Originally published in A Turning Wind (1939)
As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
the wrecked season, haunted by plans of salvage,
snow, the closed door, footsteps and resurrections,
machinery of sorrow.
The warm grass gave to the feet and the stilltide water
was floor of evening and magnetic light and
reflection of wish, the black-haired beast with my eyes
walking beside me.
The green and yellow lights, the street of water standing
point to the image of that house whose destruction
I weep when I weep you. My door (no), poems, rest,
(don’t say it!) untamable need.
*
When you have left the river you are a little way
nearer the lake; but I leave many times.
Parents parried my past;the present was poverty,
the future depended on my unfinished spirit.
There were no misgivings because there was no choice,
only regret for waste, and the wild knowledge:
growth and sorrow and discovery.
When you have left the river you proceed alone;
all love is likely to be illicit; and few
friends to command the soul;they are too feeble.
Rejecting the subtle and contemplative minds
as being too thin in the bone;and the gross thighs
and unevocative hands fail also. But the poet
and his wife, those who say Survive, remain;
and those two who were with me on the ship
leading me to the sum of the years, in Spain.
When you have left the river you will hear the war.
In the mountains, with tourists, in the insanest groves
the sound of kill, the precious face of peace.
And the sad frightened child, continual minor,
returns, nearer whole circle, O and nearer
all that was loved, the lake, the naked river,
what must be crossed and cut out of your heart,
what must be stood beside and straightly seen.
*
As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
how the one crime is need. The man lifting the loaf
with hunger as motive can offer no alibi, is
always condemned.
These are the lines at the employment bureau
and the tense students at their examinations;
needing makes clumsy and robs them of their wish,
in one fast gesture
plants on them failure of the imagination;
and lovers who lower their bodies into the chair
gently and sternly as if the flesh had been wounded,
never can conquer.
Their need is too great, their vulnerable bodies
rigidly joined will snap, turn love away,
fear parts them, they lose their hands and voices, never
get used to the world.
Walking at night, they are asked Are you your best friend’s
best friend? and must say No, not yet, they are
love’s vulnerable, and they go down to Rotten Lake
hoping for wonders.
Dare it arrive, the day when weakness ends?
When the insistence is strong, the wish converted?
I prophesy the meeting by the water
of these desires.
I know what this is, I have known the waking
when every night ended in one cliff-dream
of faces drowned beneath the porous rock
brushed by the sea;
suffered the change : deprived erotic dreams
to images of that small house where peace
walked room to room and always with one face
telling her stories,
and needed that, past loss, past fever, and the
attractive enemy who in my bed
touches all night the body of my sleep,
improves my summer
with madness, impossible loss, and the dead music
of altered promise, a room torn up by the roots,
the desert that crosses from the door to the wall,
continual bleeding,
and all the time that will which cancels enmity,
seeks its own Easter, arrives at the water-barrier;
must face it now, biting the lakeside ground;
looks for its double,
the twin that must be met again, changeling need,
blazing in color somewhere, flying yellow
into the forest with its lucid edict:
take to the world,
this is the honor of your flesh, the offering
of strangers, the faces of cities, honor of all your wish.
I say in my own voice. These prophecies
may all come true,
out of the beaten season. I look in Rotten Lake
wait for the flame reflection, seeing only
the free beast flickering black along my side
animal of my need,
and cry I want! I want! rising among the world
to gain my converted wish, the amazing desire
that keeps me alive, though the face be still, be still,
the slow dilated heart know nothing but lack,
now I begin again the private rising,
the ride to survival of that consuming bird
beating, up from dead lakes, ascents of fire.
