There's a dark deep down in ordinary things

Resists our bringing them into view,

Or else in bringing them what light we bring,

As if to ask the question 'Who are you?'

I do not know what answer I would make

Being myself, and, so, invisible—

Although I know when I give or when I take,

Outfitting my days as I best am able.

There's a dark deep down in ordinary things

Resists us, the way a mirror pushes

Until we're left again with things as things,

Alone among our daylit doubts and guesses.

I am one keeps to himself, and although

I do, I do not keep the dark alone.

It lay self-entangled, curled as ramshorns,

—And pushed the belly into being mother—

Who, to be herself, had first to the Other,—

Which looked as if it didn’t want being born.

Its sideways was more, and worse, than backwards.

It had to be sawn out to be itself a lamb,

Startle the clover and bleat "I am."

The bowie knife came handy without a word.

A tense scarlet torn sort of giving-in,

A clattering shape cauled on scattered straw,

Ungainly upright legs besides the ewe’s,

Shook me wet and bellowed out of pain.

What had come too soon would need a mother’s milk.

I pulled all night through wetness with raw silk.

The provident power of hurt and harm

The provenance of an eye ingathers,

(Its certain witness of a moment's charm

That lightly changes a life forever),

Bluely demonstrates in this morning glory

That measures us, our smallness and our fear,

With too blue an eye to ever bear

Until a touch of night shuts its story.

Then we dream, with a certain sort of blue rue,

And wonder in sleep's deep wanderment

If the sun will show us what to do

Or if dreaming can tell us what we meant.

An eye perhaps has followed us all day through,

But we do not know the eye's intent.

Having grown long words in fieldgrass daylong,

I stepped into a wooded brook to dip

Ink-worded hands into the snickering quips

Offered up by the silverquick stream;

I wondered just what the water had meant to mean,

Whose loose stones insist the water into song.

Many times I had lost what footing I had felt,

Suddenly cried out, or laughed in despair,

By hard wet things beneath thrown over,

Raw agony raised to the eloquence of a welt;

And, with water in my mouth, I'd often remarked

The sincerer operations of the lark,

Spilling a slippery noise above taciturn rocks

That break bones and never forget.

Three dark junipers shadow where time stood,

Representative of my brothers and

Myself, from earth and water grown to good

Plain wood on the township's public land.

Huddled under them by the neighboring pond

Fireworks cracked to color July the Fourth;

We then, as I now, beside the dawn-like mud

Stood every year we'd been on earth,

Three stranger brothers our divided folks

Reaped as seedlings from the brick adoption house

Into a home too shy and shamed for such a name.

Now torn away ourselves to spouses

And lives, from rooted things by time unyolked,

I stand between the trees without a name.

I wake in dark. The air itself seems stained.

The dark appears a darkness self-sustained

By whatever of darkness must remain

Even at whitest noon. But this is not noon.

This is the dark without a shadow, without a moon;

A dark that won't stay shut in rooms;

One that follows even the ripest mood

And rots there, and will not give way to good.

This is the dark wolves build in woods

Who have no hands and whose teeth are sure.

This is the black that cancels the cure;

This the emptiest hour and the deepest hurt.

This lies behind eyes and bottoms every heart.

This it is that makes a faster beating start.

His dusty body goes backwards to be dust.

On dust more frictionless than ice

A frantic slipping ant will make us wince

To see a crucible mind no more than claw;

A mind that harbors no dark thought to appall

But shapes his perpetual falling wall.

He does not jump for justice or to be just.

Summer’s first rain-drop rolls in dust a world

Whose wet invites all wetness hints of growth

(Such a world may we recognize in drought).

Silent and dry, he emerges like a roar

And makes the molten tension burst,

And drowns himself with water, nothing more.

And a something unrepeatable is learned.

One year all year I kept the pond for mirror,

And tasked water in place of one that broke

And so had run out of looking luck.

The pond re-made me foot to head,— and, nearer,

Showed my face as something like, no clearer.

Flat stones I scalped across what shone for song

Laughed at my distorted self the summer long.

Then one day in the polished lead of water

I saw what my broken mirror showed too often: fear

Of eyes in eyes, a black kept-back glance

Desperate for breakage like a last chance

To be itself something more than a moment’s stare.

When autumn came, and I dared again look down,

A reluctant pond as rough as hands hid my face

For days, but not the sense of my disgrace.

Leaves above my pallid blur mocked me with a crown.

Winter’s stintless nights full of wishes as a star

Drew ice across my mirror in a frozen sheet

Obscure and cold, and chilled a glance that

Knew me once, and I held back a shiver.

When my breath came back to breathing more at ease—

When pond had been blanched ice long enough—

I thought how roots go down, fathomless and tough

To stretch what stark water offers into trees.

Then I looked again, with midnight thoughts,

At the rowans surrounding.— And then beyond all thought,

Far into the night, and past night to coming dawn.—

I looked into my mirror and hoped Spring again

Would wake it as full of fears as it had been.

On an uneven roof comes midsummer’s chore

To clear the flue that had all winter roared—

A core of darkness with a throat of fire

Soaring to a speech of sparks that suspires—

White-hot fleets into a world of frost,

A second set of constellations we may cross.

I cleaned with broom and water, a working witch

Fouled by the labor black as a sewer ditch,

Like pulling up a fountain by its roots

That has no cleaner wet than velvet soot;

Every swish and lunge bade me be a bear

Until an evening’s scrub would wash me clear.

I heard a cry like a baby’s squeak.

A bat. Something in me that could not speak,

But saw two eyes like spider’s eyes to scare,

Gave the thought: I would not have him here.

Six million years had put him in his cave.

I sought to sweep him with the broom I waved.

We were too much strangers for the bat to fear

Untoward intentions in my coming near;

Our worlds were not close enough to make us foes;

(Hate’s a thing of nearness as things go.)

I would not have him there, and thought to undo him

With a startlement of fire out of season.

So I built a fire to double summer,

Stood by the heat-wavered flue, heard it hum,

And waited like a cat for what would come.

In a laugh of wings, in a ring of fire,

What I saw fly out was neither foul nor fair

But a living creature of the living air.

(Face to face, my face was larger.)

I would not have.... I knew I did not want

Such rapid flapping in my fireside thoughts.

When I look to flame, I demand to dream

Upon flame’s own ever-changing theme;

Seeing how it prefigures in earnest night

The glare of summer, the stars’ own light.

Because altered fire refused to move him,

I called him a black clot devoid of reason.

I used a poison. (I would not have him there.)

Congealing and winging in the summer air—

He fell out indefinite as a spill of inks

Dark enough to make me think.

Our daily catbird in the parking lot,

Half-unknowing his danger where he stood,

Sang out eyes-shut atop a cinder block.

A blue abandoned Cougar, its purr removed,

(Haunted all last night by a pregnant stray

Hunkering into home in her birthing mood)

Had a dead crow's feathers like an exploded toy

Puffed from under a moveless wheel hoved tight,

Feeding what must come, at most, in a day.

Obliquely by her belly kept from being quite upright,

In cotton fog half-obscuring our shared world,

The mottled cat sat motionless on one stripe.

The catbird's territory song searched vacant grounds

That should have had a wood to sing through,

Not learned to be inured to all our sounds.

I wondered how I'd feel with the catbird shooed,

Mother-cat nursing uncurled by the curb,

Patched kittens purling dust just where he flew.

Silent in the silence man-made things disturb,

The cat, too quick for me to see, pounced once,—

And the catbird, leapt to asphalt eaves, sang on.

I had come too long down my own way now

To trouble with what signs dreamed appearing:

The simple-minded purpose of an arrow

An impertinence of trivial clarity

Pointed only to waves of vines that drowned it,

Getting more vine-entangled the more I walked—

Nature’s green indifference a match to man’s.

Mourning doves cooed the midday shadows soft.

I left all plans behind me and dropped intent

Back with those signs, and leaned my father's valise

Initialed in cursive gold against the last.

I would pick it up when I returned to reasons,

Sagging in voluptuous vines with a leather sigh.

Mourning doves cooed the gathering shadows soft

Under wavery arms of patchwork sycamores

Deep in the broken bounty of the wood

Where no sand-path of man or dog had stepped

To interrupt the easy gloom of leaves;

Indian Pipe and a fungus stump gave

A heavy odor the nose ignored.

The mockingbird with enviable ear

Talked to all his neighbors in their own voice,

As if by their sharing some outward wail

They shared some single mystery at source.

Half a sycamore had blown down dry

Like a thrown blade-switch in an electric storm;

Vines evinced no interest in its half-dead form,

But rode the living half half-way high.

There were whirlpools of vines in those woods,

Shunted hard aside all the time I walked them.

A bronze creeper takes its own time in ascent,

Using a tree’s own strength against it,

Snake-slow up to the tree’s own lofty end,

Like cloud gone everywhere or like climbing fire;

But more I think like fire than cloud

Or perhaps a fiery cloud come down

To threaten all that grew up from ground.

The wires that fuse back from its leaves

Tighten years against the tree-spine in a grip

To shadow-out leaves that block the creeper’s light.

A grip once light as feathers, lighter.—

Yet shows the trick of closing tighter,

Hand over hand, or leaf over leaf

More properly, it makes its imagined height

Match the trunk’s achievement grown up right.

They share a center that discernment sees.

But the outline, like a helix spun, begins

To burr and blur like an old old man

Who can’t hold even his own old name in mind,

Until all the limbs lay overtaken

By a wilder interposing dark of green

That turns dry birdsnests out to ground

Or catches in an interlace of palms

Small-nippled nuts before the autumn-fall

Drops them to the danger of maturing.

How many years had I grown outbound to here?

I hear my own father laugh and shake his head

At nothing I had thought, or at something

So far back it was plain invisible to me.

Well, now perhaps I can sense the why:

We had been let drop to grow, for reasons not

Our own— chance, or even evil, occurrence

With nothing of our own doing in it.

We’re left with nothing else to do but grow;

What better purpose has a laugh than sensing that?

Among a friendly roundelay of fieldgrass,

A sycamore has its life-plan laid out

From the first frond of its setting forth,

Unaware of how its reeled-in corkscrew

Waits to over-awe and overshadow all.

The grasses murmur nothing all day but sun.

Nor does the sycamore seem to posit

How its holding out beneath that summer sun

Provides just the slip of shade the creeper

In all its years of greenly slithering

Has learned to need. Once I came upon a giant

Sycamore sequestered in a neck of wood

Crowded as town, so hazed-over with bronze

Filaments root to crown, it seemed on fire—

The triumphal creeper self-inwound above

Even the crown of the vine-engulfed tree.

All the trees surrounding were backed away

As their live skirts might catch— but the effect

Was only the halo-emptiness of life

The dead tree had claimed in adoration of sun,

The slow outward longing of love’s eternal

Intertwine of warmness and warmed being.

Here was a love affair too cruel to countenance

One side all terribly requited want,

The other too reserved to ever push,

And that was another story out of life.

I knew down in that those who would not stand

Oftimes retained the power of hands

And, seeming weak as lace, still could strangle.

This courtship would have no day in court;

A long struggle, and a single end.—

The corpse had a solemness, I’ll give it that,

The way a bonfire dies down to ashes

And obedience. But it had no dignity,

Nothing of itself amid the choke and flame.

Bole and limbs still held themselves, riddled through

With spiny roots that cared nothing but to use.

A squirrel confused the leaves for a desperate hour

And then chewed clear. The creeper had no use

For birds, lightest true climbers of the wood,

And to their coming down proffered a net.

The creeper was everywhere and was everything.

We do not know our purpose, but onward creep

As a mood may creep day to day on fire

Behind our walls, knowing nothing but to creep.

These flamy bronzes too, were too desperate

Of their own old man’s hairy grip and perch

To hazard seed beyond their flame in flowering;

What flowers came of that flame showed too poor

And too few to drop the match-head seeds.

New life must only smolder here this season,

However wary the trees of renewing smokes,

Thrown scarves to scar and catch the throat,

And envelope a head made blind to its own good.

The creeper, for all its bronze-fire threat,

Had no enemy but itself, —heh, —

And spent its life in extending tendrils

Of itself, all green willfulness and dare

Hurling its shapeless metaphor outbound

To some self-supporting taproot, to be

That tree, that life, if but for a time—

Stretching and warping its bare being

To another’s bones, the way any son

Inherits his father’s laugh, and in time

Has his humor, right down to the last laugh.

The dilemma of doing's to 'have done,'

And by choosing from Many be left with One.

Addition's chief mischief is dubbed a sum;

The unwary mistake it for a total solution.

The wise contend that all is confusion,

Or at best a formal intuition.

To act presumes belief, or so I'm told,

And am pointed onward, backward, or upward to God,

(And reminded not to mind the length of the odds).

The less done the better is my subtractive reaction.

I'm not quite afraid to feel quite forsaken,

(Except that, of course, I might be mistaken).

One thought is left me, with which I’d begun:

"The dilemma of doing's to 'have done.'"

There’s a rhyme at the joint point of knowing.

There’s a place, a way of saying, that clearly makes

"Good" and it opposite resonate, and even ring

The way a glass cries out when struck—

Sharing its invisible essence like a singer.

Glasses, brim to abyss, display a range

Of interchanging tones to the ringer

Who bangs the magnanimous Strange.

Does a sip sip the Good, or a sip sip the Bad?

Either way the song sways, half-empty, half-full.

The opposite of Good’s not Bad, but

Odd, whose disobedient music’s beautiful.

What words can we sing, for the Good, for the Odd,

That will make them ring out, spoon-struck, like God?

A rambling meadow scenery

Rank with irrigated greenery,

Showed a semi-sawed-off double dozen

Of saplings stretched since Spring, some

Waist-high to heaven, that autumn’s

Clear-cut mowing would take care of

(Not much of disordered growth

Survives the park’s enforced swath).

Nature’s mistakes seed a scene

With a richer oddness than she means.

Plants that harbour high ambitions

Need time and shade for such positions.

Ignore me long enough, and I might

Just get to be something; kids grow at night.

Adults enlarge by thinking through

(So I’ve heard said, and think it true).

A modest eraser can undo

A millennium's gain by rubbing through.

I bite my new ones down to wood

And trust to cross-outs, understood

Arrows, and wild whole-page insertions.

Erasure’s just too much exertion

And never pays for the lost word

That down the line might have proved good.

Human education is a crop

Best harvested without a lop.

Shapely shape the upward trees

By what mind kens, and heart perceives.

The grandest but add leaf to leaf

To make their roundness right—

Just so the round of human life

Requires a necessary height.

In the right angle of a fence

Definitions first commence

To lock us into making sense.

By running round and round a thing

With a tape measure for a string

We hobble it to give us wings.

Its only from our having tried

To live without a why inside,

Or, like a mystic pray tongue-tied,

That we have ever given thought

To holding in what we have got

To see what we’ve done without.

A midnight ocean and a stippled snow

Greyly perceived from a rail I know

Shared the grainy dark of here and nearer.

What water was above me seemed uncertainer.

What rolled in mist below rolled solider.

As snow and snow will in snowing meet,

What slid down danced into a wild sleet

And randomly clung, each to each,

Resisting ocean's disassembling touch

That undoes the individual who falls

And in that fall returns to ocean's all.

I could not tell just what my seeing meant

Nor how long soundless darkness had been lent;

There was nothing there in what was of sky,

No help of light to help say why,

Only usurpation's snow-deadened hiss

That ended each self-formed singleness

Distilled from upper vagueness and the cold.

They did not fall because they had been told.

They fell because there was nothing else to do

But fall, and this the ocean knew.

A soft possible snow had descended

And let the moon climb down from the sky.

The world lay in whiteness without witness or end.

Snow lay on the tree-limbs like ladder-rungs rounded

And softened my cold need for why.

Not a blank footstep, not a note of sound

Intruded on the marvelous sight.

All creatures, all creation slept like the ground,

As though no other dark did our dark surround.

A winter Eden and a winter night.

And then I thought: It is as if some other than

The snow had snowed down or in,

Coldly immune to storm or reason.

Each hour I held that thought held only harm.

I searched the moon-snow transfigured farm.

The fallen night I found, I found no ease in.

A milkweed has it in it to become

Something, and challenges the field

With myriad pods above the other stalks,

And then there's the whiteness, all that whiteness,

Clumped and disparate with the wind slow,

A slow diaspora that struggles mostly

Into our reservoir just there, or plants its flag

In the same field that served as home.

There's that in us as well that never waits,

That wants out,— and gets out too,— past fields

It blows out onward always in the mind,

Same as the milkweed taken root and risen

To spurn its soil, and dies in seeding out its thought;

Just so, our light cares, light temptations

Lift out and abandon us, and we wish it so.

Some other valley's always more our sort,

Some other sunset igniting through the gorse.

Hand me that dead milkweed stem you've

Yanked up there— thanks. See how the lips

Have gone to beaks with vomiting dreams

All day long and under the August sun?

Here's one deep-in hasn't the heart for escape,

For leaving the only home its ever known;

No matter if that home is dead or soon to die,

Home is home. There's a reach in the design,

Wispy almost-nothing pulled to this seed

Soft as a moth, perfect for an escape

Once the pod's blown out, hardened to scrap—

Necessary for these feathers to move on

Into the endless. Rise after rise

Lies past this embankment of peaches, straight on

To the sea out somewhere, toward the Pacific perhaps

To judge by the wind. Never thought of it,

Although I suppose we all crawled from there,

But that's one home not hardened yet,

Not the sea, not yet, or if it had,

Something else has troubled it back to life.

I ride the night-yard’s rose bush like a saddle,

Burning to be nearer what shines afar,

And visit all the dreaming stars for marvel,

My rose and I still waking where we are.

All below is lost, I believe in what’s above.

Unburied from sleep, I and my heart arose—

As full of feeling as empty of self, they say.

But knowing myself as I know my yard and rose,

I say, "Losing finds all again; there is a way."

Twenty years about both house and bush I’ve spent;

Twenty years dreaming to the rose-soft summit

Where the sun arises a rose and sets a rose.

Having gone round in love, I return to love;

I wake to see where my rose-dreaming goes.

My compass rose is cunning, her roots are deep.

I dream the dream I need when I dream of sleep.

The self is buried, and its roots are mossed.

Roots are what come of being lost.