Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine

New Poems

2016–2020

Light Me Down

Light me down to the long meadow

to where the new snow taps on the fallen snow

with the fingers of the lost tribe.

Who would want us to listen?

Someone does want it:

Mother of snow

smoking your cigarette ration, your dark

lipstick mouthprint hungry

for the frail paper,

long after the war was over.

The Ring

I wear this ring

I bought before we met—

it’s too big,

so I wear it on my thumb.

Away from you,

I look at it more now,

when I go to sleep:

five animals, on a blue ground

with stars—giraffe, elephant,

lion, butterfly, lizard—

then twilight, more stars

Now I lost it.

Now a plain copper one now.

Element.

Now I lost that too.

Here, silver, healing silver. Come.

Holding all colors to you.

To My Teacher

My first own half-grown tenderness

out in the world—you teaching us

Beowulf, World War II, the army, Gertrude Stein,

already a lifetime-full of the meaning of things—

Still now, my second father, gone ahead,

I talk to you. I can’t hear your words yet,

but your voice like one of the trees

still around your old GI Bill house: Beowulf poet,

do people meet again? In our same old clothes?

or light?

Thirst

In my first hour, the thirst was for air,

then for my mother, then

existence—

who could I look to be?

—From our first walk alone,

when you’re away

or I’m away

I thirst to walk with you

neverleaving.And blackbird, fly

in the after time.

Image:

women

dressed

in black

in a line

walking, the

third one

with a black

mask over

her eyes

because

she won’t see

take

the children!

the man in the tree

is saying

everyone sees things differently

Trust me

with this dear one you hold

& hear & touch

trust me

in your dream

& waking

Pneumonia, January

I dreamed two nights ago

someone said

"I just wanted to ask you

if you were going to go away

different from us."

Dear Adrienne

Remember we sat by your window and smoked,

and read our poems to each other, we

talked about our children, poetry, money, work, race,

home, everything, movies, women’s lives,

men, poetry, sex, race, Vietnam,

Berkeley, teaching, women’s lives, Dickinson.

Then when you visited me

in Ireland, & we read our poems to each other,

I started breathing again, free from the will

to dominate my own soul.

Last summer, that night at the back of Poets House

at the launch of your last book,

I think you would have liked

the planes going over in the blue light—and the way

Yusef talked about you in the old days—

Adrienne,

the government back here is death to the living,

the earth is in its hands. Talk to me,

tell me the mysteries.

Yeats’ Stance

When I was about twenty I went by myself

up into the towerthe holy place

and never questioned it, but felt

I could never be of it.

You could feel it in the air

this power

like being shown another planet

and not sure I’d ever come back

from this world of gods who were men.

In these lonely steps I took

there was no one to help me.

You are not allowed here.

The look of the stone the sound

of the stone it’s all

go away.

The Teacher

In the library

light drifts across the ceiling

as if we are under water

these years ago

whoever it was approached you,

you lightened the comer:

you holding onto the front of my coat

with both hands, the last time I saw you

the change in your red lips—heart attack,

they said.

me? everyone is ok here.

I miss you, them too.

It seemed you pulled me out of the ground.

The Cricket

In this little borrowed

wooden house in January,

down on the field-colored rug

I came across a cricket

close to death, or sleeping.

Not breathing, that I could see.

Out walking, I saw a skull of snow,

and a snow-frog listening.

Back in the house,

my cricket, your heart has stopped.

Would you like snow over you?

Or be in here together, by the hearth.

But now your body is fallen in pieces around you.

Help me find a leaf for you to lie on, another

to cover you.

Sparrow

What do I want here

Who am I here for—It seems

—to write to you God,

help me now, your eye is on the sparrow and

I’d die if it is not.

Sparrow my baby died of an abortion.

And I near died. But then they

drove me in a car and caved me back.

My whole life I love you Sparrow,

my whole life—cave me back.

Trust

Our great-aunt Frances’s look, trust,

a mare over the half-door

of her stall—

When she was dying

in the thin gray hospital,

her beautiful eyes closed,

a little lick of her dry lips—

In a Diner

I sit across from him—

That I know him.

That I am beginning to know him.

I – half-open:

He sees – what does a half-open

half-palomino see?

To see that.

A voice? A hand?

Not make any sudden movements.

Not lie.

Not leave.

The thou is holding up the lit snow.

For Tomas Tranströmer & Max Ritvo

Come, lonesome one, to the lonesome

—St. Symeon, the New Theologian, addressing his God.

I looked,

and there he was, my older brother,

my guide to the underworld.

His eyes were kind. He said,

Here, take my hand, we cross here…

It was the little blue restaurant.

He was the Swedish poet.

He jumped up over the back of the chair

and sat down right next to Max.

And Max said, "Come, lonesome one,

to the lonesome."

February, 2017

Dear life,

Planes are flying in low

over New Hampshire

under the republic’s hysteric

razor cut voice.

Life,

follow the deer

into the woodslearn how to eat

the winter grass under the snow

like your ancestors did—

A little more time

dear life

The Longing

The longing is gone to know you, God

—I know your silence

in the dropped branches,

the lost hands, the lost ship’s

voices.

Why I want to talk to you is

I want to die

instead of my young friend.

I know your silence, God,

I have sometimes almost

come to rest with it.

The silence of women.

The 40’s

Out the window

there was a linden tree.

Our father was in the war. He sent

censored letters from the Pacific.

Fear and tight cheer in the house,

Roosevelt’s faraway voice on the radio at night,

Churchill in the newsreels, Saturdays

with him with Stalin & de Gaulle, announcers’ calm voices

over films of the trains, the children, the guards in the camps,

the cold, the hunger. Executions. Our mother

scared to be so blessed.

Poem with a Line from Ko Un

All this from the world,

from the kindness of people,

to the tea in this cup,

—most dear is the silence

the rainthe touch

the touch of your voice in my body

leaving all words behind.

Dear Merton’s God

We stand here like trees in the night,

I know you for your words

in the loud silence, your words listen,

they make room for a stranger,

for the dead & the living, the child

We stand here like trees in the night, dear Merton’s God,

you throw yourself at us, I know you

for your words in body, in sign language,

I throw myself at you, God, God

you run after people, talking,

people on bicycles, pushing wheelbarrows,

baby carriages, hospital carts, you make room

—with me, you were quiet, you sent it,

or I couldn’t have heard it,

sent the warmth deep around my head

like a headband, only inside.

In Ireland

You wanted to see Achill Island

so I drove you there

in the rickety car

slow over the Achill roads.

Later, you called to say you dreamed

I was driving you in that car

up to the passage graves, Carrowkeel,

the narrow quarter, and you felt safe.

Safe—did we not both remember then

the country road we were both once driven over

dangerouslyby a soul in danger

—You had cried Stop.

At the last

the soul couldn’t stop.

In China

We are seated on a wide stage. In the bright-lit

auditorium, a PA pronounces the directions in English:

You are poets. Take off your masks.

A young man stands up & says, in English,

"I come from a small mountain village.

I am studying art. I want to ask,

What is beauty? What to pursue?"

I take off my mask.

What is my love?

with its old hard-beating erotic lungs—

What is my soul,

if it has lost its words?

But it never had its words.

Maybe another look, or step,

or water step or air—

For a friend who died young

Who is my lord?

The bark of the birch tree is

my lord,

the sap of the young tree;

the leap of his voice

in the new branches—

friend,

let me in—

Regard all dharmas as dreams

You waking to me

me waking to you

now never not woken

For Monty

Away, I dream

I see you walking up the block

—the kindest sight on earth

A minute of silence for C.D. Wright

The prophets shade their eyes,

a deer bends his head to a spring,

—C.D. looks back out from a frame of sun and wood.

The Prison

The gray slate roof for hair,

the six eye-windows,

red bricks for the body, &

God’s earth & river floor

—the round black window,

where she looked out,

put her hand up to say Stop—

After Fernando Traverso

NI UNO, NI OTRO

NOSOTROS

the rubbed heart

the black bicycle

stenciled on the wall

13/8/93

LORE TE AMO

—the awkward-leaning phone poles,

old men and women resting back

against the sky in blue chairs,

—some sort of opening, like the dream

last night, with you still living—

did you make the dream-opening? or who?

I will carry you. Your happiness.

I am coming.

To who I do know.Te amo.

This happiness.Old life,

I’m glad, all my rubbed life

I was found,

I was written on a wall in air.

Here

Sometimes

even as I touch you here

I hear whatever

I could never hear or know

away from you.

I hear what we are meant for

outside this room.

A question lies on my bed—

can you tell me?

What is it for the others…

I hear what I could never know

Outside this roomor night

Dream Barker

1965

First Love

How deep we met in the sea, my love,

My double, my Siamese heart, my whiskery,

Fish-belly, glue-eyed prince, my dearest black nudge,

How flat and reflective my eye reflecting you

Blue, gorgeous in the weaving grasses

I wound round for your crown, how I loved your touch

On my fair, speckled breast, or was it my own turning;

How nobly you spilled yourself across my trembling

Darlings: or was that the pull of the moon,

It was all so dark, and you were green in my eye,

Green above and green below, all dark,

And not a living soul in the parish

Saw you go, hélas!

Gone your feathery nuzzle, or was it mine,

Gone your serpentine

Smile wherein I saw my maidenhood smile,

Gone, gone all your brackish shine,

Your hidden curl, your abandoned kill,

Aping the man, liebchen! my angel, my own!

How deep we met, how dark,

How wet! before the world began.

For a Woman Dead at Thirty

No one ever talked like that before, like your

Last white rush in the still light of your

Last, bungled fever: no one will any more.

Now we breathe easier: Love,

Released from itself, blows words of love all over,

Now your hands are crossed down there.

We wanted your whole body behind glass,

And you left just half a footprint,

Half-smiling.

All night, driving,

I wanted to know:

At the turn of light that somewhere

Must still be cock’s crow

You smiled slantwise in the side mirror,

Six months dead: here’s Romance:

You wanted to know.

You Never, you blazing

Negative, o you wavering light in water,

Water I stir up with a stick: wavering rot,

O my sister!

even if I’d known,

All I could have said was that I know.

Miles from Home

Grown, and miles from home, why do I shy

From every anonymous door-slam or dull eye?

The giant-step, the yawn

That streaked my dreams twenty years ago are gone:

The hero and nurse, the smashing Rubens hoof

And fist, the witch who rode my bedroom roof

And made my finger bleed, after all are man and wife

Whose mortal ribs I cracked to water my life,

Whose eyes I weighted keeping my late hours,

Loving my boys, chain-smoking in late, dead bars,

Watching the first light pickle Storrow Drive.

Why did I need that empty space to live?

The hand in the dark was my own, God knows whose cars.

The clay gods lean, and cast shadows under the stars,

Enjoying the blameless flowers on their Boston roof.

The watering-can’s bland nozzle gleams like a hoof.

To Salter’s Point

Frances Wadsworth Valentine 1880-1959

Here in Framingham, black, unlikely

Wheel spoking into mild Republican townships,

I have come to where the world drops off

Into an emptiness that cannot bear

Or lacks the center to compel

The barest sparrow feather’s falling.

Maybe our mortal calling

Is, after all, to fall

Regarded by some most tender care:

But here, the air

Has grown too thin: the world drops off

That could imagine Heaven, or so much care.

Framingham is building. The savage ring

And shake of the drill turn up your morphined sleep.

I fall, still in earth’s monstrous pull,

To kiss your hands, your planeless face.

Oh, you are right

Not to know your death-bed’s place;

To wander in your drugs from Framingham

To Salter’s Point, the long blond beaches where

You and your brothers peeled oranges and swam

While your parents looked on in daguerreotype.

Your iron bedstead there was white like this:

And in this grave, unspeakable night,

Beyond the pull of gravity or care,

You have no place: nor we:

You have taken the summer house, the hedge,

The brook, the dog, our air, our ground down with you,

And all the tall gray children can run

Away from home now and walk forever and ever

And come to nothing but this mouthful of earth,

All endings over.

Lines in Dejection

for my sister

Remember how we spread our hair on the sea,

Phosphorous fans, the moon’s edge crumbling under

Moving pieces of sky? Ghostly weeds loitered

Like misty Thetis’s hair, or some sea-monster’s

Ancient whiskers, floating around our knees;

Moony children, we drifted, and no god or monster

Could have seemed foreign then to our globe of water.

Remember

Lying like still shells on the glass water?

The paper moon opened, a Japanese water flower

Drifting free of its shell in the bowl of the sky.

Who poured it out? In twenty years

The bay is still in its place, they are still there,

Walking slowly by the water.

Have they been here, all along? Have we?

Back, back, I strike out from the ancestral stare

And now the bowl’s shadow composes what I see:

The weeds cradle me and draw me under, under.

But there they are, on the pitch-black ocean