INTRUDING?
Help us, Mirabell—Uni’s all upset;
We named the wingèd horse. Make sense of it.
GLADLY: CIRCA 3000 BC A WIND
SWEPT DELOS THE MALE POP RUSHING TO PUT STONES ON THEIR ROOFS
WERE SWEPT UP UP UP THEN IN A CYCLICAL FREAK MANNER
RETURND, SET DOWN. ONE CASUALTY: A FAT TEMPLE SCRIBE
WHO, LEFT ARM BROKEN, DECIDED IT MEANT THEY HAD BECOME
TOO SOBER TOO WITHOUT LYRIC JOY SO HE INVENTED
GREAT PAEANS TO WEIGHTLESS LOFTY & PURELY COMIC LIFE.
DELOS SET UP A SHRINE & THE SCRIBE’S WORDS ‘WE RODE THE AIR,
WE LAUGHD DOWN AT THE DOMESTIC EARTH’ CAUSED A HORSE FIGURE
TO BE WORSHIPT THERE BY ALL WHO ASPIRED TO THE WORD.
NOTE THAT THE ‘GOD’ RESPECTED THE SCRIBE’S RIGHT HAND
Why “god” in quotes? MY DEAR EX
PUPILS, I BELIEVE U KNOW. BUT ARE NOT GODS & MUSES,
MYSTICAL BIRDS & BEASTS MORE LOVELY THAN METRICAL STORMS
OR EVEN NUMBERS? Dear Peacock, yes and no.
But tell us one more thing before you go:
Uni, just then, took us to Ephraim—how?
MASTERS, IS IT NOT SIMPLE? HE SHUTS
3 SIDES OF THE FRAME THE MIRROR OPENS TO THE OTHER.
WE ARE HERE IN A 4 DIMENSIONAL SPACE, YR ROOM &
OURS COINCIDING. YR GREEK’S WORLD IS THAT ONE DIMENSION
Called?
HEAVEN We’d have called the fourth dimension Time.
MY FRIENDS, SINCE TIME DOES NOT EXIST FOR US, IS IT
NOT ONLY FAIR THAT HEAVEN SHD ELUDE YOU? UNI! DOOR!
*
PLATO MY DEARS IN FULLEST MAJESTY
OF ALL HIS POWERS FOR THE NEW LIFE! ‘POET,
REMEMBER, WHEN IN EARTH, HOW FRIVOLOUS
A THING IS GRAVITY.’ SUCH PEARLS! & ME
WITH NO THREAD TO MAKE MM A CHOKER Where is
Plato to be born? BOMBAY A RICH
PUNJABI FAMILY FATHER A MATHEMATICIAN
& BANKER MOTHER A DOCTOR OF MEDICINE:
‘PARENTS, POET, ROCKING MY CRADLE WILL
NO DOUBT DIZZY ME WITH LOVE. ONE MUST
BRACE THE LITTLE FOOT AGAINST HIGH HEAVEN.’
Something’s coming back: wasn’t it Plato
Ephraim said “intervened” for Wallace Ste—
(Drowned in an imaginary whoosh!)
WHAT DO I SEE? Mr Stevens? WHY ON HORSEBACK?
It’s a long story. OR IS THAT A HORSE?
No, but let Wystan tell you. Is it true that—
YES THE GREAT ONE CAME TO MY DEFENSE:
‘THIS DRY SCRIBE, READ HIS WORK THRU, MASTER PLATO,
& TELL US WHERE HE FITS.’ ‘SIRS, NEITHER TOP
NOR BOTTOM, DEEP NOR SHALLOW, BUT NOT SHORT LIVED.
I SAY MAKE OF HIM A PERMANENCE
TAPPABLE BY LESSER TALENT.’ Faint
Praise for one whose paramour’s lit candle
Set the tents of Hartford glimmering.
AH THANK YOU YES SHE KISSED MY CHEEK THAT DAY
BUT YR MOUNT CHAFES
(And gallops us away.)
WHERE HAVE U BEEN ENFANTS? 00 WILL SPEAK
TOMORROW SUNDOWN WE’LL MEET NEXT IN CLASS
NO SPECIAL PREP FOR YOU GABRIEL TRES
INFORMAL It’s moving so quickly, you’ll be gone,
Maman, before we know it! AH COME ON
THE MOON IS WAXING FULL
& WE DEAR ENFANTS ALSO FEEL ITS PULL
*
LORD GABRIEL GRACIOUSLY APPEARS WITH GREAT COMPANY
THIS HOUR TOMORROW. WILL THAT ALL GOES WELL. THESE LAST VISITS
SEE YR V WORK THROUGH, YR DEAR ONES SOON AFTER ON THEIR WAY.
MY LEGIONS RING WITH PRAISE. I SALUTE YOU AS MY MASTERS.
You mustn’t! We’ve just sat back while they—
Gone.
SIRS? Uni, did you see something then?
A FLASH A SHADOW LIKE A STORM AT NIGHT
Clear skies now? BLANKNESS FOR WE WORK IN BLANKNESS
Ah Uni, we’re about to lose our friends.
IT WAS A MIXED GIFT, GOD’S IMMORTALITY.
MY MASTER SAYS WE TOO MUST PART
MAY I ADMIT I AM NOT HAPPY?
Nor are we at that prospect. WELL WE GRIEVE
TOGETHER BLESS OUR NATURES, TEARS!
THIS WILL FOREVER BE MY FIELD
This mirror. YES & WHEN YOU ONE DAY COME HERE
THINK OF YOUR UNI AND HE WILL APPEAR!
We’ve made it to the lessons that say No.
DJ, as backstage hammering dies down,
Leans apprehensively into the glow
Of footlights coming up all over town.
The moon, weakly at first, strikes the south wall.
JM “unseeing” roams the house, where high
Ceiling, bare floor, doorframe, stairwell, all
Courtesy of our resident stagecrew,
Have watched with him since May—it’s late July—
These rooms under what concentrating pressures
Turning to stanzas (type them? will they do?
U ARE THE SCRIBE MY BOY OK then, yes)
—Our setting no less vital in its way
Than any sunrise to another day:
The House in Athens
Walls of blond-washed cement
With us inside have risen,
These years, from rags to riches.
Starting with our basement spinster “frozen”
Since wartime there by rent
Control (unlike her roaches),
They end high up in splendor—
Well, actually a terrace
Of waving oleander,
Geranium, jasmine at its plumy lushest.
Between extremes the space
Is filled by our two stories.
Mediterranean Fascist
In style, the house would still
Be several years our junior
—Point we haven’t scrupled to drive home
By frequent imposition
Of our taste and will:
A Titian red bedroom;
One low-cut balcony
Glass-enclosed and curtained;
The former rooftop laundry—ghosts of dirty
Linen—made to be
The room in which I write.
True, there remain some built-in
Drawbacks: the kitchen window
Too mean for air, for light,
For anything but ineffectual screeching
At a child or cat from
In the dank court below;
Or the storage space. Through gloom
Midway upstairs, on reaching
The portal of this slowly
Brimming, costive diverticulum
One risks his neck to leave,
We risk our wits to enter.
And pipes, of course, that hiss
And grieve, and icy currents
Becoming dog-day smells
In proper season…Who once said The House
Is Mother? Full concurrence.
Here in the parlor smiles
Escape the guest escaping
In his turn two dwarf chairs
Whittled for hard declensions,
Through the years, from babe in arms to crone.
He’s made for couch and cushions
And—there’s the telephone.
Who’s calling? Mimí? Yannis?
Which Yannis? George? Nelláki?
The rings proliferate,
Overlapping, afternoons, with sticky
Ones of ash-and-anise
We take a sponge to later.
Or else on an illegal
Ten-meter cord the chatter
Trails me inexorably
Up this antique, shuddering iron spiral
To where, with fan or heater,
Teapot and OED,
Shorter lines are busy,
Where summer clouds disperse till
Pinned against the blue
By midday, and from wind-stuffed shirt or jeans
Ever sparser crystal
Drupelets of the view
(Sky, mountain, monastery,
Traffic blur and glint
From center town, the very
Pattern, upon my soul,
Of catalytic inter-
sections in the cell)
Dripping on flagstone, strew
A shade of velveteen,
Rags of moss to contemplate, come winter
—In the odd hour at least
When idle “contemplation”
Isn’t the chimney’s cue
To act. How often, here
At our bright airiest,
Upgusts of smut have peppered everything!
Kleo torn her hair—
Back gone the wash to soak;
Hose turned on choking plants;
Downstairs the poor old body
Brushed past, and her complaints,
For a despairing squint into that dark
Annex where the furnace
Belched and grumbled. Greedy,
Erotic little orc,
Was it what kept the house
Through January frost
Flushed with welcome floor-to-floor, the hosts’
Attire neo-Grecian,
Whatever sense of cost
Drowned in a splash of seltzer?
And was it to feed its
Facelessness that self-
Made men around the clock succumbed to fits
Of envy and aggression
In air-conditioned Tulsa
Or on the Persian Gulf?
—Where from his kiosk the Sheik
Saw tanker after tanker
Tiny as ants on the horizon play
Slow-motion hide-and-seek
With an obese, rust-cankered
Harem of white roses.
Think of the house that day
It stood complete but pupal,
Whom a first kiss, light and electric, rouses.
Think of the sudden thrill
Coursing through each vein;
The first meal, the first people.
Now think of that anemic
High-rise Cranach Venus
We saw how many years ago (in Munich?)
With Cupid at her heel—
Quiver and arrow-tip’s
Pubescent thermostat.
Though they weren’t much our types
—Too sallow, too immodest—
Not having found Greece yet, we spent a while
Admiring “values”, “volumes”,
“Relationship” of brat
To smiling, cat-faced goddess,
As if in that long hall
The work had been a wonder
Dreamlike, neat, abstractable from all
The moods and codes of matter,
Goings-on kept under
Her nodding ostrich hat.
NO
No sooner are two mortals and four shades
Assembled (yes, for all his escapades,
Robert has slipped into the last free slot)
Than Light suffuses the old schoolroom. Not
The lights we’ve seen according to thus far
—Spectral gems, first waters of a star—
But Light like bread, quotidian, severe,
Wiped of the sugar sprinkles of Vermeer;
Light gazing beyond thought as from a dark
Material cowl, abstracted Patriarch
All-seeing yet Itself unseen, until
Halted by peeling mullion or cracked sill;
Light next to which the radiance that pours
At six o’clock in Athens through our door’s
Frosted glass—transfiguring a pair
Of sandals tossed upon the nearest chair—
Is a poor trot done into Modern Greek
From an Ursprache even angels speak
Half-comprehendingly BUT WHICH GAVE MY DEAR
US ALL TO UNDERSTAND THAT GOD WAS HERE
Among us? HUSH ENFANT YES Light that keeps
Its absent eye where one unruly tress
Of gold escapes, or the small bare foot peeps
Restlessly out from under a white dress:
For She is here as well, perched on a stall
Salvaged from Chapel for the servants’ hall
Below, the Brothers sit up neat as pins.
Gabriel—mantled in that air of shyness
None can resist, it seems, mortal or Highness—
Receives a Glance and gives one. So begins
The Last Lessons: 1
WHA.
Solemn in his rumpled seersucker
Steps forward. After a low bow to Her:
LORD MICHAEL SWITCHED ON A LIGHT
AND ILLUMINED OUR HUMAN MIND.
WE CALL HIS GODLY MAGIC DAY.
SINCE THEN, SUNUP TO SUNDOWN, HUMANKIND
HAS SET IDEA TO INNOCENCE, TO ALLAY
ITS FEAR & HOARD ITS HOPE AGAINST THE NIGHT.
LORD GABRIEL, HELP US NOW TO UNDERSTAND
THIS BLACK BEYOND BLACK. IS IT AN END TO DREAM?
AN HOURGLASS EMPTY OF SAND?
LORD GABRIEL, WHAT IS YOUR MAGIC’S NAME?
Gabr.
SENIOR POET, IT IS TIME.
(Time! The forbidden, the forgotten theme—
We dip our poor parched faces in the stream.)
TWIN PARENTS, GLORIOUS UNIVERSAL TWINS,
TWINS EARTH & SEA, DEAR TWIN MY BROTHER LIGHT,
TWINS SCIENCE & MUSIC, TWIN SCRIBES, MADAME SECRET WEEDER & TWIN SECRET HAND,
WE SIX PAIRS ARE HERE AND A TWELFTH OF IT, HAIL!
MY THEME IS TIME, MY TEXT:
OF ALL DESTRUCTIVE IDEAS THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE IS THE IDEA OF DESTRUCTION.
DOCTOR?
Two of our three blackboards are now gray
With ghosts of half-erased symbol and word.
Tearing his eyes from the dark, gleaming third,
George rises overwhelmed, can scarcely say:
THEOS! O KYRIA!
Psy.
CALM, DEAR GREEK.
A quick glance upward, sparkling into light.
AH BROTHER, WE GAVE HIS RACE WIT, & SEE HOW WEAK!
ENOUGH, CHILD. TAKE GABRIEL’S TEXT AND REMEMBER:
THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE OF ALL IDEAS IS THAT FEELING SETS IT RIGHT!
GK.
GOD, O SPLENDID COMPANY, IMMORTALITY
WAS AFTER ALL A BANISHMENT OF TIME.
ANY ALLIANCE WITH ITS STILLED BLACK FORCES
MADE (THE EXPERIMENT OF ATLANTIS PROVES)
FOR A STILLBORN CHILD. AM I CORRECT, LORD GABRIEL?
Gabr.
PROCEED.
GK.
AN ADJACENT EXPERIMENT—
Gabr. LATER, SCIENTIST.
GK.
Brow shining from the dry rebuff. LIPON.
THE HOPE, THEN, OF A RACE PERFECTED AND
IMMORTAL WAS POSTPONED. MAN WAS HOWEVER
PERMITTED THE ONE GENE: A MEMORY TIC
AND, BEING OF GOD’S GENIUS, SET ABOUT
CONSTRUCTING A CHEMICAL SYSTEM FOR REACHIEVING
HIS IMMORTALITY. I, LORDS, WAS MADE
TO SPY UPON THAT WORK, ITS ORIGIN,
ITS FATE. YOU CALLED ME BACK WHEN IT WAS DONE:
TWICE IMMORTALITY PROVED A FATAL GIFT.
THIS THIRD TIME ITS RECIPIENT MUST BE
PREPARED. LORD GABRIEL, IN YOUR LABORATORY
I SAW THE ‘THINNING PROCESS’ & KNOW THAT THE NEXT
PHASE IS IMMINENT. LORD GABRIEL!
PRAY, SIR, SPARINGLY! WE MORTALS ARE
IN LOVE WITH EVEN OUR SHORT BRUTISH LIVES.
TAKE PAINS, PLEASE SIR, TO MAKE A PAINLESS CHANGE
OR ONE NOT SO TRAUMATIC THAT THE NEW
GENERATION SHUDDERS IN ITS DREAMS
ALTHOUGH AWAKENING IN PARADISE.
No illustrations. Frames once lit are dark,
And images Imagination brought
Wrapped like Lenten gods in purple Thought…
Only the voice, chalk’s blind squeak and white mark.
Gabr.
SCIENTIST, WHEN NEXT WE MEET TO STROLL THE GROUNDS OF OUR WORLD, TWO SCIENTISTS ADMIRING THEIR HANDIWORK, APPROVED BY GOD,
YOU AS ONE OF THIS NEW GENERATION, AN ALPHA MAN, WILL TELL ME WAS I KIND OR NOT.
GK.
A whisper. I PRAY I WILL LOVE YOU STILL.
Gabr.
MAJESTIES! SIX OF US HERE ARE (WERE) CHRISTIAN, & ON THE DAY NAMED FOR MY TWIN CELEBRATED THEIR FAITH.
SO ON THE MORROW SHALL WE TO CHURCH, SING SOME HYMNS, AND STUDY OLD MASTERS?
Psy.
Risen with a shrug of charmed surrender.
RASCAL, HAVE YOUR WAY! YES, CALL THEM IN
& WE WILL ON THE MORROW STUDY THEM.
ADIEU BROTHER, ADIEU MY GREAT & DISTANT-MINDED TWIN.
MORTALS & SHADES, ADIEU. OUR GABRIEL
WILL RING THE STEEPLE BELL!
(MADAME REMEMBER, ‘WEAR A HAT’)
The room—as Psyche and the Angels go—
Adjusts to our bewildered afterglow
The Changing Light at Sandover Page 44