Sonnets for Five Seasons
(i.m. Charles Leslie Stevenson, 1909-79)
This House
Which represents you, as my bones do, waits,
all pores open, for the stun of snow. Which will come,
as it always does, between breaths, between nights
of no wind and days of the nulled sun.
And has to be welcome. All instinct wants to anticipate
faceless fields, a white road drawn
through dependent firs, the soldered glare of lakes.
Is it wanting you here to want the winter in?
I breathe you back into your square house and begin
to live here roundly. This year will be between,
not in, four seasons. Do you hear already the wet
rumble of thaw? Stones. Sky. Streams. Sun.
Those might be swallows at the edge of sight
returning to last year’s nest in the crook of the porchlight.
Complaint
‘Dear God,’ they write, ‘that was a selfish winter
to lean so long, unfairly on the spring!’
And now — this too much greed of seedy summer.
Mouths of the flowers unstick themselves and sting
the bees with irresistible dust. Iris
allow undignified inspection. Plain waste
weeds dress up in Queen Anne’s lace. Our mist-
blue sky clouds heavily with clematis.
‘Too much,’ they cry, ‘too much. Begin again.’
The Lord, himself a casualty of weather
falls to earth in large hot drops of rain.
The dry loam rouses in his scent, and under
him — moist, sweet, discriminate — the spring.
Thunder. Lightning. He can do anything.
Between
The wet and weight of this half-born English winter
is not the weather of those fragmentary half-true willows
that break in the glass of the canal behind our rudder
as water arrives in our wake — a travelling arrow
of now, of now, of now. Leaves of the water
furl back from our prow, and as the pinnate narrow
seam of where we are drives through the mirror
of where we have to be, alder and willow
double crookedly, reverse, assume a power
to bud out tentatively in gold and yellow,
so it looks as if what should be end of summer —
seeds, dead nettles, berries, naked boughs —
is really the anxious clouding of first spring.
…’Real’ is what water is imagining.
Stasis
Before the leaves change, light transforms these lucid
speaking trees. The heavy drench of August
alters, things; its rich and sappy blood
relaxes where a thirst ago, no rest
released the roots’ wet greed or stemmed their mad
need to be more. September is the wisest
time — neither the unbearable burning word
nor the form of it, cooped in its cold ghost.
How are they sombre — that unpicked apple, red,
undisturbed by its fall; calm of those wasp-bored amethyst
plums on the polished table? Body and head
easy in amity, a beam between that must,
unbalanced, quicken or kill, make new or dead
whatever these voices are that hate the dust.
The Circle
It is imagination’s white face remembers
snow, its shape, a fluted shell on shoot
or flower, its weight, the permanence of winter
pitched against the sun’s absolute root.
All March is shambles, shards. Yet no amber
chestnut, Indian, burnished by its tent
cuts to a cleaner centre or keeps summer
safer in its sleep. Ghost be content.
You died in March when white air hurt the maples.
Birches knelt under ice. Roads forgot
their ways in aisles of frost. There were no petals.
Face, white face, you are snow in the green hills.
High stones complete your circle where trees start.
Granite and ice are colours of the heart.
To My Daughter in a Red Coat
Late October. It is afternoon.
My daughter and I walk through the leaf-strewn
Corridors of the park
In the light and the dark
Of the elms’ thin arches.
Around us brown leaves fall and spread.
Small winds stir the minor dead.
Dust powders the air.
Those shrivelled women stare.
At us from their cold benches.
Child, your mittens tug your sleeves.
They lick your drumming feet, the leaves.
You come so fast, so fast.
You violate the past,
My daughter, as your coat dances.
Temporarily in Oxford
Where they will bury me
I don’t know.
Many places might not be
sorry to store me.
The Midwest has right of origin.
Already it has welcomed my mother
to its flat sheets.
The English fens that bore me
have been close curiously often.
It seems I can’t get away from
dampness and learning.
If I stay where I am
I could sleep in this educated earth.
But if they are kind, they’ll burn me
and send me to Vermont.
I’d be an education for the trees
and would relish, really,
flaring into maple each October—
my scarlet letter to you.
Your stormy north is possible.
You will be there, engrossed in its peat.
It would be handy not
to have to cross the whole Atlantic
each time I wanted to
lift up the turf and slip in beside you.
Inheriting My Grandmother’s Nightmare
Consider the adhesiveness of things
to the ghosts that prized them,
the “olden days” of birthday spoons
and silver napkin rings.
Too carelessly I opened
that velvet drawer of heirlooms.
There lay my grandmother’s soul
begging under veils of tarnish to be brought back whole.
She who was always a climate in herself,
who refused to vanish
as the nineteen-hundreds grew older and louder,
and the wars worse,
and her grandchildren, bigger and ruder
in her daughter’s house.
How completely turned around
her lavender world became, how upside down.
And how much, under her “flyaway” hair,
she must have suffered,
sitting there ignored by the dinner guests
hour after candlelit hour,
rubbed out, like her initials on the silverware,
eating little, passing bread,
until the wine’s flood, the smoke’s blast,
the thunderous guffaws at last roared her to bed.
In her tiny garden of confidence,
wasted she felt, and furious.
She fled to church, but Baby Jesus
had grown out of his manger.
She read of Jews in the New Haven Register
gassed or buried alive.
Every night, at the wheel of an ambulance,
she drove and drove, not knowing how to drive.
She died in ’55, paralyzed, helpless.
Her no man’s land survived.
I light my own age with a spill
from her distress. And there it is,
her dream, my heirloom, my drive downhill
at the wheel of the last bus,
the siren’s wail, the smoke, the sickly smell.
The drawer won’t shut again. It never will.
Swifts
Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, ‘The swifts are back!’
Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther
Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields.
Swereee swereee. Another. And another.
It’s the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.
The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether.
These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers.
But a shift of wing, and they’re earth-skimmers, daggers
Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.
Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for
Earth is forbidden to them, water’s forbidden to them,
All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,
They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.
Here is a legend of swifts, a parable —
When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds,
The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things
Like shoes, with long legs and short wings,
So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk.
And they stayed there. ‘Well,’ said the Raven, after years of this,
‘I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky
On condition that you give up rest.’
‘Yes, yes,’ screamed the swifts, ‘We abhor rest.
We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep,
Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms.
Let us be free, be air!’
So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies.
He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives.
He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet.
Then he released them, Never to Return
Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so
We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but
Bolts in the world’s need: swift
Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply
Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world’s breathing.
The grace to say they live in another firmament.
A way to say the miracle will not occur,
And watch the miracle.
The Enigma
Falling to sleep last night in a deep crevasse
between one rough dream and another, I seemed,
still awake, to be stranded on a stony path,
and there the familiar enigma presented itself
in the shape of a little trembling lamb.
It was lying like a pearl in the trough between
one Welsh slab and another, and it was crying.
I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother.
Nothing was there. What did I know about lambs?
Should I pick it up? Carry it . . . where?
What would I do if it were dying? The hand
of my conscience fought with the claw of my fear.
It wasn’t so easy to imitate the Good Shepherd
in that faded, framed Sunday School picture
filtering now through the dream’s daguerreotype.
With the wind fallen and the moon swollen to the full,
small, white doubles of the creature at my feet
flared like candles in the creases of the night
until it looked to be alive with newborn lambs.
Where could they all have come from?
A second look, and the bleating lambs were birds—
kittiwakes nesting, clustered on a cliff face,
fixing on me their dark accusing eyes.
There was a kind of imperative not to touch them,
yet to be of them, whatever they were—
now lambs, now birds, now floating points of light—
fireflies signaling how many lost New England summers?
One form, now another; one configuration, now another.
Like fossils locked deep in the folds of my brain,
outliving a time by telling its story. Like stars.
Elegy
Whenever my father was left with nothing to do —
waiting for someone to ‘get ready’,
or facing the gap between graduate seminars
and dull after-suppers in his study
grading papers or writing a review —
he played the piano.
I think of him packing his lifespan
carefully, like a good leather briefcase,
each irritating chore wrapped in floating passages
for the left hand and right hand
by Chopin or difficult Schumann;
nothing inside it ever rattled loose.
Not rationalism, though you could cut your tongue
on the blade of his reasonable logic.
Only at the piano did he become
the bowed, reverent, wholly absorbed Romantic.
The theme of his heroic, unfinished piano sonata
could have been Brahms.
Boredom, or what he disapproved of as
‘sitting around with your mouth open’
oddly pursued him. He had small stamina.
Whenever he succumbed to bouts of winter bronchitis,
the house sank a little into its snowed-up garden,
missing its musical swim-bladder.
None of this suggests how natural he was.
For years I thought fathers played the piano
just as dogs barked and babies grew.
We children ran in and out of the house,
taking for granted that the ‘Trout’ or E flat Major Impromptu
would be rippling around us.
For him, I think, playing was solo flying, a bliss
of removal, of being alone.
Not happily always; never an escape,
for he was affectionate, and the household hum
he pretended to find trivial or ridiculous
daily sustained him.
When he talked about music, it was never
of the lachrimae rerum
that trembled from his drawn-out phrasing
as raindrops phrase themselves along a wire;
no, he defended movable doh or explained the amazing
physics of the octave.
We’d come in from school and find him
cross-legged on the jungle of the floor,
guts from one of his Steinways strewn about him.
He always got the pieces back in place.
I remember the yellow covers of Schirmer’s Editions
and the bound Peters Editions in the bookcase.
When he defected to the cello in later years
Grandmother, in excrucio, mildly exclaimed,
‘Wasn’t it lovely when Steve liked to play the piano.’
Now I’m the grandmother listening to Steve at the piano.
Lightly, in strains from Brahms-Haydn variations,
his audible image returns to my humming ears.
Innocence and Experience
I laid myself down as a woman
And woke as a child.
Sleep buried me up to my chin,
But my brain cut wild.
Sudden summer lay sticky as tar
Under bare white feet.
Stale, soot-spotted heapings of winter
Shrank in the street.
Black headlines, infolded like napkins,
Crashed like grenades
As war beat its way porch by porch
Up New Haven’s façades.
Europe: a brown hive of noises,
Hitler inside.
On the sunny shelf by the stairs
My tadpoles died.
Big boys had already decided
Who’d lose and who’d score,
Singing one potato, two potato,
Three potato, four.
Singing sticks and stones
May break my bones
(but names hurt more).
Singing step on a crack
Break your mother’s back
(her platinum-ringed finger).
Singing who got up your mother
When your daddy wasn’t there?
Singing allee allee in free! You’re
Dead, you’re dead, wherever you are!
