5
THE TRANSLUCENT MECHANICS
Combed thru the piers the wind
Moves in the clever city
Not in the doors but the hinges
Finds the secret of motion
As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices, murmurs
Flaws
In the wind
fear fear
At the lumber mastheads
And fetched a message out of the sea again
Say angel say powers
Obscurely ‘things
And the self’
Prosody
Sings
In the stones
to entrust
To a poetry of statement
At close quarters
A living mind
‘and that one’s own’
what then what spirit
Of the bent seas
Archangel
of the tide
brimming
in the moon-streak
comes in whose absence
earth crumbles
6
silver as
The needle’s eye
Of the horizon in the noise
Of their entrance row on row the waves
Move landward conviction’s
Net of branches
In the horde of events the sacred swarm avalanche
Masked in the sunset
Needle after needle more numerous than planets
Or the liquid waves
In the tide rips
We believe we believe
Beyond the cable car streets
And the picture window
Lives the glittering crumbling night
Of obstructions and the stark structures
That carry wires over the mountain
One writes in the presence of something
Moving close to fear
I dare pity no one
Let the rafters pity
The air in the room
Under the rafters
Pity
In the continual sound
Are chords
Not yet struck
Which will be struck
Nevertheless yes
7
O withering seas
Of the doorstep and local winds unveil
The face of art
Carpenter, plunge and drip in the sea Art’s face
We know that face
More blinding than the sea a haunted house a limited
Consensus unwinding
Its powers
Toward the thread’s end
In the record of great blows shocks
Ravishment devastation the wood splintered
The keyboard gone in the rank grass swept her hand
Over the strings and the thing rang out
Over the rocks and the ocean
Not my poem Mr Steinway’s
Poem Not mine A ‘marvelous’ object
Is not the marvel of things
twisting the new
Mouth forcing the new
Tongue But it rang
8
THE TASTE
Old ships are preserved
For their queer silence of obedient seas
Their cutwaters floating in the still water
With their cozy black iron work
And Swedish seamen dead the cabins
Hold the spaces of their deaths
And the hammered nails of necessity
Carried thru the oceans
Where the moon rises grandly
In the grandeur of cause
We have a taste for bedrock
Beneath this spectacle
To gawk at
Something is wrong with the antiques, a black fluid
Has covered them, a black splintering
Under the eyes of young wives
People talk wildly, we are beginning to talk wildly, the wind
At every summit
Our overcoats trip us
running for the bus
Our arms stretched out
In a wind from what were sand dunes
9
THE IMPOSSIBLE POEM
Climbing the peak of Tamalpais the loose
Gravel underfoot
And the city shining with the tremendous wrinkles
In the hills and the winding of the bay
Behind it, it faces the bent ocean
Streetcars
Rocked thru the city and the winds
Combed their clumsy sides
In clumsy times
Sierras withering
Behind the storefronts
And sanity the roadside weed
Dreams of sports and sportsmanship
In the lucid towns paralyzed
Under the truck tires
Shall we relinquish
Sanity to redeem
Fragments and fragmentary
Histories in the towns and the temperate streets
Too shallow still to drown in or to mourn
The courageous and precarious children
10
BUT SO AS BY FIRE
The darkness of trees
Guards this life
Of the thin ground
That covers the rock ledge
Among the lanes and magic
Of the Eastern woods
The beauty of silence
And broken boughs
And the homes of small animals
The green leaves
Of young plants
Above the dark green moss
In the sweet smell of rot
The pools and the trickle of freshwater
First life, rotting life
Hidden starry life it is not yet
A mirror
Like our lives
We have gone
As far as is possible
Whose lives reflect light
Like mirrors
One had not thought
To be afraid
Not of shadow but of light
Summon one’s powers
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