(THE MODERN EPOCH, continued)
Now we dwell among the fabulous half-truths
Of the fabled century; now we live by
Revelation, intuition, fear unnamed. And
The past is an embarrassed reference to
The old man in the other room, who is
Darkly eating a snack, who peers out the
Diamond window toward the ancient winter
Scene. I take up the unmanageable thesis--
And then I see in the morning of reality,
How touchingly attached to this brightness
And clutter, you are, child of the hour.
Only to retrieve in adoration,
To light the picture in her mind, she
Smoothed the curtains in the quiet room,
Regaling the winter lawns as if with her
Hands in gentle remonstrance she were
Folding a sacred cloth, as if to walk
Back through the house, to the kitchen,
To the calendar peeling off the walls,
Were to be swept into the violent April
And the chorus of the Easter song.
Though she could never name
The source, deep in the days that penetrate
The order of learning to move, blithely,
More blithely than the wind and its
Trenchant host, the silent ministry of woes
Are passing into her outward form.
It is when I talk, the words roll back the tapestry,
Under the nexus of ceiling lamps, in the
Sudden arena, when the people turn around
And speech is unguarded. When I stroll past
Dark by the many dark mansions, where no one
Is at home . . . it’s simply thoughts
And their radical contents
That carry along the strolling description
Until, like a preacher, I deliver the song.
Sculpture? It’s historical, there is no
Image in the stone. I think you’d have to
Have a good idea in mind, like a man
On a horse, or victory itself. No one makes
Statues anymore. Pyramids? They need
Distance--such distance as to overwhelm
The man equipped with the London guidebook.
And these acoustics in the cathedral!
The streets were very silent, silent processions
Were going past, when inside the church
The music swelled, fell through the
Draperies of the air.
Only cartwheels outside, a family of gypsies;
And inside, droning, a language larger than the
Tongue of man. Dead languages? To us
This is a rough hewn, like the stone that stops
The mad sculptor with its new heiroglyphics.
And the longer they comb the hills of the northeast,
The more Indians appear more, the more
Ancient settlements.
From knowledge there is no return. We’ve crossed
A barrier in time, we’re looking back; now
A strictly human voice sings, murmurs,
Enchanted, like a listener made
Vocal by some evil overflowing.
Man? Man has no past, Only the world,
Only the world . . .
Christ cast out the demons, the son of man
Was a famous breed above, rare powers
He could give out of friendship and love.
But the Son of God is unanswerable, he has
Nothing to do with these powers over life.
There are things discoverable in thought,
And it is the beauty of the light
That is a fact unveiling the sacred torn world.
You’ll do anything but discover that an
Injury suffered to yourself, yesterday, has
Its source, its answer, is a partial clearing
In pain, to the wide devastation of blood
And sacrifice, with which the world was won--
In the past. In the past it was
The whole mystery was solved.
You saw brush fires on the prairie, soldiers
In the mud of foreign jungles plugging on.
No chorus sang to us instructions in the street.
And at home, he came nightly to maturity,
Gathering the strings of a thesis so slowly--
It was hard not getting dull.
Secret thoughts?
I know the secret that has exploded in the
Heart of the common man (retracting his gaze
From the injured plain, to the interior of
His own travelling wagon).
It is so many years refining a notion of time,
So many years to see memory, overwhelmed,
By the plodding march of history, by truth
Never held, dead stones along the highway,
By the depth of silence and its sad epigraphs . . .
When everyone knows from a visit to the museum,
That the past is not a previous time, but
A different place. Their faces show the
Captured lives of brave children. I say
We’re duly charged with a new rhetoric, that
We’ll all look recognisable to one another,
When triumph dawns over the land forsworn
By the Lord of history.
(to be continued)
Comments