I rode in bronze and saw the panoply of ore
Laid out on every leaf and every roofing cope
And balustrade;
The train rode high on trestle as it braked on toward its stop
And I gazed out upon that special dusking sea
Which washes for scant minutes on the world
At rise and set of sun.
Stepped down, I moved upon the yellow planks
Torn up from all the halls of ancient myths. The station sign was gold.
The trees, my god, the trees wore epaulettes!
The ivy on the old school wall was dazzling braid.
And in the shade the eye of cat sent forth
A minted signaling which could be spent!
The walks I trod were saffron from an Indian sand;
The lawns were amber carpetings
Where warrior ants climbed stricken with such luscious tints
As made them seem the richest armory in time.
Mere bees upon the air were tapestries.
And down the slanted beams of now-lost afternoon
And soon-come night
A spider made his way
On harps of honey-colored twine
Which struck might cry with pure delight.
All, all was light!
The very air swam syrupy with tunes of wind
And rattlings of coins which tufted every branch.
The leaves beneath each tree were jackpot avalanche.
A dog trot-rambled by
His fur made up of stuffs from out Fort Knox,
His eyes cuff-links he sported without pride,
Accepted, knew, forgot, and took in stride.
The house where I was born,
My grandma’s house,
Most terrible, most beautiful of all!
As I came by
Aflame it was, all fire in the windows
From the plunging sun;
Each glass a meld of brazen metals
From old shields on which a thousand dead
Were proudly borne toward sunset cairns.
As if raised high upon the instant of my coming
The windows dazzled, clamoring the lawns,
Then rushed to set more torches
On the blazing rose-filled porches,
And attics danced with firefly dust
As cupolas took light like lust
And virgin chandeliers were crazed
And cracked with flame.
I stood amazed,
I trod the flaxen grass;
Let smoldering towers blind my gaze.
Never such welcome!
In all my days of going forth and coming back,
Never such wealth.
The sunset knew my lack
And sparked a million bons to show the way,
All celebrant, a burning down of happiness
Before my river-running, gladsome-fractured eyes.
All of its banks it opened,
All of its wealth it spent
In one last great pervading spree.
I sensed but one cool shade of Death behind a single tree
Waiting for the silent river of light to ebb
So it might seize not only cash but me.
But now it was an hour all sweetly met;
I did come home and chose by clumsy miracle
A time which made the world stand still
Mute-struck to bronze.
A statue, then, I fed myself the splendid prides of air
And heard the birds that sang with jeweled throats:
You’ll live forever. This, your summer, gone eternal,
Will stay fair.
I stayed.
The sun went out.
The sky shut down its light.
Gone wise, a few days later, rising up near dawn
I made my way through streets of night
To train and left the way I came—
As sun fired gold to mint the town;
Still the same king I was upon arriving
All royal gowned I left in a lie of light.
The last I saw of it
The town was, avenue and shop, bright swathed
In goldleaf touching and renewed.
A tree all dripped with Spanish royal doubloons
Shook with premonitions as I passed
And mouthed farewells.
In Chicago
Some hours later,
The railway station men’s room
Smelled like the lion house
At the zoo
In Dublin.
When I was very old.
AND DARK OUR CELEBRATION WAS
And dark our celebration was,
For Death was sweet to us;
By that I mean it filled our sacks so full
We leaned atilt round moonlit corners of the town
And sprinted on to doorways where we buzzed and rang
And lit the pumpkin windows and held forth our hands
To take the treasures of the time,
Then ran again, my lovely thistle girls and I
Gone old within a night yet young with them.
How grand such Eves, how good such girls
That they slowed pace for ancient boys like me.
Who could not give it up, stay home, put by that holiday.
I had to go, to lurch, to tap, to laugh, to walk at last
All happy-tired home in cold wind blowing
With the full-lit moon to wife and hearth and aunts
Come by to wait for us: the crazy man and his wild pride
Of maiden beasts.
Long years ahead, dear girls, on nights like those,
Do please drop by at dusk, come sit upon my stone
And speak glad words
To spirit gone but wishing to be still
With you when you go forth with your own children
Thus to filch and prize and laugh at every door.
No more. I stay.
But save for me a single sweet, some Milky Way to munch
Or bring a pumpkin cut and lit and place it so to warm my feet.
Then on the path run, go! knowing that I’m not dead,
For you are my head, my heart, my limbs, my blood set free;
You are the me that is warm,
I am the me that is cold,
You are the me that is young,
I old.
But what of that?!
Death’s mean at all his Tricks, God, yes,
But you the Treats
Who run to beg my life and yours
In all the Future’s wild, delirious, dark
But warm and living streets.
MRS. HARRIET MADDEN ATWOOD,
WHO PLAYED THE PIANO FOR THOMAS A. EDISON
FOR THE WORLD’S FIRST PHONOGRAPH RECORD,
IS DEAD AT 105
And did you know that still she was alive?
Somewhere, old Harriet Madden Atwood, there’s a name!
And freshly gone now at, listen to the sum:
One hundred years plus five!
Why, gods in multiples, there’s no one else alive
Recalls what she recalled just some few days ago
When in her bed, remembering, she tuned pianos past
our ken;
She outlived twenty-on-a-thousand better men
And women who shored up their bones
And lived out lives on borrowed blood
And loans of vital stuffs,
While kindling up her dreams with echoings of song
That needle-hissed her mind all midnight long.
She played for Edison!
Old Thomas asked her talent to begin.
So she began and in beginning knew no end.
George Atwood came to find her at Old But Then Young Edison’s request.
Timidly she came, all doubt, and saw the strange machine
In which he would entrap, wind up her trembled soul,
There nest her sound like fragile mail To be delivered in some unfrequented year
She would frequent by song and song alone,
Her body gone, her touch would linger on the sill
And fill the year Two Thousand Ninety-Nine with chords.
Her late rewards?
A tumult of applause broadcast down shoals of stars
And Space
From all the future places where the race
Has gone, will go, to hide and seek,
The billions of them nameless as they go.
But, strange—
The name of Harriet Hadden Atwood they will know.
For Edison she played.
This maid another year did sit her down
In some small glade of time
And place her fingers to the keys
From which sprang old but now-made-new within-the-instant
Melodies.
Her claims were modest, Nor did she take a fee
She removed her gloves and gently kicked the pedals
A trimly perfect mediocrity—
Which means not bad nor yet a hair beyond
The median good;
She was a known commodity in the tuneless humming of bees
That was her green-fern, sharp-thorned summer rose
And cut-grass neighborhood.
All children, with their butterflies like Fates
Caught up in nets, nodded as she passed,
Their fingers aching at remembrance of strict lessons
That she taught;
She baked and bought the simples of her Time.
When in between a lesson or recital
Less than humble are her vital statistics,
Less than a complication the logistics of supply and demand
In her life.
Tom Edison needed a sweet-sour pound of high green summer apples;
George Atwood looked and found: a pianist, then a wife.
Both were gladdened by her sound.
Now that sound will gladden out the hearts of girls unborn
Beyond Poughkeepsie, Saturn, Jupiter,
Far Rockaway, Moon, Mars, or Matterhorn.
In nebulae at present kept beyond our gaze
Harriet Madden Atwood, who played for the now-long-dead
In other days,
Will, in future ages,
Doubtless in Alpha Centauri,
Be counted as one of their new and unpredictable culture rages.
Unknown in her own time,
No titan talent she.
Yet since she was the start of some new thing,
One billion years from tonight
She will bloom in eternal spring.
Five light-years away and away,
Miss Maiden-Lady Madden, later found-and-married Atwood,
Will play and play and play.
Tom Edison asks it!
In seance he sets her task ever on:
More, yes! once more, yes, now, more!
Five presidents heard and sent notes
On her birthdays recalling some raggedy tunes
They’d last heard on some late summer night
Now-gone-forever excursion boats.
Such threadbare keys,
By a passaging of time beyond the lees of every planet
In our basement system of the Void
May well outlive the off-beat hummings of a Freud,
Linger with Beethoven,
Stay with Berlioz.
Made up of humble clay, ?
Harriet Hadden Atwood, a girl whose only Cause
Was to play
Piano
Trapped by Thomas Alva E.,
Now lives Forever!
Give or take a day.
WHAT SEEMS A BALM
IS SALT TO ANCIENT WOUNDS
All things are mixed.
The very flesh of God
Is compound eye which looks upon a world
And cracks the light,
And fixes star at very blackest heart of night,
And shades the noon with ghost
And leans the shadow tree
Across the flowered lawn,
And fringes, all serene,
The sea with teeth of carnivore
Which boil in hungry schools beneath the calms;
What seems a balm is salt to ancient wounds;
What seems a death, gone teeming unto worms,
From splendid garbage rouses up new forms;
Beneath the mask of Peace
Old War hones swords and builds
A battlement of scrimshaw bone;
Beneath the battered shield
Soft flesh, gone simple with a summer’s day,
But waits for asking and then, asked, gives yield.
So round-about all goes, now hard, now soft,
Now mild, now mad, the sheep and wolf arun in tandem flocks:
Lost man, found world,
Fused paradox.
HERE ALL BEAUTIFULLY COLLIDES
The sky is inked with blue
The grass, sketched, scribbled, drawn, is green ink, too,
And all about ravines take children to their Deeps;
While from the east at dawn and west at sunset seeps
A color of life’s blood
Where clouds amass
And spread the tincture.
At the airport, dragon-shadows pass
Kites shuttle
Shadow down
Becoming planes
Which
Oh
So
Softly Land On…
…grass.
On rooftops roosters cut from metal
Whine with wind and nose gone-far directions
Where only children with their secret
Gum-chewed mint impacted wisdom go.
The eaves glide-whisper soft of summer nights
Now letting flow
The silk discumberments of dreams:
Remembered snow.
Rivers run here not
