Poems, 1957–1967

THE ICE SKIN

THE ICE SKIN All things that go deep enough Into rain and cold Take on, before they break down, A shining in every part. The necks of slender trees Reel under it, too much crowned, Like princes dressing as kings, And the redwoods let sink their branches Like arms that try to hold buckets Filling slowly with diamonds Until a cannon goesoff Somewhere inside the still trunk And a limb breaks, just before midnight, Plunging houses into the darkness And hands into cupboards, all seeking Candles, and finding each other. There is this skin Always waiting in cold-enough air. I have seen aircraft, in war, Squatting on runways, Dazed with their own enclosed, Coming-forth, intensified color As though seen by a child in a poem. I have felt growing over Me in the heated death rooms Of uncles, the ice Skin, that which the dying Lose, and we others, In their thawing presence, take on. I have felt the heroic glaze Also, in hospital waiting Rooms : that masterly shining Helmets 157 And the slow weight that makes you sit Like an emperor, fallen, becoming His monument, with the stiff thorns Of fear upside down on the brow, An overturned kingdom: Through the window of ice I have stared at my son in his cage, Just born, just born. I touched the frost of my eyebrows To the cold he turned to Blindly, but sensing a thing. Neither glass nor the jagged Helm on my forehead would melt. My son now stands with his head At my shoulder. I Stand, stooping more, but the same, Not knowing whether I will break before I can feel, Before I can give up my powers, Or whether the ice light In my eyes will ever snap off Before I die. I am still, And my son, doing what he was taught, Listening hard for a buried cannon, Stands also, calm as glass. 158 ...