Spring Four
1.
The interminable colors of life flow through me with this
light rain, each downward
stroke a feeling or thought looking slantingly strange,
neither mine nor not mine,
belonging to anyone living or maybe not: maybe
only to those
dead and dying that chance to flash through to me here
while I take things in,
soaking up, thoughtless, everything happening now,
all that's passing
and coming to be, while the rain goes battering down
the grasses and leaves,
wetting houses and animal faces, slowly changing the faces
of bombarded children
in far jungle villages, pinned down under huts
that fold into flames,
surprised to be drenched as they lie there dying and staring
up in the rain.
By this drenched old house over the Tagus from Lisbon,
an elephant-eared
banana tree is clattering -- the rain having sharpened
almost to hail,
the last fruit eaten, the new in its viscous buds
beginning to stir.
A gold bantam rooster has just started over the checkerboard
cobblestone sluices
that take on infinite shadings of God knows what
reflections of light
thrown off by a tense pine forest looking spacious as death
back of the wall.
And these shadings of light before me fall as though brushed
through crisscrossing webs
to glint in the swift and vigorous rain, impending
for days and insisting
the way one insists when thinking he'll last forever.
2.
Caught or uncaught, everything falls in a lifetime.
Who can keep track?
Though I favor those more who sop it all up than those
so engrossed with themselves,
their next word or thought, they are deaf-dumb-and-blind to the world
staring right at them --
except sopping it up at times may just be too much
to bear and go on.
As when falling lightly, invisibly from a new wind,
it spreads like stuff
that statues intercept to catch for patina,
and we wonder
where and by what hands and eyes this ultra-
finest mesh
of memory was blown and magnified
into such minutely
all-pervading palish pollen. Is it
the dandruff off
the "hair of graves"? or the transcendental "dust
of ages" reseeded
in the eye-stemmed mushroom cloud now settling on
our everyday
bare heads, coarse coats -- the fallout overblown
by nations jostling
their super-plussing million-headed death's head?
3.
So again,
for the millionth time this year, you want in,
you want out,
you want off (in that catchy phrase of the musical)
of this lovely planet,
letting showers of all weights and thoughts pour down on everyone
else but you.
Just give me time to put it all down on paper
before we're all dust!
4.
The world that ticks in your hand asks Who runs the show?
and Whose heart is bleeding?
Since confessing is never confessing the time is past,
tomorrow is nothing.
It's like day and night, the bay and the tree you watch
from your window at home.
Night happens. The night just happens and you move into it.
It's like the day.
The day moves into the night. The waters go by.
There is a bay.
The tree is silent, leaves fallen. Tomorrow happens.
You move into it.
5.
The papers say six chairs around a table
are changing the world.
Whose men are in the chairs? And whose ideas
are in their heads?
They do not look at one another -- they look
at nothing; they hear,
they speak, they think of nothing. They are dead.
6.
The world is changing as we think it. Thinking
is a flame burning.
Thinking is in the head where nothing happens.
Thinking happens
inside the flame. The flame will go on burning.
The flame is nothing.
Thinking is like tomorrow. Tomorrow will
have windows. It will
have windows out of which we look, and we look
through windows which
reflect our eyes. In our eyes there are windows,
not made of glass,
not made of windows. Our eyes are the windows
our thoughts burn.
7.
Tomorrow will happen. The flame will burn. Nothingness
will appear.
8.
This thinks like a thought
that is not a thought -- and yet it goes on thinking
automatically.
It clicks around, it speaks to us, we listen
automatically.
And this is like the night that speaks and listens
automatically
to the automatic word, and shrivels -- and the same word
shrivels the day.
If I know this, how do I know it? Does it
know me as that silence
when I vaguely listen to the word rising faintly out
of my speaking hand?
What is the silence listening out of my hand
that writes this down?
9.
If God is Sherrington he'll comfort me
in Man on his Nature:
Each cell, we remember is blind; senses it has none. It knows not 'up from
down'; it works in the dark. Yet the nerve-cell, for instance, 'finds' even
to the fingertips the nerve-cell with which it should touch fingers. It
is as if an imminent principle inspired each cell with knowledge for the
carrying out of a design.
* * *
Water is the very menstruum and habitat of each and every cell. Water, within
and without, allows the cell free scope for action. Water is a wonderful
'surround' and the germinal cell seems to appreciate that.
* * *
Nerves seem for their purpose, constructed in view of what will be 'wanted'
of them. Before ever they function they grow where they will be wanted,
they make the 'right' connections.
10.
But Sherrington, Why
do we go on living like creeping ants and die
like exploding novas?
11.
Day after Day
I
Remember Pope John took a long time to die
The banner headlines in Lisbon
A small hotel near the Park
Everybody's old dad
Older than retired millionaires
When made Papa to the multi-millions
A man of the people poor and reluctant
Not wishing the office
Huge overflowing face
With the sad kind eyes of a clown
The Portuguese always in mourning
Go glass-eyed into mourning again
The TV booms in the screamingly clean
Linoleum room
Brown hands rustle and fold
Sunday green rotogravures
A hunched lady in lace lets go
Over her rosary belching
Back after lunch to devour
The flickering life story
Was nobody glad
To see him go?
Don't grieve ( he said ) I am entering
The consummation of my life
I delved with the rest in his dying
Like a virgin not convinced of her innocence
II
Call the police
A man's gone amuck on the Avenue
They're running him down
The length of Sidonio Pais
Heads jam at the window
One black cassock flies by
It's Lisbon's drunk bishop shouting
Take me home Lord
And mimicks the ancient nun's prayer
For I am sick of Love
Say it at last
O Papa é morto
I will not mourn with the living
But rejoice with the dead
Smother the mouth of my death
With his death
Take me home Lord
For I am sick of Love
12.
I follow my words like an ant on his pile among piles,
and they sing to me --
the music my words make when I read them in print. I smile,
I purr, my eyes'
Pygmalion rubs lover hands over them, and all because . . .
no, not just because . . .
I made them -- they're no longer me, I love them only
momentarily.
The music passes, its loveliness turns sour --
a dying fall,
enough, no more. Is this because it is
no longer me
but spoken memory congealed in Was and, like
the child I was,
looks like me and likes me? Rather, looks
like what I dreamt
I wished that I could be, if words put down,
just so, could make
so firm a thing as Me or Mine, something
I'd never be --
never be but not know it . . . yes, and know it
but still not know it:
in words converting me I'd find what I dreamed
I had to be.
And who'd think of dreaming this dream of me but a Me
lots better than me?
13.
My heart is a love that I like and dislike a bit more,
a bit less, than a friend.
It turns like a world half-known that is huge and cold
as the moon still-a-moon,
And you don't remember me, it says, because
I've always been there.
You bear with me as you would with a parent you care for
more the less
that you see, the longer you live to remember as younger
than you are now.
Oh world, my heart, as you live and sleep, remember me
less and less,
but bear with me to wake to the stars and the moons
always there to land on
in dreams when the earth, grand mother-father of life,
is no longer there.