Some Trees: Poems Read online

  Why not now? The boy seemed to have fallen

  From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.

  That night it rained on the boxcars, explaining

  The thought of the pensive cabbage roses near the boxcars.

  My boy. Isn’t there something I asked you once?

  What happened? It’s also farther to the corner

  Aboard the maple furniture. He

  Couldn’t lie. He’d tell ’em by their syntax.

  But listen now in the flood.

  They’re throwing up behind the lines.

  Dry fields of lightning rise to receive

  The observer, the mincing flag. An unendurable age.

  Glazunoviana

  The man with the red hat

  And the polar bear, is he here too?

  The window giving on shade,

  Is that here too?

  And all the little helps,

  My initials in the sky,

  The hay of an arctic summer night?

  The bear

  Drops dead in sight of the window.

  Lovely tribes have just moved to the north.

  In the flickering evening the martins grow denser.

  Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.

  The Hero

  Whose face is this

  stiff against the blue trees,

  Lifted to the future

  Because there is no end?

  But that has faded

  Like flowers, like the first days

  Of good conduct. Visit

  The strong man. Pinch him—

  There is no end to his

  Dislike, the accurate one.

  Poem

  While we were walking under the top

  The road so strangely lit by lamps

  And I wanting only peace

  From the tradesmen who tried cutting my hair

  Under their lips a white word is waiting

  Hanging from a cliff like the sky

  It is because of the sky

  We ever reached the top

  On that day of waiting

  For the hand and the lamps

  I moisten my crystal hair

  Never so calmly as when at peace

  With the broken sky of peace

  Peace means it to the sky

  Let down your hair

  Through peaceful air the top

  Of ruins because what are lamps

  When night is waiting

  A room of people waiting

  To die in peace

  Then strike the procession of lamps

  They brought more than sky

  Lungs back to the top

  Means to doom your hair

  Those bright pads of hair

  Before the sea held back waiting

  And you cannot speak to the top

  It moves toward peace

  And know the day of sky

  Only by falling lamps

  Beyond the desert lamps

  Mount enslaved crystal mountains of hair

  Into the day of sky

  Silence is waiting

  For anything peace

  And you find the top

  The top is lamps

  Peace to the fragrant hair

  Waiting for a tropical sky

  Album Leaf

  The other marigolds and the cloths

  Are crimes invented for history.

  What can we achieve, aspiring?

  And what, aspiring, can we achieve?

  What can the rain that fell

  All day on the grounds

  And on the bingo tables?

  Even though it is clearing,

  The statue turned to a sweeter light,

  The nearest patrons are black.

  Then there is a storm of receipts: night,

  Sand the bowl did not let fall.

  The other marigolds are scattered like dust.

  Sweet peas in dark gardens

  Squirt false melancholy over history.

  If a bug fell from so high, would it land?

  The Picture of Little J. A.

  in a Prospect of Flowers

  He was spoilt from childhood by the future,

  which he mastered rather early and

  apparently without great difficulty.

  BORIS PASTERNAK

  I

  Darkness falls like a wet sponge

  And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch

  In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.”

  Her tongue from previous ecstasy

  Releases thoughts like little hats.

  “He clap’d me first during the eclipse.

  Afterwards I noted his manner

  Much altered. But he sending

  At that time certain handsome jewels

  I durst not seem to take offence.”

  In a far recess of summer

  Monks are playing soccer.

  II

  So far is goodness a mere memory

  Or naming of recent scenes of badness

  That even these lives, children,

  You may pass through to be blessed,

  So fair does each invent his virtue.

  And coming from a white world, music

  Will sparkle at the lips of many who are

  Beloved. Then these, as dirty handmaidens

  To some transparent witch, will dream

  Of a white hero’s subtle wooing,

  And time shall force a gift on each.

  That beggar to whom you gave no cent

  Striped the night with his strange descant.

  III

  Yet I cannot escape the picture

  Of my small self in that bank of flowers:

  My head among the blazing phlox

  Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus.

  I had a hard stare, accepting

  Everything, taking nothing,

  As though the rolled-up future might stink

  As loud as stood the sick moment

  The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong,

  Still, as the loveliest feelings

  Must soon find words, and these, yes,

  Displace them, so I am not wrong

  In calling this comic version of myself

  The true one. For as change is horror,

  Virtue is really stubbornness

  And only in the light of lost words

  Can we imagine our rewards.

  Pantoum

  Eyes shining without mystery,

  Footprints eager for the past

  Through the vague snow of many clay pipes,

  And what is in store?

  Footprints eager for the past,

  The usual obtuse blanket.

  And what is in store

  For those dearest to the king?

  The usual obtuse blanket

  Of legless regrets and amplifications

  For those dearest to the king.

  Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

  Of legless regrets and amplifications,

  That is why a watchdog is shy.

  Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

  These days are short, brittle; there is only one night.

  That is why a watchdog is shy,

  Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.

  These days are short, brittle; there is only one night

  And that soon gotten over.

  Why, the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying!

  Some blunt pretense to safety we have

  And that soon gotten over

  For they must have motion.

  Some blunt pretense to safety we have:

  Eyes shining without mystery

  For they must have motion

  Through the vague snow of many clay pipes.

  Grand Abacus

  Perhaps this valley too leads into the head of long-ago days.

  What, if not its commercial and etiolated visage, could break through the meadow wires?

  It placed a
chair in the meadow and then went far away.

  People come to visit in summer, they do not think about the head.

  Soldiers come down to see the head. The stick hides from them.

  The heavens say, “Here I am, boys and girls!”

  The stick tries to hide in the noise. The leaves, happy, drift over the dusty meadow.

  “I’d like to see it,” someone said about the head, which has stopped pretending to be a town.

  Look! A ghastly change has come over it. The ears fall off—they are laughing people.

  The skin is perhaps children, they say, “We children,” and are vague near the sea. The eyes—

  Wait! What large raindrops! The eyes—

  Wait, can’t you see them pattering, in the meadow, like a dog?

  The eyes are all glorious! And now the river comes to sweep away the last of us.

  Who knew it, at the beginning of the day?

  It is best to travel like a comet, with the others, though one does not see them.

  How far that bridle flashed! “Hurry up, children!” The birds fly back, they say, “We were lying,

  We do not want to fly away.” But it is already too late. The children have vanished.

  The Mythological Poet

  I

  The music brought us what it seemed

  We had long desired, but in a form

  So rarefied there was no emptiness

  Of sensation, as if pleasure

  Might persist, like a dear friend

  Walking toward one in a dream.

  It was the toothless murmuring

  Of ancient willows, who kept their trouble

  In a stage of music. Without tumult

  Snow-capped mountains and heart-shaped

  Cathedral windows were contained

  There, until only infinity

  Remained of beauty. Then lighter than the air

  We rose and packed the picnic basket.

  But there is beside us, they said,

  Whom we do not sustain, the world

  Of things, that rages like a virgin

  Next to our silken thoughts. It can

  Be touched, they said. It cannot harm.

  But suddenly their green sides

  Foundered, as if the virgin beat

  Their airy trellis from within.

  Over her furious sighs, a new

  Music, innocent and monstrous

  As the ocean’s bright display of teeth

  Fell on the jousting willows. We

  Are sick, they said. It is a warning

  We were not meant to understand.

  II

  The mythological poet, his face

  Fabulous and fastidious, accepts

  Beauty before it arrives. The heavenly

  Moment in the heaviness of arrival

  Deplores him. He is merely

  An ornament, a kind of lewd

  Cloud placed on the horizon.

  Close to the zoo, acquiescing

  To dust, candy, perverts; inserted in

  The panting forest, or openly

  Walking in the great and sullen square

  He has eloped with all music

  And does not care. For isn’t there,

  He says, a final diversion, greater

  Because it can be given, a gift

  Too simple even to be despised?

  And oh beside the roaring

  Centurion of the lion’s hunger

  Might not child and pervert

  Join hands, in the instant

  Of their interest, in the shadow

  Of a million boats; their hunger

  From loss grown merely a gesture?

  Sonnet

  Each servant stamps the reader with a look.

  After many years he has been brought nothing.

  The servant’s frown is the reader’s patience.

  The servant goes to bed.

  The patience rambles on

  Musing on the library’s lofty holes.

  His pain is the servant’s alive.

  It pushes to the top stain of the wall

  Its tree-top’s head of excitement:

  Baskets, birds, beetles, spools.

  The light walls collapse next day.

  Traffic is the reader’s pictured face.

  Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits;

  Worms be your words, you not safe from ours.

  Chaos

  Don’t ask me to go there again

  The white is too painful

  Better to forget it

  the sleeping river spoke to the awake land

  When they first drew the wires

  across the field

  slowly air settled

  on the pools

  The blue mirror came to light

  Then someone feared the pools

  To be armor enough might not someone

  draw down the sky

  Light emerged

  The swimming motion

  At last twilight that will not protect the leaves

  Death that will not try to scream

  Black beaches

  That is why I sent you the black postcard that will never deafen

  That is why land urges the well

  The white is running in its grooves

  The river slides under our dreams

  but land flows more silently

  The Orioles

  What time the orioles came flying

  Back to the homes, over the silvery dikes and seas,

  The sad spring melted at a leap,

  The shining clouds came over the hills to meet them.

  The old house guards its memories; the birds

  Stream over colored snow in summer

  Or back into the magic rising sun in winter.

  They cluster at the feeding station, and rags of song

  Greet the neighbors. “Was that your voice?”

  And in spring the mad caroling continues long after daylight

  As each builds his hanging nest

  Of pliant twigs and the softest moss and grasses.

  But one morning you get up and the vermilion-colored

  Messenger is there, bigger than life at the window.

  “I take my leave of you; now I fly away

  To the sunny reeds and marshes of my winter home.”

  And that night you gaze moodily

  At the moonlit apple-blossoms, for of course

  Horror and repulsion do exist! They do! And you wonder,

  How long will the perfumed dung, the sunlit clouds cover my heart?

  And then some morning when the snow is flying

  Or it lines the black fir-trees, the light cries,

  The excited songs start up in the yard!

  The feeding station is glad to receive its guests,

  But how long can the stopover last?

  The cold begins when the last song retires,

  And even when they wing against the trees in bright formation

  You know the peace they brought was long overdue.

  The Young Son

  The screen of supreme good fortune curved his absolute smile into a celestial scream. These things (the most arbitrary that could exist) wakened denials, thoughts of putrid reversals as he traced the green paths to and fro. Here and there a bird sang, a rose silenced her expression of him, and all the gaga flowers wondered. But they puzzled the wanderer with their vague wearinesses. Is the conclusion, he asked, the road forced by concubines from exact meters of strategy? Surely the trees are hinged to no definite purpose or surface. Yet now a wonder would shoot up, all one color, and virtues would jostle each other to get a view of nothing—the crowded house, two faces glued fast to the mirror, corners and the bustling forest ever preparing, ever menacing its own shape with a shadow of the evil defenses gotten up and in fact already exhausted in some void of darkness, some kingdom he knew the earth could not even bother to avoid if the minutes arranged and divine lettermen with smiling cries were to come in the
evening of administration and night which no cure, no bird ever more compulsory, no subject apparently intent on its heart’s own demon would forestall even if the truths she told of were now being seriously lit, one by one, in the hushed and fast darkening room.

  The Thinnest Shadow

  He is sherrier

  And sherriest.

  A tall thermometer

  Reflects him best.

  Children in the street

  Watch him go by.

  “Is that the thinnest shadow?”

  They to one another cry.

  A face looks from the mirror

  As if to say,

  “Be supple, young man,

  Since you can’t be gay.”

  All his friends have gone

  From the street corner cold.

  His heart is full of lies

  And his eyes are full of mold.

  Canzone

  Until the first chill

  No door sat on the clay.

  When Billy brought on the chill

  He began to chill.

  No hand can

  Point to the chill

  It brought. Where a chill

  Was, the grass grows.

  See how it grows.

  Acts punish the chill

  Showing summer in the grass.

  The acts are grass.

  Acts of our grass

  Transporting chill

  Over brazen grass

  That retorts as grass

  Leave the clay,

  The grass,

  And that which is grass.

  The far formal forest can,

  Used doubts can

  Sit on the grass.

  Hark! The sadness grows

  In pain. The shadow grows.

  All that grows

  In deep shadow or grass

  Is lifted to what grows.

  Walking, a space grows.

  Beyond, weeds chill

  Toward night which grows.

  Looking about, nothing grows.

  Now a whiff of clay

  Respecting clay

  Or that which grows

  Brings on what can.

  And no one can.

  The sprinkling can

  Slumbered on the dock. Clay

  Leaked from a can.

  Normal heads can

  Touch barbed-wire grass

  If they can

  Sing the old song of can