Rich - Leaflets: poems, 1965-1968

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 20072010A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 19972008Poetry & Commitment: An EssayTelephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 20042006The School Among the Ruins: Poems 20002004What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and PoliticsThe Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 19502000Fox: Poems 19982000Arts of the Possible: Essays and ConversationsMidnight Salvage: Poems 19951998Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 19911995Collected Early Poems 19501970An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 19881991Times Power: Poems 19851988Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 19791985Your Native Land, Your Life: PoemsSourcesA Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 19781981On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 19661978The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 19741977Twenty-one Love PoemsOf Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and InstitutionPoems: Selected and New, 19501974Diving into the Wreck: Poems 19711972The Will to Change: Poems 19681970Leaflets: Poems 19651968Necessities of LifeSnapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 19541962The Diamond Cutters and Other PoemsA Change of World Some of these poems have appeared in the following periodicals: Night Watch, Charleston in the 1860s, and Six ghazals in The Nation; The Demon Lover in The New York Review of Books; For a Russian Poet, Night in the Kitchen, 5:30 A.M., The Break, and Implosions in Poetry; In The Evening, Continuum, The Observer, and Gabriel in The Quarterly Review of Literature; On Edges and Four ghazals in The New Republic. ISBN 978-0-393-04191-0 ISBN 978-0-393-34808-8 (e-book) Copyright 1969 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. FIRST EDITION Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 69-14708 All Rights Reserved Published simultaneously in Canada by George J. McLeod Limited, Toronto www.wwnorton.com Far back when I went zig-zagging through tamarack pastures you were my genius, you my cast-iron Viking, my helmed lion-heart king in prison.

Years later now youre young my fierce half-brother, staring down from that simplified west your breast open, your belt dragged down by an oldfashioned thing, a sword the last bravado you wont give over though it weighs you down as you stride and the stars in it are dim and maybe have stopped burning. But you burn, and I know it; as I throw back my head to take you in an old transfusion happens again: divine astronomy is nothing to it. Indoors I bruise and blunder, break faith, leave ill enough alone, a dead child born in the dark. Night cracks up over the chimney, pieces of time, frozen geodes come showering down in the grate. A man reaches behind my eyes and finds them empty a womans head turns away from my head in the mirror children are dying my death and eating crumbs of my life. Pity is not your forte.

Calmly you ache up there pinned aloft in your crows nest, my speechless pirate! You take it all for granted and when I look you back its with a starlike eye shooting its cold and egotistical spear where it can do least damage. Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon out here in the cold with you you with your back to the wall. 1965 The hunters shack will do, abandoned, untended, unmended in its cul-de-sac of alders. Inside, who knows what hovel-keeping essentials a grey saucepan, a broom, a clock stopped at last autumns last hour all or any, what matter. The point is, its a shelter, a place more in- than outside. From that we could begin.

And the wind is surely rising, snow is in the alders. Maybe the stovepipe is sound, maybe the smoke will do us in at firstno matter. Late afternoons the ice squeaks underfoot like mica, and when the sun drops red and moon faced back of the gun-colored firs, the best intentions are none too good. Then we have to make a go of it in the smoke with the dark outside and our love in our boots at first no matter. 1965 for C. A cracked walk in the garden, white violets choking in the ivy, then, O then...

Everyone else Ive had to tell how it was, only not you. Nerve-white, the cloud came walking over the crests of tallest trees. Doors slammed. We fell asleep, hot Sundays, in our slips, two mad little goldfish fluttering in a drying pond. Nobodys seen the trouble Ive seen but you. 1965 Three hours chain-smoking words and you move on. 1965 Three hours chain-smoking words and you move on.

We stand in the porch, two archaic figures: a woman and a man. The old masters, the old sources, havent a clue what were about, shivering here in the half-dark sixties. Our minds hover in a famous impasse and cling together. Your hand grips mine like a railing on an icy night. The wall of the house is bleeding. 1966 There it was, all along, twisted up in that green vine-thread, in the skeins of marble, on the table behind themthose two! white-faced and undeterred everything doubled: forks, brown glass tumblers, echoing plates, two crumbled portions of bread. 1966 There it was, all along, twisted up in that green vine-thread, in the skeins of marble, on the table behind themthose two! white-faced and undeterred everything doubled: forks, brown glass tumblers, echoing plates, two crumbled portions of bread.

That was the point that was missed when they left the room with its wavy light and pale curtains blowing and guessed the banquet was over, the picnic under the leaves was over, when haggling faces pushed in for a look and the gingerbread village shrieked outside: Whos in the wrong? Whos in the wrong? 1966 from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg Maybe you spoke to someone and on that hour your face printed itself for good. Where is that man? I need to find him before he dies and see you drift across his retina. You have played with children. They will run up to me whenever you come home free in their dreams. Houses, realized by you, slumber in that web. Streets suppose you in other streets, and call: Evening papers...

Strawberries... The city has changed hands; the plan you gave it, fallen through. from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg In the never, still arriving, I find you again: blue absence keeps knowledge alive, makes of October an adjusted lens. The days have almost no clouds left. Cassiopeia, the Great Bear let their signals burst by night to rip into impossibility. The Pleiades rage silently about.

To wait is the password; and to listen. In Dwingelo you can hear it whisper, the void in the radiotelescope. There too the singing of your nerves is gathered, becoming graphic on a sheet of paper not unlike this one here. Fatigue, regrets. The lights go out in the parking lot two by two. Desire. Desire. Desire.

The nebula opens in space, unseen, your heart utters its great beats in solitude. A new era is coming in. Gauche as we are, it seems we have to play our part. A plaid dress, silk scarf, and eyes that go on stinging. Woman, stand off. Shes gone. Shes gone.

In her place stands a schoolgirl, morning light, the half-grown bones of innocence. Is she your daughter or your muse, this tree of blondness grown up in a field of thorns? Something piercing and marred. Take note. Look back. When quick the whole northeast went black and prisoners howled and children ran through the night with candles, who stood off motionless side by side while the moon swam up over the drowned houses? Who neither touched nor spoke? whose nape, whose finger-ends nervelessly lied the hours away? A voice presses at me. If I give in it wont be like the girl the bull rode, all Rubens flesh and happy moans.

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