Стихотворения Кэтлин Рейн (на английском языке)

Not much of a dog yet,
that smudge in the distance, beyond the reach

of focus. It’s just an impressionist
gesture, a guess. From the edge of the clearing, the farmhouse
materializes, settles

into wall & stone. The water,
making the surface

of the stream, makes
reflections. So why shouldn’t the dog

accept limits, become

a figure? Is it like the girl who sits
in the hall closet and says she’s not
hiding? She’s inside—

listening without the burden
of sight, letting locations
release hold. Out of body,
they seem lighter: her parents’ voices no longer

hooked to their mouths. They seem
cleaner. Even the electric can opener;
the sounds of children

that rise from the yard, and fall; the opening
window, these are no longer

effects, things expected
of a subject and verb. The world anyhow is too
straightforward.

Maybe the dog
does not want to be a dog, does not want
to be turned into landscape

but to remain in the beginning, placeless:

with the wind opening, the wind
a vowel, and the stars and waters
that flash, recoil, and retch

unnamed as yet, unformed, unfound.

O never harm the dreaming world,
the world of green, the world of leaves,
but let its million palms unfold
the adoration of the trees.

It is a love in darkness wrought
obedient to the unseen sun,
longer than memory, a thought
deeper than the graves of time.

The turning spindles of the cells
weave a slow forest over space,
the dance of love, creation,
out of time moves not a leaf,
and out of summer, not a shade.

Strange that the self’s continuum should outlast
The Virgin, Aphrodite, and the Mourning Mother,
All loves and griefs, successive deities
That hold their kingdom in the human breast.
Abandoned by the gods, woman with an ageing body
That half remembers the Annunciation
The passion and the travail and the grief
That wore the mask of my humanity,
I marvel at the soul’s indifference.
For in her theatre the play is done,
The tears are shed; the actors, the immortals
In their ceaseless manifestation, elsewhere gone,
And I who have been Virgin and Aphrodite,
The mourning Isis and the queen of corn
Wait for the last mummer, dread Persephone
To dance my dust at last into the tomb.

I came too late to the hills: they were swept bare
Winters before I was born of song and story,
Of spell or speech with power of oracle or invocation,

The great ash long dead by a roofless house, its branches rotten,
The voice of the crows an inarticulate cry,
And from the wells and springs the holy water ebbed away.

A child I ran in the wind on a withered moor
Crying out after those great presences who were not there,
Long lost in the forgetfulness of the forgotten.

Only the archaic forms themselves could tell!
In sacred speech of hoodie on gray stone, or hawk in air,
Of Eden where the lonely rowan bends over the dark pool.

Yet I have glimpsed the bright mountain behind the mountain,
Knowledge under the leaves, tasted the bitter berries red,
Drunk water cold and clear from an inexhaustible hidden fountain.

In my first sleep
I came to the river
And looked down
Through the clear water –
Only in dream
Water so pure,
Laced and undulant
Lines of flow
On its rocky bed
Water of life
Streaming for ever.

A house was there
Beside the river
And I, arrived,
An expected guest
About to explore
Old gardens and libraries –
But the car was waiting
To drive me away.

One last look
Into that bright stream –
Trout there were
And clear on the bottom
Monster form
Of the great crayfish
That crawls to the moon.
On its rocky bed
Living water
In whorls and ripples
Flowing unbended.

There was the car
To drive me away.
We crossed the river
Of living water –
I might not stay,
But must return
By the road too short
To the waiting day.

In my second dream
Pure I was and free
By the rapid stream,
My crystal house the sky,
The pure crystalline sky.

Into the stream I flung
A bottle of clear glass
That twirled and tossed and spun
In the water’s race
Flashing the morning sun.

Down that swift river
I saw it borne away,
My empty crystal form,
Exultant saw it caught
Into the current’s spin,
The flashing water’s run.

Now he is dead
How should I know
My true love’s arms
From wind and snow?

No man I meet
In field or house
Though in the street
A hundred pass.

The hurrying dust
Has never a face,
No longer human
In man or woman.

Now he is gone
Why should I mourn
My true love more than mud,
than mud or stone?

Their reward is
they become innocent again,

and when they reappear in memory
death has completely erased
the blurs, given them boundaries. They rise

and move through their new world with clean,
clear edges. My grandmother, in particular
has become buoyant, unattached finally

from her histories, from the trappings
of family. By no means was she

a good woman. But the dead don’t care anymore for that.
Weightless, they no longer assume
responsibility, they no longer

have bodies. Once,

at the end of August, after swimming
in the muddy pond

I’d gone into the living room, cool
as vodka, where my grandmother
sat. Greed thins a woman,

I remember her rings, bigger
than her fingers.
Water ran down my legs

onto the floor becoming slippery
and my grandmother, her breath
scratchy from cigarettes and blended whiskey,

leaned into my ear and whispered
you’re an ugly girl. Do I have

to forgive her? My mother tells me

no one ever loved her,
so when I see her, I see her again in the park
in her pink tailored suit, suede pumps,

I see her moving among the strange
gentlemen that have gathered, the dark
powerful men. She is still young, blonde

and most of all, she is beyond reach, beautiful.

A Gaelic bard they praise who in fourteen adjectives
Named the one indivisible soul of his glen;
For what are the bens and the glens but manifold qualities,
Immeasurable complexities of soul?
What are these isles but a song sung by island voices?
The herdsman sings ancestral memories
And the song makes the singer wise,
But only while he sings
Songs that were old when the old themselves were young,
Songs of these hills only, and of no isles but these.
For other hills and isles this language has no words.

The mountains are like manna, for one day given,
To each his own:
Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen
Or the golden-haired sons of kings,
Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves,
Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail,
Whose words make loved things strange and small,
Emptied of all that made them heart-felt or bright.
Our words keep no faith with the soul of the world.

God in me is the fury on the bare heath
God in me shakes the interior kingdom of my heaven.
God in me is the fire wherein I burn.

God in me swirling cloud and driving rain
God in me cries a lonely nameless bird
God in me beats my head upon a stone.

God in me the four elements of storm
Raging in the shelterless landscape of the mind
Outside the barred doors of my Goneril heart.

Reaching down arm-deep into bright water
I gathered on white sand under waves
Shells, drifted up on beaches where I alone
Inhabit a finite world of years and days.
I reached my arm down a myriad years
To gather treasure from the yester-milliennial sea-floor,
Held in my fingers forms shaped on the day of creation.

Building their beauty in three dimensions
Over which the world recedes away from us,
And in the fourth, that takes away ourselves
From moment to moment and from year to year
From first to last they remain in their continuous present.
The helix revolves like a timeless thought,
Instantaneous from apex to rim
Like a dance whose figure is limpet or murex,
cowrie or golden winkle.

They sleep on the ocean floor like humming-tops
Whose music is the mother-of-pearl octave of the rainbow,
Harmonious shells that whisper forever in our ears,
The world that you inhabit has not yet been created.

Behind the tree, behind the house, behind the stars
In the presence that I cannot see
Otherwise than as house and stars and tree.

Tree, house and stars
Extend to infinity within themselves
Into the mystery of the world

Where whirl the wheels of power whose pulse beat
Out of nothing, out of night,
Leaves, stones and fires,

The living tree whose maypole dance
Of chromosome and nucleus
Traces the maze of boughs and leaves.

The standing house of stone that poured
In molten torrent when was hurled
Out of chaos this great world,

And suns whose kindling begins anew
Or ends the course that tree, house, world move through.

Upheld by being that I cannot know
In other form than stars and stones and trees
Assume in nature’s glass, in nature’s eyes.

From star to star, from sun and spring and leaf,
And almost audible flowers whose sound is silence,
And in the common meadows, springs the seed of life.

Now the lilies open, and the rose
Released by summer from the harmless graves
That, centuries deep, are in the air we breathe,
And in our earth, and in our daily bread.

External and innate dimensions hold
The living forms, but not the force of life;
For that interior and holy tree
That in the heart of hearts outlives the world
Spreads earthly shade into eternity.

Where is the seed
Of the tree felled,
Of the forest burned,
Or living root
Under ash and cinders?
From woven bud
What last leaf strives
Into life, last
Shrivelled flower?
Is fruit of our harvest,
Our long labour
Dust to the core?
To what far, fair land
Borne on the wind
What winged seed
Or spark of fire
From holocaust
To kindle a star?

Night comes, an angel stands
Measuring out the time of stars,
Still are the winds, and still the hours.

It would be peace to lie
Still in the still hours at the angel’s feet,
Upon a star hung in a starry sky,
But hearts another measure beat.

Each body, wingless as it lies,
Sends out its butterfly of night
With delicate wings, and jewelled eyes.

And some upon day’s shores are cast,
And some in darkness lost
In waves beyond the world, where float
Somewhere the islands of the blest.

Yours is the face that the earth turns to me,
Continuous beyond its human features lie
The mountain forms that rest against the sky.
With your eyes, the reflecting rainbow, the sun’s light
Sees me; forest and flower, bird and beast
Know and hold me forever in the world’s thought,
Creation’s deep untroubled retrospect.

When your hand touches mine it is the earth
That takes me—the green grass,
And rocks and rivers; the green graves,
And children still unborn, and ancestors,
In love passed down from hand to hand from God.
Your love comes from the creation of the world,
From those paternal fingers, streaming through the clouds
That break with light the surface of the sea.

Here, where I trace your body with my hand,
Love’s presence has no end;
For these, your arms that hold me, are the world’s.
In us, the continents, clouds and oceans meet
Our arbitrary selves, extensive with the night,
Lost, in the heart’s worship, and the body’s sleep.

Primrose, anemone, bluebell, moss
Grow in the Kingdom of the Cross

And the ash-tree’s purple bud
Dresses the spear that sheds his blood.

With the thorns that pierce his brow
Soft encircling petals grow

For in each flower the secret lies
Of the tree that crucifies.

Garden by the water clear
All must die who enter here!

Where are those dazzling hills touched by the sun,
Those crags in childhood that I used to climb?
Hidden, hidden under mist is yonder mountain,
Hidden is the heart.

A day of cloud, a lifetime falls between,
Gone are the heather moors and the pure stream,
Gone are the rocky places and the green,
Hidden, hidden under sorrow is yonder mountain,
Hidden, hidden.

O storm and gale of tears, whose blinding screen
Makes weather of grief, snow’s drifting curtain
Palls th’immortal heights once seen.
Hidden, hidden is the heart,
Hidden, hidden is the heart.

If you go deep
Into the heart
What do you find there?
Fear, fear,
Fear of the jaws of the rock,
Fear of the teeth and splinters of iron that tear
Flesh from the bone, and the moist
Blood, running unfelt
From the wound, and the hand
Suddenly moist and red.

If you go deep
Into the heart
What do you find?
Grief, grief,
Grief for the life unlived,
For the loves unloved,
For the child never to be born,
Th’unbidden anguish, when the fair moon
Rises over still summer seas, and the pain
Of sunlight scattered in vain on spring grass.

If you go deeper
Into the heart
What do you find there?
Death, death,
Death that lets all go by,
Lets the blood flow from the wound,
Lets the night pass,
Endures the day with indifference, knowing that all must end.
Sorrow is not forever, ad sense
Endures no extremities,
Death is the last Secret implicit within you, the hidden, the deepest
Knowledge of all you will ever unfold
In this body of earth.

This war’s dead heroes, who has seen them?
They rise in smoke above the burning city,
Faint clouds, dissolving into sky —

And who sifting the Libyan sand can find
The tracery of a human hand,
The faint impression of an absent mind,
The fade-out of a soldier’s day dream?

You’ll know your love no more, nor his sweet kisses —
He’s forgotten you, girl, and in the idle sun
In long green grass that the east wind caresses
The seed of man is ravished by the corn.

Day is the hero’s shield,
Achilles’ field,
The light days are the angels.
We the seed.

Against eternal light and gorgon’s face
Day is the shield
And we the grass
Native to fields of iron, and skies of brass.

Wanting to know all
I overlooked each particle
Containing the whole
Unknowable.

Intent on one great love, perfect,
Requited and for ever,
I missed love’s everywhere
Small presence, thousand-guised.

And lifelong have been reading
Book after book, searching
For wisdom, but bringing
Only my own understanding.

Forgive me, forgiver,
Whether you be infinite omniscient
Or some unnoticed other
My existence has hurt.

Being what I am
What could I do but wrong?
Yet love can bring
To heart healing
To chaos meaning.

I. Kempton, Pennsylvania

Perhaps the last of the light
lifting this evening from the field of wheat

means something. Perhaps the view
includes us, and we are not errors
in the landscape

or meant to be erased. The painter, it’s true,
prefers not to preserve
our figures in the brush

of hills layered into green. Perhaps he too
is careless with the truth. What lies

have you had to tell to land you here

outside Kempton, with the creek rising behind us?
How did the story sound? If I say your hand
on my thigh, the truck still idles

beneath us, tracks in the frozen road

that months from now will thaw
& heave. If I say your mouth
and the deer begin drifting

across the field, who’s to say
we didn’t call them out—their figures shadowy,

their eyes gem-like and glittering?

II. Undine

It was all too urgent being human.
You ordered drinks, gestured
with your hands, told stories

and the more I knew

the more I was frightened. Those evenings
the air came unpinned, got lost
in autumn & dusk, in the leaves

at the edge of the field. And weren’t the edges themselves
vanishing? When you walked to the barn
where the cats had gone in,

taken to rafters. I heard your footsteps
moving the gravel, the ice
in your glass of vodka.

I listened like that
for the ends of things: the last of the cars, the headlights crossing
our bedroom. I listened
to your breathing.

but rooms kept turning in places
I could not ignore. I left because I loved you

without reserve. Because I would not be allowed

to keep you with me in the world.

III. “Kings River Canyon”

Because when you read it your voice shakes,
breaks over the last words,

Because in the Pennsylvania Hospital
at 8th and Spruce, surgeons have split open your chest
and with instruments

are cutting your heart,

and because I wanted to hurt them, because they never
get older, but return each year

refreshed, blond—

I read the poem, Rexroth walking back through the canyon
where twenty years before he had slept
with his new wife

at the beginning of autumn.
It was her birthday

and they lay there on the hard earth,

the stream running beside
and the walls soaring up

to hold them there. Maybe
he made love to her, the air
chilling the skin

or maybe that was the disease

beginning even then, gathering itself deep
inside her body, considering
the distance between itself

and the surface.
There was no path.
They’d cut their way into the canyon

where eighteen years later,
a highway’s been blasted through. Eighteen years
he writes ground to pieces.

I am more alone that I ever imagined.

You are dead. And in the mechanical
cool of the classroom
I felt it grip me:

how it will be without you
when I’ll be fifty-five, sixty,

in the beginning of winter, in the first
waves of snow. I’ll watch the slow drag
of the Schulykill

or I’ll go the garden where we met,
the leaves spinning down
into the empty fountain,

where I will never see you,
not again, not your hands, your face,
or hear aloud the way

you said my name. I’ll turn
and turn again,

but you’ll be gone, nothing filling up your place.