[Esquire, December 1959
POETRY
Editor's Note
CARSON'S CONCENTRATION in her early writing was not on poetry as is often the case with beginners. She began with plays and a novel and although all of her fiction is musical and poetic, she did not write poetry as such until she was a well-established author. In later years, she liked to have her manuscript in progress read aloud, partially because her vision was more affected by the strokes than she let on and reading was difficult for her, but also, I think, because she listened for the rhythm and the cadence of the language—the sound as well as the meaning of the words.
Although Carson did publish Sweet as a Vickie, Clean as a Pig, a collection of verse for children which she thoroughly enjoyed writing, she published little of her other poetry. What she did publish or record is collected here. Much of what remains in her files is unfinished—that is, there are often several versions of the same poem or handwritten manuscripts that are unclear.
Carson always liked to share her poems on a personal level. "The Dual Angel," which was written in France in 1951, was sent out as her Christmas card that year. She often recited poems for her friends in her soft voice. At the M-G-M recording she recited from memory, as usual, and somehow left out four lines of "Saraband," which on the record is titled "Select Your Sorrows If You Can."
About her poetry, I remember best one evening at a university lecture. After she had recited "Stone Is Not Stone" in her gentle Southern voice, there was a long silence. Then suddenly a young student stood up and said, "Mrs. McCullers, I love you."
The Mortgaged Heart
The dead demand a double vision. A furthered zone,
Ghostly decision of apportionment. For the dead can claim
The lover's senses, the mortgaged heart.
Watch twice the orchard blossoms in gray rain
And to the cold rose skies bring twin surprise.
Endure each summons once, and once again;
Experience multiplied by two—the duty recognized.
Instruct the quivering spirit, instant nerve
To schizophrenic master serve,
Or like a homeless Doppelgänger
Blind love might wander.
The mortgage of the dead is known.
Prepare the cherished wreath, the garland door.
But the secluded ash, the humble bone—
Do the dead know?
[Voices, September—December 1952. In somewhat different form, this poem appeared earlier in New Directions X, 1948.]
When We Are Lost
When we are lost what image tells?
Nothing resembles nothing. Yet nothing
Is not blank. It is configured Hell:
Of noticed clocks on winter afternoons, malignant stars,
Demanding furniture. All untelated
And with air between.
The terror. Is it of Space, of Time?
Or the joined trickery of both conceptions?
To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.
[Voices, September—December 1952 and, in somewhat different form, in New Directions X, 1948. Also recorded for MGM records under the title "When We Are Lost What Image Tells?"]
The Dual Angel
A Meditation on Origin and Choice
INCANTATION TO LUCIFER
Angel disarmed, lay down your cunning, finally tell
The currents, stops and altitudes between Heaven and Hell.
Or were the scalding stars too loud for your celestial velleities,
The everlasting zones of emptiness uncanny to your imperious hand?
Did you admit the shocks and shuttles of the circumstance,
And were the aeons ever sinister
Or were they just vulgar as a marathon dance?
Did you keep camping all through chaos
Comparing colors of infinity to neon lights?
Forever were you inconsolable during the downward flight
Spurning the comfort of affinity and rose, the rest of sunset, clarity,
Avoiding rainbows in that desperate clash against the stars?
Your tearless wizardry soon caught the rhyme
Of universe, the planetary chimes, atomic quandary.
It took you only a zone or two to riddle
The top-secret density relating Space to Time.
Did once your hurtling senses turn
To paradise that you had robbed and spurned?
Did you once wonder, one time weep?
As earth nears, turn again defaulting eyes to paradise,
Defaulting eyes, turn once again
With the presentiment of further bliss
Before you shudder with the first and final kiss.
HYMEN, O HYMEN
It was the time when the newest star was inchoate
And there were only revolving seas and land still malleable.
There was no garden at that time—but there was God.
For when the sun burst God chose the minority side of firmament
And settled on earth to study an experiment.
We know nothing of that meeting, nothing at all
Only the protean firelight fearful on the wall.
Since we only know it happened it's anybody's guess
How abdicated angel asked for and found God's rest.
Ecce, the emperor of velocity and glare
The splendor from his awful odyssey, his starlit hair
Landed on a rim of ocean, striding to shore
The radiant grace and arrogance before
The blue-veined instep faltered and slowly dimmed the pirate eyes.
Ecce, the quailing emperor against a violet sea and the primeval skies.
Behold this homage to a majesty almost impossible to explain
For after the heavenly holdup God was left rather plain.
Deliberate and unadorned, but after all what need
Of scepter had the hand that hewed the Universe?
And ruler of infinity has little use for speed.
His visage black with wind and sun, almighty hand vibrant with strife
Feeling in blank mysterious seas the secret miracle of life.
Imagine the encounter when the polarities chance
When stars of love and sorrow met Satan's jeweled glance.
We are told nothing of conception, really nothing at all.
Only the firelit symbols of an antique nurse scary and changing on the wall.
We are told nothing
Of the vibrato of desire remorseless
Until the solar-plexal swinging
Orchestrates to all flesh singing.
Post coitum, omnia tristia sunt.
Sadness, then sleep, the blaze of noon, love's gladness.
There was no witness of this bridal night
Only azoic seascape and interlocking angels' might.
So now we speculate with filial wonder,
Fabricate that night of love and ponder
On the quietude of Satan in our Father's arms:
Velocity stilled, the restful shade.
Satan we can understand—but what was God's will
That cosmic night before we were made?
The next day He completed His experiment
Found in the seas that atom He willed alive
Nursed in His awesome hand, taught to survive
The shock of creation, watched with His love and care
Astride in ocean and unknowing that Satan's ocean-skipping eye was there
Envisaging end in the beginning, wrestling with God's life,
The eye of guile had sliced the atom with Satanic knife.
LOVE AND THE RIND OF TIME
What is Time that man should be so mindful:
The earth is aged 500 thousand millions of years,
/> Allowing some hundred thousand millions of margin for error
And man evolving a mere half-million years of consciousness,
twilight and terror
Only a flicker of eternity divides us from unknowing beast
And how far are we from the fern, the rose, essential yeast?
Indeed in these light aeons how far
From animal to evening star?
Skip time for now and fix the eye upon eternity
Eye gazing backward or forward it is the same
Whether Mozart or short-order cook with an infirmity
Except the illuminations alter their shafts
Except we would rather be Mozart, we want to last as long as
possible, to radiate, to sing
Although in eternity it may be the same thing.
In God's cosmos according to report
Nothing lapses, no gene is lost
After centuries may bustle in the sport
Which will in time command the line.
Those who find it a little harder to live
And therefore live a little harder,
As struggling gene in oceanic plant
Predestine voluntary cells that give
The evolutionary turn to fish, then beast
With multiplying brain that dominates earth's feasts.
From weed to dinosaur through the peripheries of stars
From furtherest star imperiled on the rind of time,
How long to core of love in human mind?
THE DUAL ANGEL
The world dazed by Satanic glares
Like country children spangled-eyed at county fairs
Seeing no terror in trapeze, kinetic thrill of zones above listening,
And the unheeded shrill of the world lost, rocketing in space,
Despairs of those who are struck down upon Hell's floor and die
—or crawl awhile a little more.
The screams are heard by blasted ears within the radiation zone
And hanging eyes upon a cheek must see the charred and iridescent craze—
Earth orphaned by atom, each man alone.
The furious intellect relating furtherest space to beyondest time,
Exalting abstractions, vaulting the 123,
Defaulting from the simplest kinship, disjoining man from man,
Seeing across oceans, and stumbling on a grain of sand. Almighty God!
After the half a million years this is the century of decision
Between obscenest suicide and Man's transfigured vision.
Here are the flowering plant, beast and the dual angel,
The living who struggles with the weight of dead and,
Recognizing victory, surmises radiance in lead.
FATHER, UPON THY IMAGE WE ARE SPANNED
Why are we split upon our double nature, how are we planned?
Father, upon what image are we spanned?
Turning helpless in the garden of right and wrong
Mocked by the reversibles of good and evil
Heir of the exile. Lucifer, and brother of Thy universal Son
Who said it is finished when Thy synthesis was just begun.
We suffer the sorrow of separation and division
With a heart that blazes with Christ's vision:
That though we be deviously natured, dual-planned,
Father, upon Thy image we are spanned.
AVE
[Mademoiselle, July 1952, and Botteghe Oscure IX, 1952. On copies sent to friends at Christmas 1951, Carson McCullers noted that it had been written "August 1951, London-December 1951, Nyack."]
Stone Is Not Stone
There was a time when stone was stone
And a face on the street was a finished face.
Between the Thing, myself and God alone
There was an instant symmetry.
Since you have altered all my world this trinity is twisted:
Stone is not stone
And faces like the fractioned characters in dreams are incomplete
Until in the child's inchoate face
I recognize your exiled eyes.
The soldier climbs the glaring stair leaving your shadow.
Tonight, this torn room sleeps
Beneath the starlight bent by you.
[Mademoiselle, July 1957. Also recorded for M-G-M records under the title, "There Was a Time When Stone Was Stone." An earlier version, called "Twisted Trinity," appeared in Decision II, 1941.]
Saraband
Select your sorrows if you can,
Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile.
Adjust to a world divided
Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles
What natural alchemy lends
To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair
The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth's fabled stare.
If you must cross the April park, be brisk:
Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar
Lest you be held as a security risk
Solicit only the evening star.
Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster
And higgledy piggledy giggle once begun
Crown a host of unassorted sorrows
You never could manage one by one.
The world that jibes your tenderness
Jails your lust.
Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts
Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk:
It may be only you can understand:
On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold
When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl
The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man
Beat on the ocean's floor the same saraband.
[Recorded for M-G-M records under the title, "Select Your Sorrows If You Can."]
The Mortgaged Heart Page 30