Hammered Dulcimer Read online

  Yellow Bird

  Where, oh where, has my yellow bird gone?

  Has he gone to the ocean? Has he gone to the town?

  He has stitched up the steeple with hardly a sound

  and the bells haven't rung, haven't rung.

  Where, oh where, has my yellow bird gone?

  Does he sing in the orchard? Does he sleep by the pond?

  He has plucked a black spider and swallowed it down

  and he leaves its torn web on the ground.

  Where, oh where, has my yellow bird gone?

  Have his feathers been scattered, like leaves in the wind?

  He has flown to the well where his shadow falls in

  as he lands on the stones of its rim.

  Where, oh where, has my little life gone?

  Have I nothing to guide me, and cold days to come?

  I have seen his bright body approaching the sun

  and his feathers have turned into flame.

  Page 12

  What the Wind Said to the Girl Who Was Afraid

  When he comes for you, that dark gentleman, fear,

  tell him you already know him,

  that you're not the foolish bride that he thinks,

  that even in the crevices and chinks

  of your own mind, things get carried away.

  That you gaze into the arms

  of trees, into a vacant night

  where desire tears every dream apart.

  That you walk on a path and hope it will stray.

  That each twist from what's safe breaks a wish

  like a curious seed

  where the weeds of the wilderness mesh.

  He can have the run of your house.

  He can have the ruin of your grace.

  He and the sadness that keeps circling nearer,

  like a song you were born with and slowly remember,

  like a song you were humming, and later divine.

  That fine-limbed and bold as the delicate deer

  on the gold hill at morning, whose legs turn to stone

  at a sound, but who doesn't stop chewing the leaf

  on its tongue while its body stands frozen, aware,

  you believe in the constant infringement of pleasure.

  You believe in the hill of your pleasure, not fear.

  You too will not run. Your life will be moving

  its teeth when he comes. He'll be bitten in half

  while the wind in your spirit whips over the grass.

  Oh how pure is that wind! It runs harder and faster

  than death. It runs like a silvery fox,

  like a flourish of foxes who don't have a doubt.

  And you will push fear, that dark gentleman, out.

  Page 13

  The Fall

  For Milton's Satan

  heaven was a chill place,

  too much already realized.

  He had nothing to taste.

  What he hadn't yet seen

  seemed to him like real paradise.

  Sometimes, beauty means

  an ecstatic indifference

  that freezes the heart.

  It is cold. It is cold.

  And it stays on its throne.

  But you have to begin,

  as a woman begins

  when she turns from observing

  the face of her youth

  in a glass or a mirror-

  the face she had once.

  It's that turn to existence

  when you stop thinking Am I?

  or Should I? or When?

  but instead, I'm outside

  the cold dreaming of heaven.

  I have fallen at last,

  and you enter the world.

  Page 14

  The Tenderness

  for Neil

  A strong doe running with her young

  is an unfathomable thing. In this late light

  the trees form a craggy embrace

  for her searching, and nothing's at rest.

  Not the hill, not the fawn she defends,

  not the pasture of clover and grass

  but pursuance of movement itself

  is her meaningthe absence of stone.

  From embankment to thicket to lawn

  that running must be her existence.

  Sometimes she is splintered. Sometimes

  her own child and its tenderness catches

  on the adamant surface of flight

  We are lucky to come upon this

  as we barrel headlong through the world

  in our hard, narrow armor of self,

  to come upon some kind of tenderness

  turned, for a moment, to us.

  Even if we stand defenseless

  and certain to lose what we want,

  we are lucky to notice her stop

  in the grey morning mist, the sharp upward

  incline to the heart of our forest,

  this fleeting but palpable guest.

  Page 15

  The Hammered Dulcimer

  The novice can't use her hands well.

  Their frailty reminds her of twigs

  but she tries to make sounds. First she holds,

  very lightly, between timid fingers,

  the foreign, cool weight of a hammer

  (so small) made of maple or spruce

  and nervously taps several strings.

  Her next notes aren't crystalline bells

  but splintered, exploding, with trouble,

  the questions discordance inspires.

  Is this me? Will the painful get better?

  The girl sits alone in a room,

  or else she's surrounded by faces.

  No matter. She's lost in the order

  her flapping hands make: tiny errors

  eked out of her into the air

  that crash on her body like water.

  But the fine strings lie under each hammer.

  Over those, her bent body casts shadow,

  a flat but imperious shadow

  more sprawling, more dark, than the dulcimer's

  wood. Oh the intimate shadow!

  A raven hunched down in late sun

  in her yard closes wings not in prayer

  but downward, to heed small dark thoughts.

  This raven, which seems nihilistic,

  shifts and flickers: green, indigo, violet,

  as if some new garden were opened

  in darkness to please the great sun

  who sits on her throne of blue weather.

  Page 16

  More slowly, an insect discovers

  rough orange wings, bright green feet, whatever

  its form needs to burst into song.

  And the raven believes it is best.

  And the insect has found its own rhythm,

  a low parchment hum, as the dulcimer

  responds to her troublesome fingers

  (or responds to the small wooden hammers,

  for through those, she must reach the fine strings).

  The girl's back stays turned on the shadow

  which hulks in the wings of her music

  while the people in mind or around her,

  growing bored now, begin to complain:

  "This novice's noises make trouble.

  We want more than all her harsh fumbling.

  We want her to play a real song."

  But she finds this new failure exciting,

  as if minor spaces broke open

  in the sounds she thought major, complete.

  So she tries to ignore the pale sounds

  of the people who murmur in protest;

  it's essential her effort be focused

  not on song, but on what guides her heart

  through resemblances plucked on the strings . . .

  The flat shadow waits. It expects

  her to straighten. She's turned to the dulcimer

  though the people are drifting away,

  drifting far from th
e fields discord brings,

  and the raven, the intricate insect,

  are nestled in burgeoning trees.

  "We know what we like," think the people.

  You're playing it wrong, cries the dulcimer.

  A chord hovers over the strain.

  Page 17

  Complaint

  There is no mother in this night,

  only the trees, with their strong backs,

  their proud chests curved over the creek.

  There is no mother. Why did we think

  if we walked into darkness we would find her?

  Why did I think

  if I asked you for nothing, you would find me?

  Walking into darkness is like

  walking into an absence of questions:

  there's a kind of peace settling down,

  an inestimable reference,

  a lack of desperation.

  The wind goes on its way.

  The eyes move through the grass.

  Description takes its place

  piece by piece, loss by loss.

  There is no mother in this night

  which pours its warm limbs over us

  like a lover without motive,

  without hidden interests,

  like a lover that simply is.

  It is good, how the self exists

  and would be centered, strong, and proud

  in its own right.

  Page 18

  Eve, after Eating

  It had nothing to do with God,

  what had made her

  plunge her teeth into fate,

  and nothing to do with hunger.

  The shape of her lust

  was not one of those globed fruits.

  Nor was the pleasure

  of pulp on her tongue

  as simple as Truth

  spilling seeds in the mind.

  The snake wasn't so clever,

  "Empress" this, "Goddess" that.

  She saw through his compliments.

  It was simply a choice,

  to open an error,

  to pluck from the branch

  of knowledge and abundance

  as it had been defined.

  Her mouth filled with juice.

  Her blood filled with song.

  The plant at the center,

  the growth in the heart,

  the self and its lover,

  are joined in this art . . .

  A strange afternoon.

  Afterwards,

  she lay on the ground

  listening to the wind

  as it paused in the orchards,

  hoping they wouldn't come yet

  death, god, the man.

  She needed to think for a while,

  and to learn.

  Page 19

  Man Walking

  In the evening when walking

  he looks on the scene

  with an eye full of time.

  See, say the trees standing tall.

  Us, say the clouds floating high.

  Aim, say the stalks in a row.

  And he wants to drift up

  where the first twigs erupt

  in the bright, in the cold,

  where their cracklings delineate

  finer and finer

  small strokes of intent

  like an orderly art.

  In the evening when walking

  he looks on the scene

  with its blue simple light

  and would like to be bold.

  Here, says the burgeoning mud.

  You, say the houses of wood.

  Move, says the moon to its kind

  through the branches that cover the mind

  and it goes when he goes,

  and it stops when he stops,

  like a rhyme.

  Page 20

  Black Horses

  Black horses on a yellow hill

  against a clouded sky.

  How can desire go unfulfilled

  or run from you and I

  Not run, but simply wander past

  as if it had the wish

  to find a greener circumstance

  beyond our small request.

  Black horses on a yellow hill

  so stalwart, so serene.

  What the heart may want today

  does not a lifetime mean.

  Longing, like those bodies dark

  and curved with skin and bone,

  may find a hill, may find a dale,

  but not a solid home.

  Black horses on a yellow hill

  against a clouded sky

  Not any creature, good or ill,

  can calculate the eye.

  Page 21

  The Growth

  I heard a weed cry in a dream

  let me in, let me in.

  It grew on a hill outside my window,

  was gnawed by cicadas, taunted by crows,

  but still had five leaves

  large as tortoises, and near the earth

  a stem rotted brown. How the roots thrived

  I couldn't guess, but in my dream

  the weed bent its stem and slid

  down to the luminescent pane

  next to my bed, where I lay thinking

  about pain. I saw its fringed head

  nod. I saw the liquid drum

  through its huge green vein.

  It looked and looked at my infant life

  until I felt my heart crack,

  disintegrate, and swell up in my throat

  like a brilliant adventure

  that hadn't yet occurred.

  And I woke up and whispered

  (for the dark seemed fruitless)

  Oh rancid, blooming mystery,

  how long before your messenger

  will come for me?

  Page 22

  Manners, 1977

  My grandmother took me for a ride

  in her brand new turquoise glide

  of a car, with doors for fins.

  We sank in the fabulous plush,

  soft leather like family skin,

  the windows opening at will.

  Wish had become mechanical.

  My grandmother steered the way

  through complicated streets,

  through the old, Southern sights.

  We moved in clouds of blue:

  hot blue, Amazon River blue.

  We were partners in luxury.

  The sidewalks jumped, then disappeared.

  Birds sprang in various directions.

  We were calm. We didn't care.

  There were tiny, tree-lined roads,

  and streets of rowdy schoolchildren.

  We passed the hospital, the pharmacy,

  the house behind the highest fence,

  another house we'd lived in once,

  its same old willow weeping.

  My grandmother had silver hair

  that dazzled anyone who noticed.

  She'd worked for years at duty.

  The Lincoln suited her slow beauty.

  We passed, serenely,

  our favorite, blooming neighborhoods,

  vast mansions we would never enter

  that is, would never see together.

  Page 23

  The sun was certain; the sky one view.

  No news of what lay just ahead.

  Or was it miles and miles of pleasure

  as we stretched our azure limbs?

  Only my dazzling grandmother

  could make the whole town take us in.