Door in the Mountain. Jean Valentine
saints, more rollicking sunbeams, more birds about your heads!
Catherine, more Catherine-wheels!
Sic transit gloria mundi, The quick flax, the swollen globe of water. Sic transit John's coronation, mortal in celluloid. Underground roots and wires burn under us. John outlives the Journal's 4-color outsize portrait Suitable for Framing, flapping, no color, No love, in the rain on the side of the paper-shed. Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commit my soul. All Venice is sinking.
Let us dance on the head of a pin
And praise principalities!
Life is a joke and all things show it! Let us praise the night sounds in Connecticut, The Czechoslovak's parakeet, Whistling Idiot, Idiot!
The moon's disk singes a bucketing cloud
Lit by the sun lit by a burning sword
Pointing us out of the Garden.
Turn your back on the dark reflecting glass
Fogged up with the breath of old words:
You will not be forgiven if you ignore
The pillar of slow insistent snow
Framing the angel at the door,
Who will not speak and will not go,
Numbering our hairs, our bright blue feathers.
Sasha and the Poet
Sasha: I dreamed you and he
Sat under a tree being interviewed
By some invisible personage. You were saying
'They sound strange because they were lonely,
The seventeenth century,
That's why the poets sound strange today:
In the hope of some strange answer.'
Then you sang ‘hey nonny, nonny, no' and cried, And asked him to finish. ‘Quoth the potato-bug,' He said, and stood up slowly. ‘By Shakespeare.' And walked away.
The Second Dream
We all heard the alarm. The planes were out
And coming, from a friendly country. You, I thought,
Would know what to do. But you said,
‘There is nothing to do. Last time
The bodies were like charred trees.'
We had so many minutes. The leaves
Over the street left the light silver as dimes.
The children hung around in slow motion, loud,
Liquid as butterflies, with nothing to do.
A Bride's Hours
I. DAWN
I try to hold your face in my mind's million eyes
But nothing hangs together. My spirit lies
Around my will like an extra skin
I cannot fill or shake.
My eyes in Bachrach's rectangle look in.
I, who was once at the core of the world,
Whose childish outline held like a written word,
Am frozen in blur: my body, waiting, pours
Over its centaur dreams, and drowns, and wakes
To terror of man and horse.
2. THE BATH
My sisters walk around touching things, or loll
On the bed with last month's New Yorkers. My skin, Beaded with bath-oil, gleams like a hot-house fake: My body holds me like an empty bowl. It is three, it is four, it is time to come in From thinking about the cake to eat the cake. My sisters' voices whir like cardboard birds On sticks: married, they flutter and wheel to find In this misted looking-glass their own lost words, In the exhaled smoke.
There isn't a sound,
Even the shadows compose like waiting wings.
I am the hollow circle closed by the ring.
3. NIGHT
I am thrown open like a child's damp hand
In sleep. You turn your back in sleep, unmanned.
How can I be so light, at the core of things?
My way was long and crooked to your hand!
What could your jeweled glove command
But flight of my stone wings?
Our honeymoon lake, ignoring the lit-up land,
Shows blank Orion where to dip his hand.
Afterbirth
I loiter in the eye of the Slough,
Every joint aching for sleep;
The sky, inhumanly deep,
Sarcastically casts back the Slough.
Did my child take breath to cry
At the slick hand that hooked her out,
Or cry to breathe? or did she lie
Still in her private dark, curled taut
Under her sleep's hobgoblin shout?
Anesthesia blew me out:
I gardened shadows in my lost crib
While they took her from me like a rib.
Swaddled and barred, she curls in sleep
At the dry edge of mortality.
If the sky's side proves too steep
Who will take up the little old lady,
Who will call her by her name
When she's a crumble of bones?
What logos lights the filament of time,
Carbon arc fusing birth-stone to head-stone?
The mud pulls harder: the stepping stones
Shake in front of my swimming eyes.
There dear, there dear, here's a pill:
Sleep, sleep, all will be well:
Lull-lullaby.
Sarah's Christening Day
Our Lord, today is Sarah's christening day.
I wouldn't build the child a house of straw,
Teach her to wait and welcome the holy face
With candles of prayer, or pray, if the wager were all.
But I have never seen or loved the holy face.
I don't believe the half of what I pray.
This world is straw: straw mother, father, friend,
Per omnia saecula saeculorum, amen. But Lord! it shines, it shines, like light, today.
Tired of London
When you came to town,
Warm bubbling rains came, the teething leaves,
Steaming spring earth, and the tough, small-footed birds;
Reckless colors sifted the closed, dense sky
As we went hand in hand through our larky maze
In