How to Do Things With Tears

By Allen Grossman b. 1932 Allen Grossman

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels

Of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.

Whack. Dying. And then death. Whack. Learning. Learned.

Whack. Breathing. And breath. Whack. Gone with the wind.

I am old. The direction of time is plain:

As the daylight, never without direction,

Rises in a direction, east to west,

And sets in a direction, west to east,

Walking backwards all night long, underground;

So, this bright water is bent on its purpose—

To find the meadow path to the shore and then

The star (“Sleepless”) by which the helmsman winds

And turns. Zion of mind! This is the way:

Towards nightfall the wind shifts offshore, north by

Northwest, closing the harbor to sail

And it stiffens, raising the metal water

In the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.

The water shines. In the raking light is

Towed the great ship home, upwind, everything

Furled. And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

A castaway, in the body alone,

Under the gates of Erebus—the meeting

Place of daylight underground and night wind

Shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

Ravelled banners streaming to the south-east

Like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind

Shifts and rises and the light fails in the long

School room of the setting sun. What is left

To mind but remembrances of the world?

The people of the road, in tears, sit down

At the road-side and tell stories of the world

Then they rise again in tears and go up.

The mill sits in the springs. Water wheels whack

Round: Alive, whack. Dying, whack. Dead whack. Nothing.

How, then, to do things with tears?—Deliver us,

Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

Source: How to Do Things with Tears (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2001)

Biography

Poet and critic Allen R. Grossman occupies a unique position in contemporary American letters: though influenced by the modernism and post-modernism that shaped so many poets of his generation, Grossman does not align himself with any one poetic community. Instead, his poetry is often described as coming out of the Romantic tradition of lyric poetry, and he writes in a high style, reflecting the influence of William Butler . . .

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