Auguries of Innocence Read online

  Auguries of Innocence

  Patti Smith

  A skylark wounded in the wing,

  A Cherubim does cease to sing.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  Contents

  Epigraph

  The Lovecrafter

  Worthy the Lamb Slain for Us

  Sleep of the Dodo

  The Long Road

  A Pythagorean Traveler

  Desert Chorus

  Written by a Lake

  The Oracle

  The Setting and the Stone

  The Mast Is Down

  The Blue Doll

  Eve of All Saints

  She Lay in the Stream Dreaming of August Sander

  Fourteen

  Birds of Iraq

  Marigold

  Tara

  To His Daughter

  The Pride Moves Slowly

  The Leaves Are Late Falling

  Wilderness

  The Geometry Blinked Ruin Unimaginable

  Fenomenico

  Three Windows

  Our Jargon Muffles the Drum

  Death of a Tramp

  Mummer Love

  The Writer’s Song

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE LOVECRAFTER

  I saw you who was myself

  slightly stooped whistling mouth

  with leather sack and breeches brown

  striding the naked countryside

  with summer bones long and dry

  into the breadth of our glad day

  mid afternoon the longer night

  as you tread bareheaded bright

  I saw you a wraith bemoan

  stir the fires of the ancient ones

  scarred with sticks pome and haw

  as the nectar for their script

  I saw you walk the length of fields

  far as the finger of Providence

  far as the mounds we call hills

  ranges cut from the heart of slate

  I saw you dip into your sack

  scattering seeds where they may

  as the woodsman hews his way

  through oak ash and variant pines

  for writing desks that shall reflect

  a sheaf of lines that speak of trees

  all sober hopes required within

  all drunkenness as sacred swims

  I saw the book upon the shelf

  I saw you who was myself

  I saw the empty sack at last

  I saw the branch your shadow cast

  WORTHY THE LAMB SLAIN FOR US

  On the edge of a pasture in a confusion of stones,

  obscured by the long grass and floramour,

  the footprint of horror cloven and drawn.

  She had a beautiful name: freedom.

  Pretty little chop. Unmarketable, light

  the bleating of new life.

  He loved her mouth, tiny feet dressed in pleats.

  Hearing her cry, he picked her up by the stem

  of her throat in his thick arms slick with dew.

  And he, a governed soul, broad shouldered

  with eyes like Blake, lamented who bred thee, nursed

  thee on mead and flowers, as he ripped her apart.

  The barn was burning an indifferent hell,

  engulfing little maids in their curly coats.

  The field and fell lay empty as the heart.

  He called to his god gasping for breath

  we abandoned the farms we culled,

  cut the cord, incinerated our little ones.

  We did it for love we did it for man,

  the hawthorn and the cuckoo,

  the footpaths of Cumbria.

  We did it for a beautiful name.

  freedom, baa baa baa,

  nothing you could put your finger on.

  SLEEP OF THE DODO

  The dodo sleeping, dreaming of himself,

  lost in his daily doings. His wife mounted

  in a menagerie of mogul extremes.

  His children born and slain for sport,

  with nary a nod save the wind,

  echoing an old dance tune.

  Funny squawks: coracoo, coracoo

  swept by mist into the grotto,

  the sugar plantation. Funny beaks

  bobbing the swamp’s dreaming pond.

  Comic bodies washed up on the craggy

  shore. Funny bones, then no more.

  The sun hung, bled into the clouds.

  God’s bloodshot eyes, such sad surprise.

  The dodo awoke, and seeing them,

  slowly closed his own again.

  Out of this world, into the indistinct

  memory of a line that had forgotten itself.

  THE LONG ROAD

  Here we had best on tiptoe tread

  While I for safety march ahead.

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  We tramped in our black coats,

  sweeping time, sweeping time,

  sleeping in abandoned chimneys,

  emerging to face the rain.

  Wet, bedraggled, a bit gone,

  trudging the grooves, chewing bulbs,

  we were so hungry, tulips

  blazed with ragged petals.

  We adorned ourselves in pennywort,

  slogged ’til spent the elected front,

  the whisper of a trail we somehow knew,

  rain that was not rain, tears not yet tears.

  And the grail, oh the grail was just this close,

  finished with foil, wrapped in sun.

  Gladiolas were in bloom, bursting

  from every crack. The whole world

  anxious for holy mother to inspect

  our chins with this familiar song—

  Do you like butter?

  Oh you like butter…

  then set upon a hill yellow everywhere.

  We mounted horses, rambled forests

  mischievous fairies danced underfoot.

  Branches snapped in our faces.

  Our kingdom behind a chain link fence…

  We grappled in the quarries, polished marbles,

  knelt and shot for spoils in fervent circles.

  We set up our furious camps,

  our tents punctured with pegs,

  nicked with pocket knives—

  little foxes gauging the hard earth,

  cursing the bottomland for making us soft.

  We gathered rye, stuffed sacks, made pillows

  for our men. We wrung the blood from soaking beds,

  covered the martyrs’ rolling heads, balanced

  the buckets filled to the brim,

  and we saw nothing and everything.

  We rode on the back of the great bear, dipping our ladle

  into the milky liquor spread like a white lake before us.

  Our ships boasted obscenities scribbled

  on parchment sails, floating illiterate rivers overturned

  in bloody pools of rainwater muck.

  We blew songs of praise into horns of sacred animals—

  catcalls, confessions, teenage prayers

  woven into tapestries of cloistered gardens.

  No mother had we now, and rapping infinitesimal threads,

  vows erupted with a new violence bearing no ill will

  save to be born—our allegiance to motion

  and the movement of the stars.

  A blue light projected from the cap of a being

  we could no longer name. We climbed the stairs

  into a bluer heaven scarred with streamers,

  bleeding the wind. We savored the spectacle.

  Then it disappeared, but we were already gone.


  We possessed a new radiance. Dew dropped

  from our noses. We boasted shining skin,

  shedding it without a sigh. Some raised their lanterns.

  Some seemed to walk in a light of their own.

  Fiery mounds that were not mounds, on the horizon…

  Drawing closer we fell upon masses of greatcoats

  abandoned by admiralty, deposed kings’ purple,

  medals of honor, regulation boots of dog tongue leather,

  chits, animal hides, ermine and fleece worn by those

  of high rank, princes and pilots, the magus and mystic.

  Yet no rank had we fishing glad rags woven by the blind.

  Ours was a country of sockets. They were empty.

  And yet within one would find all a child hopes—

  our own sweet story, our own sweet life,

  cut with the cloth of ecstatic strife.

  Once we knew where we were going, we leapt

  in consecrated coats. We could have gone on forever

  if not for this and that pulling at the starch of our sleeves.

  We broke our mother’s heart and became ourselves.

  We proceeded to breathe and therefore to leave,

  drunken, astonished, each of us a god.

  Now you turn out the light.

  Press your thumb to the wick.

  If it sticks, you will burn.

  If it goes poof, you will turn

  into a beam that will extinguish

  with the night into a dream

  peppered with gimcracks.

  We saw the eyes of Ravel, ringed in blue, and blinking

  twice. We sang arias of our own, bummers chanting

  dead blues of hallowed ground and mortal shoes,

  of forgotten infantries and distances never dreamed—

  yet only as far as a human hill, turned for wooden soldiers

  stationed in the folds of blankets, only as far as a sibling’s hand,

  as far as sleep, a father’s command—

  …the long road my children.

  We broke from our moth husks alive in the night,

  the sky smeared with stars we no longer see.

  A child’s creed stitched on handkerchiefs—

  God does not abandon us

  we are all he knows.

  We must not abandon him,

  he is ourselves

  the ether of our deeds.

  The whistling hobo calls, sweeping time,

  sweeping time. We sleep. We scheme, pressing the vibrant string.

  Happily self conscious, we begin again.

  A PYTHAGOREAN TRAVELER

  Awoke in a light not known before

  the lodging’s glass door mirroring

  a likeness not hoped to glimpse again

  clouds of my childhood, clouds of God

  that supported the feet of Jesus Christ

  ascending the brush of Raphael.

  The young on their motorbikes do not lift

  their heads nor cry: The clouds, the clouds.

  They are always there—Mediterranean arias

  mounting with swift and terrible calm.

  Do they know me? Do they know I am here,

  scribbling as they are decomposing?

  The moon rises filled with moon blood

  drawn from the Italian skies. Here Byron

  unwound his turban and shook out his locks

  as gulls dropped into the sea. The moon

  knew her rival and hung like an ornament

  from the ear of a bright deity curling his lips,

  expelling great puffs, the clouds of San Remo.

  I will sit here until dawn tripping the spine

  of the stars, a Pythagorean traveler marveling

  another numerical scheme, adding to his shoulder

  a music not heard but attained.

  Beauty alone is not immortal.

  It is the response, a language of cyphers,

  notes, and strokes riding off on a cloud charger—

  the bruised humps of magnificent whales.

  Clouds of my childhood, clouds of God

  awash in rose, violet, and gold.

  DESERT CHORUS

  In the rich chorus of night, cosseted

  beneath a web of diamonds, tiny

  as mosquito eyes, a stranger mourns

  the brevity of desert rain

  a swaddled enemy’s cries.

  Soon the sun will ascend over Libya.

  Can it matter? We have bombed

  Benghazi. A dazed warhead struck

  the compound of our foe lying alive,

  his eyes white, black rimmed.

  He could be heard crying in the desert

  with arms now orphaned,

  his infant swept into a burlap sack.

  To what purpose?

  The gold leaf of surrender?

  The sun will ascend. Can it matter?

  A poet sealed in skin disrobed, split.

  Jean Genet, a thief in flight,

  astray in the weave laid down

  his arms spiraling in a length

  of mosquito netting, dotted with eyes

  of onyx, blinking above a one-star

  Paris hotel indifferent to a bugger

  a swaggering son of a bitch.

  How shall his soul be redeemed

  If not suffered by a little girl?

  The dawn breaks the tempered heart

  exposing a love for all things.

  Hana Qaddafi, child of the flowers,

  lead him across the violent threshold

  where his marvelous pals await.

  His prison a house of cards

  collapsing in columns of roses—

  a garland for your head.

  Let your ashes anoint him.

  He will magnify your name.

  Opal hands gathering you

  in a bridal train.

  WRITTEN BY A LAKE

  New Year’s Day. Rain. Two candles light the room where they sleep. He writes. She confesses. This is where she weeps. She is the cause of the rain. She could not stop weeping and the sky obliged to follow.

  (How is it mapped? What is the refrain? Why must the sky follow?) The heart drops in the center of an inexhaustible lake. How light the heart appears, yet how weighty a thing. A powerful stone carved in the shape of an organ with chambers pumping. How slick a shadow it leaks as its signature. Sticky, oxblood, the color of new shoes. High topped, gold laced and worn with expectations poised to ride out life on horseback. Racing from hill to hill with humor, horror, bits of Spanish stitched on sleeves.

  The work wrung with this cry. Look you radiant wash yard. The sheets billow. Their wet folds tell a tale. Once there was a girl who walked straight, yet she was truly lame. She walked upright in new boots, yet I tell you her feet were bare. She lives forever, yet she lies buried in a vault of fertile air.

  New Year’s Day. The wicks twist. The insistent mirror winks. An eye with time as her lashes. And if he—slipping at last, face pressed against the glass, releasing beads of spittle from parting lips—should suddenly speak, what would he say? And if she, shaken from her torpor, should rise to write, what would she write? Their table is laid with the promise of the lake. Water sighs for want of blood. It is nothing. These remains, malleable ash, are nothing. Signs for want of substance. A sack of sticks spilling order upon the surface. Words traced on a slab hewn from another forested mind.

  a postscript prefiguring—

  Your fingers press the door triggering a spring exposing the hard corner where you have walked. You shall not stumble. Offer a fist encasing rivets extracted from the wet pout of this time or that. Prick the hour’s hand with nothing but eyes. Think nothing of it. For what remains to flush is nothing but salt jamming the mechanism of formal delights, former misery. Nothing but salt to bundle and fling over a shoulder. Nothing but clumps of salt to toss, years later, like dice across a board of glass where you’ll sit on a ledge c
ircling a glowing body, unfastening the dressings of a burden gone. The cremation of all my sorrow—may you spread the singed grains with your fingers, and without thought brush them aside.

  Thus free to drown in sorrow of your own, may you sit in the shadows of our lost life, immersed in stillness, flanked by translucent hills, one a mountain coated immaculate and ringed at the throat with beads of cloud.

  These words were written by a lake.

  String them around a wrist. Do not grip a sword or draw what might be drawn, for wisdom is a dying bird, engraved on a palm. Next to nothing. And these words were written by a lake, before being as being was scripted and dealt. A pack of lives, each with a winning face, each with this blushing command:

  Prick this. This moment the hand is free.

  THE ORACLE

  He was a stone boy divined by his sister.

  She slept standing while he by the rim

  played with a ball the color of water,

  gazing all reason therein.

  He was summoned to the sibylline barren,

  carried by sweetness his mouth drew the spring.

  They rejoined through the ball of water,