For whom the thrusting blood, so long deferred
In alder-stem and elm, is not the rise
Of flood in their own veins; some who can see
That green unholy dance without surprise.
I only say it has been this for me:
The time of thinnest ice, of casualty
More swift and deadly than the skater’s danger.
The end of March could make me stand a stranger
On my own doorstep, and the daily shapes
Of teapot, ladle, or the china grapes
I kept in winter on the dresser shelf
Rebuked me, made me foreign to myself.
Evans beside me on that moonless road
Walked hard as if he thought behind us strode
Pursuers he had fled through weary ways.
He only said: “Where I was born and grew,
You felt the spring come on you like a daze
Slow out of February, and you knew
The thing you were contending with. But here—”
“Spring is a bolt of lightning on the year,”
I said, “it strikes before you feel it near.”
“The change of seasons is another thing
God put on earth to try us, I believe.
As if the breaking-out of green could bring
Escape from frozen discipline, give us leave
To taste of things by will and law forbidden.”
“Maybe it was the weather lost us Eden,”
I said, but faltering, and the words went by
Like flights of moths under that star-soaked sky.
And that was all. He brought me to the door;
The house was dark, but on the upper floor
A light burned in the hallway. “Joel’s asleep,”
I told him, and put out my hand. His touch
Was cold as candles kept unlit in church,
And yet I felt his seeking fingers creep
About my wrist and seize it in their grip
Until they hurt me.
“Neither you nor I
Have lived in Eden, but they say we die
To gain that day at last. We have to live
Believing it—what else can we believe?”
“Why not believe in life?” I said, but heard
Only the sanctioned automatic word
“Eternal life—” perennial answer given
To those who ask on earth a taste of heaven.
The penalty you pay for dying last
Is facing those transactions from the past
That would detain you when you try to go.
All night last night I lay and seemed to hear
The to-and-fro of callers down below,
Even the knocker rattling on the door.
I thought the dead had heard my time was near
To meet them, and had come to tell me so;
But not a footstep sounded on the stair.
If they are gone it means a few days more
Are left, or they would wait. Joel would wait
Down by the dark old clock that told me late
That night from Boston. “Evans walked me home;
We sat together in the train by chance.”
But not a word; only his burning glance.
“We stopped to have some coffee in the station.
Why do you stand like that? What if I come
An hour or so after the time I said?
The house all dark, I thought you’d gone to bed.”
But still that gaze, not anger, indignation,
Nor anything so easy, but a look
As fixed as when he stared upon his book.
No matter if my tale was false or true,
I was a woodcut figure on the page,
On trial for a nameless sin. Then rage
Took him like fire where lightning dives. I knew
That he could kill me then, but what he did
Was wrench me up the stairs, onto the bed.
The night of Joel’s death I slept alone
In this same room. A neighbor said she’d stay,
Thinking the dead man lying down below
Might keep the living from rest. She told me so:
“Those hours before the dawn can lie like stone
Upon the heart—I’ve lain awake—I know.”
At last I had to take the only way,
And said, “The nights he was alive and walking
From room to room and hearing spirits talking,
What sleep I had was likelier to be broken.”
Her face was shocked but I was glad I’d spoken.
“Well, if you feel so—:” She would tell the tale
Next morning, but at last I was alone
In an existence finally my own.
And yet I knew that Evans would find reason
Why we were not our own, nor had our will
Unhindered; that disturbance of a season
So long removed was something he would kill
Yet, if he had not killed it. When I stood
Beside the churchyard fence and felt his glance
Reluctantly compelling mine, the blood
Soared to my face, the tombstones seemed to dance
Dizzily, till I turned. The eyes I met
Accused as they implored me to forget,
As if my shape had risen to destroy
Salvation’s rampart with a hope of joy.
My lips betrayed their Why? but then his face
Turned from me, and I saw him leave the place.
Now Joel and Evans are neighbors, down beneath.
I wonder what we’re bound to after death?
I wonder what’s exacted of the dead,
How many debts of conscience still are good?
Not Evans or his Bible ever said
That spirit must complete what flesh and blood
Contracted in their term. What creditors
Will wait and knock for us at marble doors?
I’d like to know which stays when life is past:
The marriage kept in fear, the love deferred,
The footstep waited for and never heard,
The pressure of five fingers round the wrist
Stopping its beat with pain, the mouth unkissed,
The dream whose waking startles into sight
A figure mumbling by the bed at night,
The hopeless promise of eternal life—
Take now your Scripture, Evans, if you will,
And see how flimsily the pages spill
From spines reduced to dust. What have they said
Of us, to what will they pronounce me wife?
My debt is paid: the rest is on your head.
THE INSOMNIACS
The mystic finishes in time,
The actor finds himself in space;
And each, wherever he has been,
Must know his hand before his face,
Must crawl back into his own skin
As in the darkness after crime
The thief can hear his breath again,
Resume the knowledge of his limbs
And how the spasm goes and comes
Under the bones that cage his heart.
So: we are fairly met, grave friend—
The meeting of two wounds in man.
I, gesturing with practiced hand,
I, in my great brocaded gown,
And you, the fixed and patient one,
Enduring all the world can do.
I, with my shifting masks, the gold,
The awful scarlet, laughing blue,
Maker of many worlds; and you,
Worldless, the pure receptacle.
And yet your floating eyes reveal
What saint or mummer groans to feel:
That finite creatures finally know
The damp of stone beneath the knees,
The stiffness in the folded hands
A duller ache than holy wounds,
The
draught that never stirs the sleeve
Of glazed evangelists above,
But drives men out from sacred calm
Into the violent, wayward sun.
My voice commands the formal stage;
A jungle thrives beyond the wings—
All formless and benighted things
That rhetoric cannot assuage.
I speak a dream and turn to see
The sleepness night outstaring me.
My pillow sweats; I wake in space.
This is my hand before my face.
This is the headboard of my bed
Whose splinters stuff my nightmare mouth;
This is the unconquerable drouth
I carry in my burning head.
Not my words nor your visions mend
Such infamous knowledge. We are split,
Done into bits, undone, pale friend,
As ecstasy begets its end;
As we are spun of rawest thread—
The flaw is in us; we will break.
O dare you of this fracture make
Hosannas plain and tragical,
Or dare I let each cadence fall
Awkward as learning newly learned,
Simple as children’s cradle songs,
As untranslatable and true,
We someday might conceive a way
To do the thing we long to do—
To do what men have always done—
To live in time, to act in space
Yet find a ritual to embrace
Raw towns of man, the pockmarked sun.
THE SNOW QUEEN
Child with a chip of mirror in his eye
Saw the world ugly, fled to plains of ice
Where beauty was the Snow Queen’s promises.
Under my lids a splinter sharp as his
Has made me wish you lying dead
Whose image digs the needle deeper still.
In the deceptive province of my birth
I had seen yes turn no, the saints descend,
Their sacred faces twisted into smiles,
The stars gone lechering, the village spring
Gush mud and toads—all miracles
Befitting an incalculable age.
To love a human face was to discover
The cracks of paint and varnish on the brow;
Soon to distrust all impulses of flesh
That strews its sawdust on the chamber floor,
While at the window peer two crones
Who once were Juliet and Jessica.
No matter, since I kept a little while
One thing intact from that perversity—
Though landscapes bloomed in monstrous cubes and coils.
In you belonged simplicities of light
To mend distraction, teach the air
To shine, the stars to find their way again.
Yet here the Snow Queen’s cold prodigious will
Commands me, and your face has lost its power,
Dissolving to its opposite like the rest.
Under my ribs a diamond splinter now
Sticks, and has taken root; I know
Only this frozen spear that drives me through.
LOVE IN THE MUSEUM
Now will you stand for me, in this cool light,
Infanta reared in ancient etiquette,
A point-lace queen of manners. At your feet
The doll-like royal dog demurely set
Upon a chequered floor of black and white.
Or be a Louis’ mistress, by Boucher,
Lounging on cushions, silken feet asprawl
Upon a couch where casual cupids play
While on your arms and shoulders seems to fall
The tired extravagance of a sunset day.
Or let me think I pause beside a door
And see you in a bodice by Vermeer,
Where light falls quartered on the polished floor
And rims the line of water tilting clear
Out of an earthen pitcher as you pour.
But art requires a distance: let me be
Always the connoisseur of your perfection.
Stay where the spaces of the gallery
Flow calm between your pose and my inspection,
Lest one imperfect gesture make demands
As troubling as the touch of human hands.
I HEARD A HERMIT SPEAK
Upon the mountain of the young
I heard a hermit speak:
“Purity is the serpent’s eye
That murders with a look.
Purity’s king of poisons
And duke of deadly night.
Abhor the single-minded man,
The woman lily-white.
Go cold under the heavens,
Run naked through the day,
But never wear the armored shirt
Of total Yea or Nay.
Stare into the looking-glass:
Your enemy stares you back.
Yet never cringe and hide your face;
Hear all that he will speak.
The day that glass dissolves to show
Your own reflection there,
Then change your mirror for the world,
The teeming, streaming air.
O let your human memory end
Heavy with thought and act.
Claim every joy of paradox
That time would keep intact.
Be rich as you are human,”
I heard that hermit cry
To the young men and women
All walking out to die.
In this long room, upon each western pane
The sunset wreaks its final savage stain;
And we, like masquers costumed in an air
Outcrimsoning the gaudiest cock that crows,
Parade as torches and diabolos
Along the blood-red spiral of the stair.
An imminent amazement of the heart
Constricts our greeting as we meet and part.
A gesture or a word can make us turn
Ready to cry a sudden sharp goodnight;
Yet still delays the dark, still cockerel-bright
Smoulder the dyes in which we wade and burn.
Not tragical, the faces that we wear:
A modern gaiety, fitting as despair
Shall pass the hour till domes and sunsets fall.
Extravagant and ceremonious words
Rise on the air like flights of Chinese birds
Uncaged upon a fiery carnival.
What’s left us in this violent spectacle
But kisses on the mouth, or works of will—
The imagination’s form so sternly wrought,
The flashes of the brain so boldly penned
That when the sunset gutters to its end
The world’s last thought will be our flaring thought?
A WALK BY THE CHARLES
Finality broods upon the things that pass:
Persuaded by this air, the trump of doom
Might hang unsounded while the autumn gloom
Darkens the leaf and smokes the river’s glass.
For nothing so susceptible to death
But on this forenoon seems to hold its breath:
The silent single oarsmen on the stream
Are always young, are rowers in a dream.
The lovers underneath the chestnut tree,
Though love is over, stand bemused to see
The season falling where no fall could be.
You oarsmen, when you row beyond the bend,
Will see the river winding to its end.
Lovers that hold the chestnut burr in hand
Will speak at last of death, will understand,
Foot-deep amid the ruinage of the year,
What smell it is that stings the gathering air.
From our evasion we are brought at last,
From all our hopes of constancy, to cast
One look of recognition at t
he sky,
The unimportant leaves that flutter by.
Why else upon this bank are we so still?
What lends us anchor but the mutable?
O lovers, let the bridge of your two hands
Be broken, like the mirrored bridge that bends
And shivers on the surface of the stream.
Young oarsmen, who in timeless gesture seem
Continuous, united with the tide,
Leave off your bending to the oar, and glide
Past innocence, beyond these aging bricks
To where the Charles flows in to join the Styx.
NEW YEAR MORNING
The bells have quit their clanging; here beneath
The coldly furious streaks of morning stars
We hear the scraping of the last few cars,
And on the doorstep by the frozen wreath
Return goodnights to night. Dear friends, once more
We’ve held our strength against a straining door,
Again the siege is past, another year
Has lost the battle. You can leave us now.
The hours are done that must be clamored through
Lest darkness think us sleeping, lest we hear
Secret police engendered out of night
Advancing on our little zone of light.
Now each of us can dare to be alone,
His room no longer populous with spies
Bending above the pillow where he lies
To sow his dreams with fear that all is done,
That there’s no more reprieve, no leaf to tear
And find another January there.
So we are safe again. Goodnight, brave friends.
So may beginnings always follow ends.
Though time is treasonable, may we stand
Gathered each year, a stubborn-hearted band
Whose gaiety rises like a litany
Under the dying ornamental tree.
IN TIME OF CARNIVAL
Those lights, that plaza—I should know them all:
The impotent blind beggar shouting his songs
Of lovers, while the headlong populace