A Grain of Mustard Seed Read online

  There is no grief; too much was taken and given,

  More than administrators can discover.

  And so you go your ways, and I go mine,

  Yours into the world at last, and mine away—

  To some adventure on another planet.

  Whatever failed or you still hoped to do

  Will grow to harvest in some other way,

  Not against the stream of a college, but

  Toward an ordering of the spirit in pure air

  Where no one is bound by custom, or so engined

  Toward immediate goals, and trapped by time:

  Your poems will happen when no one is there.

  And when the angel comes, you will remember

  Our fierce encounter, beyond devious ways,

  Not at the end of some blank corridor—

  Outside all walls, the daring spirit’s wrench

  To open up a simple world of praise!

  Girl With ’Cello

  There had been no such music here until

  A girl came in from falling dark and snow

  To bring into this house her glowing ’cello

  As if some silent, magic animal.

  She sat, head bent, her long hair all a-spill

  Over the breathing wood, and drew the bow.

  There had been no such music here until

  A girl came in from falling dark and snow.

  And she drew out that sound so like a wail,

  A rich dark suffering joy, as if to show

  All that a wrist holds and that fingers know

  When they caress a magic animal.

  There had been no such music here until

  A girl came in from falling dark and snow.

  An Intruder

  The other day a witch came to call.

  She brought a basket full of woe and gall

  And left it there for me in my front hall.

  But it was empty when I found it there

  And she herself had gone back to her lair

  Leaving the bats of rage to fly my air.

  Out of ambivalence this witch was born;

  All that she gives is subtly smeared and torn

  Or slightly withered by her love and scorn.

  The furies sit and watch me as I write;

  The bats fly silently about all night

  And a black mist obscures the kindest light.

  But I shall find the magic note to play,

  Or, like a donkey, learn the wild flat bray

  That sends all furies howling on their way.

  The note is laughter. No witch could withstand

  The frightful joke all witches understand

  When they are given all that they demand.

  The word can neither bless nor curse, of course.

  It must bewitch a witch and leave her worse.

  Perhaps I’ll call her just a failed old nurse.

  Love cannot exorcize the gifts of hate.

  Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight,

  But laughter we can never over-rate.

  The Muse As Medusa

  I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone.

  I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold.

  I was not punished, was not turned to stone—

  How to believe the legends I am told?

  I came as naked as any little fish,

  Prepared to be hooked, gutted, caught;

  But I saw you, Medusa, made my wish,

  And when I left you I was clothed in thought…

  Being allowed, perhaps, to swim my way

  Through the great deep and on the rising tide,

  Flashing wild streams, as free and rich as they,

  Though you had power marshalled on your side.

  The fish escaped to many a magic reef;

  The fish explored many a dangerous sea—

  The fish, Medusa, did not come to grief,

  But swims still in a fluid mystery.

  Forget the image: your silence is my ocean,

  And even now it teems with life. You chose

  To abdicate by total lack of motion,

  But did it work, for nothing really froze?

  It is all fluid still, that world of feeling

  Where thoughts, those fishes, silent, feed and rove;

  And, fluid, it is also full of healing,

  For love is healing, even rootless love.

  I turn your face around! It is my face.

  That frozen rage is what I must explore—

  Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!

  This is the gift I thank Medusa for.

  For Rosalind

  On Her Seventy-fifth Birthday

  Tonight we come to praise

  Her splendor, not her years,

  Pure form and what it burns—

  Who teaches this or learns?—

  Intrinsic, beyond tears,

  Splendor that has no age.

  Take your new-fangled beauties off the stage!

  The high poise of the throat

  That dazzled every heart—

  Who was not young and awed

  By beauty so unflawed

  It seemed not life, but art?—

  Terrible as a swan

  Young children, deeply moved, might look upon.

  The blazing sapphire eyes—

  They looked out from a queen.

  Yet there was wildness near;

  She glimmered like a deer

  No hunter could bring down.

  So warm, so wild, so proud,

  She moved among us like a light-brimmed cloud.

  The way her dresses flowed!

  So once in Greece, so once…

  Passion and its control.

  She drew many a soul

  To join her in the dance.

  Give homage fierce as rage.

  Take your new-fangled beauties off the stage!

  The Great Transparencies

  Lately I have been thinking much of those,

  The open ones, the great transparencies,

  Through whom life—is it wind or water?—flows

  Unstinted, who have learned the sovereign ease.

  They are not young; they are not ever young.

  Youth is too vulnerable to bear the tide,

  And let it rise, and never hold it back,

  Then let it ebb, not suffering from pride,

  Nor thinking it must ebb from private lack.

  The elders yield because they are so strong—

  Seized by the great wind like a ripening field,

  All rippled over in a sensuous sweep,

  Wave after wave, lifted and glad to yield,

  But whether wind or water, never keep

  The tide from flowing or hold it back for long.

  Lately I have been thinking much of these,

  The unafraid although still vulnerable,

  Through whom life flows, the great transparencies,

  The old and open, brave and beautiful…

  They are not young; they are not ever young.

  Friendship: The Storms

  How much you have endured of storm

  Among sweet summer flowers!

  The black hail falls so hard to do us harm

  In my dark hours.

  Though friendship is not quick to burn,

  It is explosive stuff;

  The edge of our awareness is so keen

  A word is enough.

  Clouds rise up from the blue

  And darken the sky,

  And we are tossed about from false to true

  Not knowing why.

  After this violence is over

  I turn my life, my art,

  Round and around to discover

  The fault in my heart—

  What breeds this cruel weather,

  Why tensions grow;

  And when we have achieved so much together,

  What breaks the flow.

  God help us, friendship is aware

>   That where we fail we learn;

  Tossed on a temperament, I meet you there

  At every turn.

  In this kaleidoscope

  Of work and complex living,

  For years you buttressed and enlivened hope,

  Laid balm on grieving.

  After the angry cloud has broken

  I know what you are—

  How love renews itself, spoken, unspoken,

  Cool as the morning star.

  Evening Walk In France

  When twilight comes, before it gets too late,

  We swing behind us the heavy iron gate,

  And as it clangs shut, stand a moment there

  To taste the world, the larger open air,

  And walk among the grandeur of the vines,

  Those long rows written in imperfect lines,

  Low massive trunks that bear the delicate

  Insignia of leaves where grapes are set;

  And here the sky is a great roofless room

  Where late bees and late people wander home,

  And here we walk on slowly through the dusk

  And watch the long waves of the dark that mask

  Black cypresses far off, and gently take

  The sumptuous clouds and roofs within their wake,

  Until the solid nearer haystacks seem

  Like shadows looming ghostly out of dream,

  And the stone farm becomes an ancient lair,

  Dissolving into dusk—and is not there.

  A dog barks, and a single lamp is lit.

  We are two silent shadows crossing it.

  Under the lamp a woman stands at rest,

  Cutting a loaf of bread across her breast.

  Dutch Interior

  Pieter de Hooch (1629-1682)

  I recognize the quiet and the charm,

  This safe enclosed room where a woman sews

  And life is tempered, orderly, and calm.

  Through the Dutch door, half open, sunlight streams

  And throws a pale square down on the red tiles.

  The cosy black dog suns himself and dreams.

  Even the bed is sheltered, it encloses,

  A cupboard to keep people safe from harm,

  Where copper glows with the warm flush of roses.

  The atmosphere is all domestic, human,

  Chaos subdued by the sheer power of need.

  This is a room where I have lived as woman,

  Lived too what the Dutch painter does not tell—

  The wild skies overhead, dissolving, breaking,

  And how that broken light is never still,

  And how the roar of waves is always near,

  What bitter tumult, treacherous and cold,

  Attacks the solemn charm year after year!

  It must be felt as peace won and maintained

  Against those terrible antagonists—

  How many from this quiet room have drowned?

  How many left to go, drunk on the wind,

  And take their ships into heartbreaking seas;

  How many whom no woman’s peace could bind?

  Bent to her sewing, she looks drenched in calm.

  Raw grief is disciplined to the fine thread.

  But in her heart this woman is the storm;

  Alive, deep in herself, holds wind and rain,

  Remaking chaos into an intimate order

  Where sometimes light flows through a windowpane.

  A Vision of Holland

  The marriage of this horizontal land

  Lying so low, so open and exposed,

  Flat as an open palm, and never closed

  To restless storm and the relentless wind,

  This marriage of low land and towering air—

  It took my breath away. I am still crazed

  Here a month later, in my uplands, dazed

  By so much light, so close to despair.

  Infinite vertical! Who climbs to Heaven?

  Who can assault the cloud’s shimmering peak?

  Here the intangible is the mystique,

  No rock to conquer and no magic mountain,

  Only the horizontal infinite

  Stretched there below to polarize

  The rush of height itself, where this land lies

  Immense and still, covered by changing light.

  Those troubling clouds pour through the mind.

  An earthquake of pure atmosphere

  Cracks open every elemental fear.

  The light is passionate, but not defined.

  So we are racked as by a psychic fault,

  Stormed and illuminated. “Oh sky, sky,

  Earth, earth, and nothing else,” we cry,

  Knowing once more how absolutes exalt.

  Slowly the eye comes back again to rest

  There on a house, canal, cows in a field.

  The visionary moment has to yield,

  But the defining eye is newly blest.

  Come back from that cracked-open psychic place,

  It is alive to wonders freshly seen:

  After the earthquake, gentle pastures green,

  And that great miracle, a human face.

  Bears and Waterfalls

  Kind kinderpark

  For bear buffoons

  And fluid graces—

  Who dreamed this lark

  Of spouts, lagoons,

  And huge fur faces?

  For bears designed

  Small nooks, great crags,

  And Gothic mountains?

  For bears refined

  Delightful snags,

  Waterfalls, fountains?

  Who had the wit to root

  A forked tree where a sack

  Of honey plumps on end,

  A rich-bottomed fruit

  To rouse a hearty whack

  From passing friend?

  Who ever did imagine

  A waterspout as stool,

  Or was black bear the wiser

  Who sat down on this engine

  To keep a vast rump cool,

  Then, cooled, set free a geyser?

  Who dreamed a great brown queen

  Sleeked down in her rough silk

  Flirting with her huge lord,

  Breast-high in her tureen?—

  “Splash me, delightful hulk!”

  So happy and absurd.

  Bear upside-down, white splendor,

  All creamy, foaming fur,

  And childhood’s rug come true,

  All nonchalance and candor,

  Black pads your signature—

  Who, above all, dreamed you?

  When natural and formal

  Are seen to mate so well,

  Where bears and fountains play,

  Who would return to normal?

  Go back to human Hell?

  Not I. I mean to stay,

  To hold this happy chance

  Forever in the mind,

  To be where waters fall

  And archetypes still dance,

  As they were once designed

  In Eden for us all.

  A Parrot

  My parrot is emerald green,

  His tail feathers, marine.

  He bears an orange half-moon

  Over his ivory beak.

  He must be believed to be seen,

  This bird from a Rousseau wood.

  When the urge is on him to speak,

  He becomes too true to be good.

  He uses his beak like a hook

  To lift himself up with or break

  Open a sunflower seed,

  And his eye, in a bold white ring,

  Has a lapidary look.

  What a most astonishing bird,

  Whose voice when he chooses to sing

  Must be believed to be heard.

  That stuttered staccato scream

  Must be believed not to seem

  The shriek of a witch in the room.

  But he murmurs some muffled words

  (Lik
e someone who talks through a dream)

  When he sits in the window and sees

  The to-and-fro wings of wild birds

  In the leafless improbable trees.

  Frogs and Photographers

  The temperamental frog,

  A loving expert says,

  Exhibits stimulation

  By rolling of bright eyes

  (This is true frog-elation);

  But in a different mood

  Withdraws under a leaf

  Or simulated bog

  (This is frog’s sign of grief),

  Closes his eyes to brood.

  Frogs do not weep, they hide.

  The camera makes him cross.

  Eyes glaze or tightly close;

  His whole expression’s changed.

  He will not take a pose,

  He has become estranged

  Who was so bright and gay—

  “Hysterical,” they say,

  As subject, total loss—

  Burrows himself away,

  Will not rise to a fly:

  The frog is camera-shy.

  A form of lunacy?

  But whose face does not freeze,

  Eyes shut or wildly blink?

  Who does not sometimes sneeze

  Just at the camera’s wink?

  Withdraw to worlds inside?

  Invent himself a bog?

  And more neurotic we

  Than the spontaneous frog,

  Sometimes cannot decide

  Whether to weep or hide.

  Eine Kleine Snailmusik

  “THE SNAIL WATCHERS ARE interested in snails from all angles… At the moment they are investigating the snail’s reaction to music. ‘We have played to them on the harp in the garden and in the country on the pipe,’ said Mr. Heaton, ‘and we have taken them into the house and played to them on the piano.’ ”

  —The London Star

  What soothes the angry snail?

  What’s music to his horn?

  For the “Sonata Appassionata,”

  He shows scorn,

  And Handel

  Makes the frail snail

  Quail,

  While Prokofieff

  Gets no laugh,

  And Tchaikovsky, I fear,

  No tear.

  Piano, pipe, and harp,

  Dulcet or shrill,

  Flat or sharp,

  Indoors or in the garden,

  Are willy-nilly

  Silly

  To the reserved, slow,

  Sensitive

  Snail,

  Who prefers to live

  Glissandissimo,

  Pianissimo.

  The Fig