Honey and Salt (6 page)

All bloods are red and all bones white.

The beginning is being born.

The end is being dead.

The magnificent repeated themes of line and color

forming the final exterior of a Pharaoh mummy

try to appeal otherwise and fix an affirmation

of the blood there yet and the bones there yet.

Nevertheless and for all the exquisite patterning

The blood is dry as dust and the bones obey no voices

Telling them to rise and walk.

 

Some such Pharaohs are born with a name,

one more of a line of names.

Some such Pharaohs die with music and mourning

and sleep under careful epitaphs.

Yet they and the scrubs, the rabble, the hoi polloi

end in the same democracy to never fail them all,

to be true to each, to render the blood and bones

of high and humble the dust of homage.

This is the timeworm chant of the grand democrat

Death: dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

For them all, scrub or wellborn, the hustle, the race,

the hullabaloo, is over.

They no longer earn their livings.

They no longer take what is handed them.

In a house he remembers in the Howlong valley

not far from bends of the Shooshoo river

where each of the leaves of fall

is a pigeon foot of gold on the blue:

there is a house of a thousand windows

and in every window the same woman

and she too remembers better than she forgets:

she too has one wish for every window:

and the mountains forty miles away

rise and fade, come and go,

in lights and mist there and not there,

beckoning as mountains seen on a Monday,

phantoms traveled away on a Tuesday,

scrawls in a dim blot on Wednesday,

gone into grey shawls on Friday,

lost and found in half lavenders often,

back again one day saying they were not gone,

not gone at all, being merely unseen,

the white snow on the blue peaks no dream snow,

no dream at all the sawtooth line of purple garments.

Can a skyline share itself like drums in the heart?

Why did he write to her,

“I can't live with you"?

And why did she write to him,

“I can't live without you”?

For he went west, she went east,

And they both lived.

The fingers turn the pages.

The pages unfold as a scroll.

There was the time there was no America.

Then came on the scroll an early

America, a land of beginnings,

an American being born.

Then came a later America, seeker

and finder, yet ever more seeker

than finder, ever seeking its way

amid storm and dream.

Be still as before oh pool

Be blue and still oh pool

As before blue     as before still

Oh pool of the many communions

 

A wingprint may come

Flash over and be gone

A yellow leaf may fall

May sink and join

Companion fallen leaves

The print of blue sky

The night bowl of stars

These far off pass and bypass

Over you blue     over you still

Oh pool of the many communions

 

Now hold your quiet glass oh pool

Now keep your mirrorlight blue

They come and they go

And one and all

You know them one and all

And they know not you

Nor you nor your mirrorlight blue

Only old music for quiet hearts;

The personal idiom of a corn shock satisfies me.

 

So does the attack of a high note by an Australian mezzosoprano.

 

Also the face and body blow punishment taken by the boilermaker who won the world's championship belt.

 

I find majesty in the remembrance of a stump speech by John P. Altgeld explaining his act as governor of Illinois in the pardon of four convicts.

 

The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.

 

The color of redhaws when the last driving rain of October sprays their gypsy crimson against the khaki brown of the blown leaves, the ankle-deep leaves—

 

If I should be sent to jail I would write of these things, lover of mine.

 

If I live to a majestic old age becoming the owner of a farm I shall sit under apple trees in the summer and on a pad of paper with a large yellow lead pencil, I shall write of these things, lover of mine.

Time says hush.

   By the gong of time you live.

   Listen and you hear time saying you were silent

long before you came to life and you will

again be silent long after you leave it,

why not be a little silent now?

        Hush yourself, noisy little man.

 

Time hushes all.

    The gong of time rang for you to come out of a

        hush and you were born.

    The gong of time will ring for you to go back to

        the same hush you came from.

    Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those

        who say little and try to say it well, and

        those who babble and prattle their lives away,

                                   Time hushes all.

Yellow leaves speak early November's heart on the river.

Winding in prairie woodland the curves of the water course are a young woman's breasts.

Flutter and flutter go the spear shapes—it is a rust and a saffron always dropping hour on hour.

Sunny and winey the filtering shine of air passes the drivers, cornhuskers, farmers, children in the fields.

Red jags of sumach and slashes of shag-bark hickory are a crimson and gray cramming pictures on the river glass.

Out of their tubes of May and June they squeeze great changing dabs of earth love, wind passion.

Now it is a sorrel horse neck, now a slow fire of Warsaw, anything you wish for—here in the moving leaves and slow waters.

Five o'clock and a lemon sky—long tubes spread lemon miles and miles—submarines, dreadnaughts, coal-boats, flotillas of destroyers cross the lemon sea bringing darkness, night.

Shadows fall blue on the mountains.

Mountains fall gray to the rivers.

Rivers fall winding to the sea.

Oldest of all the blue creep,

                                the gray crawl of the sea

And only shadows falling older than the sea.

 

***

 

***

 

      Can you begin to own

      both yourself and your shadow?

      Can you measure

      moments in the sun

      when your shadow lays down your shape?

      Does your shadow speak to you

      or is it you telling your shadow

      what to be telling you?

      Can a man listen to his shadow

      hoping it tells him where to go,

      what to do when he gets there?

      Has ever been a man praying,

            “Make me into a thin

            goblet of glass, oh Lord.

      I fear what my shadow tells me”?

      What has happened

      when you forget and the sun forgets

      to lay down your old companion,

            your lifelong shadow?

 

***

 

***

 

      Now the shadow of Shakespeare—

      what did he say to it?

      what did he leave unsaid?

      and how well did he know he left

            millions of shadow soliloquies unspoken?

      When Napoleon saw his shadow

      could it be he lacked for words

      and often beyond his own

      saw shadows fateful as his own?

 

***

 

***

 

            Shadows lighter than any mist

            fall on the sea's blue creep,

                    on the sea's gray crawl.

 

                    Fateful high over

                    swings the sun

                    swings the High Witness

                          of shadows.

      Said the panama hat to the fedora:

      “Sins have different prices in hell.”

      Said the fedora hat to the panama:

“Yeah, nickel and dime sins, silver-dollar sins,

sins setting you back a century, a grand,

sins you can't settle under a million bucks,

tin and aluminum sins, brass sins, copper, old gold,

pint and bushel sins, inch and mile sins,

calculated little teapot sins and roaring tornadoes.”

The skyscrapers stand proud.

They seem to say they have

sought the absolute

and made it their own.

Yet they are blameless, innocent

as dumb steel and the dumber

concrete of their bastions.

“Man made us,” they murmur. “We are

proud only as man is proud and we

have no more found the absolute

than has man.”

A man came to the pool of Bethesda

and sat down for his thoughts.

The light of the sun ran through the line

of the water and struck where the moss on

a stone was green—

The green of the moss wove into the sun silver

and the silent brackets of seven prisms added

to the pool of Bethesda—

Thus a man sat long with a pool and its prisms.

 

***

At an autumn evening bonfire

came rose-candle co-ordinations.

Burning and burnt

came a slow song of fire leaves.

 

The summer brought

valley breaths of spun moonmist.

 

Can there be keys

commanding the locks of constellations,

letting loose white spokes of light,

blue waves of flame?

 

***

 

***

 

Make like before, sweet child.

Be you like five new oranges in a wicker basket.

Step out like

a summer evening fireworks over black waters.

Be dizzy in a haze of yellow silk bandannas.

Then in a change of costume

        sit silent in a chair of tarnished bronze

Having spoken with a grave mouth:

                                “Now I will be

                                a clavichord melody

                                in October brown.

                                You will see me in

                                deep-sea contemplation

                                on a yellow horse in a white wind.”

 

***

 

***

 

        Her room had a number.

        Likewise she had a number.

        They heard her saying:

        “Who is more numbers than I am?

        Which of you on a golden morning

        has sent a silver bullet