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Title: It Takes Practice Not To Die

Author: Elizabeth Bartlett

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[Illustration: Front cover]





IT TAKES PRACTICE NOT TO DIE

Elizabeth Bartlett


_It Takes Practice Not to Die_ was originally published in 1964 by Van
Riper and Thompson in Santa Barbara, California.  The book is now
out-of-print and the publisher no longer exists.  The author's literary
executor, Steven James Bartlett, has decided to make the book available
as an open access publication, freely available to readers through
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IT TAKES PRACTICE NOT TO DIE




 IT
 TAKES
 PRACTICE
 NOT TO
 DIE

 BY

 ELIZABETH
 BARTLETT



 VAN RIPER & THOMPSON, INC.
 SANTA BARBARA 1964




ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some of these poems appeared in the following anthologies: _The
American Scene, The Golden Year, New Poems By American Poets II, New
Voices 2_.

Thanks are also due to the _Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea Review,
Commentary, The Critic, Dalhousie Review, ETC., Fiddlehead, Harper's,
Harper's Bazaar, Literary Review, New Mexico Quarterly, New York Times,
Odyssey, Poetry Dial, Queen's Quarterly, Quixote, San Francisco Review,
Saturday Review, Tamarack Review, Yale Literary Magazine_.



Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 64-22731

Copyright 1964 by Elizabeth Bartlett

First Edition

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
parts thereof in any form, except for review purposes.

Printed in the United States of America




 TO
 PAUL AND STEVEN




 OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

 _Poems of Yes and No
 Behold This Dreamer
 Poetry Concerto_




CONTENTS

HOMO ELASTICUS

BALANCE

SIMPLE WITH COMPASS

ACHILLES HAD HIS HEEL

ASCETIC

I WOULD REMEMBER

AFTER THE STORM

THE CAGE

MENTAL HOEING

HUNGER

VOLUNTARY EXILE

THE FOURTH CATEGORY

THE CHANGING WIND

JINXED

ALONG THAT ROAD

THE REFUGEES

SHIP OF EARTH

AMONG THE PASSENGERS

(1 x 1)^n

AIR BRIDGE

AS YOU MAKE IT

CITY GAME: MARBLES

FREE-FALL

_E_xistence=_m_ultiple _c_onditions^2

THE UNDERSTANDING

WOOLEN DIGNITY

THE COAT

ON A ROCK OF ATLANTIS

EVEN IF WE DID

SELF-EVIDENT

THE SACRAMENT

PROLOGUE TO OLD AGE

ALL THIS, BEFORE

THE EARTH AGE

NEGATIVE ABSOLUTE

TIME WILL TELL

THE TEST

DIARY

ITEM: BODY FOUND

LANDSCAPE: WITH BREAD

O TO BE AN OSTRICH

THE BARREN FIG TREE

THE SOWER

INTERVIEW

THIS SIDE THE FOG

CIVILIZED SPRING

REPLY TO CRITICS

INSOMNIA IN THE CITY

WHEN YESTERDAY COMES

FULL CIRCLE

CONVERT

NOT JUST ONCE

NOTES FOR THE FUTURE

THE SLEEPWALKERS

MEXICAN PROFILE

DRY SANCTUARY

RETURN TRIP

THE CAVE

DARK ANGEL

FUGITIVE

THE TRAP

THE RUIN OF THAT HOUSE

THEIR FIRST HUNT

WOLF!

FINAL PERFORMANCE

HOUSE OF THE POET

THE GHOST OF ANNE FRANK

THE MISTAKE

REFLECTED IN BRASS

MODERN PRIMITIVE

PERSONAL HISTORY

I THINK I AM

INSTINCT AND REASON

THE SUMMING UP

THERE WILL BE TIME FOR MOSS

PERSPECTIVE

THE QUESTION IS PROOF

UNDER A THATCHED ROOF

CONDITIONAL REFLEX

THE DARK CENTAUR

WORLD OF TOMORROW




[Illustration: Abstract design]


 HOMO ELASTICUS

 I tell you it is inside,
 a substance no one has yet identified
 or described
 as something natural to flesh,
 a glutinous secretion in the cells
 that can harden and melt.

 Milky, it clings to the gums
 with a stickiness that fastens on the tongue
 to be dumb,
 or else stretches and winds a band
 around the heart so tight, it has to snap
 or loosen, springing back.
 Fluid, it waxes the bones

 to ease their impact and recoil as they bounce
 over stones,
 except when the latex thickens,
 becomes too crude, more fat than resin,
 and freezes in the sun.




 BALANCE

 My head has no affinity with my feet.
 When I stand on one heel and lean
 on my axis spine, I reel to the floor;
 I can not turn on a fixed orbit.
 My shadow divides me by day and escapes
 me at night, a trait apparently made
 to confuse me, since I follow a course
 without regularity or recurrence, my cosmos
 inclined to alternation at moments
 evident to no one, not even myself.

 Who is reasonable?  A tightrope walker,
 perhaps, builders of bridges, sailors,
 mountain climbers--those whose direction
 is indicated by their opposition
 and held in a careful equilibrium
 like a golden pendulum, its means,
 each according to some counter force.
 Lacking such moderation, I look for
 wisdom in safety, and safety
 in wisdom--and dangle between.

 A two-legged creature, whose symmetry
 goes paired from ear to foot, I find
 duality a natural condition; a Chang
 and Eng existence united in fact
 but separate in fulfillment.  Parted,
 we die, and together compromise
 our right and left, depending which has
 the stronger influence.  Made as I am,
 the wonder is not that I sway or spin,
 but manage to stay inside my skin.




 SIMPLE WITH COMPASS

 Consider the circle.
 It is a miracle
 of completion,
 end and beginning one.

 Reduced to a point or
 expanded to a sphere,
 its ratio
 is unchanged by ego.

 Compare it to the line,
 that matter of fact sign
 of direction
 started but never done.

 Whichever way it moves,
 how far or long, it proves
 distance can go
 only so high or low.

 I think we should rejoice
 there is no other choice
 than straight or round--
 makes life easy, I've found.




 ACHILLES HAD HIS HEEL

 And still the arrows fly
 in all directions.
 No one is safe.  The wind
 has no armor.

 Strength, beauty, valor,
 whatever we find
 and name perfection
 is target to the eye.

 Who is immune?
 Either we aim--and miss,
 or ourselves become
 the victims hit.

 Even a hermit,
 locked inside his room,
 remembers St.  Francis
 sang often out of tune.

 We learn to die
 from a thousand wounds,
 each scarred inside
 till the final failure.

 Meanwhile we endure
 and suffer with some pride
 that we can be so human--
 enough, if we must, to cry.

 The point is inevitable.
 Whether heel or head,
 who is invulnerable
 is already dead.




 ASCETIC

 Be whatever you like,
 close your eyes:
 on the desert a burnished stone,
 in the murky sea a jewel.

 Go wherever you wish,
 bind your feet:
 through the night where a wing has flown,
 towards dawn where a leaf drops cool.

 Live however you would,
 stay your blood:
 with the sky over earth as friend,
 at peace with the mind and breath.

 Speak whenever you will,
 seal your lips:
 of this life proclaim time an end,
 in the next cry Nazareth.




 I WOULD REMEMBER

 I have walked from river's end to end,
 a slow companion to the light seagulls
 that circle overhead

 and I have stood still above the bend
 that separates the foot from distant hulls,
 to fill my eyes with flying sails' wings spread.

 I have watched them many times repair
 the far shore's curve around the sun
 and hold it there ensnared

 until provoked they drop midair,
 instinct with seaward gravitation
 and angry claws declared--

 their mutiny a gold crazed rout
 that tears the cargo from its hold
 and scatters it about.

 I am not old
 and yet, when night brings me to town,
 I forget their wings and drown.




 AFTER THE STORM

 That morning, after the storm,
 everyone gathered about the tree
 and marveled at its fall:
 the body leaning gently on one arm,
 its mighty head now cushioned by deep
 branches, seemingly asleep.

 "You wouldn't think a storm," one said,
 then broke off, staring at the fruit
 that never would be eaten red
 and sweetened by the sun, or set
 in jars and slowly left to cool,
 the ripening years ahead gone, too.

 "It was the wind."  "The rain."  Each spoke
 a part of truth out of his own mouth
 with words that could not make it whole
 because the naked roots showed
 how much there was to doubt,
 the secret in the darkness crying loud.

 Even a tree, she thought, biting her tongue
 and bringing her childish thoughts down,
 remembering the climbs, the stout swing hung
 on rafters soaring to the sun,
 a tree built like a tower
 so you could visit God and talk for hours.

 The men sawed logs and timber all that day
 until there was nothing left, not
 even a shadow where you could wait
 and hide to see if it would wake,
 then they buried the hole and forgot
 what else they might have covered with the sod.

 Dead trees tell no tales, she thought,
 nor empty nests, nor little girls who see
 how helpless all things are when caught
 by storm, no matter how big or
 strong or secure, and she walked quietly
 into the house to help with the next meal.




 THE CAGE

 Thoughts like an empty cage
 receive the morning
 through the windowpane
 and quietly swing.

 No flutter brings my eye
 to a meaninged core
 for the waking light,
 the door transparent.

 Held blind by the mirror
 and deaf by the bell,
 I must search my mind
 by taste, smell, and touch.

 Bars silhouette a wall
 to enclose the noon
 where images halt
 and the night soon comes.

 O bird that set me free
 to try my own wings,
 how this false spring tree
 clings that I perch on!




 MENTAL HOEING

 Breaking the soil of her mind
 was an old habit as she plied
 the hoe back and forth over the year
 to see its design, the cut and stripped
 images of reason stacked in rows
 of answered arguments.  She swore
 at the stones, the matted grass
 and stubborn clay that held her back
 as though to a winter still unprepared
 for spring.  Was she never to be spared
 from questions rooted in the past?
 She attacked the clods with wrath
 until there were holes in the ground,
 then her thoughts crumpled down,
 taking her strength with them.
 Aching from remembered resentment,
 she turned to the struggle within herself,
 but moved lightly now and penitent,
 trying to ease the rebellious soil
 and soften it, to make it pliable
 to the new seeds, the new demands
 of the changing season, knowing plants
 thrive better in kindness than bitterness.
 And suddenly the year stood plain, at rest.




 HUNGER

 Hunger, I have known your pangs,
 the gnawing urge, the ceaseless demand
 from beginning to end;
 inevitable as air and light,
 as rain and seed and soil, as tides
 and seasons; the perpetual cause
 of all that moves and is moved; the force
 that flows through stars and men.

 We are born hungry.  Begins
 the appetite with warmth and tit,
 with wombskin quivering yet
 from cry replying cry, then another sense
 commands another hunger fed
 to feed the next and the next, each heir
 and progenitor of this past,
 that future, and the cycle reset.

 Hungry pilgrims, we can not rest.
 Distance is but another nearness,
 as soon met, then shorelines bend
 and we must home again
 to other journeys, our Eden
 faith a continual repetition
 of arks and floods from which none
 returns invulnerable, the apple bitten.

 Creed, color, race, we have all sworn
 allegiance, fought bitter wars,
 tasted glory and gall
 for insatiable gods deified
 by our own hungers; with rites and sacrifice
 made bread and wine from flesh and blood
 that we might have eternal food
 here and hereafter, immortal.

 We are fed by desire
 and consumed like the fire
 on our tongues, in our hearts;
 a flame forever unappeased
 by our words, symbols, deeds
 or monuments; the phoenix, man himself,
 recreated from his own ashes
 out of hungering dreams and parched.

 We live with hunger always,
 that fearfilling, painpinching cave
 wherein we hide like hunted stags,
 lips dry, but tasting heroically
 of miracles...  Who has not seen
 visionary lions fall to dust
 and, scornful of the world's ambition,
 left the hunters truth in rags?

 Fish, birds, beasts, all are prey
 to the same illusion, all wake
 to the hunger that stalks and prowls.
 Sands thirst for unquenchable seas,
 plains thrust toward implacable peaks,
 time moves unfulfilled and blind
 from plans unrealized to those surprised.
 We die hungry even while hyenas howl.




 VOLUNTARY, EXILE

 The day to day commitment to failure
 that judgment daily argues against me
 condemns me to despair.  I am guilty
 of more than silence.  At times words fail your
 wisest men and then, intentionally.
 But my silence, like all my secrecies,
 has no defense, none conventionally,
 my personal idiosyncrasies
 no social crimes.  When pride is pain and shame
 an agony too keen for reason, I
 had no other weapon.  Who is to blame?
 There was no intent to deceive or lie.
 My absence is sufficient evidence,
 voluntary exile, not providence.




 THE FOURTH CATEGORY

 Of vegetable, yes,
 but amorphous
 by analogy
 to stem
     leaf
         root

 not a flower
 nor a seed
 and no use as fruit.

 Of animal, too,
 but understood
 independently
 of cry
     growl
         purr

 not a fish
 nor a fowl
 and no good as fur.

 Of mineral, besides,
 but disinclined
 organically
 to heat
     break
         pour

 not iso-
 nor meta-morphic
 and no worth as ore.




 THE CHANGING WIND

 Now there are great numbers of people
 coming and going with the wind,
 and the wind seems changed;
 its voice is never still
 and its eyes are strange.

 Once, we remember, it was possible
 for the wind to move on two feet
 and formulate a philosophy
 of life and death by reason
 of environment.

 Then the wind that blew around us
 was a familiar one;
 we knew which side of the house was open
 and what grew from our hand
 each season of the year.

 When it was far, we could gaze
 beyond mountains, across seas,
 over days and miles of distances
 to twisted deserts and vast plains,
 bridging there with here.

 Wind voyageurs, we knew
 what a man puts into his mouth
 he eats, where he lays his head
 is shelter, that the clothing
 he wears, covers him.

 Then we had no illusions
 about customs or differences,
 since the wind was the same wind,
 whether it came from the north, the south,
 the east, or the west.

 Time was a place, we remember,
 where the wind was able
 to look a man in the face
 and remain long enough to hear
 what he had to say.

 Now there are great numbers of people
 coming and going with the wind,
 and the wind seems changed;
 its voice is never still
 and its eyes are strange.




 JINXED

 I went to the orchard
 where the trees were ripe
 and found a hard
 lemon.

 I went to the meadow
 when the grain was bright
 and heard a crow
 sermon.

 I went to the valley
 which was hidden from wind
 and saw a bleached
 galleon.

 I went to the mountain
 whose peak showed no print
 and met a lame
 stallion.

 I went to the desert,
 the jungle, the shore,
 and always some cursed
 omen.

 I went to the city
 at last for the source,
 and there in the streets
 were men.




 ALONG THAT ROAD

 A stranger came one day along that road
 and looked out on the field, the barn,
 the house set by itself against the woods,
 the air as empty in its fence
 of silence, as the hour of light.

                                       Alone,
 clothes torn, his hands streaked by the cuts
 of glass through which he came like hurtling stone
 to sudden halt, he searched the bluff
 of easy miles for signs of God on wheels,
 then limped some more and paused, the bills
 in his pocket less a commodity
 of exchange for another man's good will,
 than a threat of violence that was worse
 for being secret.

                           _Car wreck found._
 _Driver missing_.  He saw the headline words
 small on a page, his name announced
 in an obituary column.

                               Twice
 he glanced back over his shoulder
 to see whose shadow was following behind,
 while at a darkened window, its owner
 stood with gun upraised, remembering Job.

 A stranger came one day along that road.




 THE REFUGEES

 After the burning nights and the barren speech,
 after the dry wind through stony streets,
 we found our little green where lilies were,
 and knee-deep oxen stood watching us
 triumphant under trees.  For this was peace
 as nature meant nature's peace to be,
 with fruitful soil made ready by its need,
 with instincts tamed in gentler ways than fear,
 with freedom measured freely as the sky
 measures breath.  We lay there side by side
 breathing kisses, feeling the wet and cool
 of bodies grassed in loving, each a groove
 within a groove, seeking counterpart,
 with close-open-close, with light-in-dark
 and waves lapping.  We heard the overflow
 of lake down buttressed dam and sluiced walls
 making music in ditches, singing birth
 to seed in spike, to trunk in root, one surge
 alike in all.  Then, happily, we chose
 which way, and barefoot climbed the gold
 to tip the rim of that day's widened
 cup, before the darkness could descend
 to cheat our purpose.  Together, all of us swam,
 caught in a shower of light that fell on hands
 and hoofs, on flesh and hide--the rainbow now
 a shore towards which we moved with one accord.
 And the sun ceased fire and lowered its arms,
 promising new terms for our tomorrow.




 SHIP OF EARTH

 This earthship, which we now sail on seas
 of time and space, aware of other tides
 and stars and winds than move about us here,
 is smaller than we dreamed.  Once, its high
 mountain masts pierced infinity,
 as we rode, bow into future, and past
 at our stern, a vessel without peer
 in the universe, the first, the last!

 The sails gave way to engines, the spars to wings,
 the continental coasts to cosmic shores,
 and still we see no end to journeying.
 Although our rocket shrinks, we keep our course.
 We watch, we sleep, our dream a toylike thing
 that wakes and wonders---whose will, which force?




 AMONG THE PASSENGERS

 1

 Through the window of the bus, he combs a field,
 close-shaves the bristling oats, straps in a fence line,
 pockets adjoining timber, then rides into the morning,
 pleased.
         Now retired and let out to pasture, he
 does not mind the clouds, the rain that fogs the highway--
 his eyes are patched with blue.
                               Hands leathered and roped,
 knees astraddle, boots shined, he is seated beside
 as neat a filly as any in the herd he used to lope
 in season.
           With stallion gallantry, with sweets, he holds
 the miles to coffee stops and anecdotes ... till memory
 spurs his old man's hopes ... and the night stampedes.

 2

 Separated by long years and the visibility poor,
 her mood reflects the weather, darkening within.

 Dishes, diapers, sighs, and pills ... roof by roof,
 she hears the monotone of wheels recite the gloomy
 catechism, and prays for a different kind of virgin
 miracle.
         Nervously, she rubs her good luck stone,
 then wraps her thoughts in cellophane as a heroine
 of film and fashion, glad to forget home, school,
 and all the lost-girl tales they tell of Hollywood,

 She listens, nods, and smokes.  She does not mind his boasts,
 only too aware how the ashes cling to his coat.




 (1 x 1)^n

 I can accept
 the being born
 and the dying,
 in doubt, alone.

 I do not reject
 or, seeing, scorn
 anyone's crying
 about the unknown.

 And yet.  And yet.
 How the being alone
 in the living
 makes me mourn.

 I can not forget
 the breathing in stone,
 unforgiving
 and forsworn.




 AIR BRIDGE

 Together we talk of parting
 and are drawn out from the shore
 across a running sea
 that was not there before.

 Cautiously we lay our bridge
 in air, island to mainland,
 and wonder will it reach
 beyond the tide or stand.

 Already our eyes are widened
 by the miles that split us here
 as we turn at the bend
 and pause.  Dark reefs appear.

 Together we mark the distance
 between words and waves, the wind
 swinging our cables.  Chance
 moves forward--we, behind.




 AS YOU MAKE IT

 Your bed
 they said
 so shall you lie on it

 But I found rocks
 were kinder than clocks
 and did not cry for it

 They meant
 content
 without a sigh in it

 But I liked stars
 much better than bars
 and kept the sky on it

 No crown
 or down
 held me in tie to it

 But I dreamed jewels
 in the deepest pools
 where none could spy on it

 They thought
 I ought
 so I could die in it

 But I learned ends
 do not make amends
 and did not try for it

 Some day
 I may
 know the how and why of it




 CITY GAME: MARBLES

 Like gods competing for the universe,
 they shoot the planets between their fingers
 with trigger thumbs that scale the speed of light
 to intervals of space-colliding time.

 Ping! and fiery constellations leap apart,
 bright spheres of whirling suns and moons that mark
 the checkered squares of sidewalks, heaven's zone,
 and hell, the sewer curbs where lost stars roam.




 FREE-FALL

 Having lost my terror of the air
 and learned, by dropping hard, a pity for
 the grass, I grow used to the ways of cats.
 It takes practice not to die in the act
 of living, whether climbing up a tree,
 walking a fence, or coming to a brink,
 springing free.  The ninth time can't be worse
 than the first.  Meanwhile, there are birds,
 sunshine, roofs, and kind old ladies.
 The grass itself is innocent with sleep.




 _E_xistence=_m_ultiple _c_onditions^2

         _You who would be mathematicians in your living,
         remember Einstein_
 The problem
 is not always immediately apparent:
 it does not become one
 until the response to a given condition
 fails to satisfy
 the need that a continuance implies.

 Whether conscious
 in amoeba as well as hippopotamus
 or unaware
 as in water, earth and air
 there is evidence
 that each continues to be present.

 The process
 by which we seem to choose or guess
 solutions
 based on inference and conclusion
 regarding what is
 and what is not suggests both as hypotheses.

 For the nature
 of questions is to question nature
 since its design
 is reciprocal by reflection of the mind
 as the rainbow
 to its image or crystals to snow.

 Perplexed by reason
 reality itself dissolves in the sun
 while the question
 remains above and beyond all consideration
 of doubt and fog
 a bubble suspended in the hands of God.




THE UNDERSTANDING

What is it you want? he asked.

Looking at him.  As though she thought he had something to say and
could find the words to say it.  The words no one else had yet found or
said.

What is it? he repeated.

Her eyes an open darkness.  Leading to a corridor of black mirrors.  As
though at the end was a locked door and behind it the final secret.

What?

Within that hallway of silence, her breathing, the beating of her
heart.  As though echoing his questions.  Waiting, hoping for the
answers.

If you would tell me, he said.

Pinpoints of light straining towards the threshold through a soft warm
mist.  As though they would help him to see, to slip across barriers of
being.

If I knew--

Blind beams behind opaque windows.  As though in an act of desperation,
a man might hurl a stone.  The shuddering tinkle of shattered glass.

Here, he said, you take the stone.

Placing it in her hands so that she could feel it, roll it between her
palms, sense it through her fingers.  An ineffable, tangible continuum.

I give it to you, it's yours.

The whole, beautiful truth, God helping.  Love solidly immured within
its mineral heart.  Ticking away the centuries, immune to change.




 WOOLEN DIGNITY

 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



[Illustration: Abstract design]




 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.


[Illustration: Abstract design]




 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.

 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.



[Illustration: Abstract design]




 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



[Illustration: Abstract design]




 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.




 WORLD OF TOMORROW

 Whereless in a sea of space,
 how shall we reckon with the dead
 whose graves we marked on a shifting land
 and left at a distance travelled by light?
 What pilot navigates our course
 through a finite but expanding void
 no almanac explains or chart defines?

 Sun, stars, birds, nothing avails
 since Phoenician and Viking passed
 with cross-staff, astrolabe and compass
 to bring us to shores we have left behind.
 We are speeding our unborn young
 to harbors no heard voice guides us toward,
 no radar yet detects, no octant sights.

 Now new dimensions of mind
 extend the geometric skull
 of Ptolemy and Euclid, of occult
 priest and philosopher, to measure time
 not by the sun's zenith at noon
 or the moon's eclipse, but by spectra
 through which we can identify time's white.

 Past and present, both are blind
 to the future, while the Sphinx waits
 for another Oedipus.  O waste
 of sand and wind, swept by an airborne tide!
 Shall we find a snakeless Eden
 and with the apples unforbidden
 begin our second exodus, from Paradise?




 This first edition was completed in May 1964.
 The poems were set in 14 pt. Centaur
 by Mackenzie & Harris, Inc.
 and printed by Bradley Brownell
 in the shop of Van Riper & Thompson, Inc.
 on Curtis Colophon text.
 Bound by the Santa Barbara Bindery
 Designed and illustrated by
 Wayne Thompson

 Van Riper & Thompson, Inc.
 703 Anacapa Street
 Santa Barbara, California



[Illustration: Back cover]











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