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A p. n P. r...~V a C. a Work} 29- COLLECTED POEMS by Mary Frances Davis A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of English 1976 TABLE OF CONTENTS Documentary Shifting Gears Three Women Wednesdays The Gist Quiet Story Calendar and Climate Fatality Stepping Back Lay of the Last Romantic Argument Pasa Doble Two Trips Artifact Years Later Becoming Familiar Woman Dressed Receipt Post Scriptum Description of a Hazard in July The Shade Sign of the Ram Consent In the Old Style To the Greekest God So Far A Western Medicine Page OQN§WN 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 Anniversary Arriving at Schubert Contrasts A Rhetoric Change of Venue To a Flirt Appearances Enough .Crossing Over Translation One Sentence at a Time I - III IV - VII ii Page 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 Documentary The hand I know. It is of such a breadth, Of such a bone and tendon, The fingers of the type one sees with When the eyes are closed; They hold a book Out of the jacket says An exaltation. The rise and shift of such a wave One sees it in museums strained from hills Suspending amulets in dung. Shifting Gears George has a shop with all his tools In wooden boxes, big tin cans, Or hanging from their various hooks Or soaking in a dishpanful of gasoline. George makes his own wine of berries From the fence around his shop. In the fall his family comes With food and empty bottles. Everybody eats, everybody drinks, Everybody sings, and everybody dances A small beauty of a step from Lebanon That takes two ordinary feet And one small drum. Three Women The last time I saw her signature She was drunk again, her sweetness Cloying soured cream Dolloping the strawberries With bankheads full of darling. ‘ggggz, she wrote And I would wonder Could she say it if She were not an admiral In the Kentucky Navy Knowing bastard sons of English kings Playing culbuto on Wednesday nights While the house detective drew cartoons And I dipped sugar in your demi-tasse Her French slipping as her foot would slip On the summer ice of the lobby step embarrassed. Wednesdays We would go to the City Early in the morning Watching gulls dip Flowering the sky Surprised that they had beaks Had solid eyes, had pitches Harboring their throats Harboring our boat Droning its machinery we were pipers. Every wave we forced 'Slapped our sides, we drummed Our course, we shook small shakes Each nautic inch, we moved Between one island And another Licking spray In summer, in the winter we wore coats. we shopped For gloves, our necks were wrapped Our feet were never bare In canyons from a distance Streets when we were there Edging our own progress In the floating air Every holiday we shared. we walked in the last field Of our own island, you told Stories, did I hold your hand, we often sat together, we saw Everything in front of us opera Through our glasses, the woman In a spasm on the floor, Turn your head away She is sick. we always started out together, we never met ourselves. we met The others waiting For our stories over dinner Smiling color Of the food upon the plate The clinking clatter Of the restaurant noise, Strange people. Where were you on Christmas Quiet in your chair, By that time blinking Holding your own face Against the popping bottle, No taste for drinking "I am tired," you would say. You fasted. For lunch I ate One pear, one plum, one apple, Grapes, the omelet I practiced While you watched. One day You followed up my laughter "But you do believe in God," No smile on your own face. We had Whispered together often Patriotic songs, Schumann In Die Beiden Grenadieren Marseillaise. was it France, Dates in the Iranian Pavillion, Guavas in the north, the Scottish Plaid I wore, the green suede vest, The Indians I saw myself Regenerating, did you never smile But at old memories, were we No more than adult saying "Sweetheart" And a child? The Gist It was probably like sneezing in the morning, Watching someone grow too thin, Or wearing feathers to a funeral. Time moved, its noises deadened By the shelves, the paper. There was no wheel, no scurry. Once a stranger shuffled from where he was living And smiling out of cheek Delicately brilliant As the chapping on a baby's face, Remember, he said, these Are three and different books; The pages are where covers were And you will wonder, this one Is the middle, this beginning This an end. Each piece of clothing became ballast, The weight of shoes as binding As the morning in a belt. We stopped, considered skin The way a sheedeg contemplates A coat in winter. Quiet Story They are on vacation in their winter house. They dress by lapse in laundry day, the drinking hour The slips from their own deck into the water where they swim. He does a frog kick with his long white muscles Feet turned out in what would be two jokes If he were walking one side to the other Drawing curtains on the winter glass Straight as soldiers painted In a children's book Before cartoons. Her eyes would grow, her stare would match the space between her feet, Her shoulders at the ready for a ball A lob, a smash, a racquet At her ear. Calendar and Climate Christmas was nice. He smiled and looked much happier Than years ago out in the country spring Summer on the porch, the willow tree, Everybody else talking vacation. Maybe he knew the frosted windshield, Grating gears, leaps over the drifted snow, The way a camel knows the mass of its diameters Gaiting in the sand, the sun, the moon, Where women set their hair with urine And wind reduces gravity To bellies on the earth. Fatality He had spent another night waiting like a sleeping swimmer Next to her propped in her chair. He heard the cough, moved Five hours of respiration. By noon, afraid of everything but air, She drowned Cut across the walks, Took the tamped earth Between talks of ivy And the wall of flowering trees Into a bower of green too high. The girls have raucous voices, The boys are made of wood. There was no funeral. Later, a day, a year after the death We said, stay stay a while, we are our tenderness, We exalt minutes the way we played with clay pipes When bubbles came from soap, and we will Lie out in the snow, The eye the ear the difference The lungs breathing compassion In the air. 10 Stepping Back It may turn out That it is full of words, That its resemblance to a chamber Is some thing out of a bookcase Or a glass bowl where the letters swim A school of fish made sensitive by stomach Or the passage of a long electric eel. It is quite possible that its resemblance To a heart is as a room‘without a window Is a house, a city under ancient seige Believing in the day the first man Gathered with the other for his warmth, Became his enemy. 11 Lay of the Last Romantic The thing I liked about him.most in those days was the way he lied, assuming me and all my Hearts unto himself. Anyone, I knew this, Who would lie, must love so very Much, lying being painful And a sacrifice. He had said to me back in the days When he spoke several languages My own And that was all, the intonation The iris and the lens and bathing In salt water just as we Had kept our frogs while scientific In the summers of dissection And big bottles. Jesus in the marigolds, have you Been sneezing. Do you glisten of a gland Provoked by pollen and directions of the wind. And where the rooftiles of fat history Shine their towers through the smoke, Must I make love a progress From the arms of the beloved. 12 Argument You will be cruel then. With odd dispassion you will walk In some odd way, your eye chalking a bitterness, Your ear become an earthwork against sound. I will wish you paper made of ashes, Pens of mercury, your presence hateful As the sight of theory stalking Lotus, olive, cornflower Sweet grasses scenting cavities, The lobbing of a boomerang at marshbirds Rising from the reeds along the river. He wore a dagger in a granulated sheath, A flail of faience beads on golden wire. His necklace had a counterpoise of jasper Green as the cold freakish pool Where children throw their pennies And the trout swim the clear opulence Of chill. 13 Pasa Doble Let's plan, we say, a party Net with the common paper crepe But with fresh posters we will paint. You know a man who sings A.woman who can dance While that one we both know Plays a guitar. You have a list Sorting the one who jokes From one who paints The one whose eyes glaze with bolero Where the condor shades the mountain And your mother sits Half-smiling this is Lent The office cold and Spanish soup Duena to fiesta Where the spine is stiff between the hips And dancers play the bull. 14 Two Trips we drank hot cocoa As if it were wintertime And we were skiing Before chairlifts and the crowds. we would warm ourselves, Admire mountains, Patterns in the wools, Origins of brushes On the fur felt hats. I doubt that we will play again, The way the wind blows and we shiver Up against the glasses of our windowsills Remembering ourselves as isolate as fruit Inside the sugar of its glaze on holidays, But not so stiff. The jokes we played, The live the dead by chorus, by the blood The urn the blossom where the ground is Where the marble grows And I know you are beautiful And you know I am drunk. 15 Artifact We will not know quite enough To lick the honey or to dry the air. we will adhere to what we touch, and One of us will smile because the clock runs, The other at the bombast of the steps. There is not tenderness, a box In which to wear sweet flowers Delicate astringence of largesse. The sky becomes where birds shriek their dry privacies And we shake standing in the sun, our paths invisible As ears of quicksilver and tunnels in the throat. We used to look. We saw tooled ivory, An alabaster vase encircled by a necklace Of unfolding lotus blossom, minute golden cases For the viscera of God. We used to wonder was the walk on polished granite When the earth was made of sand Until as brilliant as our innocence We took a paleness in our own and careful hands, Turned it so, and this way in the light Amber and the stricken prisms Nerveless pearls of moonshell In the night. 16 Years Later I found the hat you talked about, The soft one in my pocket When it is not on my head. It is as blue As both your eyes are amber In the whiSper of the news That you are dead. 17 Becoming Familiar Your messages arrived this morning Through the loose weave of a curtain On a street no longer etched by night A tray of breakfast served unordered in the quiet Of a strange hotel, a dining room, A stopping place unplanned. The blind girl Weaving rather solidly Finally collapsed her cane And stood. 18 woman Dressed Her bonnet is matching her skirt again, Her breasts hang heavy of the babies She has not been feeding, smiling so Within her garden, old, so Different from the days When she was laden in the spring. This is fall. She matches Corduroy with cretonne, Bands it in a patchwork of a quilt Around her hips, her ears, the silence Of the trees as she goes smiling At the people walking by. Rumor says her house Is tacked and pasted with such souvenirs As we will never know in frames around our mirrors, And that she, for at least several seasons was, and was. Probably she weeps, Closes both her eyes, contrives Tears for each love Pegged by the crispness Of the air. Her hair Is very flaxen, very pale, There is odd stiffness in her legs, Contagion in the strangeness of the way She bends when she is facing towards the street And waits her company. 19 Receipt The coffee warms my throat As much as you did But I'm older now, The lines that cross the paper Are the paper, as the bones I never saw until a friend died Are the friend. There are no pockets For the body and the sounds To hide in, we are not In symbiosis, there is not A laughter in our walk, our dreams Go burying before we wake, and in the morning What we know is little words This is hair, this is eye, This is chin, the hand To hold it spinning in the air We breathe as if we knew ourselves Without adoring what ourselves displaced Before the pleasure of exchange. That day I saw many pictures Every movement in the crotchet of a note Yelled there is not an interruption, Any shelf tohouse its object As we lavished where we looked, Our images the bursting of a shell Felling in the light we knew Obstructions of ourselves. 20 Post Scriptum ‘ I almost lose My sense of where you are. I do not smile in distant places, Never chant myself in reaches, probabilities, Surprises. When I eat, the food Is not the spoon. I have grown Into a woman on a table Of a science. Yesterday A child tore to my room, Her Indian eyes largesse Of her own terror, while her mouth Obscured my safety, and her color For too long a time was the whole pleasure Of my eye. 21 Description of a Hazard in July The air sounds like a birdhouse in a zoo, Ourselves an unremitting ear to pitches And some differences in twitter. Such seeds As bluejays chew for strength and sublimation Crack as gunshot cracks the sunlight While our stomachs rumble And the drums on which we walk Absorb our heat. My friend Confuses gold And yellow, Out of a sweetness Drawn in books, confounds The pigments of his eye until Within the crisscross of the light His own astounded fingers pull another Brilliance into warrant of the day that bursts Upon the sufferance of our wait Our eyes, our ears A wave, a current Undertow to drag us From the dry dry brightness Of desertion on a mountain To where we are a question Of each other On a plainthat slowly dies Of its own noise. A raucous voice Conforms it, and its eyes grow hard Within the circle of the sound of its own cries. 22 The Shade I live where I was living When we flew farther than the crackle Of dry leaves looming their diamonds In a bed of anthracite. You hover where my eyes The skin of both my arms Perch on the ties of patience An embroidery of sun, wind, kidney, heart Rising to laugh because too tired to hate Their spume still marks the creating Of another dark green wave. If we were here, . If simple as ourselves Beyond preoccupation we told stories, if ecstacies were tacit as old paints, and tongues Fluid as ribbons in the air, if sleep Were freed of dying, if we buried standing In the blossom of a tree warbling a birdcall Of a spring, if when we smiled Were present as a common thing And your hand raised again And mine, than time would be a stranger's press On doorbells in the color of the sun. 23 Sign of the Ram Into my softness you have placed A grain of sand, your hope a poem, Mine a pearl of anybody's guess Now that we know components And the fracture of a nucleus. I hear no song. The water waits In tablatures statistical as joints Of an old athlete's rumor of himself, His gait so dry that children Become starry tears of metaphor, The eye a thrust of javelins, The ear a drunken leap Into a sea of engineers. 24 Consent I wondered.if your voice were fragile As your lips, the lines you drew Between the air's own vacuum And the celibate monastic's Drawing from a well we could not see. , You were my face, the food I ate, The sleep I took, the waterfall, the snowflake Striding into deserts Sifting sands I never knew Until the shock of draught At my own knee. 25 In the Old Style I had thought the winter done, That spring would come and we would sing New small-scale havoc with the night, the birds, The lions riding deserts on a camel. I read of Danes in newspapers, Of Polish visitors, migrations From the snow. I thought of conjury, Of rubbing both my hands on an oak table, Crossing both my ankles, holding up my head Uhtil my spine recalled the amber of your eye My safety when the wind blows Heavy arms around my waist, The tremor of your hand my taste Of the futility of crying. 26 To the Greekest God So Far Flat face, flat voice Succulent as shavings Rings of smoke, rearings Of a goatskin on a drumhead Spoked, fire, wheel, a pair Of orange sandals or a crate Become a greeting in the spring: I do, I do, I will And when you leave I breathe the garlic of a Roman Ah Until my stomach sighs, my sweatglands Exercise pursuit of hirsute marble Back, thighs, the poise Of the braincage until my eyes Stare as a case of hyperthyroid fish Into the salt of germane seas With us 0 Liebchen Siehst du nicht, Longer than the focus Of two boney knees. 27 A Western Medicine Lucy, he said, Simply take the train Down to the post, and tell The general, your father, Go to hell The boxes and the wires To the temples With no bell. 28 Anniversary I called for you, Put my head inside the door, Heard my voice ring where, where Down hallways I remembered as a poet And the round eye of a deer The spear, the rush of air, Shot through my ear Impaled as yours By where we were At this same time last year. 29 Arriving at Schubert Twice today the music moved as surely as the line From your low voice to highlands far as noises Of old selves made out of whispers Drying laughter, hissing spells Where grace is footing Spare clicks of the heels, the hoof, The shale, the pebbles seeding pathways The way hailstones seed a roof A corridor, a hallway, a pinpoint Lighting mirrors, flecks of dust, Lenses thick as old ice on the water Where the trout lives in the spring. 30 Contrasts Helen goes to the Greek Church. She Dances. Her hair is black. Her eyes are neither amber Nor the ocean, nor the blue. She is not Sally waters Crying in the sun. The sound of her is quiet As the air around the loading And the locking of a gun. 31 A Rhetoric of Institutions Is it true that you became The other end of a long pole Between two hemisperes, the reds The greens, the stories In old newspapers? I dreamed that you were history Rods, cones, iris while your voice Droned incantations in the hallway Of a church. Each bird to pass Became your sleeve, You waved it At the sky, the tree, the spring Night breathing at your footstep Dancing campgrounds sewn up tight. 32 Change of Venue Now that you have shot me ‘With the truest arrow of the truest bow, I write you lighter than the float we know Religious and the praises that we groaned When we were heavenly, ‘Were maiden, were a weapon, were an altar, were a flower, were a candle lighting ceilings vaulting hours to the East, the beast- Bird pecking at her breast, her blood Feeding the young, the nest, The talons hobbling feet Pinning a reason. we meet the way a gesture Meets a season, and a meter Measures light. Our words Curse their own meaning Sharp as chisels in the night Of an astronomy for sighting Beyond death and the contrite. 33 To a Flirt I would do something mad if I were you Your half an eye, a mouth, a laughter In the current of the night Without a morning, Flashes of a light Struck on a table Struck by match Struck by the thunder Of a summer storm, a hatchet Of an arm chopping at wood, The clutter of the ash of an old fire Filling air with gestures of desire. Appearances We were colors of a keyborad Black and white and waiting The next passage, the next scale. Once we swept the way the wind sweeps Grasps of music Your eyes black as ebony Mine staring through the whites Winding the two of us Flights of color Flecks of cloth Moths Until I closed my eyes You dropped your arms The crowd shrouded our shoulders We found each other's fingers Wingless as alarms. 35 Enough You called me after I had gone to sleep. I cut you off, afraid that neither of my eyes would sleep again, that loud as carnivals Their lens would lie there hypnotized Bearded women, bales of hay, Billboards on a highway Taut as wires we take our walks on By the light of day. 36 Crossing Over You change From bottoms of thermometers To tops. Quiet as a mercury Your silver rises, drops Glass columns of a temperature Reams passages of air, The shadows of an arc Drawing a summer Where the winter was a track Flat with its waiting Pacing spring Sitting as a child sits on the floor, Furling fingers, furling toes Around the air become the water, Anemones like flowers When wind blows. 37 Translation We left each other Smiling at the last thing We had talked about, ships Their masts, their berthing Real as colors of our eyes Brown, blue, Docks, sails, Gravity, surprise. 38 One Sentence At A Time She talked that way Bouquets, aromatics burgeoning her hair Her diadem a sundial time in gardens. Mornings she would pad the lawn The mignonette, the baby's breath Lilly of the valley in the wind Tearing the sky. II we could haggle. This party is impossible. We dance where voices dirge the snowflake And each eye looks for its mirror In the punch. III He sits on a horse, His costume bright with the particulars, The points, the ruff, the bell A drooping arm, a drooping foot. 39 IV The old one is the blue one The red one with the flat white eggshell street Where the child walks in black stockings And a polka-dotted dress. The women.walk their parasols, An old man steers his cane, Another drives a carriage In the street just washed by rain. How casually he casts his hip Against the angle of his hand, The blousing of his shirt. His lips look like a bird Arrested flat against chalk cliffs. VI They still dance In heavy shoes, their arms Starched as their collars, A Breton poppy in each apron bib, A dog sniffing the grass. VII One man smiled, And one man left, And one kept right on Dying in the sun. 40 “CHEW"mm1@IEITMIETIMTIIEME‘ififl“