This poem is titled "Beirut." It's from my first book, Fields of Thenar, and though this starts in a very far away place, it ends up in a close place. And it's sad to think about that I wrote this poem I'm thinking in 1973, and what's happening in the Middle East is still going on.
"Beirut"
Machine guns inhabit the rooftops
like hungry crows.
Bullets peck the library
city hall the cobble streets
Allah's forehead.
To the east
the mountains belch dust
as artillery fires into the city
planting the bloom of brown orchids
on the beach apartments
on the Hilton
in courtyards filled
with the shattered rosary of bricks.
People are opening their bodies
for the world to read
the print still wet and so red
it pours out a stoplight
on Broadway and Ninth
in downtown Columbia, Missouri.
This poem is called "Civilized Sacrifice."
I have climbed the backs of gods too. It’s not so
strange, dressed in heavy coat and boots, hat
pulled down to the eyebrows, cheeks windburnt,
gloved fingers numb, and each brief breath prayed
upon, each step thrown onto the loose altar of stone.
Blinded by spires of light, I’ve looked away
as the unblemished blue splintered in all directions.
And I’ve backed away from the sheer
precipice, the infinite suddenly a fearful measure,
the way down to tundra and the jagged maze of
granite, leaving only a crevice in which to cower.
I’ve lain on the steep slopes of night under spruce,
wrapped against rain and cold, and watched clouds
explode in my face. Stark boughs reached
then sagged back in a sweeping, resolute silence.
I was shaken loose by thunder and lightning,
like the small girl, named Juanita by strangers.
She tumbled a hundred yards down
Nevado Ampato peak, her whereabouts unquestioned
for five hundred years until a nearby volcano
began a festering eruption, thawing the slope,
and wrapped in her illiclia shawl woven in the ancient
Cuzco tradition, wearing a toucan- and parrot-feathered
headdress, her frozen fetal posture a last effort
at warmth above tree line amid ice fields, there
to address and redress for rain and maize, for
full vats of fermenting beer, plentiful llama herds,
for the civilized sacrifice, to be buried alive and wait
in private, as we all do to speak with our gods, hoping
to appease, to know, to secure the illusive cosmic
machinery, and in that last numb moment her left
hand gripped her dress for the intervening centuries.
It's called "Icebound," and of course we've been dealing with ice storms, so it seems rather appropriate. Basically it's the story of myself and my teenage daughter on a day school gets cancelled, and I'm sitting there with a bunch of translations of the Tao Te Ching, just amazed at the differences that are being revealed in the translations, and me trying to interest her in what I'm doing and, of course, not really succeeding.
"Icebound"
Sky’s gray sheet spreads icy rain.
Through the night we heard the branches cracking.
Now they bend with the bowed ache of apostrophes.
Backs to the window, sitting on the couch, we listen
as the radio announces the list of schools closed.
An hour earlier I inched my way along
the road, tires spinning toward the ditch.
Now I read aloud to a teenage daughter,
who tolerates my foolishness, my claim
that Lao Tzu traversed a more slippery world.
With two books open on my lap, one in my hand,
two on the floor, I’m surrounded by imperfect
translations: a gathering chaos; something
mysteriously formed; without beginning,
without end; formless and perfect.
She responds, Sure,
I knew that, so what? I persist:
that existed before the heavens and the earth;
before the universe was born. She’s ready to go
upstairs and listen to the radio. I ask,
What was her face before her parents were born?
she answers, Nothing. I ask again.
She says it again. Where are the angels,
nights on humble knees, the psalms of faith,
the saints of daylight? She walks out of the room.
I’m surrounded by thin books.
How pointless to go anywhere on this day,
or maybe any other, but then
the time comes when there is
no other way but to stand firm on ice.
OK, this poem is called "Map to the Party."
If you wait, you grow old, nothing
more. Traveling light is your only
illuminating illusion.
Either way you can't remain
time and place inseparable.
To settle is to amass names:
lespedeza, hickory, Providence Road.
To accelerate is to compress
latitude and longitude,
to shoulder wind in every
direction, to wear a hole
in the already worn cartography.
To grow old is to grasp sheer
granite faces, to negotiate
declivities and eruptions
of aspiration, to disbelieve
coded legends, to find instead
water's divides, to follow the rule
of thumb-civilization's always
down stream a steaming ruin,
a crumbling repository, a flow,
a seepage, the final flush
to sea level and lower. Buried in
the alluvium: Etruscan bronzes,
eroding pyramids coral-encrusted
hub caps, cracked glass fishing
floats. On an oil-blackened spit
the aging Archimedian rabble
gathers to count the grains
again, praying for a mistake.