| Prizes and Honors
Kansas City Star Heart of America Poetry
Contests, April 17, 1964.
"The Horses,"
First Prize for U. S. University Students (see
below)
"Either Before or After,"
runner up for non-students.
Awards chosen by William Jay Smith and William Stafford
and conferred in Kansas City by
Gwendolyn Brooks.
Borestone
Mountain Poetry Awards,
The Sea Birds,
included in The Borestone Mountain Best Poems of 1966.,
reprinted from The New Yorker magazine, October 23, 1965.
Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards,
"Peter's Complaint,"
in anthology Borestone Mountain Best Poems of 1973.
reprinted from Southern Poetry Review.
3rd place in the anthology.
The Florida Poetry Prize (The Florida Review) First Prize, Non
Students.
Florida Individual Artist Fellowships
Rockefeller Fellowship from Center for the Study of Southern Religion and
Culture.
Poetry Editor of National Forum: The Journal of Phi Kappa Phi,
1979 - 19
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The Sea Birds
No light except the stars, but from the
cliff
I saw in motion, out on the rolling waves,
The white sea birds that swim beyond the surf.
Their movements made a pattern on the mauve
Contorted stretch of cold, corrosive water,
Where even the images of stars dissolve.
When I had thought the birds were fixed in order,
I saw the swimming rim of their starlit ring
Minutely swerve and spiral toward the center.
The birds that had been swimming in between
Were shuttled outward on a wheel of light,
Reflecting, like the sea, the stars' design.
I paused, and looked, and saw a star burn out
And sink back into space as through a fissure.
It was an ancient word without a thought.
Perhaps birds move in pattern for the measure
It imposes on the ruptured waves at night;
Perhaps they spiral purely for their pleasure.
While I was trying to untie this knot,
A motion in the motion of the weather
Turned, and the birds turned too and tore the net
I knitted for them (a star had torn another
I had knitted for stars). I saw them climb the gale
That drove small arrows in through every feather.
One by one they spread their flapping sails.
I think the birds are moving in a school
With restless birds above a freezing pool,
And no one shall put salt on their bright tails.
The Horses
Overtaking a
double horsetrailer,
I can see only
the ears and rears of
the two horses. One
has his tail tucked in
the tailgate; one tail
hangs out. The beige tails
contrast with chestnut
flanks. Because they are
alike, the contrast
makes them both appear
misshapen. Somewhere
between, their one form
blurs and won't focus;
for slight differences
become the movements
of horses running
diagonally
opposite ways in
airy arenas
containing only
horse torn by horses.
And now though I can't
put a rein on God,
I feel him tearing
between the horses
and myself, for we
are in separate
vehicles, each one
moving fast. I pass,
hills and curves moving.
|
Peter's Complaint
I
After supper, we argued over stars
While you went off, saying, "Keep watch for soldiers."
But supper was too heavy and we slept.
You woke us with such quiet admonishment
That, seeing the flares, I was whelmed with guilt
And would have killed a fellow with my knife
Had you not stopped me, saying, "I'll go," and gone
To show us what your words had always meant.
But seeing word as fact, I felt betrayed
And said, "I never knew him in my life."
II.
Then hidden in my mantle, in the mob,
Hoping to purge myself ofa a sick dream,
I watched you pinned, mothlike, against the sky.
The sun grew black in eclipse, ringed thin with light,
Then was itself again, so suddenly
That those who watched grew blind. Terror had turned
My dark eyes inward. It was then you died.
III.
Since we had met in groves, often at night,
I found it harder now to reconcile
Your sunburned flesh, your new, translucent face>
Yet having to wear a beard taught compromise:
I! Me! a native of the oath.
Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman--we
Saw all powers turning on one spit,
The light and dark, flesh, mind and spirit.
They hung me upside down. The nails were keys
To kingdoms--the empire, then its conquerors.
IV.
Authority had so fixed our eyes on quiet
Atriums that we, inured to nature now,
Judged all landscapes by our secluded gardens.
Triumphant, we became the absolute,
Bent men to God, burned books, castrated statues,
Structured time, foreshadowed revolutions.
Cathedrals of stressed logic, bound and buttressed
By new hierarchic heraldry, told our story.
The Word, woven into stone-dark facades
That anchored tall shafts spanned with colored glass,
Held up our stone tents, pitched high in the air.
Spirit infused matter, mater omnium,
Chanted new quantums, through stained and filtered dark,
While under drowsing lids we worshipped light.
V.
Mist in a wind, the light of ancience, distilled,
Began to rain and freshen stagnant water.
When everything withers into the new year,
While winter holds time frozen in its mind,
We do not know what new thoughts spring will have.
The stars have grown too great to comprehend,
Too far (or near) to argue, and turned from silver
To flame. The blood runs upward toward the brain.
Our minds grow younger while our hearts grow old.
But God inhabits, while eluding, all ideas
And will be found again in wind and waves,
Subject, like us, to fortune and to rumor.
The churches crowd the planet of hunger. Children
Make crosses of sticks and wish for food--
Awed at your monuments, museums of torture
Devices: the cross itself, edicts against
Prevention and abortion, the anomalies of birth,
Pickled grotesqueries.
Crosses orbit. Cathedrals spin toward the moon.
VI.
I try to remember if you are what we remembered.
But I cannot clearly remember you--
And never saw you clearly. When we both were,
The air was always filled with vapors of dawn,
The dust of day, the haze of twilight, starlight.
Our sight was never steady or finely shaded.
And I was not a rock. It surprises me
They say you said so. What I was is vague
Even to me. For I have been confused
With fact and legend since that old impermanence.
Even as I speak I am being altered.
VII.
Though we have been hard grains in the sieve,
We dissolve in streams, disperse, and strained by earth,
Are assumed again by time, crossed with dream.
On the rack constellations of the night,
The motion of the wheel grinds and scatters in space
Until we rain out of abyss itself.
But the world's savage mob forcing our door
Is crying for blood, the old sacrament,
Though we have turned, like all magic, to myth.
Thus they are turning from us and we from them.
Yet we are shackled, ourselves a cross, to stars
That twist us as they turn and turn and turn.
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