15th Street

Almost dark, and the wind off the river.
It’s November. But quite a few
(kids mostly) out on the stoops. A bunch of young girls
posed on the steps of this one,
ladies of the court. Oh, one’s the queen,
red hair, & that turn
of the head, a long neck.
A woman in black’s going up between them now
slowly, bringing home groceries. ‘Where’s Johnnie tonight?’
       ‘Oh, I’m mad at him.’--Deirdre, tossing her head.
‘Hah,’--the woman, over her shoulder, in fond contempt,
going on in

		The sky has cleared itself of clouds
at always at this hour, preparing 
for the stars it’s hard to see.
Hockey players on roller skates are
shouting, hard, they glide subtly
to dodge a cab, not looking at it.
Here, a few doors down, two youths reveal & exchange
scraps of their work-world, still new.
‘He pushes himself right to the front, this guy,
swearin’; and hollerin’. So we said to him, “Listen, mister
there’s other people waitin’ besides you.”’
We. It’s here, here, here, ‘it frees, it
creates relief.’ Poetry, element, in which we move
as fish in water.

		The river-hooting, illusion of north-lights 
shaking in fever over 14th, & away uptown, 42nd.
It’s getting late, the kids drift off
indoors. Better get supper. Deirdre will forgive
Johnny, later, in this unlit doorway (launderette)
saying ‘Goodnight. So long. Goodnight.
			           I’ll see you around.’



New York, late ‘50s'







A Dream of Cornwall

Footprint of fury quiet, now, on the salt sand
hills couched like hares in blue grass of the air
water lifting its glass to star and candle
time curled at rest in a ready hand.

Now claw of wind plucking the string of the sea
never a bought bent no sad fruit falling;
never rage of autumn’s angry angel
but sails in to the haven of a tree.

O fear dissolves hear and now I cease 
to hear the hammer the axe the bone the bell,
shade of a shade grown still, grief of a grief
lulled in green hollows of a well of peace.



1946







An Innocent (II)
(1st version)

At 9 on Hudson St., by 10
    through rotten mounds of foodscraps
in Chelsea, an don, north, with 
perhaps some glove (or what?) to show for his pains.

Pink face, curved nose, white mustache,
white hair curling 
over his collar; an army greatcoat. A blue sack
	    or sometimes a white sack stencilled
	    with faded dollar-signs.

It's not his thoroughness and speed
distinguish him so much as the invention
he wears, intimate as a hearing aid: an aid
       to delicate poking:
       a hook
       attached to his arm, projecting
       beyond the hand.

One, hearing of
this prince of scavengers, cried out
	in horror at that bad dream of a hook
	(methodical defilement coyly reduced)
and I too recoiled then; but later

thought my disgust false:
for I'd seen on the old man's face
only the calm intense look of a craftsman:
innocent!

He accepts what we reject, endlessly stuffing
his floursack, silent
	(no one speaks to him)
	from can to can--an endless
city of refuse. And makes
some kind of life from it. His face
				      rebukes us.



New York, mid-’50s







An Innocent (II)
(2nd version)

Pink faced, white haired, aquiline old man
endlessly stuffing your floursack--with what?
--Scraps from an endless
city of refuse--
		Silent, all day from can to can
picking garbage with an ingenious hook--

It’s the hook we most recoiled from--
in false disgust--
		Calm, intense--
	     the face of a craftsman--innocent!



New York, mid-’50s







The Anteroom

Out of this anteroom whose light is broken
by slatted blinds and rustling portieres,
a tentative room too near the street,
pierced with street voices and sound of horns,
uneasy halting place of travelling ghosts.

out of this season of uprooted hours,
where time, that should grow round as hanging fruit,
rushes like showers of dry and shrivelled leaves,
and no hour quickens into truth; where love,
confused, can never touch or penetrate
a growing dream, but hovers at its side:

that love, that dream, must travel
into wide landscapes where the heart has rest,
and quietly (as stones, pure on the still earth,
await a strange completion into dream,
by the slow rain, or by a man’s desire)
await their transformation into life.



Florence, 1948







A Woman
For L.B.

Exciting not by excitement only; subtler:
'beautiful & unhappy''s not enough:
a woman engrossed
in delight or anguish or simply in passing
from point to point: stretched proudly
ready to twang or sing at pluck or stroke.
Northward: now her green eyes 
are looking, looking for a door
to open in a wall where
there's no door, none unless she makes it:
an ice-wall to be broken by hand. Northward
in fact and in fact: 
now her green eyes spend their sea-depth & glitter
remotely; she's gone, who stays so strangely.
And we--we look at each other: 
'Where should this music be?'



New York, early '50s







Down Here and up There

Swing of the scythe
illuminated, displaced
into my book of hours, the falling
grass, goldleafed
on the uneven
left upper windowpane--

But way up on the hill
the drift of field-air around you,
the scythe singing,
and what birds you may here.



Maine, early’60s







Fear of the Blind

The blind tap their way from stone to stone
feel from shadow to shadow, suncaressed
between the plane-trees.
I listen with closed eyes to the dry
autumnal sound of their searching.
Whom the tree grows in, whom clouds compel,
green enter, red, blue of a bell
of a ringing sky; whom wings delight
or waving weed on frayed sleeves of the sea,
I fear the blind: they cannot share my world
but stop its spinning with their heavy shadows.



Paris, 1947







Folding a Shirt
for S.P.

Folding a shirt, a woman stands
still for a moment, to recall
warmth of flesh; her careful hands

heavy on a sleeve, recall
a gesture, or the touch of love;
she leans against the kitchen wall,

listening for a word of love,
but only finds a sound like fear
running through the rooms above.

With folded clothes she folds her fear,
but cannot put desire away,
and cannot make the silence hear.

Unwillingly she puts away 
the bread, the wine, the knife,
smooths the bed where covers lay,

while time’s unhesitating knife
cuts away the living hours,
the common rituals of life.



London 1946







Interim
for K.S.

A black page of night
flutters: dream on or waken,
words will spring from darkness now,
gold-bright, to fill the hollow mind
laid still to hear them, as an iron cup
laid on the window-ledge, would fill with rain.
Not more alone
waking than sleeping, in darkness than in light,
yet it is now we can assume
an attitude more listening than longing,
extend invisible antennae towards
some intimation, echo, emanation
falling slowly like a destined feather
that lights at last before the feet
of hesitating fear. Not less alone
 in city than in solitude, at least 
this time--an hour or minute?--left between
dreaming and action, where the only glitter
is the soft gleam of words, affording
intimacy with each submerged regret,
awakes a new lucidity in pain,
so that with day we meet
familiar angels that were lately tears
and smile to know them only fears transformed.



London, 1946







Kresch's Studio

Easels: a high & bare room:
some with charcoal, one with a brush,
some with loud pens in the silence,
at work. The woman
in taut repose, intent:

under violent light that pulls
 the weight of breasts to answer the long
shadow of thighs, 
confronts angles with receding
planes, makes play with elements.

That they work, that she will not move too soon,
opposes (as Bartok's plucked strings oppose)
the grinding, grinding, grinding of lives,
pounding constant traffic.

On paper, on canvas, stroke, stroke: a counterpoint:
an energy opposing 
the squandered energy.



New York, early '50s







Listening to Distant Guns

The roses tremble; oh the sunflower's eye
Is opened wide in sad expectancy.
Westward and back the circling swallows fly, 
The rooks' battalions dwindle near the hill.

That low pulsation in the east is war:
No bell now breaks the evening's silent dream.
The bloodless clarity of the evening's sky
Betrays no whisper of the battle-scream.

1940







Poem

Some are too much at home in the role of wanderer,
watcher, listener: who, by lamplit doors
that open only to another’s knock,
commune with shadows and are happier
with ghosts than living guests in a warm house.
They drift about the darkening city squares,
coats blown in evening winds and fingers feeling 
familiar holes in pockets, thinking: Life
has always been a counterfeit, a dream 
where dreaming figures danced behind the glass.
Yet as they work, or absently stand at a window
letting a tap run and the plates lie wet,
while the bright rain softly shines upon slates,
they feel the whole of life is theirs, the music,
"colour, and warmth, and light"; hands held 
safe in the hands of love; and trees beside them 
dark and gentle, growing as they grow,
a part of the world with fire and house and child.
The undertone of all their solitude 
is the unceasing question, "Who am I?
A shadow’s image on the rainy pavement,
walking in wonder past the vivid windows,
a half-contented guest among my ghosts?
Or one who, imagining light, air, sun,
can now take root in life, inherit love?"



London, 1946








Sarnen

Under the harvest sun the heart
ripens on its wall;
under the heat of noon the mind
like leaf is cool.
The angelus and the goatbell
sway across the grass;
butterflies in blue mid-air 
touch and spin apart.
Any attempted dream must fall
to ruin in this light, must pass
before the mocking glance of idle animals.
There is no need to escape 
from the motionless mountain
there is no need to escape 
when here the indifferent lake 
accepts the nervous image,
demands no affirmation 
of innocence or faith.



Switzerland, 1946







Solace
for N.P.

Memories at best are old wives’ ghosts,
   transparent and incredible, their chains
   clanking grotesquely. Only an unforeseen
   access of longing in the blood can bear
   the risen burden of true ghosts, that are
   powerful and near as, on a moor,
   the immanent spirit of a rock may seem; are warm
   to touch, and, fading, undermine
   the elaborate bulwarks of indifference.

Better to drift, happy, among stone faces
   which, looking back, are alive, but exact nothing,
   neither a past nor a future, to commune
   with Apollo’s impersonal smile, which surrounds
   your listening silence like a phrase of music.

The head of Euripides or a tense
   Egyptian cat (so still, you feel
   it turns and stretches when you look away)
   are not more distant than a lover
   in a far country (does it rain there,
   the small rain in the streets of home?
   Do you sleep sound or hear the dripping eaves?)

Not less real, the melancholy, eager,
   black-olive eyes of lost Byzantium
   than recollected glances met
   lat year or yesterday, and now forgotten
   even while longing strives to raise a ghost.



Paris, 1947







“So You, too...”

So you, too, are a part of me. My solitude
always beginning, as grass grows, is a tide
running at daybreak out of the grayrose east
to slide over the sand, encircle
the drowned beauty, the dead bird, the old boot;
my life explores the caves, pours into pools,
hunts with the starry hunters. I stretch out 
fingers of grass, fingers of flame, and touch
my own name engraved on air, own flesh 
walking towards me down a dream. I wheel
as a wave pounces, unmask the stranger:
you too a part of me, I enter the gate of your eyes,
my beggar, my brother, answer of the sea.



Holland, 1947







Today’s Saint

O.K., so he’s crazy,
	dowser, cloudbuster. But it’s his goodness
makes him attempt so variously,
assuming rapports.
		      He’s looking
not at the fragments but for
the interplay. It’s your pain,
	my grimace, torments him:
				       why, why
		   the jagged lives.
He wanted, even in his first mistakes
	(the cold girl taken too often
	hating him at last, escaping)
that all should flower, everyone 
joyful. If his imagination
proliferates, it is for you. If not, 
he gave us the sudden rain last Sunday,
the darkening. Maybe raindrops?
			     It’s a
‘means of grace’ he’s trying to 
secure for us.
	         ‘The cloud
compact of energy.’ That we may
live.



New York, late ‘50s







Too Easy: to Write of Miracles

Too easy: to write of miracles, dreams where the famous give
mysterious utterance to silent truth;
to confuse snow with the stars,
simulate a star’s fantastic wisdom.

Easy like the willow to lament,
rant in tramples roads where pools
are red with sorrowful fires, and sullen rain
drips from the willows; ornamental leaves;
or die in words and angrily turn
to pace like ghosts about the walls of war.

But difficult when, innocent and cold,
day, a bird over a hill, flies in 
--resolving anguish to a strange perspective,
a scene within a marble; returning
the brilliant shower of coloured dreams to dust,
a smell of fireworks lingering by canals
on autumn evenings--difficult to write
of the real image, real hand, the heart 
of day or autumn beating steadily:
to speak of human gestures, clarify
all the context of a simple phrase
--the hour, the shadow, the fire,
the loaf of a bare table.

Hard, under the honest sun, to weight
a word until it balances with love--
burden of happiness on fearful shoulders;
in the ease of daylight to discover
what measure has its music, and achieve
the unhaunted country of the final poem.



Sicily, 1948







The Whisper

Among the leaves & bell-flowers
he who carved them contrived to
entwine the letters of his name.
Other letters complete the 
span of the small round table
		         but these

don’t seem to spell even
in Hungarian. They are probably
	not in code, not
	initials of a phrase, only
	part of a pattern.
			  Yet: it is

a message--some continuing whisper,
	the act of choice of Anders
Szoltesz, alive or dead, drawn to
just these from all the alphabet, to enhance
the table I love for its
solid stance and
involved, angular, delicate ornament.



New York, mid-’50s







Who He Was

One is already here whose life
being like seed its distant death, shall grow
through human pain, human joy, shall know
music and weeping, only because
the strange flower of your thighs
bloomed in my body. From our joy 
begins a stranger’s history. Who
is this rider in the dark? We lie 
in candlelight; the child’s quick unseen movements
jerk my belly under your hand. who,
conceived in joy, in joy,
lies nine months alone in a walled silence?

Who is this rider in the dark,
nine months the body’s tyrant,
nine months alone in a walled silence
our minds cannot fathom?
Who is it will come out of the dark,
whose cries demand our mercy, tyrant
no longer, but alone still, in a solitude
memory cannot reach?
Whose lips will suckle at these breasts,
thirsting, unafraid, for life?
Whose eyes will look out of that solitude?

The wise face of the unborn
ancient and innocent
must change to infant ignorance
before we see it, irrevocable third
looking into our lives; the child
must hunger, sleep, cry, gaze, long weeks
 before it learns of laughter. Love can never
wish a life no darkness; but may love
be constant in the life our love has made.



New York, 1949