House of Light Read online

  the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet

  into the darkness.

  And now will come—I can count on it—the murky splash,

  the certain victory

  of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic

  circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks

  flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart

  will be most mournful

  on their account. But, listen,

  what’s important?

  Nothing’s important

  except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,

  of which this is a part,

  not be denied. Once,

  I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,

  a dusty, fouled turtle plodding along—

  a snapper—

  broken out I suppose from some backyard cage—

  and I knew what I had to do—

  I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it—

  I put it, like a small mountain range,

  into a knapsack, and I took it out

  of the city, and I let it

  down into the dark pond, into

  the cool water,

  and the light of the lilies,

  to live.

  THE DEER

  You never know.

  The body of night opens

  like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,

  like so many wrappings of mist.

  And on the hillside two deer are walking along

  just as though this wasn’t

  the owned, tilled earth of today

  but the past.

  I did not see them the next day, or the next,

  but in my mind’s eye—

  there they are, in the long grass,

  like two sisters.

  This is the earnest work. Each of us is given

  only so many mornings to do it—

  to look around and love

  the oily fur of our lives,

  the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.

  Days I don’t do this

  I feel the terror of idleness,

  like a red thirst.

  Death isn’t just an idea.

  When we die the body breaks open

  like a river;

  the old body goes on, climbing the hill.

  THE LOON ON OAK-HEAD POND

  cries for three days, in the gray mist.

  cries for the north it hopes it can find.

  plunges, and comes up with a slapping pickerel.

  blinks its red eye.

  cries again.

  you come every afternoon, and wait to hear it.

  you sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,

  in the silence that follows.

  as though it were your own twilight.

  as though it were your own vanishing song.

  WHAT IS IT?

  Who can say,

  is it a snowy egret

  or a white flower

  standing

  at the glossy edge

  of the lily-

  and frog-filled pond?

  Hours ago the orange sun

  opened the cups of the lilies

  and the leopard frogs

  began kicking

  their long muscles,

  breast-stroking

  like little green dwarves

  under the roof of the rich,

  iron-colored water.

  Now the soft

  eggs of the salamander

  in their wrappings of jelly

  begin to shiver.

  They’re tired of sleep.

  They have a new idea.

  They want to swim away

  into the world.

  Who could stop them?

  Who could tell them

  to go cautiously, to flow slowly

  under the lily pads?

  Off they go,

  hundreds of them,

  like the black

  fingerprints of the rain.

  The frogs freeze

  into perfect five-fingered

  shadows, but suddenly the flower

  has fire-colored eyes

  and one of the shadows vanishes.

  Clearly, now, the flower is a bird.

  It lifts its head,

  it lifts the hinges

  of its snowy wings,

  tossing a moment of light

  in every direction,

  like a chandelier,

  and then once more is still.

  The salamanders,

  like tiny birds, locked into formation,

  fly down into the endless mysteries

  of the transforming water,

  and how could anyone believe

  that anything in this world

  is only what it appears to be—

  that anything is ever final—

  that anything, in spite of its absence,

  ever dies

  a perfect death?

  WRITING POEMS

  This morning I watched

  the pale green cones of the rhododendrons

  opening their small pink and red blouses—

  the bodies of the flowers

  were instantly beautiful to the bees, they hurried

  out of that dark place in the thick tree

  one after another, an invisible line

  upon which their iridescence caught fire

  as the sun caught them, sliding down.

  Is there anything more important

  than hunger and happiness? Each bee entered

  the frills of a flower to find

  the sticky fountain, and if some dust

  spilled on the walkways of the petals

  and caught onto their bodies, I don’t know

  if the bees know that otherwise death

  is everywhere, even in the red swamp

  of a flower. But they did this

  with no small amount of desperation—you might say: love.

  And the flowers, as daft as mud, poured out their honey.

  SOME HERONS

  A blue preacher

  flew toward the swamp,

  in slow motion.

  On the leafy banks,

  an old Chinese poet,

  hunched in the white gown of his wings,

  was waiting.

  The water

  was the kind of dark silk

  that has silver lines

  shot through it

  when it is touched by the wind

  or is splashed upward,

  in a small, quick flower,

  by the life beneath it.

  The preacher

  made his difficult landing,

  his skirts up around his knees.

  The poet’s eyes

  flared, just as a poet’s eyes

  are said to do

  when the poet is awakened

  from the forest of meditation.

  It was summer.

  It was only a few moments past the sun’s rising,

  which meant that the whole long sweet day

  lay before them.

  They greeted each other,

  rumpling their gowns for an instant,

  and then smoothing them.

  They entered the water,

  and instantly two more herons—

  equally as beautiful—

  joined them and stood just beneath them

  in the black, polished water

  where they fished, all day.

  FIVE A.M. IN THE PINEWOODS

  I’d seen

  their hoofprints in the deep

  needles and knew

  they ended the long night

  under the pines, walking

  like two mute

  and beautiful women toward

  the deeper woods, so I

  got up in the dark and

  went there. They came

  slowly down the hill

  and looked at me sitting under

>   the blue trees, shyly

  they stepped

  closer and stared

  from under their thick lashes and even

  nibbled some damp

  tassels of weeds. This

  is not a poem about a dream,

  though it could be.

  This is a poem about the world

  that is ours, or could be.

  Finally

  one of them—I swear it!—

  would have come to my arms.

  But the other

  stamped sharp hoof in the

  pine needles like

  the tap of sanity,

  and they went off together through

  the trees. When I woke

  I was alone,

  I was thinking:

  so this is how you swim inward,

  so this is how you flow outward,

  so this is how you pray.

  LITTLE OWL WHO LIVES IN THE ORCHARD

  His beak could open a bottle,

  and his eyes—when he lifts their soft lids—

  go on reading something

  just beyond your shoulder—

  Blake, maybe,

  or the Book of Revelation.

  Never mind that he eats only

  the black-smocked crickets,

  and dragonflies if they happen

  to be out late over the ponds, and of course

  the occasional festal mouse.

  Never mind that he is only a memo

  from the offices of fear—

  it’s not size but surge that tells us

  when we’re in touch with something real,

  and when I hear him in the orchard

  fluttering

  down the little aluminum

  ladder of his scream—

  when I see his wings open, like two black ferns,

  a flurry of palpitations

  as cold as sleet

  rackets across the marshlands

  of my heart,

  like a wild spring day.

  Somewhere in the universe,

  in the gallery of important things,

  the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish,

  sits on its pedestal.

  Dear, dark dapple of plush!

  A message, reads the label,

  from that mysterious conglomerate:

  Oblivion and Co.

  The hooked head stares

  from its blouse of dark, feathery lace.

  It could be a valentine.

  THE GIFT

  I wanted to thank the mockingbird for the vigor of his song.

  Every day he sang from the rim of the field, while I picked blueberries or just idled in the sun.

  Every day he came fluttering by to show me, and why not, the white blossoms in his wings.

  So one day I went there with a machine, and played some songs of Mahler.

  The mockingbird stopped singing, he came close and seemed to listen.

  Now when I go down to the field, a little Mahler spills through the sputters of his song.

  How happy I am, lounging in the light, listening as the music floats by!

  And I give thanks also for my mind, that thought of giving a gift.

  And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.

  PIPEFISH

  In the green

  and purple weeds

  called Zostera, loosely

  swinging in the shallows,

  I waded, I reached

  my hands

  in that most human

  of gestures—to find,

  to see,

  to hold whatever it is

  that’s there—

  and what came up

  wasn’t much

  but it glittered

  and struggled,

  it had eyes, and a body

  like a wand,

  it had pouting lips.

  No longer,

  all of it,

  than any of my fingers,

  it wanted

  away from my strangeness,

  it wanted

  to go back

  into that waving forest

  so quick and wet.

  I forget

  when this happened,

  how many years ago

  I opened my hands—

  like a promise

  I would keep my whole life,

  and have—

  and let it go.

  I tell you this

  in case you have yet to wade

  into the green

  and purple shallows

  where the diminutive

  pipefish

  wants to go on living.

  I tell you this

  against everything you are—

  your human heart,

  your hands passing over the world,

  gathering and closing,

  so dry and slow.

  THE KOOKABURRAS

  In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.

  In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting

  to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.

  The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of

  their cage, they asked me to open the door.

  Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them,

  no, and walked away.

  They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.

  They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly

  home to their river.

  By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.

  As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.

  Nothing else has changed either.

  Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.

  The sun shines on the latch of their cage.

  I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

  THE LILIES BREAK OPEN OVER THE DARK WATER

  Inside

  that mud-hive, that gas-sponge,

  that reeking

  leaf-yard, that rippling

  dream-bowl, the leeches’

  flecked and swirling

  broth of life, as rich

  as Babylon,

  the fists crack

  open and the wands

  of the lilies

  quicken, they rise

  like pale poles

  with their wrapped beaks of lace;

  one day

  they tear the surface,

  the next they break open

  over the dark water.

  And there you are

  on the shore,

  fitful and thoughtful, trying

  to attach them to an idea—

  some news of your own life.

  But the lilies

  are slippery and wild—they are

  devoid of meaning, they are

  simply doing,

  from the deepest

  spurs of their being,

  what they are impelled to do

  every summer.

  And so, dear sorrow, are you.

  DEATH AT A GREAT DISTANCE

  The ripe, floating caps

  of the fly amanita

  glow in the pinewoods.

  I don’t even think

  of the eventual corruption of my body,

  but of how quaint and humorous they are,

  like a collection of doorknobs,

  half-moons,

  then a yellow drizzle of flying saucers.

  In any case

  they won’t hurt me unless

  I take them between my lips

  and swallow, which I know enough

  not to do. Once, in the south,

  I had this happen:

  the soft rope of a watermoccasin

  slid down the red knees

  of a mangrove, the hundreds of ribs

  housed in their smooth, white

  sleeves of muscle moving it

  like a happiness

  toward the water, where some bubbl
es

  on the surface of that underworld announced

  a fatal carelessness. I didn’t

  even then move toward the fine point

  of the story, but stood in my lonely body

  amazed and full of attention as it fell

  like a stream of glowing syrup into

  the dark water, as death

  blurted out of that perfectly arranged mouth.

  THE NOTEBOOK

  “Six a.m.—

  the small, pond turtle

  lifts its head

  into the air

  like a green toe.

  It looks around.

  What it sees

  is the whole world

  swirling back from darkness:

  a red sun

  rising over the water,

  over the pines,

  and the wind lifting,

  and the water-striders heading out,

  and the white lilies

  opening their happy bodies.

  The turtle

  doesn’t have a word for any of it—

  the silky water

  or the enormous blue morning,

  or the curious affair of his own body.

  On the shore

  I’m so busy

  scribbling and crossing out

  I almost miss seeing him

  paddle away

  through the wet, black forest.

  More and more the moments come to me:

  how much can the right word do?

  Now a few of the lilies

  are a faint flamingo inside

  their white hearts,

  and there is still time

  to let the last roses of the sunrise

  float down

  into my uplifted eyes.”

  PRAISE

  Knee-deep

  in the ferns

  springing up

  at the edge of the whistling swamp,

  I watch the owl

  with its satisfied,

  heart-shaped face

  as it flies over the water—

  back and forth—

  as it flutters down

  like a hellish moth

  wherever the reeds twitch—

  whenever, in the muddy cover,

  some little life sighs

  before it slides into the moonlight

  and becomes a shadow.

  In the distance,

  awful and infallible,

  the old swamp belches.

  Of course

  it stabs my heart

  whenever something cries out

  like a teardrop.

  But isn’t it wonderful,

  what is happening

  in the branches of the pines:

  the owl’s young,

  dressed in snowflakes,

  are starting to fatten—

  they beat their muscular wings,

  they dream of flying

  for another million years

  over the water,