“You’re quitting your — ?”
“Nobody can write poems and have a job at the same time. It’s impossible!”
“You don’t think so?” He wondered if he should mention that Clarice worked as a secretary to the principal in the school where Hubert taught — and seemed to turn out her share.
“Do you think I should quit my job because they — not the people I work for, but the people I sometimes write for — asked me to review that silly little girl’s silly little book? Of poems?” He crossed his arms severely, hunched his shoulders as if it had suddenly grown chill. “And, of course, they’re not silly. Really. They’re quite good — a handful of them. But they’re not as good as poems I wrote when I was that age. (But doesn’t every poet feel like that?) And they’re certainly not as good as the poems I could write now!” He rocked a few times on the bench, then declared: “Now who do you think it was who wrote,
“Do you think there’s that much fudge — and does anybody ever really notice? Fidge, perhaps? Well, Lowell did in Poe…” He rocked a few more times, then began, softly, intensely, voiced, yes, but quiet as a whisper:
He broke off, turning aside, then added: “No, wait a minute. What about this.” Now the voice was louder:
Again the man sat back, relaxed his arms. “All right — tell me: is that the greatest — ” he growled greatest in mock exaggeration — “poem you’ve ever heard? Or is it?”
Sam looked up, where arch ran into arch, along great cables. “What’s it about?” he asked, looking back. “The bridge?”
“It’s called…‘Finale’!” The man seemed, now, absolutely delighted, eyes bright behind his lenses.
“I get the parts about… the bridge, I think. But what’s the dome?”
“Ah, that’s Sam’s ‘starry splendor dome’—from a poem he wrote, called ‘Words.’ ‘One sad scrutiny from my warm inner self / That age hath — but the pleasure of its own / And that which rises from my inner tomb / Is but the haste of the starry splendor dome / O though, the deep hath fear of thee….’ It goes on like that — and ends: ‘… Another morning must I wake to see — / That lovely pain, O that conquering script / cannot banish me.’ Conquering script — I like that idea: that the pen is mightier; that writing conquers.” His eyes had gone up to tangle in the harp of slant and vertical cables, rising toward the beige-stone doubled groin. “Yes, I think I’ll use it, make that one mine — too.”
“Can you do that?” Sam asked. “If you write your own poems, can you just take words and phrases from someone else’s?”
The man looked down. “Did you ever see a poem by a man named Eliot — read it in The Dial a couple of Novembers back? No, you probably didn’t. But his poem is nothing but words and phrases borrowed from other writers: Shakespeare, Webster, Wagner — all sorts of people.”
“Taking other people’s poems,” Sam said, “that doesn’t sound right to me.”
“Then I’ll link Sam’s words to words of mine, engulf them, digest and transform them, make them words of my own. Really, it’s all right. You said you grew up on a college campus?” Leaning forward, his face became a bit wolfish. “The word is…‘allusion’!”
“I grew up there,” Sam said. “But I didn’t go to school there.”
“I see. But look what I’ve managed to call up! Go on — take a look there, now.” The man nodded toward Manhattan. “What’s that city, do you think?”
Sam turned, about to say… But the city had changed, astonishingly, while they’d been sitting. The sunlight, in lowering, had smelted its copper among the towers, to splash the windows of the southernmost skyscrapers, there the Pulitzer, in the distance the Fuller, there the Woolworth Building itself.
“Risen from the sea, just off the Pillars of Hercules — that’s Atlantis, boy — a truly wonder-filled city, far more so than any you’ve ever visited yet, or certainly ever lived in.” Behind Sam the man lowered his voice: “I’m a kind of magician who makes things appear and disappear. But not just doves and handkerchiefs and coins. I’m one of O’Shaunessey’s movers and shakers, an archaeologist of evening. I call up from the impassive earth the whole of the world around you, Sam — stalking the wild nauga and bringing it all down to words, paired phalluses, bridge between man and man. I create and crumble worlds, cities, visions! No, friend! It is Atlantis that I sing. And poets have been singing it since Homer, son; still, it’s amazing what, at any moment, might be flung up by the sea. So: ecce Atlantis Irrefragable, corymbulous of towers, each tower a gnomon on the gold afternoon, flinging around it its metric shadow! And you should see it by moonlight — ! They speak a wonder-filled language there, Sam: not like any tongue you’ve ever heard. My pop — C. A. — thinks poetry should be a pleasure taken up in the evening — but not so in Atlantis! No! There, Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi makes as lucid sense as mene, mene tekel upharsin or Mon sa me el kirimoor — nor is it anywhere near as dire as Daniel. But we need Asia’s, Africa’s fables! In Atlantis, when I stand on the corner and howl my verses, no one looks at me and asks, ‘Whadja say?’ Because mine’s the tongue they speak there. In Atlantis I’ll get back my filched Ulysses with the proper apology. I tell you, all twenty of those dead workers are up and dancing there with savage sea-girls, living high and healthy in garden-city splendor, their drinking late into the dawn putting out Liberty’s light each morning. And the niggers and the jewboys, the wops and the krauts say hey, hi, and howdy — and quote Shakespeare and Adelaide Crapsey all evening to each other. And even if I were to pull a Steve Brodie this moment from the brink of the trolley lane there — watchman, what of the track? — , as long as that city’s up, the river would float me, singing on my back, straight into its docks at a Sutton gone royal, no longer a dead end, and I’d walk its avenues in every sort of splendor. You say you saw the empty boat of our dark friend a-dribble over his gunwale? Well, if it was empty, it’s because he’s found safe harbor there. And he’s happy, happy — oh, he’s happy, Sam, as only a naked stallion (may St. Titus protect your foreskin in these heathen lands) prancing in the city can be!”