Plumly - Old heart: poems

FOR DAVID BAKER God-a-mercy, old heart, thou speakst cheerfully. CONTENTS Inevitably alchemy, the lesser into the greater, morphing to the pupa stage, the chrysalis, but faster, the cuticle of skin sloughed off, regrown, and shed again, each larval, instar meta phase passing through more molting lives than saintsfive, six times before the final birth, then into the light, like eyes wadded up, then slowly, with the blood, wings opening. Opening and closing. For those that fly like birds, at least four inches tip to wingtip, continent to continent, Emperors, Monarchs, Giant Swallowtails, large enough to feed like leaves along the branches or be the blown leaf drinking from the dung pool hoofprint in the mud size the compensation and camouflage for color. For those that fly the garden, in graduated light, like those that live inside us, smaller, different distances, in colors just arrived at by pigment or reflection, tiny scales of forewings and hindwings overlapping, colors the secret shadings of the sun dawn yellows, blood oranges, fritillary reds, gentian blues, each slighter than a whistle blade, like hummingbirds seen through, Flame Coppers, Streak Indigos, White Bruise, intensity at once-in-a lifetime brightness, Brightness at the flower finding food, inside the maul and marl of the mouth The spirit world the negative of this one, soft outlines of soft whites against soft darks, someone crossing Broadway at Cathedral, walking toward the god taking the picture, but now, inside the camera, suddenly still. Or the spirit world the detail through the window, manifest if stared at long enough, the shapes of this or that, the lights left on, the lights turned off, the spirits under arcs of sycamores the gray-gold mists of migratory birds and spotted leaves recognize. Autumnal evening chill, knife edges of the avenues, wind kicking up newspaper off the street, those ghost peripheral moments you catch yourself beside yourself going down a stair or through a doorthe spirit world surprising: those birds, for instance, bursting from the trees and turning into shadow, then nothing, like spirit birds called back to life from memory or a book, those shadows in my hands I held, surprised.

I found them interspersed among the posthumous pages of a friend, some hundreds of saved poems: dun sparrows and a few lyrical wrens in photocopied profile perched in air, focused on an abstract abrupt edge. Blurred, their natural color bled, theyd passed from one world to another: the poems, too, sung in the twilit middle of the night, loved, half-typed, half-written-over, flawed, images of images. Hed kept them to forget them. And every twenty pages, in xerox ash-and-frost, Gray Eastern, Gold Western, ranging across borders. A murder of crows, what I saw on a spindle of dead white oak, two or three of them, at different times, hectoring the head of the sick one, the old one, the weak one apart. From school those Eskimo stories in which leathery grandfathers and grandmothers are left behind or set afloat.

Theyd freeze, Mr. Steinman said, from the extremities in. Thinking about what they must have been thinking, I imagined the brain last on the ascending list As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow I read, in chilling poetry, years later. Even at twelve, the concept seemed distant, efficient, in keeping with the clarity and killing cold of vast, undifferentiated arctic spaces. In keeping with the landscape of the old. In the language of the desert Navajo, the old man didnt drown, the water came up to get him.

Thats how I imagined freezing, as a kind of incremental drowning, a sort of slow, word by word submersion, then, at last, the pulling under, rings on water. The killed crow fell the sixty feet in seconds, less, though in the while it took to find it, it had moved. My mother, alive in the machine, becalmed on hard white sheets, the narrative of legs, arms, animal centers stilled, some starlight in the mind glittering off and on, couldnt tell me whether or not to leave her. The sun flatlining the horizon, the wind off the Atlantic hard enough to swallow arctic, manic, and first thing the morning beach walk north lasting less than half an hour, while youve stood in the middle of the room that long trying to get your breath back to normal. It seems to take all the time there is, as if a flake of ash burning off the sun had entered at the mouth, turned ice, and had, in slow-borne seconds, grown glacial, granite, dark. The summer in the mountains there was snow, new snow, you could walk in fifteen minutes down the narrow gravel road and thered be ghostweed, spiraea, and stunted laurel trees blossoming their own snow-on-the-mountain.

Ten, eleven thousand feet, and the water, with a spirit of its own, moving over rock without once touching, flying toward the world. The thin fresh air too spiritual as well. Down below, with lights, Durango, Colorado. City snow, especially, transforms backwards antique, baroque, medieval, hand-to-mouth. Karel apek, in a book called IntimateThings, says Prague can go back one, two hundred years just overnight in a three or four-inch snowfall, as in the stillness of a postcard of the Charles, looking from the square in Mala Strana toward the sad-faced saints along the high sides of the bridge, snow-capped, blessed and even fouled with the Old World and other-worldly, since Prague is a winter city, night city, streetlights blurred in mist, the centuries-looming buildings basic gothic under the glow. apek adds that you are startled at the darkness deep within you standing in the history and cold beauty of the place.

Kundera, too, clarifies the quality of light, as if among the weight of intimate things you were lifted, and the face in the water looking up from the river were not yours, and those werent your footprints in the snow. Water filling a void created by a glacier hundreds of these lakes healing over wounds. And when you choose you must be silent. So wed row out slowly, barely lifting up our oars, in order to fool the fish, whod rise to see what foolish fish we were, then go back down. Fresh water, black water deep. You had the sense, at dusk, of dreaming, of floating in a light now almost gone the anchor tied to a ladder, oars like wings, but nowhere to go but drifting until morning.

At a height above Punto Spartivento, the point at which the northern wind divides, Como and Lecco assume their separate waters, deep enough theyve drained the deepest sky. The lift from the lakes sun surfaces is swallows, terns, and Mediterranean gulls, green hills and granite mountains, white tourist boats and seaplanes circling in, then steps beyond the timed arrivals and departures, terraces and gardens of terra-cotta towns that look like, from here, no one lives there. Eliot says that home is where you start from, memory and body so confused they are the same. In London, in Holland Park, in late October on a Sunday, in an after-rain late afternoon, I stood under the great horse chestnut Id stood under in the spring when it lit its candelabra into flame. The chestnuts, like the eyes of deer, were gonebuckeyes if youd grown up in Ohio, conkers if you played them or fed them to the horses. And half the leaves were gone.

Yet through the intricate yellow lattice of what was left the changing sky took on a shape less random. Eliot, in East Coker, also says that as we grow older the world becomes stranger, the sky, the painters sky, transformative as earth Constables woolgathering, towering clouds, Turners visceral, annihilating sunsets. I went to this tree every season for a year. In winter it was purity, in summer full green fire. The skys huge island canopy felt focused through its branching, the ground more certain. The way a child might hide.