The Eagle's Mile Read online

  In the early fall, fire-breathing with oak-leaves,

  Your patched tunnel-gaze exactly right

  For the buried track,

  the England-curved water strong

  Far-off with your other sight, both fresh-waters marbling together

  Supporting not surpassing

  What flows what balances

  In it. Douglas, power-hang in it all now, for all

  The whole thing is worth: catch without warning

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  Somewhere in the North Georgia creek like ghost-muscle tensing

  Forever, or on the high grass-bed

  Yellow of dawn, catch like a man stamp-printed by God-

  shock, blue as the very foot

  Of fire. Catch into the hunted

  Horns of the buck, and thus into the deepest hearing

  Nerveless, all bone, bone-tuned

  To leaves and twigswith the grass drying wildly

  When you woke where you stood with all blades rising

  Behind you, and stepped out

  possessing the trail,

  The racked bramble on either side shining

  Like a hornet, your death drawing life

  From growth

  from flow, as in the gill-cleansing turn

  Of the creek

  or from the fountain-twist

  Of flight, that rounds you

  Off, and shies you downwind

  Side-faced, all-seeing with hunger,

  And over this, steep and straight-up

  In the eagle's mile

  Let Adam, far from the closed smoke of mills

  And blue as the foot

  Of every flame, true-up with blind-side outflash

  The once-more instantly

  Wild world: over Brasstown Bald

  Splinter uncontrollably whole.

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  Daughter

  Hospital, and the fathers' room, where light

  Won't look you in the eye. No emergency

  But birth. I sit with the friend, and listen

  To the unwounded clock. Indirectly glowing, he is grayer,

  Unshaven as I. We are both old men

  Or nearly. He is innocent. Yet:

  What fathers are waiting to be born

  But myself, whom the friend watches

  With blessed directness? No other man but a worker

  With an injured eyeball; his face had been there

  When part of an engine flew up.

  A tall nurse blotted with ink

  And blood goes through. Something written

  On her? Blood of my wife? A doctor with a blanket

  Comes round a blind corner. "Who gets this little girl?"

  I peer into wool: a creature

  Somewhat strangely more than red. Dipped in fire.

  No one speaks. The friend does not stir; he is innocent

  Again: the child is between

  Me and the man with one eye. We battle in the air,

  Three-eyed, over the new-born. The doctor says,

  "All right, now. Which one of you had a breech baby?"

  All around I look: look at the possible

  Wounded father. He may be losing: he opens his bad eye.

  I half-close one of mine, hoping to win

  Or help. Breech baby. I don't know. I tell my name.

  Taking the doctor by his arms

  Around her, the child of fire moves off. I would give one eye for her

  Already. If she's not mine I'll steal her.

  The doctor comes back. The friend stirs; both our beards

  Quicken: the doctor is standing

  Over me, saying, "This one's yours."

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  It is done: I set my feet

  In Heavenly power, and get up. In place of plastic, manned rubber

  And wrong light, I say wordlessly

  Roll, real God. Roll through us. I shake hands

  With the one-eyed man. He has not gained

  A child, but may get back his eye; I hope it will return

  By summer starlight.

  The child almost setting

  Its wool on fire, I hold it in the first and last power

  It came from: that goes on all the time

  There is, shunting the glacier, whirling

  Whole forests from their tops, moving

  Lava, the flowing stone: moving the hand

  Of anyone, ever. Child of fire,

  Look up. Look up as I lean and mumble you are part

  Of flowing stone: understand: you are part of the wave,

  Of the glacier's irrevocable

  Millennial inch.

  "This is the one," the friend repeats

  In his end-of-it daze, his beard gone

  Nearly silver, now, with honor, in the all-night night

  Of early morning. Godfather, I say

  To him: not father of God, but assistant

  Father to this one. All forests are moving, all waves,

  All lava and ice. I lean. I touch

  One finger. Real God, roll.

  Roll.

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  The Olympian

  Los Angeles back-yarding in its blue-eyed waters

  Of empty swim, by my tract-house of packaged hard-candy

  I lay in wait with the sun

  And celebrity beer

  for the Olympian,

  Now my oldest boy's junior

  High school algebra teacher, who had brought back the black-magic gold

  Of the East, down the fast lane,

  Freewaying, superhuman with rubberized home-stretch,

  The four hundred meters from Tokyo

  To Balboa Boulevard, leaving in his wake

  All over the earth, the Others, the nation-motley doom-striped ones,

  Those heart-eating sprinters, those Losers.

  With Olympia Beer I was warming

  Warming up with the best chill waters

  Of the West Coast, cascading never-ending

  Down out of Washington State. Now is your moment of truth

  With me at last, O Champion! for I had laid a course as strange

  To him as to me. Steeplechase! I had always leapt into water

  Feet first, and could get out

  Faster than in. I was ready for the Big One:

  For the Water Jump in the corner

  Of the lax, purfled pool, under the cemented palm

  Where at night the shrewd rat climbed

  And rustled and ruled the brown fronds over the underlit

  Blue oval, surveying Sepulveda,

  And in its color and kind, suffered

  World recognition.

  With a slide-rule in his shirt-pocket,

  His bullet-proof glasses drawing

  Into pointscompetitive pointsand fish-eye-lensing,

  Crossflashing on my hogged, haggard grassplot

  Of slapped-down, laid-back Sepulveda, just after he'd Won It All,

  He came lankily, finely drawn

  Onto my turf, where all the time I had been laying

  For him, building my energy-starches,

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  My hilarious, pizza-fed fury. My career of fat

  Lay in the speed-trap, in the buckets and tools of the game-plan,

  The snarls of purified rope. Then dawned the strict gods of Sparta,

  The free gods of Athens! O lungs of Pheidippides collapsing in a square

  Of the delivered city! O hot, just-hurdlable gates

  Of deck-chairs! Lounges! A measured universe

  Of exhilarating laws! Here I had come there I'd gone

  Laying it down confusing, staggering

  The fast lane and the slow, on and over

  And over recliners, sun-cots, cleaning-poles and beach-balls,

  Foiled cans of rusty rat-poison bowing, split casks

  Of diatomaceous earth corks spaced-out like California

  On blue-and-white dacron cords lost-and-found swim-fins

  Unma
tched and pigeon-toed half-hearted air

  In blazing rings doughnuts and play rafts dragons and elephants

  Blown-up by mouth, now sighing most of life

  Away the lawful No-Running signs

  Turned to the wall. And all the time, all the time,

  Under the brown-browed, rose-ash glower

  Of the smog-bank, the crows, long gone

  Gray with the risen freeways, were thronging and hawing

  To be Doves of Peace to be turned

  Loose, displaying and escaping, over the jolted crowds

  Of Unimart, the rammed Victory Stand,

  and in the rose-ash

  Of early dusk, we called our wives, gray as crows

  In their golf-hats, to the secret Olympics, laid down in my laws

  Within laws, where world champions, now mad with the moon

  Of moonlighting, sold running shoes. This so, we insisted

  On commercials, those all-comers'

  Career-dreams of athletes: "We are brought to you by the Bringers of the Flame,

  The double-dry double martini," those women said. "Get set!

  Get set! You're being born

  Again, in spite of everything!" James Bond and my smallest boy

  Blazed with one cap-pistol together. We hove like whales from the line.

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  Twice around

  We were going for, cursing and cruising like ghosts, over dog-food bowls,

  Over sprinklers passed-out from their spin-off

  Of rainbows and I was losing

  But not badly, and even gained a little, coming out

  Of the water-jump and over the jump-rope, and out of him or maybe

  Me surely me burst a mindless deep

  Belching blindsiding laugh down the backstretch

  Of earth-kegs and dirty cleansing-tools that skinned the dust

  From the under-blue, and for one unsettling moment left it

  Blazing and mattering. I blazed I felt great I was a great

  Plaster stadium-god lagging lolloping hanging

  In there with the best: was running pale and heavy

  With cement-dust from two wives running

  Then coming around coming back

  Down the slow lane lurching lorry-swaying:

  Now toward two wives making up for making

  The gelatin-murmur of crowds, I pounded, wet and laboring,

  And then, half a pool

  Behind, went into the bell-lap.

  I was holding my own

  Back there, as we rounded

  Past the stands he a long first and I

  A world-class second and counting

  On my finish or something Yes! My finish to come

  From the home turf like an ascension all-seeing

  World-recognized poison-proof smoke-proof time-proof

  Out of the pool, a rat's climb grappling

  Half-a-lap half-a-lap still alive

  In mid-stride, louring, lumbering, crow-hopping

  Behind the athlete's unhurried

  Slack, unearthly footling lope:

  I stepped low and heavy

  Over the last light rope, smashed water with my sole

  Flat climbed, lurched, legged it and duck-footed

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  For home a good not shameful

  Second this was all right and everything

  But no! My weave my plan the run

  Of my knots had caught up with him caught

  Him where he lived

  in his feet

  and he was down

  In styrofoam, and on a bloated blessèd doughnut-ring

  Of rubber rolled: the finish-line leapt exploded

  Into Reality, shot-through with deathless flame, crossed with white paper:

  Swam illicitly, aboundingly

  Like wind-aided glory. With courage to do credit

  To any rat, I cornered and turned

  It on. He came back instantly, but instantly was not soon

  Enough, for I charged past like a slow freight

  All over the earth, and had got it

  And gone long gone and burst

  Through the living tissue: breasted and blanked

  The Tape and can feel it

  Bannering, still, on my chest

  Like wing-span, that once was toilet-paper, torn epically

  Where the true Olympian slurred

  His foot and fell, and I felt my lungs collapsing in a square

  Of the City, like Pheidippides dying of the sheer

  Good of my news.

  Far off, still rising at rose dusk

  And night, free under the low-browed smoke, and grayer

  Than any fake peace-bird,

  Like a called crow I answer

  Myself utterly, with a whole laugh that body-language one-world

  One word of joy straight into the ruining tons

  Of smoke that trash my head and doom it

  And keep it recognized

  in the age

  And condition of my kind, and hear also, maybe not entirely

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  From myself, the Olympian's laugh

  Coming from somewhere

  Behind, blindsidedly, getting the point

  At last, sighing like ghosts and like rubber, for fat

  And luck, all over the earth, where that day and any and every

  Day after it, devil hindmost and Goddamn it

  To glory, I lumbered for gold.

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  THe Little More

  JBTD

  I

  But the little more: the little more

  This boy will be, is hard

  For me to talk of

  But harder for him. Manhood is only a little more,

  A little more time, a little more everything than he

  Has on him now. He would know, if he could go forward

  From where he puts down his ball,

  His top, his willow spear,

  that he will face into the air

  Where the others his age will be breaking, or be

  About to break,

  and he will watch them grow pale

  With the warnings of doctors,

  And all their balloons, and parents and the other

  Dead will be floating

  Away from them, over the mountains.

  I would tell him

  This * is where the quiet

  Valley comes in, and the red creek

  Where he will row with no other,

  The water around each blade

  Explosive, ablaze with his only initials,

  Joy set in the bending void

  Between the oars

  and swung,

  As the last balloon disappears, needing

  Color no more. Yes! This is when the far mountain

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  Will come to him, under his feet

  Of its own wish

  when he steps up

  From water, and in the wind he will start

  To hear the enormous resonance

  Children cannot make out: of his own gigantic

  Continuous stride over all ferocious rocks

  That can be known.

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  II

  From the ones who have grown all they can

  Come and stop softly, boy,

  On the strong side of the road

  That the other side does not see. Then move.

  Put your feet where you look,

  and not

  Where you look, and none of your tracks

  Will pass off, but wander, and for you

  Be fresh places, free and aggressive.

  Boy who will always be glanced-at

  and then fixed

  In warm gazes, already the past knows

  It cannot invent you again,

  For the glitter on top of the current

  Is not the current.

  No, but what dances on it is

  More beautiful than wh
at takes its time

  Beneath, running on a single unreleased

  Eternal breath, rammed

  With carry, its all-out dream and dread

  Surging bull-breasted,

  Head-down, unblocked.

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  For a Time and Place

  A South Carolina inauguration of Richard Riley as governor

  May we be able to begin with ourselves

  Underfoot and rising,

  Peering through leaves we have basketed, through tendrils hanging

  Like bait, through flowers,

  Through lifted grave-soil: peering

  Past the short tree that stands

  In place for us, sawed-off, unbendable: a thing

  Pile-driven down

  And flowering from the impactsuch weaving

  Consuming delicacy in the leaves, out of such

  Up-wedged and pineappled bark! We look alive

  Through those petals in the censer-swung pots: through

  That swinging soil, and the split leaves fountaining out

  Of the mauled tree, to the east horizon vibrant

  With whole-earth hold-down, past a single sail pillowing