W.W. Norton - Diversifications: poems

PS3501.M6D5 811.54 7511616 ISBN: 978-0-393-04414-0 ISBN: 978-0-393-35715-8 (ebk.) for Richard Howard Contents Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of the following periodicals for first publishing the poems listed: American Review The Marriage Antaeus Terminations Brim Uppermost Caf Solo Fix Chicago Review Narrows Diacritics Full, Lightning, Double Exposure, Emerson, Meeting the Opposition, History, Tussock, Fundamental Constant, Ballad, Mind, Attenuations, Turning Epoch Transcendence, Ars Poetica, 8o-Proof Georgia Review Making It Granite Louise Harpers Delight The Hudson Review Pray Without Ceasing Modern Occasions Salt Flats New Letters Imago, Self-Projection, Certainty New York Quarterly Imperialist, Weight, Sight Unseen, Having to Do with Birth New York Times Currencies, Appearances, The Flaw Poetry Bonus Quarterly Review of Literature Measure, Three Travelogues Raven Glass Globe Salmagundi Insouciance, Crying Out Diversifications Just because the transcendental, having digested all change into a staying, promises foreverness, its still no place to go, nothing having survived there into life: and here, this lost way, these illusory hollyhocks and garages, this is no place to settle: but here is the grief, at least, constant, that things and loves go, and here the love that never comes except as permanence. You notice as the flowering spike of the forget-me-not lengthens with flowering it leaves behind a drab notation (namely seeds even smaller than the flowers) which does not say forget me not because it means to be back Constrictions, gross substantialities (the lifting of form) figure definitions: narrows govern seas: like there at Gibraltar, an enrichment, landforms, Africas good-sized mountain easily as if seeing across the Straits, looking into Iberia, the Mediterranean touching the Atlantic in a seeable scape: that ruffling of surfaces, Atlantic weather mixing with Mediterranean, the winds of each weather buttressing, reconciling their systems: awareness frantic with things and differences, the forces of great matters brought into concisions of resolution: the meeting of differences, a sexual stir: (I liked it there: I was amused and somewhat afraid:) strictures clarify: the rock, coarsened with form, has an edge, at least, like relief: the mulling ocean, au contraire, seldom shows an island, whale, or glacier, its mounts of a watery likeness, however majestically they lift, roll, suck under, and kill: get at the stone in the duct, though, and you know why the bladder swells: bolus in the artery, quickly damaging: but the oceans fine, in a way, with a life of its own apart from inlets and outlets: knots, tangles, twists draw attention, provide milieu, engrossing turn and contrariety, give circulations focus, wield greatnesses unspecific: how can we leave the narrows firm, surveyable, and prefer undifferentiations wider motions: how can we give up control into being controlled: the suasions. I need this broad place to work because Im not certain what design wants to emerge: I have to have room to work in various places with minor forms reconciling multiplicity here and there a little at a time before unity, subsuming all lesser curves and devices, can assume perimeter: the blue-air mountains on the plains edge jingled with vanishment: I set to work: here is this, I said, drawing from a center certain yearnings into line: and here is this, wavy: I ran several miles across the sand, roughed an area off, then informed it deeply with glyph and figure: when a single wind arrived, set down its many hands, whirled, and made me out. I retire from the broad engagements, leave the line and go back into the woods to openings of hillslides and lakes: I do not want to be loud with emptiness a hundred years from now: the simple event sufficescomplete when fall hawkweed spindling lifts a single adequate blossom. The top grain on the peak weighs next to nothing and, sustained by a mountain, has no burden, but nearly ready to float, exposed to summit wind, it endures the rigors of having no further figure to complete and a blank sky to guide its dreaming Once a roving man tired of roving took a place and planted a tree which grew year by year its roots deepened, complicating, its branches filled out holding, figuring space: and the man, mirrored, stood in the tree: one day the causes of his roving found him and struck: he turned to the tree: it held and could not go: tired of roving but unable to stay, where could he go: he hangs from the tree. The world is wound round with theorems, a winding: syntax in thickets meshing: coalescences of ongoing darkening with thread of thought, unraveling: tangles of hypothesis weaving semantic currents: spools of possibility feeding spun cotton balls: caps of a priori with zones of steamy incipience: the minds spider laying into the natural motions binding filaments of sight, the orb sustaining warps of motion under heaving, forced declarations: ah, this caught thing! it cant get loose from meanings and the mind cant pull free of it.

Though I have cut down, pulled up, and plowed you under, dont, weeds, spurn my more usual love: that others have hated you costs my love not a quality: because others have hated you my imagination, at home with dirty saints, gets sand in its eyes: if this lessens neither your horror nor mine, if this lessens neither your hardiness nor mine, still it adds my pip to the squeak: the rejected turn strange to get their song through: Im familiar with byways: Ive worn paths out of several unlocated woods. Flounder-like, poetry flattens white against bottom mud so farthest tremors can get full-ranged to the bone: but on the side it flowers invisible with blue mud-work imitations, it turns both eyes. I participate with rain: precipitate at twig-ends and come down: drop from the bellies of galls: elbows of branches accumulate trembling nodes that flash fang-silver into snow-soaked ground: I participate with rains gathering and coming down: hear me, gathered into runlets, brooks, breaking over falls, escaping with the silver of seeing. The hemlocks slumped already as if bewailing the branch-loading shales of ice, the rain changes and a snow sifty as fog begins to fall, brightening the ices bruise-glimmer with white holdings: the hemlocks, muffled, deepen to the grim taking of a further beauty on. The stone longs for flight, the flier for a bead, even a grain, of connective stone: which is to say, all flight, of imaginative hope or fact, takes accuracy from stone: without the bead the flier released from tension has no true to gauge his motions in: assured and terrified by its cold weight, the stone can feather the thinnest possibility of height: that you needed to get up and I down leaves us both still sharing stone and flight. The wind sidles up to and brusquely in a swell flattens lofting one side of the spirea bush: but the leaves have so many edges, angles and varying curvatures that the wind on the other side seeps out in a gentle management.