Human / Nature
Poetry by
Lance Lee
Copyright © 2006 by Lance Lee
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for brief passages in a review or interview, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-937520-17-5
Published by First Edition Design eBook Publishing August 2011
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com
Smashwords Edition
First edition
Library of Congress Control No.: 2006924865
ISBN: 9780913559994 (PRINT)
Cover by John Robertson
Published by:
Birch Brook Press
PO Box 81
Delhi, NY 13753
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…to Jeanne
CONTENTS
I / From the Family Romance
Late Spring
What A Man Gives
My Father's Song
Father Death
Haunting
By Love's Doing
Virgin Spring
Late Spring
Soft Weathers
Peace
Escape
Kidnapped
My Best Friend
Hard Grace
Anniversary Card
Live in the Lie of Love
Winter Gardens
Against The Grain
II / Passages
On The Beach At Quidnet
Passages
The Church at Ovingdean
Hotel-Dieu, November
The Death of a Sparrow
Plays Within Plays
Buddha in Los Angeles
Dreams
Why Jeffers Still Builds Tor Tower
Harry's Place
Aberfoyle
Hannibal / At Sixty
Crone
Actaeon
Eurydice
Rembrandt Talks About His Women To Me
Eros in Piccadilly
III / Through Nature
Thin. . .
Tracks
Idyll
Stonehenge in Winter
Winter Solstice
A Panther in an Old Wood
The Ow1
Coyote
The Dolphin
Muskrat
Contraseasons
Autumn
Spring
Summer
Winter
Given Wing
Dreams Are
Heron, Carmel
Orion Setting
The True Self Is Not in Motion
About the Author
About the Book
I / From the Family Romance
LATE SPRING
poems on my father
What A Man Gives
My Father's Song
Father Death
Haunting
By Love's Doing
Virgin Spring
Late Spring
Soft Weathers
Peace
WHAT A MAN GIVES
I
His heart explores its inward flaw,
his bone its wither; he is a leaf quivering
on the branch, a breath of air...
He frightened my youth,
a domineering, hostile man:
now I wonder if he will fall
as once he fainted into my arms
paying for lunch at Nate & Al's:
bills flapped in the air,
coins wheeled across the floor,
but he recovered and hurried off,
a street actor improvising for a later show
while the ambulance I called
ferried up Beverly Drive all siren,
turning each gray head...
II
Sometimes he is a house
whose rooms are grieving old women
who draw black shawls tight,
for my sister and I rarely visit here—
some love-starved child in him
made him starve those he loved in turn:
now he goes room to room,
an old child wondering where
his sundered family has gone.
He was the son less loved
by a woman so foolish
she chose between twins: early and late,
their photos show him glowering
while his twin smiles smiles
smiles.
So he is doomed to be compressed
by love until he goes, for he fears
the more deeply love is held
the more certain love must fail.
III
Mother tired of the women
he denied to her but regaled
to me. He split himself in two,
in three, in... and thought
he was faithful to mother's part.
Now, at lunch, young waitresses
dote on him, smiling
at his flattery; they see
the shadow of a ladies man,
while he swears me to lie
so his second wife younger
than his daughter won't know
we dine in regal elegance,
lamenting "The folly of
this marriage I endure
for fear the stress of breaking
it will break me too.
I've had bad luck in women,
I've loved unwisely. I suffer
from chronic heart chronic
skin disease— some days
I'm so tired it hurts to stand.
My career gives no solace,
devoted to ephemera:
the years are stones that grow
and bear me under."
IV
When unleavened darkness rises
will he hear a song
that braids all half-measures,
failures and shames
into a larger harmony?
Or dream some wild gesture,
skydiving with no parachute
to grasp death in pure defiance
expansive, released, for choosing makes free
whatever its end?
At last put to rest
the need to be first
that gene and early accident
conspired role by role
to make him miss,
and now give all he could
or would or should? No,
who does? He will whisper, if he can,
once there is no other choice,
or signal a final 'yes' to pull the plug,
and sink, emblematic to the end.
V
I will mourn him long and hard
and hold my sheaf of sung defiances
to slow the fading of anger and love—
only accidents of time bring
virtues to light, and not faults
to condemn a man past recall:
only pride makes a man deny
all men are of a kind.
My heart explores its inward flaw,
my bone its wither—I am a leaf quivering
on the branch, a mere breath of air...
MY FATHER'S SONG
My blood is singing
behind my right eye.
I am half blind with song.
From the left
the world lurches
me side to side.
Pains hound
across my chest after
what fox, what hare:
I feel their fear.
My right leg
declares its presence,
my right forearm aches
as though raked and torn—
suddenly I know
I am the goal
of fleet savage feet.
Is this a stroke descending?
Or am I feeling
the mortal state
my father feels
in his barren room,
ticking after the seconds
his eyes chase
around the clock?
We are less separate,
less I/Thou than we think.
My blood is singing
his song, and his? Note
by note he scales
towards that silence
I fear one day will be
all of song I hear.
FATHER DEATH
Twice I had to say "Yes, that's him"
first when my father died at the home
open-mouthed between breaths,
second at Mt. Sinai where a dwarf
wheeled him in silent and bloodless
as if stunned from seeing God.
I lied identifying him— we are the
flesh's fire
not that residue there, not slag!
The dwarf leaked coldness, his face
fine featured
but squashed, and pure white:
I had stumbled into nightmare.
How had he closed my father's mouth
that no one not me could do at the home?
Are the dead blocks of ice we hammer
we chisel?
I watch a pretty girl as I write.
I imagine her breasts in my mouth
her milk, the rich cream of life: I need
an image to banish my father's
that rolls into view with his dwarf
when I make love, when I sit in the sun
when I examine my guilts, when I
recall our long rivalry, all unneeded.
I should have lied the truth, "No,
that's not him":
what would they have done? Rolled in
a series of stiffs?
'No, not him. Not him, no. Sorry, no'
but as usual I conformed. "Yes," I said,
and the hearse took him off; "Yes,"
and the dwarf wheeled him out.
Later when I walk by the ocean beneath
the Milky Way
as I have done since I was ten
to find silence and self to frame
the tensions we call living,
I fit words to the surf's rhythms, like
"Live, there is only living, each star
lives in its own milky fire; the hottest
blood burns in the coldest water:
why, father death lives in our flesh
to free us from anxious self-knowledge
when that burden grows too great"—
but I know these only gloss the unpleasant
truth:
he must fade the way he died, by inches...
There should be more to us when we live.
There should be more to us when we die
than a bleaching like a photo left in the sun—
we aren't mayflies for a season,
not one of the countless ants:
but he after one "I don't know if I can do this"
faded steadily into distance, aware helpless
acquiescent.
Better to go mad.
Only now, after so many years listening
do I know what the waves really say
as they beat against my anger:
forgive forget forgive forget forgive
HAUNTING
A wind wheels over the meadow
and breathes through my mind
as I relax by an empty house.
Clear across the bog I see the fox's corner
where the dogs always slaver against
their chokechains. Inside, I hear
a faucet turn, water run, stop, a footstep fall.
I know it's my friend's dead daughter, Canda,
wandering where she once lived.
I freeze, changed utterly in a second, afraid
of whatever comes through
when the wall between worlds, tumbles.
The next moment I know it's not her
but my father touching unfamiliar things,
a door a faucet a drawer
treading a strange hallway, his breath
making a daddy longlegs tremble,
determined to find me and never let go.
I'm terrified... My friend calls, Lance—
I breathe, myself again, but what is that—
how easily I walk with the dead,
whether ghostly or just some bodying
of guilt and loss! I worry at that
like a dog at a fox's scent: I imagine
I slip my chokechain and dash
into those shadows folded into the light,
teeth bared, snarling, sure of my prey,
and find myself stumbling among presences
just this side of known... At a loss,
I turn a faucet: water runs through my flesh
like blood. I tread a strange hallway,
make the spider tremble in turn,
touch an arm— Please, I'm lost, don't run,
don't freeze so in terror at my face—
I only want to go home— .
I snap to. Now I know what sound
teases just beyond the edge of hearing:
it is the sound walls make when they crumble—
and walls are always falling down.
BY LOVE'S DOING
Blind in this darkness
I edge over the smallest rise, afraid
to fall,
the ocean's weight on my shoulders;
or recoil from accordioned wrecks
as I follow the dream thread to caverns
that open and shut like mouths.
I stop:
my father's body whitens that dark
where death is the only light—
or a window full of sky where I press my
three year old face
shines before me, full of inexpressible longing
for a father always walking away.
So I imagine
until the woman beside me flutters the sheets,
hot-limbed, restless,
so long unable to wake me as I dreamed.
I am painfully sad, and think
I whitened those depths, but slid away
when I tried to touch my own death.
I'm not sure what images are true:
we always try to give face to the inexpressible,
or discover one story disguises another,
even feel sorrows we only fear may come—
like I may rehearse in a past loss
the death I will owe at the end.
Only the pain is sure, and entire.
I reach for the woman, desperate
to be pulled into flesh, love, life
by love's doing,
away
from that marrowed pain, from my childish face
pressed full of longing to the window;
from knowing now love will leave
whatever I do to make it stay
VIRGIN SPRING
Is my rage done, plowed into the meadow,
grief let loose in the rain, the desperate drive
to change everything
burned out by distance and sun, as much to say
time is space heat loam leaf in the air?
How quickly loss doesn't matter, not really, not
after the first boil of blood, whatever trace
stays in memory:
for what grief goes on intense now as then—
some too intense knowledge there is no
but there for the grace of God go I
when all go that way;
some balanced likening of self to self lost
so we go on grieving after father death
mother death child death for ourselves?
For me life breaks in, fog, rain, sun, the stars
on clear, crisp nights,
wind, love, those still here or newly come.
We are the blood pumped through the great
heart of things,
driven in spent and expelled readied
for new losses—
like leaves that pile on the ground, decay,
sink down, become rare
lady slippers in the woods or shoots
that crack concrete, delicate yet steady as steel.
Nothing is still, nothing stops.
Even the words that died into my loss
I could not imagine returning, return
when all seemed used, misused, and done,
gushing from my ground in a virgin spring
LATE SPRING
Where has it hidden, this late spring?
Only now pheasants call like rusty gates
forced open,
the air at last so warm and clear
Great Point Light is visible over twenty miles
of Sound.
Heat ribbons the pines' resin through the trees,
and robins, in a fur of feathers in flight
seize the moment to mate and mate and mate.
And I— two years tending my father's dying—
peer into the marsh where ducks talk in tones
of low strings breaking,
herding their young from shadow to shadow
as fox and coyote hunt the watery verge
and hawks swing between the day moon
and dry white sun,
their hunger patient, and penetrative as a
ray of light.
Two years... Medicines, treatments, hopes
tidal in their lift and fall, and at all times
the slide towards the fire
however we mate or pay to drug ourselves
with the latest wonder—
why shouldn't age greet death instead as
Friend,
have you come to end my suffering?
Tomorrow storm will whiten the hollows
between the groves,
whiten the leaves, whiten the sky, whiten
the air with slashes of cold, pale rain
however my heart hungers for summer
like a fire under snow.
No wonder I yearn for purpose
as clear as coyote or fox or hawk
who set hunger on foot or give it wing,
but I am left just words for loss, for lateness,
for the late blooming of relief,
words that matter, sure, and promise an end
but are not flesh not bone but air in my mouth
absence in my belly,
coals in my brain.
SOFT WEATHERS
I lived my father's long dying
spreadeagled in the bog through a two year
winter:
sleet-slashed, sleeked by frozen rain
I gleamed in the cold light in primary hues,
all that time unable to move,
grief layered in snowfall on fall,
covered by floodtide for months, still
still except for the slow ooze of mud
embracing my flesh before, finally,
spring's ebbtide bared me, stunned,
to this sun.
I sit up as the cranberry beds
lift through the ebb,
blink in the light, dazed, unsteady
when I stand,
and wash in the stream,
cross naked to firmer land
where the oaks are new leaved with suns,
gay streamers hanging from their boughs.
I feel grass in my toes, and smell
its hayscent where mown, taste
the musky pink vulva of lady slippers
inviting me to dim recesses—
I forgot so much, giving my senses to my
father...
My face opens in this light,
lianas of paradise flowers entwine my arms,
rugosa roses thicket my legs. My tongue
croaks like a crow from a height,