After proximities—in streets packed solid
With human flesh, their souls feel immune To all metaphysical threats. We are rather shocked, But we need shocking: to accept space, to own
That surfaces need not be superficial Nor gestures vulgar, cannot really Be taught within earshot of running water Or in sight of a cloud. As pupils
We are not bad, but hopeless as tutors: Goethe,
Tapping Homeric hexameters On the shoulder blade of a Roman girl, is (I wish it were someone else) the figure
Of all our stamp: no doubt he treated her well,
But one would draw the line at calling The Helena begotten on that occasion, Queen of his Second Walpurgisnacht,
Her baby: between those who mean by a life a
Bildungsroman and those to whom living Means to-be-visible-now, there yawns a gulf Embraces cannot bridge. If we try
To "go southern," we spoil in no time, we grow
Flabby, dingily lecherous, and Forget to pay bills: that no one has heard of them Taking the Pledge or turning to Yoga
Is a comforting thought—in that case, for all
The spiritual loot we tuck away, We do them no harm—and entitles us, I think To one little scream at A piacere!,
Not two. Go I must, but I go grateful (even
To a certain Monte) and invoking My sacred meridian names, Pirandello, Croce, Vico, Verga, Bellini,
To bless this region, its vendages, and those
Who call it home : though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
September 1958
81
Dame Kind
Steatopygous, sow-dugged
and owl-headed, To Whom—Whom else?—the first innocent blood
was formally shed By a chinned mammal that hard times
had turned carnivore. From Whom his first promiscuous orgy
begged a downpour To speed the body-building cereals
of a warmer age: Now who put us, we should like to know,
in Her manage?
Strait-laced She never was
and has not grown more so " Since the skeptical academies got wind
of the Chi-Rho; St. Cuckoo's wooden church for Her
where on Green Sundays Bald hermits celebrate a wordless
cult in Her praise: So pocket your fifty sonnets, Bud;
tell Her a myth Of unpunishable gods and all the girls
they interfered with.
Haven't we spotted Her Picked Winners
whom She cossets, ramparts And does the handsome by? Didn't the darlings
have cold hearts? .. . ONE BOMB WOULD BE ENOUGH. ... Now look
who's thinking gruesome! Brother, you're worse than a lonesome Peeper
or a He-Virgin Who nightly abhors the Primal Scene
in medical Latin: She mayn't be all She might be but
She is our Mum.
You can't tell us your hypochondriac
Blue-Stocking from Provence Who makes the clockwork arcadies go round
is worth twopence; You won't find a steady in that museum
unless you prefer Tea with a shapeless angel to bedtime
with a lovely monster: Before you catch it for your mim look
and gnostic chirrup, Ask the Kind Lady who fitted you out
to fix you up.
Supposing even (through misdirections
or your own mischief] You do land in that anomalous duchy,
Her remotest fief, Where four eyes encounter in two
one mirror perilous As the clear rock-basin that stultified
frigid Narcissus, Where tongues stammer on a First Name,
bereft of guile, And common snub-nosed creatures are abashed
at a face in profile,
Even there, as your blushes invoke its Guardian
(whose true invocable Name is singular for each true heart
and false to tell] To sacre your courtship ritual so
it deserves a music More solemn than the he-hawing
of a salesman's limerick, Do a bow to the Coarse Old Party that wrought you
an alderliefest Of the same verbose and sentient kidney,
grateful not least
For all the dirty work She did.
How many hundreds Of lawful, unlawful, both equally
loveless beds, Of lying endearments, crooked questions,
crookeder answers, Of bawling matches, sarcastic silences,
megrims, tears, How much half-witted horseplay and sheer
bloody misrule It took to bring you two together
both on schedule?
You
Really, must you, Over-familiar Dense companion, Be there always? The bond between us Is chimerical surely: Yet I cannot break it.
Must I, born for Sacred play, Turn base mechanic So you may worship Your secular bread, With no thought Of the value of time?
Thus far I have known your Character only From its pleasanter side, But you know I know A day will come When you grow savage And hurt me badly.
Totally stupid?
Would that you were:
But, no, you plague me
With tastes I was fool enough
Once to believe in.
Bah!, blockhead:
I know where you learned them.
Can I trust you even On creaturely fact?
I suspect strongly You hold some dogma Of positive truth, And feed me fictions: I shall never prove it.
Oh, I know how you came by A sinner's cranium, How between two glaciers The master-chronometer Of an innocent primate Altered its tempi: That explains nothing.
Who tinkered and why? Why am I certain, Whatever your faults are, The fault is mine, Why is loneliness not A chemical discomfort, Nor Being a smell?
September 1960
83
After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics
If all a top physicist knows About the Truth be true, Then, for all the so-and-so's, Futility and grime, Our common world contains, We have a better time Than the Greater Nebulae do, Or the atoms in our brains.
Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
Though the face at which I stare While shaving it be cruel For, year after year, it repels An ageing suitor, it has, Thank God, sufficient mass To be altogether there, Not an indeterminate gruel Which is partly somewhere else.
Our eyes prefer to suppose That a habitable place Has a geocentric view, That architects enclose A quiet Euclidean space: Exploded myths—but who Would feel at home astraddle An ever expanding saddle?
This passion of our kind For the process of finding out Is a fact one can hardly doubt, But I would rejoice in it more If I knew more clearly what We wanted the knowledge for, Felt certain still that the mind Is free to know or not.
It has chosen once, it seems, And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes Really becomes a creature Who comes in a median size, Or politicizing Nature Be altogether wise, Is something we shall learn.
1961
84
On the Circuit
Among pelagian travelers, Lost on their lewd conceited way To Massachusetts, Michigan, Miami or L.A.,
An airborne instrument I sit, Predestined nightly to fulfill Columbia-Giesen-Management's Unfathomable will,
By whose election justified, I bring my gospel of the Muse To fundamentalists, to nuns, To Gentiles and to Jews,
And daily, seven days a week, Before a local sense has jelled, From talking-site to talking-site Am jet-or-prop-propelled.
Though warm my welcome everywhere, I shift so frequently, so fast, I cannot now say where I was The evening before last,
Unless some singular event Should intervene to save the place, A truly asinine remark, A soul-bewitching face,
Or blessed encounter, full of joy, Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan, With, here, an addict of Tolkien, There, a Charles Williams fan.