Sun-Up and Other Poems | Page 9

things
strike and die,
letting
their hate live on
in the spreading purple of a wound...
I too
will
make covert of a crevice in the night,
and turn and watch...
nose at
the cleft's edge.
WILD DUCK
I
That was a great night we spied upon
See-sawing home,
Singing a
hot sweet song to the super-stars
Shuffling off behind the
smoke-haze...
Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river...
Lights
dwindling to shining slits
In the wet asphalt...
Purring lights... red
and green and golden-whiskered...
Digging daintily pointed claws in
the soft mud...
... But you did not know...
As the trains made golden
augers
Boring in the darkness...
How my heart kept racing out
along the rails,
As a spider runs along a thread
And hauls him in
again
To some drawing point...
You did not know
How wild
ducks' wings
Itch at dawn...

How at dawn the necks of wild ducks

Arch to the sun
And new-mown air
Trickles sweet in their
gullets.
II
As water, cleared of the reflection of a bird
That has lately flown
across it,
Yet trembles with the beating of its wings,
So my soul...
emptied of the known you... utterly...
Is yet vibrant with the cadence
of the song
You might have been....
'Twas a great night...
With

never a waste look over a shoulder
Curved to the crook of the wind...

And a great word we threw
For memory to play knuckles with...

A word the waters of the world have washed,
Leaving it stark and
without smell...
A world that rattles well in emptiness: Good-by.
THE DREAM
I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day....

(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium...
domes

fired in sulphurous mist...
sea
quiescent as a gray seal...
and the
emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out
of the bay....)
But the day is an up-turned cup
and its sun a junk of
red iron
guttering in sluggish-green water--
where shall I pour my
dream?
ALTITUDE
I wonder
how it would be here with you,
where the wind
that has
shaken off its dust in low valleys
touches one cleanly,
as with a
new-washed hand,
and pain
is as the remote hunger of droning
things,
and anger
but a little silence
sinking into the great silence.
COMRADES
Life
You have been good to me....
You have not made yourself too
dear
to juggle with.
NOCTURNE
Indigo bulb of darkness
Punctured by needle lights
Through a
fissure of brick canyon shutting out stars,
And a sliver of moon

Spigoting two high windows over the West river....
Boy, I met to-night,
Your eyes are two red-glowing arcs shifting with
my vision.... They reflect as in a fading proof
The deadened eyes of a
woman,
And your shed virginity,
Light as the withered pod of a

sweet pea,
Moist and fragrant
Blows against my soul.
What are
you to me, boy,
That I, who have passed so many lights,
Should
carry your eyes
Like swinging lanterns?
CACTUS SEED
Radiant notes
piercing my narrow-chested room,
beating down
through my ceiling--
smeared with unshapen
belly-prints of dreams

drifted out of old smokes--
trillions of icily
peltering notes
out
of just one canary,
all grown to song
as a plant to its stalk,
from
too long craning at a sky-light
and a square of second-hand blue.
Silvery-strident throat--
so assiduously serenading my brain,

flinching under
the glittering hail of your notes--
were you not safe
behind... rats know what thickness of... plastered wall... I might fathom

your golden delirium
with throttle of finger and thumb
shutting
valve of bright song.
II
But if... away off... on a fork of grassed earth
socketing an inlet reach
of blue water...
if canaries (do they sing out of cages?)
flung such
luminous notes,
they would sink in the spirit...
lie germinal...

housed in the soul as a seed in the earth...
to break forth at spring with
the crocuses into young smiles
on the mouth.
Or glancing off buoyantly,
radiate notes in one key

with the sparkle of rain-drops
on the petal of a cactus flower

focusing the just-out sun.
Cactus... why cactus?
God... God...
somewhere... away off...

cactus flowers, star-yellow

ray out of spiked green,
and empties of
sky
roll you over and over
like a mother her baby in long grass.

And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees,
pricking
multiple leaves
at his amazing story.

WINDOWS
TIME-STONE
Hallo, Metropolitan--
Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,
Red
eye notching the darkness.
No use to ogle that slip of a moon.
This
midnight the moon,
Playing virgin after all her encounters,
Will
break another date with you.
You fuss an awful lot,
You flight of
ledger books,
Overrun with multiple ant-black figures
Dancing on
spindle legs
An interminable can-can.
But I'd rather... like the cats
in the alley... count time
By the silver whistle of a moonbeam

Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls,
Than all your tally of the
sunsets,
Metropolitan, ticking among stars.
TRAIN WINDOW
Small towns
Crawling out of their green shirts...
Tubercular towns

Coughing a little in the dawn...
And the church...
There is always
a church
With its natty spire
And the vestibule--
That's where
they whisper:
Tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz...
How many codes for a
wireless whisper--
And corn flatter than it should be
And those
chits of leaves
Gadding with every wind?
Small towns
From
Connecticut to Maine:
Tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz...tzz-tzz...
SCANDAL
Aren't there bigger things to talk about
Than a window in Greenwich
Village
And hyacinths sprouting
Like little puce poems out of a
sick soul?
Some cosmic hearsay--
As to whom--it can't be Mars!
put the moon--that way....

Or what winds do to canyons
Under the
tall stars...
Or even
How that old roué, Neptune,
Cranes over his
bald-head moons
At