by Barry Goldensohn
To Lorry and Tom Whitaker
whose opposition is true friendship,
whos energy is eternal delight.
plates for a drawing by Thos. G. Miller
by Barry Goldensohn
To Lorry and Tom Whitaker
whose opposition is true friendship,
whos energy is eternal delight.
plates for a drawing by Thos. G. Miller
I
III CROW DOWN
V
See this, the gross
ways that grief
makes our bodies mock us:
hiccups jerking us and tears
flushing nosesfrom the head's
hidden channels; nerves that loop
our stomachs and that clog
all the obscure valves that make
you smooth, me stiff love-
making possible. Machines have
laws we live against, across.
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1
When we hauled
it up into the biting wind
from the dark bottom of the flooded quarry
the arms were still outstretched as if they still
held the wheel. The grappling hook tore
the pants to the bent knees. It was the Chief's
second cousin's uncle, or something distant.
As we stood there silent,just with the wind
whistling between us, the chief straddled the thing,
covered his cold shame, and tried to bring
down the rigid outright arms, and flatten
down the knees, grunting as he wrestled,
cursed, gasped for air, as both bodies
flailed in this ritual of late love
to order, to straighten, to compose a man.
2
His glasses steamed. My eyes were full of sweat.
I could not see him through the row of corn, just
his
steady chop and grunt in pace with mine.
At the garden's end we grabbed the hose, staggered,
drank, caroused, and doused each other down.
3
Three were in the car: you and I
together, David alone.
David was driving. The intense talk
was tiring. I was tense. I leaned
forward and you touched my back,
and all of David's deep-grained solitude,
as he saw you, clenched into his face.
O wife love David too, and touch him too.
4
Sister, for violence most compact and pure
brains beating brains and bloodless injuries
and hid bruises, forgive this poisoner.
I apologise in pain for unbending knees.
It should be easy to kneel to give, much more
easy than this parting cold kiss at the door.
5 / EUCHARIST
If, as his therapist said,
he hated women, he was still
capable of charity for suffering,
regardless of sex. His province
was suffering for love: an almost
chaste pederast, tortured
by his students, nubile boys,
in ways they never understood
though he did in his silence,
as they used him, his house,
his car, his time, and his timid
inability to demannd, expose,
refuse, ask, anything.
His summers in Mexico
were freer. In Tehuantepec
once, he was accosted (as the Cops
and Prosecutors say) by a child,
this one a girl, and since compassion
was clear on his face, they talked.
In conclusion, he took her home
to warm food and clothes,
her first nest. That he made
no demands amazed her:
his manner unaccountable
in her world as small and hard
as her green plum breasts. The third
night she crawled into his bed
and tried' ingenuous child,
to return in her only way
his charity. She failed and saw
his pained gratitude, shame.
Then, as a silent votaress
or priestess wholly gone
in devotion, returned to him
a charity with mouth and hands.
The crucial edge of
road had disappeared
in the night's rain. Around the slick curve
the car slid off, started down
the long steep drop to the creek and hung,
two wheels snagged on a pipe along the cliff
above the tops of the tall wavering firs,
so precarious, time vanished in that
stern order of delicate infirm balance
before they dared to breathe. And then, one
by one he fed his children through the open
window to the road, youngest first,
all five in order, from Joshua the baby
to his teenage girls and then he last,
at last.
7
She is open like a melon,split ; eyes and mouth
admitting all,fixed ; thighs like a fallen
wall through which a great force passes unopposed ;
the game evasion at an end, abrupt.
She will stay open, has
stopped her light touch.
To push away to sigh, to breathe deep, to smile,
would be retreat, returning tight to home:
the soft door in deep confusion, closed.
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1 / RECOGNITION IN BED
She who sounded,
throbbing in his arms,
as if her whole body rang a choral
Jubilate for the little death, now shakes
with fear of death, at large, inside.
The arms that hold her now
seem straws that scratch her as she passes;
she is shrinking as the sweat dries; keening
like the car radio, a shrill Kyrie
within. And he, abandoned and astringent,
sees her shaking body pass from him,
sink into the pillow, yielding bed,
her panic locking both of them in cold
dull armor in the dark.
2/CAGE SONG
A ccomplice, let
us get it straight.
We are together in this cage,
it is late. If I sing now, you suffer.
If I do not sing, I rage.
3 /AESTHETIC DISTANCE
Loving you is heavy
loss.
Every other thing burns, breaks
away: occupation, craft, the cold
concentration on the poem,
the strenge Satz. I am tangled
in your long thin fingers, your dizzying
mouth and what it gives, withholds
and gives, control me. I can write
for you only, for your hot, exacting
heart. Stay away. Let me keep
my slow even motion going now,
with what I give, given cooly
with a dry glass grace. If you
arrive, twist your mouth to
my ear and say, "Why do you give
such dry harsh flowers,"
my thin balance breaks.
4 / COLD PASTORAL
IN THE COMPANY PARKING LOT
When the blizzard stopped
we dug,
even though we knew what we should find.
But we were numb to it. We breathed out ice
that frosted on our beards and furs, giving
the slow mounds of cloth and skins we made
stiff white masks. We beat our hands
to keep them live
and dug for the stilled car.
The snow locked in the
fumes which worked fast.
The boss's wife was crouched above the smith
on the front seat: her face was buried
in his neck and he in her. When we pulled
them out things broke off. Ears. Splayed
fingers. The couple snapped apart. The boss
hoisted up his wife by a bent leg
and laid her on the bed of the throbbing truck,
an up-ended savage figurine,
stuffed, frozen into pure acceptance.
We could not see his
eyes through frost
and we were glad that he could not see ours.
He yanked out the brittle smith and fell
on him, and broke the slow pace of all
our movements, breaking all a man's weight
could break: the arched legs and arms, the head
thrown back in ecstasy; cursing, wrestling
with this fragile stone. Then, with a tire iron
he dove for his wife, and with flailing arms
dug and pried for the buried head of power.
5 / DISINTERESTED RESEARCH
Herewe maintain the pleasure
of rationality and define at leisure
the strategy, the pace calm,
disinterested, without urgency.
We pursue the great plan: leaving
the factories standing, farms
productive enough to keep the force
and personnel we'll need alive.
6
Post coitium all of them are sad.
The pipes cry. The faucets drip below.
They look for god in bed, not men.
The fellow sweats, tomorrow has to go.
7 / ORDER: THE GAS CHAMBER
The gasses rise. The rest is automatic.
A fight for breath. The weak and old below,
the strong on top. Father stands on child.
A natural pyramid has formed. Will grow.
Watching her walk, surrounding
my chatter with silence,
watching her feel the snow grunt under her boots, white
under brown, and savor the play of late light texturing the drifts,
following with her eyes the strand offence wire up the hill,
beyond the circle of confusion, checking
out the old patterns, patting them down.
After I grabbed and gulped
lunch
I watched Steve sort and balance on his fork into a perfect
cone unruly peas and carefully shift the sweet symmetry
to his mouth, savor them, almost singly,
caressing each discovery that enters
that terrific organ of pleasure, his mouth,
watching him eat and smile the way nursing children do.
Watching Tom handle an
idea in conversation, caressing
with long exquisite fingers the perfectly sculptural
tall fortress cathedral of words, arranging
the sly qualifications so that the words touch
at all points the shifty ground, hanging it all
in an instant of utter stillness, before
the words drop out like shaped and numbered stones.
You and I Jack will sit
at the same table
at a sweet intense communion feast:
after drinking,
sad exiles, our California wine,
will eat the same food and I
will watch your mouth and jaws and throat
shift and press and slide and still won't know
the other room where you are Jack and eat.
The sacred is a bore
we ducked
(relief!) with shock resistant
waterproof resentment, ticking on
and off and on. The way we go
to different films together, bring
them closer with impatience. "But
you didn't see that?" O ingenuous amaze
with bright teeth! And so we get
together greedily and sometimes, which
is not required, tenderly, in frank
amaze, profane and tangled.
Made rude by love and
music, his daughter
taunts him with a rough doubling
of the double bass and drums. Her instruments:
the double bed, her hoarse tense boy, her room's
thin, resonant walls, her firm
young ass bouncing. Half the band comes
and goes by windows and the brass half
flounces through the house, betweentimes, mis-
understood and sighing with impatience, grass,
the hidden sun and "when" and "never." Father
smiles with thin lips, his lids close
and open over eyes like netted birds.
1
Everything I can't control, that slips,
rolls across the room and doubles back
with great weight and speed and heat-light
on great feet-a big cat-a bear-slack
when I expect resistancetense when I don't-
in grasping you I hold, hold on to, back.
2
Only two sacraments
have touched you:
communion and extreme unction. The rest
connect one with the world, but these, O these
are intimate, direct: the deafening breast,
clasped hands, the cross, kissing mouth
half open, bruising lips, the last, the best.
3
You are my banality
and arsenic,
I gave you both: the stale
come of sentimentalists, the douche-
corrosive, killing. You are lying, pale
and sleepless, everywhere in France tonight
beside some snorting, grunting male,
and in my bed when I am most alone.
4
Have I devised
you as my lover?
as myself? as you both? Do those slim hands
prodding at your meat upon the plate
(bored, you brood on steaming beef, your man's
face) serve both of us in this dismembering sea
where everything dissolves into ourselves.
On the essential head
features are holes, its surface
is chance decay, it chews
dirt and stones and teeth.
NOMOS, LOGOS
"...if there were
nothing else in heaven to delight the eye but the
great beauty of glorified bodies, that alone
would be very great bliss . ..."-Saint Teresa of Avila
Prayer would be relief.
No man,
husband or lover, will follow her
down, down to where she goes,
where flesh hangs like strung stones
on the arm and the numb hand knows
nothing to keep its cunning hold,
dropping book and glass and bone.
What she knows of ecstasy,
the going
out, away, of breath, leaving
the vague point behind the eyes
clear and high and ringing, comes
by the window, seeing the field of snow
lucid in the dark; feeling the silence
screaming in the leap of the cat
at the poised bird; or naked and cold,
shivering beneath a thin quilt,
staring at the fire.
Among her men, dissatisfied,
perverse,
knowing they never know her where she lives,
she has a restless sense of where the arm
would fall around
her, where the face
would touch her face, his few words.
Prayer seems the only
way to call
the figure of a lover knowing all
down from his distances to her.
His touch will shake her, throw
power through her, make her rough body
move with grace among her pots and show
to her, in light, her own transfigured face.
Is there a name, a high
clear trill
filling the mouth to bring him in,
tasting of him, resonant and full? Now,
the old search, the slow scrape down
to where he lives,
where no name
will reach and no word serves,
where the empty eye starves for clarity
perpetually gone, for the absurd
word to invoke the wordless dark.
We've both seen the girl's
hands, in seizures,
dig into each other as she mutters,
seen them whitening and then seep blood.
She is learning to distinguish and control.
The hands hold tight. She moves with stiff restraint
past the crowd that hoots behind all windows.
She will not smash. Her strong hands
are crosshatched with scars from smashed glass:
hands that twist with great strain from chaos
dissonance, from dissonance a kind of resolution.
The force of all this order is like music.
Beneath a naked bulb
her white
body centers all
the light
and makes the small room seem black;
a figure in a formal
portrait. She
plays Cranach's
Eve, and he her mirror,
a bland Adam, propped. He notes
the deliberate arrangements of her hair,
her hand hung as if broken, fingers
splayed, incapable of grasping;
but an inner poise
of self absorption he sees in thighs
and belly, broad, smooth, slung
to one side and forward.
"Only see
these white surfaces,
I
show you these.
Then touch
these small breasts
and shoulders
if you dare. They are firm
with their severe power."
And he,
without motion, rises,
falls,
turning like a shark in air.
All we could fix of her
was an open door, she
was so evasive, thin,
quick to run from us,
her stolid teachers wanting
her to focus. Now, she
is gathered and has found
the way. She is taken
by marriage and the cult:
purity in food and sex,
hatred of the body, loss
of Self submission to
the Master. One would think
all this renunciation
would make her vanish,
she was so little there.
But she's still alive,
her child is healthy,
fearless,
mauls my large dog,
attacks my garden hose, both
tame dragons, and she
who would be all
spirit
takes some flesh
on. Now
I regret all the
arguments
about the way with her
pig-headed husband.
That gentle man is no
abstract beast. He
has made her safe;
potted her and let her grow.
When
he was out of town for ten days
she took the high tapering scream of the great
diesel earth movers in the gravel pit
for rutting stallions across the river.
All the open flowers in the garden
and the wave of sweet air from the upper meadow,
clover, milkweed, wild geranium and yarrow,
the slow engorging cherries, all cruising cars
with their steady whine and low horns, charm
everything his distance has suppressed,
say the same hot, uncomfortable thing.
She
is afraid to go to bed alone and sits
among a pile of books, humming, and waits
for me to push aside my chair, climb
the stairs, and lead our little force against
the slow, ominous shapes that foul the night.
Underneath
their prints and weaves the girls
are naked. Under blue flannel shifts,
rough wool suits and suede, even under fur,
they have their furry places, snowdrifts,
and warm alcoves where the cat curls.
When they move, it all moves. Living under
vinyl coats, Egyptian cotton blouses, smooth
black silk sheathes it, keeps it warm
and ready for the hand. Beneath
the surfaces are surfaces, swelling, calm,
varied with their seasons. Clothes conceal
like words and skin: what they cover (even Gothic
drapes, classic folds, baggy comic
stacks, starched habits) they reveal.
ON
MEETING
THE BLESSED VIRGIN, JANE AUSTEN
To be seen for once with
clarity!
by eyes so quick only
the catch lights flicker, marking
my complacency and vanity
before I say "Of course, of course."
She'll note the way my
eyes rip her dress
in search of friendly meat, but pass
and talk of Austerlitz, how numbers
(a mercy) protect us
from contact with the merciless facts.
Then I grouse about renting
out
my house: "I am not fond
of the idea that my shrubberies
will always be approachable." She will,
how I pray for this, laugh down grace.
In all sounds I hear
you come for me.
The irregular clatter
of your second-hand car
coming from miles
away, I hear in the wind
that chuffs in the chimney
with the loose flue.
I stretch and fill with rescuing noise
the silence around me.
I watch
her walk about the room
playing spider, with long strides, stretching
legs and arms to circle everything.
She picks up lamps, books, ciqarettes,
the wandering jew, my pants and calculates,
then looks at me with the same look
and back to them again, without
a break in stride, checking, checking.
She plays with power, likes to think
I move because she makes me move.
I seem safer that way, she
less exposed. She stops and checks
the mirror, pats her hair and curls
her lip to check her teeth and gums.
If she thought this queer game was real,
and that I did not move from love, because
I love her and I love to move,
she would pull I'll her legs and arms and die.
When all out mothers
sit on Empire chairs,
slim, miniaure women always poised,
and the shapes,
O, of lost fertility
cunningly cantilevered cunningly hung,
it takes a young girl to be
so openly a matron, full
of pride in booming breasts and hips
and O, the shape, a great bell rung.
My God! She knows I'm
staring at her thirty
feet away, five feet behind. The corner
of her eye catches every time she looks
at the crap she types. She pivots to confirm,
eyes wide-strength in a fast bold stare.
She rises and revolves
across the room
like a minor planet. The great hips
and buttocks never move, yet she moves;
legs and waist and torso wave like stalks
anchored in the earth that sway and flow
their own way.
To ride on that great
world (not like little
girls that groan
for air), one must be an astronaut
or mountaineer.
1
My breasts are tin sunflowers
stylized and radial, my arms
are coiled springs, my lank
body a cloth sack, draped
over sticks. O women
do not let the vanity
of being made of meat
keep you from seeing my beauty.
Our differences are trivial:
cherish impurity and these
rough untidy surfaces.
2 / WOMAN WITH OUTSTRETCHE
Sweetly she greeteth
me;
she greet eth every wight,
in Jesu roy souveraine,
with the same outstretched grace.
"Come a mon cour demesne."
A wedge of black wire net
her charm doth signify,
her belly's open smile.
A lover fair and
free,
an overweight butterfly,
she has been mine
and theirs.
and reason telleth
me
that she will also be
yours and yours and yours.
3 / WOMAN IN A LONG DRESS
She is a forceful backward
lady.
Her stone face, with features
like scratches on its surface, made
by wind or boys with harder stones
or rain, wears a long dress,
a smooth pure cylinder to the floor.
And O that dress has a big hole
behind, through which everything
that enters and leaves that backward lady
with a flat face must pass.
4 / FIGURE OF A WOMAN
The way men grab at me,
the way their hands rasp and flow
and hold is so goddam sweet
it makes me want to throw
all my clothes
away and screw
the whole world and you.
Aftershe told their story
with courtly dignity
and would retreat wordlessly, I reached
out to seize her free arm and said:
"I must know more. Did you both tie
all those deaths together as you died
both on Giancotto's sword?
Did he burst out first, fumbling,
impatient at the ten years' delay,
leaving you mothering or cold,
wondering after all, Why? Or were you
so overfull that you exploded,
screamed and flooded, sounding ring on ring,
to bring him in with you, amazed;
or to paralyze him, spin him back,
afraid of all that force? Or was it
a long farce ofjoint performances
grinding in and in,
grating fatigue at the cold drill?
Or did you come with textbook tenderness,
at once, together,
one spirit making
one body there on the soft grass
dying with the sword?
The meaning of your deaths and the entire
gesture depends on this. Is it a fable
of the old imprecision of the flesh,
its frailty, absurdity,
weak service,
or of its rare success?"
She whispered, "No matter. No matter."
And as both bodies smoked away
into that boneless spiral of lovers, I fell,
as limp after truth as lovers after love.
THE CROW DOWN COMFORTER
"Jusqu'à
l'heure de l'oiseau noir
Annonçant la fermenture légale du coeur."
-Yvan Coil
Because your wife has
run off with one man
only, count yourself among the fortunate.
Down a down hey down a down
You have disovered, simply,
the limits
of trust and knowledge. Besides, he is like you.
hey down a down
Consider him whose wife
with clear eyes sailed
his Triumph into a motorcycle club.
Down a down
...her wiry and disciplined
body with shrill
cries to each delighted member. Everyone screamed
hey down a down
She has acted out the
joyful fantasies
of starvation and despair. Those at least are
Down a down
He has discovered a further
limit: that when
each of them loved
No-one, the other became No-one For love.
With a down derry derry derry down down.
THE
LETTER
KILLETH,
THE LETTER GIVETH LIFE
They lied so long, so
well to one another
that words, any words, astounded speech
that drops in stone fists, the soft
stuff that charms from the arrogant and gruff,
bare bewildered sounds, any words, even
the slow, the backing up and lunging
stalled words that fight and stop, inchworm
on, in, for true feeling, all words lie,
drift, bob on racing surfaces, are
light flecks that betray the movements
of the dark cat's light muting fur.
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Sustaining unbreathing
poise, arms crossed,
legs crossed and re-crossed, balancing
our rigid bodies (O your shrouded breasts),
our eyes evade and check with grim skill.
Not touching. Stiff deliberate
revisions
of position : as precise as diplomats
around, around their heavy chairs; or birds
in flight that touch only to court or kill.
Slow gears
tick,
recirculate
by habit.
"No it
isn't fun,
it is just
burning and lying
to both men,
most to myself,
driven blind
without
choosing
(Give me! Leave
me alone!)
straightforward
measures for my
needs, or what
I thought
were needs. The
rabbit
trapped in head-
lights keeps
swerving out
and out."
1
With smooth strokes, the skin, the quick, precise
thermostat, was broken. Demian
was drawn still warm in the open square;
his entrails steamed as warm things will in snow.
Because we fought our
fathers
in his clear fair mind
he's strengthened his defense
against the press of us.
The skin on his long slim
provoking hands has now
thickened. He touches
heavily, quickly, but
unfeeling; pokes
about with broomsticks
in the dark of us.
3
Stretched between bitches, his tight skin
is closed to concupiscence and sin.
He is a proper husband now to wife,
to wifely mistress, to the wife within.
Our squames are cities
of the gram-
positive aerobic
floral souls
that hang on us,
their colonies, communes.
And each touch and brush does violence,
disrupts bacterial
millenia.
Yet knowing this
we kiss and kiss
again with sweaty long caresses
that convulse our
dull proles,
our masses. From
our submarines
we torpedo all the dams and flood
the whole ancient world, cities
hived on deep swamps
below.
5 / NATURE MORTE
She moved against the far wall, dropping
clothes like a fledgling shaking down out,
stopped and arched her lank arms back
to spread her long black hair out.
To a final silent cadence she rolled,
slow, her eyes above my head
and held: held by her own time less
pose and by my sharp intake.
From her staged abstract daze her eyes widened
in delight; she smiled; they widened more,
in fear. She caught: could not bring down
her arms, her breasts would sag; bend forward,
her taut belly would be slashed
with creases; she could never bear
young to gorge her, tweed her bright skin.
Snared, her eyes fixed, she let time die.
Some Greek witch, an
arrogant Diotima,
told me at a party, "my dear fool,
you are afraid of your emotions." Banal
advice! never having seen the clenched
face and hands strain to tear the stiff
limbs apart, destroy the order of my life,
its stupid dripping pace, its dead mask.
She does not know my northern home, has not
seen or heard the spring river throw
its black muscular violence through ice.
The tall conspire to
defraud the dwarfs.
No force is needed. The freaks
have no recourse of any sort against
the graceful and beautiful. Passionate squeaks,
accepting rumbles, the
bright cathedral
thighs swing open and they fall, plumb,
dizzy, caution abandoned. Slowly, they recover;
the whispering behind the wall they come
to recognize. Then, by
sharp intelligence
and tight cooperation, speaking in close
codes, meeting at night with knives,
they slice her up and win control and lose.
He has Kaddish in his
voice,
a high throaty whine, a whine;
suppressed tears for all loss. He
is guilty of everything he can
imagine. Life is a slow choke.
He cannot close the holes
through which
the aching salt races, mouth and eyes.
Pissing tears. Ejaculating tears.
He has walked the plank,
stripped;
bobs, a shrinking spot on the ever
widening sea chopping around him.
Wind and water do this,
and snow in sun
down mountains and across the bad lands,
eroding into patterns of the peeled leaf
and body. Wearing stone down,
rivering through rich fields and sand,
scraping land to bare vein and bare nerve.
It was better other times.
In winter
with the earth frozen still, we could still
move together; in that silence, live.
But now your shrill voice abrades away
with this flush spring thaw, my skin and me,
and leaves me standing here in my bare teeth.
This is no dream. I am
here awake,
eroding as things soften and move-
even marble is driven to movement
in my hand the deliberate glacier's
gifts lie ready, heavy granite, sharp obsidian;
as they cleave, I cleave, break away and down.
Here we are locked. Let
all who think
that loving the indefinite
is easy, look at the cold, black
devices in our hands, listen
to us squeeze words out.
TESTIFYING
IN DIVORCE COURT
The impossible contract breached, we here
foregather to prove to their Honors that those
we have seen slain and self-slain, slay.
And our elaborations for the bar appear
a sprightly, courtly entertainment to divert us
from its strict simplicity; that they hate
each other; life together is their wish
to die hourly; clenched, the heart stops.
Deliberate as statesmen
we ignore
each other publicly. Within,
hilariously, we admire the skill
with which we play unconscious, cold.
Such hot, gay virtuosity!
And tomahawks and great hearts
beneath the bison robes and dark
poker faces at the powwow.
So cloaked, the need
to speak out straight
or kiss the soft corner of your neck,
there, below the ear, will die.
Our elaborate dishonesty
will lie like truth.
1
The place that she has never gone is wild.
That much she knows. She feels its map careening
in her hands, blown by a hidden wind
in wild touching, an anarchy of turn
and plunge; tongues caress the trees, bodies
torn and open in its dark. Then,
when she sees his eyes engage with hers
among their friends or in a dim room alone
her throat restrains the scream of its savage women.
2
She attempts maturity: to turn,
with dignity, away from truth.
A knife of mind reveals
the small bones of her hand:
not in death; alive
with blood and active nerves;
when uncovered, cold.
A lost phrase returns:
"One should never see one's bones."
3
Seed catalogues arrive on time, and seeds
for starting in the window. Guards against the winter
sunlight and the snow that make the house
shadowless and dizzying. Anchors in the window
to peer at. Reminders of time and the movement of season.
4
Every footfall
shakes the house.
Cupboards roar and shower stalls
roar back. There is a time for stillness
when every presence seems a messenger:
the water pipes are voices; insects
reveal great purposes; the drape of ferns,
designs that must be stared at, in great
quiet. The ceiling cracks are going
someplace with significance.
5
Dance is strain.
To move with the boneless grace
of the stalk of grass that sways against the porch:
to be purposeless like that, the hang of its flower,
to accept the movement of air, she
must be deliberate. She knows a dancer's hand,
to hang, fall, splay like that,
must be all control.
6
She sees those women among fat, ragged trees.
Their dance releases. The lines her mind connects
and hands hold firm, her life
unravels now. The man upstairs asleep
intrudes on her, guards against her passage.
Old dog. Worn rug. Partner in the old dance
where everybody moves in time.
Familiar stranger, like the flesh
of her back. But to be boneless, sustained
by release, a deathdance, held in love,
holding, handless.
How thin the thing is,
amazing
that it keeps intact so long,
through long shrill arguments with dry rigid faces,
that inner freeze reserved for the drawn-
out tedious sieges of the other ego.
The inner car horn blaring on forever
hasn't broken it, and suddenly perhaps
at the sight of weakness or an old
trick of the hand, it will open, the familiar
staggering balance restored.
Through the scope he
moves absurdly,
unaware across my cross hairs, stiffly,
neither arms bend nor legs bend.
He drops a milk can silently. His silence
is my distance:
old movies and the moon men.
Yet always in the background
he hears
some noise: someone driving up, getting
out loudly, entering slow and close.
He is too familiar. . . too far to shoot.
Light
to Erich Auerbach
1
The even light, the north light,
burns no details, caresses
and defines the subtlest grain:
floor boards in an old loft, dust,
paint and grease on old machines;
pores and soft hair in faint patterns.
Red and yellow toys scattered
on the grass in this light shake
with clarity. All objects
stay separate. Talk is logical
and clear. The moment disappears
into the steady movement of events.
2
In sun, across snow, across summer hayfields,
walking, blinded by light. The clatter
from one's pockets is like
distant, gigantic machinery. From the woods
a horse screams, the sun so bright
nothing can be seen within. One
guesses wildly, feels the weave of
everything against
the skin.
3
Special definitions:
moonlight;
frostlight; after rain by streetlight,
when the manhole covers all reveal
themselves as Byzantine.
Frost and dawn:
the delusion of a leaf, its idea
of itself, with edges and raised surfaces
white and definite, rigid with cold,
all the fuzz of movement gone.
Last. The river's color
which is varied,
look, as the skin of your arm, is black
by moonlight when everything is space
and contour, and each opaque face reflects
one light. You see lines on walls,
figures, that you never see by day.
4
Beware the dark.
It is
dense with clichés.
What do we know in the dark?The ocean trench bottom
with unending currents
tumbling things along,
touched by quick albino fish without eyes,
by colorless anemones, eaten
by nameless things, abraded away.
Another dark...
By day dull, at night
vatic:
when the daily
important distinctions,
schedule, time and distance
go, then the dream light
gathers to great
syntheses, hidden
causes, to the trans-
figured details of your life,
lights the blind
suck and cry.
5
Innuendoes of light, where we spend
our lives in and out of doors and heads.
Lamps and windows shine and shadow for us,
reveal issues by their choices, play
on surfaces and grillwork, parquet,
mosaics, inlays, carved mahagony on desks,
finding and hiding things in drawers
and corners. Too little is explained.
In garages cars reveal their bumpers
as we pass. From the window ledge
a glass spatters light about,
a bunch of flowers holds it, a man
against the window stops it.
There is much to be assumed
about him, what the flowers and his face
(what we see of it) can say.
What is his history? Why
does he hold himself that way?
Disguise has cleared
us now
from accidents of self:
from blotched skin, protruding
nose and jaws. It leaves
attraction pure, beauty
in bearing, tendency; the long
slope of a back, the sway
of breasts and hair; the way
body extends and turns
the masked unknowing eyes
like tenwatt bulbs
right before your face
with pure want-abstract
woman, abstract man.
The little boys around
us,
crop-dusting pilots, motorists,
flexile professors behind glass
and young career bureaucrats
with stiff seething wives on wheels,
all eyes, are spying on us
from the woods, the road, the air;
the littles giggle from the trees
at our heat-dazed caresses
in the grass; at my stiff cock-
hilarious; your tanned body's
moony breasts and ass-mysterious
shadows and your thatch;
our slow stoned sun-
intensified embrace. The hot
eyes of whisperers are crammed
full as we of hungers, all
devour us as we devour ourselves.
THE
ALERT SCRIBE
Dynasty V.
2650 B. C. (Louvre)
The limbs rest easily
as long
settled stacks of logs: the face
is ready, tense with held breath;
a stretched poise about the mouth
and wide nostrils; ears are open jaws;
inlaid eyes of alabaster, black
stone, silver and rock crystal shine.
All the intake valves are open
with disciplined attention. This
is pure giving. Speak to him,
he listens and his eyes are suns.
Every day, e ven on the
lays.
the fat Padre plays the harpsichord
in the adobe courtyard.
Children dance
around him, race around that elegant
inlaid instrument, a round that lush tree
whose broad leaves are nearly black. The yard,
the high walls, are lurid-yellow as lemons.
When Padre jumps up, run they never know
whether he will join them in their ring.
that stress of brilliant limit energy sustained,
or pirouette, florid and screaming.
THE
FOURTH AND LAST ATTITUDE
(Moksha)
And in the end, detachment.
The shaking hand
releases the twisting girl, the beet face retreats
to white and grey. The man is free to leave.
Where? Is free to find where, but he
must leave, detach from all served and loved:
the gravity of family in long gowns;
two friends beside the door with pursed mouths,
nodding; his shrill, stinking village. Now
he learns to know. For this, the inexhaustible
delusion was the only preparation.
He has climbed the thin, shaking, free-
standing ladder and the silent comedy demands
he go ahead, over the top to nothing,
to spin , flail his arms, churn the top rungs,
flapping like a plastic tarp; the ladder weaves;
a full breath; he goggles at his hands ; falls
while the young run officiously across the field
and the flickering camera swings to them.
THE
LISTENER
ASPIRES TO THE CONDITION OF MUSIC
for Janos Starker's
performances of the Bach cello
Because a bow across
a cello
moves with such precision that the strings
fill the air with that progression of exact
vibrations that ensnare the ear, that hammer,
anvil, stirrup all transmit the movement
of, and move themselves, and move
the mind in such complex voluptuous
sensations, moving everything within to make
it dance its court and country dances in a
suite of dances no human body
ever danced, or could dance, because
air will not support our heavy bodies,
some thing in us dances, lets us die
a little, making music of us, of the still
gross grounded lump that listens.
SKETCHES THAT WILL OFFEND THE FAMILY
1 / ANCESTORS
None of them came with an occupation:
functionaries, at best, in a loose
settlement of Jews. Ritual slaughterers,
circumcisers, things that with a dose
of Polish vodka anyone could do.
Nothing to defend them from the new
cringing need for approval and praise.
2 / THE CALCULUS OF MINIMA
My great-grandfather
came to Brooklyn
from Sweden, settled among the Swedes,
outlived his four wandering sons,
and toyed with mathematics in the front room.
He could compute, in an instant,
the number of times a tied bird would need
to fly around a post of given size
to the limit of a given length of rope.
3 / MOSES, MOTHER OF
US ALL
One uncle is a
mild womanish man:
his handshake is soft, a kind of touch or kiss;
a garment worker and old unionist.
He spent the war delivering to Brooklyn
hundreds of young men,families,
and children from the Nazis in Pilsen.
On a quiet street among the baby carriages
I saw, once, a young Polish Jew, a giant,
throw his arms around him, bury his face
in my uncle's soft chest and cry,
babbling in Yiddish," brought forth... brought forth."
4 / AVE, THE SILLY SHEPHERD
My saintly cousin
teaches idiots. (Affinity
of spirit.) Parades them through the school
reciting Kipling, "keep your head," and Yeats.
O they shine, he shines, worried parents shine,
even the Priest shines, when, after a year
of patient drill, a giant Mongoloid,
without mistake, could hail Maria in Latin.
LINE
UP
the silent vigil
against the Vietnam War
Montpelier, Vermont,
1967
1
With the silent Quakers here we still
line up like Jews : witnesses to suffering,
but now by choice; one whose life was given
randomly by German border guards
in 'thirty-seven ; the rest of us who've
learned about the will to violence domestically,
the trim slice of eye and hand in homes
and streets, thrown between the parked cars
and garbage cans, between the kitchen table
and the wall. There is enough of dying
in living to teach the tough
and the impure of heart that innocence
is not the only argument for peace.
2
The state offices
are full
of homely people.
The homeliest
and loneliest walk by us.
I would like to kiss them.
Even the puffy old men
and the gimpy girls
with pimples. But it would
embarrass them.
It would
do no good. So
I stand here
and smile at them in silence,
trying to look like someone
who really wants to kiss them,
their mother or the prince of peace.
3
Across the street
in a carnival-colored car
a young man and woman sneer at us
between their rough attempts to meet.
We unite them in contempt. The unity invites
his quick hand to breast or thigh; she slaps
and scowls; he leers; she sulks and re-aligns
her dress and then her face (for us); they turn
to us and then begin again. We serve
a purpose here: embarrassed panderers.
The game was not erotic.
It was power.
Both had jaws and shoulders forward, earnest.
He had power to take and she to keep
what here lay crossed. On some damp rural
mattress they will fight, when we are gone
and leave this cycle incomplete.
Cratylus stands, forever
pointing
at the river and says, refining
on his master Heraclitus, "One
cannot step into the same river once."
I am neither desperate
nor blind.
A toothless man, paralyzed by truth,
passive, seized by change and shift, I am
conceding nothing by the need to bathe.
The river argues symbols
move the mind.
The rush of water past the sloughing skin
returns me to the bank, extends my arm,
renews the still symbol of all motion.
The still symbol only.
Self is never still,
is never self. No one bathes. And f I must
remain, reminder that I don't exist,
what has this to do with flesh and dust?
Cats
are massive, even
little cats. Their grace
is light movement of weight.
They should be made of stone.
A
SHACK IN THE SIERRAS
"... cities
are the only source of inspiration for
a truly modern contemporary art."-Zhivago
Because the Ranger said
that spiders, snakes
and wood rats took it over, lording it
beneath the shaking boards, on quivering walls,
in drawers, on the soft, suspect bed, and in
the small windows leaving dirty lace,
this place invites, enclosing here a steady
scraping wildness, the compact industry
of vermin getting food and cover, each
another's meat. Standing at the door,
blind in brightness, I can feel (retreating
from the thought) like Christ or Hamlet
fated to redeem this rotting shack.
On this soft floor I can understand
the grip of simple answers-purifying
fire and violence, rather than the slow
decay of daily politics, resistance,
cleaning the poisoned bodies bit by bit.
Retreating from the thought, it's easier
to pitch a tent, return to the city,
paint an apartment, lead another life.
Pigs and goats had eaten
the ancient rose bushes,
all leaves and soft twigs
from lush Arab trees
nursed home from the crusades;
finally every green thing;
then lace curtains, linens,
hangings on the relequaries,
the knuckle bones of saints,
manuscripts and tapestries.
After the rationed wine
and cheese,
the people ate the pigs,
then the goats, rancid, wiry,
cats, candles, falcons, dogs.
They held court, judged,
ate their mortal part themselves.
The castle was a desert.
In the gray dust, thin
men and polished arrows,
spears and shields; dim stars
with no lines between
them.
THE JUDGES
Thejudges twirl their
fat mustachios about,
lick their lips red and toss their thick boots
over the arms of their archiepiscopal chairs.
The judges smooth and
pat the ink-line bands
of hair on their flat scalps, tighten their
ambiguously wavy mouths and cross their legs.
The judges shake their
white manes about
their white faces, bellow and fill their lungs
rising out of their deep chairs.
The judges clasp and
unclasp their slender fingers,
compress their squealing teeth, force
their attention,
attention and drilling eyes.
The judges brace their
legs and separate
the long approaching line to left or right
along the railway platform, tapping
with a white baton the quick or slow.
The judges warm behind
their glasses, smile
benign disingenuous smiles, their soft brown
curls and beards surround entangling questions.
The judges adjust and
maladjust their ties,
impatient with this hot interpolation
riffled into their prim figures and facts.
The judges point distractedly
to one bench
or the other, caress their quilted faces,
turn to check their files and lose their places.
The judges lean back,
discreetly suck their teeth,
tap their paunches, count the flies in the webby
high window, hearing it all repeat and repeat.
The judge nods yes out
of the warm light
behind him with wide eyes framed by the golden
glare; rests his left hand in the book on his lap
and reaches out his right, relaxed and open.
Passionate and dazed
by lack of grasp
of all they've seen, the bleared saints
come back to speak to us, assembled
quietly here in stiff backed chairs.
His blond hair wisps
around him,
hers, restrained in one perfunctory
knot. They stare, blue eyes wary;
mouths are soft, pursed as if to kiss.
So full, words seem alien:
they drop slowly out, some whispered,
or muttered in great bursts that lapse
in self-absorbed silence. They look
wide eyed around to check
that we
are still miraculously there. So much
is lost. (We understand and lean
forward in our chairs: We're here. we're here.)
Every word is soft, urgent
and they speak in stories:
the curious sheriff and neighbors, the stray
child, the small
particulars of
that dizzying life where
each touch
and each person
touched, wing
tip to wing tip, are
vulnerable, snared in air, resigned.
No flush limb I ever
loved has parted
under scalpel or bone saw, thudding
into the surgeon's pail or plastic bag.
Only the milder ailments
whiten faces
around me in the room, none will vanish
among the cooling bodies in the wards.
No glass or steel or
jellied gasoline
has discomposed the clear skin or parted
sharply any person dear to me.
Time is gentle to my
colleagues, adds
only dignity, even to the dull;
improves my students immeasurably;
seasons and frees my
wife and ripens
slowly with care my children. Easy, easy
to gloat now. I live in a land without death.
Tight, compact, quick-
moving men with fast
hands wheel and wheel
sharp without pause
for breath or balance
in the drills, double-
time in close, suppressed
rhythms and the rhythm
of suppressed rage,
clenched jaws, white
nails and knuckles that
release by shuddering the frame
not with the detached
(ah) delights of snipers
but taking the whole body
with a full clip's burst.
MY friends are not in
trouble. There
is time to talk of trees and the delights
of women's company, the broad view
from this high lawn, be taken by
the perfect word and blindly turned
to music by some cadenced phrase
before the time comes. Before the young
mechanic and the fat check-out boy,
both compulsive sinilers, before, armed
and arrogant at 4a.m., they come.
In Vermont you stare
directly at the sun
with impunity in winter-curtained, protected
by clouds. To be friendly you forget the use of speech:
presence is radiance
enough. Oh, grocers may be garrulous
but lovers (who count) grunt. Here
the way is laid with small cares:
chickens, cows, dry hay
and cold, stalled old cars.
Here the names of the inconspicuous dead
are all in place in crossings, corners.
Here the scale is human-small.
Slate gravestones.
I wish that I were
loveless
blind and shrunken in superfluous New York.
It's like that olive
tree, once
sacred to Zeus's children, now
standing fresh from the nursery, slim,
traditionless, along a white suburban fence:
sanctuary for no wrecked, blind
wandering kings; just with limbs
too long and too thin, unsure
with an isolated childish beauty,
in and out of history and place.
THE
AMERICAN DREAM
OF THE UNENDING FRONTIER to Frampton's kidney
To wander with a case
of cold beer
in that obscure country
where the Arkansas
the Colorado and the Platte
begin to south
and west and north,
as white and twisty
headwaters, and to piss
in all of them
in all directions, there
to spread the Great
West with my waters,
and with this perhaps
persuade Charon to permit
a last piss in Styx.
Ruthlessly drunk, walking
through the park,
we laughed until we had to sit and wait
for air on the cool grass. The poor whore,
the poor lugubrious whore, drunk and fat:
"I've lost my innocence, every bit of it,"
she said. How marvelous! How right! Her words
the most innocent for centuries!
We saw her patient virtue fall from grace
in one nine-day Miltonic plunge,
and nine nights of booze, Lysol, grease,
accessory to same Evangelist's
Convention or Retreat. Poor thing. Poor thing.
And now you come to me distressed with power,
roaring like an undergraduate
idealist or our poor old time whore,
"I've had to dump myfriends," as if you never
knew the rules you chose to play by
to turn our failing Commonwealth to Truth
and get to where you want to be, alone.
THE POEM IS WHAT IT'S LIKE HERE
The thing said:
voices, human voices,
messages. I have
a message for you,
Sir, from some-
one not here,
for you:
what it feels like
to be here,
slap of air
there, the cold
thinning the smell
of the black river;
skimming birds
that
turn and vanish
over the dense
banks
into the glare,
you, gone.
1/ DON JUAN IN HELL
He slides in with greased
reflexes, sets
down his coat and starts the insistent hot
whisper in her ear, hunched, trousers fat
with lust, his mouth a small frozen o.
How far will she go? Will she resist?
Turn off the t.v. That was the climax of the show.
2 / -----'S PETITION
TO STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Set me at a table
in the sun,
feed me Cappuccino and the young
and I will be a sage. Either sex
will do. The poet is diverse, beyond
bias or fixation, cf. Keats.
Myself, I am a constant
daydream of poises and cool laughter, contempt
and devastating lines. Hire me. Hire me.
3 / THE STUD IS AN ANGEL
It's not a game of numbers, it is proof
of power. To be a stud is hard. The job
takes decisive execution: taste
and pleasure have no part. This strikes against
fragility of meat, limit by the law:
it is an art, refined, severe and chaste.
4 / EVEN THE REPROBATE
HAVE SECRET HOPES OF HEAVEN
The old roué reviews distastefully
his conquests of the young, regretfully
the middle-aged industrious and bold
voluptuaries (Pussycat, your paws!),
most painfully his prostate growing hard,
and hopefully, the graceful Mother of God.
5 / NEW CENTER OF GRAVITY
I keep in balance
and I keep it low,
remembering the fierce way you go
through the little world you once could fill.
The stubbed cock falls, obedient to will.
6 / "Whores, by
that rule, are precious" -Allen Tate
Contempt for whores is easy. Get to know
one or two, however, and you'll realize
that whores are people and, conversely,
people whores; ignorant and starved, that throw
away what they should keep; perversely
stay alive in spite of Truth. Great lovers prize
whores. They know themselves below their eyes.
7/ THE METAPHYSICIAN
The slow, linear precision of his speech
intimidates. No mind should dare
to lay it out so neatly, plot
its own intricately cracked mirror
with such thorough half-hot despatch.
8 / THE FORMALIST
He writes a verse whose order clearly states
a mind surrounding life, whose steady pace,
a pit, a pat, assures us that by night
the honest watchmen never lose a step,
their proctoscopic eyes are thick with light.
9
Our few jokes are
great. They make
the old confusion easy, ignorance
and beasts possible to live with, the dance
of pratfalls into the dark lake
from the bright dock acceptable:
as the music rises, lets us sink home
then rise once too Often, comb
out our hair and dance off...
10 / SIMPLE TALK
From an ancient
hate
of the formal lie
we now distrust
high resonance.
Just simple talk
of this or that
is how we likes
to lose our pants.
Copyright
© 1971, by Barry Goldensohn
The Cummington Press
With the Nomad Press
West Branch and Iowa City
