Wiman - Hammer is the prayer: selected poems

GEORGE HERBERT She loved the fevered air, the green delirium in the leaves as a late wind whipped and quickened a storm cloud glut with color like a plum. Nothing could keep her from the fields then, from waiting braced alone in the breaking heat while lightning flared and disappeared around her, thunder rattling the windows. I remember the stories I heard my relatives repeat of how spirits spoke through her clearest words, her sudden eloquent confusion, trapped eyes, the storms she loved because they were not hers: her white face under the unburdening skies upturned to feel the burn that never came: that furious insight and the end of pain. It was when I walked lost in the burn and rust of late October that I turned near dusk toward the leaf-screened light of a green clearing in the trees. In the untracked and roadless open I saw an intact but wide open house, half-standing and half-lost to unsuffered seasons of wind and frost: warped tin and broken stone, old wood combed by the incurious sun. The broad wall to the stark north, each caulked chink and the solid hearth dark with all the unremembered fires that in the long nights quietly died, implied a life of bare solitude and hardship, little to hold and less to keep, aching days and welcome sleep in the mind-clearing cold.

And yet the wide sky, the wildflowered ground and the sound of the wind in the burn and rust of late October as the days shortened and the leaves turned must have been heartening, too, to one who walked out of the trees into a green clearing that he knew. If you could find this place, or even for one moment feel in the word-riddled remnants of what I felt there the mild but gathering air, see the leaves that with one good blast would go, you could believe that standing in a late weave of light and shade a man could suddenly want his life, feel it blaze in him and mean, as for a moment I believed, before I walked on. Lost in the lush flesh of my crannied aunt, I felt her smell of glycerine, rosewater and long enclosure enclosing me, and held my breath until shed clucked and muttered me to my reluctant unmuttering uncle within whose huge and pudgy palm my own small-boned hand was gravely taken, shaken, and released. Sunday: sunlight oozing through drawn blinds of the dining room over fried okra and steaming greens, cherry yum-yum and candied yams, Navy knives and forks, placemats picturing national parks. Bless these gifts were about to receive, my uncle mumbled and my aunt amened, before with slow clinks and shakes, amphibious slurps and gurgles, they dug untasting in, bits of gifts not quite received tumbling down laminated canyons, improbable waterfalls, far, clear mountains. Nothing stopped unless I stopped: their mouths surprised wide on half-finished mouthfuls, my aunt in unfeigned alarm straining a full bowl or meat-laden plate in front of me, little jiggles shooting through wattled, weighted arms and my iced tea.

Exhausted, sprawled on vinyl recliners in the dim glooms of the half-lit den, they shouted down the loud television telling me which neighbors name was in the news that week, whose heart stopped in sleep, or some man by cancer eaten clean away. Its early yet, theyd sigh and say if I sighed or said anything at all about leaving, nodding their heads at me and nodding noisily off like a parody of people sleeping: my aunts face crazed with whiskery twitches, her glass eye slitted eerily open; the unmuscled melt of my uncle, broad-skulled, flaring forested nostrils. The lamp, handcrafted out of Coke cans, flickered erratically if I moved. The clock, shaped like the state El Paso nine, Amarillo noon, and the vast plastic where we wereticked each itchy instant. Then it was time: my uncle blundering above me, gasping tobacco and last enticements; while my aunt, bleary, tears bright in her one good eye, fussed and wished the day was longer, kissed and sloshed herself around me, a long last hold from which I held myself back, enduring each hot, wet breath, each laborious beat of her heart, thinking it would never end. My grandson walks through walls he does not see.

Touching nothing, he touches tools and stalls, A bucket and a clutch of warm eggs: The torn-down henhouse, wellhouse and the barn. He wonders where the fenceline was, the maize, The garden and the yard; stands blinking back The brightness under the unshadowing eaves Of the house, even the shade tree sheared away, High cotton blooming in these rooms of air. My grandson, leaning over the white rows, Over the long porch gone to light, picks A lock of cotton and he wants to know If I would live it all again Wind stirs In the leaves, in the windmills vacant blades, Spinning and spinning without sound. Wind threads Unwhistling through the windsplit wood, over The filled-in well where something of the cold Stone walls, of buried air and clear water, rose When children we called down to hear a sound Survive us; and it stirs before it dies These leaves that rise and fall like the leaves of the tall Pecan tree in the shadow-flooded yard When the day was done, the work done, right here, Where killdeer cried into our silences And locusts sang themselves out of their skins. He waits, listening. J.C.W. (19131995) Built or torn away? All I know is noise of wood and workmen woke me this morning and for an hour or more Ive drowsed between my body and next door where a ladder scrapes across the pavement, tools clatter and whine, tick, tick as someone climbs. (19131995) Built or torn away? All I know is noise of wood and workmen woke me this morning and for an hour or more Ive drowsed between my body and next door where a ladder scrapes across the pavement, tools clatter and whine, tick, tick as someone climbs.

Time to get up. Time to sit down and try once more to work. Time for Rebecca, the art restorer from England, with freckled cheeks and fingers finer than a watchmakers, who never sleeps and lives on cigarettes, gin, and Chinese food, to stir upstairs, begin the early ablutions that have made these weeks of fog and idle solitude oddly intimate: creak of bedsprings, creak of hardwood, stuck doors and drawers and the rusty sound of faucets coughing on, water quicksilvering down white shoulders and thighs into the pipes around me like a teasing dream of rain; and the silence then as she chooses what to wear: the pale blouse with its paler plunge, the flaxen dress that matches her hair; click, click of her heels over the floor, out the door, up Clayton Street. But not yet, not quite yet I close my eyes and let myself recede again into the pillows and sheets, inflections and directives in a language I cant place, pink hues and pigments of Rebeccas face at my door last night as she smiled, or tried to, held out her fine-boned hand the streetlight seemed to shine through, and said, Its time we met. The salt fog poured off the water as we walked, formed and tore Sutro Tower, the bridges blinking girders into the moldy keeps and closes of Suffolk, cathedraled Cambridge, Rotterdam and Rome and the huge high-ceilinged rooms of the dream shed had for years, our footsteps echoing through that empty opulence of silence and chandeliers, nothing on the walls, nothing in the doorways or in the long white halls but the guards, gray, impassive, motioning us on. Up Parnassus, past the hospital, where the Richmond glittered between the park and the farther darkness of the bay, we came into the last room of her dream, immense, immaculate, with guns of every kind and time arranged on the floor, all the gleam and lovely grain of barrel and stock, trigger and hammer hoarding the light, as one by one the guards with their sensible shoes and saintlike patience, their tired, proprietary silence, pressed close, waiting for her to choose the proper moment and means of dying.