The Eagle's Mile Read online

  From there on out.

  We peer also from the flat

  Slant sand, west from estuary-glitter,

  From the reed-beds bending inland

  At dawn as we do, to the high-ground hard-hurdling

  Power of the down-mountain torrent: at a blue-ridged glance

  From the ocean, we see all we have

  Is unified as a quilt: the long leaves of the short tree,

  The tough churchly feathers, dance rice-like this side of

  The far-out wave-break's lounging

  Curved insolent long sparking thorn, and

  The gull's involving balance, his sweeping-through shuttle-run

  Downwind; his tapestry-move

  Is laid on our shoulders, where the unspilled dead

  Are riding, wild with flowers, collision-colors

  At the hairline, tended, sufficient, dead-level with us

  From now on out.

  What visions to us from all this lived

  Humidity? What insights from blue haze alone? From kudzu?

  From snake-vine? From the native dog-sized deer

  Page 39

  From island to island floating, their head-bones

  Eternal and formal,

  Collisionless? We are standing mainly on blends

  Of sand, red-rooted, in dark

  Near-fever air, and there is a certain weaving

  At our backs, like a gull's over-the-shoulder

  Peel-off downwind. Assuming those wings, we keep gazing

  From goat-grass to the high

  Shifts, splits, and barreling

  Alcohol of the rocks, all the way from minnows flashing whole

  The bright brittle shallows, waiting for our momentum

  From here on out.

  It is true, we like our air warm

  And wild, and the bark of our trees

  Overlapping backward and upward

  Stoutly, the shocks of tough leaves counter-

  balancing, with a flicker of lostness. Beside the dead,

  The straw-sucking marsh, we have stood where every blade

  Of eelgrass thrilled like a hand-line

  For the huge bass hanging in the shade

  Of the sunken bush, and have heard the unstuffed moss

  Hiss like a laundry-iron. This point between

  The baskets and the tree is where we best

  Are, and would be: our soil, our soul,

  Our sail, our black horizon simmering like a mainspring,

  Our rocky water falling like a mountain

  Ledge-to-ledge naturally headlong,

  Unstoppable, and our momentum

  In place, overcoming, coming over us

  And from us

  from now on out.

  Page 40

  Vessels

  When the sound of forest leaves is like the sleep-talk

  Of half-brothers; when it trembles shorts itself out

  Between branches, and is like light that does not cost

  Itself any light let me turn: turn right thén,

  Right as it happens and say: I crave wandering

  And giving: I crave

  My own blood, that makes the body

  Of the lover in my arms give up

  On the great sparking vault of her form,

  when I think instead

  Of my real brother, who talks like no leaf

  Or no half,

  and of the road he will be on

  As my body drops off

  And the step he takes from me

  Comes kicking,

  and he feels the starry head that has hovered

  Above him all his life

  come down on his, like mine

  Exactly,

  or near enough.

  Page 41

  Sleepers

  There is a sound you can make, as if someone asked you

  To sing between oar strokes, or as though

  Your birth-cry came back, and you put it into sails

  Over water,

  or without vocal cords, like a torso,

  Said what it meant, regardless. That is the voice

  For sleepers; find it

  Use it and you can join them, that assault-force

  Without a muscle, fighting for space

  To lift in planned rows over graveyards

  Like full battalions. Not one can give you the location

  Of his stump-stillness, or even one

  Of his edges; none knows where his body will end,

  Or what it is stamped with

  This moment: agate,

  Nova-burst earthworm

  Owl feather.

  Sound off, sleepers,

  Headless singers. One.

  One, two: Sound off.

  Not knowing where your tombs

  Already lie, assemble, sail through

  The lifted spaces, unburied.

  Page 42

  Meadow Bridge

  There might be working some kind of throwaway

  Meditation on Being, just

  From what I am looking at

  Right here. I can't tell, myself. But it may already have happened

  When I batted my eye

  a new fix

  Of sun lined out, squaring off: a fresh

  Steel bridge,

  exactly true

  To a crosscut of starkness

  And silver.

  Tell me: why do I want

  To put over it, the right hand drawing

  Inexhaustibly drawing

  out of the left, a vibration

  Of threads? This also, beholders,

  Is a fact: gauze

  Burns off,

  keeps coming: the bridge breaks through anything

  I can pull from my hand. No matter how I brim, there is

  No softening.

  Field, what hope?

  Page 43

  Tomb Stone

  This place named you,

  And what business I have here

  Is what I think it is

  And only that. I must ask you, though, not to fall

  Any farther,

  and to forgive me

  For coming here, as I keep doing,

  as I have done

  For a while in a vertical body

  That breathes the rectangular solitude

  Risen over you. I want time to tell the others

  Not to come, for I understand

  Now, that deep enough

  In death, the earth becomes

  Absolute earth. Hold all there is: hold on

  And forgive, while I tell them * as I tell

  Myself where I stand: Don't let a breast

  Echo, because of a foot.

  Pass, human step.

  Page 44

  To Be Done in Winter

  in memoriam, T. C.

  What you hold,

  Don't drink it all. Throw what you have left of it

  Out, and stand. Where the drink went away

  Rejoice that your fingers are burning

  Like hammered snow.

  He makes no sound: the cold flurries, and he comes all the way

  Back into life; in the mind

  There is no decay. Imagine him

  As to behold him, for if you fail

  To remember, he lies without

  What his body was.

  His short shadow

  Is on you. Bring him in, now, with tools

  And elements. Behold him

  With your arms: encircle him,

  Bring him in with the forge and the crystal,

  With the spark-pounding cold.

  Page 45

  Moon Flock

  No, don't ask me to give you

  What happened in my head when the dark felt

  It should change: when the black ploughblade

  Went through and dissolved. That was bad enough,

  But if you want to understand

  Frustration, look up while the moon, which is nothing

&nb
sp; But a wild white world,

  Struggles overhead: fights to grow wings

  For its creatures but cannot get

  Creatures to have them. It is known: nothing can be put

  Up on a wind with no air;

  No wing can lift from stones

  Lighter than earth-stones, where a man could leap

  Leap till he's nearly forever

  Overhead: overhead floating.

  No wings,

  In all that lightness. You want to understand:

  All right. You don't have to look up, but can look straight

  Straight

  Straight out out over the night sea

  As it comes in. Do that.

  Do it and think of your death, too, as a white world

  Struggling for wings. Then

  All the water your eyesight will hold

  While it can, will not be lost

  Page 46

  And neither will the moon

  As it strains and does nothing

  But quiver

  when the whole earth places you

  Underfoot

  as though suspended

  For good. You deserve it. Yóu should be

  That moon flock; and not, as you wíll be,

  A moveless man floating in the earth

  As though overhead, where it is not

  Possible to wave your arms

  At something, or at nothing: at a white world

  Or at your mother, or at the ocean

  In shock, that I told you about, all insanity

  And necessity when it sees you, and is right at you

  Coming

  hair-tearing

  Hair-tearing and coming.

  Page 47

  Snow Thickets

  Helplessly besieging: it is dim,

  Unity wavering

  Wavering on us, the land in cancelling flak. From inside, you and I

  Are watching gravity come down

  In monotonous awe

  each flake a part

  Of it, or not. With no blinking, we do

  As the snow does

  eyes burning thorns hooding our tongues

  Being born: we watch, under the bush

  Being bound, those all-whites yearning

  For anvil-points, for contact,

  still holding

  The airborne embattlement:

  Offered and cutthroat lost

  Very great winning hand

  Down-dealt to the upthrust.

  Page 48

  Expanses

  Enjoyable clouds, and a man comes;

  It's true, he's alive, but from this distance

  No one could tell he is breathing.

  You want to be sure he knows, though,

  Not to confuse the sea

  With any kind of heart: never to mix blood with something

  As free as foam. The color white is wing, water, cloud;

  It is best as sail.

  Sail.

  Drawn always off, off the sea

  To the chopped soft road, your look

  Goes willingly yonder, to and through

  The far friendly mountain

  then

  Back over earth level-jawed shoulder-energy widening

  From water, everywhere there is land,

  Brother: boundless,

  Earthbound, trouble-free, and all you want

  Joy like short grass.

  Page 49

  DOUBLE-TONGUE:

  COLLABORATIONS AND REWRITES

  Page 51

  Lakes of Värmland

  with André Frénaud

  Under the terrible north-light north-sea

  Light blue: severe smile of a warrior who sleeps in chain-mail

  Like a child: sleeps for the many, in water turned to brass

  By the dumped cannon of Charles the Twelfth

  leave them at their level,

  O Sweden, like the ultimate weapons,

  Like the last war-dead

  steeped in the angles of your just light

  A single pine tree standing for my heart, I wish to gather near them

  Anything that grows; myrtle, this stuff could be,

  Or bilberry; whatever.

  Page 52

  Form

  with André Frénaud

  I

  Pull out the pissed-on clinkers,

  Rake down the ashes of my bed, and come in

  And let's do it, as cold as we can get,

  Calving into the void like glaciers

  Into the green Northern Sea. Give me a cliff-shudder

  When you're finishing, before you split off

  Unheard, almost booming: cliff-shudder child-shudder

  That ends it. We have been here before, as you know.

  Page 53

  II

  We have been here again, humped-up and splintering

  Like ice-junk: here it has happened

  But we missed it, and dead birds from many migrations

  Float eye-up between us,

  between bergs, Carrara-piles

  Where we chopped and hacked, shattering glass, searching jaggedly

  For the radiant nude ice-sculpture

  That never showed never shaped itself free

  Of us was never anything

  But chip-chaff and gentian-blue zero

  and, as before,

  The glorious being we froze together

  To bring forth, that we chiseled toward closer and closer,

  Whinging and ringing, weeping

  For discovery: that together we have annihilated

  But not found, is now no more

  Than our two hostile cadavers, together.

  Page 54

  Heads

  with Lucien Becker

  I

  There is no longer any reason to confuse

  My breath with the room's. Sleep empties the pillow;

  The world looks into various windows

  Where human beings are unfinished,

  Like blueprints; no substance has come.

  Meadow-saffron dries, tenses. Morning pulverizes it

  With a single vague foot, heavy as with

  All the sleepless eyelids that there are.

  The wellsprings are gray as the sky;

  The smoky wind, a wind for headless people,

  Flees with the thousands of voices

  That solitude waits for, like tide-slack.

  Above the roofs everything is empty;

  Light cannot get all the way up

  To where it was, stalled in dim lamp-bulbs

  And bottles drunk dry to hold it down.

  Page 55

  II

  Beyond the sill the day has started and quit.

  The sheet has cut off my head; my mirror's

  Still deep with the whole night

  And the road has made great progress

  Into the wall. A fly goes all around

  In a big balance. I used to lie here, darling,

  With unimproved light: I took it from your brow

  To mine, a glimmer over well-springs,

  Not zoned, not floor-planned for death.

  But a building you can see through is rising:

  They are settling and dressing the stones

  That pain from everywhere, so long as human,