Zone Journals Read online

  For Glenn Gould and Merle Travis

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Yard Journal

  A Journal of English Days

  March Journal

  A Journal of True Confession

  Night Journal

  A Journal of the Year of the Ox

  Light Journal

  A Journal of One Significant Landscape

  Chinese Journal

  Night Journal

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  Yard Journal

  —Mist in the trees, and soiled water and grass cuttings splotch

  The driveway,

  afternoon starting to bulk up in the west

  A couple of hours down the road:

  Strange how the light hubs out and wheels

  concentrically back and forth

  After a rain, as though the seen world

  Quavered inside a water bead

  swung from a grass blade:

  The past is never the past:

  it lies like a long tongue

  We walk down into the moist mouth of the future, where new

  teeth

  Nod like new stars around us,

  And winds that itch us, and plague our ears,

  sound curiously like the old songs.

  —Deep dusk and lightning bugs

  alphabetize on the east wall,

  The carapace of the sky blue-ribbed and buzzing

  Somehow outside it all,

  Trees dissolving against the night’s job,

  houses melting in air:

  Somewhere out there an image is biding its time,

  Burning like Abraham in the cold, swept

  expanses of heaven,

  Waiting to take me in and complete my equation:

  What matters is abstract, and is what love is,

  Candescent inside the memory,

  continuous

  And unexpungable, as love is …

  —Blue jay’s bound like a kangaroo’s in the lawn’s high grass,

  Then up in a brushstroke

  and over the hedge in one arc.

  Light weights down the azalea plants,

  Yesterday’s cloud banks enfrescoed still

  just under the sky’s cornice,

  Cardinal quick transfusion into the green arm of the afternoon.

  Wax-like flowers of sunlight drift

  through the dwarf orchard and float

  Under the pygmied peaches and pears

  All over America,

  and here, too, the blossoms

  Continuing down from nowhere, out of the blue.

  The mockingbird’s shadow is burned in the red clay below him.

  —Exclusion’s the secret: what’s missing is what appears

  Most visible to the eye:

  the more luminous anything is,

  The more it subtracts what’s around it,

  Peeling away the burned skin of the world

  making the unseen seen:

  Body by new body they all rise into the light

  Tactile and still damp,

  That rhododendron and dogwood tree, that spruce,

  An architecture of absence,

  a landscape whose words

  Are imprints, dissolving images after the eyelids close:

  I take them away to keep them there—

  that hedgehom, for instance, that stalk …

  —A bumblebee the size of my thumb

  rises like Geryon

  From the hard Dantescan gloom

  Under my window sash to lip the rain gutter’s tin bolgia,

  Then backs out like a hummingbird

  spiraling languidly out of sight,

  Shoulders I’ve wanted to sit on, a ride I’ve wanted to take,

  Deposited into the underlight

  of cities thronged in the grass,

  Fitful illuminations, iron-colored plain that lies

  Littered with music and low fires,

  stone edge of the pit

  At the end of every road,

  First faces starting to swim up:

  Bico, my man, are you here?

  A Journal of English Days

  (September)

  —Kensington Church Walk, St. Mary Abbots

  Gray stone and dun through the mustard edges of chestnut leaves.

  Inside, a funeral’s going on and I back off

  To sit on a wooden bench

  Against a brick wall

  in the slick, unseasonable sunshine,

  Trying to piece together

  The way it must have been for someone in 1908

  Fresh up from Italy,

  A couple of books of his own poems in one hand

  and a dead galaxy

  Set to go off in crystal inside his head.

  Over the stained-glass windows in front of me,

  In Kensington black and white,

  Ancient Lights

  Is nailed to the churchside stone,

  The children trailing out of the false penumbra

  into the sun-screed in Indian file

  Then in again, shrilling, in cadence, their little song.

  —I’m back for a second look,

  but someone is meditating on last week’s bench

  In a full lotus. Now he touches his nose

  With his right forefinger, and now

  With his left.

  His black shoes puddle beneath him

  Like backs of mirrors he’ll walk on tenderly

  Over the flat-laid churchyard gravestones when he leaves.

  But now he’s back in position,

  hands cupped

  In his lap, thumb end touching thumb end, his eyes closed—

  One of those weightless, effortless late September days

  As sycamore leaves

  tack down the unresisting air

  Onto the fire-knots of late roses

  Still pumping their petals of flame

  up from the English loam,

  And I suddenly recognize

  The difference between the spirit and flesh

  is finite, and slowly transgressable …

  (October)

  —October everywhere out of the sunlight

  Onto the China jade of the blowing fields

  Of Kensington Gardens—

  or else come down like wet lint

  Over the Avon, soaking the glass.

  It swivels my eyes that work me for grief and affliction

  And pink my spirit, it guides my hand.

  Fulke Greville lies in his stone boat in the church of St. Mary

  In Warwickshire, not rippling the cold

  Which clings like water drops to what was his face

  On the other side of the light.

  His kinsmen, Lords of the Bear and the Ragged Staff,

  lie scattered around him,

  Hermetically sealed in stone,

  Who was friend to Elizabeth R and Sir Philip Sidney, ghost

  In his own room now,

  all passions heeled.

  This afternoon I came up

  Out of his Warwick dungeon

  into the slow swish of the English rain,

  Its bead curtain and lengths of chain

  Strangely consoling after the iron artifacts

  Hanging below like rib cages

  and lungs in the torturous gloom.

  The castle seemed to encircle me with its stone wings

  And all of it lift

  slightly at once, then settle back

  As though the wind had died

  That blows continuously under our feet

  Holding up everything, then started again,

  and what had sunk was risen,

  I don’t know, at least to whe
re it began …

  —October’s a kind time,

  The rain lying like loose bandages over the ground,

  The white bounty of mushrooms thrusting their flesh up,

  The comforting slide of darkness

  edging like deep water

  Back through the afternoon.

  The sycamore trees in Lennox Gardens crisp and spray

  In the wind, our discontent,

  like Orpheus, singing elsewhere,

  Charon, in slow motion, poling his empty boat

  Cross-current, over the dark water

  Into the different music of London traffic,

  the coin still clenched in his teeth

  The other side of the Thames …

  Back in the Gardens, it’s tag end of a skitterish day,

  October 17, Sir Philip dead

  397 years today,

  I watch the stiff papers scudding across the lawn,

  Leaves heaped to vindicate speedily

  The offices of the end,

  dogs nosing the moist-eared edges of things,

  Noticing gradually

  A larger darkness inching up through the dark

  Like grass, that means to cover us all.

  Across the way, the yellow moths of the window lights

  Break from their blue cocoons.

  —The trees stay green longer here, lacking

  The clubbing frost that stuns them to glory.

  Their leaves lie in limes and tans

  Flocking the grass, vaguely pre-Cubist to me,

  And blurred, without my glasses, arranged

  In an almost-pattern of colors across the yard,

  The same colors Cézanne once used in the same way

  So often down in Provence.

  He died there today

  Seventy-seven years ago, October 22, the fields and houses and trees

  Still these colors and pure arrangements

  Oozing out of the earth, dropping out of the sky

  in memory of him each year

  Everywhere, north and south …

  He never painted the moon.

  Never romantic enough,

  he saw what he saw in a white light.

  Still, I remember it there, hanging like a doubloon

  Over Puyricard, outside Aix, some fifteen years ago,

  Godfrey and I in our yellow suits

  vamping the landscape

  Along the canal, first in its half, then two weeks later its full dress.

  It’s here now, powdering through the trees

  as cars go by, and drunks sing in the street.

  The blue light from a TV swarms at the windowpanes

  In one of the Dutch Georgians across the way.

  He made us see differently, where the hooks fit, and the eyes go …

  Nothing is ever finished.

  —Up from the basement flat at 43A,

  up past the Greek college,

  Across Walton to Ovington Gardens

  Then over to Brompton Road

  And across,

  left to the Oratory and right

  Up under the chestnut trees to Ennismore Mews,

  Up past the gardens and Prince’s Gate

  Across the main road and Rotten Row,

  bicycle track

  And long grass down to the Serpentine,

  Ducks on the water, geese on the water, the paired swans

  Imperious and the gulls

  neat on the slick edges,

  Then backtrack and a right turn

  To the west, across the road and into Kensington Gardens

  And out to the chestnut and beech grove

  As the dogs go by

  and the Punks noodle along

  In their chrome stud belts and Technicolor hair.

  What breeze-bristled cities the trees are,

  Their lights snatched off and on,

  streets cluttered with leaves.

  The sky is scrubbed to a delft blue

  in the present tense,

  Segueing into gray and a future pearl.

  I’m stuck here, unwilling to trace my steps back,

  The month running down like a love affair

  inexorably to its close,

  Sunday, October 30, Pound’s birthday ninety-eight years ago,

  Everything lidded with gray, unporridgy clouds now,

  Smooth as a slice of tin

  or a flat rock in the street.

  Like a bouffant hairdo of steel wool,

  The limbs of a leafless chestnut tree are back-combed by the wind.

  The English mind, he said, the cold soup of the English mind.

  At Pisa it all came back

  in a different light

  In the wind-sear and sun-sear of the death cages,

  Remembering Christmases in the country, the names

  Of dead friends in the Tuscan twilight

  building and disappearing across the sky.

  Cold soup, cold soup,

  Longwater color of pewter,

  late grass green neon.

  —Short Riff for John Keats on His 188th Birthday

  Hopkins thought your verse abandoned itself

  To an enervating luxury,

  a life of impressions

  In fairyland, life of a dreamer,

  And lacking the manly virtues of active thought.

  Born on All Hallows’ Eve, what other early interest

  Can one assume,

  that single, arterial drop of blood

  On the clean sheet dispelling for good

  a subsequent second,

  Little black light magnet, imagination’s Buddha …

  (November)

  —A Traveler between life and death …

  Where is that line between sleep and sleep,

  That line like a wind over water

  Rippling toward shore,

  appearing and disappearing

  In wind-rise and wind-falter—

  That line between rain and sleet,

  between leaf-bronze and leaf-drop-

  That line where the river stops and the lake begins,

  Where the black blackens

  and light comes out of the light …

  Stone circle at Castlerigg,

  Cumbrian, Paleolithic chancel

  Against the November mist and vault,

  Mouth-mark of the invisible, air become breath

  And ecclesiastical smoke …

  Crows, like strings of black Christmas-tree lights, burn in the bare

  trees,

  And silver Y moths—though soon to die—appear at dusk,

  The night coming down, a dark snow

  Piecemeal and hard across the moors

  like the ashes of Paradise

  3500 years ago,

  Helvellyn and Thirlmere

  Sluicing to charcoal down-valley, water and earth

  And air all bleared to the same color, an indiscriminate estuary

  Shoaling into the landscape, nobody here but me

  Unspooling to nothingness,

  line after line after latched, untraceable line …

  —November pares us like green apples,

  circling under our skins

  In long, unbroken spirals until

  We are sweet flesh for the elements

  surprised by the wind’s shear

  Curling down from the north of Wales

  Like Occam’s edge to Steeple Aston and Oxfordshire.

  “Worst time of the year,” he said,

  “leaves everywhere

  And fresh cold to shiver your very seeds.

  I’ve burned two piles already, Saturday morning yet”—

  This in the Norman churchyard,

  Gray flake and flame in a hushed mound on Delia Johnson,

  God Knows His Own,

  Lead lines in the arteries for the first time, magpies

  Hustling their double notes

  steadily, like oars in an oarlock,

  Beec
hwoods and whitehorns, hawthorn and mountain ash

  All burning down to bare ricks

  Against the dropdraft of cold as winter circles and moves in …

  —Chelsea Embankment, 5 p.m.: Whistler pastels squished

  Down the fluted water, orange,

  Tamarind, apricot

  jade on the slate slip of the river,

  Tug-ducks moored at the mudbanks,

  Southbank light-string reflections stretched like struck and vibrat

  ing pipes,

  The Thames rung softly

  cross-river, and always a different note

  Under the Albert Bridge, the Chelsea and out through town—

  Or star-colored steps that sink

  Beneath the sharkskin of the current

  down to the corridors

  And bone-bossed gallery gates of the end.

  —I keep coming back, like a tongue to a broken tooth,

  Kensington Church Walk,

  late afternoon,

  Pigeons in bas-relief and frieze on the building’s edge—

  There is no sickness of spirit like homesickness

  When what you are sick for

  has never been seen or heard

  In this world, or even remembered

  except as a smear of bleached light

  Opening, closing beyond any alphabet’s

  Recall to witness and isolate …

  November’s my favorite month,

  the downside of autumn

  And winter in first array, the sky

  Constabled now and again

  Over Kensington Gardens:

  north of the Serpentine,

  A pale light on the bright side of the dark,

  Everything starting to glide and refract,

  moving just under water …

  —Today is fire and solution, rack

  of veins in the ruined trees,

  A warm wind from the south and crows like mistletoe in the twist

  And tuck of diluvial branches-

  Stay out of the way and be conspicuous,