Albert Cook

It is like falling and not Being forced to break the fall (for some time hence), So like rising, This arousal, arising in a light Striking through large crystal-edged squares of thinner Glass in a strange land. Water-thin, O salubrious air! Or possibly it is like swimming: I am a fish out of water who gains Through exerting his gills Ability to survive, Learning to love survival as he strives. Accustomed, I gain water to swim in Buoying up theory, imaginary water As the ether of Victorian physicists Or the heavy-air ectoplasmic element Of a séance.

On the mahogany bureau, Directoire, The wavy varnished wood, Far: a clock, unheard, with Roman numerals Like straight strokes of hairs On an eggshell dial. It is late, Later than I believed or wished, but ever So early in my life, and where I am Empires and delectations Indicate not at all, though I am clocked In all the blazonings of circumstance.

Out the window above the high rim Of the surrounding mountains, forested and without Visible birds, a small free space of dimpling sky. Clouds may cover it soon, A rain fall on the fresh breath of the mountains; Then veils of rain lift, clouds lift In a once more dimpling sky. You are rising too, in the light Of our surviving love. The heat Induces a mutual yawn and we dress for a walk Like yesterday's, around the transparent Lake, under The breathtaking nearness of a mountain. Beside the green-scummed reeds at this shallow end We passed an inn, held hands, and took the air. And will take the air, watching The yellow leaves crackle and flake off onto The lower face of the mountains, as at home. On the upper face we see Already from our window The sprinkled snow slowly solidifying down.

We are not at home. We are here. Why? Between Easy answers to hard questions and hard Answers to questions easy on their face, However otherwise, we move in our own urgencies, Fully awake, whatever that may mean; May have meant To the count who built the castle, the monks' Foundation who inherited it And sold it to another nobleman till at last The Luciferian general bought it and used it rarely (He had so many) As a hunting lodge. He lost it in our war. Under the same mountains by the road To the lake, lie in a neatly mown mass grave His victims, under their own star. Does circumspection Defeat its own ends? We are charged With our own clear purposes, whose weight Does not disturb this country we belong to Only as visitors Whatever that may mean. We do not labor for life like the overcoated Woman with a switch driving cows by now In a nearby field Whatever that may mean Out in the nature that so gladdens us The happiest man would still blink his eyes; Nature, simply laid out for us, whatever Nature has ever meant.

Crab, purple sun, and architect's T square Jostle each other's preciosity In the jelled air of seaside evening streets.

Headstones are bleaching on their mossy slope Where tongue-hued serpents slither. And among Fresh lime trees issue what currents of sound?

An amplitude of flutes. Unprinted sand Amasses contours from a brilliant sea. In lunar somnolence snails grip the rocks.

When I rose round about it was peopled with animals, Trotting horse, nursing sow, Russian wolfhound, Crane poking awkward for nourishment, Zebra on champain, giraffe nibbling trees, Jabbery jungle aviary, toucan and macaw.

A gazelle, seized by a lion, in terror blacks out, Other gazelles bound, horns aslant.

Water creatures mobile with their sides Wink finely in bold unbewilderment. Far down others divagate in a black Element stunned.

Grasses prink in morning winds, a saturnine Walker on dolmens parades his eyes, on runes.

I met a man whose whetstone was the thought Obduracy of will could masquerade As soft compliance and never be found out. He filled his unlocked living room with jade. The unspoken may exasperate anyone. The stone, however fierce the sun, stays stone.

Another drove afield for the slightest end In a small car. He puffed the folderol. One drink, and I was cast his long lost friend; A second, and we were pressed to weep a full Lament unmeant for how a ruby room Could all but deep fidelity consume.

There was a girl nervous over the lifelong Weaning she had fallen heir to. Love was a plum She thought she had to swallow to get along. Her sole terror the degradation of humdrum Silks and soft airs crepitating her skin, She lived as though air should be adrenalin.

And one craved for protective coloring The circuses of huzzahing crowds, Crimped in a paper compromise, the thing Of loving cups, glad hands, and daring odds. But the warm home he banked on for his real Stretching ground, bilked him in the mortal scale.

O passions we grow strange in, summer's pride And wry winter's need, the strength to wrest Contemptus mundi from the world's inside Whole choice will gain or looking glass arrest. An unspoken bent exasperates anyone. Stone, in a sun however fierce, stays stone.

When you were sick they brought up cambric tea. You sipped. And summers for your running limbs Lush, blowing grasses grew below Chirruping birds, stormbleating lambs. If now you sicken and let memory Benumb the foregone present with those calms, Is there no other way?

When the ripe fields had shrunk and unforeseen Loves truckling to your short temper bowled You over, and you made big days careen, Till when you were told 'Kill or be killed' Your bloodless hands were willing to demean The substance that the shadow be upheld, Was there no other way?

Though out of such brawls you steered a steady course, In every room that flattered your aplomb, The one shadow thrown pitiless was yours. A jazzed up frenzy bored your off hours dumb. Your partner's played-out fervor broke: divorce Settled the issue and revoked the claim. Was there no other way?

You slipped your moment of truth because it came Sudden: as some new confirmand abroad In the squares and tortured façades of Bernini's Rome Might, seeing ornate waters everywhere outpoured, Light with baptismal memories, sham The more, and sin more thoroughly be restored. Was there no other way?

And when your mornings rankled on circumstance, Your evenings on remoteness, geniality Served as no mask. New men for their main chance Left your uncomplaining high and dry. For all the half deeds you look on askance, You raise no utterance no stronger than a sigh. Is there no other way?

Nothing of salience had the road out lost For stubbornly refusing a view ahead. Depth of the windshield through the noiseless miles, Green bearing in, soothed as it terrified.

Wild asters second growth timber stalwart pines Just over the edge of the shoulders, red With iron natural to the soil. There I was Ready at any moment to turn off.

A white wooden arrow marked the place. Thick brush grazed my slowed hood. An indefinite blue glimpsed through trees proved lake water. When over soft needles I walked to your door

And saw in the eyes of you both for the first time A gay sobriety self pacified, I knew what you had to thank, and so did you Smiling toward the plain table and a big meal.

You were yourselves. Night hugely showed The eyelid how much inches might come to Under such fragment rafters such black air. Morning there never had been leaves so high

Out the window nor water so low By the rotting dock, low bright and unperturbed. Dark it was on the unruffled swell we pulled out onto. The island was soon behind, and the lake itself

Under our creaking oarlocks. The day was ours. In a thin stream's mouth you spied watercress, Plucked it at the root and took up your stint With wet hands at the oars. It was still

On the riverbend and deep where we shipped oars, Dropping our lines. All morning long Frogs and dragonflies held sway, while we Struggled in patience mostly with ourselves.

Few fish, but we were content to know The impress of stillness. Under the grey eminence Above dead trunks we were keeping an eye out For the huge rumored bird, eagle or whatever;

Above the granite ledge, just before we turned, Too much like a bird of prey for an eagle, Except eagles are birds of prey, hanging Over the water, horrid, it slowed, aloof.

The waves back were against us, heavier, Lights coming on as we pulled into the lake. There was nothing more to say. Our lulling noise Followed us to the dock. We groped up the path.

Next morning, mass at a wooden altar, The sacramental light the villagers Went about in as if the sun were not A bodilessly white unburning fire.

In that lull we photographed each other. All Sunday was peaceful repetition. I drove hard after sundown to find in the next strict morning The terrible demands had never budged.

Already the dying horizon and the thought A skyline's death inspires is tamped down For you, shrieking child, and the ones who brought You into the world live half tamped down.

Farmer, the flicking seasons take a toll But wheatfields under your application bend. Worker, your nerves first bear the strain, then call For steel turned on a lathe to shriek and grind.

Acres of pages covered with fine print, With notes, figures, acid-eaten ink, Not given to shortening the given stint, Drive you on the more to act and think.

My sky lies heavy with what I have done, Not birth, not death, but a sense that makes them one.

Look, just look, at the façades of houses, Grey, brown, weatherbeaten, argus eyed, Less tall than silent, distinguished than old, Commanding the street, remanded by an eye. Like implications rigorous stairs wind, Decline, incline, some even plainly lead To privacy: a cut glass chandelier Hives, perhaps too dignifiedly, reservations,

Or a naked bulb irradiates fear Of masked tensions to a gas jet unfed. Habitations also need men Exhaling their absence as underground Rivers in ancient time were thought mouths of hell. Into them too an Orpheus absorbed in love Of some past phase can as freely disappear.

The door locks behind him and his rare Appearances deceive, for he always looks back. Angels on crystal paperweights, devils in wastebaskets, We over carpets taking care to tread How? As we are certain is decorous For the particular house. Interiors Of houses, façades of houses: pause and blast Of one trumpet, for where do streets lead Finally but back to the same houses?