Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

Invocation

FROM Facing the Tree (1975) Invocation Dirt and stone, if I may know you as you know yourselves, if you do have sense ofyourselves, I walk upon and study you as my next brothers and sisters, in this only way I know how to think about you. I pick you up in my hands and run you slowly through myfingers, I feel so close to you, if only not to fear but to know and make you my kin, even if I must do it alone. I am resigned, if I must say it that way. Try as I might, I cannot think myself exactly that. I see us each in separateworlds and because I must join yours and graduallybecome as you, I want to know what home will be like there. If I could say that from you can be made men and women, how happy and relieved I'd be to know we have a sort of exchange program between us, in which we spring up out of the dust and are greeted with open arms to tell that all is well back there growing its fruits. And then to embrace, all of us together, and celebrate with drink and dancing and to see one into the soil with solemn benedictions on a current ofjoy, waving him farewell as he disintegratesto dust. I speak to you in pity for myself; speak to me and return the love I must have for you, since I must be buried one day in you and would go toward love again, as in life. Let us be reconciled to one another. Dirt and stone into which my flesh will turn, this much we have in common. As I cannot speak to my bones nor my blood nor my own flesh, why then must I speak? 81 What says I must speak if I am not answered? What then that I should speak or am I speaking at all, if my own flesh and bones cannot answer me, as if already they were partners of the stones and dirt? Reading the Headlines I have a burial ground in me where I place the bodies without fuss or emotion, hundreds of thousands at a glance. I stow them in and as it happens I am eating dinner. I continue to eat, feeding myself and the dead. I walk around in this burial ground, examining it with curiosity, find it dark but stroll with a sense of safety, my own place. I want to lie down in it, dissatisfied with it, true, but seeing no exit, I lie down to rest and dream. I am lost anyway, without horizon or recognizable features. It's just to walk on. At least it's not necessary to kill myself.I'll die of attrition of my energy to live. I know my direction and have companions, after all. My Enemies I know how I have learned to hate. I've turned on trees and animals and crushed the ant in my path. Many a time I've ignored the sun and the moon in my walk to keep my eyes turned down toward the dirt of the path or its concrete and often refused to wash my body of its sweat and oils. I saw no purpose in a tree growing or in the food set before me. I could see no commerce between men and me. Did the stars touch each other? Didthey reach out to give light when the light failed in another? Wasthe sun sympathetic?Didthe moon care? Did my feet warn me of the creatures beneath their soles as I walked? Who held me in such regard as to want to unburden me of my faults and let me live? It was a concert of divisiveness without anyparticular 82 | Poems of the 1970s ...