Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

My Own House

FROM Whisper to the Earth (1981) My Own House As I view the leaf, my theme is not the shades of meaning that the mind conveys of it but my desire to make the leaf speak to tell me, Chlorophyll, chlorophyll, breathlessly. I would rejoice with it and, in turn, would reply, Blood, and the leaf would nod. Having spoken to each other, we would find our topics inexhaustible and imagine, as I grow old and the leaf begins to fade and turn brown, the thought of being buried in the ground would become so familiar to me, so thoroughly known through conversation with the leaf, that my walk among the trees after completing this poem would be like entering my own house. Behind His Eyes A man, tied to a tree, thinks he is beginning to feel something of the tree enter his body. It is hard for him to discern what it could be, but he would like to grow tiny branches from his head, and leaf buds. He loves standing still. He thinks he can feel the tree pressing up against him, as ifit were trying to instill in him its nature and its seed. He is in a kind of trance about himself. Thinking, as he had sensed before , is no longer a function of thought but of action. That is because he has welcomed the possibilityof tiny branches and leaves that now he believes are growing from his sides and from his head. He would laugh in pleasure but that he finds himself swaying back and forth as in a dance that could have been induced by wind. He is very happy, very much the tree, and he has shed his alarm at having been tied to it in the middle of the woods and left to die. He can forget the reason for his captivity which he thinks of no longer as capture but as a piece of luck to have happened in the midst of this crisis in his life. He is free of crisis, and can celebrate by bringing forth more branches and leaves, and he straightens up from his now stooped posture of exhaustion to let new growth emerge more easily 779 ...