Dream Work Read online

Do dreams lie? Once I was a fish

  crying for my sisters in the sprawling

  crossroads of the delta.

  Once among the reeds I found

  a boat, as thin and lonely

  as a young tree. Nearby

  the forest sizzled with the afternoon rain.

  Home, I said.

  In every language there is a word for it.

  In the body itself, climbing

  those walls of white thunder, past those green

  temples, there is also

  a word for it.

  I said, home.

  CONSEQUENCES

  Afterward

  I found under my left shoulder

  the most curious wound.

  As though I had leaned against

  some whirring thing,

  it bleeds secretly.

  Nobody knows its name.

  Afterward,

  for a reason more right than rational,

  I thought of that fat German

  in his ill-fitting overcoat

  in the woods near Vienna, realizing

  that the birds were going farther and farther away, and

  no matter how fast he walked

  he couldn’t keep up.

  How does any of us live in this world?

  One thing compensates for another, I suppose.

  Sometimes what’s wrong does not hurt at all, but rather

  shines like a new moon.

  I often think of Beethoven

  rising, when he couldn’t sleep,

  stumbling through the dust and crumpled papers,

  yawning, settling at the piano,

  inking in rapidly note after note after note.

  ROBERT SCHUMANN

  Hardly a day passes I don’t think of him

  in the asylum: younger

  than I am now, trudging the long road down

  through madness toward death.

  Everywhere in this world his music

  explodes out of itself, as he

  could not. And now I understand

  something so frightening, and wonderful —

  how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing

  through crossroads, sticking

  like lint to the familiar. So!

  Hardly a day passes I don’t

  think of him: nineteen, say, and it is

  spring in Germany

  and he has just met a girl named Clara.

  He turns the corner,

  he scrapes the dirt from his soles,

  he runs up the dark staircase, humming.

  CLAMMING

  I rise

  by lamplight and hurry out

  to the bay

  where the gulls like white

  ghosts swim

  in the shallows —

  I rake and rake

  down to the gray stones,

  the clenched quahogs,

  the deadweight

  fruits of the sea that bear

  inside their walls

  a pink and salty

  one-lunged life;

  we are all

  one family

  but love ourselves

  best. Later I sit

  on the dawn-soaked shore and set

  a thin blade

  into the slightly

  hissing space between

  the shells and slash through

  the crisp life-muscle; I put

  what is in the shell

  into my mouth, and when

  the gulls come begging

  I feed them too.

  How detailed and hopeful,

  how exact

  everything is in the light,

  on the rippling sand,

  at the edge of the turning tide —

  its upheaval —

  its stunning proposal —

  its black, anonymous roar.

  THE FIRE

  That winter it seemed the city

  was always burning — night after night

  the flames leaped, the ladders pitched forward.

  Scorched but alive, the homeless wailed

  as they ran for the cold streets.

  That winter my mind had turned around,

  shedding, like leaves, its bolts of information —

  drilling down, through history,

  toward my motionless heart.

  Those days I was willing, but frightened.

  What I mean is, I wanted to live my life

  but I didn’t want to do what I had to do

  to go on, which was: to go back.

  All winter the fires kept burning,

  the smoke swirled, the flames grew hotter.

  I began to curse, to stumble and choke.

  Everything, solemnly, drove me toward it —

  the crying out, that’s so hard to do.

  Then over my head the red timbers floated,

  my feet were slippers of fire, my voice

  crashed at the truth, my fists

  smashed at the flames to find the door —

  wicked and sad, mortal and bearable,

  it fell open forever as I burned.

  BANYAN

  Something screamed

  from the fringes of the swamp.

  It was Banyan,

  the old merchant.

  It was the hundred-legged

  tree, walking again.

  The cattle egrets

  flew out into the sunlight

  like so many pieces of white ribbon.

  The watersnakes slipped down the banks

  like green hooks and floated away.

  Banyan groaned.

  A knee down in the east corner buckled,

  a gray shin rose, and the root,

  wet and hairy,

  sank back in, a little closer.

  Then a voice like a howling wind deep in the leaves said:

  I’ll tell you a story

  about a seed.

  About a seed flying into a tree, and eating it

  little by little.

  About a small tree that becomes a huge tree

  and wants to travel.

  Listen, said the voice.

  This is your dream.

  I’m only stopping here for a little while.

  Don’t be afraid.

  WHISPERS

  Have you ever

  tried to

  slide into

  the heaven of sensation and met

  you know not what

  resistance but it

  held you back? have you ever

  turned on your shoulder

  helplessly, facing

  the white moon, crying

  let me in? have you dared to count

  the months as they pass and the years

  while you imagined pleasure,

  shining like honey, locked in some

  secret tree? have you dared to feel

  the isolation gathering

  intolerably and recognized

  what kinds of explosions can follow

  from an intolerable condition? have you

  walked out in the mornings

  wherever you are in the world to consider

  all those gleaming and reasonless lives

  that flow outward and outward, easily, to the last

  moment the bulbs of their lungs,

  their bones and their appetites,

  can carry them? oh, have you

  looked wistfully into

  the flushed bodies of the flowers? have you stood,

  staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers

  where the birds like tossing fires

  flash through the trees, their bodies

  exchanging a certain happiness

  in the sleek, amazing

  humdrum of nature’s design —

  blood’s heaven, spirit’s haven, to which

  you cannot belong?

  DRIVING THROUGH THE WIND RIVER RESERVATION: A POEM OF BLACK BEAR

  In the time of snow, in t
he time of sleep.

  The rivers themselves changed into links

  of white iron, holding everything. Once

  she woke deep in the leaves under

  the fallen tree and peered

  through the loose bark and saw him:

  a tall white bone

  with thick shoulders, like a wrestler,

  roaring the saw-toothed music

  of wind and sleet, legs pumping

  up and down the hills.

  Well, she thought, he’ll wear himself out

  running around like that.

  She slept again

  while he drove on through the trees,

  snapping off the cold pines, gasping,

  rearranging over and over

  the enormous drifts. Finally one morning

  the sun rose up like a pot of blood

  and his knees buckled.

  Well, she whispered from the leaves,

  that’s that. In the distance

  the ice began to boom and wrinkle

  and a dampness

  that could not be defeated began

  to come from her, her breathing

  enlarged, oh, tender mountain, she rearranged

  herself so that the cubs

  could slide from her body, so that the rivers

  would flow.

  MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE

  Ahead of me

  they were lighting their fires

  in the dark forests

  of death.

  Should I name them?

  Their names make a long branch of sound.

  You know them.

  I know

  death is the fascinating snake

  under the leaves, sliding

  and sliding; I know

  the heart loves him too, can’t

  turn away, can’t

  break the spell. Everything

  wants to enter the slow thickness,

  aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost.

  Wants to be stone.

  That time

  I wanted to die

  somebody

  was playing the piano

  in the room with me.

  It was Mozart.

  It was Beethoven.

  It was Bruckner.

  In the kitchen

  a man with one ear

  was painting a flower.

  Later,

  in the asylum,

  I began to pick through the red rivers

  of confusion;

  I began to take apart

  the deep stitches

  of nightmares.

  This was good, human work.

  This had nothing to do with laying down a path of words

  that could throttle,

  or soften,

  the human heart.

  Meanwhile,

  Yeats, in love and anger,

  stood beside his fallen friends;

  Whitman kept falling

  through the sleeve of ego.

  In the back fields,

  beyond the locked windows,

  a young man who couldn’t live long and knew it

  was listening to a plain brown bird

  that kept singing in the deep leaves,

  that kept urging from him

  some wild and careful words.

  You know that

  important and eloquent defense

  of sanity.

  I forgive them

  their unhappiness,

  I forgive them

  for walking out of the world.

  But I don’t forgive them

  for turning their faces away,

  for taking off their veils

  and dancing for death —

  for hurtling

  toward oblivion

  on the sharp blades

  of their exquisite poems, saying:

  this is the way.

  I was, of course, all that time

  coming along

  behind them, and listening

  for advice.

  And the man who merely

  washed Michelangelo’s brushes, kneeling

  on the damp bricks, staring

  every day at the colors pouring out of them,

  lived to be a hundred years old.

  STARFISH

  In the sea rocks,

  in the stone pockets

  under the tide’s lip,

  in water dense as blindness

  they slid

  like sponges,

  like too many thumbs.

  I knew this, and what I wanted

  was to draw my hands back

  from the water — what I wanted

  was to be willing

  to be afraid.

  But I stayed there,

  I crouched on the stone wall

  while the sea poured its harsh song

  through the sluices,

  while I waited for the gritty lightning

  of their touch, while I stared

  down through the tide’s leaving

  where sometimes I could see them —

  their stubborn flesh

  lounging on my knuckles.

  What good does it do

  to lie all day in the sun

  loving what is easy?

  It never grew easy,

  but at last I grew peaceful:

  all summer

  my fear diminished

  as they bloomed through the water

  like flowers, like flecks

  of an uncertain dream,

  while I lay on the rocks, reaching

  into the darkness, learning

  little by little to love

  our only world.

  THE JOURNEY

  One day you finally knew

  what you had to do, and began,

  though the voices around you

  kept shouting

  their bad advice —

  though the whole house

  began to tremble

  and you felt the old tug

  at your ankles.

  “Mend my life!”

  each voice cried.

  But you didn’t stop.

  You knew what you had to do,

  though the wind pried

  with its stiff fingers

  at the very foundations —

  though their melancholy

  was terrible.

  It was already late

  enough, and a wild night,

  and the road full of fallen

  branches and stones.

  But little by little,

  as you left their voices behind,

  the stars began to burn

  through the sheets of clouds,

  and there was a new voice,

  which you slowly

  recognized as your own,

  that kept you company

  as you strode deeper and deeper

  into the world,

  determined to do

  the only thing you could do —

  determined to save

  the only life you could save.

  A VISITOR

  My father, for example,

  who was young once

  and blue-eyed,

  returns

  on the darkest of nights

  to the porch and knocks

  wildly at the door,

  and if I answer

  I must be prepared

  for his waxy face,

  for his lower lip

  swollen with bitterness.

  And so, for a long time,

  I did not answer,

  but slept fitfully

  between his hours of rapping.

  But finally there came the night

  when I rose out of my sheets

  and stumbled down the hall.

  The door fell open

  and I knew I was saved

  and could bear him,

  pathetic and hollow,

  with even the least of his dreams

  frozen inside hi
m,

  and the meanness gone.

  And I greeted him and asked him

  into the house,

  and lit the lamp,

  and looked into his blank eyes

  in which at last

  I saw what a child must love,

  I saw what love might have done

  had we loved in time.

  THE HOUSE

  It grows larger,

  wall after wall

  sliding

  on some miraculous arrangement

  of panels,

  blond and weightless

  as balsa, making space

  for windows, alcoves,

  more rooms, stairways

  and passages, all

  bathed

  in light, with here

  and there the green

  flower of a tree,

  vines, streams

  casually

  breaking through —

  what a change

  from the cramped

  room at the center

  where I began, where I crouched

  and was safe, but could hardly

  breathe! Day after day

  I labor at it;

  night after night

  I keep going —

  I’m clearing new ground,

  I’m lugging boards,

  I’m measuring,

  I’m hanging sheets of glass,

  I’m nailing down the hardwoods,

  the thresholds —

  I’m hinging the doors —

  once they are up they will lift

  their easy latches, they will open

  like wings.

  STANLEY KUNITZ

  I used to imagine him

  coming from the house, like Merlin

  strolling with important gestures

  through the garden

  where everything grows so thickly,

  where birds sing, little snakes lie

  on the boughs, thinking of nothing

  but their own good lives,

  where petals float upward,

  their colors exploding,

  and trees open their moist

  pages of thunder —

  it has happened every summer for years.

  But now I know more

  about the great wheel of growth,