The Eagle's Mile Read online

  Fastens onto like clothespins. Lie still, though,

  We're not hanging. You are always covered

  By your smooth forehead and your eyelids;

  You are grazed by no tissued humming

  Of razor wire, or by the shadows that come out

  Framing, scraping, hosing-down sides of glass,

  And leave for a specified time

  The sides of their heads against banks.

  Page 56

  Farmers

  a fragment

  with André Frénaud

  There are not many meteors over the flat country

  Of the old; not one metaphor between the ploughblade

  And the dirt

  not much for the spirit: not enough

  To raise the eyes past the horizon-line

  Even to the Lord, even with neck-muscles like a bull's

  For the up-toss. The modest face has no fear

  Of following a center-split swaying track

  Through grain and straw

  To the grave, or of the honor of work

  With muck and animals, as a man born reconciled

  With his dead kin:

  When love gives him back the rough red of his face he dares

  To true-up the seasons of life with the raggedness of earth,

  With the underground stream as it turns its water

  Into the free stand of the well: a language takes hold

  And keeps on, barely making it, made

  By pain: the pain that's had him ever since school,

  At the same time the indivisible common good

  Being shared among the family

  Came clear to him: he disappears into fog

  He reappears he forces out his voice

  Over the field he extends his figures

  With a dead-right clumsiness,

  And the blazon that changes every year

  Its yellow and green squares, announces at each moment

  Page 57

  What must be said: the justice that the power of man installs

  In exhausted fresh-air coupling with the earth:

  Slogger

  Figure of glory

  Less and more than real, fooled always

  By the unforeseeable: so nailed by your steps

  Into the same steps so marked by wisdom calamitously come by,

  And always uncertain, valiantly balancing,

  So stripped, so hog-poor still, after a long day

  In the immemorial, that I cannot say to you

  Where you will hear me,

  Farmer, there will be no end to your knowing

  The pastures drawn breathless by the furrow,

  The fields, heartsick, unquenchable arid

  avid,

  The forgivable slowness, the whispered prophecies of weather:

  Winter spring, the season that always comes through

  For you, and never enough,

  But only dies, turning out

  In its fragile green, its rich greens,

  To be nothing but the great stain of blankness

  Changing again

  Gravedigger

  On Sunday, you come back Monday to the laying-out

  In squares, of your infinite land

  the furs of snow do not reach us

  When they should

  the moon has troubled the sown seed . . .

  Page 58

  Craters

  with Michel Leiris

  Roots out of the ground and ongoing

  The way we * are, some of them

  Spokes earth-slats a raft made of humped planks

  Slung down and that's right: wired together

  By the horizon: it's what these roads

  Are growing through: fatal roads,

  No encounters, the hacked grass burning with battle-song

  Then when we get our voices together,

  When we mix in that savage way, in the gully of throats

  Where the fog piles up, and we turn our long cadences loose

  Over the grooved pasture, the running fence of song

  Will flap and mount straight up for miles

  Very high, all staring stridulation,

  Softer than beer-hops:

  one of the days when the wind breathes slackly,

  Making the lightest perches tremble

  Like hostile stems interlacing,

  As in the heart a lock of blond hair knots on itself

  Suicidally, insolubly

  someone will plough-out a door,

  A staircase will dig itself down, its haunted spiral

  Will blacken and come out

  Where the ashes of those who were once turned to Pompeian lava

  Will abandon their smouldering silkworks,

  Their velvet slags, and take on the courtliness

  Of ghosts: then, then the sky will be gone from us

  Page 59

  Forever, we wretched ones who can love nothing

  But light.

  Such will the craters tell youany crater

  Will tell you, dry-heaving and crouching:

  will tell us we've stumbled

  Onto one:

  we're in * one, dry-heaving and crouching.

  Page 60

  Attempted Departure

  with André du Bouchet

  I come back

  hoping to leave

  From these planks; for farewell and for lift-off I am lighting

  Four walls of a fire, here. Blank plaster comes alive

  On me in square gold: my shadow goes giddy with dimension, dropping off

  The outflanked pious hunger of the flat;

  The damn thing can come at me now

  Like death, from anywhere

  but while I stand

  No side protected, at home, play-penned

  With holocaust

  the slashes disappear from this flayed back, like

  My step on the rammed road,

  the only thing fleeing.

  Page 61

  Poem

  through a French poet, Roland Bouhéret, and my running father

  For having left the birds that left me

  Better streaks on my eyes than they can make

  On any sky alive:

  for having broken loose new stars

  By opening to the storm a deaf window

  At the moment the summer park closed:

  for having rubbed out,

  From cliffs not dangerous enough, or cold enough

  For you,

  the name of the dead,

  I hear the sound of fresh steps seeding toward me,

  Steps I could take.

  Gene,

  Dead in the full of July

  Ten years ago, I have learned all the tracks

  Of the stars of that month: they give me more body-authority

  Than a beast-birth in straw. Believe me I have kept

  The old river that ran like something from a crock,

  Through the cow-battered weeds: that runs over us

  As baptismal water always;

  I believe I could be walking there

  Like high valleys crossing,

  In the long laconic open-striding fullness

  Of your muscular death. In whole air your form

  Takes up with me best, giving more than it could

  In the hospital's mirror-blanked room

  Where you leaned toward the grim parks under you

  Before they closed,

  and out of the rattling rails

  Page 62

  Of your cocked bed, talked about mowing, nothing

  But mowing, of all weird, unearthly

  Earthly things: like a shower of grassblades

  Talked, tilted and talked,

  and shivered, down past you, the gaunt

  Traffic-islands into green; from that time on, I saw them

  As blocked fields, part of elsewhere.

  But we are advancing

  By steps that grew back to my d
oor,

  And if I set your long name in the wind

  And it comes back spelling out

  The name of a far port-of-call,

  the place we never got to,

  That is all right.

  And yet, with the ashy river

  Running like a soul where I'm headed,

  Even with the names of harbors that swarmed all over me

  When I hit the open, when I paced myself exactly

  With the currentthese and the birds, the old cows,

  Have stubborned here

  stalled no matter how I increase

  My leg-beat, or stretch and find myself

  Calling out in mid-stride. You are motionless, you are in the middle

  Of elsewhere, breathing the herd-breath

  Of the deadsingled and in-line breathing

  Among so manylooking in the same direction

  As the rest of them, your long legs covered with burrs

  And bent weeds, splinters of grassblades:

  Squared-off, power-bodied, pollen-lidded

  You are: green-leggèd, but nailed there.

  Page 63

  Purgation

  homage, Po Chü-yi

  Before and after the eye, grasses go over the long fields.

  Every season they walk on

  by us, as thoughno; I and you,

  Dear frienddecreed it. One time or another

  They are here. Grass season . . . yet we are no longer the best

  Of us.

  Lie stiller, closer; in the April I love

  For its juices, there is too much green for your grave.

  I feel that the Spring should ignite with what is

  Unnatural as we; ours, but God-suspected. It should come in one furious step, and leave

  Somea littlegreen for us; never quite get every one of the hummocks tremoring vaguely

  Tall in the passed-through air. They'd make the old road be

  The road for old men, where you and I used to wander toward

  The beetle-eaten city gate, as the year leaned into us.

  Oh fire, come on! I trust you!

  My ancient human friend, you are dead, as we both know.

  But I remember, and I call for something serious, uncalled-for

  By anyone else, to sweep, to use

  the dryness we've caused to become us! Like the grasshopper

  I speak, nearly covered with dust, from the footprint and ask

  Not for the line-squall lightning:

  the cloud's faking veinsYes! I catch myself:

  No; not the ripped cloud's open touch the fireball hay

  Of August

  but for flame too old to live

  Or die, to travel like a wide wild contrary

  Single-minded brow over the year's right growing

  In April

  over us for us as we sway stubbornly near death

  From both sides age-gazing

  Both sighing like grass and fire.

  Page 64

  Basics

  I

  Level

  Who has told you what discoveries

  There are, along the stressed blank

  Of a median line? From it, nothing

  Can finally fall. Like a spellbinder's pass

  A tense placid principle continues

  Over it, and when you follow you have the drift,

  The balance of many compass needles

  Verging to the pole. Bring down your arms, voyager,

  And the soul goes out

  Surrounding, humming

  standing by means

  Of the match-up in long arm-bones

  Dropped:

  held out and drawn back back in *

  Out of the open

  compass-quivering and verging

  At your sides, as median movement

  Lays itself bare: a closed vein of bisected marble, where

  Along the hairline stem

  Of the continuum, you progress, trembling

  With the plumb-bob quiver of mid-earth,

  with others in joy

  Moving also, in line,

  Equalling, armlessing.

  Page 65

  II

  Simplex

  Comes a single thread

  monofilament coming

  Strengthening engrossing and slitting

  Into the fine-spun life

  To come, foretold in whatever

  Ecstasy there's been, but never suspected, never included

  In what was believed. The balance of the spiral

  Had been waiting, and could take

  What was given it: the single upthrust through

  The hanging acid, the helix spun and spellbound

  By the God-set of chemistry, the twine much deeper

  Than any two bodies imagined

  They could die for: insinuate, woven

  Single strand, third serpent

  Of the medical wood, circling the staff of life

  Into the very body

  Of the future, deadly

  But family, having known from the beginning

  Of the sun, what will take it on.

  Page 66

  III

  Word

  Heat makes this, heat makes any

  Word: human lungs,

  Human lips. Not like eternity, which, naked, every time

  Will call on lightning

  To say it all: No after

  Or before. We try for that

  And fail. Our voice

  Fails, but for an instant

  Is like the other; breath alone

  That came as though humanly panting

  From far back, in unspeakably beautiful

  Empty space

  And struck: at just this moment

  Found the word ''golden."