from The Ambition of Ghosts: I. Remembering into Sleep

Rosmarie Waldrop

I. Separation Precedes Meeting

The cat so close

to the fire

I smell scorched

breath. Parents,

silent, behind me,

a feeling of

trees that might fall.

Or dogs.

A poem,

like trying

to remember,

is a movement

of the whole body.

You follow the

fog

into more fog.

Maybe the door ahead

divides

the facts

from natural affection. How

can I know. I meet

too many

in every mirror.

When I was little,

was I I?

My sister? A wolf

chained,

smothered in green virtues?

Slower

time

of memory. Once

I’ve got something

I lie

down on it

with my whole body.

Goethe quotations, warm

sand, a smell of hay,

long afternoons.

But it

would take a road

would turn, with space,

in on itself,

would turn

occasion into offer.

For days I hold

a tiny landscape between

thumb

and index:

sand,

heather,

shimmer of blue between pines.

No smell: matchbook.

Sand as schematic as

Falling

into memory,

down,

with my blood,

to the accretions

in the arteries,

to be read with the whole

body, in the chambers

of the heart.

The light: of the match,

struck,

at last.

Concentration: a frown

of the whole body. I can’t

remember. Too many

pasts

recede

in all directions.

Slow movement into

Distant boots.

Black beetles at night. A smell

of sweat.

The restaurant,

yes. You’ve no idea

how much my father used to eat.

Place thick with smoke.

Cards. Beer foaming over

on the table.

And always

some guy said I ought

to get married,

put a pillow behind my eyes

and, with a knowing

sigh, spat

in my lap.

The present.

As difficult as

the past, once a place

curves into

Hips swinging elsewhere.

Castles in sand.

Or Spain. Space

of another language.

Sleep

is a body of water.

You follow your lips

into its softness. Far down

the head finds its level

6. Tropisms

Inward, always. Night

curls the clover leaf

around its sleep.

Tightly.

The bodies of the just

roll,

all night,

through subterranean caves

which turn

in on themselves.

Long

tunnel

of forgetting. Need

of blur. The air,

large, curves

its whole body.

Big hammering waves

flatten my

muscles.

Inward, the distances: male

and female fields,

rigorously equal.

The drunk fell toward me

in the street. I hope

he wasn’t

disappointed. Skinned

his sleep.

November.

And a smell of snow. Quite normal,

says the landlord, the master

of rubbish, smaller

and smaller in my

curved mirror.

I have un-

controllable

good luck: my sleep

always turns dense

and visible. There

are many witches

in Germany. Their songs

descend in steady half-tones

through you.

You’ll die, Novalis says, you’ll die

following endless rows

of sheep into your

even breath.

Precarious,

like Mozart, a living

kind of air,

keeps the dream

spinning

around itself, its

missing core.

Image

after image of pleasure

of the whole body

deepens

my sleep:

fins.

9. Introducing Decimals

A dream, like trying

to remember, breaks open words

for other,

hidden meanings. The grass

pales by degrees, twigs

quaver glassily,

ice

flowers the window.

Intimate equations more complicated

than the coordinates of past

and Germany. The cat

can’t lift its paw,

its leg longer and longer

with effort.

A crying fit

is cancelled. An aria jelled

in the larynx.

Nothing moves in the cotton

coma: only Descartes

pinches himself

an every fraction

must be solved.

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From “Five Poems” by Edward Dahlberg

I
He who has never tasted the grapes of Canaan can only view them from Pisgah.

I have my tides, O sea-foamed Venus, dearer than watercress, pipkins, thyme and clymene. You once held me by the cord of my navel, but I have not died to live in Mahomet’s paradise.

Would that I could gather up my love to me as one does one’s fate, or measure her nature as God does the sea.

We are a weary race that hates seedtime. Poor Persephone, who is Maying springtime, and the coming up of flowers! We remember only what we seed, and Persephone goes down into the earth after Spring and Summer vegetation only because Pluto gave her pomegranate seeds to remember him, but if the seed perish, Persephone will die, and memory shall pass from the earth.

A man of humble blood, with a soul of Kidron, needs a Rachel, but I labored for years in the weary fields for Leah.II
The world is a wound in my soul, and I have sought the living waters in meditation, and the angelical fountains in the desert of Beersheba for solitude, for what health there is in friendship comes when one is alone.

I shed tears on the Mount of Olives because people no longer care for each other, but my friends have lacked the character for the vigil. There is no Cana wine in human affections that are not always awake, for people who do not trouble about each other are foes.

It is humiliating being the lamb and bleating to each passerby, “Feed me!” What is the use of saying that men are stones when I know I am going to try to turn them into bread.

I am afraid to say that people are truthful. When a man tells me he is honest I press my hand close to my heart where I keep my miserable wallet. If he says he has any goodness in him, I avoid him, for I trust nobody who has so little fear of the evils that grow and ripen in us while we imagine we have one virtuous trait. These demons lie in ambush in the thick, heady coverts of the blood, where hypocrisy and egoism fatten, waiting to mock or betray us in any moment of self-esteem.

I have no faith in a meek man, and regard anyone that shows a humble mien as one who is preparing to make an attack upon me, for there is some brutish, nether fault in starved vanity.

Yet once a friend leaned as gently on my coat as that disciple had on the bosom of the Saviour, and I went away, not knowing by his affection whether I was the John Christ was said to have loved most. I whispered thanks to my soul because he leaned upon me, for I shall never know who I am if I am not loved.

V
Much flesh walks upon the earth void of heart and warm liver, for it is the spirit that dies soonest.

Some men have marshland natures with mist and sea-water in their intellects, and are as sterile as the Florida earth which De Soto found in those meager, rough Indian settlements, and their tongues are fierce, reedy arrows. They wound and bleed the spirit, and their oaks and chestnut trees and acorns are wild, and a terrible, barren wind from the Atlantic blows through their blood as pitiless as the primitive rivers De Soto’s soldiers could not ford.

Do not attempt to cross these mad, tumid rivers, boreal and brackish, for water is unstable, and you cannot link yourself to it.

There are also inland, domestic men who are timid pulse and vetch, and though they may appear as stupid as poultry rooting in the mire, they are housed people, and they have orchards and good, tamed wine that makes men loving rather than predatory; go to them, and take little thought of their ignorance which brings forth good fruits, for here you may eat and not be on guard for the preservation of your soul.

People who have domestic animals are patient, for atheism and the stony heart are the result of traveling: sorrow never goes anywhere. Were we as content as our forefathers were with labor in the fallow, or as a fuller with his cloth, or a drayman with his horses and mules, we would stay where we are, and that is praying.

There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone, and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.

God forgive me for my pride; though I would relinquish my own birthright for that wretched pottage of lentils which is friendship, I mistrust every mortal.

Each day the alms I ask of heaven is not to have a new chagrin which is my daily bread.

December 1959