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D. H. Lawrence
The space of the world is immense, before me and around me;
If I turn quickly, I am terrified, feeling space surround me;
Like a man in a boat on very clear, deep water, space frightens and confounds me.
I see myself isolated in the universe, and wonder
What effect I can have. My hands wave under
The heavens like specks of dust that are floating asunder.
I hold myself up, and feel a big wind blowing
Me like a gadfly into the dusk, without my knowing
Whither or why or even how I am going.
So much there is outside me, so infinitely
Small am I, what matter if minutely
I beat my way, to be lost immediately?
How shall I flatter myself that I can do
Anything in such immensity? I am too
Everybody knows if you don't love
Then you don't get hurt
And so I taught myself emptiness
And the more emptiness I learned,
The more I realized everyone around me
Was empty, too
Like we had all learned the same trick
Without ever having a teacher
It was ingrained in our genetic makeup
Sustenance, fire, shelter and isolation
These were the things that ancient man
Needed in order to survive
Sustenance to feed and nurture our bodies
Fire to make our sustenance edible and safe
Shelter to protect our fire from the elements
And isolation to protect us from each other
I drift beneath a grammar of sharply etched shapes
and clear contrasts. Eddies dance as if to mock
my dumb back as I pass under a cove’s calm surface.
Sometimes a seabird’s shriek thuds through thick
water. I feel forever dark weight of water.
It’s as present to me as my own body as I push
through it with ridiculous flippers. One day I will
just stop and drop to ancient mud;
clouds of mud will mushroom out about me, swirl,
disappear on currents. I'll roll on one side
with one eye buried in muck and one still staring
at black water mottled with insinuations of light.
A sound will grow in me, rise out of my
mute years, build into a moaning like a sunken
ship’s crushed hull, then race into a scream smothered
When they returned from building the kay-dam
(of logs and drift pins, to make again
a place where salmon might yet spawn)
they divvied up: each hauled a pack frame
loaded with tools and sundries, twice down
the canyon to its end, then up the old fire trails
a mile and a half, ducking vine maples
all the way, to the parked trucks. A third trip
for each would end the business,
but night came on, as it generally does;
they might have come back another day, but
as the moon was full, down they went.
One folded and refolded the old tent
and packed it away, while the others sat,
taking down the old sheepherder stove,
dumping ashes, talking. She would walk ahead,
It is the most boring number—
a thin, sour preacher flagging
in the second hour of an August sermon,
an enraged father pounding on an anvil.
It is priapic but sterile, one tree
remaining after clear-cut.
“One” wakes up drunk, snarls
at the television. “One” demands
compliance and calls it consensus.
“One” complies. “One” is the arrow
that killed the crow.
The shores of the world are ours, the solitary
Beaches that bear no fruit, nor any flowers,
Only the harsh sea-grass that the wind harries
Hours on unbroken hours.
No one will envy us these empty reaches
At the world’s end, and none will care that we
Leave our lost footprints where the sand forever
Takes the unchanging passion of the sea.
To hide your isolation, you become
Tame and loquacious, bowing to the men
Who bring you ornaments and poverties.
Your cryptic melancholy dwindles then,
Solved by the distant contrast of your words.
Your loneliness, with an amused relief,
Sits listening to your volubility
And idling with an enervated grief.
The play does not begin until you say
Your last "good-night," for you have only made
A swindled fantasy regain its parts.
Throughout the night you held an unseen blade
Upon your lap and trifled with its hilt,
And now you lift it with submissive dread.
Should you attack your loneliness and grief
Now that they are asleep? You shake your head.
Like to islands in the seas,
Stand our personalities--
Islands where we always face
One another's watering place.
When we promenade our sands
We can hear each other's bands,
We can see on festal nights
Red and green and purple lights,
Gilt pavilions in a row,
Stucco houses built for show.
But our eyes can never reach
Further than the foolish beach,
Never can they hope to win
To the fastnesses within:
Rocks unsealed that watch the sky
And the tormented clouds go by;--
Well, don’t you see this was the way of it:
We bought the farm with what he inherited,
And his brothers and sisters accused him of poisoning
His father’s mind against the rest of them.
And we never had any peace with our treasure.
The murrain took the cattle, and the crops failed.
And lightning struck the granary.
So we mortgaged the farm to keep going.
And he grew silent and was worried all the time.
Then some of the neighbors refused to speak to us,
And took sides with his brothers and sisters.
And I had no place to turn, as one may say to himself,
At an earlier time in life;
“No matter, So and so is my friend, or I can shake this off
With a little trip to Decatur.”
Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes, me-too, me-too.
The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gabble of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.
I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it — on the streets, in the postoffice,
On the cars, into the railroad station
A MAN made a symphony
Out of the chords of his soul.
The notes ran upon the air like flights of chickadees,
They gathered together and hung
As bees above a syringa bush.
They crowded and clicked upon one another
In a flurry of progression.
And crashed in the simultaneous magnificence
Of a grand finale.
All this he heard.
But the neighbors heard only the croak
Of a wheezy, second-hand flageolet.
Forced to seek another lodging
He took refuge under the arch of a bridge.
For the river below him might be convenient
Some day.
All day, all day I brush
My golden strands of hair;
All day I wait and wait. . . .
Ah, who is there?
Who calls? Who calls? The gold
Ladder of my long hair
I loose and wait. . . . and wait. . . .
Ah, who is there?
She left at dawn. . . . I am blind
In the tangle of my long hair. . . .
Is it she? the witch? the witch?
Ah, who is there?