PART TWO
The Shallow Grass
The plow of tamarisk wood which is shared with black copper
And drawn by a yoke of oxen all black
Drags in the earth.
The earth is made ready with copper,
The earth is prepared for the seed by the feet of oxen
That are shod with brass.
They said, Good Luck! Good Luck! What a handsome couple!
Isn’t she lovely though! He can’t keep his hands
Away from her. Ripe as a peach she is. Good Luck!
Good-bye, Good-bye—
They took the down express,
The five-five. She had the seat by the window—
He can’t keep—
She sat there looking out
And the fields were brown and raw from the spring plowing,
The fields were naked, they were stretched out bare,
Rigid, with long welts, with open wounds,
Stripped—
In the flat sunlight she could see
The fields heave against the furrows, lift,
Twist to get free—
—his hands—
Why, what’s the matter?
We’re almost there now, only half an hour.
And we’ll have our supper in our rooms. I’ve taken
The best room, what they call the bridal chamber—
What they call—what do they call it?—
And I dressed up
All in these new things not a red ribbon
You ever had on before and mind you keep
The shoes you were married in and all to go
Into a closed room with a bed in it,
To lie in a shut chamber
What they call—
Something
the chalked letters
does he say
That
I wonder
or what—
She held his hand
Against her breast under the flowers. She felt
The warmth of it like the warmth of the sun driving
Downward into her heart.
And all those fields
Ready, the earth stretched out upon those fields
Ready, and now the sowers—
What is this thing we know that they have not told us?
What is this in us that has come to bed
In a closed room?
I tell you the generations
Of man are a ripple of thin fire burning
Over a meadow, breeding out of itself
Itself, a momentary incandescence
Lasting a long time, and we that blaze
Now, we are not the fire, for it leaves us.
I tell you we are the shape of a word in the air
Uttered from silence behind us into silence
Far, far beyond, and now between two strokes
Of the word’s passing have become the word—
That jars on through the night;
and the stirred air
Deadens,
is still—
They lived that summer in a furnished flat
On the south side of Congress Street and no
Sun, but you could look into the branches
Of all those chestnut-trees, and then they had
A window-box, but the geraniums
Died leaving a little earth and the wind
Or somehow one June morning there was grass
Sprouting—
How does your garden grow, your garden
In the shallow dish, in the dark, how does it grow?
To-morrow we bear the milk corn to the river,
To-morrow we go to the spring with the pale stalks:
Has your garden ripened?
She used to water them
Morning and evening and the blades grew
Yellow a sort of whitey yellowy all
Fluffy
hairs from a dead skull
they say
The skulls of dead girls—
Won’t it let you die
Even, burgeoning from your bones, your dead
Bones, from your body, not even die, not just
Be dead, be quiet?
What is this thing that sprouts
From the womb, from the living flesh, from the live body?
What does it want? Why won’t it let you alone
Not even dead?
Why, look, you are a handful
Of fat mould breeding corruption, a pinch
Of earth for seed fall—
How does your garden grow?
Hot nights the whole room reeked with the fetid smell
Of chestnut flowers, the live smell, the fertile
Odor of blossoms. She half drowsed. She dreamed
Of long hair fragrant with almonds growing
Out of her dead skull, she dreamed of one
Buried, and out of her womb the corn growing.
Construe the soundless, slow
Explosion of a summer cloud, decipher
The sayings of the wind beneath the pantry door,
Say when the moon will come, when the rain will follow.
Unless the rain comes soon the colored petals
Sheathing the secret stigma of the rose
Will fall, will wither, and the swollen womb
Close, harden, upon a brittle stalk
Seal up its summer, and the hollyhock,
The broom, the furze, the poppy will become,
Their petals fallen, all their petals fallen,
Pease-cods—seedboxes—haws—
It should have rained when the moon
Spilled out the old moon’s shadow.
Seven days I have been waiting for the rain now,
The sound of water.
Seven days I have been walking up and down in the house.
There was nothing to do, there was nothing to do but wait,
But wait, but walk and walk
And at night hear
The patter of dry leaves on the window and wake.
And waking, think, The rain! Yes—and hear
The patter of dry leaves.
There was nothing to do, there was nothing to do but wait,
But wait, but wait, but wait, and the wind whispering
Something I couldn’t understand beneath the door,
Something that I wouldn’t understand.
And the grass stems
Stiffening to bear the headed grain,
The rose,
The hawthorn
Covering with bony fingers
Their swollen wombs,
The summer shrivelling to husks, to shells,
Pease-cods, seedboxes,
The summer sucking through a withered straw
Enough stale water for a few beans,
For a handful of swelling peas in a sealed bladder,
For the living something in a closed womb.
Upon the sand
This brine, these bubbles—
The wave of summer is drowned in the salt land.
And I, the climbing tip
Of that old ivy, time,
To waver swaying over a blind wall
With all
To-day to dream in,
and, behind,
The never-resting root
Through my live body drives
The living shoot,
The climbing ivy-tip of time.
I am a room at the end of a long journey
The windows of which open upon the night
Or perhaps
Nothing—
I am a room at a passage end where lies
Huddled in darkness one that door by door
Has come time’s length through his old windy house
For this—
For what, then?
Neither.
I am a woman in a waterproof
Walking beside the river in an autumn rain.
Above the trolley bridge the market gardens
Are charnel fields where the unburied corn
Rots and the rattling pumpkin vines lift brittle fingers
Warning—of what?—and livid, broken skulls
Of cabbages gape putrid in a pond—
My face under the cold rain is cold
As winter leaves that cover up the year.
I feel the wind as the numb earth feels it.
I feel the heavy seed in the warm dark
And the spring ripening—
And what is this to be a woman? Why,
To be a woman, a sown field.
Let us
Attribute a significance perhaps
Not ours to what we are compelled to be
By being it:
as privately forestall
The seed’s necessity by welcoming
The necessary seed;
likewise prevent
Death with the apothegm that all men die.
Yes.
And then wake alone at night and lie here
Stripped of my memories, without the chairs
And walls and doors and windows that have been
My recognition of myself, my soul’s
Condition, the whole habit of my mind,
Yes, wake, and of the close, unusual dark
Demand an answer, crying, What am I?
Ah, What! A naked body born to bear
Nakedness suffering. A sealed mystery
With hands to feed it, with unable legs,
With shamed eyes meaning—what? What do they mean
The red haws out there underneath the snow,
What do they signify?
Glory of women to grow big and die
Fruitfully, glory of women to be broken,
Pierced by the green sprout, severed, tossed aside
Fruitfully—
Yes, all right, Yes, Yes,
But what about me—
What am I—
What do you think
I am—
What do you take me for!
Snow, the snow—
When shall I be delivered?
When will my time come?