The Book of Embraces
I’m
vexed with myself tonight
that
I, fitful tiller of words,
cannot
write you a poem,
warm
as your ironing-board,
well-shaped
like your finest vase,
which
should tell everlastingly your truth
clear
like any ordinary morning
when
the smog lifts to wide-open skies.
What is
your truth, or what is love?
Where
you move without ripple in my blood,
there
the clods of deep little hurts –
oh,
forgiven, nameless in memory
and
yet, without my conscious intent,
let
to grow like thorny touch-me-nots
and
rankly creep with tiny purple eyes
to
demean me darkly in my sight.
How
their bramble cut my soul
where
I would not look to save myself!
Why
do I struggle toward your truth?
Where
words and words swirl about,
dust
in my speech, without power
to
trace their meaning in my blood,
I
coax like a conscientious gardener
from
dead clods their hurtful bloom,
then
look upon my soul’s wildness
that
you had loved, and strain
from
our days’ erasure of worship,
syllable
by syllable,
the
struck bliss and dazzle
of
our secret ‘book of embraces.
Care of Light
As soon as it gets dark, I turn on the lights
in my old professor’s cottage, and the following
in my old professor’s cottage, and the following
morning before office, turn them off again.
With one key I open the iron gate, and with two,
the main door. I turn the lamp on in her library,
the vigil light for the Sacred Heart on the shelf
jutting out a wall; then I switch on the single
electric bulb outside the kitchen, and last,
the red and green halogen like Christmas lights
below the front eaves.
I follow strictly her instructions.
She loves order in her life, and requires
a similar order in other people’s behavior –
a discipline of mind sometimes terrorized
by the haps and hazards of thieving time.
She needs to be always in control,
but she’s old now and frail, can hardly walk,
deaf and half-blind, and often ill, so that,
having no choice, no housemaid able to endure
her sense for order, she had to leave
and stay at her sister’s place,
finally dependent.
In the half-darkness and mustiness now
of her deserted cottage, all its windows closed,
her books and papers, once alive with breath
of her impetuous quests, are filmed with dust
on her long working table, awaiting it seems
her return.
I think of how a time ago
she’d walk briskly to her early morning class,
dressed in style to shame old maids; then call
our names as though each had irreplaceable
post in her invincible order of things;
and then, her shoulders hunched, teach
with a passion that, before the imperious gale
of her questioning, drove us bleating
on the open plain of the world’s sharp winds.
So; at the day’s end,
I’m her lamplighter on her silent asteroid,
among books, papers, rubble of chalk.
I close the gate behind me as I stride out,
making sure I hear the lock’s tiny click.
I follow strictly her instructions.
Down her street the street lamps cast
my shadow ahead. Crickets in the bushes
whirr according to their nature.
In the same order, the sun too will rise
tomorrow, and I shall be back.
Toys
Now our boys have such toys
as my brother and I never dreamed;
Did the same spirit stir our make-believe?
Yet outdoor was where we took its measure.
But how could I wish it were otherwise
for them, and would it be wise
since other kids inhabit the same quarry
where X-men wage their fantastic wars?
Indeed we knew the hot spill of blood,
with slingshots searched the bushes and trees,
but also knew ourselves pierced
where the world’s songs first were made.
But those video games, those robots,
armaments of glory, sirens of terror,
must root their eyes in our politics
and scavenge for hope in the world’s rubble.
Something’s amiss, or toys perhaps
have changed their meaning.
In the overflood of their kind,
they’ve lost their round of seasons.
It may be the same with the world’s
weather, but in our time,
there was one season for kites
when the wind seemed to make the sky rounder;
There was another, for marbles and rubber bands,
the earth firmer, the blaze of sunshine brighter;
and yet another, for tops and wheels,
as streetwise we vied for dusty prizes.
And when the rains came,
and the skies fell with the thunderclap,
how we would run in drenched nakedness
to dare a lightning race to the edge of time.
But how shall I travel to my boys’ heart
and break their dreadnought of heroes,
and find, as when light breaks,
the pieces of their manhood whole?
O, their heroes create them,
but if they could invent their games
and stage their future, might they not
surprise the hero with their fate?
