A Poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(for Joseph Satterwhite)

I

If at the whole year’s nooning and the noon
Of days, at the still daylight hour I am begot
Of fleshéd bones, death, darknesses, of doom
The which I pray Thou sparest me, what-not:
If at the whole day’s nooning and the year’s
Day, and the bright hour and bright eye of the cagéd bird,
(Alas, poor bird) whose fall at my mild passing there he fears,
The which I pray Thou sparest me; if, in a word
At the Year’s nooning day, the summer’s head,
The haughty sun, the day of burnished platter,
Of choosing ties and prayers for the dead
And soda flavors and the empty chatter
The which I pray Thou sparest me,
I take
A glass of fruit-juice and a piece of cake
My day’s remonstrances (nor do I give)
My dear, you must eat something; how you live. . .
(Nor would I give a drachma or a damn),
One’s daily dose of sham;
My straw, my handkerchief, my wallet, and the shoves
Of filthy urchins from the seaméd sweat
Of their rank beds, the which I pray
Thou sparest, to meet mine own true love,
How is it, upright in day
I am permitted thus and thus to walk,
Seersuckered thus, O Lord, and scented in the sun?
This citied gaggle, barefoot or in buck
Goes aimless, aimless, baffled here, begun
And baffled, but I do not give a fuck.
Remarkable, the metaphors we choose
To lose ourselves in, figures that we loose
In loosing figures (here remark the pause
Which, ipso facto, figures as a kind of hope)
Before the figure loosed, or the loosed bras
That one may, with such irony and such a trope, unhook—
Oh! I have pimped as poets made a pass
(Toujours, toujours, c’est l’affaire of books)
At chaste minds in the freshman class
And gone in red debt as they all escape
Leda, the gods, all reason and the rape.
Goosey, goosey, goosey!

I was remarking, just the other day,
How one may argue, colleagues, s’il vous plait,
These things, vide my next essai . . .
Of which I pray,
Both the rudenesses of rouge, men cap-a-pied,
Holy despair of scholars, the blear-eyed
Negation of those who have lived and died,
Those who have never, and those who have for their negation tried
And been tried,
Thou sparest me.

II

In a shy gazebo where
You fiddled with your underwear,
I told you many splendid things:
Arms that hold you, lips that sing,
Which, as the years advance,
If the years spare me, if you becoming spare,
If we, then, are spared,
For all the dismal day that I declared
At your sheer-stockinged knees and ankles there
Envisioned enticements and in visage vised,
Your arms, your absinthe, your quintessence iced,
From illness, stubbornness, or being scared,
I say,
If on some latter-day decrepit street
We two should meet,
I pray you,
Do not pretend your youth was fiery
Or that our times were hot,
When they were not,
Burn your diary,
Spare me.

III

On the south side, below the tracks,
The swinkers swill in bad saloons,
Raise holy hell in the chicken shacks,
Do comic capers in three acts.
And stomp to gut-bucket tunes;
Teiresias sits with his spent teats
And Stentor holds the floor,
And when the sheep are in too deep
A cyclops guards the door;
Tarpacia dives into Plutarch’s Lives
From any random rock,
In rooms upstairs Helen declares
Pendular as a clock;
There Jason jousts and Ajax boasts
And things are quite contrary,
And the sirens they have smiles like May
And eyes like January;
In any corner Jack the Horner
Sits with Jill Complacent,
While Georgy Porgy plans an orgy
In the booth adjacent;
There sibyls curse and wives rehearse
Red ways of getting even,
There Max or Gene is any queen
And Stella is a Steven;
And sure as hell is Little Nell
Asleep by little Dickie
In father’s car beside the bar
While father has a quickie.
. . . Don’t let Little Nell die . . .
Jesus H. Christ, I said, It is
The Man on Gadshill’s the patient now. You
Smiled and blew a kiss across your fizz; I
Could have made another—but why try?
I do declah, you said, pointing (idiot!),
That gurrl’s head! like cawton candah!
You . . . ! do you remember an inn, Miranda?

But at that instant with a muffled roar,
A sound of klaxons and of rending wood,
A bearded man cross-gartered to the knee
Came bursting bolt and screw and tavern door
To pieces on an engine that he rode
And tumbling backwards in a booth by me
Looked up grinning through my plate of food:
Man in the reindeer helmet
Man deer-headed
Antlered man,
Aie!
And bouncers came and beat his head to blood.

Having drunk and eaten in rowdy places
With men and women, sometime later
One had objected to your face
And someone struck her. Jesus, how one hates
These things in the little hours when
His pipes are hot and sunday morning
Is real. Is real . . . the bells begin
And Christ is drunk and eaten
Borne on the bells one hears: din! din!
Hy! Zy! Hine! My head
Was throbbing. You had said,
I want my fortune told and sobbed
On some damned cabbie! He grinned. You puked.
Why must I always pay? I don’t mean money.
It is not money that I mean

The city
by the tracks is noisy, hateful,
The stews where tyrants’ daughters dive, unclean,
Unsheltered, uninviting, where she waited
Some years before he came and bade her go
And sin no more uncertain, slow
Moving of dim eyes, drugged heads, misconstrued
Apologies, vague threats, and nothing screwed down
Tight, bare arms tattooed
Onto the shoulders of these several whores
Who sit like all the swag of foreign wars

UNIVERSA QUAE IN QUOQUE BELLI GENERE NECESSARIA
ESSE CREDUNTUR, SECUM LEGIO DEBET UBIQUE
PORTARE, UT IN QUOVIS LOCO FIXERIT CASTRA,
ARMATAM FACIAL CIVITATEM the world
Unfooted like a drunken dancer
Spins like a dancer drunken in one’s head
Where one can pick a fight or nurse a cancer
Spins, and one begins to wish for bed want
My fortune told, you said.
She walked in beauty and around her skirt
Whose several falls were layered, one on one,
A train of fauns in mauve and red and dirt
Ran undulant; from either hip was run
A silken scarfing and a filigree
Of golden chains and tiny bells and beads
Said tink-a-tink beside her either knee
(How many fingers and how many needs
Had told such tales of sorrow and reproof
And being blessed had left beside her door,
Where rode three globes, a scarab set in jade,
Silvers as the evening wore, cum laude . . .
All paid).
The gioconda smile she wore, aloof
Against that backdrop there of seine and shawl
Was enigmatic as the words of praise
Low dives defended: let me count the ways.
Her eyes, her fingers sharp as any awl,
As from that backroom came a child of sin
Who trilled a la castrati, Yeeeees? You wish?
There was a scent of incense over fish,
Quo vadis? I replied and no one smiled,
But pointed at a place of skulls where piled
In gay profusion with those bleachéd heads
Were globes for having fortunes read,
And took us by the hands and led us in;
There was a table I remember; there
That sofa and a much beruffled lamp;
Upon a tattered calendar a vamp
Of Gibson’s toyed with flowers in her hair;
Was it Sans Loi I saw who disappeared
Behind that beaded-curtained cove? one’s sight
Cannot be sworn to
Suddenly the room had cleared
But left—how shall I so refresh you?—left
The air uncertain, sullen, succorless, bereft
Of—what? The times one thinks to shout, IS IT I, THEN,
BEING TALKED ABOUT? IS IT? WELL, THEN GODDAMN YOUR EYES!

But then . . . who would not feign surprise . . .
A clock in saying from a shadowed bin
The seventh hour could not ascertain
But left us tense and stricken still, as when
The sunday morning bells I hear, din! din!
And Christ is made . . .
Sans vin, sans chanson, sans femme et sans foi
I played the fool, and backward sitting on a broom
Pitched no small sum of silver to a dirty boy
To fetch a mangy one-eyed deer’s head from the room
THAT HAD BEEN TOO LONG WINKING ME! which done the gloom
Was more unsettling for the hieroglyph it wore
In leaving its unquestioned hornéd shadow there above the door
Man in the reindeer helmet
Man deer-headed
Antlered man,
Killer of meat,
Aie!

As in the crevices of Caesar’s tomb,
As in the kitchen middens of one’s heart’s desire,
As sitting drunken in a gipsy’s room,
As in one’s parlor staring in the fire,
Consider; once these sundered bones would walk
Some length of miles to turn a coursing herd;
Lips once hung upon this chapless chalk
And wrought to turn the seasons with a word;
On painted peoples and the shivered shards
Of painted peoples zigzagged onto clay
And on the refuse of their teeming yards,
The feasts of marriages of nights and days,
O, perihelion aphelion
As on the painted peoples of our birth
The sweet herbs flourish—
A disquisition on the fundamental gneiss:
Some say the world will end in fire, some ice,
And some say nothing. . . .
Staring in this fire
One sees a people painting wind and rain
And, forming curious circles on the plain,
They race between the thunder and the sun
From Calpe unto Caucasus, they run!
From Carnac down to Wiltshire racing still
They cast their painted selves into Silbury Hill!
La la la! la la!
Man deer-headed
Antlered man,
Aie!

The planets line in summer,
In this midsummer’s fire
We burn the people.
Unhappy girl in Egdon, did you think
Your heart at Budmouth once, before you sank
Circling in the drowned Victorian day
To painted people and to painted clay?
From Rainbarrow and your sloping shoulders in the rain
And scarlet promise of your mouth I came to this
(A mouse is at the pantry of my brain)
Such a one that one might never kiss
Unless the stars ordained it, and no stars
Were visible that night, that drunken sparring
Of painted peoples and of sawdust bars.
These are the zigzagged patterns I have read. . . .
My fortune told, and hiccoughed,
Here! I said,
And tossed you grinning truth set in a head
Which rolling snugly to your virgin zone
(Since instinct only made you part those thighs)
Worked a macabre birth of death in bone
Against your velvet dress and drunken eyes;
Heh, heh, my lady, lay your inch of paint
My fortune told, you said—to such a quaint
Honor at Piltdown?
The day of doom?
Or spraddled drunken in a gipsy’s room
A cross-eyed lapping such a runic grin?
A sudden sense of sometime sudden sin
One had not known he yet possessed begins . . . as
Memories of sunday bells, din! din! All jokes untonguing
clappers in one’s head. . . .

There was a scent that I could not define.
That was a scent that did not say, here is my heart.
That was a scent like tenuous memories that wind
About one’s consciousness, that words can rarely start,
That linger in the senses, that should surely wane,
About the winnowed ruined runs of time,
That linger, like the taste of oysters and of wine,
Of lox and piquant cream on sunday morning should one wish,
Or luscious red strawberries for one’s dish,
Strawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwberries!
Strawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwberries . . . in the still hour
and the stroke of Noon
That sends a courtier gagging to his doom,
That was a scent of incense over fish.

You were so fair
A long-limbed goldness velvet-kirtled there,
That all the light within that little space
Sat on your shoulder-fallen length of hair
And haloed goldennesses round your face,
So fair,
The garibaldied gipsy boy who stared
Will not forget you, though he come to hate
Those golden ramparts at your either ear,
Cachet d’ofay and mis man’s estate. . . .
But when Delores had begun to read
In sibilant rillings foreign to our own
The figured caper of your runic need,
The dark vermillion of my painted bones
Crescendoed like a coursing violin
Might cause to course in Napoli when night
Will roil on silken pillows the dark curls
Of sloe-eyed boys and girls who lip until
The cock crows thrice upon the hill
And sunday morning bells begin.
Given such pause, a man may think:
At Dewlish in Dorset is a great ditch . . .
(Beneath the ball her knees said tink-a-tink)
And saying nothing of the sort, the bitch
Came on the usual line, while you so fair,
Of someone tall and heart’s desired and dark,
The pregnant future of some gipsy’s mark,
Sat until morning, sodden, silly, there.
Around the corner cast on silver feet
A girl came rilling down a silver stair
And sweetened all the morning and made sweet
The airs of morning that were stirring there,
That stirred the ancient arras; such an air
I witnessed once: with wetnesses a street
Was laving and a kissing-coupled there
Stood shrouded in her shoulder-fallen wave of hair,
Then . . . vanished rilling up a silver stair.
Still falls the rain, and one no longer cares
To name the rain by any name but rain,
To say, in wetness on a curtained street,
In sweet surrenderings and singings sweet,
Above her bow of shoulder and her winnowed hair,
I once saw Iris, who reminded me
Still falls the rain.
Such fallings filled my heart with such a song
I thought to sing you, Lady
while small rain is calling,
In the birding yards
Jay and robin wheel and fall,
Let us go where freshened curtains
Wafting by your bed,
Perfumed, poignant, veil your head
Sheer before my kisses;
Lady, knowing only certain
Seasons, let us as birds do,
Think of no time guessed or missed;
Let us now, the crocus gone,
Lady, while small rain is calling
On the lately lilac’d lawn,
Spire like trellised roses fading
In the shadow of the spade. . . .
Time will come for rue.

And was wrong.
Nor would not sing, nor Iris see again,
Words one does not care to sing again
Nor to hear sung again, nor think
That on her either knee the tink-a-tink
Of tiny bells the hours did declare,
Of painted days and nights, of one’s red need,
Of poignant memories of leeks and mead,
Of one so fair,
So unaware,
Of a small gipsy’s foreign stare,
Or of Delores’ such an ancient wink! La la la!
There as I lingered long La la la! la la!
Entered my heart this song;
All of April’s mohohorning
April airs were abrawwwwwwwwwwwd!
and
Down a wending way of stone
A painted people walked a runing road
Who wrought such ruin in the running woad
That ran their faces, such a magic stirred,
I ran among them as they ran,
A man deer-headed there, A PAINTED MAN!
and so endured.
Within such ruins . . .
Within such ruins of this painted ground
One may discover in the barrowed round
Round-headed people of a painted day
And in the circles at their painted feet
A sometime sweet provend and mildew sweet
And long unhelved beside their painted hands
The yet keen edge discovers that the lands
Walked painted once for warwhen, blood
Ran mildewed in the summer wood.
These are the painted patterns. . . .

IV

I have read by sunlight and by candlelight and by
still waters, and by dying flesh dear and beloved
and was not sickened at the loss of day
or at foundations dropping like hot wax, unmoved
by death or dying but have been moved
much, by books, much. For which I pray
Thou sparest me.
I have returned all your mementoes, every one
we gave a memory by candlelight, by shadow, or by sun,
both those you burned and those you did not burn
to give me what you did not, such a turn
you must not boast of, for it is not true,
but would if you would you returned to me
Memento mori; you have not deserved
To be so served. In nomine, ignoramus . . .
Delores, Delores, Delores.
Which I pray (going now I know
to teach my class
where someone will be playing grabass
in the second row. . . .
Sheeit, man! You not failing me because I
Don’t know the words! You failing me because I black!)
Thou sparest me. . . .
Aie!