Honey and Salt Read online

  Sheet white egg faces, strong and sad gorilla

  mugs, meet yourselves, meet each other.

  Long Heads

  Sleep, long-face of the long-head family.

  Go back to the inside of the ten thousandth

  mountain you came from.

  Out of sleep you came; back to sleep you go.

  Eyes out of morning twilights, how now it is easy

  to join up with evening twilights.

  Nose cut from the spear handle of a morning star

  finding its mirror-slant in a mountain rock nose,

  how now it is easy to sit next and alongside an

  evening star spear handle.

  Yearn, too; you might as well yearn; yearners or

  not, out of sleep, back to sleep; this is put on

  the mouth.

  Sleep, long-face, back now to the inside of the

  ten thousandth mountain.

  Three Shrines

  Three shrines a woman has for a man.

  She loves him for what he is out in the world.

  She loves him for what he seems to her of which

  the world knows nothing.

  She loves him for the touch of his personal

  magnets.

  Thus we might frame these three declarations and

  listen to bystanders:

  Is that so?

  Who told you—a little bird?

  What are these personal magnets?

  What is a shrine?

  You mean she never opened

  a barrel of snakes for him?

  Variations on a Theme

  She was given crystal flesh for a home.

  And her windows were tremulous to visions.

  Love me, love me, was her often cry.

  She put lover higher than all else.

  She carried series of love-birds and gave away.

  ***

  ***

  Pour love deep into me.

  Thus ran her cry.

  Let me have all love.

  She murmured this want.

  Love may be toil, waste, death

  Yet come pour love deep into me.

  Thus her years ran to one theme.

  Timesweep

  I was born in the morning of the world,

  So I know how morning looks,

  morning in the valley wanting,

  morning on a mountain wanting.

  Morning looks like people look,

  like a cornfield wanting corn,

  like a sea wanting ships.

  Tell me about any strong beautiful wanting

  And there is your morning, my morning,

  everybody’s morning.

  Makers and givers may be moon shaken,

  may be star lost,

  Knowing themselves as sea-deep seekers,

  both seeking and sought,

  Knowing love is a ring and the ring endless,

  Seeing love as a wheel and the wheel endless.

  Love may be a hard flesh crying its want.

  Love may be a thin horizon air,

  thinner than snowwhite wool finespun,

  finer than any faint blue mist

  blown away and gone on yesterday’s wind.

  There are hungers

  for a nameless bread

  out of the dust

  of the hard earth,

  out of the blaze

  of the calm sun.

  Blow now, winds, you so old at blowing.

  Oat at the river, pine at the rocks,

  brandish your arms

  Slow to a whisper wind, fast to a storm howl.

  ***

  ***

  The wind carves sand into shapes,

  Endless the fresh designs,

  Wind and ice patient beyond telling.

  Ice can tip mountains over,

  Ice the giant beyond measure.

  And the sun governs valley lights,

  Transforms hats into shoes and back again

  Before we are through any long looking.

  ***

  ***

  The pink nipples of the earth in springtime,

  The long black eyelashes of summer’s look,

  The harvest laughter of tawny autumn,

  The winter silence of land in snow covers,

  Each speaks its own oaths of the cool and the flame

  of naked possessions clothed and come naked again:

  The sea knows it all.

  They all crept out of the sea.

  ***

  ***

  These wheels within wheels

  These leaves folded in leaves

  These wheeling winds

  and winding leaves

  Those sprockets

  from those seeds

  This spiral shooting

  from that rainfall—

  What does a turning earth

  say to its axis?

  How should a melon say thanks

  Or a squash utter blessings?

  ***

  ***

  In the heave of the hankering sea

  God put precisions of music and accord

  to be heard in the deepest seabells

  amid the farthest violet spawn

  moving in seagreen doom and skyblue promise.

  The sea shares its tokens—

  how and with whom?

  To these shores birds return

  and keep returning

  for the curves of fresh flights.

  To these waters fish return

  and keep returning

  for the fathoming of old waters.

  To sky and sea they are born

  and keep returning to be reborn.

  The sharing of the sea goes on

  for the sake of wings and fins

  ever returning to new skyblue,

  ever reborn in new seagreen.

  Could the gray-green lobster speak

  what would he say

  of personal secrets?

  Could one white gull utter a word—

  what would it be?

  what white feather of a word?

  ***

  ***

  Among the shapes and shadow-shapes

  in the blurs of the marching animals,

  among the open forms, the hidden and half-hidden,

  who is the Head One? Me? Man?

  Am I first over all, I the genus homo?

  Where did I come from?

  How doing now and where to from here?

  Is there any going back?

  And where might I want to go back?

  Is it told in my dreams and hankerings, looking

  back at what I was, seeing what I am?

  Like so a man talking to himself

  of the bitter, the sweet, the bittersweet:

  he had heard likenings of himself:

  Cock of the walk, brave as a lion, fierce as a tiger,

  Stubborn as si mule, mean as a louse, crazy as a bedbug,

  Soft as a kitten, slimy as an octopus, one poor fish.

  Then he spoke for himself:

  I am bat-eyed, chicken-hearted, monkey-faced.

  Listen and you’ll hear it told,

  I am a beast out of the jungle.

  Man, proud man, with a peacock strut

  seeing himself in his own man-made mirrors.

  Yet I am myself all the animals.

  Mix in among lavender shadows the gorilla far back

  And the jungle cry of readiness for death

  Or struggle—and the clean breeds who live on

  In the underbrush. Mix in farther back yet

  Breeds out of the slime of the sea.

  Put in a high green of a restless sea.

  Insinuate chlorine and mystic salts,

  The make-up of vertebrates,

  the long highway of mammals who chew

  Their victims and feed their children

  From milk at a breast,

  The fathers and the mothers who battled hunger

&
nbsp; And tore each other’s jugulars

  Over land and women, laughter and language.

  Put in mystery without end. Then add mystery.

  The memorandum runs long.

  I have feet, fins and wings.

  I live on land, in the sea, in the air.

  I run, fly, sneak, prowl, I kill and eat.

  Among killers and eaters I am first.

  I am the Head One.

  What is this load I carry out of yesterday?

  What are the bygones of dreams, moans, shadows?

  What jargons, what gibberish, must I yet unlearn?

  I have been a dim plasm in the sea,

  rocking dumb, not-so-dumb, dumb again,

  a dab and a dangling tangle

  swarming and splitting to live again.

  I have been a drop of jelly

  aching with a silver shot of light

  and it sang Be-now Now-be Be-now Now-be.

  I have been a rockabye baby

  sloshed in the sludge of the sea

  and I have clung with a shell over me

  waiting a tide to bring me breakfast.

  I have been the little fish eaten by the big one

  and I have been the big fish

  taking ten lesser fish in one fast gulp.

  I have been a shrimp, one of a billion,

  fed to a million little fish

  ending as fodder in the bellies of big fish.

  In the seven seas

  of the one vast glumbering sea over the globe

  I have been eater and eaten,

  toiler and hanger-on.

  I lived half in the sea, half on land,

  swimmer and crawler, fins and legs.

  I traveled with layers of earthworms

  grinding limestone into loam.

  Encased as a snail

  I wrought one pure spiral,

  an image of no beginning, no end.

  “This is the image wherein I live;

  the outer form of me to be here

  when the dried inner one drifts

  away into thin air.”

  I have journeyed

  for sticks and mud and weaving thongs

  to build me a home in a bush.

  I have mounted into the blue sky

  with a mate lark on a summer morning,

  dropping into sycamore branches to warble.

  The orioles called me one of theirs;

  herons taught me to stand and wait in marsh grass,

  to preen my wings and rise with legs bundled behind.

  I was the awkward pelican

  flying low along the florida coast with a baby.

  I stood with pink flamingoes

  in long lagoons at tallahassee watching sunrise.

  I am black as a crow with a caw-caw in my throat

  and I am lush with morning calls of catbird and mocker,

  the cardinal’s what-cheer what-cheer

  and the redbird’s whistle across hemlock timbers

  in early april in wisconsin.

  I have done the cleansing service

  of scavengers on land and sea;

  the red and sea-green lobsters told me

  how they win a living.

  I have slunk among buzzards and broken hunger

  with a beak in a rottening horse.

  I have fed where my greatgrandfathers fed.

  I know the faint half-words

  of the fly and the flea,

  the midge, the mosquito.

  I was kin of a vampire

  doing what a blind thirst told me.

  A louse seeking red blood told me

  I carry feeders in blood.

  I ganged up with maggots

  and cleaned a cadaver

  and left the bones gleaming.

  I am a grasshopper taking in one jump

  a hundred grasshopper lengths.

  I buzz with earnest bees

  in the lingering sun of apple orchards.

  I loiter with tumble bugs

  seeming to know solemn causes.

  I climb with spiders, throw ladders, nets,

  frameworks out of my navel coils.

  I am the building ant

  of architectonic galleries and chambers.

  I am egg, cocoon and moth.

  I count my caterpillar rings of black and yellow.

  I inch with the inch worms

  measuring pearl-green miles of summer months.

  I have swept in the ashen paths of weevils,

  borers, chinch bugs eating their way.

  Born once as a late morning child

  I died of old age before noon.

  Or again I issued as a luna moth,

  circles of gold spotting my lavender wings.

  I have zigzagged with blue water bugs

  among white lotus and pond lilies.

  From my silver throat in the dew of evening

  came a whippoorwill call, one, another, more

  as a slow gold moon told time with climbing.

  I am the chameleon taking the tint of what I live on,

  the water frog green as the scum he sits on,

  the tree frog gray as the tree-bark-gray.

  The duck, the swan, the goose, met me as sisters,

  the beaver, the porcupine, the chinchilla, as brothers.

  The rattlesnakes let me live with them

  to eat mice, to salivate birds and rabbits

  and fatten in sleep on noontime rocks.

  I was a lizard, a texas horned toad,

  a centipede counting my century of legs.

  I was a crocodile in africa

  with a lazy mouthful of teeth.

  The stealth of the rat, the mink, the squirrel, came.

  The weasel gave me his lingo

  of now-you-see-me now-you-don’t.

  The rabbit hideout in clover, the gopher hole,

  the mole tunnel, the corn-shock nest of the mouse,

  these were a few of my homes.

  One summer night with fireflies

  I too was fluttering night gold.

  Long ago I ran with the eohippus,

  the little horse that was.

  I wore dodo feathers

  but that’s all passed.

  I had a feathered form fade in fog:

  you can find it now in feathered fossils.

  I was a mammoth, a dinosaur

  and other hulks too big to last.

  I have been more quadrupeds than I can name.

  I was the son of a wild jackass

  with swift and punishing heels.

  I lifted my legs and carried a camel hump

  in slow caravans pausing at nightfall,

  lifting my hump again at dawn.

  I locked my horns with another moose;

  our antlers lie locked and our bones whitening.

  I slouched up hills of ice with polar bears,

  practiced smell with the red fox,

  trained my fangs with timber wolves.

  I fight now for the rights to a carcass.

  The killer who crouches, gets set, and leaps

  is a kinsman I can call my cousin.

  The strangling gibberish of the gorilla

  comes out of my anxious mouth.

  Among a thousand ring-tailed monkeys

  scratching buttocks, sharing fleas,

  shinning up trees in guatemala, I am one.

  Among the blue-ramped baboons,

  chattering chimpanzees and leering orangoutangs,

  I am at home using paws for hands, hands for paws.

  The howl of one hyena eating another is mine.

  In a boneless tube of ooze

  I soaked dumb days with sponges

  off the gulfcoast sea-bottom.

  Now I am the parrot

  who picks up palaver and repeats it.

  Now I am the river-hog, the hippopotamus

  and I am the little bird who lives in his ear

  and tells him when to get up
and where to go.