Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

Turn

This quiet, these still unvisitable stars move with choices. Our kin are here. Were here. Turn This is the new apartment new painted livingroom its table, its bed, its chair. It is floating, and the earth’s bright rim is floating through an indifferent blank, without color, without consolation— The pregnant woman with a child at home rests, has a cup of tea, closes her eyes . . . I want to walk in the winter field again . . . Was peacefulness ever what we were after? She thinks of the child, who wants the tea, who wants her eyes, her mouth, her hands, who pulls her out to the field to the thick of things away from the thick of things. A woman stands at the new window. Torso: a bronze Matisse back: in the museum garden. Its children playing, still, inside its hollow part. Its strength thickens, simplifies. Grows quieter. The first day’s quiet. The second; the second year. I’m taking up my life. If you were here who I am honest with 134 door in the mountain I’d have to think a long time to say the simplest thing: nothing like anything I know. Prayer in Fever The hospital shuts down to its half-night. I stand back, talk in words from some book: The wall could be the floor. Everything you look at is changed by your looking at it This packed dirt square, these wires . . . somewhere someone must run for it, black hair, red mouth, burn strips of fish on a green edge of the Hudson, under a cloud of stars, under bridge lights, they must hunch down, talk to each other, touch each other, the way this thin bright snow masses, this blind oval pulling gold across the ceiling floating out off the foldback of space The day does rise. The turning gaze of the river: So many eyes. So calm. The gray green curve of earth still waiting with us holding us huge curved mosaic hands your hand —how would you bide so long? the messenger 135 ...