Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003
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Winner of the National Book Award in Poetry (2004)
Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain."
Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects—love, and death, and the soul. Her images—strange, canny visions of the unknown self—clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.
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Door in the Mountain - Jean Valentine
ALSO BY JEAN VALENTINE
The Lighthouse Keeper, Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor, editor
WESLEYAN POETRY
DOOR in the
MOUNTAIN
New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003
J E A N V A L E N T I N E
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS • MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
for Pesha & Rebecca
with love
Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459
This collection © 2004 by Jean Valentine
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Valentine, Jean.
Door in the mountain: new and collected poems, 1965-2003 / Jean Valentine.
p. cm.—(Wesleyan poetry)
Includes indexes.
ISBN 0-8195-6712-4 (cloth: alk. paper)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3572.A39D66 2004
2004016019
8II'.54—dc22
Contents
Acknowledgments
NEW POEMS
Annunciation
*
In our child house
Nine
The girl
Mother
Eighteen
She Sang
A Bone Standing Up
The Hawthorn Robin Mends with Thorns
Out in a sailboat
I came to you
*
Cousin
The Very Bad Horse
Once
So many secrets
Eleventh Brother
Once in the nights
Under the gold
The Windows
Go Clear
The Coin
October morning
I heard my left hand
In the evening
*
We cut the new day
Occurrence of White
How have I hurt you?
Do flies remember us
You drew my head
The little, faintly blue clay eggs
Happiness (3)
Letter
I could never let go
The Basket House
The House and the World
In your eyes
Woman, Leaving
Trim my hoofs
Two Poems for Matthew Shepard
The Blue Dory, the Soul
The Rally
The Growing Christ of Tzintzuntzan
Sheep
To the Bardo
Rodney Dying (4)
*
Door in the Mountain
Monarch butterfly
My old body
Inkwell daybreak
The path between
The Night Sea
The Shirt
One Foot in the Dark
A weed green
Fears: Night Cabin
so wild
I have lived in your face
A goldfinch in the rain
The grain of the wood
The push or fly
I would be
Avalon
Do you remember?
Advent Calendar
We didn’t know each other
Touch with your finger
Noon in the Line Outside
Inside
Your number is lifting off my hand
*
The Needle North
The Passing
In the Burning Air
Little house
*
Notes
DREAM BARKER (1965)
First Love
For a Woman Dead at Thirty
Miles from Home
To Salter’s Point
Lines in Dejection
Sleep Drops Its Nets
Déjà-vu
Sunset at Wellfleet
Asleep over Lines from Willa Cather
Cambridge by Night
To a Friend
Waiting
Sasha and the Poet
The Second Dream
A Bride’s Hours
1. Dawn
2. The Bath
3. Night
Afterbirth
Sarah’s Christening Day
Tired of London
Cambridge, April 27, 1957
New York, April 27, 1962
September 1963
Riverside
For Teed
My Grandmother’s Watch
The Beast with Two Backs
The Little Flower
Sex
Adam and Eve: Poem on Folded Paper
Dream Barker
To My Soul
PILGRIMS (1969)
I
The Couples
Fireside
Solomon
In the Museum
By the Boat Pond
The Summer House
Woods
Her dream: the child
Orpheus and Eurydice
Goodbye
Separation
Thinking about Cain
Dearest
II
April
Broken-down Girl
Bin Dream, West College East, D-11
Bin Dream #2, Interview with Stravinsky
Death House
Archangel
Half an Hour
Visiting Day at School
The Child Jung
Coltrane, Syeeda’s Song Flute
Photograph of Delmore Schwartz
The Torn-down Building
Moon Man
The Child and the Terrorist, The Terrorist and the Child
Night
Pilgrims
ORDINARY THINGS (1974)
I
After Elegies
‘Autumn Day’
He said,
Forces
Kin
Anesthesia
After Elegies (2)
II
3 A.M. in New York
Space
Letter from a Country Room
A Child’s Death
Revolution
Three Voices One Night in the Community Kitchen
The Knife
Seeing L’Atalante
III
Twenty Days’ Journey
by Huub Oosterhuis, translated from the Dutch with Judith Herzberg
IV
This Hate
This Minute
Couvre-Feu: after Paul Eluard
Fidelities
Susan’s Photograph
Outside the Frame
Forces (2): Song
*
Notes
THE MESSENGER (1979)
Beka, 14
Dufy Postcard
The Field
Living Together
Here Now
The Forgiveness Dream: Man from the Warsaw Ghetto
Turn
Prayer in Fever
Working
Silences: A Dream of Governments
After Elegies (3)
The Messenger
Two Translations
Huub Oosterhuis: Orpheus
Osip Mandelstam: 394
Solitudes
December 21st
Sanctuary
What Happened
Turn (2): After Years
The Burden of Memory
February 9th
Love and Work
: Freud Dying
Letter from a Stranger
Actuarial File
Lines from a Story
March 21st
*
Notes
HOME.DEEP.BLUE (1989)
Willi, Home
To Raphael, angel of happy meeting
Primitive Painting: Liberation Day
Awake, This Summer
Mandelstam
The Drinker’s Wife Writes Back
Birthday Letter from South Carolina
The Counselor Retires, and Then He Dies
Juliana
Visit
Snow Landscape, in a Glass Globe
Everything Starts with a Letter
About Love
Little Song in Indian Summer
The King
High School Boyfriend
Tonight I Can Write…
Trust Me
THE RIVER AT WOLF (1992)
X
Spring and Its Flowers
The Summer Was Not Long Enough
Still Life, for Matisse
Still Life: in the Epidemic
Ikon
The Year of the Snake
The One You Wanted to Be Is the One You Are
Ironwood
Bud
To a Young Poet
Foraging
Alfred and the Abortion
Redemption
Seeing You
The Free Abandonment Blues
The First Station
Night Lake
The Badlands Said
The Missouri Speaks
The River at Wolf
The Ring
Barrie’s Dream, the Wild Geese
Fox Glacier
Lindis Pass, Borage
By the Tekapo River, 100 Degrees
After Consciousness of This Big Form
Everyone Was Drunk
In Fear (1)
In Fear (2)
In This Egg
The Under Voice
Come Akhmatova
James Wright: in Memory
Wish-Mother
At Cullen’s Island
The Wisdom Gravy
American River Sky Alcohol Father
The Morning of My Mother’s Death
The Night of My Mother’s Death
Second Mother
The Sea of Serenity
My Mother’s Body, My Professor, My Bower
Butane
At My Mother’s Grave
We Go Through Our Mother’s Things
Death Asphodel
To the Memory of David Kalstone
The First Angel
At the Door
Yield Everything, Force Nothing
Alone, Alive
Flower
Skate
Guardian Angel in New York
To Plath, to Sexton
The Power Table
GROWING DARKNESS, GROWING LIGHT (1997)
Rain
Sick, Away from Home
Friend
Homesick
New Life
Bees
The Tractors
River Jordan
Night Porch
*
World-light
Snow Family
To the Black Madonna of Chartres
Tell Me, What Is the Soul
Mastectomy
Secret Room, Danger House
Red for Blood
Yellow for Gold
Green for the Land
Black for the People
Home
Long Irish Summer Day
*
Dog Skin Coat
Fellini in Purgatory
Elegy for Jane Kenyon
You Are Not One in a Sequence
Alcohol
Where Do You Look for Me?
Documentary: AIDS Support Group
Poem with Words by Thornton Dial
A Bit of Rice
The Night of Wally’s Service, Wally Said,
Rodney Dying
Rodney Dying (2)
Father Lynch Returns from the Dead
The Baby Rabbits in the Garden
*
Mother and Child, Body and Soul
Soul
Soul (2)
The Mother Dreams
Fistula
Soul (3)
*
Open Heart
Listening
THE CRADLE OF THE REAL LIFE (2000)
Part I
The Pen
Elegy for Jane Kenyon (2)
Black Wolf
Mother Bones
They lead me
Your mouth appeared to me
Mare and Newborn Foal
Truth
October Premonition
Rodney Dying (3)
November
Labrador
1945
Leaving
Running for a train
The Welsh poet
Radio: Poetry Reading, NPR
The Tower Roof
For a Woman Dead at Thirty (2)
The Blind Stirring of Love
Little Map
The Drinker
The Drinker (2)
Happiness
Happiness (2): The I Ching
He leaves them:
Away from you
Child
Part II: Her Lost Book
1.
2.
3.
Index of Titles and First Lines
Acknowledgments
The following sections of this volume were previously published as books.
Dream Barker. Copyright © 1965 by Yale University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press.
Pilgrims. Copyright © 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by Jean Valentine. First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1969.
Ordinary Things. Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974 by Jean Valentine. First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1974.
The Messenger. Copyright © 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Jean Valentine. First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1979.
Home.Deep.Blue. Copyright © 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Jean Valentine. Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books.
The River at Wolf. Copyright © 1992 by Jean Valentine. Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books.
Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Copyright © 1997 by Jean Valentine. First published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1997.
The Cradle of the Real Life. Copyright © 2000 by Jean Valentine.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals in which the poems in Door in the Mountain first appeared: American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Boston Book Review, <canwehaveourballback.com>, Hayden's Ferry, Heliotrope, Kestrel, Luna, Massachusetts Review, The New Yorker (Sheep,
My old body,
One Foot in the Dark
); Ohio Review, Persephone, Poetry Ireland, Two Rivers, U.S. I Worksheets, van Gogh's Ear, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Washington Square Review.
Also to the following anthologies: Best American Poems 2002, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, The Book of Irish American Poetry, Hammer and Blaze, and Poetry After 9/11.
To the editors, and to Dorland Mountain, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, my deep thanks.
New Poems
Annunciation
I saw my soul become flesh breaking open
the linseed oil breaking over the paper
running down pouring
no one to catch it my life breaking open
no one to contain it my
pelvis thinning out into God
*
In our child house
In our child house
our mother read to us:
England:
there the little
English boy would love us under
neath a tree:
not kill us:
that was white space only
like her childhood like her
father her sorrow
Nine
Your hand on my knee
I couldn't move
The heat felt good
I couldn't move
The shutmouth mother goes down the stairs
and drinks warm whiskey
she always goes
and drinks warm whiskey
down in the corner: Hand-
me-down:
And everything on the hair
of starting again.
The girl
spills the half-gallon of milk on the floor.
The milk is all over the floor, the table,
the chairs, the books, the dinner, the windows
—Mother and son are gone happy.
The father to work.
The sister to marriage.
The girl is still spilling
the milk-house
white negative shining
out of one life into another life.
Mother
in your white dress
your smoke
your opaque eye
you whose name
my foot
wrote
I had to die
break the rope
push through the stone fence
of you, of myself, and fly
Eighteen
Green bookbag full of poems
I leaned with my bicycle
at the black brick edge of the world
What was I, to be lost
or found?
My soul in the corner
stood
watched
*
Girl and boy
we had given each other
*
I gave up signing in
to the night book
little notes in time
signing our names
on the train's engine car
gray 19th century Irish men
in our gray stiff clothes
She Sang
Save the goat of humanity!
She started out
shot through with love books
She chose closed hearts
those she knew
would not kill her
Save her memory her bones
dig under the house
dig near home
here at the X in the mouth of the house
the shell shocked woman all her bones
goat bones
A Bone Standing Up
A bone standing up
she worked for words
word by word
up Mt. Fear till
she got to her name: it was
She Sang.
The Hawthorn Robin Mends with Thorns
Talking with Mary about 1972:
like a needle
through my 25-years-
older breast my years thinner rib: 1972:
a child-life
away from my children:
"but you couldn't have been different
from the way you were"
but I would to have been different
Out in a sailboat
Out in a sailboat with the warden
he says so-and-so weighs 95 lbs. now
says she slept with him
because he was kind
when she was in prison
She woke up
hypnotized
A wonderful boat
She woke up
walking with the homeless
on a plank
no red schlock rope
I came to you
I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence
of this world
no, not the world, not reticence, oh
Lord Come
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground.
*
Cousin
The erotic brown fedora on the desk:
the erotic silver watch from your father's time
balanced on its thin hinged silver lid
on the Teacher's Desk:
Once or twice, someone comes along
and you stand up in the air
and the air rises up out of the air:
One leaf
then branches
stood up in the sun consuming
—Cousin, it was happiness on earth.
The Very Bad Horse
The very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones.
—The Buddha
My first own home
my big green bed-sit
in London, in 1956
double bed green spread
sixpence coin-fed gas fire
London fog huge little footsteps