Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968–1993

Scenes from a Death

Scenes from a Death I wrapped my face in my clank and wept for myself.—Plato The women had been sent away so there would be no scenes, but when their friend had actually drunk the cup of poison then the men broke down like women and they wept. The death of earth is to become water and the death of water is to become air and the death of air is to become fire and reversely, Heraclitus says. I say the death of us is to become. A plane appeared in the water and a sail in the air, the lichen on the crag was a gold version of the greens you could see upright in the oncoming sea; the tide was timed just right and in our eyes the brown and blue things bloomed. The universe is transformation, says the Stoic, in a mystic moment. Life is only an opinion. It's philosophy he loves, not poetry (which he adjudges ornamental). What he does deem necessary, though, is just exactly what I'd swear a poet does: "make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented you, so as to see distinctly what kind of thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, 45 in its completeness; tell yourself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it's been compounded and the others into which it will resolve . . . Look at things so as to see what kind of universe this is . . . " The day somebody dies you want never to go to sleep. You want the day in which he was alive never to end. Does darkness fall? Or does the moviehouse of our mentality just open, and its sense of inside spread? Doesn't darkness escape from us, to comprehend the world as a whole—(take it, or leave it, in other words, so we can fall asleep)? Some weird bird worried the dormant EEC, small hours in the skullery. The darkness rose, it didn't fall, to keep us all in mind, where we can't tell branch from branch, or time from time. But dot by dot we needle our way back into the sky: we reconstruct the (count 'em) eighty-eight constellatory big ideas: starring animals first, and then a hunter (whose weaponry sparkles); then the mind bends down to its abode and puts a chained woman near a winged horse. Now we have a story again! One we can live under. Because lines lead to points. Because points lead to lines. We thought the big was strong, the little weak. But couldn't stop the bird from screaming, or the night from shaking in that brainstorm's beak . . . 46 The women had been sent away so there would be no scenes. But when their friend had actually drunk the cup of poison then the men broke down like women and they wept. It rains all day and small birds tremble in the cliff-side tree we call a mountain ash (its leaves are feathery as iron filings, radiant around a field of force). The birds sit there in all that shivering, and shiver. Easiest to call it weather—tree with wind trouble, wren with rain. But nature's nowhere without weather, nowhere outside ripples of relation, shifting, shimmering, showering, still. The air is parted, then departed: seeming soaks the fabric of it, the physical fact, where I had always loved the thought of God: without material, he has no act. The cars approach and then get swallowed up in wet hedge, shine transmogrified to hiss; the hedge grows fast and faster on this diet of wet traffic, deepening my ear and eye. The kids arrived by air from several thousand miles away; they wore their Walkmen even when they slept. They made a mental map of airwaves: "You get KISS here!", said the twelve-year-old. I said I fear it's not the same. "You should have sent them somewhere else," said the Bulgarian. "He isn't famous," I said kidward, "for his tact." "He's not 47 a lot of things," the eight-year-old replied, "you should have thought of that before you married him." I wanted then to tell the children everything—the ins and outs, the ups and downs, beginning with it wasn't want of thought that got me married. What was it Angelus Silesius was said...