Paul Smyth

2.
The sadness of the melody, remote
As suburban hills twinkling across a river,
Conjures a purple evening air in which
The near and delicate will thrive, the sadness
Not of sad church-bells, nor sad foghorns,
Nor traffic sounds, nor the rise and fall of voices,
But fingertips tapping lightly on a wineglass.

3.

The theme begins to verge toward resignation.

The notes become like strangers on a platform,

Each aware of the others, each certain now

That nothing at all can save it from its silence.

The music disengages from the world,

Drawing around itself an intimate darkness.

The notes become an auditory Braille.

OUR LADY

“Why, then, do you pray to me? You summon life

But speak of loving only, darkness of soil

And white roots winding among stones, of earth

Where you have drawn your passion's nourishment.

Love must embrace more than the struggle of loving.

Speak of the exile,

“Speak of the hour of silence. This morning, alone:

Was it autumn, and you in a withered garden, you

Cutting the dry stalks? Or, naked at the mirror,

Aware first of your hands, then of breasts and hips,

Did conception melt you? Did the violet light of genesis

Flash through your body?“

“Madonna, I felt only the familiar light,

The steady bulb, cool, as in a florist’s

Refrigerated showcase. My body was full

With roses, with the hush of a million crisp petals,

And I heard, somewhere, an electric motor humming,

Keeping the fragrance.“

THE CRY

But how could my throat contain that tangled sound
When we pushed through brush to a lowland field and saw
That iron shape?—an old, high-wheeled hay rake
Left there to rust, half-sunk in the muddy ground.
Years and its own dead weight were all its law
As it sank there, slow as knowledge of a great mistake.

OF HIS AFFLICTION
                Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver;
                I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.
                                                     Isaiah 48:10

I.
                You stand alone,
          A broken wall, pine trees
Drive roots beneath the bleaching stone.
The steady hissing of disease
      Seeps from the ground. And these,
The fruits of moments Fear has sown,
      Fear on his hands and knees
                  With chips of bone.

II.
You crouched in a cave of grapevines, knelt toward the hum,
The field of insects, watching the thick dusk spread
Like anguish over a face--you who had come
Running through swollen woods, who lied then fled
To this field's edge, this frantic hum the same
As thin internal humming that scorched not ears
But lungs and brain, that sizzling you would name
The Locusts. You knelt at the edge of seven years,

Then stood, and pushing aside the veil of vines
Stepped into the field: instantly all sound ceased--
Except, as it rose from the dead tree slowly on
Enormous wings over the murky pines,
The crow cawed twice. For a moment, all memory gone,
You wore the silks of silence like a priest.

III.

Always the threat,

Downstairs, of violence—

Whiskey and frothy shouting; yet

Silence was worse, the creaking silence.

And what was your offense?

Weakness: the kind that must beget

An iron obedience

Upon its debt.

Lying in bed

You heard his shouting rise

Around your name, a sound that led

To ruin, to facts like myths: his size,

His strength, his fists, his eyes.

You listened to the brook instead,

Its muddy compromise

Of hope and dread.

How to prepare?

You watched the ceiling, tried

To gauge his voice. Time was your lair,

And night, where hope and dread collide

Crushing the minutes. Outside

The brook kept gurgling, unaware

Of his terrific stride

Leveling the stair.

IV.
Like a pinball, shot and played against the slant:
roll down slip past two flippers clattering fall
into the trough but no so want to can't
green flippers red electric bumpers all
buzzing to touch and jingling on the board
back-bending neon girls flash as they smile
now carom flee this bumper's cringing chord
upping the score clicked index of denial

steel pinball chrome-skinned shot electric effect
know nothing else not volts not any cause
so flipped and spinning monad o reflect
whirl neon girls hot face of him who plays
his nickel's worth of what?--conceal steel's flaws
slick pinball chrome blushing with vivid praise.

V.
                    Now live with pain,
          The god who flaps his way
Through sinew, joint, and wrinkled vein.
As close as breathing you obey
          Pain's scraping beak by day,
By night his caw. Your bones disdain
          The little prayers you weigh
                    Like suet or grain

                    But can't recite;
          You think of a grinning skull,
Also a speechless thing, then bite
Your lip to make deep pain seem dull
          Till sleep begins to pull,
To lure you in, till sleep seems right
          And even masterful.
                    But in the night

                    Your nerves, that twist
          Like roots down through your back
Begin the ruttish whines that mist
Your eyes with turpentine and crack
          Your skin--veins drip shellac,
Hot bubbling muscle-fibers kissed
          To tar. Shrunk hard and black,
                    Your brain's a fist.

VI.

In the wavy bathroom mirror rippling lay

Five badge-like bruises: four fingerprints, the thumb.

He’d grabbed and held your throat like a fistful of clay.

Sick with pain and the smell of spilled Bay Rum

You winced touching those marks that seemed afloat

Like islands on your skin—his madness’ map,

A clumsily worked projection of remote

Volcanic realms that would spread and overlap—

The blotch would be too hideous in school.

But the bus, your daily ark, could not be missed:

You readied yourself for playground ridicule

And washed your swollen face and buttoned your coat.

Then, in a last reflex of the will to resist,

You smeared your mother’s makeup on your throat.

VII.
                    You knew so well
          The fist that crushed your lip,
Had watched so closely as it fell
Or rushed in level from his hip,
          That when that hand would grip
A chair-back angrily you could tell
          By a whitening knuckletip
                    Degrees of hell.

                    You braided strings
          To divine your labor's wage:
The strands revealed that famine brings
A time of plenty, that every rage
          Must, more or less, presage
Delight. You counted your breaths, logs' rings,
          Making each thing the gauge
                    Of other things,

                    And thought you could
          Store years themselves away
With little loss: you cut the firewood,
Each cord a year, the loss a day
          In sawdust. But the ash was gray,
Buckets of ashes; and you understood
          That life is the price you pay
                    For livelihood.

VIII.

Trudging across the fields you could not say

The sum of corn, exhaustion, peas, and heat.

You lowered the buckets for the hundredth time that day

Into the shallow brook: Here two worlds meet.

Over the stones and ooze of bottom slime

Flows water fat with life, with leafy plants

Whose white roots hold against the drag of time,

Resigned, resolved in undulating trance.

You looked deep in—past shiny browns and greens,
Past water and light and shadowy moving gloom,
Past metaphor: to one who kneels, who leans
Into the deepening breath, whose breathing slows--
Then turned, lifting the buckets, to resume
Soaking the twelfth of twenty dusty rows.

IX.
                    Why did you wait,
          Shy, in the clearing? There
No question asked could compensate
For those unasked in shrill fear
          Of sudden answers where
The world was rage. It's getting late,
          You and the cooler air
                    Deliberate,

                    But still no word,
          No voice responds here, none,
The woods keep silent. Now a bird
Questions the disappearing sun
          Bright edgy notes that run
Through heavy boughs. At dusk you heard
          The air's long sigh begun,
                    A minor third

                    Raising the scent
          Of withered grass and moss:
A dim hour paused, and bent
Slowly to gather up your loss,
          The shadows cast across
Your lips with every breath, then went
          Into the pines that toss
                    Bewilderment.

X.
You stand alone. A broken wall, pine trees
Drive roots into the sodden earth and drink.
Their boughs are dark with voices murmuring, “Please“--
Mere statement, not a request. Your seasons shrink
And hissing fade like a long wave's foam and froth.
Four billion years ago parched cells first sipped
Nutrition from the steaming primordial broth
Defining life, and entering the crypt

Of age and place forever. Now, you wait.
The past backs off, the future turns and flees.
You arrange the shriveled griefs, weigh what's left,
As a child will push cold peas around his plate.
Did those first cells drink to Charity or to Theft?
The pine-boughs' ponderous tossing answers, “Please.“

XI.
                     Go back to the car,
          Give up this hopeless thing,
Drive home. Wish on the blue-white star
For simple moonlight, fields that sing,
          Declare that mornings bring
New reasons, clear as the minutes are.
          Give up this hopeless thing.
                     It's gone too far.

Lying in bed
          Imagine a chain-link fence
With barbed-wire gates, a tin-roofed shed,
Lean, iron-eyed guards who live in tents
          Nearby. For all time hence
Let memories eat the meager bread
          Of despair, each violence
                    Dying or dead.

                    How to prepare?
          Fear rolls large flickering eyes,
Swings nimbly from rib to rib--“Beware!“
Kill him, feed him, muffle his cries--
          A stack of heartbeats tries
Buying that hunchback out of there,
          But fear is penny-wise
                    Screeching, “The stair!“

XII.
You drive all night--a windshield wiper's arc,
The headlights' sprawl, and the ever-dying hiss
Of tires on wet asphalt. At dawn you park
And step from the car and stretch, embracing this:
Green picnic tables, trash cans, the silence of mist
Drifting among the trees, and beside the road
Two crows devouring flesh. Those years subsist
On your will to devise their final episode,

You cross wet grass toward where the dead thing lies.
The patient crows retreat to a nearby tree.
You kneel. It was a hound. His stomach is torn,
Neck twisted, mouth open howling silence. And his eyes,
Opaque and staring skyward: through them you see
That threat of which his abstract howls still warn.

AUBADE

As hushed as nuns pressing God to their lips,

As deliberately as when great musics start,

The dawn extends itself, a rose light slips

Through mists that hold familiar forms apart:

Two courtyard lemon trees stand mute, as still

As thoughts of what they are, but they remain

Vague, vague as all things were before the mill

Of language ground the world from Adam’s brain.

My breath mists on the window, I look out

On imminence as—nearer, nearer—it

Gives way to names, scant words which make me doubt

The simplest intimacy: kitchens are lit,

A shrimper thumps and chugs across the bay…

Morning begins with all the world to say.

ASHES

My father’s ashes were scattered over the sands,

The windswept dunes he loved. For thirty years

I’ve thought of that and stared hard at my hands.

His breathing is oceanic in my ears.

Death asks us nothing, nothing at all, and yet

We ache to answer death with something true,

A voice will force its little rivulet

Of syllables over silence. My father knew

The mountain we must move is not our doubt

But awesome certainty risen in the brain.

Ashes blow over sand, are blown without

A name or children, a voice, a thing to gain.

We’d move mountains of silence. We ask a lot.

A trickling voice is all the means we’ve got.

DAY MOON

1.
I think of how, this morning, you stooped to lift
Your white silk nightgown up from the floor. You were
Naked, your face abstracted, the linen curtains
Luminous white behind you, your body outlined
Against the morning light like fire-lit copper,
Sweet as russet apples, the curve of your breast
Making my mind a zither. You straightened, turning,
Dropping the nightgown on the bed, then smiled
That inward smile you smile recalling pleasure.

2.
I think of how a certain gesture will tease
A tensile music out from hesitant light,
How sometimes you will stand there at the window
Watching the dawn, pale gray and pale blue shadows,
Your fingertips lightly tapping the window frame
Seeming to find time's metronomic time,
Seeming to draw the rapt natural world
Close to your body, the first white daylight flowing
In through the window, swirling at your feet
As seafoam swirled and sighed at the feet of Venus.

3.
I think of how, on summer afternoons,
You wash your hair at our old-fashioned sink,
Barefoot, in rolled-up jeans, your bare back bent,
Your hands buried in soap. The water is running,
You turn your head from side to side, rinsing
That three-foot rope of foaming golden light,
A pale Susanna bathing. And when you turn,
Bare-breasted, tying the towel around your hair,
I am no gawking Elder. No, I am
Earth's ordinary god, bemused by beauty.

4.
A pale day moon rises over the trees,
Love's silver thumbprint, that faint identification
Of who we are who listen, listen, trying
Phrase by phrase to score familiar voices,
Dream, touch, remembrance. A hushed afternoon,
That symbol rising faintly over the world,
These visions of you refracted from common daylight--
My mind has played the body's music gladly
You nap in the next room, about to waken.
A pale day moon rises over the trees.

THE ESCAPED

              live off the land.
         They get fresh meat by guile
and sticks and stones, they understand
         by adverbs, how and while.
             They're out there: vile,

             starving, obsessed
         with darkness, swamp, and ledge,
freedom their only fire and rest.
         They mock the sheriff's pledge,
             red teeth on edge.

A BOX TURTLE

1.

His swamp reeking behind him, dry woods ahead,

A turtle blunders toward the asphalt road.

The turtle in me shudders—there’s little enough

Traffic here, and what there is goes slowly,

But his is an awful gamble all the same.

His claws scratch on the asphalt. He lifts his head

High as he can and, getting up on tiptoe,

Makes his lurching way. He looks silly,

The humped back, the bullet head. I imagine

Him on a train, holding a rolled umbrella.

And I’ve seen him in the natural history museum,

A species which has blinked dully at change

For millions of years. I’ve felt him tug at my fish line.

I’ve seen him squashed on a road near where I

Was a child. The child in me shudders and runs.

2.

The domed carapace shines in the sun, flecked

With orange and yellow, the red eyes shine like drops

Of his own blood. The hinged plastron beneath

Can lock his soft life tight, a pocket watch case,

A confidence the world will break but once.

3.

He’s nearly halfway now, he falters, stops,

Inspects the yellow line, then crosses it.

He is a moving target crossing the still

Surface of his own death. He blunders into

The roadside grass, he blunders into the woods.

4.

And that’s that. Or does his small success

Deserve a gesture, some acknowledgment

Beyond my inward sigh for vulnerable things?

Chances are he’ll outlive me. By now

He’s found a rotten log teeming with grubs.

He crawled from swamp to woods, his reasons his own,

While I walk home on the road he crossed, the swamp

Sour on my left, the sweet woods on my right,

And I hear behind me now the clank and clatter

Of Mr. Winter’s mail truck, and here’s my mailbox,

Its red flag up, poems inside, outgoing.