Classic Poem

It begins like a legend told to a fretful child:
It was, it was, and it was not. It begins
As if with symptoms of that sweat
I hear, so late (oh not
Thank God too late), you were spared:
A little blush along the throat. A restlessness.
Then the silkworm’s casement, tapering
& pale as the egg of a chimney-swift,
Which we will convert to cloth
To cover the naked Indian. A bobbin,
Which dropped in my tisane would ravel the maelstrom
Of silk. Spindle of whirlwind, spoonful
Of follow. The thread’s stained scalding mile
Pours out my glass tempered in our kiln,
As each new settler is also seasoned
In this furnace, our new-found land.
(As the man drowning believes he digests
The mild water, as the damned marry flame
& yet blister, so do I know myself
Grasped by change at the stroke of change.)
Hold this glass up to your eye & through
Its pebbled horizon you may spy your room,
See its ire of surfaces sore with chairs.
Green grass green grace …
Would that I could account this world one
Where nothing is lost only exchanged.
Without coppice, park, romancely glade,
Or commanding vantage,
Woods press on us; they fester,
& they watch. To the northeast white spruce,
Phalanxes of fledging pinions, clamp
Root to granite & hoard
What they glean off salt-fog, sea-spray, & stone.
From ewers of willow-oaks darkness steams.
At breakfast I have pinched the plantlets
Insinuated by a maple’s winged seed overnight;
It unclasps twin leaves, pale hands
Loosening the soil of my rest,
They never empty of their solicitations.
I find no empires here, no apostles or emeralds.
Instead, all things a-broil with an awful begetting
& my hours unsettled by some new show
Of riotous & mystical imagination.
Though we might wish to wedge us barnacle-tight
To shore’s edge, our foundation raised
On marshland recalls this irritable fact—
The estuary, a nursery of strange devices,
Throws off new forms so promiscuously
I wonder how the world holds any more shape
Than a dream?
From my hand at night (my light
A little oil in a dish or a rush taper smoking
Not so different from his), flower
Ovid’s fantastic shapes, shadows
Of an old empire’s former splendor
Now perjured by Virginia’s clay & leaf & sand
Turned to the king’s profit as iron, silk, & glass.
Belief is possible at night, solitary, firelit.
Then, I can believe in Ovid’s centaurs,
Or at death that he was met by a three-headed dog.
I can believe in your letters, which never come.
It is for you that I persist
In translating fresh birdsong, like this bunting’s
Comecomecome wherewherewhere
All together down the hill.
(Where did they go, who went before us?
Starved trove: scatter of blue beads & a name
Grafted to that bald acre.
Roanoke.
There is my terror & my tale: to go west
Under this eternity of nameless trees.)
And what will you make of this
Humble hieroglyphic of nature I forward to you?
Nocturnal, double-wombed, variously called
Monkey Fox; Frosted,
Or Short-headed, or Indolent.
Let this Leafy-Eared Rat-Tailed Shuffler
The naturals call Possoun
Join your zoo’s other fantasies
& with the Little Military Learnéd Horse
Enjoy its dish of ale. Its fur is durable;
Its flesh wholesome, white, & pleasant.
With one hand I can reach for
A medicine man’s last breath caught in a vial
Or a hummingbird, stuffed
With arsenic & leaves & looking
Like a fine jeweled dagger aimed at my heart,
With the other hand I brush away
The web spun in a fox skull’s whitened socket
While a wild turkey glowers from its corner
Like a small dyspeptic dragon.
My cullings do not quite master my closet.
When I imagine myself returned to the smells
& noise of London, from my stiff knee
Sands grinding as I walk, no marvels
Except those which the mirror surprises in all of us,
The swan-white wing at my temple,
I do not know what to hope for:
That you do not see me, or that you do,
But as though I were pinned under glass.
At my windowsill a quince widens
A jaundiced eye into the dark where are
Real nettles beneath the words & invincible red
Root of the madder.
As long as any image of this world
Sticks in my soul, I remain—