Classic Poem

Another year of sweetness
out of these trees —
sap throbbing into the spile
with a regular beat

as if in the earth a heart
five thousand miles down
clenched and unclenched.
(Why should there not be a heart —
and a mind too — in her midst,
old mineral mother — " Can that-
which-made-the-eye be blind? " )

I'd like to make something un-
presidentially clear — clear
as this cold ichor from the underworld
that glints at the spile's end an instant
then drums into the bucket ... Sap,
among maples at least,
seems to be all sweetness and light. . . .

Here's a trunk with some fifty holes
healed on its grey hide — scars
from so many sugarings. The trees,
like shafts of anti-light,
columns of a briery darkness, go
down and go back
to times and places we have not seen.

" The eye can perceive a single
electron, " says Bohr. Psychic events
reach down to atomic strata. And Daphne
becoming her own family tree
must've felt, from the middle of the earth,
a pulse, like maples' — maybe
the quanta of time. . . .Surely
all the power of a tree is
in time — five hundred, two thousand years —
the archean sequoia the merely old
grey maples our grandfathers tapped their marks
like a scatter of blacked-out lights
on a transport. Down at the bottom
of some blank socket here, it's '23:
President Warren Gamaliel
Harding the Harmonizer is five months
from his last " ... tired, so very tired... "
and I unborn still, blank as the moon, waiting
in pre-pre-partem darkness dark
as the middle of a tree marrow of time.

In time, we cross, Harding and I —
though nowhere else; and as for Ohio
I shan't go there, the name
of the place is like a yawn.

What have I to do with Ohio —
" Business and Politics " —
but that in the year of my birth
the last of the Ohio line dies?
New England projected me
up from New England carbon, New England salt,
New England water and iron.

At every spile's end now
the small bright sapules seem
to form, shudder and drop like worlds
in series geological time
stroboscoped a millennium
going by in a second. Surely
there is something to scry in such
simulacra — in crystal, the planets-past. . . .

Times when there are neither maples
nor men, only one dumb
aboriginal drop ... and now
a moon, torn from the earth a dead
daughter umbilically held, haunting
after her lost socket,
and the tidal tug of her blank
mass now east now west again —
nagging awake those cold
immortals — carbon and sodium and sulphur —
(mountainous knees rising
one over another
in basalt and crystal)

and carbon, unable to suffer
the rings of the moon, making
its own rings against them —
maples and men against them
and these too dragged by the moon
unable to rest ... Poor Harding
even in death diminishing
under a gaudy monument to chagrin...

Sap is still running sometimes
as night comes and one's bootprints stiffen
and overhead among black branches
the stars bud out, Orion
past zenith already the Dog
rampant his Sirius eye
in the highest fork. . . .
I remember a blaze of stars in a window
when I was so small
I knew words but could not yet speak —
and a song sung to me: " ... boat
... a silver moon " ; remember
anger at how it ended: " ... Sail
again to me " . Something
wanting to be gone forever — as far
and as fast as light —
shrank from the suffocating closure.

Nor can I say now why
when a hawk arrowheads over,
or even a tribe of crows boom-
eranging in the March wind
their clumsy airframes, tears
come to my eyes.
I have flown in my time higher
and further than any of those.
And never escaped. We remain
at the moon's mercy,
at carbon's desperation.
You can see it in the eclipse.
When the moon cold-chisels the sun,
there are little eclipses
all over the leopard's-coat-
light-and-dark beneath trees. Ut tota
ut partibus . But the moon's
always at work ... Poor Harding
is long since in eclipse.
And we have watched the rim of the shadow
blacken the Department of Justice,
the White House the Capitol,
and bite out of our hearts
what had once seemed brave
as the ascending flag
flaunts its blood-gutter red
its sepulchre white that banner
of Ben Tre and Mylai.

America darkens and each
American darkens, his own
synecdochic nick of shame
hatred or fear
eating into him under whatever tree.
There are no woods too deep.

Is this all there is —
a ubiquitous Carbon driving
into the highest forks of the maples
and the highest offices hunting
empires of sunlight and water or money and blood
for ballast against the moon?
Or have I been too long under these trees?

Something infinitesimal
moves because the moon moves
and a crystal crosses-
over into irritability,
and sap rises
and dogs whimper in sleep
and a lion roars in the Ngoro Ngoro

and the thirty-seventh president calls in advisors
and issues a lie to the press of the world
and the hierarchy of power
ascends in such utter moral indifference —
if not a convulsion of carbon,
what is it?

" There is only one kind of power, "
my father said, " but many kinds of men.
There 's only one kind of gravity —
but there are wings and there are stones. "

... my father,
with his fragrance of horses and men
of streams fished barefoot
from whose long-since-silted headwaters
he waded down, without me,
many years of my history
only the trees keep — dark,
muffled in their memorial rings:
hoofbeats of Roosevelt
riding to empire;
Wilson and World War all
the black-and-white avalanching
newsreel newsprint doughboys and transports
Wall Street parades mufti straw hats factories
riots and strikes and Lindy and out of Ohio
Harding the Harmonizer
everybody's pal whose pals
double-crossed him dead
with chagrin. . . .

The trees keep —
Acer keeps — , out of it all (and all
before and since) distilling
a sweetness somehow. Maybe
if the nights keep freezing
and the days thawing, enough
for a brief while, to go around.