Houseboat Days: Poems Read Free Page B

caused us to start caring?
    In the beginning was only sedge, a field of water
    Wrinkled by the wind. Slowly
    The trees increased the novelty of always being alone,
    The rest began to be sketched in, and then … silence,
    Or blankness, for a number of years. Could one return
    To the idea of nature summed up in these pastoral images?
    Yet the present has done its work of building
    A rampart against the past, not a rampart,
    A barbed-wire fence. So now we know
    What occupations to stick to (scrimshaw, spinning tall tales)
    By the way the songs deepen the color of the shadow
    Impregnating your hobby as you bend over it,
    Squinting. I could make a list
    Of each one of my possessions and the direction it
    Pointed in, how much each thing cost, how much for wood, string, colored ink, etc.
    The song makes no mention of directions.
    At most it twists the longitude lines overhead
    Like twigs to form a crude shelter. (The ship
    Hasn’t arrived, it was only a dream. It’s somewhere near
    Cape Horn, despite all the efforts of Boreas to puff out
    Those drooping sails.) The idea of great distance
    Is permitted, even implicit in the slow dripping
    Of a lute. How to get out?
    This giant will never let us out unless we blind him.
    And that’s how, one day, I got home.
    Don’t be shocked that the old walls
    Hang in rags now, that the rainbow has hardened
    Into a permanent late afternoon that elicits too-long
    Shadows and indiscretions from the bottom
    Of the soul. Such simple things,
    And we make of them something so complex it defeats us,
    Almost. Why can’t everything be simple again,
    Like the first words of the first song as they occurred
    To one who, rapt, wrote them down and later sang them:
    “Only danger deflects
    The arrow from the center of the persimmon disc,
    Its final resting place. And should you be addressing yourself
    To danger? When it takes the form of bleachers
    Sparsely occupied by an audience which has
    Already witnessed the events of which you write,
    Tellingly, in your log? Properly acknowledged
    It will dissipate like the pale pink and blue handkerchiefs
    That vanished centuries ago into the blue dome
    That surrounds us, but which are, some maintain, still here.”

Crazy Weather
    It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:
    Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
    Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
    People have been making a garment out of it,
    Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
    At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
    To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
    Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
    You are wearing a text. The lines
    Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
    Any other literature than this poetry of mud
    And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
    Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
    A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
    Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
    Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
    Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know.

On the Towpath
    At the sign “Fred Muffin’s Antiques” they turned off the road into a narrow lane lined with shabby houses.
    If the thirst would subside just for awhile
    It would be a little bit, enough.
    This has happened.
    The insipid chiming of the seconds
    Has given way to an arc of silence
    So old it had never ceased to exist
    On the roofs, of buildings, in the sky.
    The ground is tentative.
    The pygmies and jacaranda that were here yesterday
    Are back today, only less so.
    It is a barrier of fact
    Shielding the sky from the earth.
    On the earth a many-colored tower of longing rises.
    There are many ads (to help pay for all this).
    Something interesting is happening on every landing.
    Ladies of the Second Empire gotten up as characters from Perrault:
    Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty,
    Are silhouetted against the stained-glass windows.
    A white figure runs to the