Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun;
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantium.
What I Do Is Me—For That I Came
for Gerard Manley Hopkins
What I do is me—for that I came.
What I do is me!
For that I came into the world!
So said Gerard;
So said that gentle Manley Hopkins.
In his poetry and prose he saw the Fates that chose
Him in genetics, then set him free to find his way
Among the sly electric printings in his blood.
God thumbprints thee! he said.
Within your hour of birth
He touches hand to brow, He whorls and softly stamps
The ridges and the symbols of His soul above your eyes!
But in that selfsame hour, full born and shouting
Shocked pronouncements of one’s birth,
In mirrored gaze of midwife, mother, doctor
See that Thumbprint fade and fall away in flesh
So, lost, erased, you seek a lifetime’s days for it
And dig deep to find the sweet instructions there
Put by when God first circuited and printed thee to life:
“Go hence! do this! do that! do yet another thing!
This self is yours! Be it!”
And what is that?! you cry at hearthing breast,
Is there no rest? No, only journeying to be yourself.
And even as the Birthmark vanishes, in seashell ear
Now fading to a sigh, His last words send you in the world:
“Not mother, father, grandfather are you.
Be not another. Be the self I signed you in your blood.
I swarm your flesh with you. Seek that.
And, finding, be what no one else can be.
I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other’s Fate,
For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair
No country far enough to hide your loss.
I circumnavigate each cell in you
Your merest molecule is right and true.
Look there for destinies indelible and fine
And rare.
Ten thousand futures share your blood each instant;
Each drop of blood a cloned electric twin of you.
In merest wound on hand read replicas of what I planned and knew
Before your birth, then hid it in your heart.
No part of you that does not snug and hold and hide
The self that you will be if faith abide.
What you do is thee. For that I gave you birth.
Be that. So be the only you that’s truly you on Earth.”
Dear Hopkins. Gentle Manley. Rare Gerard. Fine name.
What we do is us. Because of you. For that we came.
I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives
Though Queen be gone, the drones come back to hives;
I am the residue of all my daughters’ lives.
I keep their old loves here, I am the friend
Of all the lost, the sad, discarded, gone, made end.
Their husbands are now mine, their lovers keep
In touch with me, they telephone to weep
On loves that, soon as lost, now are my kin.
Somehow the old sins, shunted off, wind up my sin.
I take those loves to lunch. I buy them wine;
Although these boys-grown-men were never mine.
What is this thing in me which, dumb, demands
The keeping up of face, outstretch of hands?
Why must I tend their graveyard with chill stones,
Why say hello to those young bags of bones?
Those scuttled marriages gone sour or dead
Whose ruin runs my blood and cramps my head—
Why should I dine this mortuary gang,
Why not pay out Time’s rope and let them hang?
Because, because, well now, again because—
Mayhap I drown in male’s dread menopause,
And tend to see my face in these I dine
To drink too much of sad lust’s mortal wine.
Oh, women often cry they were sore used
But these boy/men were much the same abused;
If men shunt off the fainter sex with guile
Why, women, daggerless, slay with a smile.
What do these lovers hope to gain from me?
An echo of her flesh now found at tea,
The sounding of
