Prelude
I drew solitude over me, on the lone shore,
By the hawk perch stones; the hawks and the gulls are never breakers of solitude.
When the animals Christ is rumored to have died for drew in,
The land thickening, drew in about me, I planted trees eastward, and the ocean
Secured the west with the quietness of thunder. I was quiet.
Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.
No peace but many companions; the hateful-eyed
And human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them.
But why should I make fables again? There are many
Tellers of tales to delight women and the people.
I have no vocation. The old rock under the house, the hills with their hard roots and the ocean hearted
With sacred quietness from here to Asia
Make me ashamed to speak of the active little bodies, the coupling bodies, the misty brainfuls
Of perplexed passion. Humanity is needless.
I said " Humanity is the start of the race, the gate to break away from, the coal to kindle,
The blind mask crying to be slit with eye-holes. "
Well now it is done, the mask slit, the rag burnt, the starting-post left behind: but not in a fable.
Culture's outlived, art's root-cut, discovery's
The way to walk in. Only remains to invent the language to tell it.
Match-ends of burnt experience
Human enough to be understood,
Scraps and metaphors will serve. The wine was a little too strong for the new wine-skins ...
Come storm, kind storm.
Summer and the days of tired gold
And bitter blue are more ruinous.
The leprous grass, the sick forest,
The sea like a whore's eyes,
And the noise of the sun,
The yellow dog barking in the blue pasture,
Snapping sidewise.
When I remembered old rains,
Running clouds and the iron wind, then the trees trembled.
I was calling one of the great dancers
Who wander down from the Aleutian rocks and the open Pacific
Pivoting countersunwise, celebrating power with the whirl of a dance, sloping to the mainland.
I watched his feet waken the water
And the ocean break in foam beyond Lobos;
The iron wind struck from the hills.
You are tired and corrupt,
You kept the beast under till the fountain's poisoned,
He drips with mange and stinks through the oubliette window.
The promise-breaker war killed whom it freed
And none living's the cleaner. Yet storm comes, the lions hunt
In the nights striped with lightning. It will come: feed on peace
While the crust holds: to each of you at length a little
Desolation: a pinch of lust or a drop of terror:
Then the lions hunt in the brain of the dying: storm is good, storm is good, good creature,
Kind violence, throbbing throat aches with pity.
Onorio Vasquez,
Young seer of visions who lives with his six brothers
On the breast of Palo Corona mountain looking northward,
Watches his brother Vidal and Julio the youngest
Play with a hawk they shot from the mountain cloud,
The wing broken. They crucified the creature,
A nail in the broken wing on the barn wall
Between the pink splinters of bone and a nail in the other.
They prod his breast with a wand, no sponge of vinegar,
" Fly down, Jew-beak. " The wind streams down the mountain,
The river of cloud streams over: Onorio Vasquez
Never sees anything to the point. What he sees:
The ocean like sleek gray stone perfectly jointed
To the heads and bays, a woman walking upon it,
The curling scud of the storm around her ankles,
Naked and strong, her thighs the height of the mountain, walking and weeping.
The shadow of hair under the belly, the jutting breasts like hills, the face in the hands and the hair
Streaming north. " Why are you sad, our lady? " " I had only one son.
The strange lover never breaks the window-latches again
When Joseph's at synagogue. "
Orange eyes, tired and fierce.
They're casting knives at you now, but clumsily, the knives
Quiver in the wood, stern eyes the storm deepens.
Don't wince, topaz eyes.
The wind wearies toward evening,
Old Vasquez sends his boys to burn the high pastures
Against the rain: see the autumn fires on the mountain, creeping red lakes and crescents
Up the black slope in the slide of the year: that's Vasquez and his boys burning the mountain. The high wind
Holds, the low dies, the black curtain flies north.
Myrtle Cartwright
Locked the windows but forgot the door, it's a lonely canyon
When the waves flap in the creek-mouth. Andrew's driving
The calves to Monterey, he trusts her, he doesn't know
How all her flesh burned with lascivious desire
Last year, but she remembered her mother and prayed
And God quenched it. Prayer works all right: three times
Rod Stewart came down to see her, he might have been wood
For all she cared. She suffers with constipation,
Tired days and smothering dreams, she's young, life's cheerless,
God sent a little sickness to keep her decent
Since the great prayer. What's that in the west, thunder?
The sea rumbles like thunder but the wind's died down,
Soon it should rain.
Myrtle Cartwright
Could sleep if her heart would quit moving the bed-clothes;
The lighthouse-keeper's daughter little Faith Heriot
Says " Father the cow's got loose, I must go out
With the storm coming and bring her into the stable.
What would mother do without milk in the morning? "
(Clearly Point Pinos Light: stands back from the sea
Among the rolling dunes cupped with old pasture.
Nobody'd keep a cow on the rock at Point Sur.)
This girl never goes near the cowshed but wanders
Into the dunes, the long beam of the light
Swims over and over her head in the high darkness,
The spray of the storm strains through the beam but Faith
Crouches out of the wind in a hollow of the sand
And hears the sea, she rolls on her back in the clear sand
Shuddering, and feels the light lie thwart her hot body
And the sand trickle into the burning places.
Comes pale to the house: " Ah Bossy led me a chase,
Led me a chase. " The lighthouse-keeper believes in hell,
His daughter's wild for a lover, his wife sickening toward cancer,
The long yellow beam wheels over the wild sea and the strain
Gathers in the air.
O crucified
Wings, orange eyes, open?
Always the strain, the straining flesh, who feels what God feels
Knows the straining flesh, the aching desires,
The enormous water straining its bounds, the electric
Strain in the cloud, the strain of the oil in the oil-tanks
At Monterey aching to burn, the strain of the spinning
Demons that make an atom, straining to fly asunder;
Straining to rest at the center,
The strain in the skull, blind strains, force and counterforce,
Nothing prevails ...
Oh in storm: storm's kind, kind violence,
When the swollen cloud ached — suddenly
Her charge and agony condensed, slip, the thick dark
Whelps lightning; the air breaks, the twin birth rain falls globed
From the released blackness high up in the air
Ringing like a bell for deliverance.
Many-folded hills
Mouth the black voice that follows the white eye
Opening, universal white eye widening and shut. Myrtle Cartwright's
One of those whom thunder shakes with terror: head covered
Against the flashes: " If it should find me and kill me
What's life been worth? Nothing, nothing, nothing, death's horrible, "
She hears it like a truck driven jolting through heaven
Rumble to the north. " And if I die old:
Nothing, nothing. "
Vasquez' boys have gone home.
Deep after midnight the wind rises, turns iron again,
From east of south, it grinds the heads of the hills, the dunes move in the dark at Point Pinos, the sandstone
Lighthouse at Point Sur on the top of the rock is like an axhead held against a grindstone.
The high redwoods have quit roaring to scream. Oaks go down on the mountain. At Vasquez place in the yellow
Pallor of dawn the roof of the barn's lifting, his sons cast ropes over the timbers. The crucified
Snaps his beak at them. He flies on two nails.
Great eyes, lived all night?
Onorio should have held the rope but it slid through his fingers. Onorio Vasquez
Never sees anything to the point. What he sees:
The planted eucalyptuses bent double
All in a row, praying north, " Why everything's praying
And running northward, old hawk anchored with nails
You see that everything goes north like a river.
On a cliff in the north
Stands the strange lover, shines and calls. "
In the morning
The inexhaustible clouds flying up from the south
Stream rain, the gullies of the hills grow alive, the creeks flood, the summer sand-bars
Burst from their mouths, from every sea-mouth wedges of yellow, yellow tongues. Myrtle Cartwright
Hears the steep cataracts slacken, and then thunder
Pushes the house-walls. " Hear me God, death's not dreadful.
You heard before when I prayed. Now, " she whispers,
" I'll make the bargain, " thunder leans on the house-walls, " life's no value
Like this, I'm going to Stewart's, I can't live empty.
Now Andrew can't come home for every canyon
Vomits its bridge, judgment is yours only,
Death's in your hands. " She opens the door on the streaming
Canyon-side, the desperate wind: the dark wet oak-leaves
All in a moment each leaf a distinct life
Reflect the sharp flash over them: Myrtle Cartwright
Feels the sword plunge: no touch: runs tottering up hill
Through the black voice.
Black pool of oil hidden in the oil-tank
In Monterey felt the sword plunge: touched: the wild heat
Went mad where a little air was, metal curled back,
Fire leaped at the outlet. " Immense ages
We lay under rock, our lust hoarded,
The ache of ignorant desire, the enormous pressure,
The enormous patience, the strain, strain, the strain
Lightened we lay in a steel shell ... what God kept for us:
Roaring marriage. "
Myrtle Cartwright wins up hill through the oak-scrub
And through the rain, the wind at the summit
Knocks her breasts and her mouth, she crouches in the mud,
Feels herself four-foot like a beast and the lightning
Will come from behind and cover her, the wolf of white fire,
Force the cold flesh, cling with his fore-paws. " Oh, death's
What I was after. " She runs on the road northward, the wind behind her,
The lightnings like white doves hovering her head; harmless as pigeons, through great bars of black noise.
She lifts her wet arms. " Come doves. "
The oil-tank boils with joy in the north, one among ten, one tank
Burns, the nine others wait, feel warmth, dim change of patience. This one roars with fulfilled desire,
The ring-bound molecules splitting, the atoms dancing apart, marrying the air.
Myrtle Cartwright
Knocks on her door: " Oh, I've come. Here's what you wanted.
(In the yellow inland no rain but the same lightning,
And it lights a forest.) He leads her into the barn because there are people in the house.
In the north the oil-tanks
Catch from the first, the ring-bound molecules splitting, the atoms dancing apart, marrying the air.
The marriage-bound thighs opening, on the stiff white straw, the nerves of fire, the ganglia like stars.
Don't you see any vision Onorio Vasquez? " No, for the topazes
Have dulled out of his head, he soars on two nails,
Dead hawk over the coast. O little brother
Julio, if you could drive nails through my hands.
I'd stand against the door: through the middle of the palms:
And take the hawk's place, you could throw knives at me.
I'd give you my saddle and the big bridle, Julio,
With the bit that rings and rings when the horse twirls it. "
He smiles. " You'd see the lights flicker in my hair. "
He smiles craftily. " You'd live long and be rich,
And nobody could beat you in running or riding. "
He chatters his teeth. " It is necessary for someone to be fastened with nails.
And Jew-beak died in the night. Jew-beak is dead. "
By the hawk perch stones; the hawks and the gulls are never breakers of solitude.
When the animals Christ is rumored to have died for drew in,
The land thickening, drew in about me, I planted trees eastward, and the ocean
Secured the west with the quietness of thunder. I was quiet.
Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.
No peace but many companions; the hateful-eyed
And human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them.
But why should I make fables again? There are many
Tellers of tales to delight women and the people.
I have no vocation. The old rock under the house, the hills with their hard roots and the ocean hearted
With sacred quietness from here to Asia
Make me ashamed to speak of the active little bodies, the coupling bodies, the misty brainfuls
Of perplexed passion. Humanity is needless.
I said " Humanity is the start of the race, the gate to break away from, the coal to kindle,
The blind mask crying to be slit with eye-holes. "
Well now it is done, the mask slit, the rag burnt, the starting-post left behind: but not in a fable.
Culture's outlived, art's root-cut, discovery's
The way to walk in. Only remains to invent the language to tell it.
Match-ends of burnt experience
Human enough to be understood,
Scraps and metaphors will serve. The wine was a little too strong for the new wine-skins ...
Come storm, kind storm.
Summer and the days of tired gold
And bitter blue are more ruinous.
The leprous grass, the sick forest,
The sea like a whore's eyes,
And the noise of the sun,
The yellow dog barking in the blue pasture,
Snapping sidewise.
When I remembered old rains,
Running clouds and the iron wind, then the trees trembled.
I was calling one of the great dancers
Who wander down from the Aleutian rocks and the open Pacific
Pivoting countersunwise, celebrating power with the whirl of a dance, sloping to the mainland.
I watched his feet waken the water
And the ocean break in foam beyond Lobos;
The iron wind struck from the hills.
You are tired and corrupt,
You kept the beast under till the fountain's poisoned,
He drips with mange and stinks through the oubliette window.
The promise-breaker war killed whom it freed
And none living's the cleaner. Yet storm comes, the lions hunt
In the nights striped with lightning. It will come: feed on peace
While the crust holds: to each of you at length a little
Desolation: a pinch of lust or a drop of terror:
Then the lions hunt in the brain of the dying: storm is good, storm is good, good creature,
Kind violence, throbbing throat aches with pity.
Onorio Vasquez,
Young seer of visions who lives with his six brothers
On the breast of Palo Corona mountain looking northward,
Watches his brother Vidal and Julio the youngest
Play with a hawk they shot from the mountain cloud,
The wing broken. They crucified the creature,
A nail in the broken wing on the barn wall
Between the pink splinters of bone and a nail in the other.
They prod his breast with a wand, no sponge of vinegar,
" Fly down, Jew-beak. " The wind streams down the mountain,
The river of cloud streams over: Onorio Vasquez
Never sees anything to the point. What he sees:
The ocean like sleek gray stone perfectly jointed
To the heads and bays, a woman walking upon it,
The curling scud of the storm around her ankles,
Naked and strong, her thighs the height of the mountain, walking and weeping.
The shadow of hair under the belly, the jutting breasts like hills, the face in the hands and the hair
Streaming north. " Why are you sad, our lady? " " I had only one son.
The strange lover never breaks the window-latches again
When Joseph's at synagogue. "
Orange eyes, tired and fierce.
They're casting knives at you now, but clumsily, the knives
Quiver in the wood, stern eyes the storm deepens.
Don't wince, topaz eyes.
The wind wearies toward evening,
Old Vasquez sends his boys to burn the high pastures
Against the rain: see the autumn fires on the mountain, creeping red lakes and crescents
Up the black slope in the slide of the year: that's Vasquez and his boys burning the mountain. The high wind
Holds, the low dies, the black curtain flies north.
Myrtle Cartwright
Locked the windows but forgot the door, it's a lonely canyon
When the waves flap in the creek-mouth. Andrew's driving
The calves to Monterey, he trusts her, he doesn't know
How all her flesh burned with lascivious desire
Last year, but she remembered her mother and prayed
And God quenched it. Prayer works all right: three times
Rod Stewart came down to see her, he might have been wood
For all she cared. She suffers with constipation,
Tired days and smothering dreams, she's young, life's cheerless,
God sent a little sickness to keep her decent
Since the great prayer. What's that in the west, thunder?
The sea rumbles like thunder but the wind's died down,
Soon it should rain.
Myrtle Cartwright
Could sleep if her heart would quit moving the bed-clothes;
The lighthouse-keeper's daughter little Faith Heriot
Says " Father the cow's got loose, I must go out
With the storm coming and bring her into the stable.
What would mother do without milk in the morning? "
(Clearly Point Pinos Light: stands back from the sea
Among the rolling dunes cupped with old pasture.
Nobody'd keep a cow on the rock at Point Sur.)
This girl never goes near the cowshed but wanders
Into the dunes, the long beam of the light
Swims over and over her head in the high darkness,
The spray of the storm strains through the beam but Faith
Crouches out of the wind in a hollow of the sand
And hears the sea, she rolls on her back in the clear sand
Shuddering, and feels the light lie thwart her hot body
And the sand trickle into the burning places.
Comes pale to the house: " Ah Bossy led me a chase,
Led me a chase. " The lighthouse-keeper believes in hell,
His daughter's wild for a lover, his wife sickening toward cancer,
The long yellow beam wheels over the wild sea and the strain
Gathers in the air.
O crucified
Wings, orange eyes, open?
Always the strain, the straining flesh, who feels what God feels
Knows the straining flesh, the aching desires,
The enormous water straining its bounds, the electric
Strain in the cloud, the strain of the oil in the oil-tanks
At Monterey aching to burn, the strain of the spinning
Demons that make an atom, straining to fly asunder;
Straining to rest at the center,
The strain in the skull, blind strains, force and counterforce,
Nothing prevails ...
Oh in storm: storm's kind, kind violence,
When the swollen cloud ached — suddenly
Her charge and agony condensed, slip, the thick dark
Whelps lightning; the air breaks, the twin birth rain falls globed
From the released blackness high up in the air
Ringing like a bell for deliverance.
Many-folded hills
Mouth the black voice that follows the white eye
Opening, universal white eye widening and shut. Myrtle Cartwright's
One of those whom thunder shakes with terror: head covered
Against the flashes: " If it should find me and kill me
What's life been worth? Nothing, nothing, nothing, death's horrible, "
She hears it like a truck driven jolting through heaven
Rumble to the north. " And if I die old:
Nothing, nothing. "
Vasquez' boys have gone home.
Deep after midnight the wind rises, turns iron again,
From east of south, it grinds the heads of the hills, the dunes move in the dark at Point Pinos, the sandstone
Lighthouse at Point Sur on the top of the rock is like an axhead held against a grindstone.
The high redwoods have quit roaring to scream. Oaks go down on the mountain. At Vasquez place in the yellow
Pallor of dawn the roof of the barn's lifting, his sons cast ropes over the timbers. The crucified
Snaps his beak at them. He flies on two nails.
Great eyes, lived all night?
Onorio should have held the rope but it slid through his fingers. Onorio Vasquez
Never sees anything to the point. What he sees:
The planted eucalyptuses bent double
All in a row, praying north, " Why everything's praying
And running northward, old hawk anchored with nails
You see that everything goes north like a river.
On a cliff in the north
Stands the strange lover, shines and calls. "
In the morning
The inexhaustible clouds flying up from the south
Stream rain, the gullies of the hills grow alive, the creeks flood, the summer sand-bars
Burst from their mouths, from every sea-mouth wedges of yellow, yellow tongues. Myrtle Cartwright
Hears the steep cataracts slacken, and then thunder
Pushes the house-walls. " Hear me God, death's not dreadful.
You heard before when I prayed. Now, " she whispers,
" I'll make the bargain, " thunder leans on the house-walls, " life's no value
Like this, I'm going to Stewart's, I can't live empty.
Now Andrew can't come home for every canyon
Vomits its bridge, judgment is yours only,
Death's in your hands. " She opens the door on the streaming
Canyon-side, the desperate wind: the dark wet oak-leaves
All in a moment each leaf a distinct life
Reflect the sharp flash over them: Myrtle Cartwright
Feels the sword plunge: no touch: runs tottering up hill
Through the black voice.
Black pool of oil hidden in the oil-tank
In Monterey felt the sword plunge: touched: the wild heat
Went mad where a little air was, metal curled back,
Fire leaped at the outlet. " Immense ages
We lay under rock, our lust hoarded,
The ache of ignorant desire, the enormous pressure,
The enormous patience, the strain, strain, the strain
Lightened we lay in a steel shell ... what God kept for us:
Roaring marriage. "
Myrtle Cartwright wins up hill through the oak-scrub
And through the rain, the wind at the summit
Knocks her breasts and her mouth, she crouches in the mud,
Feels herself four-foot like a beast and the lightning
Will come from behind and cover her, the wolf of white fire,
Force the cold flesh, cling with his fore-paws. " Oh, death's
What I was after. " She runs on the road northward, the wind behind her,
The lightnings like white doves hovering her head; harmless as pigeons, through great bars of black noise.
She lifts her wet arms. " Come doves. "
The oil-tank boils with joy in the north, one among ten, one tank
Burns, the nine others wait, feel warmth, dim change of patience. This one roars with fulfilled desire,
The ring-bound molecules splitting, the atoms dancing apart, marrying the air.
Myrtle Cartwright
Knocks on her door: " Oh, I've come. Here's what you wanted.
(In the yellow inland no rain but the same lightning,
And it lights a forest.) He leads her into the barn because there are people in the house.
In the north the oil-tanks
Catch from the first, the ring-bound molecules splitting, the atoms dancing apart, marrying the air.
The marriage-bound thighs opening, on the stiff white straw, the nerves of fire, the ganglia like stars.
Don't you see any vision Onorio Vasquez? " No, for the topazes
Have dulled out of his head, he soars on two nails,
Dead hawk over the coast. O little brother
Julio, if you could drive nails through my hands.
I'd stand against the door: through the middle of the palms:
And take the hawk's place, you could throw knives at me.
I'd give you my saddle and the big bridle, Julio,
With the bit that rings and rings when the horse twirls it. "
He smiles. " You'd see the lights flicker in my hair. "
He smiles craftily. " You'd live long and be rich,
And nobody could beat you in running or riding. "
He chatters his teeth. " It is necessary for someone to be fastened with nails.
And Jew-beak died in the night. Jew-beak is dead. "
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