My older self kept spelled by California airs
My younger, garden-lost in Britain’s maze,
But what a joy such days of lostness be!
How wondrous to be lovely-puzzled endlessly!
The sum and thought is good: that even when I stay I go,
Gone quiet here, my other self
Stands even much more silent still,
That one more mystery of myself,
That girl run round the wide circumference of earth
Dares take a step, a step, another step,
And then, behold!
All that was gray at sunset
Mints itself to gold;
All that was cold
Is for a moment, on the hearth of evening, kindled warm.
This self, stayed here, calls out a prayer
And asks a promise from the world:
To keep my other lost and wandering self from harm.
OLD MARS, THEN BE A HEARTH TO US
Why, damn it all,
You once werefull of life!
It dripped and fell from off your ruddy edges into Space!
Long years before our time
When dreaming tribes of men lurched in dim caves
And burnt their paws at fires newly made,
They eyed your blazing shape far up the sky
October nights and wondered what you were.
The Greeks, they wondered too,
And so along the line to men who grouped
With Galileo or some-such
Confirmed or dis-established you.
While authors, later on, competed to outfit your latitudes
And longitudes with peoples some bleached fair
And others green,
And some with gills, by God, and others saffron gone astride
Rare beasts with spider legs;
Some hatched from eggs because dear Mr. Burroughs wrote it so!
While others snatched quadruple swords,
One for each arm and hand.
Great gods in multiples, oh what a land you were,
Yes, what a land! We all of us, as boys, stretched minds in orchestras of need,
First one, and then another and another
So, signaling, we hoped that you might mother us,
Pull us like teeth, yank soul from body,
Spirit raw from bloody dreaming flesh
Across the void to land us safe in dust
To run in childish tides among blue hills!
Such thrills were common and from such common stuff
We made up armies of romancers who, full-grown,
Built metal thus to underpin the dreams
And so as astronauts strode forth on fire
And found a moon much less than halfway up to you.
For now, inadequate, ‘twill do, oh, yes, ‘twill do.
While we save up our spit to make another try
On some day soon this side of century’s end,
Put landfall down and self-destruct the dream
That caused us to commence.
Some few days hence we will set out, the boys-grown-men
And shuttle us forever back and forth again
Between your far red beacon light
And green and blue and white and mortal Earth.
Our mirth will answer all,
Our laughter in the face of, Nothing’s smile
Will ring across the abyss mile on light-year mile.
Old Mars, then be a hearth to us some little space
Before we leave your nest to start again a race
That we must win completely or be lost,
And, winning, gain Forever, so not count the cost.
Three billion lights extinguished if one light but stays?
One last light, yes, to touch the fuse and detonate
Three billion unborn men to life, to fire forth
Three billion years of everlasting joys and endless days.
Old Mars, can you help out with this?
Why, can boys piss?
And write their destinies across the skies?
Their names in sand as well as stars?
Oh, yes!
…and cross the t’s.
…and dot the i’s.
THE THING THAT GOES BY NIGHT:
THE SELF THAT LAZES SUN
Night shades a side of me
Which leans unto the North
And calls upon a polar wind to hair my spine
And fills my lungs with dread
That part of me, half-dead,
A left-hand sort of thing gone claw
Is creep and crawler on my bed;
By night I feel my spider hand cup blood
And move of its own itching pride
To throttle up my soul.
Then I have need of sun and my warmed Southern self,
My right hand called from noon
To wrestle with the dark,
To tromp the spidered clutch,
Let loose my soul in brighter gasps of climes
More yellow and more perfect
Than a Savior’s exhalations.
So noon and midnight’s self cell up in one wild flesh
And own me, each in its own time,
Or turnabout and own me in an instant fused
Where black and white twins mix to make a perfect paint
To color out my mask and make a curious sight
Within a mirror’s gaze prolong themselves
Half nights, half days.
What man is that? I ask,
Which singer of what song?
And image answers back:
The Thing That Goes By Night:
The Self That Lazes Sun.
Both answers wrong.
GROON
What is the Groon?
My young dog said.
What is the Groon;
Is it live, is it dead?
Did it fall from the Moon,
Has it arms, legs, or head?
Does it walk,
Or shamble and amble or stalk?
Does it grumble or mumble or whisper like snow?
Is it dust, is it fluff?
Is it snuff
For a ghost that will sneeze itself inside-out,
Then, outside-in, turnabout!?
Can it walk on the wall?
Will it rise, stay, or fall?
Does it moan, groan, and grieve?
What tracks does it leave
When it walks in the dust
And makes prints by the light,
By the moldy old light of the Moon?
What’s the Groon?
Is it he, she, or it?
Does it sprawl, crawl, or sit?
Is it shaped like a craw or a claw or a hoof?
Does it tread like a toad in the road
Or mingle on the shingle-high path
Of our roof?
There, aloof, does it tap in the night
And go down out of sight in the rain-funnel spout?
Is it strange going in,
But even more strange coming out?
Has it shadows to spare?
Is it rare?
Does it croon for a loved one, oh,
Much like itself
Put away on a shelf
In a grave or a tomb
Where it shuttles a loom,
Spins new shapes for itself
Made of moon-moss and lint,
Sparked with Indian flint
Struck from Indian graves
Where old Indian braves
Put their bones up on stilts
Where their mummy-dust silts
Join the corn-stalks in dance;
And the wind off the hills
Chills wild smokes torn from rooves
And the dust churned from hooves
Of ghost horses stormed by
In the middle of night—
What a sight! what a sight!
Isthis, then, the Groon?
&nbap;
Is it old as the Sphinx?
Is it dreadful, methinks?
Is it Dire, is it Awe?
Does it stick in your craw?
Is it smoke or mere chaff?
Do you whimper or laugh
At this skin of a snake left to blow on the road?
Is it cool-iced hoptoad or deep midnight frog
That goesSplash! if you jump?
Does it… bump… ‘neath your bed
Near the head or the toe?
When it’s there,is it there?
When it’s gone, where’s it go?
What’s the Croon?
Tell me soon…
For the Moon’s growing older,
And the wind’s growing colder,
And the Croon? It grows larger and bolder!
And darker and stranger!
Mysoul is in danger!
For there creep its hands
Twitched from shadowy lands,
Reaching out now to touch
And to hold and to… clutch!
&nsp;
Quick, sunlight, bring Noon!
Fight shadows, fight Moon!
Give me morning, bright sun!
Then my battle is won.
For the Groon cannot fight
What is Sun, what is Light!
It will wither away
With the dawn, with the day!
But… !
… come back… next midnight
With its scare… and its fright..
Once again we will croon:
What’s the Groon!
What’s… the… Groon…?
THAT WOMAN ON THE LAWN
Sometimes, gone late at night,
I would awake and hear
My mother in another year and place
Out walking on the lawn so late
It must have been near dawn yet dark it was
The only light then in the gesture of the stars
Which wheeled around in motionings so soft
They took your breath to see; and there upon the grass
Like ghost with dew-washed feet she was
A maid again, alone, quite singular, so young.
I wept to see her there so strange,
So unrelate to me, so special to herself,
So untouched by the world, so evanescent, free,
With something wild come up in cheeks
And red to lips, and flashing in the eyes;
It frightened me.
Why should she wander out without permit,
Permission saying go or do not go
From us or any other…?
Was she, or My God, wasn’t she our mother?
How dare she walk, a virgin, fresh once more
Within a night that hid her face,
How dare displace us in her thoughts and will?!
And sometimes even still, late nights,
I think I hear her soft tread on the sill
And wake to see her cross the lawn
Gone wild with wishing, dreaming, wanting
And crouched down there until dawn,
Washing her hair with wind,
Paying no mind to the cold,
Waiting for some bold strange man
To rise up like the sun
And strike her beauteous-blind!
And weeping I call out to her;
Oh, young girl there,
Oh, sweet girl in the dawn!
I do not mind, no, no.
I do not mind.
FROM AN ANCIENT LOCOMOTIVE
PASSING THROUGH LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT
Far Rockaway…
It seems a state of mind
And not a place.
Is it the Country of the Blind or merely
One more face lost in a fog upon a stretch of sand
That, near the sea, squanders itself in rock
And muffled heartbeats endlessly
Aform, atumble with the crumbled dregs of foam
And murmurings of travel where the wandering
Daft stumbler of the roads gives up and stands,
His shoulder creaked with weights
Of toys left over from a time when he ran out with boys
Who, in the hour, then grossly grew to men,
Have left him for some other roads to town.
So he went out through hills to where
The customs, laws, aims, dreams
And circumventures ran them down
To nothingness
Where fences rusted, rotted and gave way,
Where open fields barked foxes, sang with sparrows
Mocked with crows, accepted snowflakes
In sparse payment for old crimes
Those summers killed, deep buried now, and best forgot
And laid with white.
There, every night, a nightmare rouse and whirl
Of chaff and seed
Snuffed up, is sneezed in four directions;
Thus spent free it flounders, wanders, lingers
Molders deep across the dry and cereal land.
No matter, look, but more than looking, hear:
At starting of the dawn, at spent of dusk,
Beginning or shutting down the storms of year
The paper blowing in a dustboll on the empty road
The seaweed thistling the sand shore shoals
In murmured rustling code which speaks to naught
So Nil gives back a throated trickling of sound:
Far Rockaway.
That Rockaway which Far, which Rocks, which tumbles down
The landfall-click-away-along-away
Like time which dusts to ruin and to brine
Down destiny’s incline to desert stills,
To ruined clay
Like trollies which excursioned off the cliff
And fell in ticket-punch confettis celebrating dooms
To plunge, to steep, to drown in deeps,
