poems past midnight

[stilltrucking]

Poems past midnight



My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

by Mark Strand



1
When the moon appears

and a few wind-stricken barns stand out

in the low-domed hills

and shine with a light

that is veiled and dust-filled

and that floats upon the fields,

my mother, with her hair in a bun,

her face in shadow, and the smoke

from her cigarette coiling close

to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,

stands near the house

and watches the seepage of late light

down through the sedges,

the last gray islands of cloud

taken from view, and the wind

ruffling the moon's ash-colored coat

on the black bay.


2

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send

small carpets of lampglow

into the haze and the bay

will begin its loud heaving

and the pines, frayed finials

climbing the hill, will seem to graze

the dim cinders of heaven.

And my mother will stare into the starlanes,

the endless tunnels of nothing,

and as she gazes,

under the hour's spell,

she will think how we yield each night

to the soundless storms of decay

that tear at the folding flesh,

and she will not know

why she is here

or what she is prisoner of

if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.


3

My mother will go indoors

and the fields, the bare stones

will drift in peace, small creatures --

the mouse and the swift -- will sleep

at opposite ends of the house.

Only the cricket will be up,

repeating its one shrill note

to the rotten boards of the porch,

to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,

to the sea that keeps to itself.

Why should my mother awake?

The earth is not yet a garden

about to be turned. The stars

are not yet bells that ring

at night for the lost.

It is much too late.


From Mark Strand: Selected Poems, by Mark Strand, published by Atheneum. Copyright © 1979 by Mark Strand. Used with permission.


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The Mother


by Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed

children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,

and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?--

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.


From A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks, published by Harper & Brothers. © 1945 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

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Morning Song


by Sylvia Plath



Love set you going like a fat gold watch.



The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry



Took its place among the elements.









Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.



In a drafty museum, your nakedness



Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.









I'm no more your mother



Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow



Effacement at the wind's hand.









All night your moth-breath



Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:



A far sea moves in my ear.









One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral



In my Victorian nightgown.



Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square









Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try



Your handful of notes;



The clear vowels rise like balloons.






From Ariel, published by Harper & Row, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Ted Hughes. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.


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Kaddish, Part I


by Allen Ginsberg



For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956



Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on



the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.



downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,



talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues



shout blind on the phonograph



the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--



And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing



how we suffer--



And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,



prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-



swers--and my own imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn--



Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward Apoca-



lypse,



the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after,



looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city



a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom



Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed--



like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--



No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,



trapped in its disappearance,



sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worship-



ping each other,



worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while it



lasts, a Vision--anything more?



It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,



Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shoul-



dering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant--and



the sky above--an old blue place.



or down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk toward the Lower East Side



--where you walked 50 years ago, little girl--from Russia, eating the



first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock



then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?--toward



Newark--



toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice



cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards--



Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,



and learning to be mad, in a dream--what is this life?



Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of light



on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the



sidewalk--in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward



the Yiddish Theater--and the place of poverty



you knew, and I know, but without caring now--Strange to have moved



thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,



with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on



the street, firs escapes old as you



--Tho you're not old now, that's left heree with me--



Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe--and I guess that dies with



us--enough to cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever



every time--



That's good! That leaves it open for no regret--no fear radiators, lacklove,



torture even toothache in the end--



Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul--and the lamb, the soul,



in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair



and teeth--and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,



braintricked Implacability.



Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you're out, Death let you out,



Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with



God, done with the path thru it--Done with yourself at last--Pure



--Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all--before the



world--



There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've gone, it's good.



No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more



fear of Louis,



and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,



loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands--



No more of sister Elanor,--she gone before you--we kept it secret you



killed her--or she killed herself to bear with you--an arthritic heart



--But Death's killed you both--No matter--



Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and



weeks--forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-



ity, Chaplin dance in youth,



or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar



--by standing room with Elanor & Max--watching also the Capital



ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,



with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts



pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and



laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920



all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave--lucky to



have husbands later--



You made it--I came too--Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and



will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer--or kill



--later perhaps--soon he will think--)



And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now



--tho not you



I didn't foresee what you felt--what more hideous gape of bad mouth came



first--to you--and were you prepared?



To go where? In that Dark--that--in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the



Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with



you?



Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull



in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon--Deaths-



head with Halo? can you believe it?



Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence,



than none ever was?



Nothing beyond what we have--what you had--that so pitiful--yet Tri-



umph,



to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower--fed to the



ground--but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,



shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth



wrapped, sore--freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.



No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the



knife--lost



Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy--even in the Spring--strange ghost



thought some--Death--Sharp icicle in his hand--crowned with old



roses--a dog for his eyes--cock of a sweatshop--heart of electric



irons.



All the accumulations of life, that wear us out--clocks, bodies, consciousness,



shoes, breasts--begotten sons--your Communism--'Paranoia' into



hospitals.



You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of



stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is



Elanor happy?



Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over



midnight Accountings, not sure. His life passes--as he sees--and



what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might



have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Im-



mortality, Naomi?



I'll see him soon. Now I've got to cut through to talk to you as I didn't



when you had a mouth.



Forever. And we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's horses



--headed to the End.



They know the way--These Steeds--run faster than we think--it's our own



life they cross--and take with them.









Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, mar-



ried dreamed, mortal changed--Ass and face done with murder.



In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under



pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.



Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,



Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm



hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore



Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not



light or darkness, Dayless Eternity--



Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some



of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death



This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-



derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping



--page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine aand Naomi--to God's perfect



Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!









II



Over and over--refrain--of the Hospitals--still haven't written your



history--leave it abstract--a few images



run thru the mind--like the saxophone chorus of houses and years--



remembrance of electrical shocks.



By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your



nervousness--you were fat--your next move--



By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you--



once and for all--when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my



opinion of the cosmos, I was lost--



By my later burden--vow to illuminate mankind--this is release of



particulars--(mad as you)--(sanity a trick of agreement)--



But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and



spied a mystical assassin from Newark,



So phoned the Doctor--'OK go way for a rest'--so I put on my coat



and walked you downstreet--On the way a grammarschool boy screamed,



unaccountably--'Where you goin Lady to Death'? I shuddered--



and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask



against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma--



And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of



the gang? You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on--to New



York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound--






From Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Used with permission.




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[myrna minkoff]

Mystic Mechanic

mindless juxtaposition