371

It occurred to him, gelegentlich, to found

A system, wherein the purer

Outlay of his intuition, all trace and circuit, by

A great draughtman'sboard'sworth of schematic

Would be held,

Where the lightframe might shudder slightly

And the thought consume, at each instant he stir,

Should he wished to impress

With force upon the world his will.

Harrow, he held himself down upon it blindly ;

The ur-world split ; his eyes

Opened and he reentered his devotion.

Hot damages! He rose, head of the clutchymen.

Too great a portion of wine

Was sanctified by me le soir, he thought sillily.

He thought : I have played this role in each

Of four previous lyrics.

I find myself adrift on artistry ; this is good will

To waking but no progress man may name.

I must about my work,

Should only the good author grant fairly me to it.

But he would not, and he found himself perform

The round again and over and further and on,

That no action wear upon him

Without the Kaisergeist address him firmly to it.

Blood lies in the hands of its

Author : no unsanctioned motion on the frame.

370

Woken, he faltered in his own sense,

As at the edge of a fabric,

Plucking at a point to disturb the expanse.

Light poured in the bay, through velour drapes.

The folds converged.

What is woven can be moved, he thought :

Water, though it has no memory ;

Fire, though it joins nothing ;

Light, though we cannot know it rent.

He drew at the filament and beheld the pattern

Ruck, draw out, tatter,

As at the wind's behest.

He felt his ribs ache from the bed and he thought

That, though time and space

Coincide there for a while in stillness, though

His sleep fasten him still to indeterminacy, given

All contingence held behind,

He must allow both soon to reassume, for place

To take him back into its heart, for time to throw

Him out on its measure again.

Beyond the pane, the trees bore up their signals,

Commanding him to motion. He thought:

“Let the trees of the forest sing.”

Raunenden Beschwörer. My arborescent keepers.

He had read of fire and known its codeword. Bitter

Ghostshapes called down to ash.

Fiat lux! He hauled himself up and went to the sink.

369

Michael, child Michael, lightlimbed, darkeyed,

Creature too delicate

To endure us long. Ai! Domine, quis sustinebit?

The will fractures before such things. Holyrood.

Unchained impetus,

The subtler momentum of all such occasions.

A prince out of thy star, he thought. Bare limbs

Wove above the rectory tile,

Slate grey, capillary. Trunks dark with the rain,

Scarred by parasites. No thought worked there

That he were a Polonious.

Institutional men do not imagine themselves so.

Vagaries, rather, of the captive Geist : lion, gone

Against itself to injury,

Set about by its keepers. Bloodmane and furious.

We had been the regents of the earth, he thought.

Power of command.

Peasant's mind shrinks before freedom. Barony.

Find ourselves now in a debased state. Ah,

They would spare a shackled child for us, jadis.

Marrow for the Gespenster.

Cruel thought. He drank from the waterglass,

Rose heavily, gathered up

His coat and briefcase, went slowly to the door.

In the limpid water of the pond, orange lilies,

Winter-flowering, swayed.

Vermiculo. Darkness over the surface of the deep.

368

Life were the ascent toward one ideal,

Sisyphus' toil, broken only

In the stillness of sleep and in those moments,

Before prayer, when the mind should clear

And loose of its association ;

Life were such process, given avowal,

Given clean lacklove, word bound in trust ;

So sober a song come over

All, nothing any longer could be forced.

He thought thus, when the snow fell

And the grounds sterilised,

Walking down from the chapel where branches

Lay strewn across the path,

Costing himself though

Regions of metaphysic, led by his pluming breath

Into clarity.

Each child before their Lord kneel,

Each Lord dance within their orbis. Roundelay!

Element pass into element, cadence into cadence.

Faint music out of adjoining

Quarters. An hour passes so. The snow falls.

He waits, temperately, for the curtain to gather

Into dark heights, for the

Allappertaining to allume, and the action procede

Cathedralwise. Organwhite melody, limpid bloom.

The leaves are votive, where

Remaining : Grün in Rot in Blau in Violett in Gelb.

367

367

“Blick aufs Grüne”.

Such was his mild expression,

Queasy, seagreen. Parlous wager, Padre Piscine!

The need of adequate space for contemplation,

Burdens of praxis,

Of regulation. The white collar that binds us fast.

His entry into the ministry and his first station,

In the Preparatory School.

Moments of burdensome Angst, unter vier Augen.

Of all places for a depilated man to tread—among

Schoolchildren! The heart

Bound fast to the dying animal. Dear, dear mercy.

And there, his moist lip

At the waterglass's rand. What does it afford him,

That quiet “Blick”? It may be in the silence

Of the basement office, through the membrane

Of his broad window,

In the shade of the library, dense intimations pass :

The construction of the exact body of the Lord ;

Pale, diverse quantities ;

Proportions triplicate and further ; great diagrams

In which, perhaps, the particular implies the whole.

Basta, Vater. One lights one's

Flatus with a match and witnesses braver auroras.

One must have a mind of water

To regard the sloping lawns so.

Still, novice, we do. Or the stars recall us suddenly.

362

I take your tickets on the Hudson line.

Out of my infrequent death no flower grow,

Out of my solitude no overt word,

Out of my silence

                              An eloquence,

In which my instrument move, dumb to all

Command, and my life fall upon its cause.

I take your ticket on the Hudson line,

Watching in its each instance

                                                Tired arms,

Infant-eye's dark wellshaft, barren scalp,

Slender girl-thigh, fallen mother breast,

All, move in recognition of some other,

As my instrument move, but not speak of it.

Look to one another, and I watch you

Through our passage, out of my practice

Less love than may come between you all,

Broken as I am, in these sullen clothes,

Hard at my métier, that I stand until

Out of it I fall and my tears fall from me,

And that I love you all where you lay silent.

For that my body cannot communicate,

I chemical am, here,

                                 Waiting to be resigned.

361

Will you bring to me my ceremony

In what clothes I have now demanded it?

Or stay yet on the dull border of things,

White blooms of air erupting from your lips,

In mushroomlike ascent and in the colour

Of the water that, bending, now disperse—

Will you? Are these arctiidae that gather

At your nostrils, or of some manufacture

Else, of which I know no more than horror?

Our centuries have gone above us to

Where coral breaks the starshoals. The bear,

Once my companion, dances for another King.

I wait only for your word or your touch

To tell me that the music has elapsed

And we return into the earth, that all

Our lineage give out and like the lantern

The curtain quieted, dim. I will go down

Gracefully, as if a final sovereignty

Allowed itself to lead me there. My crown

Holds in its band the stars and all my making :

Nephropid, I wake, dressed in my armour.

Let us leave this dream, my last child—

I see where sparks blow out upon the tide.

360

A moment while I determine myself.

Lay us a further note upon the bar.

My hope to you, proud friend, and

What's more of it God give you health,

And Mr. Creeley I withdraw, modest,

A modest word that I had gone too far.

Your muttonchops cannot err in respect

Of my comportment. So, good night to you.

Last of the pier against the dark window :

Last of my breath blown soft into the flask.

We do only what all the others do,

Given half an allowance of our self,

To stir, and may it be beyond it go.

And it is in that spirit that I pass

Among you brave dragoons, that watch

My body so well, that keep me before

The time should come. Watch the fire, sir,

That it not dwindle in your hands! Be sure

I will address you a measure tonight,

If I make it up Cavendish's stairs.

Or halfway only, father bless his might

That takes me damaged up to sleep.

I will not for the station or I will

Not find freedom there. I am thirsty here,

In my lightest clothes, Lord, still.

Now down the pier and we again shall drink.

Keep you Creeley, friend, and may he you keep.

359

How out of its trajectory our project

Grows, now that in our later colouring

We appear, shy, each with a cigarette,

To speak a while and haul our memories in,

Before the Flatiron building's grey façade!

There is no longer the selfconsciousness

That lit your voice for years. What we shared

Then, of blarney and romantic address,

Must have atrophied while you were away.

You are become that sad old master we

Once lampooned, who spoke of his own day

As it should compass every fire, every

Farflung grandeur. I cannot see you through

The smoke : a person stands in place of you.

358

How should I speak naïveté

In sight of you and not go down

Before the wall and all remove

And slightly worsen in the sound,

As you of all things sunder from

Subtle sense, that stability,

In its broken costume, whereof

The deadened colours amplify?

No gesture yet to conjure up—

Haul out, my cherished fires! Befard

The wholesome panther in his first

Uniform, show there loveliness

And the dolent Schande bloom

In great salt washes from his heart.

An instant bears its weight forth : so,

Hold there the sentence in its place.

I am in every ambulance

Carried, that would restore me out.

O now hollow memory, rest ;

Allow the animal its tristesse.