Walhalla, or Valhalla — In Norse mythology, the great hall where Odin receives and feasts the souls of heroes who have fallen bravely in battle.
for Laura Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, here is the world. — Galway Kinnell 1. I thought all along a part of us was sleeping. I felt a word, the gentleness of light on my tongue, I felt your face feeling something was wrong. One kiss once subtle as sekushi, one face halflit in the pillow’s arms, like a pollen-drunk moth dipping down into the dogwood your lips opened then fanned into the softest wind, you are the poise of the monarch I couldn’t net that summer behind Oceanside Rescue Station Number One, it took a hell of a nerve to speak out then, the colors too fragile to touch. Let us die with this taste of music in our mouths. 2. I didn’t mind the daffodil tulip hubbub, it was the six dollar admission that turned me off, I don’t give a damn whose mansion. Pinchot’s is the only breath worth remembering, but I’ll recall the wrens that were indifferent as stones when you undressed, there, in the afternoon, I thought the world, I thought my life was soft. There was a silence like snow settling on my blood there was inside me an unearthly autumn. And it was nothing but the sound of water where it stops; drops dead in the middle of Keowee Lake and reflects and inverts the forest. We’re backward, I think in the fury of my sleep, and tumble and leap from dream to dream like a child unleashed in all of his youth running stone to stone in a stream. 3. And we ran that stream. I don’t know if you have rolled in your uneasy sleep onto the gray that rises when the granite opens, onto the ghost of your father who bought Satulah Mountain, a name that feels good in my mouth. He is the dead moon wobbling just ahead of your earth like a white-painted Cherokee scout. I think you carry him with you through the rotting oaks that crumble even if we look at them wrong and I have looked and I have seen you crumble. It is a fear I have seen settling on your coat, a shadow in which a threat is crouching like a seed, it is the sun that limps like a turtle full of light and creeps and weaves through the trees. If I had it I would give you the stillness of growth that makes the black trees fixtured to the side of the sky not even long to stir. 4. Once when I came home from Cuernavaca we hiked along out of breath into Reddington Pass and you undressed kind of bashfully like a budding girl, I saw Walhalla written on your cheeks. And I saw it once, I think, halfway when I was young, when my grandfather walked me through his garden alone, it was another of those unsure Brooklyn days when the sun came up and took a healthy look and went to hell and hid in the clouds. But he spoke through the ribs of his tank T-shirt a few of his few words no one remembers and I can hear his bronze voice laced with Italian, I can see the plum tomatoes piled in the bushel, and the terrace not peeling where the tendrils coiled, I can feel my fingers hold a grape to the sun and rub against his unshaven face that smiled and was ready to die that summer. 5. Walhalla you are in Whitmire, South Carolina, and in Utah and in eyes I have touched with my eyes, and in seabirds most slow and unreligious of ships, and in onionweed sprouting from the cracks in boulders, not even giving a damn. Walhalla you are the thought I am most afraid of, the doves that rise when at last they are dead with water and silence in their beaks. And in the steam the inmate wipes from a mirror, and the claw of the fiddler that gropes at the wind when the gray gull drops it toward the rocks. Walhalla even if I am a sucker for your music, the al sung twice and then backwards in la, even if I’ll believe until there’s nothing to loose and drop you like a birdcage around my only wife, I still hold faith in the other side of music where the old oak drifts more mute than a barge, and ants, most pious of all the insane, find sleep asleep in their hearts. 6. Laura, when you cried last night I felt my skeleton wobble and I wrapped you with everything left in my arms — we’ve rocked like that for too many hours mumbling into the pillow everything’s ok — not even caring I felt your hair itch my face, we were alone we were dreams that feel out of bed, two gifts that will never be given. And understanding I took this little bit of life and gave it away to myself and you and we both broke down and hugged it between us and slept like the two jagged halves of a promise not even longing to wake.
Walhalla was first published by the South Carolina Arts Commission, in a limited edition of 200 copies, and is available for $2.00 from the Special Programs Coordinator, S.C. Arts Commission, 829 Richland St., Columbia, S.C. 29201.
