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

Photograph of Delmore Schwartz

you bear yourselves in, become your own mother and father, your own child. You lying closer. You going along. Days. The strobe-lit wheel stops dead once, twice in a life: old-fashioned rays: and then all the rest of the time pulls blur, only you remember it more, playing. Listening here in the late quiet you can think great things of us all, I think we will all, Coltrane, meet speechless and easy in Heaven, our names known and forgotten, all dearest, all come giant-stepping out into some wide, light, merciful mind . . . John Coltrane, 40, gone right through the floorboards, up to the shins, up to the eyes, closed over, Syeeda’s happy, child’s song left up here, playing. Photograph of Delmore Schwartz A young king, oak, painted and gilded, writing no one should be so unhappy, holding his hands out, 94 door in the mountain but his arms are missing from the shoulders down, his right side’s gone, his mouth’s flaking like a mirror, still photograph of your childhood, your son. No one should be so unhappy, should lie still in that bending room where all the atoms fly off their hooks, animals and children and friends kill, it was a delusion, we were not living, the hotel floor wasn’t coming and going and coming at that great head hurled radiant, flat at the new world. The Torn-down Building Slowly, slowly our exploding time gives off its lives: a lens, an eyelash rub under the new ground broken, under the new primary-colored paint put up for someone to come to to start off from to cherish but dear one this December the walls walk off, we sit mother-naked smiling on our boxes of books: slowly the first snowfall pilgrims 95 ...