‘People at Night’ and Other Poems

People at Night

 

Nights are in no sense fashioned for all.

They cut off your neighbor from you like a wall

with a barrier you never should try to undo.

And if at dark you turn up your light

in hope of a face-to-face human sight,

you have to consider: who.

 

Light has most horribly altered men’s faces,

as from the features the evidence drips,

and if they go, nights, to gathering places,

you see there a world on a teetering basis

strewn as random as chips.

On all the foreheads a yellow shine

has taken the place of thought,

in their expressions is flickering wine,

and in their hands is caught

a ponderous gesture, with which they try

to make what they say clear and clever;

and therein reiterate I and I

which is to say: whoever.

 

 

Bridge by the Carousel

 

The blind man who is standing on the bridge,

gray like a boundary stone of nameless lands,

perhaps he is the thing that always stands,

by which, from far away, star time is fixed,

and is the constellations’ quiet center.

For all around him flows and splays and glitters.

 

He is the righteous one, immovable,

set down on many a snarled, chaotic road;

the dismal entrance to the underworld

amid a race bent on the trivial.

 

 

The Gazelle

 

Gazella Dorcas

 

Bewitched one: how can two selected words

in their concord ever achieve the rhyme

that in you comes and goes as at a sign.

Up from your forehead leaf and lyre ascend,

 

and your whole being moves as simile

as if through love songs, those whose lyrics lie

like rose leaves softly on the eyes of him

who having stopped his reading closes them:

 

so he can see you: carried off, as though

each of your movements were somehow spring-laden

and might not shoot away while your neck so

 

holds your head harkening: like her who bathes

deep in the woods, whose bath is broken off:

the pond in her aside-turned countenance.

 

 

Remembering

 

And you wait, you wait for the one

that unceasingly broadens your being;

the mighty, the likened to none,

the awakening of stone,

of depth brought forth for your seeing.

In the bookcase, light grows dim

on volumes of brown and gold

and you think of lands you have seen,

of pictures, and clothes once again

of women lost of old.

And you suddenly know: It was that.

You stand up, and before you, there,

is a year out of the past,

of fear and form and prayer.

 

 

The Boy

 

I would like to develop into one

like those who with wild horses drive through night

with torches, which like hair loose as in flight

wave in the mighty wind raised by their hunt.

I would stand forward as if in a boat,

as huge a presence as a flag tight-rolled.

Dark, but beneath a helmet made of gold

that casts light restlessly. And ranked behind,

ten men out of a darkness deep as mine

with helmets that, like mine, are always changing,

now clear as glass, now dark, or blind, or aging.

And one beside me stands and blows us room

upon a trumpet, which gleams and sounds out

and blows us a black loneness all about,

through which we rampage like a furious dream:

Behind us, houses fall onto their knees,

the streets and alleys bow their solid forms,

the market squares yield: we accept all these,

and our wild horses pelt on like rain storms.