Honey and Salt Read online

  He went on murmuring, “Never have I known time to fail me, time with its monotonous mumbling in the masts and stanchions, its plashing plashing measuring plashing to the bulwarks, the slinking of the sea after a storm, the crying of the birds as they ride the wind when the wind goes down.”

  He lifted his head toward scrawny warning horizons and nailed up a slogan: Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed:

  Yes Lief Ericson crossed the sea

  to get away from a woman—

  perhaps—maybe.

  Bird Footprint

  The footprint of a bird in sand brought your face.

  I said, “What of it?”

  And the next lone footprint of a bird in the sand

  brought your face again.

  I said, “It is written deeper than sand.”

  I saw a bird wing fixed forty thousand years in a rock,

  a bird wing bringing your foot, your wrist.

  Cahokia

  The Indian saw the butterfly

  rise out of the cocoon.

  That was enough for him.

  The butterfly had wings, freedom.

  The Indian saw flowers in spring

  push up out of the ground.

  He saw the rain and the thunder.

  They were enough for him.

  And he saw the sun.

  But he didn’t worship the sun.

  For him the sun was a sign, a symbol.

  He bowed in prayer to what was behind the sun.

  He made songs and dances to the makers and movers

  of the sun.

  Buyers and Sellers

  What is a man worth?

  What can he do?

  What is his value?

  On the one hand those who buy labor,

  On the other hand those who have nothing

  to sell but their labor.

  And when the buyers of labor tell the

  sellers, “Nothing doing today, not a

  chance!”—then what?

  City Number

  The soiled city oblongs stand sprawling.

  The blocks and house numbers go miles.

  Trucks howl rushing the early morning editions.

  Night-club dancers have done their main floor show.

  Tavern trios improvise “Show me the way to go home.”

  Soldiers and sailors look for street corners, house

  numbers.

  Night watchmen figure halfway between midnight and

  breakfast.

  Look out the window now late after the evening that

  was.

  On a south sky of pigeon-egg blue

  Long clouds float in a silver moonbath.

  Chromo

  This old river town saw the

  early steamboats.

  The line of wharf and houses

  is a faded chromo.

  It is bleached and bitten standing

  to steady sunrises.

  The Evening Sunsets Witness and Pass On

  Passion may call for a partner

  to share the music of its bones,

  to weave shadows, rain, moonshine, dreams—

  Passion may hammer on hard door panels,

  empty a hot vocabulary of wanting, wanting—

  it is all there in the fragments of Sappho.

  Passion may consider poppies cheap

  with their strong stalks in the wind,

  with their crying crimson sheaths—

  Passion may remember tiger lilies,

  keepers of a creeping evening mist,

  tawny watchers of the morning stars—

  Passion may cry to the moon

  for miracles of flesh,

  for red answers to a white riddle—

  it is told in the tears on many love letters.

  Passion may spend its money,

  its youth; its laughter, all else,

  till again passion is alone

  spending its cries to the moon—

  and some weep, some sing, some go to war.

  Passion may be alone at a window

  seeking kisses fasten lips in wild troths,

  a storm of red silk scarfs in a high wind,

  armfuls of redbirds let loose into bush and sky—

  and some weep, some sing, some go to war.

  Passion may come with baskets

  throwing paths of red rain flowers,

  each folded petal a sacrament—

  the evening sunsets witness and pass on.

  Passion may build itself bouses of air

  and look from a thousand tall windows—

  till the wind rides and gathers.

  Passion may be a wind child

  transient and made of air—

  Passion may be a wild grass

  where a great wind came and went.

  The evening sunsets witness and pass on.

  Deep Sea Wandering

  deep sea was the wandering

  deep brass the dripping loot

  deep crimson the bloodspill

  lyrics begotten on lush lips

  and many a hawser they saw

  rotting rope and rusting chain

  and anchors many lost anchors

  Call the Next Witness

  there will be people left over

  enough inhabitants among the Eskimos

  among jungle folk

  denizens of plains and plateaus

  cities and towns synthetic miasma missed

  enough for a census

  enough to call it still a world

  though definitely my friends my good friends

  definitely not the same old world

  the vanquished saying, “What happened?”

  the victors saying, “We planned it so.”

  if it should be at the end

  in the smoke the mist the silence of the end

  if it should be one side lost the other side won

  the changes among these leftover people

  the scattered ones the miasma missed

  their programs of living their books and music

  they will be simple and conclusive

  in the ways and manners of early men and women

  the children having playroom

  rulers and diplomats finding affairs less complex

  new types of cripples here and there

  and indescribable babbling survivors

  listening to plain scholars saying,

  should a few plain scholars have come through,

  “As after other wars the peace is something else again.”

  amid the devastated areas and the untouched

  the historians will take an interest

  finding amid the ruins and shambles

  tokens of contrast and surprise

  testimonies here curious there monstrous

  nuclear-fission corpses having one face

  radioactivity cadavers another look

  bacteriological victims not unfamiliar

  scenes and outlooks nevertheless surpassing

  those of the First World War

  and those of the Second or Global War

  —the historians will take an interest

  fill their note-books pick their way

  amid burned and tattered documents

  and say to each other,

  “What the hell! it isn’t worth writing,

  posterity won’t give a damn what we write.”

  Early Copper

  A slim and singing copper girl,

  They lived next to the earth for her sake

  And the yellow corn was in their faces

  And the copper curve of prairie sunset.

  In her April eyes bringing

  Corn tassels shining from Duluth and Itasca,

  From La Crosse to Keokuk and St. Louis, to the Big

  Muddy,

  The yellow-hoofed Big Muddy meeting the Father of

  Waters,

  In her eyes cornrows running to the prairie
ends,

  In her eyes copper men living next to the earth for her

  sake.

  Atlas, How Have You Been?

  The shape of the world is either a box or a bag

  and a box-shaped world has comers

  and a bag-shaped world is either open or closed,

  and Somebody holds the bag.

  Now whether the world is oblong, square or rhomboid

  or whether the world is a series of circles,

  rings twisted into each other’s eternal grooves,

  or whether the world keeps changing from box to bag,

  from corners to circles and back to corners,

  from rings to oblongs and back to rings

  and repeating the twist into the groove

  and practicing that twist over again

  from box to bag and bag again to box—

  this was what we were talking about

  when the first thunder crashed

  and lightning forked across a black rain.

  We decided the earth itself isn’t much.

  It is mapped and measured now

  And we fly around it in just a few breakfasts.

  And the strong man they named Atlas

  Should have had that very name of Atlas

  If he had stood under the earth ball

  And held it on his big shoulders;

  Atlas, you were made as a make-believe

  And we give you a make-believe salute.

  We say: Atlas, how are you doing,

  how have you been?

  Beyond the ball of earth are other balls,

  also double balls, triple balls, series of balls,

  and balloons, drums, cylinders, triangles, jugs,

  some with handles identified and signed,

  others with anonymous sprockets and axles—

  and we decided amid the sheet lightning—

  the whole works is held either in a box or a bag,

  afterwards asking ourselves:

  what is outside the box, what props up the bag?

  these are big questions, we told each other

  while sprags of lightning dropped from the sky—

  clutches and magnets, clocks and wheels

  made of a mud and air beyond our dreams,

  ordered in verbs beyond our doorways.

  We decided at last

  the world might be a box when awake

  and a bag when asleep

  and while we slept

  it changed from box to bag

  and back from bag to box

  and the forgetfulness of our own sleep

  is strange and beautiful by itself

  and sometimes in its shifting shapes

  the world is a cradle dedicated to sleep

  and what would you rather have than sleep?

  Cheap Rent

  The laws of the bronze gods

  are irrevocable.

  And yet—in the statue of

  General Grant astride a horse

  on rolling prairie, on little

  hills looking from Lincoln

  Park at Lake Michigan—

  here the sparrows have a nest

  in General Grant’s spy glass—

  here the sparrows have rented

  a flat in General Grant’s

  right stirrup—

  It is true? The laws of the

  bronze gods are irrevocable?

  Elm Buds

  Elm buds are out.

  Yesterday morning, last night,

  they crept out.

  They are the mice of early

  spring air.

  To the north is the gray sky.

  Winter hung it gray for the gray

  elm to stand dark against.

  Now the branches all end with the

  yellow and gold mice of early

  spring air.

  They are moving mice creeping out

  with leaf and leaf.

  Child Face

  There are lips as strange and soft

  As a rim of moon many miles off.

  White on a fading purple sea.

  “Was it there, far-off, real,

  Or did my eyes play me a trick?”

  A finger can be laid across it,

  Laid on a little mouth’s white yearning,

  Only as a white rim of moon

  Can be picked off a blue sea

  And sent in a love letter.

  Once a child face lay in the moonight

  Of an early spring night.

  Fog Numbers

  Birth is the starting point of passion.

  Passion is the beginning of death.

  How can you turn back from birth?

  How can you say no to passion?

  How can you bid death hold off?

  And if thoughts come and hold you

  And if dreams step in and shake your bones

  What can you do but take them and make them

  more your own?

  Of course, a nickel is a nickel,

  and a dime is a dime—sure—

  we learned that—

  why mention it now?

  of course, steel is steel;

  and a hammer is a hammer;

  And a thought, a dream, is more than a name,

  a number, a fixed point.

  ***

  Walk in a midnight fog now and say to it: Tell

  me your number and I’ll tell mine.

  Salute one morning sun falling on a river ribbon

  of mist and tell it: My number is such-and-

  such—what’s yours?

  Of what is fog the starting point?

  Of what is the red sun the beginning?

  Long ago—as now—little men and women knew in

  their bones the singing and the aching of

  these stumbling questions.

  Evening Questions

  The swath of light climbs up the skyscraper

  Around the corners of white prisms and spikes.

  The inside torso stands up in a plug of gun-metal.

  The shadow struggles to get loose from the light.

  Shall I say I’m through and it’s no use?

  Or have I got another good fight in me?

  Fifty-Fifty

  What is there for us two

  to split fifty-fifty,

  to go halvers on?

  A Bible, a deck of cards?

  a farm, a frying pan?

  a porch, front steps to sit on?

  How can we be pals

  when you speak English

  and I speak English

  and you never understand me

  and I never understand you?

  Evening Sea Wind

  A molten gold flows away from the sun

  to fall as a shingle of gold and glass

  on waters holding five ships, a quintet,

  five, no less, five sheathed in brass haze.

  On a bronze and copper path just over

  comes a maroon, comes a dusk of gun-metal.

  A white horse shape of a moving cloud

  meets a wind changing it to a small lamb,

  meets a wind smoothing what it meets,

  smoothing the lamb into six white snakes,

  smoothing the snakes to a ball of wool.

  The sungold shingle, ships in brass haze

  fade into walls of umber, pools of ink

  and there is abbadabra and abracadabra.

  Two smoke rings, two nightmist bracelets

  seem to be telling us and themselves:

  “We blend and go, then again

  blend and go.”

  Forgotten Wars

  Be loose. Be easy. Be ready.

  Forget the last war.

  Forget the one before.

  Forget the one yet to come.

  Be loose and easy about the wars

  whether they have been fought

  or whether yet to be fought—

  be ready to forget them.

  Who
was saying at high noon today:

  “Is not each of them a forgotten war

  after it is fought and over?

  how and why it came forgotten?

  how and what it cost forgotten?”

  and was he there at Iwo Jima, Okinawa

  or places named Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge?

  and saying now:

  “Let the next war before it comes

  and before it gets under way

  and five or six days sees its finish

  or fifty years sees it still going strong

  —let it be now a forgotten war.

  Be ready now to forget it.

  Be loose, be easy now.

  The next war goes over in a flash—or runs long.”

  God Is No Gentleman

  God gets up in the morning