but
Toward an ordering of the spirit in pure air
Where no one is bound by custom, or so engined
Toward immediate goals, and trapped by time:
Your poems will happen when no one is there.
And when the angel comes, you will remember
Our fierce encounter, beyond devious ways,
Not at the end of some blank corridor—
Outside all walls, the daring spirit’s wrench
To open up a simple world of praise!
Girl With ’Cello
There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow
To bring into this house her glowing ’cello
As if some silent, magic animal.
She sat, head bent, her long hair all a-spill
Over the breathing wood, and drew the bow.
There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow.
And she drew out that sound so like a wail,
A rich dark suffering joy, as if to show
All that a wrist holds and that fingers know
When they caress a magic animal.
There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow.
An Intruder
The other day a witch came to call.
She brought a basket full of woe and gall
And left it there for me in my front hall.
But it was empty when I found it there
And she herself had gone back to her lair
Leaving the bats of rage to fly my air.
Out of ambivalence this witch was born;
All that she gives is subtly smeared and torn
Or slightly withered by her love and scorn.
The furies sit and watch me as I write;
The bats fly silently about all night
And a black mist obscures the kindest light.
But I shall find the magic note to play,
Or, like a donkey, learn the wild flat bray
That sends all furies howling on their way.
The note is laughter. No witch could withstand
The frightful joke all witches understand
When they are given all that they demand.
The word can neither bless nor curse, of course.
It must bewitch a witch and leave her worse.
Perhaps I’ll call her just a failed old nurse.
Love cannot exorcize the gifts of hate.
Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight,
But laughter we can never over-rate.
The Muse As Medusa
I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone.
I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold.
I was not punished, was not turned to stone—
How to believe the legends I am told?
I came as naked as any little fish,
Prepared to be hooked, gutted, caught;
But I saw you, Medusa, made my wish,
And when I left you I was clothed in thought…
Being allowed, perhaps, to swim my way
Through the great deep and on the rising tide,
Flashing wild streams, as free and rich as they,
Though you had power marshalled on your side.
The fish escaped to many a magic reef;
The fish explored many a dangerous sea—
The fish, Medusa, did not come to grief,
But swims still in a fluid mystery.
Forget the image: your silence is my ocean,
And even now it teems with life. You chose
To abdicate by total lack of motion,
But did it work, for nothing really froze?
It is all fluid still, that world of feeling
Where thoughts, those fishes, silent, feed and rove;
And, fluid, it is also full of healing,
For love is healing, even rootless love.
I turn your face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore—
Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for.
For Rosalind
On Her Seventy-fifth Birthday
Tonight we come to praise
Her splendor, not her years,
Pure form and what it burns—
Who teaches this or learns?—
Intrinsic, beyond tears,
Splendor that has no age.
Take your new-fangled beauties off the stage!
The high poise of the throat
That dazzled every heart—
Who was not young and awed
By beauty so unflawed
It seemed not life, but art?—
Terrible as a swan
Young children, deeply moved, might look upon.
The blazing sapphire eyes—
They looked out from a queen.
Yet there was wildness near;
She glimmered like a deer
No hunter could bring down.
So warm, so wild, so proud,
She moved among us like a light-brimmed