Drinks, tramples, immolates itself in action;
The bloody light of braziers on the faces
Of women who are action’s means and end,
Each a laughing Fury; the towering glass
Of those cathedral saints, whose stiffened forms,
Ruby in passing torchlight, stoop to dark
And flare again as puppets of disorder,
Lifeless without its light, but in that rout
Illumined and empowered. There’s no crowd
In nave or playhouse any more; for all
Are actors where mere pasteboard roars to heaven
Under the dropped match, and the streets alone,
The amphitheatre of great night itself,
Suffice to contain their scene. Nothing will do
But action of the senses, total seizure
Of what’s to hand. And through the swaying streets
That beggar, impotent since youth, sings on,
Ignorant of the scene, blind to his power,
The songs that send those lovers wild to bed.
THE MIDDLE-AGED
Their faces, safe as an interior
Of Holland tiles and Oriental carpet,
Where the fruit-bowl, always filled, stood in a light
Of placid afternoon—their voices’ measure,
Their figures moving in the Sunday garden
To lay the tea outdoors or trim the borders,
Afflicted, haunted us. For to be young
Was always to live in other people’s houses
Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others,
Was ours at second-hand and not for long.
The custom of the house, not ours, the sun
Fading the silver-blue Fortuny curtains,
The reminiscence of a Christmas party
Of fourteen years ago—all memory,
Signs of possession and of being possessed,
We tasted, tense with envy. They were so kind,
Would have given us anything; the bowl of fruit
Was filled for us, there was a room upstairs
We must call ours: but twenty years of living
They could not give. Nor did they ever speak
Of the coarse stain on that polished balustrade,
The crack in the study window, or the letters
Locked in a drawer and the key destroyed.
All to be understood by us, returning
Late, in our own time—how that peace was made,
Upon what terms, with how much left unsaid.
THE MARRIAGE PORTION
From commissars of daylight
Love cannot make us free.
Nights of ungracious darkness
Hang over you and me.
We lie awake together
And hear the clocks strike three.
Our loving cannot exile
The felons but and if;
Yet being undivided
Some ways we can contrive
To hold off those besiegers
Who batter round our life:
The thieves of our completeness
Who steal us stone by stone,
The patronage that scowls upon
Our need to be alone,
And all the clever people
Who want us for their own.
The telephone is ringing,
And planes and trains depart.
The cocktail party’s forming,
The cruise about to start.
To stay behind is fatal—
Act now, the time is short.
If we refuse the summons
And stand at last alone,
We walk intact and certain,
As man and woman grown
In the deserted playground
When all the rest have gone.
THE TREE
Long ago I found a seed,
And kept it in a glass of water,
And half forgot my dim intent
Until I saw it start to reach
For life with one blind, fragile root.
And then I pressed it into earth
And saw its tendrils seek the air,
So slowly that I hardly knew
Of any change till it had grown
A stalk, a leaf; and seemed to be
No more a thing in need of me,
But living by some sapience
I had not given, could not withdraw.
So it grew on, and days went by,
And seasons with their common gifts,
Till at the leafage of the year
I felt the sun cut off from me
By something thick outside my room—
Yet so endowed with need and will
It took the warmth and left me cold.
And first I climbed with hook and shears
To prune the boughs that darkened me,
But the tree was stubborner than I,
And where I clipped it grew again,
Brutal in purpose as a weed.
Nor did it give of fruit or flower,
Though seasons brought their common gifts,
And years went by. It only grew
Darker and denser to my view,
Taking whatever I would yield—
The homage of a troubled mind—
Requiring nothing, yet accepting
My willingness to guard its life
By the endurance of my own.
It gives me nothing; yet I see
Sometimes in dreams my enemy
Hanged by the hair upon that tree.
LOVERS ARE LIKE CHILDREN
Chagall’s sweet lovers mounting into blue
Remind me that discovery by two
Of any world the mind can wander through
Is like the time when young and left alone,
We touched the secret fringe of being one,
Back of the playground full of Everyone.
Love is like childhood, caught in trust and fear.
The statues point to omens in the air,
And yet the fountains bubble bright and clear.
Lost in the garden rank with contradiction,
We see the fences sprout for our affliction,
And the red-rose-tree curtly labelled Fiction.
Nothing to tell us whether what they mean
Is true of this or any other scene.
We only know the summer leaves are green,
Alive and dense for two to penetrate—
An exploration difficult and great
As when one day beside the schoolyard gate,
Straggling behind to glean a sunlit stone,
One first perceived and knew itself as one.
Now add this pebble to that early one.
WHEN THIS CLANGOR IN THE BRAIN
Say a master of the track
Lightly leaped and lightly ran,
Knew his powers of chest and thigh
Clean outstripped the thought of man—
Would it not be pill and patch
And worse than queasy cripples know,
If on a day the rheum should catch
And lay that master leaper low?
Say that into certain minds
A Merlin dances, in and out,
And what he chooses, must obey
And sway the thought it thinks about—
Would it not be old folks’ home
And the dry end of the year
For the mind he left again
Unmastered, lock and stock and gear?
When this clangor in the brain
Grows perfunctory, or worse,
Put me down a sick old woman
Propped for sleep, hire me a nurse;
Till then, all things I look upon
Beat on my brain to hail and bless,
And every last and wayward power
I claim till then, and nothing less.
A VIEW OF MERTON COLLEGE
An interval
: the view across the fields
Perfect and insusceptible as seen
In printshops of the High Street—sun on stone
Worn like old needlework, the sheen of grass,
Minute and ageless figures moving down
The Broad Walk under tinted trees. Awhile
Mind’s local jangling lightens, ear is eased,
Eye’s flaw is mended in such gazing, healed
By separation as through glass. Until
Sun shifts, air turns harsher, paler, rooks
Flap in the rising wind. The wind has found you,
The mortal light of day, whose envy, waste,
Irresolution tread you as you go
Guilty and human. Here as anywhere,
Peace of the mind lies through an arch of stone,
The limitations posted strict and clear:
Not to be littered or presumed upon.
HOLIDAY
Summer was another country, where the birds
Woke us at dawn among the dripping leaves
And lent to all our fêtes their sweet approval.
The touch of air on flesh was lighter, keener,
The senses flourished like a laden tree
Whose every gesture finishes in a flower.
In those unwardened provinces we dined
From wicker baskets by a green canal,
Staining our lips with peach and nectarine,
Slapping at golden wasps. And when we kissed,
Tasting that sunlit juice, the landscape folded
Into our clasp, and not a breath recalled
The long walk back to winter, leagues away.
THE CAPITAL
Under that summer asphalt, under vistas
Aspiring to a neo-classic calm,
The steaming burgeon of Potomac’s swamp
Has never quite been laid to rest. The eye
Winces in sunlight off a marble dome.
But cannot fix the face of Jefferson
Through haze of an outrageous atmosphere
By diplomats called tropic; nor can the ear
Hold to the lifeline of a single voice
Through jettisoned rumors jamming all the air.
The dollar in that city of inscriptions
Is minted among pediments and columns
Purer than newmade coin. The afternoon
Steams with the drip of departmental fountains
And humid branches breathing overhead
Down avenues where the siren’s nervous shriek
Pursues the murderer or the foreign guest
Through those indifferent noonday crowds who never
Ask, till history tells them, what they do
In that metropolis anything but Greek.
THE PLATFORM
The railway stations of our daily plight
See every hour love’s threatened overthrow.
Each afternoon at five the buses go
Laden with those who shall be false by night.
We say goodbye in rooms too bright with noise
To catch the shades of a receding voice;
We turn at the revolving door and see
Love’s face already changed, indelibly.
Not to admit we may not meet again—
This was the parting treason of our thought.
Battering down our cowardly “till then,”
Time’s traffic hems the seeker from the sought.
We take too sudden leave; the platform reels
With thunder of a thousand pounding heels,
And at the gate where one remains behind,
Though most we strain to see, we most are blind.
Dear loves, dear friends, I take my leave all day
In practice for a time that need not come.
I turn and move from you a little way,
As men walk out beyond the fields of home
In troubled days, to view what they love well—
Distance confirming for a moment’s spell,
Meeting or going, that when we embrace
We know the heart beyond the transient face.
LAST SONG
All in the day that I was born,
I walked across the shouting corn;
I saw the sunlight flash and hail
From every spire and every sail,
But most I leaned against the sky
To hear the eagles racing by,
And all the safety of the womb
Could not betray me, lure me home.
All in the day that I was wed
I saw them strew my bridal bed.
I smelled the wind across the sheets
Breathing of lavender and sweets
That neither sea nor meadow knew;
And when my bride was brought to view
I kept a hundred candles lit
All for light and the joy of it.
All in the day that I was old
I felt the wind blow salt and cold
Like seaspray on my shaking thighs
Or sand flung up to blind my eyes.
I cried for sun and the eagles flying,
But felt those fingers spying, prying,
The same that wrenched me into life
And cut my safety with a knife.
Soon they will bind me dark and warm
And impotent to suffer harm.
I shall be exiled to the womb
Where once I lay and thought it home.
The sun that flashed my first delight
Shall never learn to cleave that night;
And all the swords of danger fly
Far from the caul in which I lie.
THE DIAMOND CUTTERS
However legendary,
The stone is still a stone,
Though it had once resisted
The weight of Africa,
The hammer-blows of time
That wear to bits of rubble
The mountain and the pebble—
But not this coldest one.
Now, you intelligence
So late dredged up from dark
Upon whose smoky walls
Bison took fumbling form
Or flint was edged on flint—
Now, careful arriviste,
Delineate at will
Incisions in the ice.
Be serious, because
The stone may have contempt
For too-familiar hands,
And because all you do
Loses or gains by this:
Respect the adversary,
Meet it with tools refined,
And thereby set your price.
Be hard of heart, because
The stone must leave your hand.
Although you liberate
Pure and expensive fires
Fit to enamor Shebas,
Keep your desire apart.
Love only what you do,
And not what you have done.
Be proud, when you have set
The final spoke of flame
In that prismatic wheel,
And nothing’s left this day
Except to see the sun
Shine on the false and the true,
And know that Africa
Will yield you more to do.
SNAPSHOTS
OF A
DAUGHTER-
IN-LAW
(1963)
AT MAJORITY
For C.
When you are old and beautiful,
And things most difficult are done,
There will be few who can recall
Your face that I see ravaged now
By youth and its oppressive work.
Your look will hold their wondering looks
Grave as Cordelia’s at the last,
Neither with rancor at the past
Nor to upbraid the coming time.
For you will be at peace with time.
But now, a daily warfare takes
Its toll of tenderness in you,
And you must live like captains who
Wait out the hour before the charge—
Fearful, and yet impatient too.
Yet someday this will have an end,
All choices made or choice resigned,
And in your face the literal eye
Trace little of your history,
Nor ever piece the tale entire
Of villages that had to burn
And playgrounds of the will destroyed
Before you could be safe from time
And gather in your brow and air
The stillness of antiquity.
1954
FROM MORNING-GLORY TO
PETERSBURG
(The World Book, 1928)
“Organized knowledge in story and picture”
confronts through dusty glass
an eye grown dubious.
I can recall when knowledge still was pure,
not contradictory, pleasurable
as cutting out a paper doll.
You opened up a book and there it was:
everything just as promised, from
Kurdistan to Mormons, Gum
Arabic to Kumquat, neither more nor less.
Facts could be kept separate
by a convention; that was what
made childhood possible. Now knowledge finds me out;
in all its risible untidiness
it traces me to each address,
dragging in things I never thought about.
I don’t invite what facts can be
held at arm’s length; a family
of jeering irresponsibles always
comes along gypsy-style
and there you have them all
forever on your hands. It never pays.
If I could still extrapolate
the morning-glory on the gate
from Petersburg in history—but it’s too late.
1954
RURAL REFLECTIONS
This is the grass your feet are planted on.
You paint it orange or you sing it green,
But you have never found
A way to make the grass mean what you mean.