Bruised ankle
turned again, she steps
down & presses up to me close
-the poem opens
like earth under my feet
“it’s not inner”
-I don’t see
putting round your head
my arms
boxed in,
looking the dark outdoors
glass-doors
a word, my right?
There are no words in spite of her. Love presses in & if I am not active, love is a book of the nauseous dead; love demands to want it total, pride in the word, for without that (but pride as we crouched side by side upon the sand, background lit bright orange & moved into the boar-step & moved into the shuttle of the crab), life is slum, death begets on wife: the tarantula weeps, the digger-wasp’s eggs planted in its back.
behind the house
soft night
swirling ashes bright popping
out the cut;
I see the blackness because of the fire
I see a double image because I live
Near the oil-drum
laborers circle glint yellow-helmeted,
calves wrapped in dark blue wool
they rest (compounding, compounding
palms, breath sailing gutturals
& wanted to be spiraling out the pitch to cold ringing
air but she was in the house
& wanted to be advancing by her
but she was in the air
filling it, flaring, wound
tight round the flame’s base
a sound
so I listened. At first
a ring. Then silence
but again unseen, hand presses the bell. No turning
back: to find her in the sound, tug
of line cranking earth out of earth
out the shaft & out the steel
cord drawing out the pulley turning
coaxing
(the moment Vallejo
names “grip yr large intestine”
headplunge into night)
gleaming line I see
lit through glass, sparks leaping
the drum
sound wavers, vanishes & returns
within round
sounding, again, again
like a honking of wild geese she comes
within round
It is to get off the wheel
doubt will flatten me should it go
on to evolve myself
to it tied. I examine my bindings,
find hemp to gnaw through, a burning
house distinct from my body
Frightful vision of the world as stone
ordered, laid in “walk in
this garden” –another does
the stone doubles up, sobbing
Again this fiber & fear
it is tendon, my
sinew grown one body to
another: image
of humanity drives me on, one man to
another bound
-but that is freedom!
Being depends not in ripcords
yanked in gut: the bagworm
depends on its silk, lowers
its own missal of courage
but the man! the man! arms outstretched
rippling before the water-wheel spinning
light’s shower, naked who moves
into counter-motion, gaining
gaining the blaze two make
if aligned: a symphony!
This is the body
of our imagination in which sky
is fiery red, air breath, each storm
having its appropriate place in
the body of a man’s work, each joist
wedded that there be no extraneous
members sucked into earth’s
stored waters. From these waters
likewise we draw, quiet
until they live within us, the dead
depending to the point of a water crystal
on the eave of my room’s roof. In that
see her face, those who have borne
with me, say learning is Yamada,
Genkawa, Yoshimoto, names
bright ricefields in June when first
you came; to Kyoto,
to East Mountain still Higashiyama,
your source in language, river
flowing shallows never ending as I stand
on Sanjo Bridge, falls dishing over
stone & out into the southern
reaches, a haze of sulphur-blue light
in which I clearly see the Mexican colors, tendon
red, clay yellow, this rock
that will not desert me in fire.
Night, tell her again. Stand
facing glass, flames swirling from the cut,
pulse in time with the sound of surf
the machinery makes as it raises earth
out of earth. Such a short time they’ve tried
to reach me these waters, the interval
I hear in silence, three years, stand
again facing the horizonless
coast of Tampico. Night, project
the porch two stories up, wind
furling my robe, Kyoto
face Tampico, Niemonjima, the years
return, Indianapolis, the birth
& highs of my life, high on the crest of
world’s gorge a thread of light is
given me for life. The length of my body
divides us, door
ajar, I see again the flaming sill, the orange
hell of fire slickened in the sea at dusk
outlined in the dark room.
You lie bride.
Into the center of her, my heart, sing
cleft & driven, no book, no art, no master
knows your foot-falls, I go
with the revolution I tried to turn
within my own grain
& couldn’t. I could
and I couldn’t, yet deeper than the need to rise
above what I can do & what I can’t,
I quarried, Barbara, what were you feeling?
I knew your desire, primal, coiling
held & shuddered in blackness;
I had never thought of anyone else in my life
& saw you were a life, separate
that there might be a unity, more than any
name I could give you,
but you had the name and this
line in the naming place, this line
neither night nor day, neither heat
nor cold. The act of my whole being builds in me blindness
bounded by light, oh inverse moon I see
blindness is light if I open the promise I made,
is light defined by creation neither past
nor present.
Slightly raised off to the side of
your head, turns
& in deep shadows I see your face, it is
as if warmth of our bodies under heavy
quilts were achieving beauty in
your face, brows & darker
hair, silken, the lips of one woman
I know cracked in winter cold
Stand again, house, tree, land
leveled drear blackness, sand, the sound
earth cranked out of earth transmuted in deep
prayer of waves, that tremendous sky over the coast of Tampico.
Birth, I knew you were there! In the waft
of cooking meats, heavy summer air, I smelled
magenta bougainvillea; I didn’t know then how
far I must return to you (for you were there
even alone, a shadow I erased into fire),
not from America nor from the crest of Niemonjima
sun struck off white rock in brilliant Pacific blue,
but in this room, tonight, from never.
Sea I knew you were earth! Space, were time! Were
the moment of creation! Ground in tiny
lights distantly the horizon
so delicate! To get the maximum pull from you sea!
So milk! She lies off the length of my body
bride.
Night there was neither sea nor earth, sky
nor fire, breath was not, nor eye & organ & bone;
My blood I tried to turn
within my own grain, to undapple the wine
meant for you, twenty-five years had groomed, had,
… & hear only sound, waves flack wrapping
columns, the rickety chamber wherein you
all eye, all breath, vulva pine
& found you sour, more, bland. No book, no master
shall sing my cleft & driven heart.
Blessed failure! for I was in love with you.
It first came to me blindness bounded by light
& now the darkness you inscribe: what were you feeling?
I thought I knew your desire, to be worked wet;
so floored by, by nothing I slept until you slept
& hated the mystery. I had never thought of anyone
else in my life. Oh before we can
unconsciously effortlessly give we must be
wrung thru that most diamond of interval!
I realized I had married you for life.
written 1964 Kyoto
accepted 1967 NYC
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