CHRISTMAS–MONTAUK POINT


The foam
blew towards me up the beach
frantically, before the gale, as in a movie that no one
would believe. That was two days before the snow covered
all but the red tips of winter bushes and the sallow dune-grasses, the beach
and the foam different versions of white, the one stable, the other
a changing line that washed the tan margin of sand between them. There were              
                 skipping-stones, and I learned
to skim them onto the trough, parallel to the wave. In this water,
Caroline remarked, you wouldn't last long, her face
reddening in the wind   wanting to blubber, her feet
ached so. There was a barren: dwarf pine
foxes and rabbits, deer. I had been thinking
of the young polish girls, lapins
they were called, whom the nazis
tested their surgery on, removing pieces of their skeletons and sewing them up
                 again. "Bunnies." Never to have children,
never to have rest from pain.
Even at Montauk, where all the roads end, there is a camp and the sand
is filled with bodies. Plumes of mist
on the water.
I had looked for a resolution.
my loved-ones are here. The dead
shall be raised, the radio sings
to me, incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.

 

 

© Mark Weiss

AMTRACK, NEW YORK SOUTH

                                            My virtue is movement
                                            which stealeth contemplation.

In the midst of the marshes
ramshackle houses built on landfill
backing on the dump. Gray fleshly ice
melting into reeds   and an oily river with bridges    scarcely flatter
than the flat marsh and the fog, and suddenly
hills
with trucks    great
tumuli
of buried rubbish. In the valleys
rusted grasses, head-high, and telephone poles
isolate, fragile.

Struck by the neatness of tract homes    each one on its
measured lot    trees
gray, and   
darker
than the fog.

Fragments:
a continuous stream of vine,
tree, and the even stubs
of clipped winter hedges
naked and violent at the edge of the forest. Rusty mulch
of summer's leafage. A dirt track becomes two curved
parallel ditches   still water.

Now, stubble-fields where corn, and at present the only snow
trapped in tractor-tracks at the edges.

And a field of drowning trees.

Would like
to sink into,
to the ankles, feel the leaves
cling there, cold,
and leathery.

Clearings with corrugated buildings in improbable colors    aqua,
turquoise.

A huge factory with a steaming fountain
one story, acres of it,
horizontal.

One wants a generalization.
Cars on a siding, the outskirts of Trenton.

Insistent rain on a greasy puddle
and the cat-like eyes
of a signal-light. The refuse of past
repairs and weedy abandonments.

Turbulent river banks, flooded
trees    maples,
drowning., I think, and a hillside
with houses irregularly planted.

Hard to separate water from pavement.

In a factory district an almost-pastoral mural,
a full block long,
fails to obliterate the grime.

An abnormal life
in which the pressures of phenomena
overwhelm continuity.

A gallery of women's faces.

Going nowhere
for a time to come.

The light transfigured by the coming storm.

A flooded roof become a habitat for gulls.

So    as if by magic
to lift the veil,
and the bride

 

 

© Mark Weiss

from DARK SEASON

VIII
This god grants nothing.
This god grants nothing.
 
Walking into a stiff wind
he mutters his multiplications
as a sort of charm.
 
Atop the hill a flag
whips smartly.
which seems to give direction. For the moment
at this edge of winter
it’s merely blazon of the god of winds
who breathes upon it.
 
Or to put it otherwise
what’s shown is an unsure index.
 
What do you say to cosmetic innocence?
 
The richness of redundancy.
 
From a set of gestures
one constructs a life

 

 

© Mark Weiss

 

 

 

 

SUBWAY TO MANHATTAN

The white light reflected from snow
still falling, and the impact
that has on white faces--cleans
them. From the El, where
Manhattan's boxes were,
a skrim
divides reality. Black men standing by the windows
glow as if burnished, and this section
of Brooklyn becomes a milltown. a skrim
that divides this reality from the facade
of the power that would deny it. On the train
some laugh tiredly, some sleep. And the woman who greeted me upon entry, her face
bubbled with lesions, locked
into quiet astonishment at my start, after years
of seeing it on other faces, as if to say,
"then I must live isolated after all," now underground in a blizzard.

 

 

© Mark Weiss