1.
Callously innocent in our disinfected games,
We plastic-swaddled children of fifty years
With unlined faces, hacking down some gnarls,
Unpeeled a dryad once, stript, trapt, and spitting;—
That older race, filth of unswaddled pulse-beat,
A god and shieldless,
uninnocently tender.
2.
Plodding back home, yanking a god we cornered:
A lassoed cataract amid canals.
Then hours of swapping new toys for old spells,
Till sobered by the hygiene-spraying aunts:
“What makes our young ones fuss round just some stump?
Go clutter honest lumber up with spooks,
Read dryads in, go hunt for haunters; yet
When all is said and done of ‘myth’ and ‘magic’,
One flashlight shrivels any hunk of dusk.
But watch for tricks: with lyric buzz re-enter
Flies, incense, backwardness, those Old Expelled.
Her spells?—her frauds! Aim lights—look, nothing there.”
3.
Frauds of the dryad:
speech, growth, weapon mocked us.
Her weapon: raids by quicksilver evadings.
Her growth: tree rhythm, an unfolding. Her speech:
A riffraff of breezes, truant from asphalt and logic,
Leaving behind a litter of petals and doubts.
Of anti-metal something shimmered then
(A winging of sap against a steeling of will)
That would have rusted something of machine in us,
Had something in us of weight not tamed that wine.
We tamed by gifts. Gave metal’s just-as-good:
“Instead! Instead! You need; we give; you change.”
And so a god gets nursed into a pet;
4.
But threshes about.
Exchanged her splintry wood—
Imagine being cooped in living coarseness—
For kind soft straw we dumped upon the pavement
Of a prefab garage we lavished on her,
A half-mile from our street. Ingratitude
Of gods we house! Not one gift worked
To stop that twisting on that first-class straw.
5.
A far-off tremor shook our sleep that evening;
A twirl of arms and boughs; recurrent dream:
No start,
Around around,
She is a god she is a plant
Undertow of flesh and ocean
Ocean and flesh of undertow
A plant is she a god is she
Around around,
No end.
6.
That obscene vibrance jarred our own snug beds
And blighted every crib from birth with pulse:
“Dear aunts, we have bad dreams, seal unrest out.”
So much of other nuisance, junk, and murk
We’ve killed for its own good, to scrape earth pure;
But when some bitch-dog wags immortal hide,
Our “put her out of her misery” won’t put.
A rotten gyp when gift and gun both fail;
No other vermin lasts; it’s them, it’s she, it’s
Immortals always spoil our cleaning up.
… And so a pet gets cursed into a god.
7.
Next dream, half farce: she sowed—amid tame starches—
Song’s fleeing laurel, wriggly still with nymph,
And love’s wild myrtle,—till a crop of sighs
Drowned out the crackle of our breakfast cornflakes.
“Deft aunts, help quick; growth shrinks us; school in panic.
Whatever sprouts, throbs to the dryad’s tossing.”
“Growth just won’t shape like plastics, you poor boys;
To wither myrtle, plant it in a pot;
To wither laurel, spray it with a footnote.
But darker than her wars, her lures. Those fancy
God-molls got gossiped of in Arcady.
Neighbors saw them bend near bulls, and as for swans—
Then stomp more moral than a quadruped;
Be well-scrubbed knights; in short, go lynch that foreigner.”
Creation gets reversed to kill a god.
8.
What cannot kill unkillable, can torture;
She, writhing stubborn, droned unwelcome myth:
“Two signs, when first your campfire banned us, wrangled:
Circle and line. Our cycle, your ascent.
‘Revere each season’s own true bend,’ we sang then;
‘Drain, build, stamp logic on,’ clanged will, male, steel.
Clang-knit geometries of girders garland
Your plumb-lines now
and grid our zigzag ways.”
“Bulldozer world: grove’s awe and rubble razed for
A smile of blueprints on a surge of chins.”
“Your lavishness with clicks and slot machines—”
“—(here tin gives birth, true stainless birth, not life’s kind)—”
“—is but man’s fear of liking being owned again
By cornucopian lap.”
“All nest and trap and
Prayer lips and infinite pillowing mercy … and quicksand
Hail man-the-improver, for his is the world without end.”
From deicide, man deified. But she:
9.
“Girl was the older race’s core, unshrined by
Who shrines machine, the heavy public man
Too willed to play or pray. And girlhood once
Uprooted roots out child, man, landmark too,
Untending—to be priestess means to tend—
The linking ivy of a heritage.
Apart, apart the mute shared sap-flow dries,
Into a crackle of unclutching. Hail
The chattery scorch-torch-ping of progress popping.”
“Back to your lute-strings; our rustproof nerves twang prose.”
“What have you prosed us to?—once tide, ode, bud.
Good for your files and glands, the thing your time-clock
And cot call ‘woman’ means but gelded male.
Yet girl-lap templed—inner Delphi—teaches
Doer what grower knows of spell and rite,
Willing what being knows of soul and gut.”
“A belly swelled into an oracle?”
“Don’t think apart the mixed-up dark of things.
As we need your half, starving you’ll need ours;
No crop from conquering plow without our furrow;
Spray all your fruit-trees clean, they still won’t dangle
Till fouled into life by dryad-rut within.”
10.
Was heard to pray when thought herself unheard:
“You high ones, old ones, watching two by two
Wherever shrineless gods are exiled to,
Send down your lightning. But your olive too.
Cool whisper of the ages, not the age,
Expand the shallows of men’s anchorage,
Apprentice them to more than they can hear.
You earth-deep resonance they dare not hear,
Be everywhere, like fragrance of the orange,
Yet single and sonorous as its root,
Till lives are sweet and inward as an orange,
And every death a quilt of leaves on root.”
11.
Nerve-drugs for war words; for daft wings, a cage.
We hiked to her garage dorm, spruced it up with
Bars into really not too glum a cell:
“To help you help yourself to be mature.”
Chain stopped much nonsense; only her locks now threshing,—
Fever of clouds across her forehead’s moon.
That orbitless sick moon our purging kindness
Drained glow-worm dim; yet sneaky silver embered
Outrageously between the bars of norm—
Whenever, chained or bribed, she still said “no”
The one vile puking way still left to say it:
“At hefty orbit sleazily genteeled
(Shuttling from chintzy homes to brassy markets,
From taciful tantrums of your filtered hearts
To drive-in heavens of a public grin),
My unchromed gullet vomits, vomits, vomits.”
12.
Oh aunts, the vileness of last gasp of gods!
Yet that foul no, the same that threshed our sleep through,
Somehow exulted more than all our yes.
Exultant oceanic resonances—
Dolphins of air—tinkled her chains like gauds;
Far off, where bulging breakers shriek their spray
Of birthday round a trouble-making island,
Her pulse found girl-communion.
Drawing up from
The caterwauling deeps at Kythera
That pain-surviving bitch-tenacity
That just can’t help enduring through and through,
She prayed her second prayer. But this time peer to peer,
Tree-skirt to foam-skirt sister, tide to tide:—
“Undertow,
You other blue,
Tow these to you.
Came sky; in upside-down of sky, there always
Was undertow.
Came Greek year; shrines held only what a port can
Of undertow.
Came eons, Lilith, Venusburg; there always
Was undertow.
Queened, demoned, pseudo-tamed, renamed, there always
Was undertow.
Lines of the straighteners, net of nerves and subways,
Came; always indestructible below
Is undertow.
Now undertow’s
Fierce coarseness, sinew us who are so birch-bark
Gentle we pale with gladness at glint of dew.
Them, goddess, too,
Swerve
not too late
from where they hurtle to;
Sway up unearned for these who earn the lightning,
The olive too.”
13.
Silence below. Prayer scorned. “You are alone.”
“Silence? No balm for these but their own ghat?
They tried to force the wooed consent of things.
Then, under-goddess, must they all the way
(From whiz to slag) plumb their own plumb-line’s end?
Once there were promises intense as noons.
Hail man-the-improver,
For his is the end of the world. In technicolor.”
To us: “Lively is not alive; a pyre
Seems snugger than a hearth a little while.”
Then royal-slim within imagined pine:
“Nears its end the chummy phase of will, male, steel,—
Bang triply stoked; a few toys more, then feeds
Your ash my wilds,
re-greened;
wild sap, strict dance;
The second bloomtide of the hacked first gods.”