Poems, 1957–1967

POWER AND LIGHT

POWER AND LIGHT . . . only connect . . . —E. M. FORSTER I may even be A man, I tell my wife: all day I climb myself Bowlegged up those damned poles rooster-heeled in all Kinds of weather and what is there when I get Home? Yes, woman trailing ground-oil Like a snail, home is where I climb down, And this is the house I pass through on my way To power and light. Going into the basement is slow, but the built-on smell of home Beneath home gets better with age the ground fermenting And spilling through the barrel-cracks of plaster the dark Lying on the floor, ready for use as I crack The seal on the bottle like I tell you it takes A man to pour whiskey in the dark and CLOSE THE DOOR between The children and me. The heads of nails drift deeper through their boards And disappear. Years in the family dark have made me good At this nothing else is so good pure fires of the Self Rise crooning in lively blackness and the silence around them, Like the silence inside a mouth, squirms with colors, The marvellous worms of the eye float out into the real World sunspots Dancing as though existence were One huge closed eye and I feel the wires running Like the life-force along the limed rafters and all connections With poles with the tarred naked belly-buckled black Trees I hook to my heels with the shrill phone calls leaping Long distance long distances through my hands all connections Even the one With my wife, turn good turn better than good turn good Not quite, but in the deep sway of underground among the roots 256 That bend like branches all things connect and stream Toward light and speech tingle rock like a powerline in wind, Like a man working, drunk on pine-moves the sun in the socket Of his shoulder and on his neck dancing like dice-dots, And I laugh Like my own fate watching over me night and day at home Underground or flung up on towers walking Over mountains my charged hair standing on end crossing The sickled, slaughtered alleys of timber Where the lines loop and crackle on their gallows. Far under the grass of my grave, I drink like a man The night before Resurrection Day. My watch glows with the time to rise And shine. Never think I don't know my profession Will lift me: why, all over hell the lights burn in your eyes, People are calling each other weeping with a hundred thousand Volts making deals pleading laughing like fate, Far off, invulnerable or with the right word pierced To the heart By wires I held, shooting off their ghostly mouths, In my gloves. The house spins I strap crampons to my shoes To climb the basement stairs, sinking my heels in the treelife of the boards. Thorns! Thorns! I am bursting Into the kitchen, into the sad way-station Of my home, holding a double handful of wires Spitting like sparklers On the Fourth of July. Woman, I know the secret of sitting In light of eating a limp piece of bread under The red-veined eyeball of a bulb. It is all in how you are Grounded. To bread I can see, I say, as it disappears and agrees With me the dark is drunk and I am a man Who turns on. I am a man. Falling 257 ...