Honey and Salt Read online

  The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.

  The color of redhaws when the last driving rain of October sprays their gypsy crimson against the khaki brown of the blown leaves, the ankle-deep leaves—

  If I should be sent to jail I would write of these things, lover of mine.

  If I live to a majestic old age becoming the owner of a farm I shall sit under apple trees in the summer and on a pad of paper with a large yellow lead pencil, I shall write of these things, lover of mine.

  The Gong of Time

  Time says hush.

  By the gong of time you live.

  Listen and you hear time saying you were silent

  long before you came to life and you will

  again be silent long after you leave it,

  why not be a little silent now?

  Hush yourself, noisy little man.

  Time hushes all.

  The gong of time rang for you to come out of a

  hush and you were born.

  The gong of time will ring for you to go back to

  the same hush you came from.

  Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those

  who say little and try to say it well, and

  those who babble and prattle their lives away,

  Time hushes all.

  Prairie Woodland

  Yellow leaves speak early November’s heart on the river.

  Winding in prairie woodland the curves of the water course are a young woman’s breasts.

  Flutter and flutter go the spear shapes—it is a rust and a saffron always dropping hour on hour.

  Sunny and winey the filtering shine of air passes the drivers, cornhuskers, farmers, children in the fields.

  Red jags of sumach and slashes of shag-bark hickory are a crimson and gray cramming pictures on the river glass.

  Out of their tubes of May and June they squeeze great changing dabs of earth love, wind passion.

  Now it is a sorrel horse neck, now a slow fire of Warsaw, anything you wish for—here in the moving leaves and slow waters.

  Five o’clock and a lemon sky—long tubes spread lemon miles and miles—submarines, dreadnaughts, coal-boats, flotillas of destroyers cross the lemon sea bringing darkness, night.

  Shadows Fall Blue on the Mountains

  Shadows fall blue on the mountains.

  Mountains fall gray to the rivers.

  Rivers fall winding to the sea.

  Oldest of all the blue creep,

  the gray crawl of the sea

  And only shadows falling older than the sea.

  ***

  ***

  Can you begin to own

  both yourself and your shadow?

  Can you measure

  moments in the sun

  when your shadow lays down your shape?

  Does your shadow speak to you

  or is it you telling your shadow

  what to be telling you?

  Can a man listen to his shadow

  hoping it tells him where to go,

  what to do when he gets there?

  Has ever been a man praying,

  “Make me into a thin

  goblet of glass, oh Lord.

  I fear what my shadow tells me”?

  What has happened

  when you forget and the sun forgets

  to lay down your old companion,

  your lifelong shadow?

  ***

  ***

  Now the shadow of Shakespeare—

  what did he say to it?

  what did he leave unsaid?

  and how well did he know he left

  millions of shadow soliloquies unspoken?

  When Napoleon saw his shadow

  could it be he lacked for words

  and often beyond his own

  saw shadows fateful as his own?

  ***

  ***

  Shadows lighter than any mist

  fall on the sea’s blue creep,

  on the sea’s gray crawl.

  Fateful high over

  swings the sun

  swings the High Witness

  of shadows.

  Quotations

  Said the panama hat to the fedora:

  “Sins have different prices in hell.”

  Said the fedora hat to the panama:

  “Yeah, nickel and dime sins, silver-dollar sins,

  sins setting you back a century, a grand,

  sins you can’t settle under a million bucks,

  tin and aluminum sins, brass sins, copper, old gold,

  pint and bushel sins, inch and mile sins,

  calculated little teapot sins and roaring tornadoes.”

  Skyscrapers Stand Proud

  The skyscrapers stand proud.

  They seem to say they have

  sought the absolute

  and made it their own.

  Yet they are blameless, innocent

  as dumb steel and the dumber

  concrete of their bastions.

  “Man made us,” they murmur. “We are

  proud only as man is proud and we

  have no more found the absolute

  than has man.”

  Pool of Bethesda

  A man came to the pool of Bethesda

  and sat down for his thoughts.

  The light of the sun ran through the line

  of the water and struck where the moss on

  a stone was green—

  The green of the moss wove into the sun silver

  and the silent brackets of seven prisms added

  to the pool of Bethesda—

  Thus a man sat long with a pool and its prisms.

  ***

  First Sonata for Karlen Paula

  At an autumn evening bonfire

  came rose-candle co-ordinations.

  Burning and burnt

  came a slow song of fire leaves.

  The summer brought

  valley breaths of spun moonmist.

  Can there be keys

  commanding the locks of constellations,

  letting loose white spokes of light,

  blue waves of flame?

  ***

  ***

  Make like before, sweet child.

  Be you like five new oranges in a wicker basket.

  Step out like

  a summer evening fireworks over black waters.

  Be dizzy in a haze of yellow silk bandannas.

  Then in a change of costume

  sit silent in a chair of tarnished bronze

  Having spoken with a grave mouth:

  “Now I will be

  a clavichord melody

  in October brown.

  You will see me in

  deep-sea contemplation

  on a yellow horse in a white wind.”

  ***

  ***

  Her room had a number.

  Likewise she had a number.

  They heard her saying:

  “Who is more numbers than I am?

  Which of you on a golden morning

  has sent a silver bullet

  into a crimson target?”

  ***

  ***

  Daybreak creeps

  in a first thin shimmering.

  Neither is the day come

  nor the night gone.

  ***

  ***

  Be shabbawobba now

  before this pool of day to come.

  Speak and be still.

  Listen and be still.

  A ring of topaz floats in rose-light.

  Handles of moongold go in a hush.

  The pool welcomes a pair of orange slippers,

  the gauze of them winking out and coming back.

  Come passwords, come numerals,

  come changing altar lights.

  Fingers, be cool, strum only half-heard chords.

  Let your words be softer than

  a slow south wind blo
wing thistledown.

  Thou Art Like a Flower

  “Thou art like a flower,”

  Ran an old song line.

  What flower did he mean?

  She might have been a quiet blue flower.

  She wore crimson carnations perhaps.

  She may have planted tall sunflowers

  Stooping with hollyhocks around a kitchen doorstep.

  They may have picked bluebells together

  Or talked about wild arbutus they found.

  Perhaps she knew what he meant by telling her:

  “Thou art like a flower.”

  Solo for Saturday Night Guitar

  Time was. Time is. Time shall be.

  Man invented time to be used.

  Love was. Love is. Love shall be.

  Yet man never invented love

  Nor is love to be used like time.

  A clock wears numbers one to twelve

  And you look and read its face

  And tell the time pre-cise-ly ex-act-ly.

  Yet who reads the face of love?

  Who tells love numbers pre-cisely ex-act-ly?

  Holding love in a tight hold for keeps.

  Fastening love down and saying

  “It’s here now and here for always.”

  You don’t do this offhand, careless-like.

  Love costs. Love is not so easy

  Nor is the shimmering of star dust

  Nor the smooth flow of new blossoms

  Nor the drag of a heavy hungering for someone,

  Love is a white horse you ride

  or wheels and hammers leaving you lonely

  or a rock in the moonlight for rest

  or a sea where phantom ships cross always

  or a tall shadow always whispering

  or a circle of spray and prisms—

  maybe a rainbow round your shoulder.

  Heavy heavy is love to carry

  and light as one rose petal,

  light as a bubble, a blossom,

  a remembering bar of music

  or a finger or a wisp of hair

  never forgotten.

  Rose Bawn

  She believed herself to have gone through tall gateways and to have marched triumphant across fire and thorn. She sat in front of a county building, under a mulberry, and once she mumbled to an invisible Irish sweetheart, “All the knocking of the tumblers of the sea is in my knee bones.”

  When the chariots of thunder drove and rolled overhead, she mumbled, “When the water comes through the sieve of the sky, that makes the rain—God does it easy—God does all things easy.”

  Memories swept over her like a strong wind on dark waters. She half-whispered, “When the moongold came on the water afterward it was too much money—too much by far—more than we wanted.”

  Speech

  There was

  what we call “words,”

  a lot of language,

  syllables,

  each syllable made of air.

  Then there was

  s i l e n c e ,

  no talk at all,

  no more syllables

  shaped by living tongues

  out of wandering air.

  Thus all tongues

  slowly talk themselves

  into s i l e n c e .

  Runaway Colors

  The smoke of these landscapes has gone God knows

  where.

  The sun touches them off with shot gold of an evening,

  with a mother’s grey eyes singing to her children.

  The blue smudge on a haystack a mile off is gone God

  knows where.

  The yellow dust of a sheet over Emil Hawkinson’s

  cornfield,

  The ribbons of red picked at by the high-flying

  hard-crying crows,

  These too are in the pits of the west God knows where.

  Out of the Rainbow End

  For Edward Steichen

  A delphinium flings a shadow

  with a rooted stalk—

  a personal shadow.

  Each silhouette documents

  designs and dooms woven

  between shape and shadowshape.

  You may add two delphiniums

  with seeds lighted in soil

  with stalks prepared in loam

  toward the upheave into bloom

  when stalk and leaves find a path

  hold a rocketform of blue

  hold it in a velvet stillstand.

  In a summer daybreak rain

  a huddle of delphiniums

  across spikes of fogblue leaves

  out of little mistblue cups

  trade meditations on being

  shapes and shadowshapes.

  Cups and bells nod in the sun,

  in the fine dust of the wind:

  one newborn delphinium laughing

  at the long scroll of marriages

  whereby she is the latest child

  bringing to the bright air her shape,

  to the dark earth her shadow.

  Shaded out of seven prisms

  in choices by living fingers

  out of the rainbow end?

  Yes and the winds

  of many evenings came:

  dawns drew in with dew and mist

  and the bells of many rains rang.

  Soft and lovely

  these transients go yet stay

  Even their violence goes in velvet.

  Sun Dancer

  Spider, you have long silver legs.

  You may spin diagrams of doom.

  Your patterns may throw fine glints

  Festooned from wandering silk.

  It may be neither art nor money

  Nor calisthenics nor engineering.

  No man trusts any woman and vice versa.

  All men love all women and vice versa.

  And all friends cherish each other.

  And there are triflers who flirt with death.

  Spider, you have long silver legs.

  Themes in Contrast

  A blue shot dawn,

  A white shot dawn,

  And she went out.

  Into the dawn water

  Until the dawn water

  Came over her head.

  And she came back

  Out of the water

  Into a blue shot dawn,

  Into a white shot dawn.

  ***

  ***

  The trucks and the cavalry came,

  The shoes and the wheels, the tarpaulins

  dripping.

  And the shadows of the grain elevators

  In the hump of the blown white moon,

  And the breathing of the tugs and barges

  In the change of the fog river gray—

  These all crossed over; the day after they

  stood up; the day after was something

  else again.

  Two Fish

  when the two fish spoke

  their speech was scarlet

  they met in a bowl

  of molten gold air

  they swung in an arch

  of seven rainbow sheens

  they swam in a grotto

  one of a thousand grottoes

  they shook their fins

  in a green feather dust

  Smoke Shapes

  Egg Faces

  Lights of egg faces, lights of monkey skulls,

  meet each other, meet yourselves.

  Lights of the morning sun warming the night-

  wet wood, fires of far-back mornings fixing

  your caldrons cooling to firestone,

  meet each other, meet yourselves.