M A Y 1 9 7 8 ![]() TRAS OS MONTESby L. E. Sissman | |||||||||||||
![]() (For help, see a note about the audio.) Also by L. E. Sissman: Love-Making; April; Middle Age (1968) The Museum of Comparative Zoology (1967) The Tree Warden (1965) In Atlantic Unbound: Attending to the Night, by Peter Davison (March 17, 1999) A new selection of poems by the late L. E. Sissman revives the sound of a distinctive postwar American voice. Sissman's friend and longtime editor looks back at the poet's career. Go to: An Audible Anthology Poetry Pages
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I. MOTHER (1892-1973) My mother, with a skin of crêpe de Chine, Predominantly yellow-colored, sheer Enough to let the venous blue show through The secondarily bluish carapace, Coughs, rasps, and rattles in her terminal Dream, interrupted by lucidities, When, suctioned out and listening with hard Ears almost waned to stone, she hears me say, "Mother, we're here. The two of us are here. Anne's here with me," and she says, "Anne is so -- So pretty," as if abdicating all Her principalities of prettiness -- So noted in her teens, when she smote all Who saw her shake a leg upon the stage Of vaudeville -- and sinking into deeps Where ancience lurks, and barebone toothlessness, And bareback exits from the center ring Of cynosure. Of little, less is left When we leave: a stick figure of a once Quite formidable personage. It is, Therefore, no shock, when next day the call comes From my worn father, followed by the spade Engaged upon hard January earth In Bellevue Cemetery, where he sways And cries for fifty years of joint returns Unjointed, and plucks one carnation from The grave bouquet of springing flowers upon The medium-priced coffin of veneer, To press and keep as a venereal Greenness brought forward from the greying past. II. FATHER (1895-1974) Whether the rivals for a wife and mother can Compose their differences and timely warp Into concomitant currents, taken by The selfsame tide when taken at the flood -- Great waters poured black downhill at the height Of melting in the middle of the night -- Is to be seen. We did not find it so. My father, whom I loved as if he'd done All his devoirs (though he had not), and shone Upon my forehead like a morning sun, Came home out of his hospital to stay In our rich, alien house, where trappings tried His niggard monkishness. Four days he stayed In his ashen cocoon; the fifth he died Under my ministrations, his pug jaw Thrust out toward the port of hopelessness, Where he (I hope) received the sirens of All possible welcoming tugs, even as I Felt under his grey, waxen nose for breath And called the doctor to record a death That made shift rather easier for me, Staring at nothing standing out to sea. III. TRAS OS MONTES (197- ) 1. In Company Inspecting their kit and equipment at first light, I am glad the dawn is behind me, so my friends Cannot reflect upon my tears. The province I Move on across the mountains is still night- Bound, deep beneath the reaches of the sun Across the passes; so it will remain All of this long and dusty day, while we -- Will, Joe, Bob, Jonathan, Garth, Peter, Paul, Ed, John, Phil, Harry, and a droptic me -- March up the sunstruck slopes, dots on the rock That jags two thousand metres high ahead Of us above the passes where the dead Take formal leave of life: a kiss on both Cheeks of the dear departing, medals stripped, With all due ceremony, from his breast, Both epaulets cut loose from their braid stays, His sword, unbroken, pommelled in the hand Of his reliever; lastly, a salute Fired by the arms of officers, the guns Of other ranks, and a flat bugle call Played on a battered Spanish instrument With ragged tassels as the body falls Over the parapet -- gaining weightlessness As its flesh deliquesces, as its bones Shiver to ashes -- into an air that crawls With all the arts of darkness far below. 2. A Deux A new scenario: on upswept slopes Of ripe green wheat -- rare in this country -- we Take, linked, a last long walk. In late July, The landscape waits, breath bated, on the whim Of cumulonimbi in the west, which roll In with deceptive stealth, revealing a Black heart cut with a cicatrice of fire, Zigzagging to its ground: a naked peak Kilometres away, a serra out Of mind. I fix your face with a wax smile. Our hands articulate our oneness, soon To dissipate, in a stiff splay of joints. Is all the language at my tongue's command Too little to announce my stammered thanks For your unquestioning hand at my side, Too much to say I know the lowly deuce Is a poor card to play beside the ace, Black with his curlicues and his strong pulse Of sauve qui peut ambition? Calling a spade A spade, I'm pierced with the extreme regret Of one who dies intestate; as I'm snatched Into the stormcloud from the springing field, From green to black, I spy on you, below, A lone maid in green wheat, and rain farewells And late apologies on your grey head, And thunder sorrows and regrets. The storm Goes east, and the sun picks out my remains Against the cloud: a tentative rainbow, An inverse, weak, and spectral kind of smile. 3. Alone The long march up the fulvous ridgebacks to The marches, the frontiers of difference -- Where flesh marches with bone, day marches with His wife the night, and country marches with Another country -- is accomplished best, By paradox, alone. A world of twos, Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, of Sound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayed By sole infiltrators who have cast off Their ties to living moorings, and stand out Into the roads of noon approaching night Casting a single shadow, earnest of Their honorable intention to lay down Their lives for their old country, humankind, In the same selfish spirit that inspired Their lifelong journey, largely and at last Alone, across the passes that divide A life from every other, the sheer crags Of overweening will, the deepening scarps Like brain fissures that cunningly cut off Each outcrop from the main and make it one While its luck lasts, while its bravura holds Against all odds, until the final climb Across the mountains to the farther shore Of sundown on the watersheds, where self, Propelled by its last rays, sways in the sway Of the last grasses and falls headlong in The darkness of the dust it is part of Upon the passes where we are no more: Where the recirculating shaft goes home Into the breast that armed it for the air, And, as we must expect, the art that there Turned our lone hand into imperial Rome Reverts to earth and its inveterate love For the inanimate and its return. FINIS Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. From Night Music: Poems, by L. E. Sissman, edited by Peter Davison. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. |
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