The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Read online

  Ocean rolls resoundingly on and snorts up

  foam over beaches.

  • III •

  Five Stanzas to Thoreau

  Yet one more abandoned the heavy city’s

  ring of greedy stones. And the water, salt and

  crystal, closes over the heads of all who

  truly seek refuge.

  •

  Silence slowly spiraling up has risen

  here from earth’s recesses to put down roots and

  grow and with its burgeoning crown to shade his

  sun-heated doorstep.

  •

  Kicks a mushroom thoughtlessly. Thunderclouds are

  piling on the skyline. Like copper trumpets

  crooked roots of trees are resounding, foliage

  scatters in terror.

  •

  Autumn’s headlong flight is his weightless mantle,

  flapping till again from the frost and ashes

  peaceful days have come in their flocks and bathe their

  claws in the wellspring.

  •

  Disbelief will meet him who saw a geyser

  and escaped from wells filled with stones, like Thoreau

  disappearing deep in his inner greenness

  artful and hopeful.

  Gogol

  The jacket threadbare as a wolf pack.

  The face like a marble slab.

  Sitting in the circle of his letters in the grove that rustles

  with scorn and error,

  the heart blowing like a scrap of paper through the inhospitable

  passageways.

  The sunset is now creeping like a fox over this country,

  igniting the grass in a mere moment.

  Space is full of horns and hooves and underneath

  the barouche glides like a shadow between my father’s

  lit courtyards.

  St. Petersburg on the same latitude as annihilation

  (did you see the beauty in the leaning tower)

  and around the ice-bound tenements floating like a jellyfish

  the poor man in his cloak.

  And here, enveloped in fasts, is the man who before was surrounded by the herds of laughter,

  but these have long since taken themselves to tracts far above the tree line.

  Men’s unsteady tables.

  Look outside, see how darkness burns hard a whole galaxy of souls.

  Rise up then on your chariot of fire and leave the country!

  Sailor’s Yarn

  There are bare winter days when the sea is kin

  to mountain country, crouching in grey plumage,

  a brief minute blue, long hours with waves like pale

  lynxes vainly seeking hold in the beach gravel.

  On such a day wrecks might come from the sea searching

  for their owners, settling in the town’s din, and drowned

  crews blow landward, thinner than pipe smoke.

  (The real lynxes are in the north, with sharpened claws

  and dreaming eyes. In the north, where day

  lives in a mine both day and night.

  Where the sole survivor may sit

  at the borealis stove and listen

  to the music of those frozen to death.)

  Strophe and Counter-Strophe

  The outermost circle belongs to myth. There the helmsman sinks upright

  among glittering fish-backs.

  How far from us! When day

  stands in a sultry windless unrest—

  as the Congo’s green shadow holds

  the blue men in its vapor—

  when all this driftwood on the heart’s sluggish

  coiling current

  piles up.

  Sudden change: in under the repose of the constellations

  the tethered ones glide.

  Stern high, in a hopeless

  position, the hull of a dream, black

  against the coastline’s pink. Abandoned

  the year’s plunge, quick

  and soundless—as the sledge-shadow, doglike, big—

  travels over snow,

  reaches the wood.

  Agitated Meditation

  A storm drives the mill sails wildly round

  in the night’s darkness, grinding nothing. —You

  are kept awake by the same laws.

  The grey shark belly is your weak lamp.

  Shapeless memories sink to the sea’s depths

  and harden there to strange columns. —Green

  with algae is your crutch. A man

  who takes to the seas comes back stiffened.

  The Stones

  The stones we threw I hear

  fall, glass-clear through the years. In the valley

  the confused actions of the moment

  fly screeching from

  treetop to treetop, become silent

  in thinner air than the present’s, glide

  like swallows from hilltop

  to hilltop until they’ve

  reached the furthest plateaus

  along the frontier of being. There all

  our deeds fall

  glass-clear

  with nowhere to fall to

  except ourselves.

  Context

  Look at the grey tree. The sky has run

  through its fibers down in the earth—

  only a shrunk cloud is left when

  the earth has drunk. Stolen space

  is twisted in pleats, twined

  to greenery. —The brief moments

  of freedom rise in us, whirl

  through the Parcae and further.

  Morning Approach

  The black-backed gull, the sun-captain, holds his course.

  Beneath him is the water.

  The world is still sleeping like a

  multicolored stone in the water.

  Undeciphered day. Days—

  like Aztec hieroglyphs.

  The music. And I stand trapped

  in its Gobelin weave with

  raised arms—like a figure

  out of folk art.

  There Is Peace in the Surging Prow

  On a winter morning you feel how this earth

  plunges ahead. Against the house walls

  an air current smacks

  out of hiding.

  Surrounded by movement: the tent of calm.

  And the secret helm in the migrating flock.

  Out of the winter gloom

  a tremolo rises

  from hidden instruments. It is like standing

  under summer’s high lime tree with the din

  of ten thousand

  insect wings above your head.

  Midnight Turning Point

  The wood ant watches silently, looks into

  nothing. And nothing’s heard but drips from dim

  leafage and the night’s murmuring deep in

  summer’s canyon.

  The spruce stands like the hand of a clock,

  spiked. The ant glows in the hill’s shadow.

  Bird cry! And at last. The cloud-packs slowly

  begin to roll.

  • IV •

  Song

  The gathering of white birds grew: gulls

  dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships

  but stained by vapors from forbidden shores.

  Alarm! Alarm! around refuse from a cargo boat.

  They crowded in and formed an ensign-staff

  that signaled “Booty here.”

  And gulls careered across watery wastes

  with blue acres gliding in the foam.

  Athwart, a phosphorescent pathway to the sun.

  But Väinämöinen travels in his past

  on oceans glittering in ancient light.

  He rides. The horse’s hooves are never wet.

  Behind: the forest of his songs is green.

  The oak whose leap’s a thousand years long.

  The migh
ty windmill turned by birdsong.

  And every tree a prisoner in its soughing.

  With giant cones glinting in the moonlight

  when the distant pine glows like a beacon.

  Then the Other rises with his spell

  and the arrow, seeing far and wide, flees,

  the feather singing like a flight of birds.

  A dead second when the horse abruptly

  stiffens, breaks across the waterline

  like a blue cloud beneath the thunder’s antenna.

  And Väinämöinen plunges heavy in the sea

  (a jumping-sheet the compass points hold tight).

  Alarm! Alarm! among the gulls around his fall!

  Like one bewitched, without anxiety,

  standing at the center of the picture

  of his joy, eleven corn sheaves bulging.

  Reliance—an alp-top humming in the ether

  three thousand meters up where the clouds sail

  races. The puffed basking shark wallows

  guffawing soundlessly beneath the sea.

  (Death and renewal when the wave arrives.)

  And peacefully the breezes cycle through the leaves.

  On the horizon thunder rumbles dully

  (as the herd of buffalo flees in its dust).

  The shadow of a fist clenches in the tree

  and strikes down him who stands bewitched

  in his joyous picture where the evening sky

  seems to glow behind the wild boar’s mask of clouds.

  His double, envious, arranges

  a secret rendezvous with his woman.

  And the shadow gathers and becomes a tidal wave

  a tidal wave with riding sea gulls darkened.

  And the port-side heart sizzles in a breaker.

  Death and renewal when the wave arrives.

  The gathering of white birds grew: gulls

  dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships

  but stained by vapors from forbidden shores.

  The herring gull: a harpoon with a velvet back.

  In closeup like a snowed-in hull

  with hidden pulses glittering in rhythm.

  His flier’s nerves in balance. He soars.

  Footless hanging in the wind he dreams

  his hunter’s dream with his beak’s sharp shot.

  He plunges to the surface, full-blossomed greed,

  crams and jerks himself around his booty

  as if he were a stocking. And then he rises like a spirit.

  (Energies—their context is renewal,

  more enigmatic than the eel’s migrations.

  A tree, invisible, in bloom. And as

  the grey seal in its underwater sleep

  rises to the surface, takes a breath,

  and dives—still asleep—to the seabed

  so now the Sleeper in me secretly

  has joined with that and has returned while I

  stood staring fixedly at something else.)

  And the diesel engine’s throbbing in the flock

  past the dark skerry, a cleft of birds

  where hunger blossomed with stretched maw.

  At nightfall they could still be heard:

  an abortive music like that from

  the orchestra pit before the play begins.

  But on his ancient sea Väinämöinen drifted

  shaken in the squall’s mitt or supine

  in the mirror-world of calms where the birds

  were magnified. And from a stray seed, far

  from land at the sea’s edge growing

  out of waves, out of a fogbank it sprang:

  a mighty tree with scaly trunk, and leaves

  quite transparent and behind them

  the filled white sails of distant suns

  glided on in trance. And now the eagle rises.

  • V •

  Elegy

  At the outset. Like a fallen dragon

  in some mist- and vapor-shrouded swamp,

  our spruce-clad coastland lies. Far out there:

  two steamers crying from a dream

  in the fog. This is the lower world.

  Motionless woods, motionless surface

  and the orchid’s hand that reaches from the soil.

  On the other side, beyond these straits

  but hanging in the same reflection: the Ship,

  like the cloud hanging weightless in its space.

  And the water around its prow is motionless,

  becalmed. And yet—a storm is up!

  and the steamer smoke blows level—the sun

  flickers there in its grip—and the gale

  is hard against the face of him who boards.

  To make one’s way up the port side of Death.

  A sudden draft, the curtain flutters.

  Silence ringing, an alarm clock.

  A sudden draft, the curtain flutters.

  Until a distant door is heard closing

  far off in another year.

  •

  O field as grey as the buried bog-man’s cloak.

  And island floating darkly in the fog.

  It’s quiet, as when the radar turns

  and turns its arc in hopelessness.

  There’s a crossroads in a moment.

  Music of the distances converges.

  All grown together in a leafy tree.

  Vanished cities glitter in its branches.

  From everywhere and nowhere a song

  like crickets in the August dark. Embedded

  like a wood beetle, he sleeps here in the night,

  the peat bog’s murdered traveler. The sap compels

  his thoughts up to the stars. And deep

  in the mountain: here’s the cave of bats.

  Here hang the years, the deeds, densely.

  Here they sleep with folded wings.

  One day they’ll flutter out. A throng!

  (From a distance, smoke from the cave mouth.)

  But still their summer-winter sleep prevails.

  A murmuring of distant waters. In the dark tree

  a leaf that turns.

  •

  One summer morning a harrow catches

  in dead bones and rags of clothing. —He

  lay there after the peat bog was drained

  and now stands up and goes his way in light.

  In every parish eddies golden seed

  around ancient guilt. The armored skull

  in the plowed field. A wanderer en route

  and the mountain keeps an eye on him.

  In every parish the marksman’s rifle hums

  at midnight when the wings unfold

  and the past expands in its collapse

  and darker than the heart’s meteorite.

  An absence of spirit makes the writing greedy.

  A flag begins to smack. The wings

  unfold around the spoils. This proud journey!

  where the albatross ages to a cloud

  in Time’s jaws. And culture is a whaling

  station where the stranger walks

  among white gables, playing children, and

  still with each breath he takes he feels

  the murdered giant’s presence.

  •

  Soft black-cock crooning from the heavenly spheres.

  The music, guiltless in our shadow, like

  the fountain water rising among the wild beasts,

  deftly petrified around the playing jets.

  The bows disguised, a forest.

  The bows like rigging in a torrent—

  the cabin’s smashed beneath the torrent’s hooves—

  within us, balanced like a gyroscope, is joy.

  This evening the world’s calm is reflected

  when the bows rest on strings without being moved.

  Motionless in mist the forest trees

  and the water-tundra mirroring itself.

  Music’s voiceless half is here, like the scent
<
br />   of resin rising from lightning-damaged spruce.

  An underground summer for each of us.

  There at the crossroads a shadow breaks free

  and runs off to where the Bach trumpet points.

  Sudden confidence, by grace. To leave behind

  one’s self-disguise here on this shore

  where the wave breaks and slides away, breaks

  and slides away.

  Epilogue

  December. Sweden is a beached

  unrigged ship. Against the twilight sky

  its masts are sharp. And twilight lasts

  longer than day—the road here is stony:

  not till midday does the light arrive

  and winter’s coliseum rise

  lit by unreal clouds. At once

  the white smoke rises, coiling from

  the villages. The clouds are high on high.

  The sea snuffles at the tree-of-heaven’s roots

  distracted, as if listening to something else.

  (Over the dark side of the soul

  there flies a bird, wakening

  the sleepers with its cries. The refractor

  turns, catches in another time,

  and it is summer: mountains bellow, bulged

  with light and the stream raises the sun’s glitter

  in transparent hand . . . All then gone

  as when a film spills out of a projector.)

  Now the evening star burns through the cloud.

  Houses, trees, and fences are enlarged, grow

  in the soundless avalanche of darkness.

  And beneath the star more and more develops

  of the other, hidden landscape, that which lives

  the life of contours on the night’s x-ray.

  A shadow pulls its sledge between the houses.

  They are waiting.

  Six o’clock—the wind

  gallops thunderously along the village street,

  in darkness, like a troop of horsemen. How

  the black turmoil resounds and echoes!

  The houses trapped in a dance of immobility,

  the din like that of dreams. Gust upon gust

  staggers over the bay away

  to the open sea that tosses in the dark.

  In space the stars signal desperately.