Until the earth is asterisk to proclamations
Made by God long years before a Bible scroll
Or ocean wave unrolled,
Before the merest sun on primal hearth was burned
And set to warm the Hands Invisible.
I stay, I linger on, remain;
Upon my rumpled brow my destiny is riven deep
In hieroglyphs by hammerings of God
Who, ambled on my head, did leave his mark.
I am the Ark of Life!
Old Noah knew me well.
Do not look round for ruins of an ancient craft,
I kept his seed, his love, his wild desires by night,
His need.
He marched his lost twinned tribes of beasts
Two and two and two within my mouth;
Once shut, there in the Mediterranean north,
I took me south,
And waited out the forty days for dove to touch my skin
And tell by touching: Earth has perished. Earth is washed
As clean as some young virgin’s thighs from old night and sin.
Noah looked out my eye and saw the bird aflutter there
With green of leaf from isle somewhere at sea.
I swam me there and let them forth
Two by two, two by two, two by two,
O how they marched endlessly.
I am the Ark of Life. You be the same.
Build you a fiery whale all white…
Give it my name.
Ship with Leviathan for forty years
Until an isle in Space looms up to match your dreams,
And land you there triumphant with your flesh
Which works in yeasts, makes wild ferment,
Survives and feeds
On metal schemes;
Step forth and husband soil as yet untilled,
Blood it with your wives, sow it with seeds,
Crop-harvest it with sons and maiden daughters,
And all that was begat once long ago in Earth’s strange waters
Do recall.
The White Whale was the ancient Ark, You be the New.
Forty days, forty years, forty hundred years,
Give it no mind;
You see. The Universe is blind.
You touch. The Abyss does not feel.
You hear. The Void is deaf.
Your wife is pomegranate. The stars are lifeless bereft.
You smell the wind of Being.
On windless worlds the nostrils of old Time are stuffed
With dust and worse than dust.
Settle it with your lust, shape it with your seeing.
Rain it with sperming seed,
Water it with your passion,
Show it your need.
Soon or late,
Your mad example it may imitate.
And gone and flown and landed there in White Whale craft,
Remember Moby here, this dream, this Time which does suspire,
This kindling of your tiny apehood’s fire;
I kept you well. I languish and I die.
But my bones will timber out fresh dreams,
My words will leap like fish in new trout streams
Cone up the hill of Universe to spawn.
Swim o’er the stars now, spawning man
And couple rock, and break forth flocks of children on the plains
Of nameless planets which will now have names,
Those names are ours to give or take,
We out of Nothing make a destiny
With one name over all
Which is this Whale’s, all White.
I you begat.
Speak then of Moby Dick,
Tremendous Moby, friend to Noah.
Go now.
Ten trillion miles away.
Ten light-years off.
See! from your whale-shaped craft:
That glorious planet!
Call it Ararat.
WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST
In The Dooryard Bloomed
When elephants last in the dooryard bloomed
Brought forth from dusts and airing attics where they roomed
For many a year and faded out the roses on their flanks
And sucked the dust and trod the ancient grass in ranks
Beyond our seeing, deep in jungles on our parlor floor,
These old familiar beasts we led into the light
And beat upon their pelts and hung them in the sight of sun
Which glorious made the panoplies of thread.
What grandeur here!
What pomp of Hannibal and Rome and Alps,
Egyptian cerements and tombs, Troy’s ruins, Delphic glooms—
Across such arabesques as these once walked Victoria.
Now in the lost great animal boneyard these lively skins are stretched,
Unravel, fall to pollen and to rust.Sic transit gloria.
All this has passed, is dim as ill-recalled rococo
But in my youth I stomped out cinnamons from these
God-awful paths and raised up such a flour of scents
As would reel down kings and make rise up to kingship
Lunatic lepers and foul penitents.
Old creatures, slung upon a wire in wind and light
And years’ ebbtide
I beat you gently with my howdah wire-racket beater,
Search tigers in the shade of your deep hills
And stand, a monarch made, along your blind impatient old
And slumbrous side,
And know that modern carpetings and rugs, so bland, so broad
So nothing, and so shallow
Were made for snails
And men who breakfast, lunch, and dine
Upon the safe, sure, ever-recurring marshmallow.
Still somewhere in this world
Do elephants graze yards?
In far towns toward the East and North toward Michigan
Do grandmothers and boys go forth to lawns,
And lines strummed there ‘twixt oak or elm and porch,
And tie thereon great beasts of Indian grace
Loomed taller than their heads?
Still on such days do heartbeats throng the town
Where elderwitch and tads,
Where toms and great-grand-crones gone feverish with sweat
Goad Time out of the warp and weave,
The tapestry of treaded hearthwarm woolen flesh,
Beat Time into the breeze and watch the billion footfalls
Sift clouds into the greening insufferable beauty of young trees?
Do old and young still tend a common ground?
Vast panoply and firewalk spread of God’s most patient brute
Whose firecoal eyes observe and well-worn hide
Now feels the woman tire, so Boy takes up the beat:
Where one thump dies, another heart begins.
Along the cliff of dusty hide
From either end, with centuries between as well as miles,
Old looks to young, young looks to old
And, pausing with their wands,
Trade similar smiles.
DARWIN, THE CURIOUS
Old Curious Charlie
He stood for hours
Benumbed,
Astonished,
Amidst the flowers;
Waiting for silence,
Waiting for motions
In seas of rye
Or oceans of weeds—
The stuff on which true astonishment feeds—
And the weeds that fed and filled his silo
With a country spread
By the pound or kilo,
Of miracles vast or microscopic,
For them, by night, was he the topic?
In conversations of rye and barley,
Didthey stand astonished
By Curious Charlie?
DARWIN, IN THE FIELDS
Darwin, in the fields, stood still as time
And waited for the world to now exhale and now
Take in a breath of wind from off the yield and swell
Of sea where fill the clouds with sighs;
His eyes knew what they saw but took their time to tell
This truth to him; he waited on their favor.
His nose kept worlds far larger than a goodly nose might savor
And waited for the proper place to fit the flavor in.
So eye and nose and ear and hand told mouth
What it must say;
And after a while and many and many a day
His mouth,
So full of Nature’s gifts, it trembled to express,
Began to move.
No more a statue in the field,
A honeybee come home to fill the comb,
Here Darwin hies.
Though to ordinary eyes it might appear he plods,
Victorian statue in a misty lane;
All that is lies. Listen to the gods:
“The man flies, I tell you. The man flies!”
DARWIN, WANDERING HOME AT DAWN
Darwin, wandering home at dawn,
Met foxes trotting to their lairs,
Their tattered litters following,
The first light of the blood-red sun adrip
Among their hairs.
What must they’ve thought,
The man of fox,
The fox of man found there in dusky lane;
And which had right-of-way?
Did he or they move toward or in or
On away from night?
Their probing eyes
And his
Put weights to hidden scales
In mutual assize,
In simple search all stunned
And amiable apprize.
Darwin, the rummage collector,
Longing for wisdom to clap in a box,
Such lore as already learned and put by
A billion years back in his blood by the fox.
Old summer days now gone to flies
Bestir themselves alert in vixen eyes;
Some primal cause
Twitches the old man’s human-seeming paws.
An ancient sharp surmise is melded here
And shapes all Dooms
Which look on Death and know it.
Darwin all this knows.
The fox knows he knows.
But knowing is wise not to show it.
They stand a moment more upon the uncut lawn.
Then as if by sign, quit watchfulness;
Each imitates the other’s careless yawn.
And with no wave save pluming tail of fox and kin
Away the creatures go to sleep the day,
Leaving old Charlie there in curious disarray,
His hair combed this, his wits the other way.
So off he ambles, walks, and wanders on,
Leaving an empty meadow,
A place
Where strange lives passed…
And dawn.
EVIDENCE
Basking in sun,
Age 37, mid-Atlantic, on a ship,
And the ship sailing west,
Quite suddenly I saw it there
Upon my chest, the single one,
The lonely hair.
The ship was sailing into night.
The hair waswhite…
The sun had set beyond the sky;
The ship was sailing west,
And suddenly, O God, why, yes,
I felt, I knew…
So was I.
TELLING WHERE THE SWEET GUMS ARE
Even before you opened your eyes
You knew it would be one of those days.
Tell the sky what color it must be,
And it was indeed.
Tell the sun how to crochet its way,
Pick and choose among leaves
To lay out carpetings of bright and dark
On the fresh lawn,
And pick and choose it did.
The bees have been up earliest of all;
They have already come and gone
and come and gone again
to the meadow fields
and returned
all golden fuzz upon the air
all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full,
nectar-dripping.
Don’t you hear them pass?
hover?
dance their language?
telling where the sweet gums are,
The syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies,
That make boys squirm with unpronounced juices,
That make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes
Their dolphin selves naked
aflash
on the warm air
Poised forever in one
Eternal
Glass
Wave.
EMILY DICKINSON, WHERE ARE YOU?
HERMAN MELVILLE CALLED YOUR NAME
LAST NIGHT IN HIS SLEEP!
What did he call, and what was said?
From the sleep of the dead, from the lone white
Arctic midnight of his soul
What shy albino mole peered forth and gave a cry?
Or was it just the wind asifting through the winter screens
Upon the attic windows
Where the dust looks out at dew on empty lawns?
Or did the dawn mist find a tongue
And issue like his mystic seaport tides
From out his mouth while, all-unknowing, drowned, he slept
And dreamed on… Emily?
O what a shame, that these two wanderers
Of threeA.M. did not somehow contrive
To knock each other’s elbows drifting late
On sidewalks-vast inhabited by only leaves
And mice and tracks of silver from lost hieroglyphic snails.
How sad that from a long way off these two
Did not surprise each
