STEIN MEHREN
The Summer House
Every autumn we leave something of ourselves
in the summer house. For two days we straighten things up,
then we give in, tossing our junk into
drawers and cupboards, lock the door and walk away
from the house that lies now like a hushed beacon
We come back a few times in the winter
breaking into the dozing locked-down space
breathy in the membranous light. There is the cry of a bird
and faint smells of the lake in the hallway,
the vibrant light of the sea
washing steps, these things dream their own life
encased in a sun-warmed sheath of shadows
projected in restive images over the walls and roof
The last one to lock up must have left his shadow
somewhere behind the blind, dark, doomed roads
And the spaces we left behind us resemble in our memories,
the whispering sweep of the sea. High-ceilinged skies
like the day spring arrives and we open the locked door
knowing the spring’s own summer, its puffs of wind
gusting towards us
Sun Boat
In those times we called one another the high names of strange gods and the barn was a boat of the sun that would soon set forth, the warm breath of the farm animals, rapturous sun in the hay of the heat of sleep, heat of grains, heat of growing. And beneath, the cowshed, within the barn’s deeper self, as if within the belly of a Cosmic Mother. With the cowshed’s floor as an open lane, steaming. Everything was perfectly still. Yet we could sense the animals, growing things, the heavenly bodies, and our bodies trembled.
Remember? There was night upon the land. The grownups called it war. And we were the children of the war. Sent here because our parents were frightened. The barn was the castle of death. In autumn storms, when the wind slammed the doors and the walls were chattering sheathes of summer…suddenly the door would burst open. Deep within the fire we could make out the salamander. The war. I can still see my childhood in there, sparking with flames, in the fire zones of memory.
I’ve met you since then. You smiled as if I still loved you. But it isn’t you I want back. It is my childhood…You should avenge yourself and say: the human brain is a computer. And soon we will have computers that can think, dream, write poetry. All by themselves. I smiled and said: But that is a memory that has neither gender nor childhood…And suddenly the salamander emerges between us. It is as though I was in the barn again. My fingers trace the pattern in the wood and your face begins to shine through. And you have stars all the way down to your eyelids. The growing things, the animals, the heavenly bodies.
Once the barn was the whole world. One with the universe. Childhood’s hay-loft, gleaming walls, galleries of the sun, light like silk and brocade. I don’t know why I think of the great ship that sank to the bottom of time. Sunken deep within the sex of the earth I float desultorily flowing in dreams…I lay within the belly of some huge animal, deep within the brute in him, not yet human. Even in the middle of winter, summer wind gusting through the barn, through the hay, as the light sank to the bottom of itself and the hay glowed fiercely from out of the summer’s rapture.
Childhood’s perilous enchantment, entangled in a web of parental love. Imagos of cocoons, fear and warm contentment. We tore ourselves out of childhood, casting ourselves into each another, so that we might sink to the bottom of one another. It was like allowing heaven and earth to perish in the depths so that they might find a new heaven, a new earth. I remember our childish hugging, even more keenly than I remember us, and the barn as a mire we got stuck in, surviving. Can you remember the animals? Huge glossy animals huffing and puffing, moving like summer magnets somewhere in the darkness. Life streaming in circles of flame behind the vaporous sweaty hides of life. Spring breezes in light gusts through the walls into our blood. Your face, the lead of a family medallion, in a deep space of gray light.
At that very moment the door burst open and a gust of wind blew in from the naked field…mixing the cowshed’s hot breath into a blue veil of twilight. Remember how we lay, like two people trying to discern the meaning of stars, as we gazed through the transparencies of our bodies, opening each other up into our own personal orbits. And suddenly, the heat of the cowshed flowing over our limbs and we knew that we bore the summer as a rapturous sun, deep within ourselves and our heart stamped like beasts in the rooms of desire.
We survive within what is brutish. Remember we dressed up as animals, a Christmas billy-goat and a scarecrow. A game that never knew any end. At night we were swaying through dreams over houses, fields, and hill, in the apparel of animals. We knew we had to get out of it and be human again. I wake at night even now, above my own face. It isn’t life that dies. It’s us who die. Winds, hills, the earth, trees, grasses, the light, are all the same. What is it there that dies? Disappearing so deeply down in sleep and oblivion that it emerges again as what is remembered, as eternity and desire.
I return. It is evening. An evening suddenly illumining, a glint from some long absence. The air cleared and wet, rain-light among the thickets. It was as though time himself were trying to make himself eternal in us. I open the door, a door to my own remembering. I can sense the hay, the heat of the earth, flowing into the empty cowshed, light glaring fantastically. Someone comes to close the door of the cowshed. A person in the opening of light. I can discern the salamander. It Flares up suddenly with a thread of light around it and it becomes human again. I think I can see your face as an open door. The growing things, the animals, the heavenly bodies. In your face, you step our of your gender and I see all the way across death…
Once, a long time ago, you were me. Once, along time ago, I was you. We called each other the high names of strange gods.
The Love of A Woman
It wasn’t his sex, but his childhood
she would have within her. Hounded into some place where
there would be no other choice but her, her. No mere reflection
no, the mirror itself, not his approval, but the cry of the birthing child
is what she would have, his first and last word in the world.
She would have him wail most bitterly in her name,
force his way into a sun
he was to remember nothing but that
With the same hand that would grasp a star, he was
to grasp her, his very being broiling
within his clasping arms. Here, right here, in this world!
In picture after picture he was meant to discover: Her.
Much as the sun might, night after night, discover a moon, pale and
ineluctably still. Should he wish to flee, she was to be the path of his
flight and he was to approach her from all directions, strong
as one who would place a dream upon the heavens: Her!
She would not caress but rather flail him, as a cleft
in the quaking earth. She was to be the only crevice in the wall of
despair, the only place he could possibly plant
his desire…she would know the taste of death within him.
The trapdoor of memory. Rent seams of common sense
and dreams. She knew where she had him, yet others
had had him before. She would send crashing all time within him,
twisting it out of shape, so he would
have to pick up again from the beginning-- with her
For she knew him right down to the faces that lay beneath his skin,
down to her finger tips, and as to his former life, his caresses gave
him away .When he breathed heavily beside her, she could hear moans
and whimperings of other women…ravenous, she would
follow the trail, devouring it, she would have him…lose his mind, all
the better to love him on down into a love he had either forgot
or dreamt. There where he would lose himself totally —there where
he would be split open, surrendering himself completely
There, is where she would, have, him…
Wind before daybreak, you are not wind, you do not
blow, you are a wind before the wind, listening
across the earth…in breaths of light, gusting,
gleaming in ice. As a crown of starry leaves
you blow out the heavens above this land drunk with night,
brightening. You break from seals of the dew,
spheres within spheres, the earth beaming: Light
over sheening spans of water, mirroring
there where birdsongs run like chinks of light, you draw
the skies behind you, a seven-colored robe
of forest wakening within a rushing wind of five seas.
Wind like a wind before the wind, gusted out of the light
into the circulation of waters, the open trembling of the high leaves
As the earth itself, heaven by heaven,
rises from the sea. Like a birth. An embrace.
Like death. Like wind. Everything that trembles in wind
© Stein Mehren 2007