Collected Poems
Page 6
The little tailors busily sitting
Flashing their shears in rival haste
Won’t spare time for a prior fitting—
In with the stitches, too late to baste.
They say the season for doubt has passed:
The changes coming are due to last.
UNSOUNDED
Mariner unpracticed,
In this chartless zone
Every navigator
Fares unwarned, alone.
Each his own Magellan
In tropics of sensation:
Not a fire-scorched stone
From prior habitation,
Not an archaic hull
Splintered on the beach.
These are latitudes revealed
Separate to each.
DESIGN IN LIVING COLORS
Embroidered in a tapestry of green
Among the textures of a threaded garden,
The gesturing lady and her paladin
Walk in a path where shade and sunlight harden
Upon the formal attitudes of trees
By no wind bent, and birds without a tune,
Against the background of a figured frieze
In an eternal summer afternoon.
So you and I in our accepted frame
Believe a casual world of bricks and flowers
And scarcely guess what symbols wander tame
Among the panels of familiar hours.
Yet should the parting boughs of green reveal
A slender unicorn with jeweled feet,
Could I persuade him at my touch to kneel
And from my fingers take what unicorns eat?
If you should pick me at my whim a rose,
Setting the birds upon the bush in flight,
How should I know what crimson meaning grows
Deep in this garden, where such birds alight?
And how should I believe, the meaning clear,
That we are children of disordered days?
That fragmentary world is mended here,
And in this air a clearer sunlight plays.
The fleeing hare, the wings that brush the tree,
All images once separate and alone,
Become the creatures of a tapestry
Miraculously stirred and made our own.
We are the denizens of a living wood
Where insight blooms anew on every bough,
And every flower emerges understood
Out of a pattern unperceived till now.
WALDEN 1950
Thoreau, lank ghost, comes back to visit Concord,
Finds the town like all towns, much the same—
A little less remote, less independent.
The cars hurl through from dawn to dawn toward Boston
Paying out speed like a lifeline between towns.
Some of them pause to look at Alcott’s house.
No farmer studies Latin now; the language
Of soil and market would confound a scholar;
And any Yankee son with lonesome notions
Would find life harder in the town today.
Under the trees by Walden Pond, the stalls
Where summer pilgrims pause beside the road,
Drown resinous night in busy rivalry
While the young make boisterous love along the shores.
He used to hear the locomotive whistle
Sound through the woods like a hawk’s restless cry.
Now the trains run through Concord night and day,
And nobody stops to listen. The ghost might smile—
The way a man in solitude would smile—
Remembering all the sounds that passed for sound
A century ago.
He would remain
Away from houses other ghosts might visit,
Not having come to tell a thing or two
Or lay a curse (what curse could frighten now?)
No tapping on the windowpane for him
Or twilight conversation in the streets
With some bewildered townsman going home.
If he had any errand, it would be
More likely curiosity of his own
About the human race, at least in Concord.
He would not come so far from distant woods
Merely to set them wondering again.
SUNDAY EVENING
We are two acquaintances on a train,
Rattling back through darkening twilight suburbs
From a weekend in the country, into town.
The station lights flare past us, and we glance
Furtively at our watches, sit upright
On leather benches in the smoke-dim car
And try to make appropriate conversation.
We come from similar streets in the same city
And have spent this same hiatus of three days
Escaping streets and lives that we have chosen.
Escape by deck chairs sprawled on evening lawns,
By citronella and by visitant moths;
Escape by sand and water in the eyes,
And sea-noise drowned in weekend conversation.
Uneasy, almost, that we meet again,
Impatient for this rattling ride to end,
We still are stricken with a dread of passing
Time, the coming loneliness of travelers
Parting in hollow stations, going home
To silent rooms in too-familiar streets
With unknown footsteps pacing overhead.
For there are things we might have talked about,
And there are signs we might have shared in common.
We look out vainly at the passing stations
As if some lamplit shed or gleaming roof
Might reawake the sign in both of us.
But this is only Rye or Darien,
And whoever we both knew there has moved away.
And I suppose there never will be time
To speak of more than this—the change in weather,
The lateness of the train on Sunday evenings—
Never enough or always too much time.
Life lurches past us like a windowed twilight
Seen from a train that halts at little junctions
Where weekend half-acquaintances say good-by.
THE INNOCENTS
They said to us, or tried to say, and failed:
With dust implicit in the uncurled green
First leaf, and all the early garden knowing
That after rose-red petals comes the bleak
Impoverished stalk, the black dejected leaf
Crumpled and dank, we should at Maytime be
Less childlike in delight, a little reserved,
A little cognizant of rooted death.
And yet beneath the flecked leaf-gilded boughs
Along the paths fern-fringed and delicate,
We supple children played at golden age,
And knelt upon the curving steps to snare
The whisking emerald lizards, or to coax
The ancestral tortoise from his onyx shell
In lemon sunlight on the balcony.
And only pedagogues and the brittle old
Existed to declare mortality,
And they were beings removed in walk and speech.
For apprehension feeds on intellect:
Uneasy ghosts in libraries are bred—
While innocent sensuality abides
In charmed perception of an hour, a day,
Ingenuous and unafraid of time.
So in the garden we were free of fear,
And what the saffron roses or the green
Imperial dragonflies above the lake
Knew about altered seasons, boughs despoiled,
They never murmured; and to us no matter
How in the drawing room the elders sat
Balancing teacups behind curtained glass,
While rare miraculous clocks in crystal domes
Impaled the
air with splintered chips of time
Forever sounding through the tea-thin talk,
An organpoint to desperate animation.
They knew, and tried to say to us, but failed;
They knew what we would never have believed.
“HE REMEMBERETH THAT WE ARE DUST”
And when was dust a thing so rash?
Or when could dust support the lash
And stand as arrogant as stone?
And where has revelation shown
Conceit and rage so interfused
In dust, that suns have stood bemused
To watch the reckless consequence?
And when did dust break reticence
To sing aloud with all its might
In egotistical delight?
Yet when the tale is told of wind
That lifted dust and drove behind
To scoop the valleys from their sleep
And bury landscapes inches deep
Till there must follow years of rain
Before the earth could breathe again—
Or when the appetite of fire
Blazes beyond control and higher,
Then sinks into the sullen waste
Of what, devouring, it effaced,
And thinly in my palm I hold
The dust of ash grown wan and cold,
I know what element I chose
To build such anger, mould such woes.
LIFE AND LETTERS
An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city
Where here and there against the febrile sky
The shaft of an unbroken column rises,
And in the sands indifferent lizards keep
The shattered traces of old monuments.
Here where the death of the imagination
Trances the mind with shadow, here the shapes
Of tumbled arch and pediment stand out
In their last violence of illumination.
By day his valet rules him, forcing him
With milk and medicines, a deference
Cloaking the bully. “Signora X was here
During your nap; I told her doctor’s orders,
You must stay quiet and rest, keep up your strength.”
He leaves the pasteboard rectangle, engraved,
Scrawled in regretful haste, and goes his way
To join a lounging crony belowstairs.
(“The old man’s not so wide awake today.”)
The ivory body in the dressing gown
(Not the silk robe the Countess sent; he spills
His milk sometimes, and that would be a pity)
Stirs in the sinking warmth that bathes his chair
And looks on summer sunlight in the square.
Below, the fat concierge points out his window
With half-drawn blinds, to tourists who inquire.
There are a few who make the pilgrimage;
They stand and gaze and go away again.
Something to say that one has stood beneath
His window, though they never see himself.
The post brings letters stamped in foreign countries.
He holds them in his fingers, turns them over.
“He always says he means to read them later,
But I should say his reading days are finished.
All he does now is watch the square below.
He seems content enough; and I’ve no trouble.
An easy life, to watch him to his grave.”
The letters still arrive from universities,
Occasionally a charitable cause,
A favor-seeker, or an aged friend.
But now it seems no answers are expected
From one whose correspondence is collected
In two large volumes, edited with notes.
What should that timid hand beneath its sleeve
Warmed by the rich Italian sun, indite
To vindicate its final quarter-decade?
No; he has written all that can be known.
If anything, too much; his greedy art
Left no domain unpillaged, grew its breadth
From fastening on every life he touched.
(Some went to law, some smiled, some never guessed.)
But now the art has left the man to rest.
The failing searchlight of his mind remains
To throw its wavering cone of recognition
Backward upon those teeming images.
New York invades the memory again:
A million jewels crowd the boyish brain
With apprehension of an unmastered world.
The red-haired girl waves from the Brooklyn ferry,
The bridges leap like fountains into noon.
Again the train goes rocking across-country
Past midnight platforms where the reddish light
Plays on a game of checkers through the window,
Till dawn spells snow on emptiness of plains.
Once more in San Francisco Margaret wakes
Beside him in the heat of August dark,
Still weeping from a nightmare.
So by day
He looks on summer sunlight in the square.
The grinning Bacchus trickles from his gourd
A thin bright spume of water in the basin,
While the hot tiles grow cool as evening drops
Deep cobalt from white buildings. Far in air
Buonarroti’s dome delays the gold.
The old man who has come to Rome to die
Ignores the death of still another day.
So many days have died and come to life
That time and place seem ordered by his valet;
He puts them on and off as he is told.
Now he is standing bareheaded in dusk
While fireworks rain into the sea at Biarritz,
And at his shoulder Louis Scarapin
Quotes La Fontaine. The giddy winds of fortune
Make love to him that night; and he recalls
Toasts drunk by rocketlight, and Louis’ voice
With its perpetual drawl: “Mon bon monsieur …”
Louis, who could have made the world more sane,
But killed himself instead, a Pierrot-gesture,
His face a whiteness in the dark apartment.
The bitter coffee drunk on early mornings
With Sandra’s straw hat hanging from the bedpost,
Red roses, like a bonnet by Renoir.
And the incessant tapping of her heels
Late evenings on the cobbles as they stroll:
Splinters to tingle in an old man’s brain.
Again the consumptive neighbor through the wall
Begins his evening agony of coughing
Till one is ready to scream him into silence.
And the accordion on the river steamer
Plays something from last season, foolish, gay;
Deaf ears preserve the music of a day.
Life has the final word; he cannot rule
Those floating pictures as he ruled them once,
Forcing them into form; the violent gardener,
The two-edged heart that cuts into every wound,
Reciprocates experience with art.
No more of that for now; the boughs grow wild,
The willful stems put forth undisciplined blooms,
And winds sweep through and shatter. Here at last
Anarchy of a thousand roses tangles
The fallen architecture of the mind.
FOR THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO PLANETS
We smile at astrological hopes
And leave the sky to expert men
Who do not reckon horoscopes
But painfully extend their ken
In mathematical debate
With slide and photographic plate.
And yet, protest it if we will,
Some corner of the mind retains
The medieval man, who still
Keeps watch upon those starry sk
eins
And drives us out of doors at night
To gaze at anagrams of light.
Whatever register or law
Is drawn in digits for these two,
Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,
Wardens of brilliance, as they do
Their dual circuit of the west—
The brightest planet and her guest.
Is any light so proudly thrust
From darkness on our lifted faces
A sign of something we can trust,
Or is it that in starry places
We see the things we long to see
In fiery iconography?
POEMS
(1950–1951)
THE PRISONERS
Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood,
Wounded alike by thorns of the same tree,
We seek in hopeless war each other’s blood
Though suffering in one identity.
Each to the other prey and huntsman known,
Still driven together, lonelier that alone.
Strange mating of the loser and the lost!
With faces stiff as mourners’, we intrude
Forever on the one each turns from most,
Each wandering in a double solitude.
The unpurged ghosts of passion bound by pride
Who wake in isolation, side by side.
1950
NIGHT
The motes that still disturbed her lidded calm
Were these: the tick and whisper of a shade
Against the sill; a cobweb-film that hung
Aslant a corner moulding, too elusive
For any but the gaze of straitened eyes;
The nimbus of the night-lamp, where a moth
Uneasily explored the edge of light
Through hours of fractured darkness. She alone
Knew that the room contained these things; she lay
Hearing the almost imperceptible sound
(As if a live thing shivered behind the curtains)
Watching the thread that frayed in gusts of air
More delicate than her breathing, or by night
Sharing a moth’s perplexity at light
Too frail to drive out dark: minutiae