Spring Three
1.
If life is a dream,
then death was always your neighbor's neighbor's or friend's:
a piece of the sky
just landing on somebody's tail, and she, Henny Penny
(who stands for humanity),
gives out the inaudible They got me! and falls.
Only you heard her
(like Goethe, who was so attuned to the universe
he could take its pulse,
pointing out, Mankind, here's where the pain is --now mend!)
and put the words down
in a notebook until you could find exactly the poem
to slip 'em into.
2.
And there's Life Is a Dream!
The stage for the play is always set, the lights
always lit, the actors,
forever the same, ardently speak their lines,
go out and come back,
resuming their roles, repeating their lines, twenty-four
hours a day.
It's the world's best unfinished play, ending only to start
all over again
without any break. And the beauty of it -- what makes it
all click -- is this:
you can take all the roles, sitting back in your mind's
dark theatre to watch,
no matter when you came in. The bewildered girl,
who greets you at first,
is dressed as a man (and is mistaken as such
until the end
by all but her flunkey, the clown, who dies oddly biting
his martyred tongue) --
poor thing, she's out for the blood of the playboy duke,
who betrayed her once,
but then mismarries her after all; or the wild
young father-devouring
Prince, who all but digests his meal on the stage
and makes you enjoy it;
or the half-eaten King himself, who's losing his grip
(the old story)
and pretends it's the fault of his slavishly loyal psychiatrist-
oracle, who
it's plain the King was always too bright to believe.
The message, of course
(says the play going on), is Long live the King of Life!
whoever he is.
3.
A woman plays life
like a waterfall outpouring all-in-one,
an endlessness
we feel in music as it is shaped by our hands,
mouths and lungs
agrapple, impounding the all-abundance of being --
all but the source,
then stopping, once emptied of joy, on coming to be,
as in death's calmness
dissolving, resuming the flesh, to cry out of darkness,
beginning to breathe.
If fire's the source, it's there that being arises
in shapeless air,
as in the dreaming of mothers endowing, instilling
their offspring-to-be,
from first heartbeat to the pounding shriek of being
born, unearthed.
When it is, it breathes -- the rest is aftermath.
Mated or mismated,
she insists to the end that her honor's a mixture of passion,
possessed and possessing,
towards the creation that hangs on the words I do,
their vow to the earth,
the deed which only awaits the spread of the seed.
Trial and error,
more trial against error, since incubation in her
is the ageless wild flood
of the cells' multiplication in search of the singular
simple conformance
that will shape the child against intricate odds or fail.
In her getting
is her begetting, in the pleasuring lock-bodied lust
the mindless matrix
starting up her mindfulness -- and from this there follow
all law, all beauty,
all cancer, and beautiful cancered society:
from caves and earthworks,
our borders and walls, our house, roof, and furniture,
excluding all others,
to protect the future rocked in the past, put a face
on the human nest.
4.
Fire comes with winds to drive it anywhere
and momentary rain
to damp it down. The flames impel keepsakes
to explode in air
with fundamentals, discharging into ash
the grimly oiled,
upstanding furniture in livid phase of reprimand.
A litter of poverty
banks up against the bare spare heart, chewed
by deprivation.
And the sturdy house of feeling, arrested in its oldest
style of being,
through a hundred thousand days of interweaving voices,
lapses now
beside its pastel plastic junk-accumulating neighbors
itching in
Pompeian frenzy for the fire's hand to come
between and break
each rooted knot of being, leaving whatever
melts to melt,
whatever's flimsy to quickly fallen bone
and char, half-eaten
evaporating faces, and the dwarfed
inconsequential remnant
sustaining on one toe its ludicrously
poignant slouch.
5.
A fire licked and curled until it kicked up
a fine-faced college town.
A fiercely hot north wind
carried heavy smoke along
from Pittsburgh and Martinez.
All night we woke
to smell smoke
and there was a heavy drifting of it
in and out
all next morning.
Someone said the fire had already burned down
a house -- but also,
and still unknown to most, one whole block
of friendly houses
lit and burned -- the roomy houses of fifty good families.
I went down to Telegraph
and had my hair cut.
When I left the barber shop at two-forty
there was dense smoke across the campus.
People said it came
from ten miles away . . .
but I was frightened.
Fire prying out
of suddenly burst-open museums all hoped-up, hopeless,
hope-redundant
objects, tilting, limp, and swiftly licked at,
to be left forever
with the smoke-infiltered look of man-rejected things.
About three we reached La Loma
and Buena Vista,
the smoke so dense
we couldn't see the flames
until close up we saw
what looked like your house
one burst of flames.
But it wasnt yours.
It was the Maybeck's house.
And the fire went on
burning ten blocks of houses, barns, garages,
bird cages, bins,
roaring past well-wrought sedentary things carried burning
to the streets.
Twenty or thirty college men
were helping move the furniture
out of the Mattheson's
and out of the Lawson concrete house.
They couldn't stand the heat
of the Maybeck fire in front.
The fire releasing
everything from mirroring its same and seemly,
self-tormented look,
with barely time to die out of its own
unwitting self.
There was absolutely no water,
and no sign of a fireman.
Two boys said the place was doomed
and to carry out the furniture
would be to burn it in the street.
Turning back I saw the Lawson house
and your garage afire.
It was raining burning shingles
and the fire extinguisher only gave
a single gasp
which quenched a faggot on the roof.
Slowly in the shifting wind, house on house
ignited like
uneasy candles blinking in solemn fury
on their own burning.
They pushed down the fences
and chopped down
(or started to chop down)
the burning eucalyptuses
while M. and I got out
all the parlor furniture
except the piano.
M. was singed
and everyone had his clothes
burned by falling embers.
Then we tried going upstairs to the study
but the smoke there was too much for me.
I threw a few books out --
they burned outdoors...
I went down
and the last thing we got out
was the sideboard
which contained most of our silver.
The roof was falling in at three-thirty....
The furniture M. moved up and down the hill
four times, and it is now safely stored.
Fire empties, purges and transforms.
What it touches once
stands crippled in the mind forever, but what
it excavates
sifts free, effaced, consumed into the mote-
enfiltered air.
But others fared much worse.
H. B., for instance, lost
the new house he was ready to move into
and the house that he was living in
and though he got his furniture
into the middle of a burned lot
and covered with wet rugs
all of it was burned
and his books inside the house . . .
Fire is the hand between, turned by winds
that die away,
start up again and die away, turned down
by rains that drown
themselves, start up again, to die. Fire lives
forever in itself.
The P's and R's left their houses
at three forty-five
without attempting to take anything away.
They thought a few books or pictures
or pieces of furniture
would only sharpen the sting
of losing everything else.
The Lawson cement house was emptied
and all the windows closed,
but it got so hot
that curtains burned inside the house
though the house itself did not.
Some still stand intact, others do not --
cared for, uncaring,
past caring -- blackened debris, smoking lots.
The wind that blew all afternoon
completely dropped at five.
Otherwise I see no limit
to what the fire might have done . . .
We've no idea what you lost
stored upstairs in the closet.
It's terrible to think
of all your books . . .
Last night I couldn't sleep at all,
reliving that half hour or so
I had inside the house
thinking of the better things
I might have saved.
If I had been home earlier . . .
If I had had a car . . .
But one can't go on like this.
We hear what goes
going -- we see what fades fading, and the thought
put into things
gone out of things. Stillness comes again,
restoring to
familiarity every light and heavy, placid, gross,
and fumbling thing,
each to its special eye-glint, unbroken stance.
The things of yours we salvaged are:
the davenport
the large living-room rug
the small hall rug
the Windsor chair
the Windsor rocker
the desk
the sideboard
the rush rocker
the rush armchair (Chippendale)
the green upholstered mahogany rocker
the oval pedestal-table
the oval gate-leg table
the oblong table with leaves
(under the lamp)
the piano stool
the small square twisted-legged table
(with leaves and stationery drawer)
the picture of a young man
(the wrong choice of course).
None of these are touched by fire . . .
One of the hinges is off.
There are some scratches . . .
6.
The flames are gone.
But fires burn inaudibly, incessantly, and fires
eat quietly,
invisibly away, in their own man-loving,
mind-created time,
in their own man-hating, mind-dissolving time,
edging a hand
between the time we count and time we leave uncounted.
And fires lick
behind the eyes, burning off the living forms
the brain devises
for the spirit's making, hollowed, burnt out blindly
from behind.
7.
Fire like a waterfall bears sounds of words
in every language,
barely heard beyond the crackling, going down in gibberish,
the drowning of all sense,
the dying of all one thought the mind must use
to keep the armor
of the brain from caving in upon the self.
Only the drowning
hear such sound: tiny titillations in the ear,
before blackout,
that dissolve into a ticking resonance
past hearing,
as though the hearing had reversed itself to be
the body's blood --
expiring roar, going down into the ear of all-sound,
and sucked in there,
absorbed, until a final crushing sound
of soundlessness
releases a hollow spontaneity, post-mortem clicks:
a hundred clickings
in succession surging, forcing upward,
like bubbles from the deep,
the last dissolving signals of the heard thing hearing
itself sent back.
8.
I spoke and was not heard. The words went out
and disappeared.
I spoke again and heard the words come back,
dead to every ear
but mine, which heard the words go down and disappear.
They died in me,
alive; they were a part of me that died
so the rest could stay
alive, sucking at the sense of words already
perished in their sound.
9.
I remembered, hearing the news of the college-town fire
thirty-four years later,
to write this poem, October l5, 1967.
A woman douses her body in gasoline,
lights a match and turns herself into a torch.
The wind dies down.
The crackling is fierce.
She slumps to the ground.
On each corner in each city a woman arises,
mother of three,
with her heart in her mouth,
stands open-eyed burning --
now her dress, now her body, burning.
And the wind dies down.
The traffic stops.
Children stand by holding hands till they drop.
The sky is glutted with planes
bearing bombs they will drop.
A woman, all women, burning,
bearing death, giving birth to death,
as the gears of the mind break down.
The last wind in the world dies down.
In her flame we are buried and born.