The River Sound

First Chapter

CEREMONY AFTER AN AMPUTATION

Spirits of the place who were here before I saw it
    to whom I have made such offerings as I have known how to make
    wanting from the first to approach you with recognition
    bringing for your swept ridge trees lining the wind with seedlings
    that have grown now to become these long wings in chorus
    where the birds assemble and settle their flying lives
    you have taught me without meaning and have lifted me up
    without talk or promise and again and again reappeared to me
    unmistakable and changing and unpronounceable as a face

dust of the time a day in late spring after the silk of rain
    had fallen softly through the night and after the green morning
    the afternoon floating brushed with gold and then the sounds
    of machines erupting across the valley and elbowing up the slopes
    pushing themselves forward to occupy you to be more of you
    who remain the untouched silence through which they are passing
    I try to hear you remembering that we are not separate
    to find you who cannot be lost or elsewhere or incomplete

nature of the solitary machine coming into the story
    from the minds that conceived you and the hands that first conjured up
    the phantom of you in fine lines on the drawing board
    you for whom function is all the good that exists
    you to whom I have come with nothing but purpose
    a purpose of my own as though it was something we shared
    you that were pried from the earth without anyone
    consulting you and were carried off burned beaten metamorphosed
    according to plans and lives to which you owed nothing

let us be at peace with each other let peace be what is between us
    and you now single vanished part of my left hand bit of bone finger-
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    who began with me in the dark that was already my mother
    you who touched whatever I could touch of the beginning
    and were how I touched and who remembered the sense of it
    when I thought I had forgotten it you in whom it waited
    under your only map of one untrodden mountain
    you who did as well as we could through all the hours at the piano
    and who helped undo the bras and found our way to the treasure

and who held the fruit and the pages and knew how to button
    my right cuff and to wash my left ear and had taken in
    heart beats of birds and beloved faces and hair by day and by night
    fur of dogs ears of horses tongues and the latches of doors
    so that I still feel them clearly long after they are gone
    and lake water beside the boat one evening of an ancient summer
    and the vibration of a string over which a bow was moving
    as though the sound of the note were still playing
    and the hand of my wife found in the shallows of waking

you who in a flicker of my inattention
    signalled to me once only my error telling me
    of the sudden blow from the side so that I looked down
    to see not you any longer but instead a mouth
    full of blood calling after you who had already gone gone
    gone ahead into what I cannot know or reach or touch
    leaving in your place only the cloud of pain rising
    into the day filling the light possessing every sound
    becoming the single color and taste and direction

yet as the pain recedes and the moment of it
    you remain with me even in the missing of you
    small boat moving before me on the current under the daylight
    whatever you had touched and had known and took with you
    is with me now as you are when you are already there
    unseen part of me reminding me warning me
    pointing to what I cannot see never letting me forget
    you are my own speaking only to me going with me
    all the rest of the way telling me what is still here

THE STRANGER

             (After a Guarani legend recorded by Ernesto Morales)

One day in the forest there was somebody
who had never been there before
it was somebody like the monkeys but taller
and without a tail and without so much hair
standing up and walking on only two feet
and as he went he heard a voice calling Save me

as the stranger looked he could see a snake
a very big snake with a circle of fire
that was dancing all around it
and the snake was trying to get out
but every way it turned the fire was there

so the stranger bent the mink of a young tree
and climbed out over the fire until he
could hold a branch down to the snake
and the snake wrapped himself around the branch
and the stranger pulled the snake up out of the fire

and as soon as the snake saw that he was free
he twined himself around the stranger
and started to crush the life out of him
but the stranger shouted No No
I am the one who has just saved your life
and you pay me back by trying to kill me

but the snake said I am keeping the law
it is the law that whoever does good
receives evil in return
and he drew his coils tight around the stranger
but the stranger kept on saying No No
I do not believe that is the law

so the snake said I will show you
I will show you three times and you will see
and he kept his coils tight around the stranger's neck
and all around his arms and body
but he let go of the stranger's legs
Now walk he said to the stranger Keep going

so they started out that way and they came
to a river and the river said to them
I do good to everyone and look what they
do to me I save them from dying of thirst
and all they do is stir up the mud
and fill my water with dead things

the snake said One

the stranger said Let us go on and they did
and they came to a carandá-i palm
there were wounds running with sap on its trunk
and the palm tree was moaning I do good
to everyone and look what they do to me
I give them my fruit and my shade and they cut me
and drink from my body until I die

the snake said Two

the stranger said Let us go on and they did
and came to a place where they heard whimpering
and saw a dog with his paw in a basket
and the dog said I did a good thing
and this is what came of it
I found a jaguar who had been hurt
and I took care of him and he got better

and as soon as he had his strength again
he sprang at me wanting to eat me up
I managed to get away but he tore my paw
I hid in a cave until he was gone
and here in this basket I have
a calabash full of milk for my wound
but now I have pushed it too far down to reach

will you help me he said to the snake
and the snake liked milk better than anything
so he slid off the stranger and into the basket
and when he was inside the dog snapped it shut
and swung it against a tree with all his might
again and again until the snake was dead

and after the snake was dead in there
the dog said to the stranger Friend
I have saved your life
and the stranger took the dog home with him
and treated him the way the stranger would treat a dog

THE GARDENS OF VERSAILLES

At what moment can it be said to occur
the grand stillness of this symmetry
whose horizons become the horizon
and whose designer's name seems to be Ours

even when the designer has long since
vanished and the king his master whom
they called The Sun in his day is nobody again
here are the avenues of light reflected

and magnified and here the form's vast claim
to have been true forever as the law
of a universe in which nothing appears
to change and there was nothing before this

except defects of Nature and a waste of marshes
a lake a chaos of birds and wild things
a river making its undirected
way it was always the water that was

motion even while thirty six thousand men
and six thousand horses for more than three
decades diverted it into a thousand
fountains and when all those men and horses

had gone the water flowed on and the sound
of water falling echoes in the dream
the dream of water in which the avenues
all of them are the river on its own way

CHORUS

The wet bamboo clacking in the night rain
crying in the darkness whimpering softly
as the hollow columns touch and slide
along each other swaying with the empty
air these are sounds from before there were voices
gestures older than grief from before there was
pain as we know it the impossibly tall
stems are reaching out groping and waving
before longing as we think of it or loss
as we are acquainted with it or feelings
able to recognize the syllables
that might be their own calling out to them
like names in the dark telling them nothing
about loss or about longing nothing
ever about all that has yet to answer

WHAT IS A GARDEN

All day working happily down near the stream bed
       the light passing into the remote opalescence
it returns to as the year wakes toward winter
       a season of rain in a year already rich
in rain with masked light emerging on all sides
       in the new leaves of the palms quietly waving
time of mud and slipping and of overhearing
       the water under the sloped ground going on whispering
as it travels time of rain thundering at night
       and of rocks rolling and echoing in the torrent
and of looking up after noon through the high branches
       to see fine rain drifting across the sunlight
over the valley that was abused and at last left
       to fill with thickets of rampant aliens
bringing habits but no stories under the mango trees
       already vast as clouds there I keep discovering
beneath the tangle the ancient shaping of water
       to which the light of an hour comes back as to a secret
and there I planted young palms in places I had not pondered
       until then I imagined their roots setting out in the dark
knowing without knowledge I kept trying to see them standing
       in that bend of the valley in the light that would come

A NIGHT FRAGRANCE

Now I am old enough to remember
people speaking of immortality
as though it were something known to exist
a tangible substance that might be acquired
to be used perhaps in the kitchen
every day in whatever was made there
forever after and they applied the word
to literature and the names of things
names of persons and the naming of other
things for them and no doubt they repeated
that word with some element of belief
when they named a genus of somewhat more than
a hundred species of tropical trees and shrubs
some with flowers most fragrant at night
for James Theodore Tabernaemontanus
of Heidelberg physician and botanist
highly regarded in his day over
four centuries ago immortality
might be like that with the scattered species
continuing their various evolutions
the flowers opening by day or night
with no knowledge of bearing a name
of anyone and their fragrance if it
reminds at all not reminding of him