A little poem-- [CLEARS THROAT] a not so little poem called
"Suite to Fathers."
I started writing in a suite form,
or a long collection of shorter lyrics
around a central core, when I moved in despair
of ever writing a long poem.
I decided that there's something in the age against writing
a long poem that is not a sequence of shorter ones.
[CLEARS THROAT] Thinking maybe as an antidote
to Frost's "Death of a Hired Man,"
writing "Death of a Hired Woman."
You know what I mean?
This is a poem called "Suite to Fathers."
I think that nights are a counterbalance,
a blind woman we turn to for nothing but dark.
In Val-Mont, I see a slab of parchment,
a black quill pen in stone.
In a sculptor's garden, there was a head made from stone,
large as a room, the eyes neatly hooded,
staring out with a crazed somnolence
fond of walled gardens.
The countesses arch like cats in chateux.
They wake up as countesses and usually sleep with counts.
Nevertheless, he writes them painful letters,
thinking of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Gaspara Stampa.
With Kappus he calls forth the stone in the rose.
In Egypt, the dhows sweep the Nile with ancient sails.
I am in Egypt, he thinks, this Baltic Jew.
It is hot.
How can I make bricks with no straw?
His own country rich with her food and slaughter,
fit only for sheep and generals.
He thinks of the coffin of the East,
of the tiers of the dead in Venice,
those countless singulars.
At lunch, the baked apple too sweet with kirsch
becomes the tongues of convent girls at gossip,
under the drum and shadow of pigeons the girl at promenade
has almond in her hair.
From Duino, beneath the mist, the green is so dark and green
it cannot bare itself.
In the night, from black paper I cut the silhouette
of this exiled god, finding him as the bones
of a fish in stone.
In the cemetery the grass is pale
fake green as if dumped from Easter baskets
from overturned clay and the deeper
marl which sits in a wet gray heap by the creek.
There are no frogs.
Death drains there.
Landscape of glass, perhaps Christ
will quarry you after the worms.
The newspaper says caskets float in leaky vaults.
Above me I feel paper birds, the sun is a brass bell.
This is not Earth I walk across, but the pages
of some giant magazine.
Come song, allow me some eloquence.
Good people die.
The June after you died, I dove down into the lake.
The water turned to cold, then colder,
and ached against my ears.
I swam under a sunken log, then paused
letting my back rub against it like some huge fish with rib
cage and soft belly open to the bottom.
I saw the light shimmering far above,
but did not want to rise.
It was so far up from the dark once it was night three days.
After that, four, six, and over again.
The nest was torn from the tree, the tree from the ground.
The ground, itself, sinking torn.
I envied the dead their sleep of rot.
I was a fable to myself, a speech to come neat.
Once in Nevada, I sat on a boulder at twilight.
I had no ride and wanted to avoid the snakes.
I watched the full moon ride a fleshy red out
of the mountains, out of a distant sandstorm.
I thought then that, if I might travel deep enough,
I might embrace the dead as equals--
not in their separate stillnesses as dead,
but in music, one with another's harmonies.
The moon became paler, rising, floating upwards in her arc.
And I, with her, intermingled in her whiteness until at dawn,
again, she bloodied herself with Earth.
In the beginning, I trusted in spirits, slight things,
those are the dead in procession, the household
gods in mild delirium with their sweet round
music and modest feasts.
Now I listen only to that hard black core,
a ball harsh as coal, rending for light, far back
in my own sour brain.
The tongue knots itself, a cramped fist of music.
The oracle, a white, walled room of bone
which darkens now with a greater dark.
And the brain, a glacier of blood
inching forward, sliding, the bottom silt covered with sweet,
becoming a river now, laving the skull with coolness,
the leaves on her surface, dipping against the bone.
Voyager, the self, the voyage, dark.
Let me open your lids.
Night stares down with her great bruised eye.