women

1

Many animals that our fathers killed in America
Had quick eyes.
They stared about wildly,
When the moon went dark.
The new moon falls into the freight yards
Of cities in the south,
But the loss of the moon to the dark hands of Chicago
Does not matter to the deer
In this northern field.


2

What is that tall woman doing
There, in the trees?
I can hear rabbits and mourning dovees whispering together
In the dark grass, there
Under the trees.


3

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels
With her meagre pale demoralized daughter.
Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun
And saying that when she was first married
She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.
(It is empty now, the roof has fallen
But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods
Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing;
The place is now more solitary than ever before.)
"When I was nursing my second baby

Inside a snowy blanket which put the trees to sleep,
I heard a fawn.
Out past the window's ice coat in the morning, I
found a sleeping fawn.

There are men in yellow kitchens watching hands of
brown-eyed women
while men in orange jackets dream in secret, of
capturing a fawn.

When I was younger I was taught, but have forgotten,
sweet timidity.
When I am older I will learn, by necessity, the
light-footedness of fawns.

Someone left a lily on my doorstep, eggshell white

The long lines of diesels
groan toward evening
carrying off the breath
of the living.
The face of your house
is black,
it is your face, black
and fire bombed
in the first street wars,
a black tooth planted in the earth
of Michigan
and bearing nothing,
and the earth is black,
sick on used oils.

Did you look for me in that house
behind the sofa
where I had to be?
in the basement where the shirts
yellowed on hangers?
in the bedroom

one thing then another

one story then another conversation
always interrupted by another conversation

I want the words to barely glaze the page
gone the moment of their utterance

as we are

I want

in back of this a story a man with his face with his name
exile emigrant refugee displaced person outsider offcomerdon stranger suspect
the terms interchangeable politically undesireable
a story of a man who leaves his country

and the woman he loves

and the story of why

Many times upon a time
There was a man who loved a woman.
Many times upon a time
There was a woman who loved a man.
Many times upon a time
There was a man and there was a woman
Who did not love the ones who loved them.

Once upon a time
Perhaps only once
A man and a woman who loved each other.

You've heard of King Henry II
And the story of how he got fond
Of one of his customer's daughters,
A lass called the " Fair Rosamond."

'Twere a lovely romance while it lasted,
The course of true love ran serene,
Till some nosey-parkering varlet
Started carrying tales to the Queen.

The Queen were at first incred-u-lous.
She said "What a tale to invent!"
The King would not stoop to such baseness
At any rate, not during Lent."

But one morning she picked up a doublet

THE world was made when a man was born,
He must taste for himself the forbidden springs;
He can never take warning from old-fashion'd things;
He must fight as a boy, he must drink as a youth,
Of the friend of his soul; he must laugh to scorn
The hints of deceit in a woman's eyes--
They are clear as the wells of Paradise.

And so he goes on till the world grows old,
Till his toung has grown cautious, his heart has grown cold,
Till the smile leaves his mouth, till the ring leaves his laugh,

A chaplain in the army,
A chaplain in the prisons,
An exhorter in Spoon River,
Drunk with divinity, Spoon River --
Yet bringing poor Eliza Johnson to shame,
And myself to scorn and wretchedness.
But why will you never see that love of women,
And even love of wine,
Are the stimulants by which the soul, hungering for divinity,
Reaches the ecstatic vision
And sees the celestial outposts?
Only after many trials for strength,
Only when all stimulants fail,
Does the aspiring soul
By its own sheer power

The Greatest Writer of to-day
(With Maupassant I almost set him)
Said to me in a weary way,
The last occasion that I met him:
"Old chap, this world is more and more
Becoming bourgeois, blasé, blousy:
Thank God I've lived so long before
It got so definitely lousy."
II
Said I: "Old chap, I don't agree.
Why should one so dispraise the present?
For gainful guys like you and me,
It still can be extremely pleasant.
Have we not Women, Wine and Song -
A gleeful trio to my thinking;