Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

Money and Grass

has left us as though we too had been possessed of a fever, and our minds now turning cool have revealed to us our arms enclosed about each other. Money and Grass i Tonight reality is in the rest I have found from murderingmyself racing through streets, my mind racing ahead, my body pounding after money—green as grass! No time to think ofgrass! No time to think of lying under a tree, watching people far off in a slow-motion drama towards each other. Tonight, I have stuffed wax into my ears to keep out the trucks and auto horns in the street. I listen to my blood ringing until it sounds likecrickets in a woods at night. I am quieted, listening to my own isolation, myself rooted in the compact, the quality of earth held in a full hand, the silkiness, the tiny workworms, the little stones and the rootbeerdeliciousness of the earth itself, brown, black or red for growing. I feel through my cricket-singing blood and rest my underlying constant affair 10 | Poems of the 1940s 2 with earth, with its trees that are tall and pregnant to express love, and the grass running with the wind: the happiness one must bring to love and the clumps of flower bushes the occasional monuments one must leave to love. I feel love only can be justice, and the earth grow it. I feel never to leave this perfect lover, and roll upon it with the abandonment of a lover on his mistress' body. I get up renewed in having released myself, the tiredness and tingling gone with it, and I am earth's offering again to wild horns and engines. The White Ceiling Until that child, one flight below, stopscrying, struck by its mother, I cannot sleep— until it is hushed up by kindness, a stroke silently, softly given upon its head. Why not, I think, go downstairs in my bathrobe, knock gently on the door and ask permission, "If you don't mind," so that I too may sleep. There was an argument between parents about money; not altogether; their voices personal as money is not. In the hush of an unhappy truce the slap sounded. Since those below are helpless, I lie here and look up at the white ceiling. 11 ...