Poems – Page 30 – Poetry Out Loud

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

For ages long, my people have been
      Dwellers in this land;
For ages viewed these mountains,
      Loved these mesas and these sands,
That stretch afar and glisten,
      Glimmering in the sun
As it lights the mighty canons
      Ere the weary day is done.
Shall I, a patient dweller in this
      Land of fair blue skies,
Tell something of their story while
      My shuttle swiftly flies?
As I weave I’ll trace their journey,
      Devious, rough and wandering,
Ere they reached the silent region
      Where the night stars seem to sing.
When the myriads of them glitter
      Over peak and desert waste,
Crossing which the silent runner and
      The gaunt of co-yo-tees haste.
Shall I weave the zig-zag pathway
      Whence the sacred fire was born;
And interweave the symbol of the God
      Who brought the corn—
Of the Rain-god whose fierce anger
      Was appeased by sacred meal,
And the trust that my brave people
      In him evermore shall feel?
All this perhaps I might weave
      As the woof goes to and fro,
Wafting as my shuttle passes,
      Humble hopes, and joys and care,
Weaving closely, weaving slowly,
      While I watch the pattern grow;
Showing something of my life:
      To the Spirit God a prayer.
Grateful that he brought my people
      To the land of silence vast
Taught them arts of peace and ended
      All their wanderings of the past.
Deftly now I trace the figures,
      This of joy and that of woe;
And I leave an open gate-way
      For the Dau to come and go.

Lonely, open, vast and free,
The dark’ning desert lies;
The wind sweeps o’er it fiercely,
And the yellow sand flies.
The tortuous trail is hidden,
Ere the sand-storm has passed
With all its wild, mad shriekings,
Borne shrilly on its blast.

Are they fiends or are they demons
That wail weirdly as they go,
Those hoarse and dismal cadences,
From out their depths of woe?
Will they linger and enfold
The lone trav’ler in their spell,

Weave ‘round him incantations,
Brewed and bro’t forth from their hell?
Bewilder him and turn him
From the rugged, hidden trail,
Make him wander far and falter,
And trembling quail
At the desert and the loneliness
So fearful and so grim,
That to his fervid fancy,
Wraps in darkness only him?

The wind has spent its fierce wild wail,
         The dark storm-pall has shifted,
Forth on his sight the stars gleam pale
         In the purpling haze uplifted.

And down the steep trail, as he lists,
         He hears soft music stealing;
It trembling falls through filmy mists,
         From rock-walls faint echoes pealing.

Whence comes this mystic night-song
With its rhythm wild and free,
With is pleading and entreaty
Pouring forth upon the sea
Of darkness, vast and silent,
Like a tiny ray of hope
That oft-times comes to comfort
When in sorrow’s depths we grope?

‘Tis the An-gu, the Kat-ci-na,
‘Tis the Hopi’s song of prayer,

That in darkness wards off danger,
When ’tis breathed in the air;
Over desert, butte, and mesa,
It is borne out on the night,
Dispelling fear and danger,
Driving evil swift a-flight.

Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,
Failed in its function as the autumn rake;
Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take
All water from the streams; dead birds were found
In wells a hundred feet below the ground—
Such was the season when the flower bloomed.
Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed
Significance. Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;

it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,

we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,

but mind opens to the smell of lightening.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Trash is so cheerful; flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic—windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.

       we make midnight a maquette of the year:
frostlight glinting off snow to solemnize
        the vows we offer to ourselves in near
silence: the competition shimmerwise

        of champagne and chandeliers to attract
laughter and cheers: the glow from the fireplace
        reflecting the burning intra-red pact
between beloveds: we cosset the space

        of a fey hour, anxious gods molding our
hoped-for adams with this temporal clay:
        each of us edacious for shining or
rash enough to think sacrifice will stay

        this fugacious time: while stillness suspends
vitality in balance, as passions
        struggle with passions for sway, the mind wends
towards what’s to come: a callithump of fashions,

        ersatz smiles, crowded days: a bloodless cut
that severs soul from bone: a long aching
        quiet in which we will hear nothing but
the clean crack of our promises breaking.

     after D.H. Lawrence

shall i tell you, then, that we exist?
there came a light, blue and white careening.
the police like wailing angels
to bitter me.

and so this:
dark matter is hypothetical. know
that it cannot be seen

in the gunpowder of a flower,
in a worm that raisins on the concrete,
in a man that wills himself not to speak.

gags, oh gags.
for a shadow cannot breathe.
it deprives them of nothing. pride

is born in the black and then dies in it.
i hear our shadow, low treble
of the clasping of our hands.

dark matter is invisible.
we infer it: how light bends around a black body,
and still you do not see black halos, even here,

my having told you plainly where they are.