And in the evening, perilously swathed
in darkness, spirals of light, the warmth
of spring impending (sandalwood and sandals,
shoe to soil restored), we walked again
(as in our world’s beginning) through a Silence-
buds still held umbilical to tree,
flowers to earth, stars to the magnet sky,
words to the cautious brain.
(Observe this man
and woman, dabbler in the niceties
of why and how and whence; your quest
will be more fruitful and more comical,
more wakefulness-inspiring than the time
you spend among the caged guinea-pigs
in a smelly cellar. See, they cry,
their muscles slightly twitch, they talk
or do not talk, they walk upon the earth
and disappear into their muddy holes.)
And all the time I wanted to see the Circus …
Pebbles, dislodged, pattered the stream surface
below us-mile or metre? In my hand
her hand the leaning of a child, the tug
of momentary terror, but her eyes
were in me, lending vision to my own.
Low branches, roots across the path, and words
unsaid-we hurdled by them into peace …
peace and the flow of endless water, peace
and the surety of stone, peace and the glow
of life from the distant city in the heavens,
peace and your image–grown real, grown true. .
What you will understand of what I said
or left unsaid (sometime) will surely be
not what was in the words or of the words,
but in and of the voice and in the mingling
of our voices with the water-voice:
singing (old serfs and peons)
Stenka Rasin
dancing on the sombrero of Zapata
Old Black Joe in Harlem-Christ in Gaul
Caesar upon the Mount of Olives
You
in sunlight on the sand along the gulf-stream
flowing as water flows in the northland, here,
at midnight, past this solid rock, alone.
The water’s clean and cold. There are no sharks.
Leave a Reply