Door in the Mountain - Jean Valentine Wesleyan Poetry Series

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double, my Siamese heart, my whiskery,

      Fish-belly, glue-eyed prince, my dearest black nudge,

      How flat and reflective my eye reflecting you

      Blue, gorgeous in the weaving grasses

      I wound round for your crown, how I loved your touch

      On my fair, speckled breast, or was it my own turning;

      How nobly you spilled yourself across my trembling

      Darlings: or was that the pull of the moon,

      It was all so dark, and you were green in my eye,

      Green above and green below, all dark,

      And not a living soul in the parish

      Saw you go, hélas!

      Gone your feathery nuzzle, or was it mine,

      Gone your serpentine

      Smile wherein I saw my maidenhood smile,

      Gone, gone all your brackish shine,

      Your hidden curl, your abandoned kill,

      Aping the man, liebchen! my angel, my own!

      How deep we met, how dark,

      How wet! before the world began.

       For a Woman Dead at Thirty

      No one ever talked like that before, like your

      Last white rush in the still light of your

      Last, bungled fever: no one will any more.

      Now we breathe easier: Love,

      Released from itself, blows words of love all over,

      Now your hands are crossed down there.

      We wanted your whole body behind glass,

      And you left just half a footprint,

      Half-smiling.

      All night, driving,

      I wanted to know:

      At the turn of light that somewhere

      Must still be cock's crow

      You smiled slantwise in the side mirror,

      Six months dead: here's Romance: You wanted to know.

      You Never, you blazing

      Negative, o you wavering light in water,

      Water I stir up with a stick: wavering rot,

      O my sister!

      even if I'd known,

      All I could have said was that I know.

       Miles from Home

      Grown, and miles from home, why do I shy

      From every anonymous door-slam or dull eye?

      The giant-step, the yawn

      That streaked my dreams twenty years ago are gone;

      The hero and nurse, the smashing Rubens hoof

      And fist, the witch who rode my bedroom roof

      And made my finger bleed, after all are man and wife

      Whose mortal ribs I cracked to water my life,

      Whose eyes I weighted keeping my late hours,

      Loving my boys, chain-smoking in late, dead bars,

      Watching the first light pickle Storrow Drive.

      Why did I need that empty space to live?

      The hand in the dark was my own, God knows whose cars.

      The clay gods lean, and cast shadows under the stars,

      Enjoying the blameless flowers on their Boston roof.

      The watering-can's bland nozzle gleams like a hoof.

       To Salter's Point

      Frances Wadsworth Valentine

      1880–1959

      Here in Framingham, black, unlikely

      Wheel spoking into mild Republican townships,

      I have come to where the world drops off

      Into an emptiness that cannot bear

      Or lacks the center to compel

      The barest sparrow feather's falling.

      Maybe our mortal calling

      Is, after all, to fall

      Regarded by some most tender care:

      But here, the air

      Has grown too thin: the world drops off

      That could imagine Heaven, or so much care.

      Framingham is building. The savage ring

      And shake of the drill turn up your morphined sleep.

      I fall, still in earth's monstrous pull,

      To kiss your hands, your planeless face.

      Oh, you are right

      Not to know your death-bed's place;

      To wander in your drugs from Framingham

      To Salter's Point, the long blond beaches where

      You and your brothers peeled oranges and swam

      While your parents looked on in daguerreotype.

      Your iron bedstead there was white like this:

      And in this grave, unspeakable night,

      Beyond the pull of gravity or care,

      You have no place: nor we:

      You have taken the summer house, the hedge,

      The brook, the dog, our air, our ground down with you,

      And all the tall gray children can run

      Away from home now and walk forever and ever

      And come to nothing but this mouthful of earth,

      All endings over.

       Lines in Dejection

      for my sister

      Remember how we spread our hair on the sea,

      Phosphorous fans, the moon's edge crumbling under

      Moving pieces of sky? Ghostly weeds loitered

      Like misty Thetis's hair, or some sea-monster's

      Ancient whiskers, floating around our knees;

      Moony children, we drifted, and no god or monster

      Could have seemed foreign then to our globe of water.

      Remember

      Lying like still shells on the glass water?

      The paper moon opened, a Japanese water flower

      Drifting free of its shell in the bowl of the sky.

      Who poured it out? In twenty years

      The bay is still in its place, they are still there,

      Walking slowly by the water.

      Have they been here, all along? Have we?

      Back, back, I strike out from the ancestral stare

      And now the bowl's shadow composes what I see:

      The weeds cradle me and draw me under, under.

      But there they are, on the pitch-black ocean floor,

      Hands out, hair floating: everywhere!

      Holding us in their charred arms like water.

      

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