Poetry from Lost Roads PublishersRiver Geography at First Hand
|
Things not explicitly remembered I. Between the two waters, I hear its murmur the night long after the storm. Or birds or a woman from her face we must recall: We are. (And this child the earth contends.) How can I return? We wake again. Of trees in the rain, we see as our bodies. When blooming ends and through the petals and when we listen, as something in a flower, afterlight to become the day. This is more than an ecstatic song, but tell her we sat all night waiting. II. Again, bathing in the fruit house. To see different forms of people, that's a token. Wherever your people live east of you, north of you, it's the way they travel. "When I was polluted in blood, then you passed over me." I know these signs, as mandrake grows at the foot of a gallows. "Same with a woman," she said. "All women come thirteen times-- the Flower's doubled up extra one month." She used to see babies on the wall terrible. The tub warmed by the sun. III. Lack of rain made leaves fall early this year. (Blackbirds sang all night.) Nearer a mild climate, take a word, hummed and make the river flow. (She learned her letters off the sides of railway cars.) And under my hand, one of her handkerchiefs, still boxed, dingy in the folds. (Here is the railroad bridge.) You will also see weathervanes, the hatpins, cufflinks, by the garden gate once buried in mud. His initial in gold, for a long time now, of water this morning. IV. What anyone who gazed there saw at the mouth of the river: sinking purple in the night. I prayed hard against it. Their boats stranded in sea-weed where meadows recede through planes of heat and pure distance. The signs in the rain, I listened. It is no longer possible to say, she pushes hard against cotton. Rain dreams the sounds One expects her to be beautiful, there, years after. (I knew it would come this way.) To bite the tongue and let them fall to each other before and after all advent. The salt that seems a sign vanishes. I think of you (when summer ends) thicket with no birdsong and trees that call from further off. And if we turn toward the whitened road, there is a sort of blue shading out of the fences now. V. River water gives off reflections, but you will not view the sea. In spite of morning outside and yet morning comes as a cold wind along the ground. He fells trees. Green of plants, so may the earth. The old indian rule: (The timber was yours as far as you could throw an axe.) Insects repeat in his song. Thunder rolls and, even so, it is a sound that integrates the whole of the atmosphere. Voice above......Voice below narrow and deep vertical. I know what he sees and hears. He sings. But is it vertical only? These are things not explicitly remembered: the woman's name, the exact location of her grave. It is a translation of her into landscape, as blackbirds fixed in white branches. Jacobs home page
|