Ants on the Melon
Beliefs and Blasphemies
Goddesses First
From the beginning, they must have been miles ahead of the men,
fleet as fawns, nimbly evading those heavy hulks lumbering after
giving apelike yells to establish mastery,
their bellies stuffed with animal fat, their lungs caked with chewing tobacco.
The escaping female swung up into the trees, while her pursuer
broke the branch and toppled into the briars. It is easy to see
why goddesses preceded gods. The female wit was sharper.
God is a girl, they intoned, and if you don't believe us, no soup tonight.
The males howled when blood ran from a cut;
the women could bleed mysteriously and feel no pain.
From the place of blood came new beings, small creations of great interest.
The men were always fooling around this secret entrance, exit.
Come on it, the girls would say, when warm and well fed.
They found the male huffing and puffing greatly amusing,
like later on, the TV comedian after the dishes and the evening news.
One Only
The winter-fearing heart implores
fire from a touch, a look, a voice;
yet soon the bodies, names, and faces
turn away into empty places.
Only one constancy survives
the passion in the park at dusk,
sustains our transient, troubled lives
beyond the sorrow and the risk.
The unfailing friend for whom we yearn,
emblem of wonder and of light,
more steadily than stars that burn
across infinitudes of night
can flood our winder world with sun,
fill solitude with ecstasy:
lost love, lost hope transformed by One
of love and hope the epitome.
Judas
The devil said, "When I was tempting Jesus,
I told him I could make him rich as Croesus.
But he misjudged my power, the pious scoffer.
His televangelists took up my offer.
Hymn
The four windows of the one-room shack
framed four mountains: Sheephole, Joshua Tree,
San Gorginio (still snow-crested in April),
and eastward, a hill of white sand that turned pink at sunset.
The man and the girl lay half nude on the bed,
staring out the open door. In the silence,
the wind hummed in the greasewood bushes
and the man was humming softly a hymn tune
she remembered from childhood:
"'Where every prospect pleases,'" she said,
"I used the think prospect was some kind of candy."
A motorbike engine buzzed not far off and then stopped.
They were both half asleep
when an unexpected footfall made him start up.
A stranger, heavyset, unsmiling, stood in the doorway.
The man, barefoot, went quickly to the door.
"Are you looking for the Browns?
It's two cabins down the crossroad."
The stranger said nothing but stared hard at the girl.
"I won't ask you in," said the man.
"My wife is not feeling well."
"She looks to me like she feels pretty good," said the stranger.
Her husband reached in the camp icebox at the door
and took out a Coke, opened it, and handed it to the other man.
In the desert you don't argue with thirst.
The stranger took it, shook it, holding his thumb over the hole.
He was still looking at the woman.
He released his thumb and the foam spewed out onto the doorsill.
"The wetter the better," he said.
The two of them watched in silence as he turned and walked
down the sand road toward his bike.
"Thank you for keeping your temper," she said.
"I had to. He had a gun in his pocket."
"I just thought of the next line," she said.
They laughed then, and sang softly together
the old missionary hymn:
"'Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.'"
Matter and Soul
The mountain looks to the sun
talks in shadows to a cloud:
Why do you come between us?
The rock looks to the mountain:
Mother, I broke away.
Do you miss me?
Sands look to the rock
a single grain whispers:
Was I not part of you?
We are so many
you are one.
Dance with us, O God.
Entrance
We have all known, now and then,
that the place is always there, waiting,
ours for the asking,
for the silent stepping out of ourselves
into solace and renewal.
We do not even need a gate,
though it can be pleasantly awesome,
a ritual of entrance.
Some walk straight in,
through the invisible wall of wonder.
Some scramble through a hedge of thorns,
thankful for the pain, the bright drops of blood.
Some enter over the token length of wall;
they like the solid scrape of stone,
the breathless act of climbing.
Once we are in, no matter how,
the secret terrain goes on forever.
When we forget it is there,
then it is gone,
and we are left outside
until we remember.
Good Night, Good Day
Time the unfathomable is neither foe nor father.
I traveled three thousand miles to walk by the sea
and you put a tiny shell in my hand;
it extended a little foot, stirring on the continent of my palm.
This poem has no ending, and the beginning
goes back a million years.
The Welcomer
Toby is trotting on ahead,
the click of his paw nails audible
only to the living in their dreams.
Overhead a playtime of cherubic puppies
gather into June clouds and Christmas snowballs.
They hail him: "We are the welcomers.
Soon you too will be a welcomer."
Toby trots on between the high gates
into the everlasting mystery.
He is not awed by the entry,
for he is planning his welcome
to the dear beings whose hads
are baskets of tenderness.
He will do his little four-footed dance of delight,
his tour jete of joy.
He will speak to them in their own language.
All parts of Toby are there,
but free of pain and perplexities.
All the loveliest smells of life
are in the air; and the gray grass
is an unimaginable green.
Already his throat and tongue are forcing
his first human syllable: love.
"And I shall teach them to bark," thinks Toby,
"Alpha and omega! Hanya haramita! Tao! Tao! Tao!"
The Reassemblage
Some myths are too terrible for our believing:
that the compendium of all our years and yearning,
that poor bundle of knobby bones and leather,
must wait through millennia as scattered dust,
its bits and pieces digested by worms and beetles?
until the great dictator gives it leave to reassemble
and stand naked to be tried, not by a jury of its peers,
but a judge with far too many cases on His, Her, or Its
agenda?
So the grave was after all a cell on death row.
Now come the rewards and punishments:
one a verdict brutal beyond imagination,
the other by most reports an eternity of boredom.
But billions have lived and died by this myth,
evolved by sadists and masochists,
even by the great John Donne, napping in his coffin,
arrayed in a frilled nightcap
just to get the feel of things to come.
Oh, you arbiters of the afterlige, let the soul go on dancing,
the mind exploring, discovering,
setting forth into unending wonders of the universe,
the wilderness of words,
the vast mysteries of the human mind.
Living On Fire
Two decades of my youth, I lived on fire,
trapped in a deep delirium of desire.
I was the spirit's wastrel and fool,
and I have taken fifty years to cool.
Porches I
In those days the front porches
with their wicker chairs and hanging baskets of flowers
became chapels of rest at the day's end,
long arms of the setting sung reaching out to us.
Talk came in soft murmurs like a prayer.
The children gathered from their games
to sit in silence on the wooden steps.
The trees were ancient guardians around us
and the closing down of evening was like violent eyelids
lowered over the day's brightness.
"We should light the lamps," someone said.
But who would care to spoil the quiet ritual
of sundown, nightfall? Somewhere just ahead
lay the ceremony of sleep.
Porches II
All over the U.S. the porches were dying.
The porch swing and the rocking chair moved to the village dump.
The floorboards trembled, and the steps creaked.
For a couple of decades a new light burned in the parlor,
the family sitting there silent infront of the box,
voices and music squawking mysteriously from far places
into the dim-lit room. Conversation was hushed.
In the next two decades, a window in a box
fashed unbelievable pictures into the room.
Strangers guffawed and howled with laughter.
Shots rang out, people died in front of our eyes.
We learned not to care, drinking Coca-Cola from bottles,
spilling popcorn into the sofa.
A highway came past the house with its deserted porch
and no one noticed. The children wandered off to rob houses
a few blocks away, not out of need, but simple boredom.
No more family games or read-alouds.
Grandparents sometimes pulled their chairs outside
hoping neighbors would stop in.
They mught even drag out an extra chair or two;
still no one came, not even to borrow something.
But it was hard to talk with the TV at their backs,
the traffic screeching by in front, the rest of the neighborhood
on relief, or in rest homes and reformatories.
The old porch is removed, and the grandparents with it.
So long, friends, neighbors, passersby.
Notes from Another City
As you struck the keys
a force of visions and passions came forth.
I was seeing the hands of the composer
over the keyboard marking black notes on white paper.
All the while, beyond a window:
the autumn leaves were letting go,
saying good-bye to the parent tree,
the safe residence of bough;
I could see their colors as the shaper of the sonata
saw them, winging into the water
that eddies under the stone bridge,
coloring the cobbles under the horse's hoofs,
half-heard, half-seen by the musician.
The living line under his pen marked the melody in his mind,
while its rhythm partook of ghostly hoofbeats,
passing so long ago, so far distant.
The builder of edifice of sounds heard it,
and the pianist of this morning
a hundred years beyond the builder's death
heard it, and I, listening as a ghost in that town
look up at the window
behind which the composer plays a bar,
watches the leaves falling and fallen,
puts their track on paper:
the white silence that will be reborn
forever at the touch of two hands.
Scarlatti
On the beaches of the world
Scarlatti still walks reinventing
the race of notes under his fingers
while the waves spilling over themselves shoreward
read his mind when the wind blows a certain way
writing his name in flourishes of foam
racing in time to his rhythms
telling the sand to be firm
under the master's feet.
Fairy Tale
The gazebo arches over her like a lover.
Against its column of pink marble
she leans her cheek.
In a sudden shower of rain she drops her gown,
rushes bare and shivering with pleasure
across the shinging grass toward, of course,
a rainbow arching at the end of the garden.
A laughter of freed birds darts around her,
encircles her as she puts up her hands
to catch and stop the ribbons of the rain.
Pink worms emerge from the garden earth;
they levitate on the edge of the lily pond.
This is the dream of the girl who wakes in damp straw.
The sky puts on its monocle of sun,
its long rays touching the rivulets
along the girl's back and the ringlets in her hair.
An albino crow paces amond the rosy worms,
pecking, full of purpose, perhaps
a bewitched minstrel or eligible prince.
We trust the beggar girl will disenchant
the royal lover in her next dream,
and all the worms will dance at their wedding.
Wild Ride
Tearing along the Kentucky River road
in a rumble seat, your mouth on mine,
your Swanee College friend, our drunken driver,
and his languid New Orleans girlfriend.
Her soft hand into his thigh, I guessed,
so the car jerked off the road and back on again,
and the wind somehow indecent and unkind
disheveled me and my clothing
or was that your hand that I loved gentle
but now as a paw of this nighttime madness
in the back seat of a roadster that threw us about
like a tin can in surg and I thought,
caught between desire and despair
was it for this was it only for this?
Leaves and Snow
The day we dances all day
wherever we found music
we were followed
by a thousand bright leaves
cutting loose
thumbing rides in the air
from honey noon
to mandarin sunset
to cold mists
circling streetlights
to the black porches
of what now.
The night it snowed
and you stayed
before the plow came
you had to walk away
from our bed of summer
across the huge whiteness
printing
printing
your dark flowers.
The day of the icicles
when we made love
on the floor
in the winter dazzle
sunfire melting
us together
forced the crystall phallus
by the window
to drop tender
beads
of spring light.
Botticelli's Venus
Love, that soul,
