Genesis

‘þis were a wikkede wey but whoso hadde a gyde
þat [myȝte] folwen us ech foot’: þus þis folk hem mened.
Quod Perkyn þe Plowman, ‘By Seint Peter of Rome!
I haue an half acre to erie by þe heiȝe weye;
Hadde I eryed þis half acre and sowen it after
I wolde wende wiþ yow and þe wey teche.’
‘þis were a long lettyng,’ quod a lady in a Scleyre.
‘What sholde we wommen werche þe while?’

Saturday I ran to Mytilene.

Bushes and grass along the glass-still way
Were all dabbled with rain
And the road reeled with shattered skies.

Towards noon an inky, petulant wind
Ravelled the pools, and rinsed the black grass round them.

Gulls were up in the late afternoon
And the air gleamed and billowed

Who will stay behind, and what? A wind.
Blindness from the blind man disappearing.
A token of the sea: a strand of foam.
A cloud stuck in a tree.

Who will stay behind, and what? A single sound
as genesis regrasses its creation.
Like the violin rose that honors just itself.
Seven grasses of that grass do understand.

More than all the stars hence and northward,
that star will stay that sinks into a tear.
Forever in its jug, a drop of  wine remains.
What will be left here? God. Not enough for you?

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

in memory of the painters Paul Klee
and Paul Terence Feeley I

The painter’s eye follows relation out.

Tonight, away begins to go
farther away, and the dream
what do we know of the dream
metallic leaps Jackson Pollock
silvery streams Jackson Pollock
I gaze across the sea

see in the distance your walk and you
pass the Pacific, distant and blue

I

Machine stitched rivets ravel on a tree
Whose name he does not know. Left in the sky,
He dangles from a silken cumulus
(Stork’s bundle upside down
On the delivering wind) and sees unborn
Incredible jungles of the lizard’s eye:
Dark fern, dark river, a shale coliseum

Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
—Genesis When the Deluge had passed,
into my head, by twos, came the creeping things,

Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting

God made man in His own image,
in the image of God made He him. —Genesis. Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

The social instincts ...
naturally lead to the golden rule.
—CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man 1