And leaning on your window-sill he’ll say one day you caused his will to weaken with your love and warmth and shelter. And then taking from his wallet an old schedule of trains he’ll say I told you when I came I was a stranger.
SELECTED POEMS
1956–1968
A PERSON WHO EATS MEAT
A person who eats meat
wants to get his teeth into something
A person who does not eat meat
wants to get his teeth into something else
If these thoughts interest you for even a moment
you are lost
MARITA
MARITA
PLEASE FIND ME
I AM ALMOST 30
THIS IS FOR YOU
This is for you
it is my full heart
it is the book I meant to read you
when we were old
Now I am a shadow
I am restless as an empire
You are the woman
who released me
I saw you watching the moon
you did not hesitate
to love me with it
I saw you honouring the windflowers
caught in the rocks
you loved me with them
On the smooth sand
between pebbles and shoreline
you welcomed me into the circle
more than a guest
All this happened
in the truth of time
in the truth of flesh
I saw you with a child
you brought me to his perfume
and his visions
without demand of blood
On so many wooden tables
adorned with food and candles
a thousand sacraments
which you carried in your basket
I visited my clay
I visited my birth
until I became small enough
and frightened enough
to be born again
I wanted you for your beauty
you gave me more than yourself
you shared your beauty
This I only learned tonight
as I recall the mirrors
you walked away from
after you had given them
whatever they claimed
for my initiation
Now I am a shadow
I long for the boundaries
of my wandering
and I move
with the energy of your prayer
and I move
in the direction of your prayer
for you are kneeling
like a bouquet
in a cave of bone
behind my forehead
and I move toward a love
you have dreamed for me
THE REASON I WRITE
The reason I write
is to make something
as beautiful as you are
When I’m with you
I want to be the kind of hero
I wanted to be
when I was seven years old
a perfect man
who kills
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LOVE ME
You do not have to love me
just because
you are all the women
I have ever wanted
I was born to follow you
every night
while I am still
the many men who love you
I meet you at a table
I take your fist between my hands
in a solemn taxi
I wake up alone
my hand on your absence
in Hotel Discipline
I wrote all these songs for you
I burned red and black candles
shaped like a man and a woman
I married the smoke
of two pyramids of sandalwood
I prayed for you
I prayed that you would love me
and that you would not love me
YOU LIVE LIKE A GOD
You live like a god
somewhere behind the names
I have for you,
your body made of nets
my shadow’s tangled in,
your voice perfect and imperfect
like oracle petals
in a herd of daisies.
You honour your own god
with mist and avalanche
but all I have
is your religion of no promises
and monuments falling
like stars on a field
where you said you never slept.
Shaping your fingernails
with a razor blade
and reading the work
like a Book of Proverbs
no man will write for you,
a discarded membrane
of the voice you use
to wrap your silence in
drifts down the gravity between us,
and some machinery
of our daily life
prints an ordinary question in it
like the Lord’s Prayer raised
on a rollered penny
Even before I begin to answer you
I know you won’t be listening.
We’re together in a room,
it’s an evening in October,
no one is writing our history.
Whoever holds us here in the midst of a Law,
I hear him now
I hear him breathing
as he embroiders gorgeously our simple chains.
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS
BE WITH ME
Be with me, religious medals of all kinds, those suspended on silver chains, those pinned to the underwear with a safety pin, those nestling in black chest hair, those which run like tramcars on the creases between the breasts of old happy women, those that by mistake dig into the skin while love is made, those that lie abandoned with cufflinks, those that are fingered like coins and inspected for silver hallmark, those that are lost in clothes by necking fifteen-year-olds, those that are put in the mouth while thinking, those very expensive ones that only thin small girl children are permitted to wear, those hanging in a junk closet along with unknotted neckties, those that are kissed for luck, those that are torn from the neck in anger, those that are stamped, those that are engraved, those that are placed on streetcar tracks for curious alterations, those that are fastened to the felt on the roofs of taxis, be with me as I witness the ordeal of Catherine Tekakwitha.
WHAT IS A SAINT
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of
