Christine

Christine:
   My news from home read at your table, mixing your
strange enchantment with the old familiar, makes all
familiar at once, and friendliness dwell with comfort in
your magic.
   So magic dwells in everything I know.
   And how shall I walk the world unstirred anymore, any
place -- since because of you everything is wonder?

                                                                            f

Night of an Invasion (July 10, 1943)

On the sky that goes down into the Mediterranean
cold stars set themselves against the blood - - and wine-warm ocean
just as in Arab villages dogs bark
against the quiet, deserved by ages
of lovers clattering stones, fatigued by incontinence,
of fighting raiders drawing one full and panic breath,
of ghosts thought they were left to their own devices.
It's cold in warm counties now; the stars that flick an unexpected
                                                           waker's eye
are caught in unfriendly glory.  At this hour a glorious ancient
                                                          poet, drunken, would turn
                                                                  savage
and Alcibiades reeling home from wisdom's banquet would behead images.
The sea, around small boats full of contraband,
invisibly lies closer to gunwales and to men's mouths
before there may be speech: warning, or cry of attack at the shore
                                                                  guardians.
The sky, with its shape-charted stars (gods, animals)
is like the ancient sea -- it may overlie us, we may never get above
                                                                  its surface;
but the eternal, waiting water is still itself:
our heads knowing legend either way
may not know it up or down.

                                                                                    may 25, 1948

Letter to Royker

Karl, by the hour
my certainties pass over me
as if they were finding their road by, on my clock's round.
If one has risen and gone on
I'd have to turn my head backward to see where it has set
and vanished large as it had risen.
My axioms of faith, of any other's treachery
have been too many sons, and shot my days with rockets
which were the barrage gone by and waste incurred in battles.
I glory most in my blindness
when I think a premonition is directly above my
not knowing or caring to imagine it has passed over my head.
I find a sure creation has moved like a planet
my eye has detected by its movements: if it is truly not phantasma-light
                 will
any fact orbit from our space.

                                                                              aug, '49

Monterosso Alma

As a machine-gunner's body burned where he had rolled, smoked, stopped just where

we entered the town,

everybody was spreading a decoration on the balconies ---

the luckiest by accident a faded American flag with fewer stars; the most calculating

and full of jest an ill-crossed Union Jack;

the handsomest and most sincere a heavy table cloth, all of cream.

And even the sullen recruits in the artillery training barracks sat down in quiet

and relief, well guarded

to listen to virulent Fascist warriors being grenaded out of their caves by our men;

and an old witch who turned pander

this day showed us welcome, German, ice-cold beer;

and in civilian clothes it was a day for Italians to stand in windows to cheer

and just for minutes to urge us to stop.

One precaution paisan, the frensied enthusiast, gave our platoon his wine bottles

and whirled his accordian music through the air while wine-fumes curled in our

stomachs

like patterns -- and there were thrown roses arching through the air, too, on our

rear guard.

Harmless bullets exploded on the Broda's pan, by the gunner burning at the edge of

the town:

we lived through a symbol,

we marched decoratively and our being was a legend;

I can never rejoice while carnival men are working and hamburger stands are smoking

and not live more that day.

june. '49

(memory of July, 1943)

The Fifth Commandment

I have no predisposition for murder.
The Sicilian yelling down in the hole -
                          cell of the two-story jail where I'd turned him
          in for a knowledge of German; handkerchiefs tolen
          from the bald-headed policeman snoring after wine I'd insisted
          he open, and hare
were bloodless, on two days of battle.
                                    I was disgusted by the dirties of whores
lust ever lagged after.  Go to the bad booze
and the old lady selling the fanciest labels
around what must have been bilge illuminated by sunlight;
two stragglers drunk but dragged on the Italian patrol
                            where nobody shot, we walked into the emptiest world
tottering beneath headaches like what we bear from those memories.
Who recalls the slick, proud, contemptuous girls beside rich civilians
                                                                          in Naples
and the insolent, blonde, British-speaking old countess by Palermo
and the insane Indian I guarded; and the stolen duckeggs were smashed
                                                                       in my fatigues?
Who' found the hunting knife or the old pillbox revolver
I borrowed to go armed into an occupied town?  Whoever found the lock
                                                                           of his door shot and his
                                                                           door not opened?
I am safe; the lights have gone up and down but I was not executed
and can leep dull as before and after was, and I have nightmares
more terrifying than real, as bad as yours.

To A Tape Recorder (editor: a voice recording device)

That damned load
in this case, under porches and eaves
of my skull
listens better.  Sense or not--
fluent words matter in action a well as thoughts;
but the breath scratched on a tape
stammers.
I make a minute none may revise
only erase.  A life halts and stops
to stumble in its own prints: a blue record-
button jams, pushing up the silver "rewind"
and equal "play" jags and creaks, forces to the force of action;
I can make my machine go on without being broken.
                                   Silent, waving ghost
                                           in the [cassette]
                                           is smoke of what could have been written.
                                    I do badly
                                           what may not be contrived
                                            in the pulling back, the twiting around
                                        and find a failure unbroken.
No inging here: the Japanese maker will not allow
much glide, roll-ball of sound.  Here's the lost gamble, uncontrolled and
                                                                  thrown breath
of a passion.
                               You can go
                                           over and over
                                            what I have said
                                     and sound can be substituted for sound, prose
                                                                                            for verse
                                     as if instructed engineering.

Sober Words for These Days

There are many selves
  to choke an instant
even when sober words
tell a lie in lasting form.
I give you the longing to use a bayonet, rise out of winnowing lanes of
                                                          air-rush sent by 88's
on a meadow where many were missed, not dead
but waiting to speak from their fright.
I joke of a bugler lying in a manger, old child who had just contracted
                                                               the syph
and who pouted for us his odd assumption
of delight in debauchery. I tell you we'd have killed kine who came to
                                                                         worship
before we slaughtered men, for we were hungry.  Sicily smelled of ordure
                                                                        that is fertile
and there were unexpected, pure mountain streams.  But a sniper never got
                                                                           you, Gilligan:
I hope you were cured from your living chancre, wafer-shaped.
  Awake in the corners of railroad lines angled to buildings
  and g ing from odd room to room in old buildings
but made like a dream set: some day is like waking, walking one's own
                                                             house strangely
as if there were no waking from a drunk and the lightening hour was
                                                             midnight and the solid house
                                                                              adobe
that crumbled in my thought.  My child's life is most real
in the pain of his funeral.  Cover over all the sense of his weight, sense
                                                 of his touch, any useless word of
                                                                    comfort
not to be heard.
Well I think of something else when I am supposed to be happy? What
                                                     praise can I trust
more than words, passed with his life, of an old friend?
Imagined spaces
of the dead, in one's life
leave one moving
through a whole, but arid freedom.