All of Us Read Free

chicken.” The moment seems unsurvivable, the collapse of a shared universe rendered unflinchingly. In the context of the entire poem we experience it action by action, as a series of spiritually irretrievable moments which cut the partners off from each other and obliterate all hope for the regeneration of the marriage:
                   We press our lips to the enameled rim of the cups
                   and know this grease that floats
                   over the coffee will one day stop our hearts.
                   · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
                   I coolly crack the egg of a fine Leghorn chicken.
                   Your eyes film. You turn from me and look across
                   the rooftops at the sea. Even the flies are still.
                   I crack the other egg.
                   Surely we have diminished one another.
    The word “surely” here is a cliff and an avalanche, accompanied by the steel-eyed gaze and barely containable assessment of the speaker.
    The poems, throughout, are keenly attentive to life as it is being lived, but from 1979 on they also make retrospective safaris into the jungle ofold harms, renegotiated from safer, saner ground. Ray had gradually absorbed some attitudes I held toward time in poetry—for one thing, that it was more than lived time, and might therefore enlarge one’s spiritual reach. My feeling that all time—past, present and future—exists within reach at the moment the poem is being written was helpful to him. He allowed himself to re-enter older work with the present moment as definitive and regenerative.
    From early to late, the poems
are
beautifully clear, and this clarity, like the sweet clang of spring water to the mouth, needs no apology. Time spent reading Ray’s poems becomes quickly fruitful, for the poems give themselves as easily and unselfconsciously as breath. Who wouldn’t be disarmed by poetry which requires so much less of us than it unstintingly gives?
    I am aware of those honed minds that find Ray’s transparency somehow an insult to intelligence. They would have applied an editor like a tourniquet. I might have served as such, had I thought it true to his gift. I didn’t. If Ray hadn’t given and published in the ample way he did, I believe we would not receive his guileless offering with the same credulity and gratitude. Certainly poems like “My Boat”, “The Old Days”, “Woolworth’s, 1954”, “My Car”, “Earwigs”, “You Don’t Know What Love Is”, “Happiness”, and any number of poems I love might have been omitted. Overreach was natural and necessary to him, and to fault him for it would be like spanking a cat for swallowing the goldfish.
    The narrative directness of his poems, as well as the precision of phrase and image, amplifies access until we push through into yet another chamber of astonishing, unadorned truth. Suddenly, like deer caught at night in headlights, blind mystery stares back at us with equal force. We are pinioned—“flimsy as / balsa wood” (“Balsa Wood”)—or told “the mind can’t sleep, can only lie awake and / gorge” (“Winter Insomnia”), or birds arrive as omens, “the clacking of their bills / like iron on iron” (“The News Carried to Macedonia”). We glimpse the extravagant yet matter-of-fact sensuality of the world around us: “lean haunches” of deer “flicker / under an assault of white butterflies” (“Rhodes”). Wonder in everyday forms appears in a shirt on a clothes-line filling out to “near human shape” (“Louise”) or a hand reaches through to touch the sleeve of a suit inside a garment bag, a burial suit, and this “reaching through” (“Another Mystery”) becomes an entrance to another world which is also the same world.
    Many of the later poems have the daybook quality