Tristia
There is, I know, a science of separation
In night’s disheveled elegies, stifled laments,
The clockwork oxen jaws, the tense anticipation
As the city’s vigil nears its sun and end.
I honor the natural ritual of the rooster’s cry,
The moment when, red-eyed from weeping, sleepless
Once again, someone hoists the journey’s burden,
And to weep and to sing become the same quicksilver verb.
But who can prophesy in the word goodbye
The abyss of loss into which we fall;
Or what, when the dawn fires burn in the Acropolis,
The rooster’s rusty clamor means for us;
Or why, when some new life floods the cut sky,
And the barn-warm oxen slowly eat each instant,
The rooster, harbinger of the one true life,
Beats his blazing wings on the city wall?
I love the calm and custom of quick fingers weaving,
The shuttle’s buzz and hum, the spindle’s bees.
And look—arriving or leaving, spun from down,
Some barefoot Delia barely touching the ground . . .
What rot has reached the very root of us
That we should have no language for our praise?
What is, was; what was, will be again; and our whole lives’
Sweetness lies in these meetings that we recognize.
Soothsayer, truth-sayer, morning’s mortal girl,
Lose your gaze again in the melting wax
That whitens and tightens like the stretched pelt of a squirrel
And find the fates that will in time find us.
In clashes of bronze, flashes of consciousness,
Men live, called and pulled by a world of shades.
But women—all fluent spirit; piercing, pliable eye—
Wax toward one existence, and divining they die.
(1918)
Night Song
The bread is blight and the air’s acetylene,
Wounds impossible to doctor.
Joseph, by his own blood bartered
Off to Egypt, grieved for home no harder.
Unslaked sky. Sleetlight of stars.
And the stallioned Bedouins, avatars
Of the day’s vagueness, and the pain
Of vagueness, close their eyes and improvise
Out of nothing more than the mist
Of events through which they’ve passed:
Coarse wind, a horse traded for grain, small wars
With sand in which an arrow was lost.
And if the song’s in search of earth, and if the song’s
Ensouled, then everything vanishes
To void, and the stars by which it’s known,
And the voice that lets it all be and be gone.
(1913)
Nowhere Air
Like water trickling from the highest ice
Its bracing ache, its brain-shard sweetness,
Its nowhere air of utter now,
So my sigh has lost its source,
And I live by meanings I cannot comprehend,
For every instant I must taste the instant that I end.
(1933)
Black Earth
Earthcurds, wormdirt, worked to a rich tilth.
Everything air, star; everything earth.
Like a choir acquiring one clean sound—brief ringing kingdom—
These wet crumbs claim and proclaim my freedom.
A thousand plowed-up mounds exploding speech:
Infinite distance an infant’s hand can reach—
All past blackness somehow, a blueness, a newness, a spell:
War here is a word, work a world in which to dwell.
Shit: earth’s a botch, a bitch, blunt back of an axe:
Plea and eat dirt, bow down and be smashed.
Beware: the flute of rot lures and snares the ear,
The woodwind windbreak wakes an ache it cannot cure.
How sharp the ploughshare, like a cutlass slashing fat.
How low, how clipped in April’s upheaval, all the steppe lies flat.
Well . . . be well, black earth, be diligent, be visionary, be violent.
Oilvowels. Soilsayings. Silence.
(April 1935)
The Poem
White meteorite, infinity’s orphan, word
Painwaking particular earth . . .
Supplicants, tyrants, it doesn’t matter.
It is matter: unbudgeable, unjudgeable, itself.
(20 January 1937)
