Now
I know why many men have stopped and wept
Halfway between the loves they leave and seek,
And wondered if travel leads them anywhere—
Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek,
The windy sky’s a locket for your hair.
—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961
YOU HAVE THE LOVERS
You have the lovers,
they are nameless, their histories only for each other,
and you have the room, the bed and the windows.
Pretend it is a ritual.
Unfurl the bed, bury the lovers, blacken the windows,
let them live in that house for a generation or two.
No one dares disturb them.
Visitors in the corridor tiptoe past the long closed door,
they listen for sounds, for a moan, for a song:
nothing is heard, not even breathing.
You know they are not dead,
you can feel the presence of their intense love.
Your children grow up, they leave you,
they have become soldiers and riders.
Your mate dies after a life of service.
Who knows you? Who remembers you?
But in your house a ritual is in progress:
it is not finished: it needs more people.
One day the door is opened to the lovers’ chambers.
The room has become a dense garden,
full of colours, smells, sounds you have never known.
The bed is smooth as a wafer of sunlight,
in the midst of the garden it stands alone.
In the bed the lovers, slowly and deliberately and silently,
perform the act of love.
Their eyes are closed,
as tightly as if heavy coins of flesh lay on them.
Their lips are bruised with new and old bruises.
His hair and his beard are hopelessly tangled.
When he puts his mouth against her shoulder
she is uncertain whether her shoulder
has given or received the kiss.
All her flesh is like a mouth.
He carries his fingers along her waist
and feels his own waist caressed.
She holds him closer and his own arms tighten around her.
She kisses the hand beside her mouth.
It is his hand or her hand, it hardly matters,
there are so many more kisses.
You stand beside the bed, weeping with happiness,
you carefully peel away the sheets
from the slow-moving bodies.
Your eyes are filled with tears, you barely make out the lovers.
As you undress you sing out, and your voice is magnificent
because now you believe it is the first human voice
heard in that room.
The garments you let fall grow into vines.
You climb into bed and recover the flesh.
You close your eyes and allow them to be sewn shut.
You create an embrace and fall into it.
There is only one moment of pain or doubt
as you wonder how many multitudes are lying beside your body,
but a mouth kisses and a hand soothes the moment away.
—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961
THE POEMS DON’T LOVE US ANY MORE
The poems don’t love us any more
they don’t want to love us
they don’t want to be poems
Do not summon us, they say
We can’t help you any longer
There’s no more fishing
in the Big Hearted River
Leave us alone
We are becoming something new
They have gone back into the world
to be with the ones
who labour with their total bodies
who have no plans for the world
They never were entertainers
I live on a river in Miami
under conditions I cannot describe
I see them sometimes
half-rotted half-born
surrounding a muscle
like a rolled-up sleeve
lying down in their jelly
to make love with the tooth of a saw
—from The Energy of Slaves, 1972
ON HEARING A NAME LONG UNSPOKEN
Listen to the stories
men tell of last year
that sound of other places
though they happened here
Listen to a name
so private it can burn
hear it said aloud
and learn and learn
History is a needle
for putting men asleep
anointed with the poison
of all they want to keep
Now a name that saved you
has a foreign taste
claims a foreign body
froze in last year’s waste
And what is living lingers
while monuments are built
then yields its final whisper
to letters raised in gilt
But cries of stifled ripeness
whip me to my knees
I am with the falling snow
falling in the seas
I am with the hunters
hungry and shrewd
and I am with the hunted
quick and soft and nude
I am with the houses
that wash away in rain
and leave no teeth of pillars
to rake them up again
Let men numb names
scratch winds that blow
listen to the stories
but what you know you know
And knowing is enough
for mountains such as these
where nothing long remains
houses walls or trees
—from Flowers for Hitler, 1964
DEATH OF A LADY’S MAN
The man she wanted all her life
was hanging by a thread.
“I never even knew how much
I wanted you,” she said.
His muscles they were numbered
and his style was obsolete.
“O baby, I have come too late.”
She knelt beside his feet.
“I’ll never see a face like yours
in years of men to come,
I’ll never see such arms again
in wrestling or in love.”
And all his virtues burning
in the smoky holocaust,
she took unto herself
most everything her lover lost.
Now the master of this landscape
he was standing at the view
with a sparrow of St. Francis
that he was preaching to.
She beckoned to the sentry
of his high religious mood.
She said, “I’ll make a space between my legs,
I’ll teach you solitude.”
He offered her an orgy
in a many-mirrored room;
he promised her protection
for the issue of her womb.
She moved her body hard
against a sharpened metal spoon,
she stopped the bloody rituals
of passage to the moon.
She took his much-admired
oriental frame of mind,
and the heart-of-darkness alibi
his money hides behind.
She took his blonde madonna
and his monastery wine.
“This mental space is occupied
and everything is mine.”
He tried to make a final stand
beside the railway track.
She said, “The art of longing’s over
and it’s never coming back.”
She took his tavern parliament,
his cap, his cocky dance;
she mocked his female fashions
and his working-class moustache.
The last time that I saw him
he was trying hard to get
a woman’s education
but he’s not a woman yet.
And the last time that I saw her
she was living with a boy
who gives her soul an empty room
and gives her body joy.
So the great affair is over
but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant
and so deeply unimpressed.
It’s like our visit to the moon
or to that other star:
I guess you go for nothing
if you really want to go that far.
—from Death of a Lady’s Man, 1978
