The Mercy Seat

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Chapter One

    Popham of the New Song

for Pamela Stewart

I.

Neither all nor any angels arrive in the mind where

The spruce and fir shake at the sun in the morning

Spilling some yellow over the water. Some yellow

And the motion of next to no motion

Across the rocks, a salt-air, the old oceans

Return us, slowly tug us, along the familiar fiction

Of childhood. We were children. No longer.

This is the beginning of something

Not given, hopefully, too often: the present

Moment. No little engine in a little boat. But the

Bucket with a hole in it. From the well to the house.

The loss of water like a problem; the referendum that

Doesn't make an ocean. It has lost all confidence

In us. A last essay in a bowl.

We are sorry but the salvages were wages.

It's the way the little clams

In their black beds peep and then stare

At the crocuses, now, up and alarmed, everywhere.

There were two books not yet dusted with a feather.

Not yet books as books in rooms.

The liars are all out on the smallest branch

That cracks the window. Around the cellar windows

There is a black sticky paper. The green of the pine

This time is saying to the winter: Give it up, give it up.

A man sits back and relinquishes his childhood, his child's

Childhood, his child. No longer carrying clear water

In a small cup. One foot before the other. He wonders

If the bright color of a bird breaking from the thicket

Will be enough. This is not the beginning or the end

Of just one or the other season. This is a man

Who believes that a child has grown and grown but

Never in the mind. In the mind under the boughs

She has just weakened.

And, now, bring the towels and basins. The fresh linen

And ribbons.

It's evening. And neither all nor any of the angels arrive here

In the rooms where a child is being clothed in jewels and dresses.

The wooden boats knocking around

Outside like two old women calling for a cat who's died

                  Out in the first mud and forsythia. Far outside.

II.

And so a man I love says fifteen years is all he has;

And so I say to the man I love: A great wheel

Made of wood and iron

Will make but one revolution in fifteen years, crossing

Fields outside Odessa, ropes and songs and mules

Making it an infinite nostalgia of a white animal.

Do men in bright blouses surround a senseless element.

The way a horn is tipped

Spilling squash, winter melons, and huge black

Leaves that are smoked in lodges near a stream.

The coronary like naked children standing in a pond.

Of forms, I tell him, the body is profound.

It is of bread and water that people die.

The will-to-change

Lugs a piano on its back.

And retires, humid

At midnight with a glass of milk. It hits the sack.

This mover of objects down the stairs says there is

Only one piano in its life and it is black.

We dressed the child and said, perhaps, that two friends

Died. There is no wife.

The measure of her waist is equal to the radius

Of the wheel above or the wrist of the ambiguous child.

Who was put in a boat. Who waved good-bye.

The will-to-change is a likable vertebrate. Surprised?

Is that what we mean when we say they die.

Or is it that we're all alike. The watercolors

Of then and now. Your father in Russia. The clover, or

The shock-tactics of lucid flowers all wired

Into bundles and found

On the chests of dead Sicilian children. A clover only

Of the mind. I mind! Who tripped

Us on the stairs.

A picture of little hope in a prospect of flowers.

A marvelous fall on the stairs and all the little hammers

And teeth of the will-to-change broken, scattered

Across the floor. I will not go!

To Peoria this time friend. Or Odessa or Romania.

Nothing will? Romania? Margaret and Rita

Are children on the stairs, and all afternoon they comb

                 Each other's hair. They don't believe in me or you.

III. OPPOSITION

Four farmers seen through an open window falling asleep

While playing cards

In the very early morning at a small railway station

In Belgium. And so poetry wins a few hearts.

This is a small boy's way of insisting on adventure,

But with the violence of a great-grandmother who spits.

We are defeated by the commonplace splendor of a battle

Between night and late evening.

The figure for the struggle could be a virgin

On a porch shaking out a tablecloth while calling

To the birds. Come and eat! Come and eat!

Vigorously shaking her tablecloth; all the birds

Fleeing to the nearest tree. Can nothing be done

Right in my story.

The rare black Auk is resting on her eggs.

There is a beautiful tall blonde in a flapping dress

Stepping from a train in Belgium. There is an open

Window through which she sees four farmers playing

Cards while looking out an open window at her knees.

Somewhere between them there's a sheet

Of hotel stationery carried by a breeze. Somewhere between what?

She and the farmers? Or her knees? In the congress of degrees of

             slow speech

There is the great black Auk about to say something.

"All across Europe I hear women dying in childbirth."

Or, "Up in the tree the owl and the nightingale

Speak to each other and tremble but don't sleep."

Poetry can win a few hearts. A woman stands in a tub:

You think one breast is smaller than the other.

But then you're not sure. You've fallen

In love. There is one idea

That is easily

Released with just a finger and a thumb.

Behind the virgin the screen door slams just once

And all the birds are coming down out of the trees

And not very secretly. The great black Auk

Is screaming for joy. Her lovely young! Things are getting

Better for my story. We're back where it had begun. One of

The farmers leans and says to the youngest, "Did you see

                 That letter fly between her knees." They are drunk.

IV. LES PAPILLONS NOIRS

A black sedan draws along the woods stopping

For occasional white daffodils; there are still

Some patches of snow. The two women looking

To both sides of the road. One says, "Emma Bovary

Had a beehive below her window and the bees

Circling in the sunlight would sometimes strike

Against the window as fast yellow balls."

The other says, "Once after some winter rains everything

Froze and to take water from the well I would

First with slack rope and a flatiron in the bucket

Drop the bucket to open the water. Seldom have

I felt physical."

"And then the shadows of evening are falling." Dreamlike.

"The triumphs are, of course, never physical."

The two women still cruising along the woods.

The younger remembers the Viscount's arm red

And twitching in mud and straw by the wagon. The first

Clear desire to touch a muscle. Once

In the war her mother wrestled a large leg away

From a starving horse. It was

Winter and she saw for the first time those black butterflies,

Those light ashes floating at the edge of everything

When your eyes are sore and tired. She also

Remembered her brother who drilled with the militia

On Sundays. Boys just up in the trees

Cheering and insulting; all of their legs dangling but

Not belonging to the scene or to the promise of

Anything simple like white daffodils in new dirt at evening.

(Catching minnows with a colander.) This is the younger's

Story and going only from one thought to another.

What provokes the birds in the morning is her man.

At the sink he vomits, the small waist moving regularly,

Poisoned with mayonnaise he had made with his father

On Saturday. The men make the mayonnaise on Saturday.

All the eggs and peppers. The bowls of ice and green cigars

From Vaubyessard. The smoke

Like April now steaming in the woods at evening. Black

Butterflies. White daffodils. A red muscle. Like monks

Sitting down to copy. Two women bent over flowers

                 On a newspaper. They say, "What to keep.

                                        What to throw away."

V.

for R.P. Blackmur

There are the countless, returning New England widows and

Spinsters. They are returning from the shed with wood

Or kerosene. They follow in their own footsteps

A course, soft but exact, like reapers with knives

Bare to the waist crossing a yellow field.

They know their lives, early and late, and talk peacefully

To the elderly hen who lives in straw, why not in the attic.

"I buried our garden last week." A blue face

With a buttercup under each eye.

The painted face of a woman laid out

In a stone house; trying to raise herself

Just with her elbows: her elbows looking more

Like the back legs of a cricket or a fly.

Emily Dickinson's job was to lay out knives

In the seminary dining hall in the morning

And to wash and dry them at night, counting them twice,

While returning them to the purple drawers. Running to her

Room under the curfew bells. She said

Her father never snored. He thought

She would hide some of her letters

In the big bushes by the vegetables and marigolds.

There was an interview with a pigeon.

Twice I dreamed I was a Jew in China

Eating blue leaves off branches with roots.

So these women were young and knew young men

From Amherst and Salem. Young men watched

From windows walking in circles under elms and oaks.

The wheeling princes of rank and order

Come to visit first with the father and then

The daughters. "The mysterious beauty of someone red

And, yes, the energy even of his stutter."

Well, I said they are all, now, stepping high

And precisely through snow and back from

The shed. Maybe, there's even a ghost or two.

In summer represented by lightning striking

The iron rooster on the roof of the barn.

They know their lives, early and late, and set out

Knives in seminaries and, nevertheless,

Die a natural death. And, nevertheless, value coal

                 With alabaster. And suffer affliction like an insect.

VI. THE JOYOUS, THE LAKE

How two women can be the same, for instance, in Poland

On a wharf at a lake where naked women are

Being instructed by soldiers to walk quickly along

To the end of the wharf, at last, every two of them

Are passed a blanket to share as they step down

Into the steady boats. It's a wet October day.

Some cry. Some sing. Naked you are beside

Yourself.These pairs of women on the hard benches

In the boats are like that, and especially at the width

Of each boat: two large middle-aged women working

The oars, their blankets fallen to the floor

Of the boat. Pulling it across, not sisters,

Occasionally looking over a shoulder. In the middle

Of the lake it rains on everyone briefly; all the songs

Now are to help the women rowing.

The sleeves of the soldiers are of red wool and they are

Also miserable. They are

Like a corpse in soil included in the scene.

Pastor Cruikshank looks out over the lake. I offer

Him dry matches. I say that order is for the birds

If it appears as the survival of restraints

After the feelings it meant to contain are no longer felt

By anyone on the face of the earth. He says, Well, and for

That matter all the birds are in Marseille. The Nazis in Warsaw.

And we, my boy, are on the shore of a cold lake. Perhaps, all

Feelings are the birth of the shape they take. Now, I thought

Of that, but made it his speech. Please, reach me down

That book, that jar, or the feeling that runs

The nude in the morning away from the water up the sloping

Lawn to the cottage with a yellow gate. An air or melody.

The Pastor says that Puritans gathered on a beach

In their capes and looked back across the ocean

Remembering the crazy bobbin on a nail of bone,

The green milk in the shade,

And the green manure in the barns outside a village.

What color was the pond? That too was a mistake.

And then he left drawing a thumb across his leg. That means

Nothing to us, early or late. The women in the boat

Were the last delay of a dream aria with water. A bird

                 Drops down from a tree in the sun in Marseille.

VII. SONG

A bird drops down from a tree in the sun in Marseille.

This is a bitter poem. This is a poem that meant

To be an admission of love to a woman

Whom it admits it loves. This is a bitter poem.

This is a poem of love for a woman and a bird both

Dropping out of a tree in the sun; yes, in Marseille.

And actually I'm now just writing this poem. You

On the other hand are just now reading this poem.

From here on it is already written for you; not yet written

For me. Why do I continue with it?

Because you are inseparable from the woman this poem

Has a love for, and the bird, also; almost down from the tree.

This poem loves a rotting boat in a green cove, some

Daffodils, and a young Nazi lacing a boot by a dead truck

By the lake in a cold rain. He is looking at a copy

Of Heine. If this bothers you. (The poem's affection

For the soldier.) Then the rest of the poem is not written

For you. It is a poem that couldn't love

The woman I love. It is a poem I couldn't love but

It is a poem of love, I think, despite either of us.

The young Nazi finishes lacing

His boot by making a careful bow. Now is that

Altogether surprising. It is a surprise to the woman

This is written for who is sometimes, also, the only

Person reading this poem. Yes, she could be you.

This is the achievement of this poem. That it is

Now finally speaking just to you . This is

No longer a bitter poem; no longer a poem

         that could continue!

Copyright © 2001 Norman Dubie. All rights reserved.