WEBVTT

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A little poem-- [CLEARS THROAT]
a not so little poem called

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"Suite to Fathers."

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I started writing
in a suite form,

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or a long collection
of shorter lyrics

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around a central core,
when I moved in despair

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of ever writing a long poem.

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I decided that there's something
in the age against writing

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a long poem that is not a
sequence of shorter ones.

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[CLEARS THROAT] Thinking
maybe as an antidote

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to Frost's "Death
of a Hired Man,"

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writing "Death of
a Hired Woman."

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You know what I mean?

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This is a poem called
"Suite to Fathers."

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I think that nights
are a counterbalance,

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a blind woman we turn
to for nothing but dark.

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In Val-Mont, I see
a slab of parchment,

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a black quill pen in stone.

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In a sculptor's garden, there
was a head made from stone,

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large as a room, the
eyes neatly hooded,

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staring out with a
crazed somnolence

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fond of walled gardens.

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The countesses arch
like cats in chateux.

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They wake up as countesses
and usually sleep with counts.

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Nevertheless, he writes
them painful letters,

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thinking of Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Gaspara Stampa.

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With Kappus he calls forth
the stone in the rose.

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In Egypt, the dhows sweep
the Nile with ancient sails.

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I am in Egypt, he
thinks, this Baltic Jew.

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It is hot.

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How can I make
bricks with no straw?

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His own country rich with
her food and slaughter,

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fit only for sheep and generals.

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He thinks of the
coffin of the East,

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of the tiers of
the dead in Venice,

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those countless singulars.

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At lunch, the baked apple
too sweet with kirsch

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becomes the tongues of
convent girls at gossip,

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under the drum and shadow of
pigeons the girl at promenade

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has almond in her hair.

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From Duino, beneath the mist,
the green is so dark and green

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it cannot bare itself.

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In the night, from black
paper I cut the silhouette

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of this exiled god,
finding him as the bones

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of a fish in stone.

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In the cemetery
the grass is pale

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fake green as if dumped
from Easter baskets

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from overturned
clay and the deeper

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marl which sits in a wet
gray heap by the creek.

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There are no frogs.

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Death drains there.

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Landscape of glass,
perhaps Christ

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will quarry you after the worms.

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The newspaper says caskets
float in leaky vaults.

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Above me I feel paper birds,
the sun is a brass bell.

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This is not Earth I walk
across, but the pages

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of some giant magazine.

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Come song, allow
me some eloquence.

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Good people die.

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The June after you died,
I dove down into the lake.

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The water turned to
cold, then colder,

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and ached against my ears.

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I swam under a sunken
log, then paused

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letting my back rub against it
like some huge fish with rib

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cage and soft belly
open to the bottom.

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I saw the light
shimmering far above,

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but did not want to rise.

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It was so far up from the dark
once it was night three days.

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After that, four,
six, and over again.

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The nest was torn from the
tree, the tree from the ground.

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The ground, itself,
sinking torn.

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I envied the dead
their sleep of rot.

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I was a fable to myself,
a speech to come neat.

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Once in Nevada, I sat on
a boulder at twilight.

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I had no ride and wanted
to avoid the snakes.

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I watched the full moon
ride a fleshy red out

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of the mountains, out
of a distant sandstorm.

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I thought then that, if I
might travel deep enough,

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I might embrace the
dead as equals--

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not in their separate
stillnesses as dead,

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but in music, one with
another's harmonies.

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The moon became paler, rising,
floating upwards in her arc.

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And I, with her, intermingled
in her whiteness until at dawn,

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again, she bloodied
herself with Earth.

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In the beginning, I trusted
in spirits, slight things,

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those are the dead in
procession, the household

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gods in mild delirium
with their sweet round

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music and modest feasts.

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Now I listen only to
that hard black core,

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a ball harsh as coal,
rending for light, far back

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in my own sour brain.

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The tongue knots itself,
a cramped fist of music.

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The oracle, a white,
walled room of bone

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which darkens now
with a greater dark.

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And the brain, a
glacier of blood

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inching forward, sliding, the
bottom silt covered with sweet,

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becoming a river now, laving
the skull with coolness,

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the leaves on her surface,
dipping against the bone.

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Voyager, the self,
the voyage, dark.

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Let me open your lids.

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Night stares down with
her great bruised eye.

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