misc/poetry

Allow me to apologize for my self-absorption. My virus
is your virus, ours is a virulent commonwealth.
We breed them together, refine them, borrow them
from friends and strangers, camels and bats,
as my body fights its infection the global corpus
combats our latest invader—retrovirus, ebolavirus, coronavirus—
we are besieged, we sicken, we counterattack, we die.
But illness leads you inward, away from the tribe,
the clan, the calculus of multitudes
vs. singletons that constitutes American thought.
Interiority is a mode of social distancing.
Here, in the hospital, I am me, alone, a being
frightened of its own mechanical failings,
like a bystander trapped in a broken elevator.
I feel, to myself, like a construct, a built thing, a city
in which I encounter my own bacterial hordes as strangers
passing silently through a maze of narrow alleys.
I watch my heart pulsing and I do not think,
That is me, there beats my engine,
I think, Ah, skillful machine, as if it were an iPhone.
I feel the body’s otherness all around me.
I compose the urgent letter in its envelope,
I carry the scepter in its keep.
It is a prison and a vehicle of emancipation, a strong horse.
My legs trot and canter, my hair grows unlicensed,
my lungs expand and contract automatically.
I am me, alone, but how do I happen
to be here? What am I
if not my body?
Who am I if not that it?
The doctors tell me the many ways I might die
but not how I come to be alive,
existence is a fever of unknown origin,
a pandemonium of desires—
I want to live, I want to breathe, I want
to see as vividly as Vermeer and as broadly as a common fly
and as encyclopedically as the mantis shrimp
though I cannot understand why
it would need to differentiate ten million colors
or how anyone could measure its ability to do so—
the Ishihara test?—simple questionnaires?
I want my heart to shake its defiant fist at the sky forever.
I want my soul to swell with sorrow as with joy.
Most of all, with a desperation that embarrasses me,
as if I had been jailed a decade, I want to go home.

When the ice will creak
Between green shoes, and from the pale
Blue bitter airs
Barbarous globes of spring
Will break through.

We will be far away.

We would like to return and look,
Caress the clover of the heaths
The doorposts of the new home
Cry in pity
Where our mother passed.

Instead we will be far away.

Instead we prisoners
Will laugh without respite
And hate as far as the knife
Blades are gripped.
Damned those who lead us.

Far, always far away.

And when we have returned
wild grass will cover the courtyards
and the breath of the dead in the air.
The creases on the hands,
the rust on the shovels.

And still we will be far.

We will still be far
From the face that welcomes us in our sleep
here, tired of hate and love.

But new hands will come
As new leaves do.

Now to our distant camps.

But the bud will open
And the water spring speak, as it once did.
You will shine, buried stone,
Our ancient human heart,
Raw shard, bare law.

In the gaze of the distant sky.

I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of eye—
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—

Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—

Out of some simple part of me
which I cannot use up
 I took a blessing for the flowers
tightening in the night
like fists of jealous love
 like knots
no one can undo without destroying
 The new morning gathered me
in blue mist
 like dust under wedding gown
Then I followed the day
like a cloud of heavy sheep
  after the judas
up a blood-ringed ramp
into the terror of every black building

Ten years sealed journeys unearned dreams
Laughter meant to tempt me into old age
 spilled for friends stars unknown flesh mules sea
Instant knowledge of bodies material and spirit
 which slowly learned would have made death smile
Stories turning into theories
 which begged only for the telling and retelling
Girls sailing over the blooms of my mouth
 with a muscular triangular kiss
ordinary mouth to secret mouth
Nevertheless my homage sticky flowers
 rabbis green and red serving the sun like platters
In the end you offered me the dogma you taught
 me to disdain and I good pupil disdained it
I fell under the diagrammed fields like the fragment
of a perfect statue layers of cities build upon
I saw you powerful I saw you happy
 that I could not live only for harvesting
that I was a true citizen of the slow earth

Light and Splendour
in the sleeping orchards
entering the trees
like a silent movie wedding procession
entering the arches of branches
for the sake of love only
From a hill I watched
the apple blossoms breathe
the silver out of the night
like fish eating the spheres
of air out of the river
So the illumined night fed
the sleeping orchards
entering the vaults of branches
like a holy procession
Long live the Power of Eyes
Long live the invisible steps
men can read on a mountain
Long live the unknown machine
or heart
which by will or accident
pours with victor's grace
endlessly perfect weather
on the perfect creatures
the world grows

Montreal
July 1964