LOVES AND DYSTOPIAS: POEMS
George Wolff
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CONTENTS To my Wife On a Line of John Clare's Having Slept Apart Transfigured Night Les Liaisons Dangereuses Sleeping through Easter Old Soldiers to Their Wives He Contemplates His Celibacy In the Growing Season Night Flight to Dallas My Grandfather's Afternoon Nap Driving North toward Chicago The Family's Vacation October Fire Myth Two Poems in Memory of my Mother For My Brother In the Intensive-Care Unit Three Loves Waiting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art For Denise Levertov The Love of Art Spring and Anti-Spring Poems Our Civilization and Its Discontents One Short Leg Locked in the Museum Ubi Sunt
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 15 16 17 18 19 21 22 23 26 27 28 29 35 38 40 41
3 Theoretical Anatomy The Bhikshu Bids His Colleagues Farewell and Follows W. S. Merwin My Obsidian Future One Soul’s Night Cutting Back the Crab Apple The Steel House In Vegas Suburban Assassin Metamorphosis Nuances on a Theme of Stevens’ The Paltry Thing Musical Composition Imagery of Castration Getting There From the Cold Tree With the Detachment of a Fisherman Two Apocalyptic Poems
42 43 45 46 47 48 52 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
4 To my Wife If love is like a bridge or maybe like a grudge, and time is like a river that kills us with a shiver, then what have all these mornings meant but aging into love? What now is straight must have been bent; what now is whole must have been rent. My hand is now your glove.
5 On a Line of John Clare's Of hips and pendent haws That toss at night And legs that wrap a body tight: Huzzas and barcarolles. The moon's tooth slits its lip And bleeds a white On sheeted hills that might Endure a million fills Of valleys with this blood; And moon itself can shed A million more, undead, And be as been before. But hips and pendent haws That wage their fight, Their brigadiers can bleed but slight And then can toss no more. No more Huzzas and barcarolles.
6 Having Slept Apart The storm came without warning. The sleep of a summer's night suddenly torn by lightning— the quiet of a dream broken. The two of us caught in one flash, eyes wide and bodies trembling. The wisps of sleep drifted away. As I touched the small of your back you pressed against me. I entered you as quietly as a dream returning. We awoke for the first time as one.
7 Transfigured Night That night the unbridgeable river that flows between living and dead ceased for hours to flow. I lay awake attesting to the spirits' presence, as they gathered in my dark but unsleeping heart. My brother was there and I hugged to my chest his heavy ashes. He spoke of all his wayward loves. And Strauss was there with Don Juan, calling my blood to life, breaking my frozen lake into tears, and smoothing the passage for you, the living. You came, offering only mysteries— your eyes, your smile, your love. A night transfigured by the merging of death and life— several spirits crossed the unbridgeable river and met in the depths of my heart. Though living, you entered that waking dream and showed me the boundaries of my narrow life.
8 Les Liaisons Dangereuses I wish to love you for a brief and pointless time, like a child playing a game as darkness falls. Nothing bitter, nothing sad—picnicking on a grassy slope and leaving by our separate paths. I will keep a fragment, a whitened relic, to evoke some pure abstractions of your face, your eyes, your form. You need keep nothing. Go and be unchanged. Go and be your eternal self.
9 Sleeping through Easter In the Ohio fields undiscovered species of green life begin among the stalks and stony furrows. The risen fields are welcomed by the sky, its rain and sun, its tangible air. In bed my wife reads and sleeps the afternoon away as if our life together were not dead and our new selves not struggling toward birth. The last generation of robins from the dispensation that is now past are singing by our empty tombs.
10 Old Soldiers to Their Wives A month of Sundays gone under the bridge. Their watery reflections of unburst clouds move like bundles balanced on small heads. We burned their bridges after them and before. When they come to it they will not cross. And I have not seen you since that bridge in London slowly settled its reflection into the slippery Thames. At last the armed service is ended. "in the service of his . . ." "life well led . . ." The column of covered trucks double timed it away. I have returned. You have until Sunday to unravel all your loves.
11 He Contemplates His Celibacy In the gray air I look for a beginning and try not to care whether winter lasts. Out of the sky the snowflakes whirl, bringing to my ears and eyes their childlike blows. Children I have known or should father sleep in my bones. I hear their cries. They would awake not for a night and brief breeding, but to feed on their father. No crooked leg stirs in the snow. Winter drags. Nothing wishes to grow.
12 In the Growing Season Suddenly in the darkness I'm awake. Beside me I feel my son. He sleeps on the edge of my bed like a wet leaf caught on a threshold. Then I hear it: The thunder makes a slow trip across the sky. All around in their places for sleeping among the new and rain-wet leaves the birds start their pre-dawn flutings— a small intermittent music inside the rumbling dark.
13 Night Flight to Dallas in memory of Mimi From the plane I saw the islands, the lights of towns, hanging fragilely at their different heights garages on empty roads, strings of lights in front of darkened stores, lots and out-buildings, farms and Diesel trucks— everything locked and silent and still, marooned in the wide dark. I read some poems by Donne to help me know that you were dead. In the slow movement below me, towns had the look of single homes and lonely farms seemed outlined by the glow of empty bulbs. "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls," it says. "It tolls for thee." And then the lights of Dallas and Fort Worth, the plane coming down and down into all those specks that slowly became red or green or white.
Suddenly I could see cars, their headlights picking out the roads, and the earth came back.
14 The plane buried itself in that Christmas tree. The next day in the brilliant sun the shadows of the living flitted over grass as we tried to make our way to where you were and as the children guessed at your closeness.
15 My Grandfather's Afternoon Nap On mid-winter afternoons, when the sun was etchingly bright and each faded grass blade was lodged in its sheath of ice, the living room filled with warmth— an invasion of the winter sun. The rooms would crystallize with light. In his bright chair my grandfather, like a heavy bear, would sleep his hours away and I, in a tent of blankets and chairs, would hide from the polar wars. But already the mantle clock, like a swollen, bitter agate, had lodged its ticking inside my ignorant heart.
16 Driving North toward Chicago The old '46 Pontiac speeding in blackness the growing fields the odor of hops more solid than the car itself the beam of its lights swimming with uncountable bugs specking the front bits blown to the side a dim glow from the dash the whole car like a bubble of dimness shooting toward the surface of a black sea my parents singing "There's a long long trail awinding into the land of my dreams. . . . " Through the back window I see the moon is closer than Kankakee.
17 The Family's Vacation Linoleum smell, hard beds, water undulled by any warmth. The screen door bangs in the unbelievable brightness of the low white sun. Dew on the ridged gray banister on the grass and stones. A dented pan sits on the grill propped across stones. The smell of bacon goes through the sharp air like gauze. I get them water from the creek and watch my raw-faced father eat. My mother's hair is held by a scarf folded to a narrow band. Again I run to fill the Thermos, breaking the bright frigid water like shale. Hovering over the pebbly mud, the thin-lipped fish watch my dipping hand. For years I have carried the memory of this small freedom cupped in the mirrored bottom of my mind.
18 October Fire Myth for my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary Twenty-five have seen the greenness of spring rise phoenix from the still entwining fingers drip ashes of winter’s slow-twined grasp and reaching forth from all the skies encompass blueness round and watch the silver minnow of the sun swim lazy in its bound, and also watch the fall bird scratch, uneager claw the tinder leaves, and build its autumn pyre, carrying brightly in its beak the notes of a soon-forgotten song. Little thought now before the fire of already burning leaves of what shall be when ashes are fingered by a curious breeze, turning them over in the hill's hollow palm, searching for the colored beads. But Proserpina too shall rise rolling back the winter's stone while our wedding dove of the zodiac flies olive-branch another spring to smooth the rippled surface before the sacred dance.
19 Two Poems in Memory of my Mother 1
Threads of Light
You sat beside the door and through dark lenses saw the appendages of night. Your eyes, stroke weakened, could pick out little they had ever known. Even that room for living was no longer home, but in the dark you saw enticing threads of light. You cried when you were left alone. And I, your frailest child, could never speak the words you longed to hear—about my heart and fumbling love. I slake my need for sorrow by returning nightly to your listening ghost. Mother, you died before I learned to speak.
20 2
To Keep
Half-orphaned by my mother's death, I hug a fading world to keep this small soul from slipping darkward, to keep from oblivion the pungent brilliance of sliced lemon bleaching a shirt on the summer grass, to keep her laughter with its throaty sound of a robin in the evening rain, to keep my anchor of sun’s light: The enduring past of all people remembered, The banter with father, The badges of infirmities, The naps delivered by afternoon, The offhand quips, off humor's hand, Delight in life's lightning, Anchor of childhood's unendingly ending days, Hoarder of histories— Mother, doer, dier.
21 For My Brother dying of AIDS in a St. Louis hospital In an isolated room at St. Luke's, the curtains are drawn against the sun, giving the air a roseate glow. Staying beside my sleeping brother, I feel the stillness enter my own breath and my eyes cease their traveling. Oxygen hisses quietly and bubbles through a bottle of water. The lists of my busy mind fall into sleep. At the bottom of my beating heart all that is left is love.
22 In the Intensive-Care Unit My brother was lying on a stiff bed looking as small, bony, and brown as he had when a child, as he had when mother played, wrestling on her feathery bed. Now he had forgotten to see and to speak. To spite his death, a machine breathed his life, its metal valve whistling in his throat. Clear tubes arched gracefully upward from his nose, disappearing in what my mind sees only as darkness. I cannot remember the meaning of all this.
23 Three Loves 1
For My Aunt Adele
I lie down and my shame covers me like my aunt's vermilion spread she gave us. We curl in balls almost lost beneath its lead. Now she strips from walls the only flowers in the Home, and in her last lucid years I never wrote or phoned.
24 2
Patient's Departure for my psychotherapist Deborah R.
When I looked back into your small room you were standing like a cracked diver in an aquarium's gloom. Around you some light swam giving you a kind of caress. Your feet sank in sand. When I left, the folding brass of the elevator's gate widened and clamped. Far above the oily wheels whined. I went down like a night-time dove.
25 3
In the Dark
One morning in the still dark we sat on the bed to count your first recurring pains. At the hospital we lay apart hearing some children play. They played in August in a leafy yard. When our son was born we gave him away.
26 Waiting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art The high, thin overcast mutes the sun, and the museum waits in this transient light for an unknown future. The air, perhaps full of a strange ozone, excites the mind like the accomplishments of genius. The past with its artifacts seems unreal. Its hours have gone off like a beautiful woman for whom I wait patiently. I watch the bronze of this Calder statue but think of your sloping shoulders and soft hair. My days, my unworkful days, are diluted like this watery sun.
27 For Denise Levertov Unpracticed dancer, you have made the elders see the way a tree moves when a child climbs within.
28 The Love of Art Before the finch perches on the branch he forwardly spreads fingers around the breasts of marble Venus, armless, from Melos.
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Spring and Anti-Spring Poems "In his terror of chaos man begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting whirl." D. H. Lawrence 1 In corners and beneath bushes the snow lies like the remains of tramps, reminding the too-clean rain of what yearly we must face.
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2 The newly sprouted leaves are pale intricate umbrellas, adding to the mind the finest feel of rain, which is: to know yourself to be and know the frailty of all who stand beneath umbrellas with their feet in puddles.
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3 The sky withdraws. The mind follows the starling. The skin is peeled like an orange.
32 4 The river has its own life, ignoring the lovers on its banks, the new houses being built, the pollution. It draws walkers who come to watch it rise above the iris on its banks and carries cups and scraps and twigs beneath the bridge. But now a chaotic rain falls, running in rivulets to the stream, softening the ground, muddying the water. I wander on this bank alone, thinking of other places I have been: the streets lit by mercury lights in which skin visibly decays and lipstick glows like phosphor, the hands I have seen exchanging nothing but the counted bills, an automobile skidding on the pavement and after months a woman is told she will not walk. But here there is a peace in this chaotic rain, in the way it reduces colors and shapes to nothing, and brings the river to my feet.
33 As I round a bend I hear a splashing as if a chained beast were being drowned, and then I see the ducks. At the water's edge two mallards are beating the water with their wings, at first apparently mating, but then I see the female cannot move. As I approach their fury grows till suddenly she's free and swimming in the stream. They cross the water and climb the bank. She has lost a leg to a turtle or a stone. So this water flows to whatever end, carrying its mud, sticks and blood, overflowing its banks in spring to become a flat reflection of the sky, unmoving, then slowly to subside and move. And I must turn again, return to the room that's cluttered with the debris of personal war, to my enemy, my cripple, my mate.
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5 The sky is smoke, the sun a quarter. Trees like bones will not revive. I gnaw at the roots of smoke, metal and bone.
35 Our Civilization and Its Discontents In memory of Howard Hughes “Une destruction organique� Thomas Mann 1
the love of machines
light falls bearing the lightless shapes of limbs dark arteries these to the ground shadows feel with their dark palms the curved planes of hood and trunk the miracle of shaped sides and watered skin slipping in the dark desired even by the black trees light falls bearing the lightless shapes of limbs these to the ground: mistaken spasms as they try to root
36 2
the love of women
watersmooth they pass hides gleaming eyes gleaming gold of Incas glows beneath glass: matchless is their polish through the tinted shields the hair piled ornately poised above necks glimpsed only when the car slows: the pedestrian turns the necks adjust for the curve the balance automatic the training deeply imprinted one of the masterworks of the times: matchless is their grace watersmooth they pass and repass
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3
the love of stars
flash on curve the comet swings out of the cave the dark mouth of the patterned sky lines are drawn connecting the brilliant teeth of light: the stick figures bleed on the walls the highest floors unvisited and not a dream even will show to us the strange orgies tasted there nightly then flash on curve the stars stoop into our sight our vision rather into our grasp grasp!
38 One Short Leg “The world was paradise malformed." Wallace Stevens Look to the gifted boy! He's all to the aerial. A jig! A jig! He's dancing a jig Of joy in the ethereal. His stockings are red, His cap's white; He's made himself A damnable sight. (Himself? Who Put the gyrations Into the top? Who yanked the string?) I hear it said He'll dance all night As vibrations sing From pole to pole, The music of an airborne mole. And more a mole If a certain lass,
39 Seeing the crowd below, Should saunter past, For up there first is last.
40 Locked in the Museum As a child I dreamt of dusk filling rooms of glass cases, muffling paintings, closing the stone faces. I saw without seeing that in a distant room the Egyptian mummy slowly rose to come, to come for the hidden me. He tore his wrappings and dragged his foot where the toes were eaten by mice. The worn eyes of coins and Greek heads, severed and adorable, turned from the noise. Stumbling horribly, he would search out the last of his living foes. At last he would see that Ra the sun-god's doors opened on nothing but fields of stones.
41 Ubi Sunt love enters, leaves, enters again my life like galactic light reflected, submerged, reflected, churning in the mid-Atlantic, the dark rollers resurrect themselves and die
42 Theoretical Anatomy There is the eye and the eye is perfect. It sees and is seen: clarity.
The mouth begins the lying, puckers and pouts, stutters: words.
The hands, too, are part of the person and what they do: is people.
43 The Bhikshu Bids His Colleagues Farewell and Follows W. S. Merwin –On being told to leave his colleagues at the university Goodbye
Choirmaster with Articles of Faith you raised up voices to cover the silence you pieced them together like stained glasses
Goodbye
Perfection with folded arms your silence was applauded on all hands Colossus Thinker with exploded feet
Goodbye
Weasel of factuality beanie of the test scores tongue pickled in Big Names
Goodbye
Nibbler and mouther inner skin of the rabbit’s ear
Goodbye
Swarthy wind planted on sprouting words like the elephant's foot on grass and your twin wind whistling in the Reviews
Goodbye
Explosion of black hair your neck shall be hung with horseshoes of flowers
Goodbye
Offender of the Faith
44 clothed in suede mud dirty wick Goodbye
Young Turkeys the spitter of gobbed grease the buttered feathers purple and green the strutting carcass
45 My Obsidian Future On the guardrail two crows, as black, smooth and hard as obsidian, watch me as I pass. When I turn and stop they lumber skyward like searchlights moving over black clouds. The three of us are as silent as wood, but I know their voices would sing better than my own.
46 One Soul’s Night One beat I am in the warm folds of a dream, the next, staring at darkness, this time the darkness of the eye only, not that other, that deepest friend. My poor eyes can see blood even in the dark. They know that another friendless day has begun, a day that may end with the soul arrested, searched by the unfriends, dropped in the deepest prison.
47 Cutting Back the Crab Apple Yes, I know a morning in early spring is not the time to cut you back. I guess you spent the winter hoarding juice in your deepest roots, waiting to force it upward into the seeds that will become your children’s lives. I crawl in arching shade. I clamp the shears again. You shower me with white pedals and dew.
48 The Steel House 1. Shift Change The new shift enters the floodlighted factory yard and stands scuffing the frozen mud with shoes of steel. Ice has padlocked the ground, making the earth impossible to break. The bell clangs and they pass: dazed face out, scraped face in. Eyes widen and shrink.
49 2. Dawn Mouth of the sky, breathing the morning grime into your lungs, exhaling warmth, gape at the wrinkled and unmade: they stand like gray stones that sink in graves, their features but shallow creases like epitaphs erased by rain, stained by breath. Spitting mouth, gloved and goggled, these workers stoke you for another day.
50 3. In the Combat Zone The capital of that jungle land was Hue, where stone walls the thickness of three men’s heights were hunched in citadel. Beneath the walls where hands with care once carved the doings of the saffron gods other hands grown hard now dig the deep and twisting holes of fight. Hunched cold in coils of tanks, we watch through slits the changes in the outer air. When time comes to move, commands curl like burnt letters in the air. The ocean within the tanks heaves in the birth of steel.
51 4. The Deep but Dazzling Night “But unto you that fear my name, shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.” Mal. 4:2 Our Phantoms fly against the moon. Its light sinks like wax beneath their smooth, translucent skin and steels these knives for work— to jet the black magnetic blood of whatever force bends the sea and drums madness on our canopies. The fragments of the sculptured moon lie scattered on the earth.
52 In Vegas the lean fingers flick over the cards, the bones roll white on green— green of bills green of felt, green eyes stare onto the board a hand stirs the cubes and gin while the table turns late, the streets lighted by figures dance in pain, the night staved off above the wind unheard of songs too sweet the unseen lights and undear the people until the end goats graze among the boulders where snow clings like wraps of fur draping shoulders, hooves cut the green skin, tear the leaves, tongue wraps cold around
teeth
53 water while the sniper waits eyeless in mud the wounded fumble their gauze waiting hearts fibrillate waiting the air is fixed the hand poised above the glass bones, eyes of mud, the sniper waits—green
54 Suburban Assassin the spring storm arrives, dusk, everything seen in oracular light— houses, swing sets, cars, trees and bushes— things ordinary words cannot describe your life has skipped the track, become a new thing— a terrorist on his last mission, a hammer in the hand of Thor your orders: Assassinate Your God!
55 Metamorphosis Je suis le sinistre miroir Ou la megere se regarde! Baudelaire You breathe the air that is stacked against you: take care! take care! The garish lips you kiss may be your own: the glue! the glue! You hear your groan slide to a bird-like squawk: your own! Your own! On air you walk; your beak taps a mirror: you cannot talk, not talk!
56 Nuances on a Theme of Stevens’ The morning the canary turned up dead the friendship ended. The lady of posh oranges and the porcelain skin did grow enraged at all unseemly silences. Many an unreal morning had they killed with horny lips clacking at the sill and, fastening on the seed-like words, had frozen with their jeweled eyes the fumbling advances of the beat-faced sun, had counted on many things but not on this.
57 The Paltry Thing For days these crows have come at evening, when the traffic flows like the final bleeding of a wounded man. To my empty hand they come for food.
58 Musical Composition Peter's blank music book hums in the windowless room. The sound of passing feet fills it with vague longings. They come quietly like workmen in white suits, carrying hammers of small steel. Windows are made in the walls and the glass shattered from the windows. Carefully, in the cascade of March sun, they mash it to bits. A crescendo of fresh air!
59 Imagery of Castration The logic professor's shoulders are curved forward. At each step nuggets of proof spill from his nodding head. Something inside his voice operates it like a puppet, cuteness of tiny sticks thumbing a ride, becoming a veteran with one arm bashing a non-extant lover. Early he wrote one famous book; his life since is laughed at openly by students. A stranger, I stop him to speak of ignoratio elenchi. On the March air his nostrils sniff defeat.
60 Getting There At year’s end a warm day. A filthy mist hangs in the air. Beside the road are fields and fields Of stubbed out cornstalks and signs. The conditioners of air, The tiny hooks under the skin, The swallowing throats of beds. At an eat-a-teria a tight-shirted man. The waitress lets up on her gum, Shows teeth, looks at the asphalt lot. She has a date with Jimmy-Joe. Werewolves on Wheels Wilderness Beast Miasmal Swamp. On the counter he leaves a residue Of coins and napkins and turns With the image of her stockings and black bra Fading like a cigarette in its shallow dish. He turns on the slick road Merging with the moving cars.
61 From the Cold Tree You are like a bird in winter grown a marvelous hunter after food, a shrewd survivor in the bonest land. When snow lies like the remains of tramps in shadows of gutter, fence, and wall, reminding the too-clean rain of what yearly we must face, then in the hooped and whitened cage of your tree you test your voice and sing.
62 With the Detachment of a Fisherman Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. M. Atwood Blind Assassin I For you who enter this room when I have left I leave these notes on the first shadows of the sun, the rearrangement upon the bed, the warmth of something more than the single body. Sunlight moves in the room like a hand upon a side—a weary tracing that begins like words sinking in half-sleep, and ends like a detached stirring of shadows on the bed. II Greatness begins with a posing of greatness but in complete knowledge of its elements. When we were young and played with passion, we would tremble with fear, then boast of our trembling. The night would begin with deep concern, with hesitation at every touching, and only slowly grow to a fearless burn. III Spots of light move on the wall like fish in shadowy water, and they become real, and fight and dance on the fisherman's line; they wriggle and gasp in his hand.
63 Two Apocalyptic Poems 1
Explanation of Angels
Seagulls are the seals of the sky: Footless but flippered Beyond belief and the eye. See! They are broken by cries. We shift our feet In sand and balance the falling sky.
64 2
For a Time Capsule
We lived on Wrath, Third of bodies by our sun, Where metal clouds Would slice the light to bars And emery-air would sand Them into neon flares. Protection was not cheap. We wove our nerves in screens And wrapped our children In the cobra's hood.