2 poems reprinted from Changeable Thunder (
Benton’s Clouds
The background is clouds and clouds above those
the color of an exhaustion, whether
of field hands stacking sheaves, or the coiling,
columnar exhaust of a coal engine.
It is eighteen seventy in nineteen
twenty-seven in nineteen ninety-eight.
The colors of his clouds express each new
or brooding effluence felt elsewhere as
progress, no matter which foreground story,
no matter the gandy dancer contoured
as corn field, no matter Persephone
naked as herself, as a sinew of
rock ledge or oak root yet pornographic
under the modern elder leering down.
The background is everywhere telling.
In the present moment, in the real air,
what we saw above the lake was an art--
gulls and then no gulls, swirl of vacation
debris twirling in funnels from the pier
though the wind rushed in wilder off the surge,
clouds, then not clouds but a green-gray progress
of violences in the lowing air, waves
like a bad blow under water. We stood
at the pier railing and watched it come on.
It is too late to behold the future,
if by future what we mean is the passed-
over detail in the painting which tells
where the scene is destined to lead--
brilliance, beside the roiling billowy
cloud banks blackened as battlefield debris,
beside the shapely physique of nature
on the move, its machinery of change,
is history in an instant. How else
infuse his Reconstruction pastorals,
his dreamy midwifes, sod farmers, dancing
hay bales wrapped in billows of sallow light,
with an agony befitting the some-
time expatriate Modernist Wobbly
harmonica player he was. Who else
could execute such a beautiful storm,
whipped white, first a color on the water
like a wing or natural improvement.
When the Coast Guard boat swept by us waving,
it was already too late and too close.
The storm took down the big tree in seconds.
Though we were running, swirl of muscle, bales
and billows of fear like the wind breaking
over each swell with the force of a hand,
though we cleared the first breakwall and elm grove,
it was only accident the baby's
carriage was not crushed by the linden bough
sheared off, clean as a stick. We were standing
in the grinding rain, too soon still for tears.
It was too soon to tell what damages
there would be, though we knew, as in his art,
as though before the last skier had tipped
into the lake, there was peril ahead.
We could see it all in an instant's clear
likeness, where the future is not coming
but is already part of the story.
Romanticism
It is to Emerson I have turned now,
damp February, for he has written
of the moral harmony of nature.
The key to every man is his thought.
But Emerson, half angel, suffers his
dear Ellen's dying only half consoled
that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her
head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life
suffer from the warfare between the force
& delicacy of her soul & the weakness
of her frame . . . March the 29th,
1832, of an evening strange
with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited
Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin.
--Emerson looking in, clutching his key.
Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild
fields of
as if stunned by persistent cold wind
or leaning over, as from rough breath.
I have brought my little one, bundled and
gloved, to the lonely place to let her run,
hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened
along the ground hard from a winter drought.
I have come out for the first time in weeks
still full of fever, insomnia-fogged,
to track her flags of breath where she's dying
to vanish on the hillsides of bramble
and burr. The seasonal birds--scruff cardinal,
one or two sparrows, something with yellow--
scatter in small explosions of ice.
Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased
by the physical crunch of the ground, damp
from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot,
that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath
too rocky to cultivate, covered thick
with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze
not far from Carlyle's homestead where they strolled,
--that half of him for whom nature was thought.
Kate has found things to deepen her horror
for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled
by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle
of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick
bramble, or the bramble itself enough
to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood-
colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa.
What does she see when she looks at such things?
I do not know what is so wrong with me
that my body has erupted, system
by system, sick unto itself. I do
not know what I have done, nor what she thinks
when she turns toward her ill father. How did
Emerson behold of his Ellen, un-
embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands?
Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are
to find out the secrets of our own natures.
Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night
with his journal, the awful natural
fact of Ellen's death, which must have been
deeper sacrifice than a sacrament.
Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down
like light snow on the beautiful hills?
Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . .
--His other half worried by the wording.