Poems, 1957–1967

FALSE YOUTH: TWO SEASONS

FALSE YOUTH: TWO SEASONS i I have had my time dressed up as something else, Have thrown time off my track by my disguise. This can happen when one puts on a hunter's cap, An unearned cowboy hat a buckskin coat or something From outer space, that a child you have got has got For Christmas. It is oddest and best in the uniform Of your country long laid in boxes and now let out To hold the self-betrayed form in the intolerant shape Of its youth. I have had my time doing such, Sitting with Phyllis Huntley as though I were my own Son surrounded by wisteria hearing mosquitoes without The irritation middle age puts on their wings : have sat By a big vine going round the rotten, imperial pillars Of southern Mississippi. All family sounds drew back Through the house in time to leave us hanging By rusty chains. In the dark, dressed up in my militant youth, I might have just come down from the black sky alive With an ancient war dead with twenty million twenty Years ago when my belt cried aloud for more holes And I soft-saluted every changing shape that saluted me, And many that did not: every tree pole every bush Of wisteria as I came down from the air toward some girl Or other. Decked out in something strange my country Dreamed up I have had my time in that swing, The double chair that moves at the edge of dark Where the years stand just out of range of houselight , their hands folded at their fat waists, respectful As figures at a funeral. And from out of the air an enormous Grin came down, to remake my face as I thought of children Of mine almost her age and a mosquito droned like an immortal Engine. I have had my time of moving back and forth With Phyllis Huntley and of the movement of her smallhand Inside mine, as she told me how she learned to work An electric computer in less than two afternoons of her job 290 At the air base. The uniform tightened as I sat Debating with a family man away from home. I would not listen To him, for what these boys want is to taste a little life Before they die: that is when their wings begin to shine Most brilliantly from their breasts into the darkness And the beery breath of a fierce boy demands of the fat man He's dying of more air more air through the tight belt Of time more life more now than when death was faced Less slowly more now than then more now. ii Through an ice storm in Nashville I took a student home, Sliding off the road twice or three times; for this She asked me in. She was a living-in-the-city Country girl who on her glazed porch broke off An icicle, and bit through its blank bone : brought me Into another life in the shining-skinned clapboard house Surrounded by a world where creatures could not stand, Where people broke hip after hip. At the door my feet Took hold, and at the fire I sat down with her blind Grandmother. All over the double room were things That would never freeze, but would have taken well To ice: long tassels hanging from lamps curtains Of beads a shawl on the mantel all endless things To touch untangle all things intended to be Inexhaustible to hands. She sat there, fondling What was in reach staring into the fire with me Never batting a lid. I talked to her easily eagerly Of my childhood my mother whistling in her heartsick bed My father grooming his gamecocks. She rocked, fingering The lace on the arm of the chair changing its pattern Like a game of chess. Before I left, she turned and raised Her hands, and asked me to bend down. An icicle stiffened In my stomach as she drew on my one lock of hair Feeling the individualrare strands not pulling any Out. I closed my eyes as she put her fingertips lightly On them and saw, behind sight something in me fire Swirl in a great shape like a fingerprint like none other In the history of the earth looping holding its wild lines Of human force. Her forefinger then her keen nail Falling 291 [3.138.174.95] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 08:32 GMT...