I wrote three odes in a sequence,
I've never tried reading them in sequence
before, I'd like to hear how they go together since they
were intended to go together.
So if you can put up with three fairly good sized poems
in a row, I'll listen.
The first is called "Cool Dark Ode."
You could have sneaked up, broken
into those under heated rooms by the windows overlooking
the tavern, or the back way up the broad but and lighted
stairs, at a moment when no one was present.
When the long planed table that served as a desk
was recalling the quiet of the woods.
When the book's, older, were thinking farther back
to the same essential stillness.
And both table and books, if they thought of the future
ever, probably shuddered, as though from a stray draft,
seeing themselves as eventual flame, some final smoke.
Now, when there is no longer any occasion,
I think of inviting you in to wait
for us on these short, cramped sofa,
beside the single candle stub, which must have frightened you
off then.
Or in the cubicle of the bedroom, where even then we
imagined ourselves extinguished by your total embrace.
Attentive meanwhile to the animal noises
of your breathing, the whimpers, the sudden intoxicated
outcries, that were not our own.
Night, oh, blackness of winter, I
tell you this, you that used to come up
as far as the frosted panes, the door, as far
as the edges of our skin.
Without any thought, I know now of entering those borrowed
rooms, or even our mouths, our eyes, which all too often were
carelessly left open for you.
"Warm, Flesh-colored Ode."
It was still possible then to imagine that no more than one
or two hands would ever move down the face of the hour.
And the shadow, which followed might remain patient.
And if anything somewhat reluctant
to continue that no more than one or two hands
that ever descended so far as the shoulders of the afternoon.
And that necessarily they would have been bare then
of even that shadow, which sometimes, the air itself seems
to be charged with and to suffer from.
That no more than one or two hands
surely would have crossed the forbidden zone
at the end of summer, and end of the sky,
there would be turning always from white to pink slowly.
And that it could no longer matter then
what shadows rose from your hollows and sank back.
And it is still possible to imagine
that there are one or two hands, which do not know,
or which do not yet know.
Anything of either that face or the shadow,
which does after all follow.
Or a flushed shoulders or turning sky,
or if those particular hollows alive with less
and less curious, and impulsive shadows now.
And that there may somewhere be hands, which will never
be smeared with a very special pollen and General
McgInnis of a dying summer.
And that there are probably other hands, which
have stopped or will stop, or even now are shaken
with premonitions of a time when they will have begun to stop.
And among these some, which remember little or nothing
of you and your coloring.
And some also, which do not and cannot forget your blood upon
them and your due.
"Pale, Tepid Ode."
Not with the vague smoke in the curtains,
not with the pigeons or doves under the eaves, nevertheless,
you are there hidden, and again, you wake me senseless,
noiseless, someone or something, something or someone faithless,
that will not return, undiscovered
star, that fade and are fading, but never entirely fading,
fixed, and that will not return, someone, someone or something
colorless, formless, and that will not return.