Rivers and Mountains Read online

Is one of the world’s longest rivers, like the Amazon.

  It has the Missouri for a tributary.

  The Harlem flows amid factories

  And buildings. The Nelson is in Canada,

  Flowing. Through hard banks the Dubawnt

  Forces its way. People walk near the Trent.

  The landscape around the Mohawk stretches away;

  The Rubicon is merely a brook.

  In winter the Main

  Surges; the Rhine sings its eternal song.

  The Rhône slogs along through whitish banks

  And the Rio Grande spins tales of the past.

  The Loir bursts its frozen shackles

  But the Moldau’s wet mud ensnares it.

  The East catches the light.

  Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes

  And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.

  The Po too flows, and the many-colored

  Thames. Into the Atlantic Ocean

  Pours the Garonne. Few ships navigate

  On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen

  On the Elbe. For centuries

  The Afton has flowed.

  If the Rio Negro

  Could abandon its song, and the Magdalena

  The jungle flowers, the Tagus

  Would still flow serenely, and the Ohio

  Abrade its slate banks. The tan Euphrates would

  Sidle silently across the world. The Yukon

  Was choked with ice, but the Susquehanna still pushed

  Bravely along. The Dee caught the day’s last flares

  Like the Pilcomayo’s carrion rose.

  The Peace offered eternal fragrance

  Perhaps, but the Mackenzie churned livid mud

  Like tan chalk-marks. Near where

  The Brahmaputra slapped swollen dikes

  Was an opening through which the Limmat

  Could have trickled. A young man strode the Churchill’s

  Banks, thinking of night. The Vistula seized

  The shadows. The Theiss, stark mad, bubbled

  In the windy evening. And the Ob shuffled

  Crazily along. Fat billows encrusted the Dniester’s

  Pallid flood, and the Fraser’s porous surface.

  Fish gasped amid the Spree’s reeds. A boat

  Descended the bobbing Orinoco. When the

  Marne flowed by the plants nodded

  And above the glistering Gila

  A sunset as beautiful as the Athabaska

  Stammered. The Zambezi chimed. The Oxus

  Flowed somewhere. The Parnaiba

  Is flowing, like the wind-washed Cumberland.

  The Araguaia flows in the rain.

  And, through overlying rocks the Isère

  Cascades gently. The Guadalquivir sputtered.

  Someday time will confound the Indre,

  Making a rill of the Hwang. And

  The Potomac rumbles softly. Crested birds

  Watch the Ucalyali go

  Through dreaming night. You cannot stop

  The Yenisei. And afterwards

  The White flows strongly to its …

  Goal. If the Tyne’s shores

  Hold you, and the Albany

  Arrest your development, can you resist the Red’s

  Musk, the Meuse’s situation?

  A particle of mud in the Neckar

  Does not turn it black. You cannot

  Like the Saskatchewan, nor refuse

  The meandering Yangtze, unleash

  The Genesee. Does the Scamander

  Still irrigate crimson plains? And the Durance

  And the Pechora? The São Francisco

  Skulks amid gray, rubbery nettles. The Liard’s

  Reflexes are slow, and the Arkansas erodes

  Anthracite hummocks. The Paraná stinks.

  The Ottawa is light emerald green

  Among grays. Better that the Indus fade

  In steaming sands! Let the Brazos

  Freeze solid! And the Wabash turn to a leaden

  Cinder of ice! The Marañón is too tepid, we must

  Find a way to freeze it hard. The Ural

  Is freezing slowly in the blasts. The black Yonne

  Congeals nicely. And the Petit-Morin

  Curls up on the solid earth. The Inn

  Does not remember better times, and the Merrimack’s

  Galvanized. The Ganges is liquid snow by now;

  The Vyatka’s ice-gray. The once-molten Tennessee’s

  Curdled. The Japurá is a pack of ice. Gelid

  The Columbia’s gray loam banks. The Don’s merely

  A giant icicle. The Niger freezes, slowly.

  The interminable Lena plods on

  But the Purus’ mercurial waters are icy, grim

  With cold. The Loing is choked with fragments of ice.

  The Weser is frozen, like liquid air.

  And so is the Kama. And the beige, thickly flowing

  Tocantins. The rivers bask in the cold.

  The stern Uruguay chafes its banks,

  A mass of ice. The Hooghly is solid

  Ice. The Adour is silent, motionless.

  The lovely Tigris is nothing but scratchy ice

  Like the Yellowstone, with its osier-clustered banks.

  The Mekong is beginning to thaw out a little

  And the Donets gurgles beneath the

  Huge blocks of ice. The Manzanares gushes free.

  The Illinois darts through the sunny air again.

  But the Dnieper is still ice-bound. Somewhere

  The Salado propels its floes, but the Roosevelt’s

  Frozen. The Oka is frozen solider

  Than the Somme. The Minho slumbers

  In winter, nor does the Snake

  Remember August. Hilarious, the Canadian

  Is solid ice. The Madeira slavers

  Across the thawing fields, and the Plata laughs.

  The Dvina soaks up the snow. The Sava’s

  Temperature is above freezing. The Avon

  Carols noiselessly. The Drôme presses

  Grass banks; the Adige’s frozen

  Surface is like gray pebbles.

  Birds circle the Ticino. In winter

  The Var was dark blue, unfrozen. The

  Thwaite, cold, is choked with sandy ice;

  The Ardèche glistens feebly through the freezing rain.

  The Ecclesiast

  “Worse than the sunflower,” she had said.

  But the new dimension of truth had only recently

  Burst in on us. Now it was to be condemned.

  And in vagrant shadow her mothball truth is eaten.

  In cool, like-it-or-not shadow the humdrum is consumed.

  Tired housewives begat it some decades ago,

  A small piece of truth that if it was honey to the lips

  Was also millions of miles from filling the place reserved for it.

  You see how honey crumbles your universe

  Which seems like an institution—how many walls?

  Then everything, in her belief, was to be submerged

  And soon. There was no life you could live out to its end

  And no attitude which, in the end, would save you.

  The monkish and the frivolous alike were to be trapped in death’s capacious claw

  But listen while I tell you about the wallpaper—

  There was a key to everything in that oak forest

  But a sad one. Ever since childhood there

  Has been this special meaning to everything.

  You smile at your friend’s joke, but only later, through tears.

  For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.

  Apples were made to be gathered, also the whole host of the world’s ailments and troubles.

  There is no time like the present for giving in to this temptation.

  Tomorrow you’ll weep—what of it? There is time enough

  Once the harvest is in and the animals put away fo
r the winter

  To stand at the uncomprehending window cultivating the desert

  With salt tears which will never do anyone any good.

  My dearest I am as a galleon on salt billows.

  Perfume my head with forgetting all about me.

  For some day these projects will return.

  The funereal voyage over ice-strewn seas is ended.

  You wake up forgetting. Already

  Daylight shakes you in the yard.

  The hands remain empty. They are constructing an osier basket

  Just now, and across the sunlight darkness is taking root anew

  In intense activity. You shall never have seen it just this way

  And that is to be your one reward.

  Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living.

  The night is cold and delicate and full of angels

  Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up,

  The chime goes unheard.

  We are together at last, though far apart.

  The Recent Past

  Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination.

  As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling

  The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear,

  The oddest device can’t be usual. And that is where

  The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars

  There is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee

  Between the blinding rain that interviews.

  You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you

  Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass

  Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader

  Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed

  How it was a rhyme for “brick” or “redder.”

  The next chapter told all about a brook.

  You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave

  Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out “Aladdin.”

  I thought about the Arab boy in his cave

  But the thoughts came faster than advice.

  If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space

  The print could rhyme with “fallen star.”

  The Thousand Islands

  Keeping warm now, while it lasts

  In the life we must suppose, continuance

  Quickens the scrap which falls to us.

  Painless rigors, like thistledown,

  Strapped to us like a heavy pack

  The massed air hanging above.

  The tether of you to this bank

  To understand the flesh left splinters.

  Depths of understanding preside

  Shelving steeply into a kind of flow

  Stumble happily as through a miracle

  Opening around you

  Pinned to the moment.

  Your eyes reflect a hunting scene.

  A promise of so much that is to come,

  Extracted, accepted gladly

  But within its narrow limits

  No knowledge yet, nothing which can be used.

  You are grateful for the imaginary pause.

  No one had imagined that the storm would be like this

  To discover its heart. The blind enemy

  Exalting the possibility of defeat

  Behind glass first unthinkable then not so much

  It would be better if one smile

  The one successful day drew darkness from the folds around it.

  Meadows then might melt into something

  For play, the necessity gone. But your

  Idea is not continuing—a swift imperfect

  Condensation of the indifference you feel

  To be the worn fiber and bone which must surround you

  For the permanence of what’s already happened in you.

  Blackness plays no part; the eye

  Is black but there is no depth.

  It is the surface black which attacks the shape,

  Bending it to present uses.

  The face on the door a hundred million years old

  Slightly smaller than real life

  To accept the cold air and bread

  And cause, in the distance, an old satisfaction.

  Their simplest construction rising slowly toward

  Your neutral ceiling in which are capsized

  Forever afternoon smells and rich zero disturbance

  As you unharness the horse moves slowly back

  Changing too the position escapes you mild and drawn

  And prisons think restlessly shifting

  There are ever new arrivals

  New standard of living and expunging

  With a shout something you’d rather have

  These equators fixed you’d esteemed

  The discovery

  Only lacking to fail eagerly

  The approach of the cool marble subject

  An aphrodisiac in its tall gray flowering

  Into separate lengths later lost

  Brought down with it hesitancy

  The bent clouds’ arrow and rutted woods.

  At Pine Creek imitation the circle

  Had swallowed the useless mystery again

  As clouds reappear after rains.

  A Blessing in Disguise

  Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,

  But I, in my soul, am alive too.

  I feel I must sing and dance, to tell

  Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

  And I sing amid despair and isolation

  Of the chance to know you, to sing of me

  Which are you. You see,

  You hold me up to the light in a way

  I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps

  Because you always tell me I am you,

  And right. The great spruces loom.

  I am yours to die with, to desire.

  I cannot ever think of me, I desire you

  For a room in which the chairs ever

  Have their backs turned to the light

  Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

  That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.

  If the wild light of this January day is true

  I pledge me to be truthful unto you

  Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

  Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day

  On the wings of the secret you will never know.

  Taking me from myself, in the path

  Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

  I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you,”

  You must come to me, all golden and pale

  Like the dew and the air.

  And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

  Clepsydra

  Hasn’t the sky? Returned from moving the other

  Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of

  That severe sunshine as you need now on the way

  You go. The reason why it happened only since

  You woke up is letting the steam disappear

  From those clouds when the landscape all around

  Is hilly sites that will have to be reckoned

  Into the total for there to be more air: that is,

  More fitness read into the undeduced result, than land.

  This means never getting any closer to the basic

  Principle operating behind it than to the distracted

  Entity of a mirage. The half-meant, half-perceived

  Motions of fronds out of idle depths that are

  Summer. And expansion into little draughts.

  The reply wakens easily, darting from

  Untruth to willed moment, scarcely called into being

  Before it swells, the way a waterfall

  Drums at different levels. Each moment

  Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true,

  Only is the bou
nding from air to air, a serpentine

  Gesture which hides the truth behind a congruent

  Message, the way air hides the sky, is, in fact,

  Tearing it limb from limb this very moment: but

  The sky has pleaded already and this is about

  As graceful a kind of non-absence as either

  Has a right to expect: whether it’s the form of

  Some creator who has momentarily turned away,

  Marrying detachment with respect, so that the pieces

  Are seen as parts of a spectrum, independent

  Yet symbolic of their staggered times of arrival;

  Whether on the other hand all of it is to be

  Seen as no luck. A recurring whiteness like

  The face of stone pleasure, urging forward as

  Nostrils what only meant dust. But the argument,

  That is its way, has already left these behind: it

  Is, it would have you believe, the white din up ahead

  That matters: unformed yells, rocketings,

  Affected turns, and tones of voice called

  By upper shadows toward some cloud of belief

  Or its unstated circumference. But the light

  Has already gone from there too and it may be that

  It is lines contracting into a plane. We hear so much

  Of its further action that at last it seems that

  It is we, our taking it into account rather, that are

  The reply that prompted the question, and

  That the latter, like a person waking on a pillow

  Has the sensation of having dreamt the whole thing,

  Of returning to participate in that dream, until

  The last word is exhausted; certainly this is

  Peace of a sort, like nets drying in the sun,

  That we must progress toward the whole thing

  About an hour ago. As long as it is there

  You will desire it as its tag of wall sinks

  Deeper as though hollowed by sunlight that

  Just fits over it; it is both mirage and the little

  That was present, the miserable totality

  Mustered at any given moment, like your eyes

  And all they speak of, such as your hands, in lost

  Accents beyond any dream of ever wanting them again.

  To have this to be constantly coming back from—

  Nothing more, really, than surprise at your absence

  And preparing to continue the dialogue into

  Those mysterious and near regions that are

  Precisely the time of its being furthered.

  Seeing it, as it was, dividing that time,

  Casting colored paddles against the welter

  Of a future of disunion just to abolish confusion