Returning to Earth

She
pulls the sheet of this dance
across me
then runs, staking
the corners far out at sea.

So curious in the middle of America, the only “locus”
I know, to live and love at great distance. (Growing
up, everyone is willing to drive seventy miles to see
a really big grain elevator, ninety miles for a dance,
two hundred to look over a pair of Belgian mares
returning the next day for the purchase, three hundred
miles to see Hal Newhouser pitch in Detroit, eight
hundred miles to see the Grand Ole Opry, a thousand
miles to take the mongoloid kid to a Georgia faith healer.)
I hitched two thousand for my first glimpse of the Pacific.
When she first saw the Atlantic she said near Key Largo,
“I thought it would be bigger.”

I widowed my small
collection of magic
until it poisoned itself with longing.
I have learned nothing.
I give orders to the rain.
I tried to catch the tempest in a gill net.
The stars seem a little closer lately.
I’m no longer afraid to die
but is this a guidepost of lunacy?
I intend to see the ten hundred million worlds Mañjushri
passed through before he failed to awaken the maiden.
Taking off and landing are the dangerous times.
I was commanded in a dream to dance.

O Faustus talks to himself,
talks to himself, talks to himself,
talks to himself, talks to himself,
Faustus talks to himself,
talks to himself.

Ikky?’s ten years near the whorehouses
shortens distances, is truly palpable;
and in ten years you will surely
get over your itch. Or not.

Don’t waste yourself staring at the moon.
All of those moon-staring-rearview-mirror deaths!
Study the shadow of the horse turd in the grass.
There must be a difference between looking at a picture
of a bird and the actual bird (barn swallow)
fifteen feet from my nose on the shed eaves.
That cloud SSW looks like the underside
of a river in the sky.

O I’m lucky
got a car that starts almost every day
tho’ I want a new yellow Chevy pickup
got two letters today
and I’d rather have three
have a lovely wife
but want all the pretty ones
got three white hawks in the barn
but want a Himalayan eagle
have a planet in the basement
but would prefer the moon in the granary
have the northern lights
but want the Southern Cross.

The stillness of this earth
which we pass through
with the precise speed of our dreams.

I’m getting very old. If I were a mutt
in dog years I’d be seven, not stray so far.
I am large. Tarpon my age are often large
but they are inescapably fish. A porpoise
my age was the King of New Guinea in 1343.
Perhaps I am the king of my dogs, cats, horses,
but I have dropped any notion of explaining
to them why I read so much. To be mysterious
is a prerogative of kingship. I discovered
lately that my subjects do not live a life,
but are life itself. They do not recognize
the pain of the schizophrenia of kingship.
To them I am pretty much a fellow creature.

So distances: yearns for Guayaquil and Petersburg,
the obvious Paris and Rome,
restraint in the Cotswolds, perfumes of Arusha,
Entebbe bristling with machine guns,
also Ecuadorian & Ethiopian airports,
border guards always whistling in boredom
and playing with machine guns;
all to count the flies on the lion’s eyelids
and the lioness hobbling in deep grass
lacking one paw, to scan the marlin’s caudal fin
cutting the Humboldt swell, an impossible scissors.

There must be a cricket named Zagreus
in the granary tucked under a roof beam,
under which my three-year-old daughter
boogies madly,
her first taste of the Grateful Dead;
she is well out of her mind.

Rain on the tin roof which covers a temple,
rain on my walking head which covers a temple,
rain covering my laugh shooting
toward the woods for no reason,
rain splattering in pasture’s heat
raising cones of dust,
and off the horses’ backs,
on oriole’s nest in ash tree,
on my feet poking out the door,
testing the endurance of our actual pains,
biting hard against the sore tooth.

She’s rolling in the bear fat
She’s rolling in the sand
She’s climbing a vine
She’s boarding a jet
She flies into the distance wearing blue shoes

Having become the person I most feared in Childhood—
A DRUNKARD. They were pointed out to us
in our small town: oil workers, some poor farmers
(on Saturday marketing), a mechanic, a fired teacher.
They’d stumble when walking, sometimes yell
on the street at noon, wreck their old cars;
their wives would request special prayers in church,
and the children often came to school in winter
with no socks. We took up a collection to buy
the dump-picker’s daughter shoes. Also my uncles
are prone to booze, also my father though it was well-
controlled, and now my fifteen-year war with the bottle
with whiskey removing me from the present
in a sweet, laughing haze, removing anger, anxiety,
instilling soft grandness, decorating ugliness
and reaffirming my questionable worth. SEE: Olson’s
fingers touch his thumb, encircling the bottle—he
gulps deeply, talking through one night into the next
afternoon, talking, basking in Gorton’s fishy odor.
So many of my brethren seem to die of busted guts.
Now there is a measured truce with maps and lines
drawn elegantly against the binge, concessions,
measurings, hesitant steps. My favorite two bars
are just north and barely south of the 45th parallel.

I no longer believe in the idea of magic,
christs, the self, metal buddhas, bibles.
A horse is only the space his horseness requires.
If I pissed in the woods would a tree see my ear
fall off and would the ear return to the body
on the morning of the third day? Do bo trees
ever remember the buddhas who’ve slept beneath them?
I admit that yesterday I built an exploratory altar.
Who can squash his delight in incomprehension?
So on a piece of old newspaper I put an earthworm
on a maple leaf, the remains of a bluebird after
the cat was finished—head and feet, some dog hair,
shavings from when we trimmed the horses’ hooves,
a snakeskin, a stalk of ragweed, a gourd,
a lemon, a cedar splinter, a nonsymbolic doorknob,
a bumblebee with his juice sucked out by a wasp.
Before this altar I invented a doggerel mantra
it is thisit is thisit is this

It is very hard to give birds advice.
They are already members of eternity.
In their genes they have both compass
and calendar. Their wing bones are hollow.
We are surprised by how light a dead bird is.

But what am I penetrating?
Only that it seems nothing convinces
itself or anyone else reliably
of its presence. It is in the distance.

No Persephone in my life,
Ariadne, Helen, Pocahontas,
Evangeline of the Book House
but others not less extraordinary who step
lightly into the dream life, refusing to leave:
girl in a green dress,
woman lolling in foot-deep Caribbean,
woman on balcony near Vatican,
girl floating across Copley Square in 1958,
mythologized woman in hut in 1951,
girl weeping in lilacs,
woman slapping my face,
girl smoking joint in bathtub looking at big toe,
slender woman eating three lobsters,
woman who blew out her heart with cocaine,
girl livid and deformed in dreams,
girl breaking the window in rage,
woman sick in hotel room,
heartless woman in photo—
not heartless but a photo.

My left eye is nearly blind.
No words have ever been read with it.
Not that the eye is virgin—thirty years ago
it was punctured by glass. In everything
it sees a pastel mist. The poster of Chief Joseph
could be King Kong, Hong Kong, a naked lady riding
a donkey into Salinas, Kansas. A war atrocity.
This eye is the perfect art critic. This eye
is a perfect lover saying bodies don’t matter,
it is the voice. This eye can make a lightbulb
into the moon when it chooses. Once a year I open
it to the full moon out in the pasture and yell,
white light white light.

A half-dozen times a day
I climb through the electric fence
on my way and back to my study
in the barnyard. I have to be cautious.
I have learned my true dimensions,
how far my body sticks out from my brain.

We are each
the only world
we are going to get.

I don’t want to die. It would certainly
inconvenience my wife and daughters.
I am sufficiently young that it would help
my publisher unpack his warehouse of books.
It would help me stop drinking and lose weight.
I could talk to Boris Pasternak.
He never saw the film.

Wanting to pull the particular nail
that will collapse the entire house
so that there is nothing there,
not even a foundation: a rubble heap,
no sign at all, just grass, weeds and trees
among which you cannot find a shard of masonry,
which like an arrowhead might suggest
an entire civilization.

She was lying back in the rowboat.
It was hot.
She tickled me with her toes.
She picked lily pads.
She watched mating dragonflies.
“How many fish below us?”
“O a hundred or so.”
“It would be fun to fall in love with someone.”
The rower continued his rowing.

Why be afraid of a process you’re
already able to describe with precision?
To say you don’t believe in it
is to say that you’re not.
It doesn’t care so why should you?
You’ve been given your body back
without a quarrel. See this vision
of your imagined body float toward you:
it disappears into you without a trace.
You feel full with a fullness again.
Your dimensions aren’t scattered in dreams.

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