EARLY ENCOUNTERS

POETRY COLLECTIONS:

A Dream of Tantalus (1960)

Mozart in Thetford (1963)

Variations (1968)

A Song for Lazarus (1970)

Letters and Voices from the Steppes (1977)

Scenes from an Old Album (1977)

ECCE OEDIPUS

He pulled himself across the street
and limped to safety near those bricks
that held a shadow from the sun;
and twice or more he stopped to scratch his head
and peer behind and myopically ahead.

He stumbled on until a sheet
blew against his swollen feet;
tensively, he must have felt it give away
and tumble to the gutter, nothing seen
beyond a crack and grit.

I watched him thread his demons,
adding one at every step, his face
contorted to a scarred grimace,
until at last he sank against a door
boarded up against the poor.

He piled himself in sooty rags,
twitched just once among the clutter,
and fell asleep with just a mutter,
as if this fall were only one of many
suffered in a gangrenescent battle.

There seemed in him no light of angel,
no strength at all, no strength of ape,
no power to destroy, no flagrant hate,
no dark and bitter fury at the world —
just dirty rags upon a dirty stoop.

I would have plucked his demons
as he had plucked his eyes,
but felt ashamed and turned to go my way,
avoiding, with a sudden lurch, his shadow
by calling to a friend among the crowd.

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VARIATIONS

DREAMS THAT NEVER LET GO

I’m tired of dreams that never let go,
of winds that continue to blow
across these steps and back to the sea;
they hold with such tenacity
the shadows where conifers grow
that, when I wake, I can only show
with what a rush the past will flow
into the dark. Will you ever see
I’m tired of dreams?

I’m tired of what I know or ought to know
of the complexity these words show.
I’d like to rest beneath a tree,
forgetful of books, of me,
of this terrifying vertigo:
I’m tired of dreams.

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LETTERS AND VOICES FROM THE STEPPES
(published by Bardic Books in 1977)

These poems were written during 1969 and 1970 as a way of dealing mythically with the horrors that, for me, began in July 1963 with a cover photograph on Life magazine: the son of Medgar Evers looks up at his mother during his father's funeral, baffled and questioning.  In order to generate some closure, this volume was published in 1977.

THE POURING OF BRONZE
        
The children have come, the cats and dog and I,
and Maiesta, wiping compost from her hands—moving
as through the ancient patterns of an awkward dance
to another casting of bronze.
                                                And he, laughing
through that grimace of contorted scars, throws salt
into the crucible of fire and almost shouts the fire
is hot enough, the wax all lost.
                                                   I find
a crouching place in the corner and conjure words
for the empty form his damaged eye has seen.

Beyond the glass the sun has slipped away
behind gray pines and a stone mill; it fades
and his laughter fades as fire and crucible of light
prepare to give shape to midnight-fingered wax.

We, not knowing what form that wax had been given,
what hollow has been left in the mold, are waiting to see
what life the fire will take, what birth, what pain
will be cut from the rigid womb.
                                                    The cats are restless,
exploring random piles of iron, and the dog
pushes his nose at my thigh.

                                                 Maiesta holds the tongs,
and children wait, as they seldom do, in silence: 
it is time for the pouring of bronze. His face, streaked
with its skin of fire, leers like some obscene priest
over his unearthly chalice, and his hands, encased
like flappers in their gloves, lift the raging crucible
from blue flame. He holds it a moment glowing
as a bell of fire.
                           Even my silent words
are at last dispelled and the curious cats are still.

Small flames dance from the volcanic heart,
and fire, like a white light, is tipped to the mold,
sparks hiss upward and cool in air,
bronze settles with the clarity of crimson glass
to stillness.
             
                     Slowly my words return from their deep
solitude beyond the protected woods of this foundry
to the dark smell of hot metal.
                                                  The cats
have disappeared, the dog scratches at the door,
the children have returned to their ordinary mysteries,
and I rise awkwardly to stretch the exhausted muscles
of back and legs.

                              As metal reaches toward hardness
with more sureness than ever spirit gave form to body,
we will drink her coffee and speak of other things
though our minds will hover over the mold, will sear
an imaginary finger with a touch of the sprue,
will experience again the founding of a shape we have not
yet seen.

                 What absurdity, I think, as he wipes the sweat
from his face, what rite have we lived here again,
what high ceremony of the damned has almost saved
these last fragments of our nerves?

                                                           In May, when trumpets
were cleansed for worship, on a raised hearth, in another
time, outside the walls of another city,
when heat from foundries was not separate from growth
of gardens, families and priests gathered together
in the ritual of spring: violence of time and violence
of the unredeemed flesh resolved in the cadence of a dance.

PLAYTHING OF THE PRIESTS

This being a god has become a tiresome joke.
The annual ritual was repeated again last week,
and for several days while priests and old women
shook dust from curtains and scrubbed the floors
I hid in the cellar, trying to read by a sputtering candle,
eating surreptitious cheese and stale bread
brought hastily by Maiesta beneath her apron.
When the ceremonies were over and that lot had cleared out,
I came up to find they had left soot on the steps
and another basket of stinking fish in the pantry.

There've been a number of houses
outside the walls of different cities,
great estates, a house of columns or polished squares of stone,
plenty of room for gardens, and a forge,
with a great huge stone hollow roaring with fire,
when I could bother to keep it lit.
But outside the walls of the city.

Except at the beginning. You may remember the place,
a high brave town, facing the sea.
At night you could hear angry waves quarreling with stones
at the foot of the cliff, and watchers at the seawall
could look down and see the moon in a thousand pieces.
It was as if the battlements had grown
as a natural outcropping of the land.

I had returned with them from an eastern expedition;
they needed metal for guns and fire to displace the fog.
They were young and I thought it a good place to settle.
There was no field outside the walls for a house;
they found me quarters down a narrow alley, within the gates;
all evening I heard soldiers on duty cursing their luck
or plotting interminable revenges upon the officer in charge.
At first the rituals were simple. They needed my skills
and repaid the lessons, quickly, without fuss,
beyond a casual bow and a few odd words for a countersign.

The city prospered in silk and enmity,
the wars came, as they always do, overland, through the desert,
and through the plunging waves at the bottom of the cliff.
The furnace fires became hotter as emissaries from the army
fed them with the furnishables of the town.

The ending is the usual one: the city consumed itself in fire
as the enemy perished on the boulders of sea and sand.

The next post I accepted contained a clause
that stipulated a house beyond the walls. Another time
I insisted only bare-foot priests and pretty virgins
enter at the driveway gates.
And so the little things were built into a habit,
with song and dancing and the ceremonial feast
that kept us in supplies from season to season.

And now that I'm old and slightly lame,
my face begrimed from years of fire,
I find it unpropitious to appear
before the priests or lovely girls.

Pardon the doggerel, but the vaudeville scene becomes
a cage to house the yapping dogs of an emperor.

Do you remember that spring festival
when you arrived out of breath, exhausted by the extension
of your own strength, when you sat in the corner
and watched the choreography of creation
and listened to the blowing of trumpets?
Afterwards we were silent over coffee,
and I heard you typing in your room all night.
For there were good times when the hand
would move with absolute assurance over a head of bronze
or the eye would blink in astonishment
when we stood back to see what had come from the mold.
Even the ritual mumbling had its place, though made of words,
and the quiet times were richer by memory of the dance.

And then the dance became a big production,
and then a chore.

I've chanted myself hoarse.

                                              But in the night,
when the city is almost quiet and a wind blows in from the sea,
and here, within the shadow of the wall, I see
the last flickering from the furnace
and hear the falling hiss of embers,
then sometimes I begin to feel again the rising land,
the outcroppings of stone in the mountains of my youth,
the great fire in the pit of the earth.

Perhaps it is time to move on, with another name,
another dream of building and pleasure,
along another path among men on islands
where the rhythm of the sun and dance are not forgotten.

I sometimes dream of that, alone or with my son,
a casual tinker on the vagrant trail,
accepting the small commissions of the great,
small castings of bronze or a new barn for the cows,
removed from all this ceremonial exhaustion of time.

Except as I am made, I shall not move,
except as you repeat the words and rhythms of these lines,
I shall remain a piece of restless statuary
for all those empty mouthings of the town.

FOREVER BECOMING A TREE
              
I know that I must touch you with these words
across the curved boundaries of space,
only I do not know what it is I would say.
Sounds in the air or scratchings across a clay tablet,
the letters or syllables of speech
have spilled across the scarred surface of our lives
like the scattering drops from a burst bubble.

I know that somewhere, there, through time
and across a space we can no longer measure
either in miles or the silences between friends,
you are wandering quietly among the geraniums,
pushing at the thyme, waiting, always waiting.

Your ears are listening for music to repeat again,
there, as the cello echoes in twisted leaves of a willow
or a flute trembles high among the firs.

I shall be forever sitting here
as I am forever becoming a tree,
roots settling into earth,
arms reaching across these stones.
And memory will be the memory of rain and summer.
And hope will be for red leaves on dogwoods
as the year twists again into shadows.

In the days when we were young,
when Perseus received the rule of power,
there across the stretching sand
we saw the purple cliffs,
we listened to a voice that said
'You must make the mountains disappear.'

I know what voices rise with the wind
across your rocky cliffs and through bristlecones
like the persistent memory of a dream
that will not step out of the dark into light.
They whisper at the ear from behind that row of books,
out of dusty curtains that cannot close the rising sun,
out of the very earth that breaks warm through your fingers,
out of these words that form a different pattern for every ear.

What can I say
except that I have seen a star fall through time,
that I have seen an early crocus
cast its yellow across the snow,
that I have heard a child laugh and cry,
that I have seen a man's face freeze into emptiness.

And shall I be forever becoming a tree?
I shall be forever dying,
I shall be forever watching sunfall through autumn leaves,
I shall be forever beside this desert
dreaming of the sea and sails full of wind;
I shall ride with the tides as the sun dies
and wind blows cold across these rocks.

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