Samuel charters – collected poems

What Paths, What Journeys | New & Selected Poems

Samuel Charters i

First published in 2015 A Portents publication ISBN 978-15-084509-0-0 Š 2015 Samuel Charters All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Of Those Who Died was originally published in 1980 by Oyez Press in Berkeley, California. It has been revised for this edition.

Designed by Martin Colyer Cover photo by Nora Charters

Portents

What Paths, What Journeys New & Selected Poems Samuel Charters

Also by Samuel Charters MUSIC

FICTION

Jazz: New Orleans 1885-1963

Mr. Jabi and Mr. Smythe

The Country Blues

Jelly Roll Morton’s Last Night at the Jungle Inn

Jazz: A History of the New York Scene The Poetry of the Blues The Bluesmen: The Story and the Music of the Men Who Made the Blues Robert Johnson The Legacy of the Blues: Art and Lives of Twelve Great Blues Men Sweet as the Showers of Rain Spelmannen (The Swedish Fiddlers) The Roots of the Blues: An African Search

Louisiana Black Elvis Presley Calls His Mother After the Ed Sullivan Show The Harry Bright Dances

CRITICISM Some Poems/Poets: Studies in American Underground Poetry Since 1945

BIOGRAPHY I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik (with Ann Charters)

The Blues Makers

Mambo Time: The Story of Bebo Valdes

The Day Is So Long and the Wages So Small: Music on a Summer Island

Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation (with Ann Charters)

Blues Faces: A Portrait of the Blues (with Ann Charters)

Songs of Sorrow: Lucy McKim Garrison and Slave Songs of the United States

Walking a Blues Road: Notes and Writings 1956-2004 New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus A Trumpet Around the Corner: A History of New Orleans Jazz A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora

POETRY The Children The Landscape at Bolinas Heroes of the Prize Ring Days, or Days as Thoughts in a Season’s Uncertainties To This Place From a London Notebook From a Swedish Notebook Of Those Who Died: A Poem of the Spring of 1945 In Lagos The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping Things to do Around Piccadilly

MEMOIR A Country Year

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SWEDISH Baltics, by Tomas Transtromer We Women by Edith Sodergran The Courtyard by Bo Carpelan

ANTHOLOGY Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, Sixth Edition (with Ann Charters)

What Paths, What Journeys New & Selected Poems Samuel Charters

For – Annie – again – this last time.

“No words can say…”

The Poems

Love

1

Contradictions

2

Early moment “Into the touch of the wind’s greening” “There is no permanence of loss” “Nothing could have dimmed” “Laughing! – a blindness” “The meaningless of the past –” “I wait/the moment”

3

Childhood 10 A Poem Is 11 Looking for Michael McClure at the Corner of Haight and Ashbury 16 Cat’s Paw 19 Gifts of Things not to be Spoken 20 We heard 22 What Firelight Offers 23 Seven Songs for Joseph Cornell 24 A Song of Himself 32 What Love Remembers 36 Sueno – and again sueno 38 As I Stand at this Window 39 Waking from a half sleep 45 The room in the light 47 I turn, I touch my wife’s body 51 Like a child 52 “June 18. It’s hard to write.” 53 A small death 54 Midsummer! 58 In the Chapel 59 ix

We follow each other’s feet 60 The Maypole 62 Midsummer pleasures 64 The sound of wood soled clogs on the dance floor’s boards 66 Midsummer’s sorrowful tears 67 Tools 68 A light smell of sticks 69 Changes that have begun 70 Opposites 72 In the Winter’s Clasp 74 Leaves 75 “April 20. Almost an incandesance” 76 June 77 Through Children’s Eyes 79 The Poet Sees his Family Sleeping 80 Summer’s Island 86 The Old Women at Skansen 87 Boats Racing in the Harbor 91 At Karlaplan 92 Climbing to Moosebacke’s Heights 94 In Lagos 97 March 4, 1974 9 a.m. Yakuba Gowan Street, Lagos Waking in a Strange Room 109 Conundrum 111 A Man Dancing Alone on an Island in Greece 112 Hopi Corn at Walpi Mesa 114 Just Before Morning 115 How Smoothly the Gulls Turn 117 Summer afternoon with friends at Long Lake 119 The Drowned Child 123

x

The Swimmer 125 To Go with a Note 130 Distances 132 After the Rain 133 A Note on the Varieties of Locust 135 As I Walk with my Son 140 Of Those Who Died 141 News at Lunch 165 The Smell of Sumac 166 Learning 167 Unimportant Confusions 168 A morning’s thoughts, somewhere 169 Eliza Dances 170 After a Summer Phone Call 172 A Life of Trees 175 Generation 181 It was a December when no birds came 182

xi

Love

I know no limit to love – or I have found within myself no place where love ends.

However long I followed love within me – I found it still there beyond wherever I walked.

Paths of love, fields of love, there wherever I turned – as the sun is everywhere on these spring mornings when I stand in the new budding garden.

Wherever I look, far arched skies of love.

And what is it?

What is this I find within myself?

But I know no definition of love, just as I know so little of love’s limits.

1

Contradictions

My heart is that bent winged, laboring form of crow heaving through a sweep of cloud banked sky.

My heart is that jagged, darting form of a small bird harrying the crow from its flight.

My heart, my heart doesn’t know what it does.

2

Early moment

Light on my face.

It is quiet waking without you.

3

Into the touch of the wind’s greening something – lifts me as the expression of a face can lift me – fills me as a dream can lift me and so much of me can be lifted, can be touched by the smells of the greening wind.

A face’s stillness and I feel myself touched, by the one, by the other, and my hands slowly reach out to what has touched me.

A wind, a face I am touched I am opened.

4

There is no permanence of loss as there is no permanence of anything for more than a season (in which rain succeeds) but still I feel its pain – pain that has become its own being.

I say – I don’t know what I lost that within me there is no permanence of loss – but there is a permanence to what we lose and nothing fills the space left when someone leaves, goes out of the room and we wait in the lowering afternoon stillness we wait – for the sound of steps of someone returning – “Why don’t you know, why don’t I know, oh why don’t you know” – a song from an open window that could be of someone’s returning and in it the sudden feeling that the only permanence is loss its pain – despite what I said – always within me.

Beyond the season the season’s loss.

5

Nothing could have dimmed your – lightness – the pale gentleness of your cheek, could have coarsened the fragility of your eyes, mouth, made bitter the taste of your hair – In the touch between us I sensed those things I would have felt and held – what my eyes – would have seen if they were not closed by your frail kiss.

If I could have lifted my face – in the room’s half light to have seen the sweetness of love that drifted in the air around us, clinging to the wet skin of arms, thighs, your breasts a swollen budding in the dimness – our bodies following their own trembling pathway – the heaving line of shadow on the wall beyond us – the light from the window enlarging our bodies’ embrace – imperfect images of the movements within the heart.

6

Laughing! – a blindness of our eyes solemnly closed – but laughing as our arms clutch at each other’s arms, fervently learn the dimensions of each other’s backs, laughing as I bite at your breast and you scratch at my face laughing – in the fierce inequality of our struggling – in the tangle of sense that binds us feverishly together – in our wild confusions not knowing caring – if I have entered you – or you enclosed me –

7

The meaningless of the past – as if to go back to the yellowing of some other, some forgotten afternoon had meaning – could alter the things I have to tell you – now – the things I feel – now – as I slowly kiss you.

The senselessness of trying to follow our steps back to wherever we were that moment – to the smells of the street – a stain, paint on my shirt, another summer.

None of this has a meaning now to my fingers – on your breast to my mouth – as I slowly kiss you.

8

I wait

the moment to become myself – at last – pull off the sweater wrapped around my arms roll up sleeves start! (or is this already myself – the figure with his nervous hands stuck in his pockets? keeping himself warm?)

9

Childhood

Something out of childhood – orange streetcars on Ellsworth Avenue, and every fifteen minutes an orange earthquake rattling my unsteady bed.

10

A Poem Is

Sometimes it’s necessary to consider again what a poem is, since a poem’s shape can be as amorphous as a jellyfish, and if the question of shape is put aside the poem’s bouquet is as much an unpredictable possibilty as the taste of a long unopened bottle of wine.

A poem taken for granted is a poem that ceases to be.

I sometimes use poems just as I use the ceramic bowl on the table – only to hold things until I find someplace else to put them.

But there is something in poems that is much more than this.

A poem is a question I have to answer for myself, since I must know what it is I touch so casually.

What is the taste of a globed fruit?

11

1.

I can say that a poem is – silence.

I can begin with the silence of the unmoving word on its staring page.

Even to say the poem aloud doesn’t break its silence, since the silence is what is left unspoken between the words, beyond the words, at the endings of the lines, below the lines, the poem is the silence, the silence that the words create but cannot speak.

The poem is the silence of the lark’s song, its notes too high – beyond our hearing – its melody with no need of words, the invisible thread spun between the trees – visible only because it is hung with dew.

2.

A poem is – shape.

A poem is the shape formed from the jumble of words which has no shape, shaped from the jumble that at the end is left still formless.

The poem’s shape 12

is the silhouette of the confusions, of the uncertainties, of the indecisions, still left over when the poem was given what would become its own unlikely shape.

A poem is an antique ivory pendant that is all we see of the soul.

3.

A poem is – limit.

A poem is the limit – not of the crudely drawn flat earth on ancient maps, with their misty distances of ships dropping off the earth’s edges, trailing sea monsters down with them into the foam.

A poem is the limit we reach – finally – as we work to sort through life’s debris.

The poem’s limit is the edge of the sown field we’ve had patience enough to clear.

If I had the strength to clear more away – what I would leave would become the field’s new boundary.

A poem is the farthest dark line the sea leaves on the gray beach sand in the convulsion of high tide.

13

4.

I lie on the soaked sand, half asleep in what will soon be darkness, but I am kept awake by the restless powers there beyond me, by the sea’s might.

The poem is – the marks I leave, where my fingers, stretching into the rivulets of foam dig into the sand in their anxious reach.

A bird sang, I heard it calling for its lost mate. I heard it calling alone, uselessly all the night.

The poem was the beauty of its inflections, of its innuendoes.

5.

A poem is – finally – words.

You have to use something to hold the poem up, or like dry sand it slips down as quickly as you shape it.

So words do their work, piled up in expectant arrangements, except for the gaps where there weren’t enough words to finish, or one couldn’t be found that fit.

14

With words, finally, to use as a scaffolding, one hand holding the hammer, another the nail, I hammer away, banging furiously – and the poem is the silence when I stop, the shape the boards leave at the edges, and the edge is the limit of what my arms could reach.

Can I go now? Do you think I’m ready?

A poem is – the questions I have to go on asking, go on asking, go on asking.

If there were answers, they would be prose.

15

Looking for Michael McClure at the Corner of Haight and Ashbury

Hanging in the dark brown wind fog smells at the corner of Haight and Ashbury I stand looking – – for Michael McClure – looking – for someone to ask. Who? Someone must notice poets – someone notices species of gulls, the veins of stones – but who? A woman, young, could know – with packages outside of drab Mulready’s Department Store so – with my expression interested but nevertheless polite, I ask – “Do you know where I could find a poet who lives in the neighborhood, Michael McClure?” – but she just stares (afraid?) “Poet?

I don’t know – no – poet?” and despite my wistful eyes I need a haircut and my shirt’s a little sweaty – only a little – but not like the nice shirt on the plaster man in the window of Mulready’s Department Store, and already she’s leaving, hurrying – (Will she look back? the soft, pale mouth, the nervous eyes I never even saw?)

But I say to myself, only one person, and decide that a serious – yes – business man would know. The Unique Men’s Shop, “San Francisco’s unique” – a man just inside the door – “Poet?”

“You mean one of them with you know all the hair and beads? Just go up to any of them and smell, and if they smell real strong it’s a poet – and the girls –” 16

What does a poet have to do to be heard in his own city?

McClure – McClure.

(I talk to two girls and their smiles become furtive giggles.)

The sea drift hangs in wisps over the wooden buildings – I lean against a telephone pole, feeling the cold, I can ask a policeman I say to myself still standing at the corner of Haight and Ashbury and push hands in pockets to wait.

“Poet?” the red face turns, shifting his revolver belt, stares with metallic suspicion – “What do you want him for?

If it was alright,” narrowing eyes “you wouldn’t ask me. If you do find this – what’s his name? – poet – maybe you better let me know,” and he stands blocking the sidewalk, so not to loiter I walk a half block to Downey, up around the block to get back to Haight and Ashbury and see outside of Holcombe’s Jewelers someone once introduced to me as a professor of poetry. “Hey!” (smiling across the street to him as he slows at the curb with a briefcase under his arm) Wait as he thinks a minute – “McClure? Poet?” (clears throat) “Oh no.

There couldn’t be a poet living around here – I have any number of books, anthologies, anthologies, essays – and all the poets in them have been dead for years.”

17

So I leave – drift slowly along the street, stopping at store windows to look back at the people still passing the corner.

The fog’s drab breath empties the streets at Haight and Ashbury and I stand discouraged in front of a window of electrical appliances.

So few signs of a poet in his city. Who listens? knows? Who – as with light feet he moves through the city – – this city – these cities – Who calls him back?

18

Cat’s Paw

Your pressing, stroking hands – mine reaching, seeking – just as the great cats paw each other’s flanks.

We prod, we roughly nudge each other’s bodies as lions jab fiercely at each other’s sand brown hides – the hard claws silently sheathed – but with each stroke writhing as if our skins were torn.

19

Gifts of Things not to be Spoken

To be permitted to enter to enter to be conscious of the permission to enter with a leg’s slight shift to be received where nothing is to be seen but to sense the receiving is shared as hips spread open to be welcomed with slide of skin to hold to be held to be granted assent and nothing restrains to be drawn into (a breath held against a mouth’s pout a breath held cupped against a cheek) 20

to cling as

fingers cling to know the yielding within the arch of flesh the yielding within the cusp of endless space where there is no space to know to know to know to know that there is no no more no more to know.

21

We heard

So many words spent which neither of us heard in hard embrace heard only the breath heard only the stillnesses we heard which held all meaning The tongue our tongues which shape words the tongues’ swelling blood which holds all meaning – whatever meaning our hoarse whispered words contained – our tongues’ own language

22

What Firelight Offers

What strained hesitations that firelight smooths, what awkward hand withdrawn that the firelight’s hints draws back again, what arm bared becomes an arm warmed, what shadow of breast becomes a gleaming crescent of breast.

A body’s warmth turns to another body’s warmth in the firelight’s golden flood.

23

Seven Songs for Joseph Cornell

(For A. C., who was with me at the Whitney long long ago.)

1. Soap Bubble Set – 1936 (first version) So tranquil this head, this shifting ring of Jupiter, these silent rings of weights, this empty glass with its stone egg – I do as I am asked to do, I take my ease in this tranquility, I sit, I stretch out legs in this tranquil space.

I see this face oblong, this face oblique, this pale of dust, this crust of dust, and the scoop of this 24

thin clay pipe.

Not that I would use it, but to know it’s there, the tranquility of knowing if I wanted it it’s there.

I do as I know I am asked to do, I run an imagined finger over the pipe’s smoothed bowl.

So tranquil this head, this shifting ring of Jupiter.

2. Suite de la Longitude Cornell here gives me a problem – if I moved the box would the rings move?

I think about it, I think about the problem. Does the “art” just happen in the way the box 25

is propped up on its shelf?

Oh problem, Cornellian problem!

They don’t move, the six glasses, the glass marbles on their rods.

The round lines of longitude and the precision of the equator meet in an unmoving dance of ring and rod.

If I just picked up the box – would they move?

Would the dance end, would a new dance begin?

I look around, carefully start to lift a corner – I put it down.

Art should be left its mysteries.

3. Museum No, that little box can’t be a museum.

26

It’s too small, and museums are very big!

What am I supposed to think of twenty bottles capped with paper? of twenty bottles capped with thread in the little compartments of that little wooden box?

What am I supposed to think of the things saved? of the small jewels, clock years, butterfly wings, not even the whole butterfly, string, marbles, lovingly crumpled pieces of paper.

And then I have to think about myself – I think would I have saved all of that?

Do I have that much to save?

4. Medici Princess I wouldn’t have loved her, though her need to be loved is palpable, 27

I wouldn’t have loved her for the tint of her skin.

I wouldn’t have loved the obsessions in her face, this woman waiting for me to tell her why I must leave her, why I don’t love her.

And no answer of mine will light the stillness of those eyes, no murmur turn them from the tides of the moon beside her.

I wouldn’t have loved her, I wouldn’t have loved her, Though I see in her face the faces of other women I’ve loved, I wouldn’t have loved her.

I would only have drowned in the stillness of her eyes.

5. The Deserted Perch I listen, I stand, I listen.

The lark is split and I’ve found the music in the spring hanging wound 28

in a corner – I stand, I listen.

A perch by its nature is only music – since it isn’t a place, isn’t a doorstep, is only the place the feet rest.

The perch isn’t deserted, only never used.

Listen! the music, Listen! the lark.

6. The Crystal Cage So lightly bound, so loosely caged, this girlish face so new engaged with valentines and down turned eyes and darkness, fires, ferns, and skies – and the crystal grace 29

of girlish face, a ribbon, the laced, the modest eye of chastity.

So lightly bound, so loosely caged, this face, this face.

7. Americana Fantastica Sousa – I have need of you brassy and incessant, Ives – I’ve left a note at your office that I need a little score for the massed high school bands of the original thirteen states and soprano soloist.

Ruggles – one of your pondered chords to starts us off as daringly, deathdefyingly spring across the page three acrobats, two acrobats, one acrobat in tights and a shirt (spangled) who hang BY THE NECK! from a TRAPEZE! Yes! Above My God, Niagara Falls! And in the deluge below the Empire of State Building is SINKING! This fantastic realm of sad princes, of enraged King Kong, of the swimming moon 30

in the Niagara mist, missing its bridled veil, of the pensive, martyred Native American.

DELIRIOUSLY EXCITING! MORAL! Entertainment who dream (low the music) dream of Nigara Falls. those sweet martyrs of American dreams who mourn us all.

31

A Song of Himself ( An Uncertain Man Greets the Day)

“I am someone,” he admits to himself – “who wants to hide himself sometimes – I am someone who wants to go unnoticed on days like this when just like on any other morning I get up and I take those tentative steps that lead from sleep’s unpredictable wanderings to necessary considerations of the first of this day’s more orderly errands, which I begin with open eyes, shaved chin, ironed shirt, clean underwear, and that’s the person you see, you see – But that’s not me!

“For I’m a man,” he admits, “who hides himself from too many eyes.

I am someone you don’t really see!

I am one of those people who has too many masks hidden on his closet shelves.

“You see me standing here,” he wants to say to friends, “you see my calm expression, but what you don’t see are the 32

rings of perspiration my fingers can leave on the pages of the books I read.

You don’t see my lips, trembling sometimes, with a trembling as light as a moth’s fluttering breath.

You don’t hear my despairing heart crying out, ‘Hide me!

Hide me!’

“For I’m someone,” he admits to himself again, “who looks for mirrors to leave his image behind him.

Another poet once understood that the mirror where she looked at her face was more alive and more cruel than what she knew of herself, and sometimes I catch myself looking into a mirror for an anxious glance of this other self who perhaps is me.

“On those still nights,” he sometimes decides to himself, “without any beginning I can remember – or did I even notice? – as I work with the clutter of words inside my head by a light bulb’s shrill glare, I am always surprised to see that at dawn the sunlight’s still there.

And you might see me standing outside 33

on one of those mornings, knowing so little, but feeling so much, but what you would see – that isn’t me!

“For I am a man who is still only a suggestion,” he sighs, “only specifications and sketches.

I am someone who is still only a proposal.

Perhaps I am the man who will be built on this spot?

“But you?” he occasionally complains to himself, – “Don’t you hide yourself too – sometimes?

On those days when my despairing heart cries, ‘Hide me!’ doesn’t your heart in its days of despair cry, ‘Hide me!’

And if we passed each other, hurrying on the street, wouldn’t we hear the anxieties in each other’s murmuring voices?

“For I am someone who wants to hide himself, sometimes,” he hums to himself, “I am someone who wants to go unnoticed on days like this.

You think you see me here, 34

but is this only someone you might think you see?

Couldn’t this someone be only a figure that with considerable cleverness I’ve managed with these mirrors that contain me!”

35

What Love Remembers

1.

“I really don’t know you.”

“I have a small scar on my cheek.”

“I know that little, at least.”

“And a long scar still unhealed inside my heart –” “I didn’t know about it.”

“I could let you touch its opened edges.”

“Will it heal?”

“Will I know when you touch me?”

2.

“Was it in the morning – was it in the morning that we were… ?”

“Does it matter that it was morning?”

“That we were… I don’t know how to say it…”

“It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t morning.”

36

3.

“I felt your hand drop.”

“Did you see the sun as it rose from the trees?”

“I only felt your hand drop.”

“But didn’t you see the sun? the sun’s crimson edge! as it rose like fire from the darkness of the trees?”

“Only your hand leaving mine.”

37

Sueno – and again sueno

So often the word coming in the poems – sueno – dream – and I feel the strength of his concentration becoming dreams as he sits quietly talking to this gathering in a small auditorium, crowded as close as the space permits.

And always I will think of this day – April 8, 1968 – the day itself almost a dream – hearing Borges.

38

As I Stand at this Window

As I stand looking out of this window, I feel at just this moment an overpowering sense of being in this place, and that as I am standing here I become defined. Whatever in my life I’ve wanted to hold on to, whatever moments – whatever places, whatever loves – whatever my thoughts might have been – it could all be here, it could be here in this pooling flood of light in this fading afternoon, as I stand looking out of this window.

And I know this is what I tried to write so many times – what I felt I had to write – and this is what my poems have been, this is what I know poems must be – this attempt to hold the moment still, until the dream that is the poem becomes itself this moment, something I can feel pressing against my skin – something almost tangible.

My breath clouding the glass of the window is itself a poem.

39

Sometimes I’ve caught myself trying to put too much into the poems, found myself left with lines that limped with clumsy feelings, ideas I only half-considered, memories I’d better left forgotten, but the poem itself should be the moment itself – that you keep to fold up, crease, and put into a pocket.

And this is what I want to tell you – whoever is reading this – I want you to understand that this morning’s smells had the same ripening scents for me as your morning had its own heady scent, and what the poem is insisting is that life goes on, that the poem is its own sense of a breath being drawn, of lips opening, of hands touching.

Can you understand that I use poems to tell you what you know already, but perhaps didn’t perceive that I have known as well.

How can I make you see this?

Bring you to feel this?

If you could stand here just the way I’m standing at this window – 40

that would be the only poem I would need to write you, since finally it is this life, and this moment, that is the poem, and the poem is only its outline.

I can help you.

Go find a room that’s like this one wearing clothes like I’m wearing, and if I tell you what I’m thinking about then you’ll have the only poem I could write to you – the poem that is this moment, the poem that is this place, the poem that is this still room, afire with its sunset.

A place for you to start would be a shirt. I’m wearing a dark, woolen shirt, half unbuttoned, the collar is open, the sleeves rolled up above my wrists.

If you can find a shirt like it it should be a somber blue, with button pockets – my pants are light tan, cotton. I’ve been sleeping and working in them for three days. A light stain on my knee where I spilled paint – I’m not wearing a belt, my shoes are loose, rubbed leather with crepe soles – the shoes come above my ankles and I have on white cotton socks. If you can find clothes like them they should be used, worn, hanging loose over your buttocks, the thighs faded 41

where your hands rubbed as you sat.

And I’m standing in a low-ceilinged, white painted room, a few pieces of woven furniture, a straw mat, a low, round table with some yellow unlined paper, beginnings of poems scribbled on three or four pages – a ragged green-white handful of daisies in a stone vase – the sun is coming in the windows.

You have to look into the sun’s yellowing eye (the windows have square sashes, looking south and west) and you have to stare into the light.

The garden outside the window should be small, with a high, closed stake fence, a fringe of bushy trees beyond it, the brick wall of a building half blocking out the darkening sky.

If you can set up some of the furniture in the room – write something on some of the papers, even if it’s only a few lines of this copied out, and as the afternoon drifts on, as the sun shifts, look out of the window, the sun on your face, hands in your pockets.

Do you have the feeling of this moment now – as I have it within me – do you feel its presence?

No – there’s still more I have to give you.

42

If you know what I’m thinking then you’ll know what I’m feeling at this moment.

It was the sun that reached out to me, and I felt its turning, its considered movement as its yellow shape darkened beyond the sky, and in its drift I felt the drift of time, as my life yielded to its own tug of drift, a time that was almost beyond anything I could understand.

It was this sun that flooded my thoughts.

So if you have that much you have enough to begin.

Try it – go into the room that looks out on the garden as the slivered crescent of the sun slips into the trees. Now – do you sense this moment is continuing within you, as it continues within me?

That what I felt is what you’re feeling at this same moment?

This is the poem that I wanted to write you.

The poem that is the joy I know as I draw a breath, as I press my fingers against the window pane and feel the strength of my fingers, as I hear the sounds of ordinary life going on beyond the window, see a bird’s glistening body, 43

its still turning in the clear air!

So finally – here – in this room – what you love – you – I have loved and what you feel – you – I have felt.

This is all I could tell you in a poem – this is the poem I had to write you.

Standing at this window I feel you – whenever you come to read this – standing near me.

44

Waking from a half sleep

Waking from a half sleep I stand naked, listening to the stillness of the house filled with the light of midsummer.

I walk from room to room and the light grows – wanes – on the stairs, slips in from a small window high in the ceiling.

I see clouds everywhere through the window’s distances as the light fires the clouds, reddens the sides of the barn across the field.

I stop, trying to write, the shadows at the stairs’ turning too dark to see the lines of the 45

notebook, to see what I’ve scribbled.

In the spaces of the downstairs kitchen the light is pale as insects’ wings diffused through yellow curtains spreading on the paper of the walls.

I stand in the uncertain light spreading on the kitchen’s surfaces, the outline of the shapes looming as vaguely as the floor’s surface in the darkness beneath them.

Through the window I see the faint gleam of the river as it streams past the field’s darkness.

I hear only a stillness that bears within itself only movement.

46

,

The room in the light

I can’t find the image I want of the room – of its softness – the light’s stillness – without shadows.

,

I can’t get the feeling of being borne up on the light in the room – . borne above the room’s two beds set against the walls, the walls so faintly striped with dark lines marking the walls – the mirror over the wood of the wash stand, its china bowl – pale oriental curve – curve of light in the room, only the corners filled with eddies of shadow.

An old clock’s sound on the wall behind me – 47

carries me down again to the spaces of the light on the floor with its whir as the hours change, time hanging in a carved wooden box ticking loudly with a metallic rasp if I notice it, softly if I don’t – old turnings of wood, a pressed metal crest and the ornate metal tracings of the hands. I can’t read the time from the bed.

But still I can’t find an image for the trembling hesitancy of the light at the window.

It’s one in the morning and the sun is only a burnt orange crescent, draining the moon behind it, the mountain’s 48

ridge streaming with light as the sun drifts motionless beyond it.

It’s this light – now that fills the room.

I can’t find the image I want of this room – but the room itself is the image of what I feel, that time has stopped, that the sun has stopped, and I am borne up in the room, over its faint lined walls, its slop jar on its stand, muted in its dumb curve. The only thing I can think if is my breath – drawn in, forced out, and before it is forced out there is the stillness of the moment that it is held.

The earth, this moment, is suspended 49

as a breath, between one day and the next day, and I am borne on this stillness to the gilded haze of the horizon.

50

I turn, I touch my wife’s body

I turn, I touch my wife’s body to waken her to the light, but she has already been wakened by the light on her bare arms, her shoulders, on the stretch of her body under the sheet, and she takes a blanket, wraps in it, and sits at the window.

I have never seen her turn to the sun as she turns to this midsummer sun.

From the bed I see the serious frame of her back against the dim frame of the window, as her hand stretches in front of her and she pulls the curtain away.

In a way I know her, as she knows me, by the ways I’ve seen her, and she is new in this light.

I see her new, I have a new perception of her . in the gold of the light from the window.

I can see the gold of her body, even where her body is hidden beneath its blanket.

51

Like a child

“I think I’ve become a child again,” my wife’s voice as she walks from room to room.

“Do you remember how long it seemed to be light?

The days never ended.”

She stops in the light swell of the window, “It’s like that now,” walks again from room to room.

I see the darkness of her eyes, the slenderness of arms in the sleeves of her dark sweater.

“I think I’ve become a child again,” my wife’s voice, almost to herself in the room’s stillness.

52

June 18. It’s hard to write – lying on the shabby red quilt I’ve brought from the house to the patch of new mown weeds and coarse grass on the hillside below the barn.

I shouldn’t be trying to write – I should just be lying on my back and listening to the wind. The wind’s sound is more than I can get down on the pages of my notebook – listening to its loose sighs – listening to what’s beyond it.

It’s strewn the petals of the white larch blooming behind me and left them in a loose scatter across the empty pages of the notebook. I have to brush them off to begin again.

It’s hard to write lying outside on the quilt on the hillside.

53

A small death

I was sorry I saw it – the small, clumsy mottled bird, broken ribbed, broken winged, slight feathered body crushed on the stones of the farm’s dirt road.

For weeks I had seen the birds bringing food to the red painted box nailed to the barn across from my window.

Redstarts – the male orange, black, the female drab as the crushed young bird in the earth of the rutted road.

They stopped only in the uncertain darkness of the midsummer’s night, 54

hung on blur of wings in front of the crude box hole with bits of insect bodies, beak-bitten, thrust banner-like into the box’s dark throat.

And one morning the drab small female was on the ridge of the barn roof, chirping incessantly at an edge of weeds left to go to seed against the house. The male was on a sagging wire across the rut of the road.

My daughter saw it first, as still as a stick, as colorless as the mud, their single fledgling crouched in the weeds and grass at the road’s edge.

55

With a slow, whispered look it we left it to their fluttering excitement.

There are four cars that use the road it tried to make its way across.

I don’t know which of us it was that didn’t see the small, mottled shape the color of the dirt of the rutted road.

The female must have chirped to it to stay where it was, or in its clumsiness it couldn’t fly the few strokes to get off the road.

It could fly a little – by the day’s end it could have flown enough.

“We heard the birds crying then,” the family on the farm 56

said at dinner. And after that the male bird had desperately thrown itself at their daughter’s dog tied in front of the house, beside the earth road.

The flatness of the small death silenced the table, and I walked a little, kicking the stones of the road, and I leaned against the red boards of the barn, listening for the birds, but there was only the whine of insects.

There was nothing moving at the dark mouth of the nest.

The birds had already left it.

57

Midsummer!

The house door now is fringed with birch leaves.

Leaves ring the windows of the house!

And inside, the floor of the kitchen is dark with the shadows of the birch leaves.

The door is hung with bundled limbs, windows framed in birch twigs, soaking trunks of birch branches in empty coffee cans filled with water, stripped limbs raw with smells of water and birch.

I feel the pull of summer’s current – of the spring’s streams – in the tongues of the edged small leaves covering the house’s painted boards – the air’s current in the lick of leaves in the summer’s mouth.

“Now we’ll have summer,” Herbert smiles, who lives on the farm with his wife and his wife’s brother, “the birches are cut.”

If I try to open the door – can I still pull it free of the twining birches?

58

In the Chapel

I listen to the voice of the black frocked priest in the village chapel at Evertsberg, the voices below his pulpit murmuring uncomfortable responses to his Midsummer sermon; hot in the crowded small church – its smells of musty wood, its odor of wavering candles hanging in the close air, the voice – uncertain – difficult to understand.

But I understand what the priest in the once richly painted pulpit is trying to tell us as I turn to the green leaves of the birch boughs hung on the dark-painted wooden walls pressing against the chapel’s cramped pews – trembling in the light of the candles, the pointed leaves hanging like tears on the sorrowing walls of Evertsberg chapel.

59

We follow each other’s feet

We follow each other’s feet striding across spreading fields, leading us the village’s women in costumes of another time, bearing on their shoulders a snake of woven boughs borne from the leaf draped doors of Evertsberg chapel.

Ahead of us sounds of fiddlers, stumbling as they play, and a young man from the village in a silver covered hat of moon, and a young woman from the village crowned in brass coined brass circled hat of sun, selected as our symbol of bride and groom.

We trail after the swaying stripes of woven aprons, red skirts, bright belts and scarves of the women’s dress to a field with the white painted pole stretched on the grass waiting its binding of leaves and vines the women bring to it.

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Who wove the men’s high stockings, I find myself thinking, thick and banded below ribboned knickers?

Some other knowledge in those women’s fingers, that wove the vines borne on their shoulders.

61

The Maypole

It is very heavy, this wavering, thin, hundred foot long white painted pole we struggle to erect into a clinging sky, its obvious symbolism of no concern to the stumbling men around me as we fumble with its long, worn notched limbs, heaving it upwards in clumsy counts.

Of the men around me I am conscious I am the only one who isn’t drunk.

Wearing an array of bright village costumes the women of Evertsberg an hour before paraded behind the village fiddlers bearing on their shoulders the woven green snake of boughs and vines to bind on the pole’s flaccid length.

In their smiles only the symbolism that tradition bears within it.

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To the ring of children who run to circle it when with shouts we heave it into the sun, its symbolism only they know as they suddenly begin to hop, like frogs, but backwards singing.

The little frogs, the little frogs, such fun they are to see, the little frogs, the little frogs, such fun they are to see.

No ears they have, no ears they have, no little tails have they, no ears they have, no ears they have no little tails have they.

The little frogs, the swaying pole, the laughing women.

A new summer has begun.

63

Midsummer pleasures

The twilight has no ending, only a muted golden light that is without movement or sound From my arms my daughter stares at the crowds at the road’s end, at the fires blazing up from holes dug in the earth, and sounds drift toward us from the clattering dance floors and the three accordion orchestras and the crowds at the tents selling beer, and beyond the tumult the ball of sun low over the midnight lake.

And she laughs at three boys, closer to us on the road with a bottle of acquavit, holding it up to the light, studying it with great seriousness, and passing it again to each other. Emptied, it’s dropped into the crotch of a tree root, which the boys stumble over in drunken helplessness.

“Why are they falling down?” my daughter asks through her laughter.

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As if they had heard her, the boys struggle up off the road and with child-like unsteadiness slap dust off elbows and thighs and backs to shouting encouragement from voices in the trees’ shadows My daughter’s laughter persists at their helplessness.

“But why,” she asks again from my arms, “do they keep falling down?”

65

The sound of wood soled clogs on the dance floor’s boards

is excitement stripped bare of its hesitations, barren thunder the plants perceive, waves of pebbles plunging down a hillside, trees’ applause at the swirling dance.

66

Midsummer’s sorrowful tears

The fires lie smoldering, the road emptied, except for a cluster of old men singing with arms around each others’ waists, crying as one of them, holding himself up unsteadily, plays on a small harmonica almost lost in his hard knuckled fingers.

I don’t know what song they are singing, what is in their thoughts as I walk past, but I’m moved by these old white haired men, crying to a breathy song played badly on a small harmonica as they stand in the dirt in these last hours of the Midsummer night.

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Tools

A clang of stone as Ann’s husband Jan and I dig in the earth for the corner of his summer house, insect-ridden, sweating, gnat splotched and my soft hands bitten with the shovel end.

“We stop a moment,” and he strips the dust off a can of beer to pass between us.

“It is a fine view,” sitting, slapping at insects on our arms.

So few words we know together, but the tools have been handled before, earth shoveled before, house foundations dug before.

“What do you call this in English?” his pick – curve handled, trowel bladed.

“We don’t have anything like it.” “Fyllhammare in Swedish.”

It fits my hand or his, no form of pick without a function.

So little need of words. Standing up we look down into the trees of the valley. “We stop a moment.”

Dirt running in streaks down my sweating face, heat of the sun in the beer.

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A light smell of sticks

A light smell of sticks burning in the fireplace as we talk in the silences of the old log hut under the smoke darkened low beams of ceiling.

A pattern of worn wood planks under chairs, under our feet, rubbed with shoes’ traces and striped with rugs, the hut its own growth – as any forest hut becomes – out of the forest earth.

A faint light of the children’s eyes, a wavering of the candles as Ann slices cake with a knife.

Perfume of mosquito smudge from the seamed board sill of the window.

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Changes that have begun

The house – still half-finished on the slope of the hillside – has begun to change the overgrown mountain pasture where Jan has placed it.

Feet have already flattened paths through the grass leading toward it, a clump of alder is dark with the burning of rubbish heaped against it, the earth has leached against the stones of the foundation.

How unending is change, when it has begun, and how much is changed in its unending – whatever we intended to change.

The earth under the joists of the floor is still heaped where our shovels left it the summer before – the earth beyond the roof is veined with the rain’s rivulets.

In another year it will be smoothed.

The roof – still only papered over – changes even the sounds of the trees, and the smells of wood, of roof paper mingle with the smells of pasture grass.

“En svala,” Jan calls, 70

“A swallow,” and we watch the confused bird who found its way in through a window opening left uncovered – and tries with flailing wings to find its way out again.

For some things – the bird – the earth – there is no way to begin again when something else has begun – to change when something else changes.

The bird, in its helplessness, has no way of knowing the two men watching could help it.

“He’s alright now,” Jan calls again. The bird had found an opening over the unfinished door. Our voices lighten, neither of us sure what is changing – but each of willing to accept the change that has begun.

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Opposites

1.

Opposites draw me to them as I walk under the bare winter trees of Stockholm’s streets.

The remains of a few withered flowers on a doorstep – the snow’s opposite – picked, pulled, left by the wind, edge over the lip of the metal vase that held them.

The pressed brass flowers of the vase’s sides still blossom, the flowers that it held – their opposites – only shreds of stems and hoar rimmed leaf.

2.

Opposites draw me to them – as I walk along Stockholm’s drifted sidewalks – I wouldn’t have seen the washed strip of lace – the drift’s opposite – so painstakingly hand woven, in the window of the flat 72

along the street – I wouldn’t have seen the artificial plants, the plaster statues, the carved wooden bird on the window sill if it hadn’t been for the winter sun – the shadows’ opposite – burning through the room, brightening the objects, streaming in from a window behind the window on the street – sweeping the room – the sun’s golden light engulfing the room and its small banalities.

I am drawn to opposites and to what I learn from each of them – as I learn of myself from my wind roughened face in the glistening mirrors of the windows I pass as I walk along Stockholm’s winter streets.

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In the Winter’s Clasp

We don’t try to speak, the girl and I passing each other along Sturegatan, too pinched in the driving snow to see beyond the street’s darkness.

I half-see the stiff glisten of her boots, her coat flattened in the wind and a knot of hair pulled back.

I think she is trying to say something – her mouth opening without sounds which the winds sweep away, not seeing the knot of snow whitening her hair, her coat, as she hurries along Sturegatan, struggling to be freed of the winter’s stifling clasp.

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Leaves

The sky had been dull for so many weeks I hurried – as I walked – toward a light patch of sun in the trees of Strandvagen.

The air had been sodden for so many months I stopped – breathing in – the soft stirring air under the trees of Strandvagen.

The slight shifting wind after so much winter and people smiled – walking – letting coats fall open in the swaying shadows under the trees of Strandvagen.

Lovtrad – the Swedish word – a “leaf tree” – barren for so many months I stopped – put my arms around it – “De forsta loven” – lov – leaf – love – “The first leaves” of the trees of Strandvagen.

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April 20. Almost an incandesance to the light. Only wisps of cloud and the bowl of sky. We walk, the three of us, down to the lake, then up through the forest to a level space of gray stone to lie in the sun. I see my daughter swinging old sticks she’s picked up, wearing her rubber boots to step through the muddy spaces along the water’s edge. I feel the intensity of the sun – intensity of the sky – the darkening of the water to a deeper blue.

Later, sitting on the terrace looking down at the lake, its eddying surface stripped of ice, glistening through the trees. Then my daughter coming close and saying, “Ask me what I want to be.” I ask, “What do you want to be?” and she answers, “I just want to be myself.” And she asks, “What do you want to be?” and I look down at the sweep of light on the gleaming surface of the lake and up to the soaring arch of the sky and then at her serious face and I answer, “I just want to be myself.”

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June

As if the air had conceived this cloud of light, windblown seed, this brownish sea of new seed that hangs with eddying movements in the uneasy wind in the city’s streets.

Drifting – there – against the door of the building, inside the door’s glass eye, a dust of clustered seed – there – on window sills – what does it want in the building?

This breath of seed the color of earth, what does it want as it sifts onto the sidewalk table with its murmuring couple who brush it away?

What does it want sticking to the sweating skin of the couple lying naked 77

on their tangled clothes in the wild bushes of the park, who don’t notice it?

It drifts, it eddies. No streets of the city without its hovering dust, as if its fecundity had no meaning, its necessity unnoticed.

But then – at a signal from the sun – itself grown heavy mouthing the air, the cloud of seed seeps down in slow stillness to fasten itself to the opened, warmed earth.

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Through Children’s Eyes

What do those large, solemn eyes see when children turn to stare at us?

Or understand?

As I walk with my daughter on my shoulders the “Stockholm” I tell her about could be that building, that street, a park, whatever I tell her it is.

But walking through the trees toward the fountain in the King’s Garden she stops me, her face close to the budding, the pink flowering of a hanging cherry bough.

“Sam, it’s so pretty!”

I hadn’t noticed.

I know at least now that on my shoulders she sees more than I do.

79

The Poet Sees his Family Sleeping

The moment comes – finally – when there’s nothing more to write.

I turn off the light, too tired to add more words to an impatient page.

I lean my forehead against the window pane, I rub at the throbbing behind my eyes. I see that the sky has grown swollen and red while I worked.

It’s almost morning, and even if only a phrase were left to finish the poem, I couldn’t make my fingers write it.

Each night I know there are only so many words there, waiting for me to find them.

I search for them like my young daughters study one of those puzzle drawings where hidden among leaves and branches are peering monkeys and snakes, alligators and wary birds.

And like those drawings only so many words were hidden there – no more, no less there in the thickets of my mind.

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I found most of the words that were hidden, I picked over what I thought I understood, and I’m tired. Tired, and now I must sleep.

But I’m not ready to sleep.

Too much of me is still left there in the weeds where the words waited.

I’m too restless to pull off clothes and slip under the tangle of sheets on the bed in the room at the end of the hall and feel – thigh touching familiar thigh – my wife curled there asleep at the edge of the bed, though it’s the bed I’ll come to later, when enough of me finally is ready to sleep.

So I shake my head, I rub aching fingers, arms, lift stiff shoulders, and I walk softly from room to room – into the room close to the stairs where my wife is sleeping, then into the room beside it where my daughters sleep.

I have been struggling with words for so much of the night that as I walk through the stillness of the house the rooms seem to open themselves out like the pages of a book.

I see my family’s faces 81

alone in sleep, like lines in a poem I never finished.

I lean close to their beds, listening for the whisper of their breathing. To see them asleep in this half-light is to see them in a new way, for their faces now are as still as the distances of the moon.

When I see them awake their faces change as each moment changes.

Their eyes skip away, surprised at something someone’s said, they lift their chins, lips tighten at interruptions, then open suddenly with laughter.

The faces I see then are like a sky mirroring clouds and light – but not now – not as they lie sleeping.

It is a summer night so I can walk through the rooms without turning on the lights, since the Swedish sunlight lingers on, and there is no darkness.

I sit a moment on the edge of a bed, I lean against the colorless flowers of the wallpaper.

I watch the sleeping faces in this night that is no night.

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I hadn’t understood before how private sleep is. Each of them, the woman, the two girls who someday will be women, has drawn off by herself, nested the sheets for herself to be alone as she sleeps.

She has gathered around her the things she needed to ward off the darkness – then drawn a cover over herself and slipped off into sleep.

How often the words we use give us away in ways we don’t intend!

“Go to sleep,” and as we say it we admit to our visions of sleep as a journey. Since our body doesn’t make the journey with us, we bring it to some private place – if we can – some yielding, comfortable place where the body can sprawl, and we abandon it there with some kind of covering over it, like a tarpaulin stretched over a boat drawn up on the beach, and it lies waiting for us to slip back for it.

My daughter who dreams of being a runner hurries past in her journey, stretching her runner’s legs.

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Her sister who dreams of studying animals of the sea draws her arms out of the sheet that binds them so her fingers will be free as she works.

Only my wife lingers close to the body sleeping there – seeking some certainties in the endless sky.

I’ve seen them more restless on other nights, hands clasping, fingers grasping, arms stretching and reaching, but they return – they return always from their night’s journeys.

If I close my eyes in the shadows I hear only the faint sounds of their breathing – no different from the breathing of any other creature as it sleeps.

All Flesh is One. The nests of sheets and blankets there against the wall – I could be in the den of animals asleep, their breathing could be a muffled purr, their bodies stretching with a grace tawny and leonine – until their lips move in sleep, and I hear the murmured words mingling with the sounds of the night, and the faces become again the faces I know, the faces I love.

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Tired enough – finally – impatient now to sleep – I move slowly for a last time from one to the other.

I pull a sheet gently over a shoulder, I bend down to kiss a soft cheek.

I slip through the rooms on feet muffled as a cat’s through ever-widening realms of the sleeping night.

85

Summer’s Island

Summer is an island now, an islands of leaf new green on the trees of the park at the King’s Garden that the birds have found.

I feel the musk of summer now as the birds swirl in tides of chattering sound in the trees as I drift through the islands of summer, fingers still sticky from a sun warmed peach a girl sold me in the street.

86

The Old Women at Skansen

What do they see, the old women at Skansen?

What is it the brings them up the hill above Stockholm, with its old houses, its gravel paths leading to wooden churches, placid animals, and its exhibitions of blown glass – in their dark watered silk dresses, their thin wrists of gold bracelets, their turbaned hats and light coats buttoned against the wind – as children hurry around them and families walk past without seeing them.

What do they see, these women who are old now who come to Skansen?

What do they hear. the women who come to Skansen?

Why do they sit so close to the roar of the music – “Old Time Swedish Dance Orchestra,” “Big Bagpipe Orchestra from Copenhagen,” “The latest Swedish Pop Group.”

Loudspeakers leading, leading the dancers over the dance floor’s boards – 87

trying to hear – mouths open in unending exchanges – trying to hear the music, over voices, the childrens’ crying.

But what do they hear, these women in flowered dresses gathered near by?

What do they feel, these old women who come to sit in Skansen?

Many, I think must be widows, they sit without men, with only a friend, two friends as old as they – a woman with hair still brown, puffed blue of beret, carrying a restaurant tray with hands so unsteady the coffee in the cup was slowly spilling, but her red face only calmly seeing she had done it so often before.

And a child with as little steadiness fell and cried in front of her.

But what did she feel, this old woman on a summer afternoon at Skansen?

What faces do children see but other children’s?

What voices their mothers hear, 88

.

but their children’s?

What do they think about the women sitting on the lines of benches beside the paths of Skansen?

.

They see us, the old women with their clasped purses, their buttoned coats, their shoes, soft with the dust of the paths as they sit in the sun of the waning afternoon at Skansen.

They see us, even if we don’t see them. They see us as we idle past, turn to talk, brush off children who have fallen.

And if we see them, we see them only as old.

But what do they see in us, in our faces, in our children’s faces, is it all their lives they see, as they sit watching us, the old women on the benches of Skansen?

How beautiful that they have come, walking with canes and cautious steps up from Skansen’s wire gates.

I see their faces past the children’s faces as the sun slackens, and the afternoon grows colder, 89

and they begin to stand up and pull coats close and they walk slowly beside us.

And I see their veined hands and lined faces and still eyes.

But what do they see of us?

What was it they came here to feel again, to know again, these old women walking with us along the summer paths at Skansen?

90

Boats Racing in the Harbor

Straining of yachts, bellying of yachts, storming at each other in bursts of sail as they spray each other with their hulls’ swings and spindles of masts twenty yards off the stone walls of the garden beside the Stadshuset.

How can they come around in the narrow neck of water between the wall where we stand watching and the docks across from us where they snarl into a turn?

Baying of yachts, bending of yachts, furrowed rush of water from the yachts as they spring from each other in reaches of gray water spilling across the seams of the stone walls of the garden behind us, as if they were turning back on us, to pull us down into the water after them – with a line thrown over the wall’s stone cornice – back through the spreading water to the squat shapes of the docks waiting silently

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At Karlaplan

It was crowded along the water in the last pale day of summer, as if everyone had to come to the water today, and children were crying, boats churning, fathers shouting, and the crowds slowly moved along the harbor, and I walked away. away from the noise, back through the empty streets to the circling trees of Karlaplan.

It is possible that there is silence in the cities we’ve built – if we’ve left ourselves a place for silence.

It was silent in the small park at Karlaplan as I stood beside the dry fountain, filled with leaves now at summer’s end.

It is possible that there is humanity in the cities we’ve built – if we’ve left ourselves a place for humanity.

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It was still in the ring of trees, the ring of the buildings circling the edge of Karlaplan.

93

Climbing to Mossebacke’s Heights

Worn stone troughs of steps, cupped hands of steps, as I trudge up the heights of Mossebacke to look across the harbor at the buildings of Stockholm – at the yellows, browns, deep tans of the buildings, and the October yellows, and reds of Stockholm’s trees.

It isn’t a bad sight – from the steps looking across – the buildings no higher than the trees, only more solid, heavy squares of buildings, lightened with the scrim of trees, both of them worn dry by the summer sun.

I couldn’t ask much more from a city – than that its buildings mingle easily with its trees. I look back across at its streets as I walk up the scuffled steps, and its shapes change as I walk.

The trees merge into the buildings, then as I look away toward the islands 94

the buildings fall away into the trees.

I can almost see it as molded shapes – of buildings, of trees, across the gray-blue, shifting tones of the harbor, see it as movement, without its people, only as its shapes, its yellow and tan, as its forms, tan and yellow, the city in its way as beautiful, on this October afternoon, as its trees.

95

96

In Lagos

97

March 4, 1974

Low coastal flight into Lagos. I can almost feel the heat sucking the land dry below me. Desert-like hardness after the raggedness of the bush in Ghana. Brown lines of stream beds in uncertain stragglings and dark patterns of spindly vegetation. Glaring sun. I have to close my eyes against it. Mouth dried with the beginnings of a mouth infection from drinking palm wine out of a village gourd near Accra, something making my skin red, fever I think. Stomach cramps worse, still the same hanging tiredness when I go out into the heat too long. Reading Achebe about Lagos as I tried to sleep last night…

Lagos a huge, sprawling choked slum spread on the flat islands by the water. Streets teeming with people, the smells of the sewers almost overpowering. A hotel close to the edge of the business section. Confusion over room and the beds in it, then out into the sunset streets as clusters of bats wheel over the bare picked branches like overripe fruit, squeaking and jostling above me as I walk through the crowds in the back streets. I begin writing as I walk – lying on the thin bed in my room for an hour out of the heat – then into the streets again. Walking late into the night, walking into the tide of filth and poverty that sweeps up to the walls of the buildings. Walking, writing all night. It’s almost as if I’m spewing out everything I’ve forced myself to see in all the slums along the coast. Writing – writing all night – sleeping, finally, feverish and exhausted – waking in the morning lying on the hard floor with the pages of a poem strewn on the floor around me.

98

Ereko Street, 9 p.m.

Shreds of fire on dark pavement – like blowing flowers – shredded petals of fire from thick greasy buds of kerosene lamps wavering over piled soap, fingered nuts, combs, peeled candy, tinned sardines, dried gnarls of pepper, pills, powders, spread on squat trays pressing bent iron elbows together down jammed board alleyways, flickering lick of small orange tongues over the walls’ dark sheen of dirt, children’s scrawls, splotches of hands, wavering notices “Obituary for our Late Beloved Sister Always in Our Thoughts.”

Alleyways so black with dirt the fouled plaster gleams in the light, shapes of women slipping back and forth in front of the wavering flames, yellow thumbs of fire – going on – going off – fire flies hanging in the darkness.

Spread broad palms of woven mats on the sweating arm of Ereko Street – mats, spread newspapers, cardboard cartons 99

that once held coffee opened out into spreading wings that hold up the sprawled, dreaming legs of a boy, bent behind the sloped backs of men still talking, legs in front of them on tired, flaccid mats faces rubbed with the blue neon of tubes screwed over rusted iron stare of shuttered doorways, heads leaning languidly against plaster pillars once painted in a year the pillars have forgot.

Uneven lines of neon tubes, below them the faint splatter of yellow bulbs swelling out of the plaster, spreading through cracks in the plaster walls like mushrooms.

Row of legs, wrung white shirts of seven men on stringy mats, whose worldly space is the size of a room’s carpet furled in a worn doorway, as if they’d been swept there, to get them off the street.

(A man in sagging city uniform and rim of cap sweeps the pavement in front of them, bent over bits of cardboard in twisted knots, a painted trash receptacle clattering after him like an interruption.)

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Sleep, sleep, the woman is saying behind little broken glass case wedged between smelly wall and sloping stairs going up to the broken building.

Sleep, sleep, the short, soft woman in raveled dirty skirt and creased purple turban, formless under torn black blouse is saying to two little girls doubled up in rags of dresses on the frayed mat where their lives are lived.

Two and a half feet by five feet. They must know it well. As well as they know the leached wall next to their faces, as high as their hands can reach.

Feet tread the stairs, dust settles like a spent breath.

Tired, tired, the woman pulls up the blouse as if she were peeling off a glove, rubs one flabby breast, rubs the other, thumb finds dirt on a dark nipple, picks at it with yawning indifference.

Sleep, sleep, a scratching hand falls on a naked leg, a thin 101

small face turns to the wall, the woman shifts her sagging body to the mat’s distant edge to make room.

Sleep, sleep.

Blare of horns, drumming of horns, bleating, pawing, pressing, snuffling of automobile horns – herds of busses, lorries, vans, crowding their way past scurrying figures, swaying through spindles of legs, thin bodies, behind the herd’s king, “Lagos City Racetrack Special Bus,” with the metal shriek of the horns ringing against weary plaster, washing into the current of voices eddying along the banks of the street like the sound of water breaking against a thousand stones.

A current of voices, tongues, seeping into labyrinths of ears, orifices of mouth, drowning in the current of voices, the din of the horns.

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But within the current of voices small, still eddies.

A platform of warped boards like a raft floated up against the edge of the pavement, with a circle of men around a lantern’s yellow eye eating in the pleasure of each other’s company.

Sitting quietly on flailed flesh of cardboard, stirring cups with bent spoons, as the din of the current streams by, feet in plastic sandals, noisy cars, streaming by, streaming by, but in their small, still eddy men in brocaded caps sitting around a low board table with the remains of a cocoa can and flakes of dried fish, with the pleasure of each other’s company.

Another eddy a block away, men of property under the humming pulse of neon lights brightening doorways like a burning match.

Men of property, wiry armed, sinewy legged, in sweat stained shorts and sandals, sprawled figures of men at ease.

Their property – their iron-ribbed street barrows, ribbed with five bent, shining pieces of iron hung with mats as their bodies weigh the myriad possibilities of sleep on them.

A rib for feet, a rib for knees, 103

drawn up in restful arc, for curve of buttocks, curve of rib there solid and sure under sagging mat. For the chest a rib, and for the head, set at an angle to strong, marvelous gift of shoulders, a last, God-given rib of iron.

How will they sleep?

Propertied and secure.

Nothing can be taken while they sleep, so they sleep, sleep.

What Canto is this?

I find myself asking as I stand swaying in the street, suddenly fevered, suddenly sick, overwhelmed with the smells, the drumming noises, the reek of bodies that draws down over my face like a plastic bag, suffocating me.

I know this is Inferno, But it’s someplace in a Canto I haven’t read – I haven’t seen these faces before – I don’t know why they’ve been dragged here. But it must have been something, since this is Hell.

Or someone has done this to them, and a different Hell’s 104

still waiting for whoever put them here.

But I force myself to walk on, to pick my way through the haze that hangs over Ereko Street, through the drift of smoke rising from the flickering lights, from the exhaust of the cars, from the spew of the open sewers lining the sides of Ereko Street.

The bodies sprawled in front of the buildings must be alive – since only the wastes of the living have this smell. The smell of the dead is different.

The smell of the dead – from that black mouth of a doorway? from that gap of window? But faces stare out of the doorway, like stones at the bottom of a well.

And the sewer hungrily mingles with the life of the street.

A woman in wound headdress sits on thin slats of a chair beside the sewer while a neighbor woman leans her head into her lap, kneeling at the sewer’s edge as her hair is twined and bound, 105

and the sewer stares up into her closed eyes.

The darkness, the darkness, the clamor of the darkness, the tumult hidden in the darkness, even when it stops for breath, the night still breathing on this dredge of street, on these figures swept up to lie in heaps in the blue, dim, pulsing light.

And under the sleeping faces, the closed faces, under the clenched fingers the dead grass of the mats.

Grass that has lost all smell, taste, feel of grass – as these bodies have had the taste, the feeling of life stolen from them, but somehow still keeping its shadowed, sighing, half-forgotten shape.

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9 a.m. Yakuba Gowan Street, Lagos

I am massa massa massa massa to the cripple calling me, dirty bowl thrust out in veiny hand, his leg twisted up in front of his body as if it were holding a mirror for him to look at his withered face, forcing him to stare at the fraying white edge of the skull cap weeping down in front of eyes, weeping in tired concentration.

I am massa massa massa massa as his shaking voice calls.

I am massa massa massa to the bone thin woman with hair bound like frayed wires, a dullness throbbing in her eyes, pulling from under swaddling robe a much handled package of chewing gum to offer.

Massa massa I am massa massa massa 107

to the wounded nervousness of the young men whose hands sliding from striped cotton sleeves seize me with the harshness of a growl to drag me to a carton bristling with the stems of sunglasses, massa to a man with fingers ending in lepers’ stubs massa to a woman from a bed of rags on the pavement, with belly like a swollen fruit under a sweat stained skirt.

As far as I can see down the dust of Yakuba Gowan Street an empire I am massa of.

I hesitate, I am pulled, dragged – whispers, shouts, pleas, like the suck of the wind – I am massa massa massa massa.

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Waking in a Strange Room

The room is strange – new to me – a hotel perhaps?

Half awake I drift in that space without dimension – between waking and sleeping – and become dimly conscious that what the cheap sheet wrapped around me insists on asking is the question of where I am.

What light there is in the room streams silently in through the curtain like the ocean’s gray current and my hand gropes out like a fisherman’s, trawling for the things I left on the table beside the bed the night before – the wristwatch I put there – my glasses lying on an opened magazine, the small silver figure on its chain I dropped there before I slept.

These small things at least stop the drift around me – even if they don’t tell me where this room is.

Like sea anchors they’ve been dropped on so many floors, on so many tables beside so many beds where I’ve lain tangled in a sheet and listened to the traffic and 109

its sound that could be anywhere.

I don’t know from the feel of the things where I’m lying, where I’m drifting in this morning’s current.

What I pick up off the bed table is like rubbish floating on the sea – valueless things yielding only a half rubbed out name on a floating board.

They only tell me who it is who is slowly being borne into consciousness.

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Conundrum

There Is no hell, but I stumble there – often.

No heaven, but I journey there – sometimes.

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A Man Dancing Alone on an Island in Greece

For H. D. His body moves to a solemn measure, this man dancing alone, arms extended as if they reached into another space, then they turn in as measured a sweep to point down to his feet.

There is no gray in his trimmed beard, he wears a tan sweater over a brown jersey, in dark rimmed glasses though his eyes are closed, and he isn’t seeing with his glasses. He is seeing something else, this man dancing alone on an island in Greece.

He isn’t alone, of course.

The rough restaurant tables in the darkness under the trees are filled with faces, shadowed under umbrellas as a light rain falls.

But this man who is dancing alone moves with sure steps over the streaming flagstones that he sees without seeing, without seeing us, as he dances alone.

He dances alone, not seeing the orchestra sitting behind him under the roof overhang 112

out of the rain.

A violin, baglamas, sandouri, an accordion, a dark haired man in a tee shirt with a guitar singing, a slim young woman in a proper blouse who could tend a shop, singing, but over the rude pulse of the orchestra, the sound of voices at the tables, the man goes on dancing alone.

I understand that the solemn sweep of his movements is telling me that to move as his body is moving and to see as he is not seeing is to to know the essence of dance, and it isn’t enough if I say that in his measured movement he has found beauty.

What I know is that in his dance, in the stillness of his dance, he has found truth.

For a moment I wonder – could I find this essence within myself if I stood up and despite my embarrassment danced – alone?

For just this moment in this soft rain could we all?

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Hopi Corn at Walpi Mesa

I wouldn’t have planted the corn like that – in crumbling holes dug into the tan hillside, among stones dusty with their rough handling by the sand’s fingers.

I wouldn’t have heaped the sticks and bits of leaf like that – around the slight green shoots of corn as they warily split up through the rind of softening kernel left to mould in the heated earth.

I wouldn’t have shielded the corn with those flapping shreds of cloth whose shadows toss in a nervous dance in the bare breath of the sunset on the dried, hard earth.

The corn I planted wouldn’t have grown.

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Just Before Morning

In the thinning darkness of the still room I see with half-opened eyes the sides of the building take shape through the curtained window – and at the same moment – something else that I don’t see now.

As the light picks its way toward me from the window’s oblong it has put out the light that I saw within me.

As if a switch had been turned off the dreams that filled my sleep have been extinguished.

Already they’ve gone, and only a dim imprint of the dreams is left in the back of my eyes.

In the dreams I’ve lost – was I strong? – stronger than I feel now as I lie on the rumpled bed and stare numbly at the window?

Was I afraid in my dreams?

Afraid of something I couldn’t quite see, afraid of a face, afraid of someone who might still be hidden there in the corner where the shadows lean with heavy arms against a shelf?

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Was I better, in my dreams?

Was I worse? Happier?

Unhappier?

The dreams I felt beside me just as I woke – they elude me – they left me without my hearing the door click shut.

Or have I eluded them?

Was I the one who slipped out the door as the dreams slept?

I only know that we’ve missed each other like two figures in a room where the light has suddenly been turned off.

We look for each other – myself, my fled dreams – listening in the silence for the sound of each other’s breath.

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How Smoothly the Gulls Turn

For A. C. How smoothly the gulls turn in the swelling air as a whisper, as a glance over a shoulder, something that was said but not forgotten, only put off to some other moment – and they turn with the stillness of a sigh toward the morning’s red sunrise.

She doesn’t turn so smoothly, the woman walking behind me on the beach’s oily shell.

Her body seems to have been shaped, not by these movements as she walks, but by the hands that have touched her.

Mine, smoothing her, as her hands have smoothed away roughnesses somewhere within me.

And by the children who have shaped her, their marks left on her stomach under the light, sweet perspiration 117

smell of sweat shirt.

Not the smoothness of the birds as they move in sweeping arcs beyond us (are they leading us? Or in their way following? since to be ahead is still to be with) – but a smoothness of life lived fully, there within the flesh warm there where the skin touches.

Over the gray pebbles of the beach, stepping slowly, as if the beach shingle were a sentence she had to read slowly to understand, she looks up, sees me watching and smiles across the distance.

Within her body under its loose, faded clothes, within its faint creasing of breasts and softness of hips, she is quiet with the same stillness that is at the heart of the gulls’ turning.

She waves, and with her arm’s motion the gulls scatter in an effortless wheeling into the glistening air, leaving her to the low whisper of the sea.

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Summer afternoons with friends at Long Lake

How tangled we lie on the narrow beach of dirt and sand that was gouged from the lake’s stony shore!

Legs squeeze together, our arms touch, backs press gingerly against wet backs.

It’s early afternoon, it’s hot, our wet bathing suits cling to our bodies like petals of old flowers.

Suit tops are tied with dripping strings that leave meandering lines down backs already reddening with fire draining from the sun.

How crowded we lie in our sprawled heap!

We are as noisy as a colony of seals!

We press together in familiar families on damp blankets streaked with sand.

Bags and baskets lie open for our children to search through noisily for the lunches we carried down paths we’ve worn on the leaf-dark hillsides from our houses that from the beach seem at such a distance, but are only beyond the high frieze of the trees.

We idly pass around food, we lie back spent, we feel the faint stir of wind on our skin.

It’s as if the lake had given birth to us, as if it had delivered us onto these soggy blankets, 119

and we sprawl along its shore, slippery and gasping.

I look around, I see how much of us in this tangle is skin! Around me bodies gleam, naked hips crowd against naked hips, only hidden by strips of whatever we’ve used to cover ourselves.

Stomachs are naked, backs, legs, hands, towels draped over our thighs only shield us against the sun, not against each other.

Our children play naked around us, but we are as naked to each other under our thin coverings.

A woman pulls on a cotton blouse, and stands for a moment with only the tumbled spread of her hair shadowing her glistening breasts, and no one stares.

The sun slips through a wash of clouds.

The afternoon passes.

I lie sweating in the bath of smells and voices, conscious now of our nakedness. I sense the nakedness of the woman’s legs stretched beside mine, the nakedness of an arm thrown across the bare shoulders of a man lying in the shadows, of the naked breasts pressed against the blankets I see spread further along the lake.

I sense my body stirred with its consciousness that to each other we are naked – 120

but what touches me even more is the sense of completion, as a circle ringed by the sun is complete. I am conscious of how completely we have given our bodies to each other to create these families crowded around us along this strip of beach.

The nakedness of the sun itself, warming the lake, is in these hands lifting the children up into the sunlight!

The nakedness we feel with each other becomes these children, tousled and sunburned, bodies bare, turning to us and holding up their arms, waiting to be lifted!

I watch the line of shadows stretch across the sand as the sun slips down toward the trees’ swaying crowns.

I see the yellow, gilded beauty of the girls’ bodies, and the bodies of the boys as they leap from the rocks into the water, I see the beauty of their slight muscled hips and slim legs.

And some of the bodies of the men, bunched and lean, arms crossed as they talk, are as beautiful, as the low bellied, wobbly-legged bodies of the children are beautiful.

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But as I lift my face from the blanket and wipe away the sand from my cheek I can see that most beautiful are the bodies of the women, rose-red now with the sun, leaning back against their wriggling children, against their dozing men, the bodies of the women out of whom this life has come!

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The Drowned Child

Where the child disappeared the water was no darker, no lighter, there was no gleam beneath the water’s surface, there was no shadow.

The surface was as slick, as green. If the weeds seemed to stream away from the pier it was only the slight pull of the current as the water drifted past the pier’s end where the child had fallen.

As the moment passed when the child slipped below the parting waters, gasping his surprise, the shimmer of light on the lake was no more translucent, no dimmer.

The eddying afternoon breezes ruffled the floating insects scurrying over the ripples, a bird’s outspread wings were reflected over the swirling surface where the child dropped 123

into the engulfing shadows.

The swift gleam of the wings’ reflection was undisturbed.

What is grief?

Or is there no grief in the world that surrounds us?

Is grief only something we have created for ourselves – as if with a name we could explain or heal?

There were no shadows on the lake’s idling surface, no slowing in the currents in the water’s green depths to mark the place where the child drowned.

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The Swimmer

It happened in only a moment.

I didn’t know of a loneliness like this!

Is this even me swept out into water beyond my depth?

Does anyone hear me?

My feet touch only uncertainties.

The current sweeping me! sweeping me!

Where am I being taken?

The clumsy bulk of the Gotland Ferry heaved uneasily as it turned with a trembling lurch out of its watery furrow into a widening circle, the ship shaking in its yawing movements like an animal wakened from sleep.

The dimming sea heaved around us, the orange flood of the sunset falling steadily behind, 125

only the uneasy skip of the sea’s incessant exclamations interrupting us.

But suddenly people leaned over the railing, people knotted on the deck, a crowd clustered jostling against the chipped paint of the boat davits.

Something in the water.

A speck.

A dark speck in the tireless insistence of the sea – the face of a man! swimming desperately to us in the water!

It isn’t only loneliness now! this fear as I search frantically in this darkness hungering beneath me!

My arms’ wild flailings still hold me up, but I’m too weighted down for flight.

My feet grope blindly in the cold darkness below me – Is there nowhere – 126

nothing – no place – I can stand?

Closer, closer over the slap of the waves until we could see that his face was red with his churning, his eyes wildly staring.

A small boat scraped down the ship’s side with iron shrieks, men’s bodies falling into it as it settled, voices lost in the abrupt buzz of the boat’s propeller, the high-pitched whine splashing toward the straining face, arms reaching down, a spray of water as his body was heaved up and spread on the slope of the boat’s deck, the swimmer’s hand clutching a dangling rope end beside him, as if he felt his heart beat in it.

The sea is exhaling me as a breath is exhaled, swirling me now in shrill questioning.

How did I lose the direction I’d taken?

Where was I going?

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What did I do that left me struggling here on weakening arms, the sea sucking at my body through the drowned seep of my clothes?

“Fishing… capsized… ” Murmuring voices as the boat is winched up the ship’s side and men from the crew rush to the swimmer with blankets as he’s lifted over the ship’s railing to the deck, his hand still clenching its soaked line.

The relieved strain of the scene finally forces applause from us, and the crew look up, surprised, embarrassed.

The swimmer doesn’t see us, or see that from the height of the deck we could see what he couldn’t – the faint lights of a small island a mile from him.

He might have seen them later when the sun had fallen, but he couldn’t have kept swimming 128

any longer.

He had only us – and in another sigh of the sunset it would have been too dark – we would never have seen him.

It was a matter of twenty minutes.

If I lie, lie with my face up, how long will the sea bear me? hold me on its heaving back?

Will I see something – finally – telling me where to turn?

How did the placid, looming body of the ship look to the swimmer in the tired frenzy of his struggle?

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To Go With A Note

I’ve let something for you on the table.

A piece of paper – it isn’t, finally, important, as a touch of your hand is important, but I wanted to leave something, if only as a kind of receipt for what I take out of the room with me.

Even if I try to leave behind the things I’ve taken from you that have a physical weight, a texture I can feel, I still take so much, since I take with me so many other things, words we whispered, breaths held between us, answers to questions we never asked.

I have to leave you sleeping as the light still is trying to find its way into the endlessness of the room’s shadows.

I have to leave you before you wake – 130

since there would be too much to say – or nothing to say.

I’ve left something for you on the table.

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Distances

What do I know?

What do I know?

Only that the bit of light there above the darkening mountains as the sunset’s orange wash dulls to gray shadow – that first, faint star – is you.

And it’s all I have of you, and that’s all I know.

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After the Rain

The empty field where my daughters play wavers between water and earth, the two elements in the mire left by a flooding rain however unwillingly conjoined, and where the streaming current – there – has worn a furrow in the mud, I can see that the pattern it leaves mirrors the outline of my hand.

The spreading rivulets open out like my outstretched fingers, and there – where my palm bore down – I can see the cupped shape of a small, still pool huddling a bright bit of the clearing sky against itself.

Bending close I can see that the print my hand could have pressed into the mud fits my life as well.

The small pool with its mirrored sky is the space I’ve taken for myself, the space that each of us assumes to stand and look out of ourselves, and the marks of fingers the small rivulets imitate could be my children, my daughters, my son, and they, like the searching streams, 133

are my reach out to life, beyond myself.

Under a sky slowly washing clear of its cloak of clouds my daughters feel none of this, I know.

Wading through sodden tufts of weed they only see everywhere around them shoots of new grass driven upward in a blind, green questioning.

A sweep of water flows past, washing away the the pattern in the mud, but already where I saw my fingers stretched, I see new patterns begin.

My daughters’ footsteps splash away to dry earth they have found for themselves, leaving me here, as my life will be left here, as my children’s lives begin.

My daughters’ laughter across the muddy fields is a cascading song that fills the far reaches of the sky.

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A Note on the Varieties of Locust

for Lillian Kelley Charters

It wasn’t even, I understood later, a locust – not one of the acridities of the order orthoptera which occur with dry ferocity everywhere in the world – not one of the brown and red locusts of South America, the “swarming” locust of Central Anatolia, not one of the several species common to the U. S., the Rocky Mountain locust, melanopus spretus, or cannula pellcida, the clear-winged locust of the Midwest, not the solitary phase of the American locust, schistocerca paranensis, not locusta migratoria, the migrant locust – I couldn’t have told what it was from the empty skins I found in the trees – thin as egg white, split at corded belly, dried to a hard brown polish, and then left to cling to ridges of bark.

Grotesque scarabs I thought of as “locust skins.”

The desolate shapes left behind when the insect shed its outer covering, the clenched knot a desperate relic of its struggle to free itself, even the film covering 135

its bulging eyes left in the glistening mold.

Locust was the name I knew.

“The locusts are singing tonight,” my aunt said, swinging slowly on the cushioned seat of the dark wooden swing hung in the shadows of the porch, listening to the slow swelling, listening to the slow falling of the shrilling insect voices.

“Can you hear them?” My mother close to me in the doorway, “The locusts are singing tonight.”

It was only later I found they were not locusts, but cicadas.

The persistent buzzing was a rubbing of membranes at the base of the male’s belly.

Their whining began as the sun set, as if they could call the sun back with the wistful clamor they set up from their hidden perches in the trees.

Cicadas – not locusts. Nothing where I grew up was as threatening as locusts. I didn’t know, as a child, of the locust of tormenting plagues, of locusts as a streaming cloud of devouring hunger.

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I never heard of the locusts that in Africa, “break the limbs of great trees with their weight.”

I never knew I should be frightened of the cloud of locusts covering 2000 square miles that in 1899 flew in a howling swarm over the Red Sea. I only felt uncomfortable at the loneliness of their shrilling voices.

So much of childhood, I know now, is like this.

Things with wrong names, words with mistaken meanings, half-remembered descriptions of things never really understood, names with no more reality than the components of the atom.

To the child I was then so much of what I “knew” was only confusing. To say “memory” only left me in a sea of uncertainty. I was as uncomfortable with the familiar as I was distrustful of the strange, and the buzzing from the shadowy trees stirred me, but I didn’t know what emotion in me had been stirred. If I was hurrying, late to get home from a friend’s house, still I stopped to peer up into the trees, into the curtain of limbs and leaves, trying to see where the thin cries of the locusts were coming from – then I pulled my hands from the crammed pockets of my summer shorts and ran home through the throbbing epiphanies of sound.

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“Cicada or harvest fly. The name given to clear-winged bugs belonging to the Cacadidae. They are also, incorrectly, called locusts.”

The word I used was a mistake, but the word “childhood” was just as much a mistake – since how could I know I was a child?

How could I know that what I thought of as days without plans and nights without interruptions when I went to sleep before anyone else had a name?

It is only now that I know the buzzing of an insect as the sun set, the dying sound of its whine – swelling, falling – on a shadowy front porch was “childhood.”

“These are the largest of the bugs of the order Homoptera, the largest the great Borneo Cicada, Pomponea imperatorial, having a body length of about 3 in. and a wing span of about 8 in. The wings and bodies of many cicadas are beautifully colored, but the majority are of somber coloration.”

For me, not even bright cicadas, or large cicadas.

I found only the discarded shapes of discarded skin.

An ordinary childhood that fit somewhere in between the fear of the great locust swarms I never saw, and the beauties of the giant cicadas that I never heard of.

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But the straining of those small forms – I could feel that. That was something I knew.

The struggle to split the skin, to be free – as someday I would want to be free of what I thought of as the childhood that was holding me so tightly, that seemed to be binding me so closely in its helpless grasp – like so much in childhood mistaking what it was, misunderstanding how it bound me.

All I knew then was the faint, wistful sound of an insect I called by the wrong name.

“The locusts are singing tonight,” my aunt swinging slowly in the shadows of the porch, my mother leaning down to smooth my hair. “Listen!

The locusts are singing tonight!”

139

As I Walk with my Son

I am surprised – when with my son in pleasure we walk together.

Walking when he was little I remember his shadow so often was covered by mine, its small form as thin as his arms and legs.

As a man he still is a little less tall than me – but when we walk now it is his shadow that leads me, that lengthens beyond me.

No – I am not surprised.

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Of Those Who Died/ A poem of the Spring of 1945

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For The uncles and cousins in the kitchen that Sunday afternoon in the 1960s – Colonel James B. Corbett Major William J. Kelley, with his sons Sergeant Michael P. Kelley and HM2 William J. Kelley, the uncles not with us – Staff Sergeant John W. Kelley and First Lieutenant James Dailey, and my father, Private (reserves) Samuel B. Charters III.

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I Of those who died I knew so little.

They had been only voices, voices in a conversation only faces that I looked up into as the men sat thin and sunburned in the stuffy rooms talking to someone else.

I was too young – only three years younger than they were, four, but I was younger, and I wasn’t like them. If in the hallway I clumsily tried on their caps, the dull olive drab sagged down over my forehead like peeling skin.

Their jackets hung from my shoulders like a question I didn’t understand.

In the hallway’s dim mirror I saw only myself.

I wasn’t like them.

I was younger by the step they had taken through a door where I couldn’t follow, and I stood waiting uneasily for them to return.

Their laughter was a kind of performance 143

as they sat on thick palms of stuffed chairs talking to their worried families, to their worried girls.

They always laughed, as if laughter had once been taken away from them and now they’d been given bags of it that they strewed around the room, draping each other with it like streamers, and every day had become a desperate celebration.

But even with shirts open, ties pulled loose, their uniforms still marked them as ones who might be killed, and I knew them so little that later I had to be told, slowly, which face, which voice, I should erase from the childish sketch I had in my mind of those I knew.

But trying to erase the faces of the ones who were killed left only the reverse of the impression somewhere inside me, and I still had glimpses of their faces that I only half remembered, and of their deaths that I only half understood.

What could it mean to me 144

that someone I’d known – a laughing voice – was rolling face down somewhere on the sand while the sea prodded him with its cat’s paws?

How could I understand?

How could I understand?

I couldn’t understand, but I could forget.

I saw a man struggling on the school steps, his legs dragging after him with an insect’s stiffness as his ams pulled him up, and forgetting, forgetting his wounds from the Pacific, I asked, “Hurt yourself over the weekend?”

And his white, set, contorted face turned to me like an animal in pain and his eyes, staring at me, were livid with hate.

They walked away, they left me alone in the hallway listening to laughter that I didn’t understand, touching decorations on uniforms that didn’t fit me, and sometimes I tried 145

to turn at the end of the hallway where they turned, run down the stairs after them to the street, but when I came to the sidewalk it was always empty.

They had gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.

II

What do I feel now when I see their faces in the discoloring distance of photographs, as tense, as apprehensive as small animals in a cage?

What do I see in those surprised eyes, what do I hear from those thin, pressed mouths?

I can almost hear them talking, see their lips move – but instead of words I only hear the words of the songs as they clung to their girls at dances. Lipstick stains on wrinkled shirts as cheeks pressed against shoulders, hips crushed against hips.

Even I, standing nervously watching could hear the songs.

It was always the same song, 146

even when the words, or the song, were different.

“Kiss me once and kiss me twice and kiss me once again, it’s been a long, long time…”

And part of the stiffness as they danced in their wrinkled uniforms was their fear, and their fear became part of the song, as close to them, and as elusive as insects caught in sunset’s unending sunset.

I could sense the song in the intense photographs of their faces.

It was there, a sound, just beyond the edge of the frames.

A customer at my afternoon job at Schiller’s Pharmacy was a young wife who sat for an hour every day at a table, her desperation as conspicuous as a statue.

She was at that moment when her body yearned to bear, and she trembled with its yearning like someone pressing against a wind that wasn’t there, that pulled at her clothes, that mussed her hair.

As I watched she drank the Coca Cola I brought her with an intensity that sagged from her shoulders like a tear, 147

and her fingers twined, untwined on the table’s glass top, twined, twisted at the ring on her finger.

Twisting it as if she’d pull it off, twisting it as if she’d force it on more tightly.

Seersucker dresses, skirts creased from the heat that sifted through the opened door, her stockingless legs brown from days empty of everything but sun.

Her hair combed, but her lips left plain, her body crouched in its hunger as if she were forcing herself not to run from the table.

But she waited the months out like someone marking off the hours in a cell, and one day on the street I saw her walking slowly with the red-faced, limping man who was her husband, and the wind had died.

Nothing was pulling at her, and her hair was tied with a ribbon that held it close to her head with the softness of breath.

“Kiss me once and kiss me twice …”

And I heard the song’s whispered lines in the flaccid, rumpled body of a woman 148

swaying against the stale smells of a stained seat across a train aisle from me, her hair straggling into small groping strings down her perspiring neck, her eyes rimmed with dark fingers of shadow.

Her body was as heavy with its hunger, but the uneasy spread of her legs said that she, unlike the other woman, was helpless against it.

Three soldiers in uniforms as fingered as the train seats sat with her, one beside her, the others helping her drink.

“I’m married to a fly boy, you know,” she whined to herself in a voice that seemed to look at itself in the dirty mirror of the sounds around them.

“He was shipping out and all and I didn’t think we ought to wait so we got married.

He’s got a leave coming in a month.”

A month, a month, but at this moment, with the dying sunlight spewing itself over the dirt of Colorado, her body was slipping helplessly through her fingers.

It wasn’t a wind that was pressing against her, tangling her clothes, her hair, 149

it was a flood that was carrying her out, turning her over in its swirling current.

“He’s just done his year’s tour so he’s getting three weeks and we can have us a little honeymoon together.”

The arm on her shoulder was a question, the unshaven face of the soldier leaning against her was a question.

“I thought I’d come out and get us a room in L. A. or Long Beach, and wait for him to get there.”

The smell of the whiskey rind, the days on the train strewn on the floor in twisted shreds of cigarets, the fingers of her hair trailing down her neck, the soldier’s fingers like a vein spreading over the sagging weight of her breast.

“My husband gets back stateside next month…” the whining voice no one was listening to.

“Thought I’d get out early, you know, and hunt something up.”

The flood rising around her in the last heavy, yellowing breath of sunset.

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The train shaking as it fumbled over a switch point, the eyes around her glittering as the light sieved into darkness.

Her voice thinning, whiskey licked from fingers as paper cups leaked, the current pushing at her, prodding her.

In the stifled darkness under a huddled blanket on the slope to the Nevada state line, she and the soldier beside her managed a kind of convulsive coupling, and I watched their bodies heave over and over again in a raging, lurching movement as the current tore them, rolled them, pulled them down into its heaving eddies until with a drunken mewing I heard her dragged under.

An aimless pushing of shadows as the morning came into the car and made its way down the aisle a seat at a time.

A low droning of sleep from the woman sprawled open mouthed now on the seat across from me, clothes rumpled, pulled loose under the blanket’s sweat, 151

skin dirtied, half-opened eyes reddening with the sun’s reflection, the skin grainy, lips burning as the train fled from the cruelty of the flaccid yellow dawn into New Mexico.

With a voice like a torn sleeve she asked for a cup of coffee.

I couldn’t talk to the men who were going to die, I couldn’t talk to the desperate, yearning women they left behind them.

They had taken a few steps away from me and I could see them as they stood talking in the half light.

The only thing I could understand from the movements of their lips were the words to their songs.

“Kiss me once and kiss me twice and kiss me once again…”

III There was no face to the death that was waiting for them there – only a distance to it that they crossed with feet that dragged heavier and heavier as they drew closer.

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But for those of us who could only see it from afar it had less than a face, less than a body.

There was nothing to it that could be touched or felt, but I knew that it happened, that it was happening.

And sometimes I would imagine it, like images from an old film that had become scratched from too much use.

One death I saw again and again and I imagined it again and again and again – the death of the pilots down over the Pacific – the pilots whose ships were lost, and as their fuel dwindled they fell into the water still searching, searching for some place for some place they could rest.

Were they calm? Did they dream?

What did they do in those last hours?

“I looked for someplace to come down,” says one in greasy overalls and goggles pushed up on his forehead, “I looked and looked and when the engine finally died I thought it was some kind of blue field 153

I was falling into, and I was going to get out and walk around, then something tapped me on the shoulder, and it was the blue water coming in to sit beside me.”

“I wrote letters,” says another one with flopping cap over his ears, “on my clipboard, on the pages of instructions for checking the instruments in case of emergencies. I wrote my wife.

I started, ‘Dear Ruth, I don’t know if you’ll ever get this letter, but I wanted to let you know how much I’m thinking of you now. Honey, this might be the last chance I’ll have to tell you…’

“The rest is personal,” he says, staring away with eyes as distant as the emptiness beyond the moon.

“Just at the last I thought I was as natural as a bird,” says another, with a smudge of oil on his forehead where he’d wiped the sweat off with his thumb.

“I thought I could keep right on going, and when the needle showed up dry I just pulled back and I went up, up letting the wind carry me one more time, looking one more time around the horizon and it was as naked as a baby’s stomach, 154

and just then the wind opened its fingers and let me go.�

The droning of the planes haunted me, the frantic buzzing, like flies trapped in a closed room, the sound weakening, dying until I could hear it in my sleep.

It was the emptiness of it that picked with insistent fingers at my dreams.

It was always the circle of the horizon that I saw, that drew its barren ring around my shut eyes, and drifting drifting toward it was the silver, droning shape of the plane.

The pilot tired now, from turning in the cramped seat, tired now from crying into the radio that only buzzed back its own stillness.

The silence stretched so tightly against the skin that it drew blood.

Hands that had clutched at the controls had loosened, tears had dried.

The ocean, in a rim, hung in front of him 155

and the plane pushed dully toward it, with only a weak line of cloud ahead of him, which was death, only a reddening, flaring ball of sun gaping up out of the streaming ocean’s edge behind him, which was death, only the feeling of the ache in his moistureless mouth, in his burning eyes, which was death.

And the choking cough as the engine shuddered still woke me, and I lay staring up into the darkness, listening to the last soughing of the dying wings as they fell.

IV But when the world turned over on its back again, and the time for war came around again, and I followed them into the uniforms they’d taken off – 156

I found only the ordinariness of it.

With my old clothes stuffed into a new khaki laundry bag I stared out of the barrack’s window onto the trampled patch of withered grass asking myself, “Is this what it was like? Is this what they were like?”

Sometimes pulling off a sweaty shirt, rubbing salve on bruises, I looked up.

I thought I saw faces that were their faces.

Sitting on the ribbed bench of a truck I turned to look into a bus parked close to us on a strip of pavement in the company area – and it was the faces I’d seen before.

I started to open a window, to say something to them, but the evolutions of time only enclose themselves within each other, they don’t intersect.

The doors closed with a metal clang, the bus started, their faces disappeared.

It was the ordinariness of it, the monotony of it that stayed with us.

As if we were all standing in the same water soaked ditch, digging with the 157

same shovel that we passed back and forth to each other, its handle sweaty from each other’s hands.

Only someone who had never done it could have said something about these hallowed deaths, or someone who didn’t understand it could relate it either to patriotism or disillusionment, to any slogans or causes, pretentions of intellect which, at least, we were without.

In a room, years later together with uncles, my father, cousins, I only felt our ordinariness.

Six of us, standing in the kitchen drinking, a sound of women’s voices from the other room as we talked.

Our ordinariness – but the uncle leaning against the refrigerator, hair graying, face still red with the sun, under his shirt his body a splay of machine gun bullets.

The cousin laughing at something his father had said, laughing in a voice with its own darkness, one lung torn away by a land mine. His older brother scarred with shrapnel.

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The rest of us unmarked on skin or bodies, but the marks left somewhere within us.

Our ordinariness, which we felt comfortable in, like an old shirt we kept to wear around the house, but the uncle with the scribble of bullets in him – thirty years service – the uncle beside me, bearded now and with eyes sad with old resolutions – twenty years. Two uncles not here, but we talk of them, one in meaningless duty – was it in Seattle? – the other a pilot, one for two, the other three years.

A cousin, the shorter, darker brother of the cousin who lost a lung, two years – myself, two years – my father with his shipyard job training with the armed reserves, kneeling in the streets, a rifle across his knee.

The ordinariness of one family, without fervor, without heroics, but between the eight of us sixty-one years of service.

What was worth these sixty-one years of our lives?

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What did our families get from these sixty-one years?

“We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…” we sang through ankle depths of dust that hugged us as we marched, and in our ordinariness that was enough, even if there was, under the skin, something we never could have said, and never needed to have said.

That we did it said the things it would have embarrassed us to say aloud.

Only one of us did try to say something, the uncle who had stayed in the army for twenty years, and he wrote, “My youngest son who died of cancer when almost three years old is buried in the National Cemetery in Fort Bliss, Texas, among many young comrades. Both my other sons were wounded in Vietnam, the younger severely, almost unto death. I neither encouraged nor discouraged their joining the Armed Forces.

I was proud on both occasions for different reasons. Eldest son voluntarily joined the Navy, and I was proud. Younger son vowed he would never volunteer nor serve if called, and I was proud. He volunteered for the draft after his closest friend was killed-in-action, and I was both saddened and proud. Each and all of these 160

‘prides’ were difficult to accept for reasons that I believe to be obvious.”

It was only our ordinariness that gave any possible meaning to those sixty-one years of our lives.

V

The death notices came drifting like small, fiery embers you couldn’t close the door against, and they hung in the air with their burning presence until the heart blazed up, and the ticking of clocks was a low crackling of flames as you sat with hands propped on a table and listened to the roaring of the fire within that was consuming you.

On the radios, on the mantelpieces sat the photos in stiff frames and the flames seemed to spread over the flimsy sheen of glass that held them fixed there on their littered shelf.

I saw the photos in the newspapers of the faces of the ones who had died – the eyes nervously staring, their 161

uniform hats on, mouths set, as if the reality were only the sentences in the newspaper articles, as if it wasn’t even death, only a different kind of event that the article was expected to explain.

The photos on the other pages, of the bodies torn to bloodied rags, never had any names.

It couldn’t have been their bodies that were the faces in the notices, whose expression, if they had any expression at all, was only embarrassed surprise.

And I saw – but how could I see? When I couldn’t even understand what was happening to them? – but I saw the sudden sagging of the faces of women who had been wives, mothers, sisters. I saw the stiff walks of men who had been fathers, and who had to keep – somehow – walking, and there was a kind of still cry that was stifled in the heart where the small fires had singed it.

If the photographs had been printed together, the heading reading “Private Ernie Hansen, son of Mr. and Mrs Paul Hansen, 1237 Westlake Drive, 162

of this city, seen shortly after his death in combat last Thursday afternoon, January 16,” and the picture was of a torn, bleeding body instead of the formal, embarrassed portrait, would someone have said then “No, this is too much, no, we can’t bear it”?

What did we say? what did they say?

“God,” some said, “God, take and keep this thy servant…”

“God,” some said, “In thy infinite mercy, help us to understand…”

“God,” some said.

And others said, “No, I can’t believe, I can’t accept…” and others said, “I can’t believe, I can’t forgive…”

And they stayed alone, and they stared into the emptiness . until the silence deafened them.

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And I understood so little, standing in the hallways in front of dim mirrors, with their sagging uniforms draped over my thin shoulders, listening to their noisy shrill of laughter, and some of them died whose caps I had tried on, and some of them came up the stairs again, and their uniforms were stuffed into boxes to put in the back of the closet, and we met again and their faces lost their lined sunburn, and we came to know each other.

But of those who died I knew so little.

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News at Lunch

for M. C.

News at lunch can surprise.

My friend’s news over a quick lunch of salad and a croissant – his voice muffled in the noise of the restaurant, his eyes following the crowded New York City rush on upper Broadway – his news is that the new lump they’ve found in his body will send the bright paintings hanging in his hallway to a friend, close the book lying open beside his chair at the window that looks over the green strip of park to the Hudson River, and finally recite his body’s last sentences – perhaps in the Greek he’s just been studying.

And people go by outside the window on upper Broadway.

And people go by outside the window.

People go by outside the window.

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The Smell of Sumac

The smell of sumac!

I thought I had forgotten that spindly, thinskinned weed of a tree, until just at this moment it sidled to the window I’d left open to the street.

It always seems to be wearing one of my dirty caps – so rank, so coarse, so offensive, its raw spears of leaves enveloping the board fences along the alleyways when I was a child.

So much else from my childhood is so much more important, but if I think about that moment the coarseness of the sumac streams toward me again out of the sweat of the sunlight, the stain of the leaves clinging once more to my child’s fingers – the smell of sumac.

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Learning

I learned – the new thing I learned today – that the birds outside at the feeder will live a few years – not so many – four or five – but enough – and it is their memory that will keep them alive.

I can see now that when I hang out the feeder in November’s first raw days – a few drop from the trees immediately – remembering.

For others a day is lost learning perches and the pecking order.

With dawn the small chickadees come in a rush, the cardinals, heavier, warier, wait for them to litter the ground with seeds too large, too coarse.

We learn – all of us – from each other.

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Unimportant Confusions

I have no idea how I write poems now – I look up from a book and a poem is there that has nothing to do with the book!

I walk through a nearby park, and a poem is lying in the weeds beside the gravel path, a poem with nothing to do with weeds, or with gravel paths!

A striped curtain hangs slack in a window, and behind it is a poem about a face I saw somewhere else when I was – eleven?

Could I have been looking for that poem?

Or was – somehow – that poem looking for me?

I have no idea how I write poems now –

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A morning’s thoughts, somewhere A moment of melody – a few notes, a phrase I remember from somewhere – as I lie on an unmade hotel bed in a gray city morning – somewhere – and my mind follows the sauntering trail of the melody until it finds its name, and with a final repeat of the trail of notes, closes it down.

And sometimes on other mornings it’s the tone of a voice I remember from somewhere.

After a moment I know it again, its anxieties, worries, concerns, sometimes its surprised anticipations.

The voice of my mother, a few months dead now, which I have no need to follow in my mind, since on a gray morning like this, on an unmade bed in a silent city – somewhere – it follows me.

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Eliza Dances

She cries, sometimes, my granddaughter, she cries, she sulks loudly, she is only four, and for the moment the earth stops.

The well of light that is her face darkens as time stops, the day stops, and there is nothing the world holds now for her but crying.

But sometimes alone in her room I see her dancing. She spins, pretending arabesques, her hands reaching out to search the space her dance defines.

She jumps without art, but with the art her small body’s joys define.

Her crying is as forgotten as yesterday, and the bright nod of her head, with its nimbus of shining hair insists that crying is not, for a moment, a possibility.

She has many more things to learn, my four-year old granddaughter, 170

but she will learn that crying stops – sometime – and she will learn that in her dancing there will linger – somewhere – memories of her crying, there with the memories of so much else she has lived as she was dancing.

I see her arms stretch out in joy, her small body jumps and spins, and she will learn that in those moments when her face is radiant with her dance, nothing is forgotten.

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After a Summer Phone Call

for L. K. Even on a summer afternoon like this one – hot enough that the air is a stifling weight, and in the heat the thin blue of the sky has been leached away – even on a summer afternoon like this one – I get up to answer the telephone, and friends die.

Friends die, and when I put down the phone I drag the plastic chair on the deck beside the house away from the sun and into the shade, and I sit in the shadows and I think about the voice on the phone, and friends die.

Once we wrote a book together, this friend and I, so I go inside for a copy and try to read a page, but how can I read? since through my tears the part of a page he wrote streams into the page I wrote, like painting in watercolors 172

that run together if not enough time is left for the paper to dry.

Friends die, even when it’s so hot it feels as if nothing could make me forget the heat, but I sit waiting for the part of me that trembles as though I’ve been struck to breath again.

My hands clasp and unclasp.

If I look up, the only thing I see are the trails the birds leave in their circling through the dust filled air.

If I close my eyes what I see is another vision behind the spiraling birds – the streaming procession of people like us, like me, an unending line of us stumbling along a littered path on a day as dull and airless as this one, and as the line pushes us along from behind, if one of us drops off, or falls along the side, we have only a moment to look back, and when we look up again the empty space is filled.

We go stumbling on and we try to swing our arms. It is hot, our mouths are dry.

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I sit with closed eyes, but the sluggish slide of the glare against my closed eyes tells me that the sun has gone on circling.

I slept a little.

My knees were uncovered and I feel a little sunburn. I bend down in the shadows and open my eyes. I don’t think of anything.

I stare at the lines that the shadows and the sunlight have sketched on the worn boards of the deck.

I notice that the deck needs painting, I notice that it’s still hot, that my legs are too red for me to think of doing any work in the yard.

I notice that the sunlight wasn’t given eyes or ears. It won’t see if I sweat – or if I don’t sweat. It won’t hear me if I cry.

If I am still sitting bowed in this unsteady chair when the sun sets, the night won’t notice if my hands go on clasping and unclasping and my eyes still blink back tears.

Friends die. Friends will die.

I am older.

I hear the night wind take up these mysteries with the leaves.

A summer phone call.

Friends die.

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A Life of Trees

I learn – always – something, even from this summer’s heat, this half-breathless, yellowing weight of heat that drags us along in its trampled path, and we press after, as if no summer before had been like this.

But it is also dry.

And at last it was the dryness, I understood, that would leave us scaled and withered, dry and as undisturbed as dust on a jar neglected on a shelf, and now I found myself staring up into the leaden surfaces of the sky, as if its barren emptiness could split and peel – not looking toward the sun, but searching the horizon’s spare fringe of clouds – urging them toward me as we coax a baby’s uncertain steps – 175

urging it to the anxious security of our outstretched hands.

But the clouds’ heedless drift forced me to accept again that my hands could only reach so little of the way toward those wavering fingers.

And there was no rain.

Each day the color changed in the massed needles of the grove of spruce, pine, and fir beyond my balcony, the green of the needles in the first weeks so fleshly physical I could taste the color on my tongue – then the green withered to orange, a bare tone of orange, then to a thin leach of dust, without life’s suck of breath, and helplessly I watched the spectacle, as if it were friends that were dying, and I could only watch.

At first I felt no excitement in the muzzling, thundering night when the rain finally came, as crude as hunger, as shrill as the shouting of someone 176

who has been long lost.

The trees – could they still be alive, or had the relentless orange of the drought already shaped itelf into a shroud that had woven itself into the branches?

Had the rains come too late?

Then in a few days I could see a faint flush of green as new needles drew up life from the newly softened earth, . already itself flushed with the green of new grasses.

I look out now from my balcony at a striped tapestry woven in strips of orange, of fresh green, of the thin streams of lifeless dust separating them into uneven bands.

I see the twitch again of the tiny birds as they pick at the new seeds they find only by dangling upside down in the mornings’ now gentled warmth.

When I walk now I cover my head against the sun.

Does my body bear within me these wavering, stripped bands 177

of my life’s apprehensions, its cloaks of fear, those layered weavings of laughter, or its measureless anticipations, its sudden fulfillments – excitements – beyond anything I could define?

I learn from the trees, I learn from whatever they can teach me of stubborn life and its blind insistences.

II

.

At the edge of the grove of pine and fir a smaller leaf tree was left to grow, its spreading canopy of leaves bare as sticks in the winter.

Then in the soft fragrance of spring as the leaves emerged with them overnight clustered gray webs appeared, in tent-like shapes in the branches, as if some coarse fibers had been caught as they were carried in the wind.

The spring – with its urging warmth had brought with it a raw, abrupt death – 178

as inexorable as the drought that had drained the color from the branches of the firs.

As I stood close I could see each festoon of net was a writhing womb of black, wire-like worms that in a week devoured the leaves of the branches so fresh around them, those shiny forms so desperate in their hungers.

I thought sometimes in my dreams I heard the sounds of their relentless feasting – and suddenly the tree’s slight limbs were stripped as if the spring had become a December of all that was green around them, only they could feel.

The hungers of life, the needs of life – as irreversible as the tides – But then by the end of the summer the leaves of the small tree grew again, their flesh as nudging green, as succulent as the spring.

In the morning’s idling breeze no sign that only weeks ago I thought the tree had died.

The black scourge of worms 179

now fluttered on nervous white wings, searching the shadows beneath the leaves.

Is this something the trees knew, this incomprehensible metamorphosis?

Did they know that this is how life goes on after despairs of drought and flood?

That beyond the rough ravages of life’s unending hungers there can be still some hopes of renewal?

Or do they know that this is only what the summer expects, something somehow only ordinary, as a rainbow is ordinary, that gleaming arch of colors before the darkness of winter?

The trees will live longer than I will – the thought humbles me.

Perhaps one day they will tell me what they know.

September 8, 2013, Årsta

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Generation

The bare earth I left in autumn now – as the summer draws its first surprise of thick buds from stick-like branches – offers me its new raw forms – coarse leaves, trembling string fibers of vine, thin straggling patches of weeds, bits of flowers soaked with morning rains.

Where has it come from, this burst of growth I had forgotten might sometime appear?

Was it there already in the earth, its generation spontaneous – as unplanned as a leaf?

But for a moment it feels as if this growth, this generation, was only hidden where I couldn’t see it – as if laughter could suddenly be spun from the clear air – as if love at last could be wrung from bodies that for so long seemed empty?.

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It was a December when no birds came

I thought – at first – nothing about it.

It turned cold, there was snow, and as always I tracked through the white drift and filled the feeder with the small black specks of seed the squirrels ignore.

And at first I thought nothing about it.

Always the birds came.

I sit now at the window in the gray twilight and I see the feeder still bare of birds, swaying in the wind, and now I think about it and now I can’t stop thinking about it, this December when no birds came.

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Samuel Charters Although he is more widely known for his many books, articles, and recordings in the areas of blues, jazz, and the musical culture of the African diaspora, Samuel Charters has also had an extended career as poet, novelist, biographer, and translator.

For many years his poetry was published by the adventurous Berkeley press Oyez. Of his early collection Days, the poet Robert Creeley described the sharp clarity of the poems’ imagery and the “cleanly drawn breath” of the poetic language. In a response to the major poem “Of Those Who Died,” poet and novelist Gerard Locklin wrote, “A beautiful, intelligent, mature poem W. C. Williams would have been proud to have written, with its music, hypnotism, and pellucid clarity… a masterpiece.”

He is married to Ann Charters, author of the first biography of Jack Kerouac and a prominent anthologist and chronicler of the Beat Generation writers. They have collaborated on a literary biography of Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and a joint biography of Kerouac and his close friend John Clellon Holmes. For more than two decades he was the poetry editor for their successful anthology Literature and its Writers. As translator he worked for many years in close collaboration with the Nobel Prize poet Tomas Tranströmer, among other contemporary Swedish poets.

His novel Louisiana Black was made into the movie White Lies, starring actor/dancer Gregory Hines.

His most recent biography, Songs of Sorrow, is the story of Lucy McKim Garrison, the woman who was the creative force behind the first collection of the spirituals of the American slaves, the 1867 volume Slave Songs of the United States. Other recent books include We Women, an enlarged edition of his translations of the Finland Swedish poet Edith Södergran, and two books for Portents, the novel The Harry Bright Dances and a collection of London street poems Thing to Do Around Piccadilly, with photographs by Martin Colyer.

Portents