—PABLO CONRAD
A CHANGE
OF WORLD
(1951)
For Theodore Morrison
STORM WARNINGS
The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.
I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.
AUNT JENNIFER’S TIGERS
Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
VERTIGO
As for me, I distrust the commonplace;
Demand and am receiving marvels, signs,
Miracles wrought in air, acted in space
After imagination’s own designs.
The lion and the tiger pace this way
As often as I call; the flight of wings
Surprises empty air, while out of clay
The golden-gourded vine unwatered springs.
I have inhaled impossibility,
And walk at such an angle, all the stars
Have hung their carnival chains of light for me:
There is a streetcar runs from here to Mars.
I shall be seeing you, my darling, there,
Or at the burning bush in Harvard Square.
THE ULTIMATE ACT
What if the world’s corruption nears,
The consequence they dare not name?
We shall but realize our fears
And having tasted them go on,
Neither from hope of grace nor fame,
Delivered from remorse and shame,
And do the things left to be done
For no sake other than their own.
The quarry shall be stalked and won,
The bed invaded, and the game
Played till the roof comes tumbling down
And win or lose are all the same.
Action at such a pitch shall flame
Only beneath a final sun.
WHAT GHOSTS CAN SAY
When Harry Wylie saw his father’s ghost,
As bearded and immense as once in life,
Bending above his bed long after midnight,
He screamed and gripped the corner of the pillow
Till aunts came hurrying white in dressing gowns
To say it was a dream. He knew they lied.
The smell of his father’s leather riding crop
And stale tobacco stayed to prove it to him.
Why should there stay such tokens of a ghost
If not to prove it came on serious business?
His father always had meant serious business,
But never so wholly in his look and gesture
As when he beat the boy’s uncovered thighs
Calmly and resolutely, at an hour
When Harry never had been awake before.
The man who could choose that single hour of night
Had in him the ingredients of a ghost;
Mortality would quail at such a man.
An older Harry lost his childish notion
And only sometimes wondered if events
Could echo thus long after in a dream.
If so, it surely meant they had a meaning.
But why the actual punishment had fallen,
For what offense of boyhood, he could try
For years and not unearth. What ghosts can say—
Even the ghosts of fathers—comes obscurely.
What if the terror stays without the meaning?
THE KURSAAL AT INTERLAKEN
Here among tables lit with bottled tapers
The violins are tuning for the evening
Against the measured “Faites vos jeux,” the murmur,
Rising and falling, from the gaming rooms.
The waiters skim beneath the ornate rafters
Where lanterns swing like tissue-paper bubbles.
The tables fill, the bottled candles drip,
The gaming wheels spin in the long salon,
And operetta waltzes gild the air
With the capricious lilt of costume music.
You will perhaps make love to me this evening,
Dancing among the circular green tables
Or where the clockwork tinkle of the fountain
Sounds in the garden’s primly pebbled arbors.
Reality is no stronger than a waltz,
A painted lake stippled with boats and swans,
A glass of gold-brown beer, a phrase in German
Or French, or any language but our own.
Reality would call us less than friends,
And therefore more adept at making love.
What is the world, the violins seem to say,
But windows full of bears and music boxes,
Chocolate gnomes and water-color mountains,
And calendars of French and German days—
Sonntag and vendredi, unreal dimensions,
Days where we speak all languages but our own?
So in this evening of a mythical summer
We shall believe all flowers are edelweiss,
All bears hand-carved, all kisses out of time,
Caught in the spinning vertigo of a waltz.
The fringe of foam clings lacelike to your glass,
And now that midnight draws with Swiss perfection
The clock’s two hands into a single gesture,
Shall we pursue this mood into the night,
Play this charade out in the silver street
Where moonlight pours a theme by Berlioz?
If far from breath of ours, indifferent, frozen,
The mountain like a sword against the night
Catches a colder silver, draws our sight,
What is she but a local tour de force?
The air is bright with after-images.
The lanterns and the twinkling glasses dwindle,
The waltzes and the croupiers’ voices crumble,
The evening folds like a kaleidoscope.
Against the splinters of a reeling landscape
This image still pursues us into time:
Jungfrau, the legendary virgin
spire,
Consumes the mind with mingled snow and fire.
RELIQUARY
The bones of saints are praised above their flesh,
That pale rejected garment of their lives
In which they walked despised, uncanonized.
Brooding upon the marble bones of time
Men read strange sanctity in lost events,
Hold requiem mass for murdered yesterdays,
And in the dust of actions once reviled
Find symbols traced, and freeze them into stone.
PURELY LOCAL
Beside this door a January tree
Answers a few days’ warmth with shoots of green;
And knowing what the winds must do, I see
A hint of something human in the scene.
No matter how the almanacs have said
Hold back, distrust a purely local May,
When did we ever learn to be afraid?
Why are we scarred with winter’s thrust today?
A VIEW OF THE TERRACE
Under the green umbrellas
Drinking golden tea,
There sit the porcelain people
Who care for you but little
And not at all for me.
The afternoon in crinkles
Lies stiffly on the lawn
And we, two furtive exiles,
Watch from an upper window
With shutters not quite drawn.
The gilt and scalloped laughter
Reaches us through a glaze,
And almost we imagine
That if we threw a pebble
The shining scene would craze.
But stones are thrown by children,
And we by now too wise
To try again to splinter
The bright enamel people
Impervious to surprise.
BY NO MEANS NATIVE
“Yonder,” they told him, “things are not the same.”
He found it understated when he came.
His tongue, in hopes to find itself at home,
Caught up the twist of every idiom.
He learned the accent and the turn of phrase,
Studied like Latin texts the local ways.
He tasted till his palate knew their shape
The country’s proudest bean, its master grape.
He never talked of fields remembered green,
Or seasons in his land of origin.
And still he felt there lay a bridgeless space
Between himself and natives of the place.
Their laughter came when his had long abated;
He struggled in allusions never stated.
The truth at last cried out to be confessed:
He must remain eternally a guest,
Never to wear the birthmark of their ways.
He could be studying native all his days
And die a kind of minor alien still.
He might deceive himself by force of will,
Feel all the sentiments and give the sign,
Yet never overstep that tenuous line.
What else then? Wear the old identity,
The mark of other birth, and when you die,
Die as an exile? it has done for some.
Others surrender, book their passage home,
Only to seek their exile soon again,
No greater strangers than their countrymen.
Yet man will have his bondage to some place;
If not, he seeks an Order, or a race.
Some join the Masons, some embrace the Church,
And if they do, it does not matter much.
As for himself, he joined the band of those
Who pick their fruit no matter where it grows,
And learn to like it sweet or like it sour
Depending on the orchard or the hour.
By no means native, yet somewhat in love
With things a native is enamored of—
Except the sense of being held and owned
By one ancestral patch of local ground.
AIR WITHOUT INCENSE
We eat this body and remain ourselves.
We drink this liquor, tasting wine, not blood.
Among these triple icons, rites of seven,
We know the feast to be of earth, not heaven:
Here man is wounded, yet we speak of God.
More than the Nazarene with him was laid
Into the tomb, and in the tomb has stayed.
Communion of no saints, mass without bell,
Air without incense, we implore at need.
There are questions to be answered, and the sky
Answers no questions, hears no litany.
We breathe the vapors of a sickened creed.
Ours are assassins deadlier than sin;
Deeper disorders starve the soul within.
If any writ could tell us, we would read.
If any ghost dared lay on us a claim,
Our fibers would respond, our nerves obey;
But revelation moves apart today
We seek, where lamp and kyrie expire,
A site unscourged by wasting tongues of fire.
FOR THE FELLING OF AN ELM IN THE HARVARD YARD
They say the ground precisely swept
No longer feeds with rich decay
The roots enormous in their age
That long and deep beneath have slept.
So the great spire is overthrown,
And sharp saws have gone hurtling through
The rings that three slow centuries wore;
The second oldest elm is down.
The shade where James and Whitehead strolled
Becomes a litter on the green.
The young men pause along the paths
To see the axes glinting bold.
Watching the hewn trunk dragged away,
Some turn the symbol to their own,
And some admire the clean dispatch
With which the aged elm came down.
A CLOCK IN THE SQUARE
This handless clock stares blindly from its tower,
Refusing to acknowledge any hour.
But what can one clock do to stop the game
When others go on striking just the same?
Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,
Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,
Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing
From all the restless ways we must be going
And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,
Whether around a clockface or a world.
WHY ELSE BUT TO FORESTALL THIS HOUR
Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed
Out of the noonday sun, kept from the rain,
Swam only in familiar depths, and played
No hand where caution signaled to refrain?
For fourteen friends I walked behind the bier;
A score of cousins wilted in my sight.
I heard the steeples clang for each new year,
Then drew my shutters close against the night.
Bankruptcy fell on others like a dew;
Spendthrifts of life, they all succumbed and fled.
I did not chide them with the things I knew:
Smiling, I passed the almshouse of the dead.
I am the man who has outmisered death,
In pains and cunning laid my seasons by.
Now I must toil to win each hour and breath;
I am too full of years to reason why.
THIS BEAST, THIS ANGEL
No: this, my love, is neither you nor I.
This is the beast or angel, changing form,
The will that we are scourged and nourished by.
The golden fangs, the tall seraphic sword,
Alike unsheathed, await the midnight cry,
Blazon their answer to the stammered word.
Beneath this gaze our powers are
fused as one;
We meet these eyes under the curve of night.
This is the transformation that is done
Where mortal forces slay mortality
And, towering at terrible full height,
This beast, this angel is both you and I.
EASTPORT TO BLOCK ISLAND
Along the coastal waters, signals run
In waves of caution and anxiety.
We’ll try the catboat out another day.
So Danny stands in sea-grass by the porch
To watch a heeling dinghy, lone on grey,
Grapple with moods of wind that take the bay.
One year we walked among the shipwrecked shingles
Of storm-crazed cottages along the dune.
Rosa Morelli found her husband’s boat
Ruined on the rocks; she never saw him dead,
And after seven years of stubborn hope
Began to curse the sight of things afloat.
The mother of the Kennedy boys is out
Stripping the Monday burden from the line
And looking for a rowboat round the headland.
Wonder if they stopped for bait at Mory’s
And if the old man made them understand
This is a day for boys to stay on land?
Small craft, small craft, stay in and wait for tidings.
The word comes in with every hour of wind.
News of a local violence pricks the air,