Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

The Complex

and had searched for Him. He had come. I saw Him standing, his hair long, face exhausted, eyessad and knowing, and I bent my knee, terrified at the reality, but he restrained me with a hand and said, I am a sufferer like yourself. I have come to let you know. And I arose, my heart swelling, and said, I have failed and bitterness is in me. And he replied, And forgiveness too. Bless your son. And I blessed him and his face brightened. And the Rightful One was gone and left a power to feel free. Self-Centered I love the only day that I was born, as if in my oneness I could love another, and yet I love a day. As of the beginning I am here, but have come really from the second day in which a skywas made. Before everything I was what I do not know, an absence, a beginning. There has been none since the start.Therefore to love my only day is to be set apart, and this what I do when I am one, and there is what has been, at which time I was the beginning. The Complex My father's madness is to own himself, for what he gives is taken. He is a single son of God. He is mad to know the loves he owns are for his keeping, 47 so if he does not love he is without himself, for God has said, Oflove you are a man. You are yourself, apart from me. And madly my father seeks his loves, with whom there is no standing, for as he would own himself he is the measuring rod, and slowly owes himself to God, giving of himself with forced breath. POEMS OF THE 1960S FROM Poems 1934-1969 (1970) The Journey I am looking for a past I can rely on in order to look to death with equanimity. What was given me: my mother's largeness to protect me, my father's regularity in coming home from work at night, his opening the door silently and smiling, pleased to be back and the lights on in all the rooms through which I could run freely or sit at ease at table and do my homework undisturbed: love arranged as order directed at the next day. Going to bed was ajourney. 48 | Poems of the 1960s ...