Collected Poems

A SECRET GRATITUDE

Only the feathers are heavy, and they drag The skeleton down now, but tomorrow at dawn Will float and rise up toward Canada. I breathe The waters poured out by snow hills That are gone. A thousand years ago, Last night, on other huge prairies, The Tartars of North China abandoned their rough-coated ponies For the wind to blister, and blundered themselves off. They groped in the snow for the shifting terraces of the moon. They chased one another's footprints, staggering, drunk On the fermented milk of lost mares. They ran up the stairs of snow towers that vanished. They huddled down between drifts, Crying with famine. Below me, already waterlogged, The old leaves and the bright wing sink down between The white hills of the south that loom now into shades, To the fallen. A SECRET GRATITUDE "Eugen Boissevain died in the autumn of 1949. I had wonderedalready, at the time of our visit, what would happen to Edna [Millay] if he should die first." (Edmund Wilson) I. She cleaned house, and then lay down long On the long stair. On one of those cold white wings That the strange fowl provide for us like one hillside of the sea, That cautery of snow that blinds us, Pitiless light, One winter afternoon NEW POEMS 183 Fair near the place where she sank down with one wing broken, Three friends and I were caught Stalk still in the light. Five of the lights. Why should they care for our eyes? Five deer stood there. They looked back, a good minute. They knew us, all right: Four chemical accidents of horror pausing Between one suicide or another On the passing wing Of an angel that cared no more for our biology, our pity, and our pain Than we care. Why should any mere multitude of the angels care To lay one blind white plume down On this outermost limit of something that is probably no more Than an aphid, An aphid which is one of the angels whose wings toss the black pears Of tears down on the secret shores Of the seas in the corner Of a poet's closed eye. Why should five deer Gaze back at us? They gazed back at us. Afraid, and yet they stood there, More alive than we four, in their terror, In their good time. We had a dog. We could have got other dogs. Two or three dogs could have taken turns running and dragging down Those fleet lights, whose tails must look asmysterious as the Stars in Los Angeles. We are men. It doesn't even satisfy us 184 To kill one another. We are a smear of obscenity On the lake whose only peace Is a hole where the moon Abandoned us, that poor Girl who can't leave us alone. If I were the moon I would shrink into a sand grain In the corner of the poet's eye, While there's still room. We are men. We are capable of anything. We could have killed every one of those deer. The very moon of lovers tore herself with the agony of a wounded tigress Out of our side. We can kill anything. We can kill our own bodies. Those deer on the hillside have no idea what in hell We are except murderers. They know that much, and don't think They don't. Man's heart is the rotten yolk of a blacksnake egg Corroding, as it is just born, in a pile of dead Horse dung. I have no use for the human creature. He subtly extracts pain awake in his own kind. I am born one, out of an accidental hump of chemistry. I have no use. 2. But We didn't set dogs on the deer, Even though we know, As well as you know, We could have got away with it, Because Who cares? NEW POEMS 185 3Boissevain , who was he? Was he human? I doubt it, From what I know Of men. Who was he, Hobbling with his dry eyes Along in the rain? I think he must have fallen down like the plumes of new snow, I think he must have fallen into the grass, I think he Must surely have grown around Her wings, gathering and being gathered, Leaf, string, anything she could use To build her still home of songs Within sound of water...