West Wind Read Free Page B

and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant's body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire! Get away from me. Come closer.
4
    But how did you come burning down like a
wild needle, knowing
just where my heart was?
5
    There are night birds, in the garden below us, singing.
Oh, listen!
For a moment I thought it was
our own bodies.
6
    When the sun goes down
the roses
fling off their red dresses
and put on their black dresses
    the wind is coming
over the sandy streets
of the town called moonlight
    with his long arms
with his silver mouth
his hands
    humorous at first
then serious
then crazy
    touching their faces their dark petals
until they begin rising and falling:
the honeyed seizures.
    All day they have been busy being roses
gazing responsible over the sand
into the sky into the blue ocean
    so now why not
a little comfort
a little rippling pleasure.
    ***
    You there, puddled in lamplight at your midnight desk—
you there, rewriting nature
so anyone can understand it—
    what will you say about the roses—
their sighing, their tossing—
and the want of the heart,
    and the trill of the heart,
and the burning mouth
of the wind?
7
    We see Bill only occasionally, when we stop by the antique shop that's on the main hot highway to Charlottesville. Usually he's alone—his wife is dead—but sometimes his son will be with him, or idling just outside in the yard. Once M. bought a small glass ship from the boy, it had chips of colored glass for sails and cost two dollars, the boy was greatly pleased.
    Today Bill tells us—for a mockingbird has begun to sing— how a friend came during the summer and filled a bowl with fruit from the cherry tree. Then, leaving the bowl on the stoop, he went inside to sit with Bill at the kitchen table. Together Bill and his friend watched the mockingbird come to the bowl, take the cherries one by one, fly back across the yard and drop them under the branches of the tree. When the bowl was empty the bird settled again in the leaves and began to sing vigorously.
    At the back of the shop and here and there on the dusty shelves are piled the useless broken things one couldn't ever sell—bits of rusty metal, and odd pieces of china, a cup or a plate with a fraction of its design still clear: a garden, or a span of country bridge leading from one happiness or another, or part of a house. Once Bill told us, almost shyly, how much the boy is coming to resemble his mother. Through the open window we can hear the mockingbird, still young, still lucky, wild beak kissing and chuckling as it flutters and struts along the avenue of song.
8
    The young, tall English poet—soon to die, soon to sail on his small boat into the blue haze and then the storm and then under the gray waves' spinning threshold—went over to Pisa to meet a friend; met him; spent with him a sunny afternoon. I love this poet, which means nothing here or there, but is like a garden in my heart. So my love is a gift to myself. And I think of him, on that July afternoon in Pisa, while his friend Hunt told him stories pithy and humorous, of their friends in England, so that he began to laugh, so that his tall, lean body shook, and his long legs couldn't hold him, and he had to lean up against the building, seized with laughter, abundant and unstoppable; and so he leaned in the wild sun, against the stones of the building, with the tears flying from his eyes—full of foolishness, howling, hanging on to the stones, crawling with laughter, clasping his own body as it began to fly apart in the nonsense, the sweetness, the intelligence, the bright happiness falling, like