Valentine - Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

Acknowledgments The following sections of this volume were previously published as books. Dream Barker. Copyright 1965 by Yale University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press. Pilgrims. Copyright 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by Jean Valentine. First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1969. Ordinary Things. Copyright 1972, 1973, 1974 by Jean Valentine.

First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1974. The Messenger. Copyright 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Jean Valentine. First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1979. Home.Deep.Blue. Copyright 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Jean Valentine. Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books. The River at Wolf. Copyright 1992 by Jean Valentine.

Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books. Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Copyright 1997 by Jean Valentine. First published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1997. The Cradle of the Real Life. Copyright 2000 by Jean Valentine. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals in which the poems in Door in the Mountain first appeared: American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Boston Book Review, , Hayden's Ferry, Heliotrope, Kestrel, Luna, Massachusetts Review, The New Yorker (Sheep, My old body, One Foot in the Dark); Ohio Review, Persephone, Poetry Ireland, Two Rivers, U.S. I Worksheets, van Gogh's Ear, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Washington Square Review. Also to the following anthologies: Best American Poems 2002, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, The Book of Irish American Poetry, Hammer and Blaze, and Poetry After 9/11. To the editors, and to Dorland Mountain, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, my deep thanks.

New Poems Annunciation I saw my soul become flesh breaking open
the linseed oil breaking over the paper
running down pouring
no one to catch it my life breaking open
no one to contain it my
pelvis thinning out into God * In our child house In our child house
our mother read to us:
England:
there the little
English boy would love us under
neath a tree:
not kill us:
that was white space only
like her childhood like her
father her sorrow Nine Your hand on my knee
I couldn't move
The heat felt good
I couldn't move The shutmouth mother goes down the stairs
and drinks warm whiskey she always goes
and drinks warm whiskey down in the corner: Hand
me-down: And everything on the hair
of starting again. The girl spills the half-gallon of milk on the floor.
The milk is all over the floor, the table,
the chairs, the books, the dinner, the windows Mother and son are gone happy.
The father to work.
The sister to marriage. The girl is still spilling
the milk-house
white negative shining
out of one life into another life. Mother in your white dress
your smoke
your opaque eye
you whose name
my foot
wrote I had to die
break the rope
push through the stone fence of you, of myself, and fly Eighteen Green bookbag full of poems
I leaned with my bicycle
at the black brick edge of the world What was I, to be lost
or found? My soul in the corner
stood
watched * Girl and boy
we had given each other

we wanted	breasts
bellies	hair
toenails	fingernails
hair	nipples
foreskin	foreskin
heart

* I gave up signing in
to the night book
little notes in time
signing our names
on the train's engine car
gray 19th century Irish men
in our gray stiff clothes She Sang Save the goat of humanity!
She started out
shot through with love books She chose closed hearts
those she knew
would not kill her Save her memory her bones
dig under the house
dig near home here at the X in the mouth of the house
the shell shocked woman all her bones
goat bones A Bone Standing Up A bone standing up
she worked for words
word by word
up Mt. Fear till
she got to her name: it was
She Sang. now
says she slept with him
because he was kind
when she was in prison She woke up
hypnotized A wonderful boat She woke up
walking with the homeless
on a plank
no red schlock rope I came to you I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence
of this world
no, not the world, not reticence, oh Lord Come Lord Come We were sad on the ground Lord Come We were sad on the ground. * Cousin The erotic brown fedora on the desk:
the erotic silver watch from your father's time
balanced on its thin hinged silver lid
on the Teacher's Desk: Once or twice, someone comes along
and you stand up in the air
and the air rises up out of the air: One leaf
then branches
stood up in the sun consuming
Cousin, it was happiness on earth. The Very Bad HorseThe very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones.
The Buddha My first own home
my big green bed-sit
in London, in 1956
double bed green spread
sixpence coin-fed gas fire
London fog huge little footsteps
TOK TOK TOK I knew three people
and three more at work
I knew you I felt around in the dark for Life
and you I picked myself up by the hair
four stories up and dropped me Still I wouldn't budge. Once Once there was a woodcutter,
when he asked me to marry him
the woman in the grocery store said
You look like you lost your last friend.
First love!
When we broke up
it was as if the last egg in the house
got dropped on the broken floor. Once Once there was a woodcutter,
when he asked me to marry him
the woman in the grocery store said
You look like you lost your last friend.
First love!
When we broke up
it was as if the last egg in the house
got dropped on the broken floor.

This world is everywhere! the woman said, You won't go unsampled! So many secrets So many secrets
held you in their glass Fear
like a green glass
on the shelf It hurt like glass
It hurt like self Eleventh Brother one arm still a swan's wing
The worst had happened before: lovebefore
I knew it was mine
turned into a wild
swan and flew
across the rough water Outsider seedword
until I die
I will be open to you as an egg
speechless red Once in the nights Once in the nights
I raced through fast
snow to drink life
from a shoe what I thought
was wrong with me with you
was not wrong now
gates in the dark at thy name hinge Under the gold Under the gold and chalk and brick, beside
the rowers on the river, the black lines lived around my crayon bones.
One line. And then my heart shut down, even so, inside the lines. I rode
out of the sorrowfence blue twine-tied gate
into the river grass The Windows Funeral dream
We'll put them all down in the great book of sleep. You may be dead but
Don't stop loving me. In memory
Don't hold yourself cheap. All the windows came to him in tears.

The chestnut tree by the North River. Its tears. Dream A bricklayer. Your father. Dream If you shoot someone
I will walk out on the ocean floor
and throw the gun away. Go Clear Go clear he said his high gray 19th c.
postmortem jaw
I loved it its high grayness go clear no touch but words no more
death fear I swam out of the streaming ikon eyes who loved me: not-me: no more care
I left the clothes
standing there I swam into swarming projectless air
redemptionless
from under the earth to over the earth
air to not air The Coin While you were alive
and thought well of me

Next page