I have been sitting still for two hours in a cabin on a mountain. The crickets give a pulse to the night. A fly bangs around inside my lampshade. His book lies open before me but I do not know how to approach the purity of this passage.
In all the scriptures of the West, has G-d ever spoken so gently?
THE ALTAR
There is a certain power in his book that cannot be denied even though you try to deny it in every word. Deny it here. Am I less disgusting than you are? Am I happier? Near the beginning of the Bible I am told how to build the Altar. It is to be raised with unhewn stones. You are such a sad hewer of stones. And you are an amusing enemy. Especially when you discover for us all your standards of hewn stone. You may worship here. You can rip a heart out on this paragraph.
COMMENTARY – THE ALTAR
There are many hearts baking on this altar. There is the heart behind the beautiful brown nipple that would not erect itself. There is the heart of one who fried to follow in my footsteps when I had stopped moving. There is the heart of one high above me who stooped to become my rival. There is the heart of the idolator who said that G-d was love alone. My maid’s heart is there, who served me too long. There is the heart that did not believe in the stone knife. There is the heart that envied and the heart that surrendered to the anonymity of this miracle. Among these few that I have offered there is my own, the heart of a translator who has fried to render into common usage the high commands of pure energy, who has not denied his own inclination to obey. If these hearts of mine are badly carved it is because THE ALTAR seduced me into a mood of happy careless butchery.
THIS MARRIAGE
I said, Because it is so horrible between us I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet. She said, That’s beautiful. Then I can commit suicide and the child falls into strangers’ hands. Great, I said. Yug, yug, yug, she said. What you did to me, I said. The lonely, we said. The nights of hands on ourselves. Your unkindness, we said. Your greed. Your unkindness. Your bitter tongue. Give me time. You never learn. Your ancestors. My ancestors. Fuck you, I said. You shit. Stop screaming. I can’t stand it. You can’t stand anything. Nobody can live like this. In front of the child. Let him learn. This is no good. Yer fuckin right it’s no good. This kitchen was once beautiful. Oil lamps, order, the set table. Sabbath observed. That’s what I want. You don’t want it. You don’t know what I want. You don’t know anything about me. You never did. Not in the beginning. Not now.
In the realms where this marriage was sealed, where the wedding feast goes on and on, where Adam and Eve face one another, the foundations are faultless and secure, your beast’s hair flares like black fire upward and your breasts, now in maidenhood, now in motherhood, draw down my face, our hunger blessed by sun and moon, a ring of dancers round the house where within the room is hid, where within the bed is undone, whereupon the hunger’s joined, where within the hunger speaks precise instructions to the chosen ones who cannot leave each other.
COMMENTARY – THIS MARRIAGE
This marriage is locked. It is impossible to enter. It is a marriage and operates like one, healing itself the moment it is condemned. In every house there is this marriage which cannot be explained. In our day it appears fragile and easily violated, but it is still the profoundest initiation, and one into which no stranger can intrude.
COMMENTARY II – THIS MARRIAGE
He hangs a crown over his filthy kitchen and expects us to put our hands together and say Grace.
THE PHOTOGRAPH
My dark companion photographs me among the daisies.
My life in art.
She is beautiful when she smiles.
She should smile more often.
We have the same nature.
We are lazy and fascinating.
One day we will go back to that creek in Tennessee
and she will shoot me with a .22.
Take one with my hat on.
We have lots of film.
I taught her how to greet a man in the morning.
These things have been lost
like the arch and the goldenrods.
She asked me to teach them to her —
forgotten modes I happen to remember.
I told her about the time
Adam and Eve tried to commit suicide
but unformed infants of the Milky Way
raised a house against them.
Some of the daisies are up to my thigh.
It is very bright.
The daisies shine back at the sun.
The wind polishes the air.
Some fool might try to pick out a lamentation.
Take one of us together.
IT’S PROBABLY SPRING
So-and-so is sick of all the shit but doesn’t feel that bad today because it’s probably Spring. The laundry in the sunshine tells the obscene family story of power and love but it doesn’t matter because it’s probably Spring. Jack is fat and Jane is twisted from the Plague. But you don’t have to choose today because it’s probably Spring. You’re nothing like the pilot, nothing like the matador, you’re nothing like the one I waited for, but I won’t rub your nose into everything you haven’t done because it’s probably Spring. I can listen to the bugle now, I can stand beside the old windmill, I can think about my loyal dog buried in the snow. Sally lost her fragrance and her broken heart won’t show but she’s going to bite her lip and start again because it’s finally Spring. The little lambs are leaping through the Easter hoop so the insomniac can get to sleep but he’s caught without his knife and fork because it’s probably Spring. It’s
