as Adams, Eves, commanded
to nonesuch being,
answer the One for Whom all
enantiomorphs
are super-posable, yet
Who numbers each particle
by its Proper Name.
April 1965
88
Fairground
Thumping old tunes give a voice to its whereabouts long before one can see the dazzling archway of colored lights, beyond which household proverbs cease to be valid,
a ground sacred to the god of vertigo and his cult of disarray: here jeopardy, panic, shock, are dispensed in measured doses by fool-proof engines.
As passive objects, packed tightly together on Roller-Coaster or Ferris-Wheel, mortals taste in their solid flesh the volitional joys of a seraph.
Soon the Roundabout ends the clumsy conflict of Right and Left: the riding mob melts into one spinning sphere, the perfect shape performing the perfect motion.
Mopped and mowed at, as their trainworms through a tunnel, by ancestral spooks, caressed by clammy cobwebs, grinning initiates emerge into daylight as tribal heroes.
Fun for Youth who knows his libertine spirit is not a copy of Father's, but has yet to learn that the tissues which lend it stamina, like Mum's, are bourgeois.
Those with their wander-years behind them, who are rather relieved that all routes of escape are spied on, all hours of amusement counted, requiring caution, agenda,
keep away:—to be found in coigns where, sitting in silent synods, they play chess or cribbage, games that call for patience, foresight, manoeuvre, like war, like marriage.
June 1966
River Profile
Our body is a moulded river Navalis
Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll country, deadly to breathers,
it whelms into our picture below the melt-line, where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell, wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner's-lamp country, already at ease with
the mien and gestures that become its kindness, in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable, down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country, in probing spirals.
Soon of a size to be named and the cause of dirty in-fighting among rival agencies, down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country, it plunges ram-starn,
to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven, robber-baron, tow-rope, portage-way country, nightmare of merchants.
Disembogueing from foothills, now in hushed meanders, now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile plain, well-entered, chateau-and-cider-press country, its regal progress
gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars, then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country, it changes color.
Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete, now it bisects a polyglot metropolis, ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country, a la mode always.
Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases, turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country it scours, approaching
the tidal mark where it puts off majesty, disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta, punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country, wearies to its final
act of surrender, effacement, atonement in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled attractive child ever dreams of, non-country, image of death as
a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely monsters, our tales believe, can be translated too, even as water, the selfless mother of all especials.
July 1966
Prologue At Sixty
(FOR FRIEDRICH HEER)
Dark-green upon distant heights the stationary flocks foresters tend, blonde and fertile the fields below them: browing a hog-back, an oak stands post-alone, light-demanding.
Easier to hear, harder to see,
limbed lives, locomotive,
automatic and irritable,
social or solitary, seek their foods,
mates and territories while their time lasts.
Radial republics, rooted to spots, bilateral monarchies, moving frankly, stoic by sort and self-policing, enjoy their rites, their realms of data, live well by the Law of their Flesh.
All but the youngest of the yawning mammals, Name-Giver, Ghost-Fearer, maker of wars and wise-cracks, a rum creature, in a crisis always, the anxious species to which I belong,
whom chance and my own choice have arrived to bide here yearly from bud-haze to leaf-blush, dislodged from elsewhere, by blood barbarian, in bias of view a Son of the North, outside the limes.
Rapacious pirates my people were, crude and cruel, but not calculating, never marched in step nor made straight roads, nor sank like senators to a slave's taste for grandiose buildings and gladiators.
But the Gospel reached the unroman lands. I can translate what onion-towers of five parish churches preach in Baroque: to make One, there must be Two, Love is substantial, all Luck is good,
Flesh must fall through fated time from birth to death, both unwilled, but Spirit may climb counterwise from a death, in faith freely chosen, to resurrection, a re-beginning.
And the Greek Code got to us also: a Mind of Honor must acknowledge the happy eachness of all things, distinguish even from odd numbers, and bear witness to what-is-the-case.
East, West, on the Autobahn motorists whoosh, on the Main Line a far-sighted express will snake by, through a gap granted by grace of nature: still today, as in the Stone Age,
our sandy vale is a valued passage. Alluvial flats. flooded often, lands of outwash, lie to the North, to the South litters of limestone alps embarrass the progress of path-seekers.
Their thoughts upon ski-slope or theatre-opening,
few who pass us pay attention
to our squandered hamlets where at harvest time
chugging tractors, child-driven,
shamble away down sheltered lanes.
Quiet now but acquainted too with unwelcome visitors, violation, scare and scream, the scathe of battle: Turks have been here, Boney's legions, Germans, Russians, and no joy they brought.
Though the absence of hedge-rows is odd to me (no Whig landlord, the landscape vaunts, ever empired on Austrian ground), this unenglish tract after ten years into my love has looked itself,
added its names to my numinous map of the Solihull gas-works, gazed at in awe by a bronchial boy, the Blue John Mine, the Festiniog railway, the Rhayader dams, Cross Fell, Keld and Cauldron Snout,
of sites made sacred by something read there, a lunch, a good lay, or sheer lightness of heart, the Fiirbringer and the Friedrich Strasse, Isafjordur, Epomeo, Poprad, Basel, Bar-!e-Duc,
of more modern holies, Middagh Street, Carnegie Hall and the Con-Ed stacks on First Avenue. Who am I now? An American? No, a New Yorker, who opens his Times at the obit page,
whose dream images date him already, awake among lasers, electric brains, do-it-yourself sex manuals. bugged phones, sophisticated weapon-systems and sick jokes.
Already a helpless orbited dog has blinked at our sorry conceited 0,
where many are famished, few look good, and my day turned out torturers who read Hilke in their rest periods.
Now the Cosmocrats are crashed through time-zones
in jumbo jets to a Joint Conference: