings of approach, with no one ready when the roof blew in. How we ran!

By autumn, to be sure, we knew the tricks and character of sticks...

Nursing bruised heads and burnt fingers, we shook the straw from our pockets and settled down... to play it safe this time we thought, with a solid house, genuine antique furniture furniture and homogenized children, finding a good night's rest harvest enough for such sound dreams as conscience feeds on... not hearing the creaks beyond our snores, the furtive glide outside our doors, until one rainy day, what a storm!

Then winter came... and we knew then, there was no escape.

Not again, not even with bricks reinforced by steel over a concrete shelter, for our pressure is high, our metabolism low, and we can no longer run... We have set traps, posted prizes, sent out scouting parties, and armed ourselves... Waking at night and trembling, we cry, "Peter Peter, please come, we need you!" knowing only his toy gun can save us. How the wind comes through...

FINAL PERFORMANCE

A spinner in the green years, I trudge the snowdeep woods to find the Rima trees where I was warm in silk through those first winters. Then the unwinding thread, from which I swung by two spare arms and legs, hung in the air like a gay trapeze, each vine humming to the brace and pull and reel of child's spider ways, an upside down dancer with her feet in the clouds and the heart in her mouth a feast.

A beginner in the green years, my thick wool thumbs push back the broken twig, the empty nest, the closed gray flaps to summer's ringling tent. Embarrassed, I lift a rose still red and moist and soft. Again I twist its thin stem toward the light and dare the sky to seize my heels and trick time's crafty eyes till I repair the web and climb to one last height before I leap ---- ---- ---- to catch the hands of night.

HOUSE OF THE POET

For the ultimate hoard I keep my board bare, no gold or lace allowed to cover or adorn that spare purpose.

Stripped of frivolity, it serves as bench and table, my words a daily rite quenching thirst and hunger.

Whether I gain more by my frugality than I here disown, or lose as debtor, only you, Lord, know.

But were I compelled to acquit this ghost, not as a prisoner in the heart's dark cell, but as host at the altar

of the mind's high temple, I would count my fast a feast in heaven, and with one candle cast the light of seven.

THE GHOST OF ANNE FRANK

The cocks have been crowing for two thousand years, so I understand that part of it and even expected, was prepared for what happened. This I swear.

As for tears, yours are mine, since I am the cause of them, and if I could, would take the blame upon myself. I know, you think in terms of innocence and guilt,

but that decision was long ago made clear in an episode of apples, bought in a hoax for a song. I recognize it still, one we will always whistle.

And feel I ought to ask forgiveness for you. A turn of cheek, if you like. Why not? Back of every lie and denial is the thing we all conceal:

the inner hurt that makes our fingers seek revenge, to brand the other fellow with our own scar, as though, by doing so, ours is eased. Let's admit it does

and, in comparison, sets a better example, hurts less than losing an eye. How many deaths do we need to prove it? And to begin to learn to live.

Love, you say, and I believe you, yet there is self-love, too, the fear of having to lose not only a garden in the sun but a chance to bloom anywhere once,

which is more natural, and why I say all will fail unless each individual succeeds, for treason always starts inside a single heart.

This is the fatal trap that none of us can step over or hope to escape, because no one is safe: first comes Abel, and then Cain.

So please understand me. What you now do here among yourselves to free and heal yourselves from grief and anger may yet preserve and defend the world.

Shalom. I pray for this release. May you be blessed and walk in peace.

THE MISTAKE

In April, when she tried to take him there, a farm where winter had not heard of spring, where snow lay banked on rutted roads and winds went shimmying up and down slick roofs and trees, he took one look around and said, "God, let's get out of here!" not seeing anything.

Luckily, night blanketed the backwoods and they missed the bus, so they went inside the house and she thought of cows in their stalls and bread in the oven, of the simple life collected here within its own crude warmth, while he stood smirking, repeating, "You would."

The next year it was Washington. They went by train and all the way she kept checking tickets, bag, baggage, feeling she had left something behind, and though he joined "the tour," she realized with a start that it was he missing and lost to everything new.

Everywhere was "like the postcards" and nowhere "was worth the time and trouble it took to get back from." In fact, if not for the car she bought for later trips, they might never have seen the stars, how they moved together. "Not all," he said, "not all," and they fell apart.

It was like that all summer, and even a continent full of moons did not change the difference between mountains and prairies, and she wondered how the others managed, the men and women living there. "Heavens!" he said, "I've tried! Let's call it a mistake!"

"Let's," she answered, knowing she would stumble over the same stones, up to the same door, till she came to the last and final one: single admission, standing room only-- which was natural, when it came to dying, but no way to live, unless you had to.

REFLECTED IN BRASS

Mortar and pestle made of brass, these and two solid candlesticks were heavy fortune, her penance for being peasant born and mixed by impure stars to common metal in a foreign land. But the level to which she raised her hands in prayer each Sabbath eve was holy: lips, eyes, heart purified by the tares that softly burned, the week eclipsed of wrongs she placed upon her head in blameless white, reflecting there the migrant image of a light that moved a wilderness of tents, made rivers part and mountains cry the voice of God. All this she meant by keeping Sabbath in her home and polishing the brass like gold.

MODERN PRIMITIVE

When morning breaks at the edge of night and the stone mind drops to its plain of light

it does not help to think of Newton. What we really need is a new invention

a mental jet faster than the speed of yawn and stretch in the life we lead

or a time lift on spatial pulleys operated by the lids of our eyes.

PERSONAL HISTORY

This calendar is one, unduplicate and unrepetitive, being my own. What system it may have I leave testate in the genes of time as my memento of the events, holidays, and seasons that made the living so importantly mine: a personal history of nones, kalends, and ides, without chronology.

God knows I fought my own battles, made peace with defeats and victories, wept and cheered. A soldier without rank, I took my ease where and when I could find it, having feared and met the worst, and found the enemy no braver than myself, as much in need of saints and miracles, each pharisee to his own convictions, though we bleed.

What headlines emphasized my days and nights are filed within the archive of my skull, a private record of scandals and crimes no press would care to publish, were it called to print even a single edition, for the weather alone would defy all guess, being unpredictable, rain or sun, and variable as the heart's unrest.

Such rulings, documents, customs, arts my life decreed, my life was witness to: I felt, I thought, I celebrated, start to finish, the world that entered through these walls of flesh; and there its evidence shall wait, in secret tissues of the bone, until some future historian's pen can disclose the infiniteness of One.

I THINK I AM

Being a supposition, it is based on some ground. As such, the connection is important, if not profound, because, without it, we would no-doubt flit as in a vacuum, like birds, not needing the support of words, rising, in-fact, above them.

I protest the conclusion, despite the evidence that I am a valid one, by necessity, if not consequence, for while I argue and pursue What I think is true, in self-defense, God does not suppose-- He knows-- and that makes the difference.

INSTINCT AND REASON

They would have us believe that to defy authority is to punish nature. I would want to be sure

what they have in mind and heart and hand, what signs of body politics they mean, before I could agree.

Each sense protests the fact: a bird obedient to cat, the innocence of thorns, a night without awe...

And yet I would accept a world less than perfect, for the sake of eggs and kittens, berries, stars, saints, children.

THE SUMMING UP

On the library of my heart they have fed, the worms of my living, and now, surfeited, they are dead, leaving their husks on the pages still unread, dry, harmless little things that crumble and shred.

Ambition took the harder crust we dread, the thick skin on the cover, and gnawed with slow, relentless tread the marquee lights for which it craved and glittered, weaving letter by letter a shroud embittered.

Love chose the softer, tender part, the bread of my daily giving, and made each ritual ahead a carnage of communion as I bled, praying for the blessing I offered, instead.

Knowledge went directly to the core, the thread that bound my life together, and bored its way up through my head, loosening by stages the gold and the red, until every chapter I had written, fled.

Now that I have finished with maggots and shed their dust with some misgiving, I am glad for the words not said, for being spared the hungers other men have bred, in my old age needing but a tranquil bed.

THERE WILL BE TIME FOR MOSS

Inventories, like spring cleaning, annoy me, and when it rains, I sleep.

Forgotten things prove me absent-minded, although I still keep goods in storage at times.

Once I did pushups and kept an earnest face, collected books, maps, stamps, and played the sweepstakes.

Now I rehearse dreams the better to remember them and navigate by leaves between green and golden.

How I am or where, no one knows for sure except my mother; she gets letters.

PERSPECTIVE

They go about with curious wonder in their eyes, like children half surprised by what they doubt.

The time moves out... they are more intimately wise of what they once surmised; they are devout.

THE QUESTION IS PROOF

If I ask why you need not reply the question is proof

Only my ear can help me to hear the rain on the roof

What thoughts I own are shaped by my bone and etched on my brain

Nothing more real than the moods I feel and what they explain

Warm hands or cold the world that I hold is all I can show

The more or less I measure by guess is all that I know

All that I see with my eyes is me and no other truth

Here with my feet time walks on the street in age as in youth

Unless you lie in asking why you have the reply

UNDER A THATCHED ROOF

With leaner hands I clutch December's sky who held the barefist branch through wind and ice in younger days. The breath of frost is gone, my eyes no longer sting. Warmed by the sun, my heart at last has thawed and finds a peace it never knew before when storms raged free.

Soft the fingering fronds would teach me how to seed my winter in a tropic ground and save my years from being cut in two-- they sway before the wind with ease, they bow-- and yet I can not loose my hold, I blink, I fear to lie in a hammock and swing.

CONDITIONAL REFLEX

If you had no choice and there was nothing else to do the caged intelligence could

If you had no voice and only silence coming through the caved subviolence would.

THE DARK CENTAUR

Between the goat and the scorpion, between the horn and the sting, the dark centaur stands.

He eyes the centuries that hold him there to a slow march, half-man, half-beast, his arrow still in hand.

The bow is gone, long since fallen among the angels, when love and honor warred, while Jacob wept.

Hunter and hunted, marksman and mark, he travels on past island suns where none has stepped.

You can see him on a clear night in the southern sky, when the earth swings and the ninth sign appears.

And if you listen, you may also hear a far-off wind carry his cry down the light-years:

"O blessed and damned, in heaven and hell, in passion and intellect, all you who are twinned even as I!

"Who controls his fate? Say! Who can escape being pierced or grazed by its accident or chance?" A shooting star replies.