"Early Poems"

The Stranger’s Song

  -for Mahmoud Darwish

I

The dewdrop that dries up at noontime

Glistens in your night of the rosemary of yesterday,

And a longing that weeps for everything past

And the absence of your image, brings forth a stranger’s faith.

My body of sticks and leaves calls to the hunter

And a bird who carries no stones in your night

And the sky tells a dreamer nothing about the last winter

Or a pair of lover’s rhododendrons in my name or your eyes.

And the sun will be carried away, like a stone

In my old friend’s palm.  And violas will cry low

For a beast and its absence in the blood of your night,

Your night of the rosemary of yesterday.

II

Persephone’s last teardrop has fallen

And I dream of your waiting.

The echo is in the silver of her flute,

And the palm’s ascent without a moon;

A bronze guitar that weeps,

Weeps to the river and waits for no one.

My exile watches the east sun and the west

And falls in love with her faith and her two doves,

And I dream, I dream of your waiting.

III

With you the road is endless.

Winter has not yet come to the slopes

Of your beauty and my tired feet

Are a chrysanthemum’s sun.

Love is hiding, just as a dream is there,

In front of my eyes, and the last song

Is a stone that torments an ideal.

With you the road is endless.

IV

The more I ask about love and the stranger’s song –

The butterfly migrates with the wind,

A rose’s blood frightens a soldier

And the tears of a stranger’s field of poppies slow.

That my yesterday has split in my body

Keeps my tomorrow close to my freedom,

And the river asks, “how many wars before Damascus;

How many years of peace before the flood?

V

The sun on the wings of the blackbird,

Here and then gone, and the salt of identity

That wounds the present – what of your ears

And of yesterday’s pain has flown to my song?

You have returned to me as a dove’s image

And an olive tree where Rilke, like a myth,

Suffered the world.  And the void’s evocation

Of faraway thunder in you…

VI

The answer, like a clock’s heart,

Still beats in rhythm with the wings of doves,

But the evening sky does not relinquish its blood

To my language, here or there.

And I have loved you.

The sky’s green

And the sun on the river,

Are not a crocus, white on orange!

VII

While I was waiting for you,

The blossoms of the Lenten rose

Cooed in the shade of metaphor

To my blood’s longing behind poetry

And I made room for a thought of you

In my soul’s width and asked,

“The relentless passing of the cloud

In what I see of you – is it my earth

That asks, ‘who am I but the water

That floods my language stranger?’”

For I am no longer myself, and this unknown land

Is the only place known to me.

VIII

When I ask how much of sleeplessness

Has found me, I let the salt in the dream

Pay homage to the wind’s direction

And say,

               Follow my sparrow hawk

On another road so that what passes

Finds its flutes and its alcohol,

And when the fox burns like a butterfly,

Close to my breast, of two swallows

And meaning beyond winter…

                                                 I am becoming

The poem’s water, as a mandolin

Keeps its sorrow on the banks,

Even as it plays its song…

Keep me from talking long to you

Keep me from talking long to you,

There where a heavy liquid flows

Like the magenta blood of orchids

And grave orbits pull like metal moons,

Where the sky rustles its straw hair,

Dusting wool overcoats;

And threads of beads loosen like scarves,

Twist and drop on hard stone.

Where flax and caraway, yellow, waiting,

Open a dry sun below cobblestone

And a wounded mirror; (drowsy time

Shifts a little, there.)

Where old curriculums taunt, sullen,

Longing for baskets and blue clay,

And out in the solemn, laughing forest,

Children toss apples and forget their births.

Duty

Treading with the utmost care,

Finding my way

To an office building

On the side of things.

A republic of mice

Scurries toward a global sorrow.

Lifetimes pass,

We wonder at the new leaves.

Carrying a blue torch

In the district at the end of love,

Flame wounds me,

And my language fills with smoke.

I don’t have much,

That hint of wine

Touches the tongue,

Opens the heart’s waves.

Tide

  -for Bei Dao

A beginning heaves,

            a slow, crashing wave,

a tide,

            rising in the mouth of the bay.           

            Look up,

                        it’s moonlight,

                                                waving,

            the wing of a gull, stray

                        and laughing

                                    in the belly of the sky.

            Man hears his own weight

            falling like endless heavy snow.

            When the lamps go out,

            he’s forced to rest,

            giving that ticket to darkness;

            the night grows purple,

            huddling close,

                        birds call through the snow-stricken branches.

The Deep Skies

There is coming to be

a land, that stretches

out with hope.

But space, I think,

the quiet living room,

the couch,

the slow days,

all I feel is somehow

not a part of it,

as if tomorrow

were the reason to live.

The stillness is aware of you,

down the window, the rain softly drips.

Past the broken lights, do you see,

the brown eyes of the mare, and past that, oblivion?

We were not charged with the building of walls,

the wide eyed terror, our gentle son,

falls over those who sleep with a gentle hum,

we sow in the deep skies our poplars of light.

The Novelty Act

Out in the garden

Tramps the sodden hero,

Without his way;

The ruddy dawn,

Like a drunk,

Encompasses him.

Clocks and desks,

White fluorescent light

He tumbles under,

With a slight weight.

No one follows,

But there are dreams,

And a heavy nostalgia,

And a cracked mask.

For Jim Krull

Smile so

the daft and pure

expanse of watering,

this – town is like a swell of music,

            panting for warm phrase

           

            exudes –

wanderers,

not strictly,

Catapult the empty sugar jar

into the sky

for to uncover

is to sing

and you,              not daft,

                             not pure,

            don’t let the other ring.

Raised head for what was true,

            old things, not accrue.

Untitled

Perhaps they are not for sitting,

nor for even glancing at,

those worn-down chairs,

or noticing perceptible movement;

the entire character of their lives

a pure abstraction; things

that if they could, would lay 

exhausted in their yellow folds.