MAN SLEEPING

 

                                                          for Charlotte

 

 

He had been sleeping for an hour and the ocean changed

he had been dreaming towers and the sand stretched west

trying to enlist him in one more continent.

Elephants and equipoise.  Market towers, minarets.

They wanted his sleeve full of doves

and his desires must be delicate as frog spawn

dry in the noon time heat.

He wanted nothing of what they wanted of him,

slept again like the barque Unparalleled

ran aground off this shoaly island

full of bibles and Dutch cheese and gabardine.

Red skulls of it wedged in rocks for weeks

till gulls and weather woke him

reeling from the Carpenter’s embrace

—whose tongue was talking so fast in his mouth?—

am I wood or water?  Shanks of maple,

hips of seaside roses, he was heaven.

A woman wearing a dress the color of jute.

And woke some more.  Mostly fire.

Mostly air.  Air was first of all

elements, the movingness before somethingness.

Mornings before a single man has gone to work—

he woke and woke, a few things almost clear.

There is no creator, though a Making Spirit

comes from time to time and welcomes us

from inside out into our own world.

Making things as fast as we can think.

In what language written was the book you never opened?

Who was the mother of the door?  Clear too

was the interactive web of influence, a day’s your motherfather,

night is your child who dreams you further

into the meek eternity of time.  The sun is your little dog.

No wonder kings fear to go to sleep and hate their daughters.

He had been sleeping for a couple of hours

and the sun bit the sea,  scorching what sees

until the looking is a kind of dark resentment.

Quiet birds bothered beings he couldn’t see.

Desperate loyalists counter rebels in beech woods.

A rabbit hobbles towards the shade.

No religion on an island.

No one will relinquish money, a revolution

is shattering the mirrors only,

doesn’t change the endless empire of Light,

every blood-slimed sliver of the glass still reflects

the intolerable injustice of this one-life universe.

He woke and knew it had to be something other,

had to be seed sown in another summer

that we reap here.  Or else the meanings

of our mind were only money.

All thought is consolation and an angry man.

He woke late and took a cab to work,

it hurried yellow deep below the bay,

his head hurt with so little sleep,

waking and waking, his whole life an endless

something, carouse, cartouche, his name

held tight in someone’s handkerchief, lariat,

the cab crossed the burning plains safe from cheetahs

and reached the northern business district

his eyes were hot with keeping open watching boys

tumbled out and left Russ to pay the fare

with his long Pall Mall cigarettes his failed

midnight.  He woke and it was insolent

like any island.  Druids came hazarding down

from violet schooners perched in lower clouds

—now under Avalon a wall of sea stones

masoned thick with visionary mortar

held back the lilac thickets still blooming

late as June and the tanager therein

gossiped with the young wife passing

and a duck skims down the sea beach.

Daylight forgives you.  Stamina

of sleeping men.  It takes

all our energy to stay asleep

when there is so much angry waking.

Into this one bottle he squeezed his vital sap

and woke with a strange feeling in his hands

as if someone held them.  Pressure

from inside out.  Who wakes?

The house on Canapitsit Neck

looks like a fortress outlined against the levant sun

a small or local gloom, bastille

of energies, all beauty locked in fear.  He woke

after three hours sure that someone had died,

a lord or kindly one, sun’s serf

perhaps or mind’s loving-kindness’s minion.

Every time you wake a great king dies.

 

He woke after four hours with his shirt on inside out

a maiden led him to a fountain or fled him

in the mountains, he drank of whatever he found was flowing,

things come back thirsty from eternity

wake up the day is made of wood

she had to run he slowed to let her hide

smile over shoulder lost in leaves

a grove of aspens quivered by the sea

things he was allowed to remember surely his purpose

to get at the words inside

unfold the greasy red wrappings stained with stars

on our prayer bundle laughing seabirds

fishermen trying to decode the foggy banks

the mind is ultimately happy and all pleasure

comes from its solitude comes from its embrace

he woke reading the coarse grain of granite

smooth insinuations of agate a dimension

washed up on the beach cachinations man or bird

for his embrace the polyester multitudes

Nepali boys strutting by the monastery gates

unsmokably damp cigarettes in monsoons

a breath of hill air and a deep drag to breathe

baseball cap with fishy visor costumes

of the self-dissuaded.  It is two hundred

years from the Vendée and finally he gets it.

No one ever wins.  It is a process of tossing out the door,

all of us used clothes worn down and cast away

chaff and draff and urinas to build

some Other Body strong and we go out.

Who is the Body all our deaths are buying,

rebel and royalist alike, our black, your white?

He woke after five hours, were they the tops

of fence posts out the window or ancient

monuments up the glacial hill, tips of them

blunt on the far slope face the open sea

the world came from to be here

to meet him.  Is he a bird again,

what kind, where is the book he woke?

He heard a tree fall two hundred miles away

it was his heart linden his folk tree his appetite.

Where the giant kept his feelings.

How the wood weeps, how the wind gets in our clothes.

Now things were cooler in him, Egypt further,

deciding against sun glare he knew the fish were there

the ones he wanted, ordered pairs, gods

obscure or youthful powers, knew were there

because he’s seen the likes of them

slammed down on jetties gape-mouthed

dead in the quivering air thirty pounds each of them

and a knife in the harbormaster’s hand.

Explain the imbrication of their scales, the feint

of color as the sun explored their dying.

Wants to have them in his childhood way,

haddock stew or fried cod, what could be better,

scour the unsuspecting elements for wise animals

not wise to you and eat them.  For Wisdom’s alkali,

shriek of potassium in dying cells,

if he could sleep long enough he’d understand

the total genome of every species,

the long count.  But never why some found it fun to kill.

His hands shook with numbers.  Was it numbers?

Inside yourself you sleep alone.

He slept in the toaster in the dinghy in the gap

between two blue rocks on Church’s Beach

just before you get to the wild sea poppies

egg yellow in even light he favored.

The smell of freshness in his line-dried shirt

is just another smell.  Why choose?

White shoes. A gold cart snarled

and some robins flew away, it’s almost sleeping

in him now, shouts of young men

the far-off giggle of island women

at the last end of their slow twilight

mumble in his lips.  Patterns.

What could a pattern be but death or sleep?

Glare on pale oak, is he seeing?

 

He had been sleeping for six hours the lop-sided sun

bothered the dog in his head, something matters

even if it’s not is house.  Who is a house?

What is a tree on an island?  Whose is the

crown now?  Twisted circlet bog-iron from the broads

worn round the head of the Queen of the Aurora

in the house of the Sixth Wisdom.  Measure him,

he sprawls from hour to hour like a horn.

Or a heron.  Or a horse leaps a ditch a spaniel scratches

he lifts time to his teeth and gnaws, he falls

and goes nowhere.  There is a settling of accounts

and then there is the quiet water of after.

When nobody is anywhere but where he is

outstretched in shady business

pavilions noisy with bright kept birds, a boy

doing something to a bench.  A coat hanger

wakes him.  There are rooms up three flights

where after the bars close they took him

to go on drinking, sour red vino in thick coffee cups

and ugly women blaming this and that.  Dawn

had nothing to do that day, the wine

was evil but it worked, it almost worked,

there still were bridges over rivers, still rivers, still

subways, the wine couldn’t get rid of that—

though it made blurry ruin of what was there

it still was there.  Wine ages the world

and makes men young, that is the difference.

Suppose he lived all year on the island,

suppose there were dances in the hedge,

snakeskin left on your doorsill, not war,

just one other visitor, an arrow

prodding gently from behind. The flow of time.

Gypsy gull, sodden dance in mist drench but a dance,

or all the fine high hours when the wind makes up

for the amateur musicians, flugelhorn and clarinet,

sea-bird klezmer, lunatics prancing in the surf

and you can see nothing but the wind.  Behavior.

He could at any moment have stopped and just asked

Teach me there is so much I don’t know, how could I,

what is my body for and how can I give it to you, explain

how it is to be me coming towards you or you

towards whom I come.  Teach me what love meant

by making me.  Explain the dirt of feeling

and how to wash, in what surf rinse me clean?

Or is the salt itself the fear, the long contaminant?

Explain fear.  But he didn’t stop and never asked.

His sleep was bluejay and a broken bottle,

his sleep was beach and stones pressed in him,

discomfort one grows used to, pain

is always new.  He woke after seven hours

with the horn blowing, the one he had been bending,

forming out of sheet metal all night long,

some alloy of copper and Miriam, an Egyptian

transit, his arms wet to the elbows turned white.

He folded it and formed it and brazed the seam shut

along the ever-widening smooth trumpet bell-mouth

the slope called history.  Full seven hours long it was

and his skin was white as the sound it made

when he pressed it to his lips and instead of

blowing somehow sobbed a mouth of air in

as if we could live on colors alone.  What disease

is this now, he thought in waking,

the heron had just gone and nothing is seen of its shadow

for this trumpet was only for the righteous,

like a nun facing out to sea, the wind

plastering her clothes against her inescapable form

or a log burning in the fire or a kingfisher diving,

we can’t get away from it, everyone doing what they do.

Around him the theologians jabbered, small

voiced men with big bodies, godding everything

or nothing, anarchs of the ordinary, connoisseurs

of disobedience, a house they said on stilts.

That was his childhood talking.  Knives and peach trees,

fishing villages, the boats moored to the pilings

underneath the pretty shacks dove-grey from weather

all opalescent was the salt wood at evening

when he’d wake from his debauch and consult the sea.

 

For seven hours he had been sleeping

there are secret places in the earth

and all his science was about them

here and there a hill or vista, concrete

pillbox left from her father’s war.

She showed him where they had been keeping.

Candles burned below the ground and a goat

bleated at midnight no one could find.

When you stumble onto such a place

you are at once more there

than you have ever felt and touching this

touch all such places.  Geopoetry, she guessed,

we make earth.  He witnesses.  He fears

losing the hour, the Good Hour a friend called

happiness, finding yourself in time and place

and a work fit to your hands

and your hands can skill.  Bonheur.  The goat

was the wind, olive was aspen, the fallen pillars

sprawled like Carthage and a rabbit sat.  Nibble me

also was his mind.  Provoke an ecstasy

that convulses all my botany.  Use all my words

and rinse me out.  He loved that word a life before

sound of water squeezing in his hands to sluice

the dishes clean.  The good hour is a rinsing and a step.

At any moment fog will take the mainland

low wind on his wrist, stairs to climb,

messages from Portugal.  All my life I told them

how beautiful they are now they must whisper that I am.

A stern stem.  Robin transfixed with sunray,

dawns.  All the journalists hid beneath the bottles

the rebel colonel snored in the cathedral, his doze

ennobled by flickering blue lights.  A church

is always underground.  And in mid-air at once.

Foss the cat fell down in fits.  The shore of Naxos

shimmered in this nuisance of a mist.

Young mothers whimpered at their cribs.  Baby sun,

baby sun, rise in haze and marry me.

The lovely is it way a jackal is concerned

with nothing but his prey.  Learn single-mindedness.

And kill —is that the lesson?  He thought it was listening

but now when the grocer was slicing the roast beef

and the joiner from the mainland lights a dry cigar?

And a grackle sails in?  And the deer on the hill

look weird, like things from Australia?

Socrates was of course the end of something, not the start.

Taught in a public way, and taught the young.

Those changes entrained the curious system we endure,

examining the obvious.  Should we not teach instead

those who know everything except that one small thing

we ourselves have guessed or figured out or felt?

And shouldn’t we do it in the dark?  Dream

is the most elite of all academies

and I have spent my science and my poetry

to make it less so, come to me,

hear me, Dream Work, democrat.

 

He woke after eight hours eating a piece of bread,

a coloring book of little birds, Broad Channel with the herons,

fluting marsh grass in green evening light, a duck,

isn’t that enough, a knife?  Some weather

is coming, a night is long enough to change the world.

He was shy with her, hopeless (happy) to declare

his needs (not needs) a fairy godmother

laid on him in the cradle such peculiar desires

a great year and a day and a book a cave

a sea a wind even this glaucous lovely mist

would never be morning enough to satisfy. 

Curse of guessing who he is

from what he wants.  Who wants?  All the witches

of Nantucket scream a gentle wind across the sound, stirs

his thinking, how we get in each other’s heads,

I feel her thinking.  A witch wants him to admire,

her only passion is such admiration.  Chilly father I guess,

internalize the enemy, betray your friends.

Dreams are scattered pages of biography,

nobody’s life, a book on fire, house clear under water,

horse hurrying in the air, a luminous translucent earth.

Let stand what dream decided. The tigers of Bagdogra

long since awakened to their danger and decamped.

It is what they found along the way that mattered

to most of them, forgetting wontedly why

why were they travelling and to what unlikely goal

they dawdled so beautifully by the shallow river

in soft clothes faded mulberry, pistachio, rainwater white.

Earth watched them with her single eye.

Sharing a little ocean tour he woke and woke

with whaler clamoring and busy fishermen and Spain

cold tips to his fingers he touched himself

counted his ribs, the preliminary weather of the world

was adequate, save him from the adequate

he woke with Persian carpets speaking to him flower by flower

woke with an auctioneer selling him cheap

to the woman in back with straw market basket

couldn’t see her face felt her red fingers test his thigh

he woke with a face in his head but whose,

woke with a language he didn’t understand

when people spoke at normal tempo to each other,

what are they saying is it to him, wake with the light

confusing him with shadows, woke in an island,

woke with a red ball in his hands he had followed,

man waking in an island, seaplane landing.

 

                                                                             11-14 June 1993

                                                                             Cuttyhunk