Door in the Mountain. Jean Valentine

Drops Its Nets

      Sleep drops its nets for monsters old as the Flood;

      You are not you, no more than I am I;

      If our dead fathers walk the wall at night

      Our hands when we wake up are white on white

      Betraying neither wounds nor blood;

      The voice is mist that made us cry.

      And then day sweeps the castle dry.

       Déjà-vu

      No, my father here, as You said,

      When I asked him for bread

      Didn't refuse me; but the bread was green;

      And now You!

      Now I'm dry and cold,

      Chattering in the corner of the greenhouse,

      Now You let me know it was always You,

      That Déjà-vu

      Tilt of the sunlight on the floor,

      That silence at the door!

      I'd laugh, but I never, never loved You,

      And here I am dead,

      My Midas teeth on edge, green

      Jade on jade.

       Sunset at Wellfleet

      A spit of sky, awash with Venetian gold

      Hangs over the Congregational bell-tower, where

      Last night the Northern Lights sifted their fire,

      Shot through with the airless dark, romantic and cold.

      The sun doesn't move, but suddenly is gone,

      The cloudy tide goes out, and leaves a ring.

      Easy to die: we knew it all along:

      Knee-high to the dark as of old:

      These words I tell you smoking in my eye:

      The tree-frog is the tree-frog. The sky is the sky,

      The rattling bay runs night and day I, I, I, Over and over, turning on itself: there, Where it curls on emptiness: there I sing.

       Asleep over Lines from Willa Cather

      Now I lay me desolate to sleep

      Cold in the sound of the underground flood,

      Brushed in half-sleep by the phantom plant

      Pressed in the book by my bed

      Blue green leaves, large and coarse-toothed… With big white blossoms like Easter lilies… Latour recognized the noxious datura. In its dead shade I lay me down to sleep. The reins inside my head that hold my hope When it leaps, in waking life, fall slack, And, beyond the world of falling things, With flesh like air, and an assumed agreement Between my body and the way it takes, I walk aimlessly by a green and perfect river. The garden is here, as I knew it would be; The garden imagined through oblique windows in paintings, Earth's lost plantation, waiting for all, all, All to be well: the fountain translates the sun. I do not see but know God follows me, And I follow, without fear of madness, Paths and turnings that are both wild and formal, Of all colors or none, tiger-lily and rock, Pools dead with the weight of fallen leaves, and falls, Follow after him I love, who waits in the garden. Mercy, Pity, Fear and Shame Spring in this garden, for it is earth's. My body is not air, it casts a shadow. At the next turning I come upon him I love Waiting by the tree from my childhood that drops White petals that hugely snow on the whitening ground. He takes my arm and we walk a little way Away from the tree towards the shining river Running clear green through the garden. The allegorists' arrow has struck me down. I freeze in the noise of the flood. When my love bends to speak, it is a language I do not know: I answer and have no voice, I am deaf, I am blind, I reach out to touch his face And touch a spot of spittled clay, my eye, Hiding the garden, the river, the tree.

       Cambridge by Night

      Down the aisles of this dark town

      Pass faces and faces I have known

      In the green, dog days, I

      forget their names, Forget their faces.

      Every public place in this city

      Is a sideshow of souls sword-swallowing pity:

      Father Dog-face barks without a sound,

      The penny candles stare me down.

      You were so close I could have touched the dead

      Childhood in your face,

      Left my mother's house a bride

      With a light, Night-light, dawn, to be by your side

      All night,

      But wanting pity, pity stood

      Between us in your face.

      Nothing troubles the dark: the last

      Tiffany windows are out. Their ghosts

      Might be my dutch uncles; pity

      it's summer, they're out of the city.

       To a Friend

      I cannot give you much or ask you much.

      Though I shore myself up until we meet,

      The words we say are public as the street:

      Your body is walled up against my touch.

      Our ghosts bob and hug in the air where we meet,

      My reason hinges on arcs you draw complete,

      And yet you are walled up against my touch.

      Your love for me is, in its way, complete,

      Like alabaster apples angels eat,

      But since it is in this world that we meet

      I cannot give you much or ask you much.

      You go your way, I mine, and when we meet,

      Both half-distracted by the smells of the street,

      Your body is walled up against my touch.

      My body sings at your table, waits on the street

      And you pass empty-handed, till when we meet

      I have been so far, so deep, so cold, so much,

      My hands, my eyes, my tongue are like bark to the touch.

       Waiting

      Ask, and let your words diminish your asking,

      As your journal has diminished your days,

      With the next day's vanity drying your blood,

      The words you have lost in your notebooks.

      Ask—do not be afraid. Praise Him for His silence.

      What I love to ask is what I know,

      Old thoughts that fit like a boot.

      What I would hazard clings in my skull:

      Pride intervenes, like an eyelid.

      All sound slows down to a monstrous slow repetition,

      Your times of reflection become a dark shop-window,

      Your face up against your face.

      You kneel, you see yourself see yourself kneel,

      Revile your own looking down at your looking up;

      Before the words form in the back of your head

      You have said them over and answered, lives before.

      O