Die K
EY
Like a new light I enter my life
And hover, not yet consumed,
With the trees in holy alliance,
About to be offered up
. . .
417
and the tone, caught from Roethke and perhaps from such contem–
porary French poets as Char and Supervielle, is achieved by the pre–
ponderance of end-stopped lines, a succession of aphorisms that remind
us of the earliest wisdom-literatures a nd stun the mind thirsting for
some Becoming by their insistent fixities :
I take my deep heart from the air.
The road like a woman
is
singing.
It sings with what makes my heart beat
In the air, and the moon turn around.
The dead have their chance in
my
body.
The stars are drawn into their myths.
I bear nothing but moonlight upon me.
I am known; I know my love.
The entities combine but do not alter or elide. The dimension of the
gradual, of growth- of time, in fact- is absent or it is only an element,
never a dimension at all. The self has its absences in eternity, then
recurs
in time, bearing its burden, for others, of transgression and
forgiveness :
Mother son and wife
Who liv,e with me: I am in death
And waking. Give me the looks that recall me.
None knows why you have waited
In the cold, thin house for winter
To turn the inmost sunlight green
And blue and red with life,
But it must be sO', since you have set
These flowers upon the table, and milk fQr him
Who, recurring in this body, bears you home
Magnificent pardon, and dread impending crime.
Yet even the crimes are not those of history, of
happening,
in which
all of life's messy ontogeny is possible, but of myth and ritual, forgiven
or punished by incantation, fixed into immutable categories of ascen–
sion and disgrace, dissolved ultimately into the natural round of
violence and recurrence:
