In the thirty-six poems of this collection,
there are many references to the past and to
ancient times. The poet's obsession with the past,
both in terms of classical allusions and a more personal history, is shown in RUINED HOUSE:
Where Time stalls like a ruined house, I
rush about, a wind slamming doors.
Dervishing in shadows I unearth the gifts
of the past, the colored glass of first seeing,
the tossed jacks of a belly laugh.
I remember when Time itself was a wind, rushing out
and circling, falconing messages of grave inconsequence,
mixing lust and poetry, science and innocence;
and Mercury strode the halls like a laughing knight,
and Bacchus raised his flagon at Caerleon on Usk.
The sweep of cultural history is the means by which the poet attempts
(and maybe fails) to locate himself in his own time and place. An example is from THE WHALE:
I squat before the whale's eye, no Ahab I, but a gerontic
Jew upon a windowsill, transfixed by doubts, requiring
guarantees of payment and proofs of ownership to secure
the living moment in its sequence of moments, that I may endure
to the next rent collection, the next drafting of a codicil.
He constantly places himself within the continuum of history, as in COLD SEASON:
The dawn sat pink on my breakfast tray and pink
on the bay thirty thousand feet below.
Here was San Francisco, my America, the great
continent looming out of a fecund history,
where the ghosts of my grandmothers outcrowded
the Iroquois, the fabulous traders and inventors,
the wielders of magic touches in the Exchanges
Synonymous with this concern with the self's place within the swirling
images of time, is the loneliness he writes of within the vast emptiness around us, as in TROPICAL NIGHT SKY:
I've always envied the poets who could talk to God.
William Pillen was right: the sky oppresses, crushing us
with the distances from star to star, from the stars
to ourselves. One looks in vain for a constellation
of an old man at a potter's wheel, a shoulder shrugged
in resignation, a hand raised, regarding the awful humor of it all
with a crooked grin.
In HONDLER he sums up his flawed attempt to encapsulate in words a totality of vision:
Here is my checkbook,
my file notes full of literary allusions,
the metal frames which housed my certificates:
devices in which I sought to contain all the uncertainties of experience.
In DOORS he describes how in a dream
in the ruined courtyard of
a tenement
God's servant with a brace of keys enters and asks him to choose a key:
So I did. Not one of the fancy ones elaborated
with reliefs of fruit and animals that if flung into the sky
could become a constellation and sing of antique mysteries,
but a simple medeco with a worn serial number, good,
perhaps, to let you into a kitchen or open a flight of stairs
onto a time where a woman, still young, twirled in a summer
dress, or bounded out to greet you in the lilac-scented air.
These interesting poems, if at times rather overwrought and over-written,
nonetheless speak movingly of the contrast between hankerings after some
grandiose, universal truth and the isolated puniness of reality; he writes in THE DARKNESS OF OLD HOUSES that
There is no rest in such a place, no respite from the abrasion
of need or the sting of memory, no home for the imagination
burdened with an old song--only the long climb back into the light
of another afternoon, another restoring of original hopes,
another renewal of the search into the core of darkness.
The final poem in this collection, BOUNCING BALL, sets out the essential
failure of any quest to place the self in relation to images of the past or future:
I have counted, forwards and backwards, many times
and still I can't say what is in my heart.
