Read an Excerpt
Reservations
Poems
By James Richardson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06329-4
CHAPTER 1
In Touch
When for no reasons but his own the silent cat
throttled your song,
I buried you in the tone-deaf garden,
alone, as I thought.
But when the shimmering catch
of sun unrolled —
blazon of corn, flourish
of feathery fennel,
deep liquid melon trill —
you are up,
and holding level in the level air
inconceivable wings!
At the first defeat,
the unutterable concentrations, the bullet grace,
disband.
The blood darkens, the eyes crowd,
the body like a vast party breaks up
into smaller and more passionate nights.
Bird, bright metal, renegade nerve, whom
no one ever touched, you now
touch openly,
and in the long and careless sun
unfold and loll and glow.
Far far down everywhere,
where even the light is far apart, the very eye
invisibly huge, matter waits in endless lines
to find out what it is.
Into the mindlessly small
the mind may not enter; nor touch
into the untouchable.
So we are just passing through
each other, deep embraces like a bullet's
kiss and ricochet; or say
we hold as waves
seize, hold, O never hold, the shore.
The willing, nervous living flash and fly.
The stubborn dead relent, and die. And die
into us, craggy water that our memories
labor to admit. They are ours
when they are not their own.
They walk into the grave, and do not stop,
but break, join hands, and breed
with stone, and slug, and light, and dandelion.
The Tracks
They come every night,
those cavernous trains, tornadoing
the frozen house,
a madness feeling for the door.
And it is hard even to imagine
the neighbors in a bath of light
playing small cards,
their windows in precipitous lines
downhill to where the silence leans
like blocks of onyx quarried
from the white moon,
tomorrow already in ruins.
So I arrange some little miracles —
the walls do not dissolve, the kettle
shrieks tea —
and pick across the hours as though they were
loose stones in a stream.
December, and again under the wheels
of stars,
of chances out of hand, and of the rage
careening mountain-long, I bend
and am nighted by necessity.
For though it all
seems unconnected, who can tell
what he has chosen to forget
by simply standing on line.
Maybe that
the far hand already bleeds, a bridge
has bowed, a tie has broken. That on the spur
of this moment, the tracks, the
labyrinthine nerves,
tense and gleam, hurrying the news.
Elegy for a Cousin
Even as a child you were the worst
at hide and seek. Everything pointed to you,
highlighted in August on the axle
of the formal garden, saying This is the hardest.
But at six on the terrace, the flagstones
breathing back heat, the rusty plaint
of the swinging couch indistinguishable
from crickets, you were not beneath your silence.
Dismissing your losses, you called for the game —
found again, rapt on the doorstep, feet
listening in the ivy, obvious on the walk,
saying Yes, but how did 1 get here?
Why in the stuttering firelight did you gaze
on the deft needle diving and gleaming up
through the falls and pools of silk, saying
No one is followed, why did you wake,
some days, before us all to circle
the house, touch all the bases, slide between
meticulous split rails, pick through the rock
garden, saying, at breakfast, It is not over?
Well you have won at last. Today, drawn in
to your plot, we thread the white gate, the two
slim pines, following the trail you laid,
though we are not sure who has died.
Writing to You after Sunset
Of the rocker washed up
from the wreck of a fortune, of the softwood
porch winded and grayed down, of the ocean
doing as ocean usually does,
I say nothing. You know these
as well as I. Perhaps I should remind you
of the darkening along the page. I am
having a hard time. It is further. But you
remember.
The Vanished
When the gifted lamps descended on your sleep,
it was one wish you never thought to rub up;
so you stuffed your shameful baggage to the brim
and trundled southward in the wake
of murderers, embezzlers, and the retiring
sun. Fifty miles. Now you're true!
You, not asking, got what silence calls —
the redeeming genius for being forgotten.
Those timid letters home drew no demands
for what you had. (Who wanted
that?) You fill the former home
of someone. No one wonders any more
(not even you) about your face, the holes
in your story, or where you get what you live on.
A Season of Farewell
All down the night the fires of ourselves
fell dim. I wake too late
to the clang and bone-crack of a thundering freeze
driving in, alone. And bury all good through the length
of the homely, hard-rutted road.
I know the half-mowed field
and the lights that scurry from the tall
cold to the unmade hay,
and lie in, safe as blades,
when the wind whets the thin moon.
Now is the meager reign
of stars. I cleave to them as skin
to winter steel. They turn inexorable
diamond-pointed wheels
on sight, the upturned stone.
And you, intractably deep-hearted one,
love, I will see far
on the road to the fire,
till you drag in, ruined, hating me,
and, disgraced, I take to you again.
Lepidoptera
When the small one graced your shoulder,
and stayed;
and stayed, as we circumnavigated the lake,
there seemed
no gravity — if this rare flake of air and gleam
could weigh so heavily, then massive us
might well fall up the blue
towering on blue.
Out of a sky that is too bright to see
mercurial visions splash in an eye,
multiplied. This is the brain
of a butterfly.
They sail,
billowing galleons;
they breathe
the lovely fire;
they dream
the leafy moon.
And stayed, but when an oar
stirred silt, became the wind,
the loss of weight no more
than something forgotten. I saw why we call
that mountainous vertigo butterflies,
and how we are used by such small things.
Settlements
Your house has fallen from my eye
like a tool dropped at the cry of war,
at the hand of snow. I turn my coat
to find what I can trade for life.
The sunward road's in bloom
with bones of the wind.
When the evil bears too hard
they rise and blaze and blow.
The ice puts down its feet,
crazed with the strength beneath,
and bright. The stone sets in
on its deep, disastrous journey.
The Encyclopedia of the Stones: A Pastoral
for Samuel H. Monk
1
They do not believe in the transmigration of souls.
They say that bodies move
as leaves through light.
Everything would be perfect if the atoms
were the right shape and did not fall down.
2
They resent being inscribed,
as if they could not remember;
but they congratulate us on the wisdom
of using them to mark graves.
3
Sand makes them nervous.
4
They perceive the cosmos as the interior
of a mighty stone.
At night this is perfectly clear.
5
Long ago
they began to give of their light
to build what we now call the moon.
It was almost finished.
6
Tradition says they were the paperweights of ß. lord
whose messages rotted beneath them.
So they think hard.
The old remember being flowers,
but the young ridicule them and remember fire.
7
Some say they were prayers
until they lost confidence;
others, the ashes
of the shrieking cold.
8
This is their heroic myth:
One afternoon the great stone set out.
It is not over.
9
They are unable to perceive moths.
10
They have a dream, but it is taking
all of them all time
to imagine it.
11
It is the same with their dance,
which has gone on since the beginning
without the repetition of a step.
12
They have computed the human life span
to the nearest hundred years.
13
Knowing them to be fond of games, I asked
why they did not arrange themselves
according to the constellations, but they said
Look
14
Under water they hear each other
and glow.
15
On the sea floor under ungodly pressure
they harbor the sonorous drought of a day
no living thing is left to remember.
16
They are fond of each season in its turn,
regretting only brevity.
They suspect this world was not made for them.
17
No hand is slow enough, really,
to catch a stone:
the long forest burns
and grows and burns before the jostled stone
like roiled water settles clear again
to its root and its prayer and its home.
18
They recognize everything.
19
They suppose that if they could forget enough
they would become stars.
20
One of them is counting the days,
but they go so fast he cannot stop
to tell us how many.
21
Stone (ston), noun. Originally a verb meaning
to illumine blackness, later
to hold without touching, or
to be capable of all things. In modern,
and less felicitous, speeches,
Indo-European, for example, to thicken or compress.
Still later, as we know.
22
Here is another of their stories:
One stone.
Like the others it is characterized
by control of plot and fidelity to the real.
23
The progress of the stone:
Primevally — a sun unto itself.
In the next age — a bend in moonlight.
Failing this — a cauldron of teeth.
Still later, pitted and harried — a dawn of iron.
In time, our time, a recalcitrant image
in a bed away from the dream.
24
They are experimenting with sex
but are still waiting for the first ones to finish.
25
They are attracted by bright lights
(especially white and blue)
at the rate of one inch per millennium.
They have large and obscure purposes
expressed as continental drift.
26
Fossils: monuments
to their tolerance. Eons
upon eons of surrender
bring a flower to bed with stone.
There is another theory: one stone
remembers one thing —
vividly.
27
They have rings
like trees, a kind of consummation,
growing from inside almost as fast
as they are eroded,
and accomplished in silence with unspeakable pain.
28
When it is unbearably clear,
the stones have taken a deep breath.
29
They have much to teach us
of what we should already know.
30
They place a high value on wit
and refuse to believe it is because they are afraid.
31
They think they eat,
but because they have never been hungry
the question is purely academic.
32
They grumble at the consequences
of leaving no stone unturned.
33
They are fond of the phrase after all.
34
They never had much use for birds
even before the crisis.
35
When I describe to them how we see a shooting star,
they say That is how you look to us.
When I tell them how they look to me,
they are elated and describe in turn
something I have never seen and do not understand.
36
Another day dawns and the stones
labor incessantly until they have
filled it with darkness.
37
Some of their favorites: October,
salt, flowers, 10 P.M., starfish,
Paul Klee, stories, waiting, the moon.
38
You know that the sky is blue
from the accumulated breath of stones,
or will, the next time you are asked.
39
When they stare at themselves too long
they become diamonds.
40
Sometimes in the intense light
they are seen to quake.
And they say Never mind,
sun, old burrower
into our dreams.
41
They do not understand the difference
between dying and just going away.
When I walk home they weep,
but not for long.
42
They have been called the eyes
of the lost angels,
and it is true they remember
great lights, and a fall,
and that they seem to be waiting
for something to go away.
43
Here is another one of their stories:
One day the great stone went out
and never returned.
They do not understand this one,
and it is therefore of dubious authenticity.
44
They are very clever at imitation.
45
The stones will not admit
that they are the fastest —
they would rather deceive us
than win.
Now you know what you will be
when you have forgotten everything
you need to.
Their wings are approaching:
the speck of a tern on the horizon, the wings
of an embryo,
but the darkness
will not support them, and the light
astonishes.
So the stones are waiting for another world.
Mostly they let themselves be used,
knowing they will inherit
what they become.
Some turn inside out. Those are the flowers,
dying before us.
46
They question the parable of Perseus and Medusa,
saying that mirrors, of all things,
would be no help.
47
They cannot tell the living from the dead.
Be careful to clarify your position.
48
The stones see only our feet.
They say nothing
has changed.
Yes,
nothing
certainly has changed.
It was winter when they died.
It is winter now.
That is the difference.
49
The success of unbearable intimacy: two stones,
the one to the windward finally
the more smooth.
50
I told them my favorite story:
One day.
They liked it except for the
surprise ending.
51
They know the infinitesimal ways
to the center of peach and oyster,
cherry, brain and heart.
52
They are continually astonished
at the thousands of ways we have invented
to say I am dying.
53
They do not mind lying in the sun,
especially when there is no choice.
54
They call themselves the abbreviation
of distance.
55
They have a proverb: Absurdity
is marvelous, but you get hungry an hour later.
I reply But that is what it is for.
56
Knowing and unknowing never love,
but form the maelstrom within the stone.
57
They have something they will say to us,
but they are revising and revising.
58
They think of the whole day
as sunset.
59
The stones are putting out their fires.
You no longer see
as many.
Only the other night is coming,
so there is no sense in burning.
The watchmen are climbing toward us like the throats
of caves
with the news so old it has never
seen us,
and the animals flee before it
into the future.
60
Along the margin of the lake,
stones in a simple line, taking account
of the shouts of generations of lilies,
are polishing the desperate poverty of life
into an opulence beyond all conception of light.
61
This whole encyclopedia reminds me of a stone.
It does not remind them of anything.
When they say That reminds me of a stone,
it means they will not
say anything else for a long time.
62
I asked How can we keep you out of the fields?
They said Give us a place of our own.
This was not like them.
63
They are never disappointed
because they expect nothing.
64
It is possible they would die for us
if they could find a reason.
65
They try to forget,
but their sadness for the flowers will be told
again and again,
though it seems I am no longer the one.
66
I say How do you get to the river?
They say It will come.
The Morning After
I leave my pain
locked, unlit,
and drift along the hill
to find out what is over.
For I have read that overnight
The End has thrown its glacier
off, and shrieked upon us,
as if we never knew it was there.
And now are reported an air
of lions, beacons
from the mildest stones, whole herds
of fountains; not the first
I have not seen.
Though they must be happening,
happening,
and it is strange how we survive.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reservations by James Richardson. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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