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North Labrador
A land of leaning ice
Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,
Flings itself silently into eternity.
"Has no-one come here
to win you,
Or left you with the faintest blush upon your glittering breasts?
Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright"?
Cold hushed, there is only
the shifting of moments
That journey toward no Sspring,
No birth, no death,
No time nor sun in answer.
Legend
As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by….
I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are, -
The only worth all granting.
It is to be learned -
This cleaving and this burning,
But only by the one who
Spends out himself again.
Twice and twice
(Again the smoking souvenir,
Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
Until the bright logic is won
Unwhispering as a mirror
Is believed.
Then, drop by caustic drop,
a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony, -
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.
Black Tambourine
The interests of a black man
in a cellar
Mark tardy judgment on the world's closed door.
Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,
And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.
Aesop, driven to pondering,
found
Heaven with the tortoise and the hare;
Fox brush and sow ear top his grave
And mingling incantations on the air.
The black man, forlorn in the
cellar,
Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies,
Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall,
And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.
My Grandmother's
Love Letters
There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such
space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
"Are your fingers long
enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"
Yet I would lead my grandmother
by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
Pastorale
No more violets,
And the year broken into smoky panels.
What woods remember now
Her calls, her enthusiasm?
That ritual of sap and leaves sun drew out,
Ends in this later muffled bronze and brass.
The wind takes rein.
If dusty I bear an image beyond
This already fallen harvest.
I can only query "Oh Fool,
Have you remembered too long;-
Or was there too little said
For ease or resolution -
Have you remembered too long
Summer scarcely begun
And violets a few picked
The rest dead?"
Repose of
Rivers
The willows carried a slow
sound,
A sarabande the wind moved on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.
Flags, weeds. And
remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noon's
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing up sulphur dreams
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder…..
How much I would have bartered!
the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn to stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled -
I remember now its singing willow rim.
And finally, in that memory
all things nurse;
After the city that I finally passed
With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
The monsoon cut across the delta
At gulf gates… There, beyond the dykes
I heard wind flaking sapphire,
like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound.
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