The sister who told fortunes prophesied
A love-letter. In the next mail it came.
You didn’t recognize the writer’s name
And wondered he knew yours. Ah well. That seed
Has since become a world of blossom and bark.
The letters fill a drawer, the gifts a room.
No hollow of your day is hidden from
His warm concern. Still you are in the dark.
Too much understanding petrifies.
The early letters struck you as blackmail.
You have them now by heart, a rosy veil
Colors the phrase repaired to with shut eyes.
Was the time always wrong for you to meet?—
Not that he ever once proposed as much.
Your sisters joke about it. “It’s too rich!
Somebody Up There loves you, Psyche sweet.”
Tell me about him, then. Not a believer,
I’ll hold my tongue while you, my dear, dictate.
Him I have known too little (or, of late,
Too well) to trust my own view of your lover.
Oh but one has many, many tongues!
And you will need a certain smoldering five
Deep in the ash of something I survive,
Poke and rummage with as reluctant tongs
As possible. The point won’t be to stage
One of our torchlit hunts for truth. Truth asks
Just this once to sleep with fiction, masks
Of tears and laughter on the moonstruck page;
To cauterize what babbles to be healed
Just this once not by candor. Here and now,
Psyche, I quench that iron lest it outglow
A hovering radiance your fingers shield.
Renaissance features grafted onto Greek
Revival, glassed, hexagonal lookouts crown
Some of the finest houses in this town.
By day or night, cloud, sunbeam, lunatic streak,
They alternately ravish and disown
Earth, sky, and water— Are you with me? Speak.
SUNLIGHT Crossfire
of rays and shadows each
glancing off a windowpane a stone
You alone my correspondent
have remained sheer
projection Hurt Not gravely Not at all
Your bloodlessness a glaze
of thin thin varnish where I kneel
Were the warm drop
upon your letter oil and were that page
your sleeping person then
all would indeed be lost
Our town is small
its houses built like temples
The rare stranger I let pass with lowered
eyes He also could be you
Nights the last red
wiped from my lips the harbor
blinking out gem by gem how utterly
we’ve been undressed
You will not come
to the porch at noon will you rustling your wings
or masked as crone or youth
The mouths behind our faces kiss
Kindlings of truth
Risen from the dawn mist
some wriggling silver in a tern’s beak scrawls
joyous memoranda onto things
TODAY I have your letter from the South
where as a child I but of course you know
Three times I’ve read it at my attic window
A city named for palms half mummy and half myth
pools flashing talking birds the world of my
first vision of you Psyche Though it’s May
that could be frost upon the apple trees
silvery plump as sponges above the pale
arm of the Sound and the pane is chill to feel
I live now by the seasons burn and freeze
far from that world where nothing changed or died
unless to be reborn on the next tide
You daylong in the saddles of foaming opal
ride I am glad Come dusk lime juice and gin
deepen the sunset under your salt skin
I’ve tasted that side of the apple
A city named for palms half desert and half dream
its dry gold settles on my mouth I bloom
Where nothing died Breaking on us like waves
the bougainvillea bloomed fell bloomed again
The new sea wall rose from the hurricane
and no less staunchly from the old freed slave’s
ashes each night her grandchild climbed the stairs
to twitch white gauze across the stinging stars
City half dream half desert where at dawn
the sprinkler dervish whirled and all was crystalline
within each house half brothel and half shrine
up from the mirror tabletop had flown
by noon the shadow of each plate each spoon to float
in light that warbled on the ceiling Wait
ALICE has entered talking
Any mirage if seen from a remote stand
point is refreshing Yes but dust and heat
lie at its heart Poor Psyche you forget
That was a cruel impossible wonderland
The very sidewalks suffered Ours that used
to lead can you remember to the beach
I felt it knew and waited for us each
morning to trot its length in teardrop punctured shoes
when in fact the poor dumb thing lay I now know
under a dark spell cast from quite another
quarter the shadow of a towering mother
smooth as stone and thousandbreasted though
her milk was watery scant so much for love
false like everything in that whole world
However This shadow that a royal palm hurled
onto the sidewalk from ten yards above
day night rustling and wrestling never shattered
except to mend back forth or lost its grip
the batwing offspring of her ladyship
Our orchid stucco house looked on greenshuttered
stoic But the sidewalk suffered most
Like somebody I shall not name it lacked
perspective It failed absolutely to detect
the root of all that evil The clues it missed
Nights after a windstorm great yellow paper
dry branches lying on the curb in heaps
like fancy dress don’t ask me whose someone who steps
forth and is changed by the harsh moonlight to vapor
the sidewalk could only grit itself and shift
Some mornings respite A grisaille opaque
as poured concrete And yet by ten o’clock
the phantom struck again in a first sunshaft
Off to the beach Us nurse in single file
Those days we’d meet our neighbor veiled and hatted
tanagra leading home out of the sun she hated
a little boy with water wings We’d smile
then hold our breaths to pass a barricade
of black smells rippling up from the soft hot
brink of the mirage past which sidewalks could not
follow Ours stood there crumbling then obeyed
a whisper back of it and turned The sea the loose
unshadowed sand too free white heterodox
ever to be congealed into sidewalks
ours never saw GIVE ME THE SNAPPED SHOELACE
LIZARDS ANTS SCRAPS OF SILVER FOIL
hoarse green tongues begged from each new crack No use
The shadow trod it as our nightmares us
Then we moved here where gray skies are the rule
What Why not simply have cut down the tree
Psyche I can’t believe my Hush You child
Cut down the I’ve got gooseflesh Feel I’m chilled
My sister’s hyperthyroid eyes fix me
The whites lackluster shot with miniature
red brambles abruptly glitter overspill
down powdered cheeks Alice can weep at will
How to convey the things I feel for her
She is more strange than Iceland bathed all night
an invalid in sunshine Lava cliffs
the geyser that erupts the loon that laughs
I move to kiss her but she hums a note
and licks her lips Well darling I must fly
before you read what it does not intend
about yourself and your mysterious friend
say or some weird rivalry that I
may once have harbored though I harbor none
now nor does Gertrude not the tiniest pang
into this long but kindly meant harangue
She nods and leaves the room And I am here alone
I place the ladder hoist from rung to rung
my pail and cloths into a cupola glassed
entirely with panes some tinted amethyst
it is my task to clean Up here among
spatterings and reflections wipe as I will
these six horizons still the rain’s dry ghost
and my own features haunt the roofs the coast
How does one get to know a landscape well
When did we leave the South Why do we live indoors
I wonder sweating to the cadence Even
on sunless days the cupola is an oven
Views blur This thing we see them through endures
MIDNIGHT I dream I dream The slow moon eludes
one stilled cloud Din of shimmerings From across the Sound
what may have begun as no more
than a willow’s sleepwalking outline quickens detaches
comes to itself in the cupola
panics from pane to pane and then impulsively
surrendering fluttering by now the sixteenfold
wings of the cherubim unclipped by faith or reason
stands there my dream made whole
over whose walls again
a red vine black in moonlight crawls
made habitable Each cell of the concrete
fills with sweet light The wave breaks
into tears Come if it’s you Step down
To where I Stop For at your touch the dream
cracks the angel tenses flees
NOON finds me faced by a small troop of furies
They are my senses shrill and ominous
We who were trained they cry to do your pleasure
are kept like children Is this fair to us
Dear ones I say bending to kiss their faces
trust me One day you’ll understand Meanwhile
suppose we think of things to raise our spirits
and leading the two easiest to beguile
into the kitchen feed them shots of Bourbon
Their brother who loves Brahms conceived a wish
for gems from L’Africana played at volumes
that make the dwarf palm shudder in its dish
The pale one with your eyes restively flashing
takes in the dock the ashen Sound the sky
The fingers of the eldest brush my features
But you are smiling she says coldly Why
STAR or candle being lit
but to shed itself
into blackness partly night’s
sure that no less golden warm than it
is our love
will have missed the truth by half
We see according to our lights
Eros husband names distort
you who have no name
Peace upon your neophytes
Help me when the christenings shall start
o my love
to defend your sleep from them
and see according to our lights
Ah and should discernment’s twin
tyrants adamant
for their meal of pinks and whites
be who call those various torches in
help me love
This is nothing I shall want
We see according to our lights
When as written you have lapsed
back into the god
darts and wings and appetites
what of him the lover all eclipsed
by sheer love
Shut my eyes it does no good
Who will ever put to rights
Psyche, hush. This is me, James,
Writing lest he think
Of the reasons why he writes-
Boredom, fear, mixed vanities and shames;
Also love.
From my phosphorescent ink
Trickle faint unworldly lights
Down your face. Come, we’ll both rest.
Weeping? You must not.
All our pyrotechnic flights
Miss the sleeper in the pitch-dark breast.
He is love;
He is everyone’s blind spot.
We see according to our lights.
“What’s that sound? Is it you, dear?”
“Yes. I was just eating something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know-I mean, an apricot …”
“Hadn’t you best switch on the light and make sure?”
“No, thank you, Gertrude.”
A hurt silence ensued.
“Oh, Psyche!” her sister burst out at length. “Here you are, surrounded by loving kin, in a house crammed with lovely old things, and what do you crave but the unfamiliar, the ‘transcendental? I declare, you’re turning into the classic New England old maid!”
Psyche’s hands dropped from her wet, white face. The time had come-except that Time, like Love, wears a mask in this story, whose action requires perhaps thirty-six hours of Spring, perhaps thirty-six Springs of a life-a moment nevertheless had come to take the electric torch and leave her sisters without a word. Later she was to recall a tear-streaked muzzle, the marvelous lashed golds of an iris reflecting her own person backed by ever tinier worlds of moonlight and tossing palms, then, at the center, blackness, a fixed point, a spindle on which everything had begun to turn. Piercing her to the brain.
Spelt out in brutal prose, all had been plain.
RAIN Evening The drive in My sisters’ gold sedan’s
eyes have gone dim and dark windows are sealed
For vision’s sake two wipers wield
the automatic coquetry of fans
In the next car young Eros and his sweetheart sit
fire and saltwater still from their embrace
Grief plays upon his sated face
Her mask of tears does not exactly fit
The love goddess his mother overflows a screen
sixty feet wide or seems to Who can plumb
those motes of rose and platinum
At once they melt back into the machine
throbbing dry and dispassionate beyond our ken
to spool her home whose beauty flabbergasts
The nervous systems of her guests
drink and drink the sparkling staleness in
Now in her element steam she looms up from a bath
The hero’s breastplate mirrors her red lips
It burns and clouds As waterdrops
course down the monumental cheeks of both
they kiss My sisters turn on me from either side
shrieking with glee under the rainlight mask
fondle and pinch in mean burlesque
of things my angel you and I once tried
In no time he alone is left of a proud corps
That dustcloud hides triumphant fleeing Huns
Lips parched by a montage of suns
he cannot taste our latter night’s downpour
while she by now my sisters fatten upon fact
is on location in Djakarta where
tomorrow’s sun illumines her
emoting in strange arms It’s all an act
Eros are you like her so false a naked glance
turns you into that slackjawed fleshproud youth
driving away Was he your truth
Is it too late to study ignorance
These fictive lives these loves of the comedian
so like so unlike ours which hurt and heal
are what the gods know You can feel lust
and fulfillment Eros no more than
ocean its salt depths or uranium its hot
disintegrative force or I our fable
My interest like the rain grown feeble
a film of sorrow on my eyes they shut
I may already be part god Asleep awake
some afterglow as of a buried heaven
keeps flickering through me I may even
learn to love it Eros for your sake
MORNING The task is done When my sisters wake
they will look once more upon pale water and clear sky
a fair far brow of land
with its fillet of Greek trees oak apple willow
and here below in the foreground
across a street finished down to the last detail
a red clapboard temple The neat outlines
it’s a warehouse really have been filled with colors
dull red flaking walls white trim
and pediment tar roof patched black on black
Greek colors An effect I hope
not too much spoiled by a big yellow legend
BOAT WORKS on the roof which seagulls helicopters
the highup living and the happy dead
are in a position to read
Outside indeed a boat lies covered with tarpaulin
Old headlines mend a missing pane The warehouse
seems but in the time it takes to say abandoned
a face male old molepale in sun
though blinded by the mullion’s shadow
has floated to an eerie scale the rising
wind flutes out of the oaken depths
I look away When I look back
the panic’s over It is afternoon
Now the window reflects my sisters’ white
mock lonic portico and me emerging
blinking Too bright to bear or turn from
Spring’s first real sun burns on the numb blue Sound
Beyond the warehouse past the round GULF sign
whose warning it ignores a baby dock has waded
The small waves stretch their necks gulls veer and scold
I walk the length of our Greek Revival village
from library to old blind lighthouse
Like one entranced who talks as awake she cannot
a potpourri of dead chalkpetal dialects
dead anyhow all winter
lips caulked with faded pollen and dust of cloves
I find that I can break the cipher
come to light along certain humming branches
make out not only apple blossoms and sun
but perfectly the dance of darker undertones
on pavement or white wall It is this dance I know
that cracks the pavement I do know
Finally I reach a garden where I am to uproot
the last parsnips for my sisters’ dinner
Not parsnips mastodons But this year’s greens
already frill them and they pull easily
from the soft ground Two of the finest
are tightly interlocked have grown that way They lie
united in the grave of sunny air
as in their breathing living dark
I look at them a long while
mealy and soiled in one another’s arms
and blind full to the ivory marrow
with tender blindness Then I bury them
once more in memory of us
Back home Gold skies My basket full
Lifting it indoors I turn The little dock
It is out there still on stilts in freezing water
It must know by now
that no one is coming after it that it must wait
for morning for next week for summer
by which time it will have silvered and splintered
and the whitewinged boats and the bridegroom’s burning sandals
will come too late It’s dark It’s dinner time
Light the lamp my sisters call from where they eat
There follows a hushed preening and straining
wallpaper horsehair glass wood pewter glue
Now is their moment when all else goes black
and what is there but substance to turn to
Sister the lamp The round
moon mallet has risen and struck Of the warehouse pulverized
one faintest blueprint glimmers by which to build it
on the same spot tomorrow somehow right
Light your lamp Psyche dear
My hand is on the switch I have done this
faithfully each night since the first
Tonight I think will not be different
Then soft light lights the room the furniture
a blush invades even the dropped lid
yes and I am here alone
I and my flesh and blood
Thank you, Psyche. I should think those panes
Were just about as clear as they can be.
It’s time I turned my light on. Child, leave me.
Here on the earth we loved alone remains
One shrunken amphitheatre, look, to moon
Hugely above. Ranked glintings from within
Hint that a small articulate crowd had been
Gathered for days now, waiting. None too soon,
Whether in lower or in upper case,
Will come the Moment for the metal of each
To sally forth-once more into the breach!
Beyond it, glory lies, a virgin space
Acrackle in white hunger for the word.
We’ve seen what comes next. There is no pure deed.
A black-and-red enchanter, a deep-dyed
Coil of-No matter. One falls back soiled, blurred.
And on the page, of course, black only. Damned
If I don’t tire of the dark view of things.
I think of your ‘Greek colors’ and it rings
A sweet bell. Time to live! Haven’t I dimmed
That portion of the ribbon—whose red glows
Bright with disuse-sufficiently for a bit?
Tomorrow mayn’t I start to pay my debt,
In wine, in heart’s blood, to la vie en rose?
This evening it will do to be alone,
Here, with your girlish figures: parsnip, Eros,
Shadow, blossom, windowpane. The warehouse.
The lamp I smell in every other line.
Do you smell mine? From its rubbed brass a moth
Hurtles in motes and tatters of itself
-Be careful, tiny sister, drabbest sylph!—
Against the hot glare, the consuming myth,
Drops, and is still. My hands move. An intense,
Slow-paced, erratic dance goes on below.
I have received from whom I do not know
These letters. Show me, light, if they make sense.
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