Although you know as well as I whose tooth
Sunk in our heels, the western guise of fate.
When Patrick Barton chased the murderer
He heard behind him in the wood
Pursuit, and suddenly he knew hé fled:
He was the murderer, the others were
His vigilance. But when he crouched behind
A tree, the tree moved off and left
Him naked while the cry came on; he laughed
And like a hound he leapt out of his mind.
I wish for you—the moon was full, is gone—
Whatever bargain can be got
From the violent world our fathers bought,
For which we pay with fantasy at dawn,
Dismay at noon, fatigue, horror by night.
May love, or its image in work,
Bring you the brazen luck to sleep with dark
And so to get responsible delight.
1938
Desires of Men and Women
Exasperated, worn, you conjure a mansion,
The absolute butlers in the spacious hall,
Old silver, lace, and privacy, a house
Where nothing has for years been out of place,
Neither shoe-horn nor affection been out of place,
Breakfast in summer on the eastern terrace,
All justice and all grace.
At the reception
Most beautifully you conduct yourselves—
Expensive and accustomed, bow, speak French,
That Cinquecento miniature recall
The Duke presented to your great-grandmother—
And none of us, my dears, would dream of you
The half-lit and lascivious apartments
That are in fact your goal, for which you’d do
Murder if you had not your cowardice
To prop the law; or dream of you the rooms,
Glaring and inconceivably vulgar,
Where now you are, where now you wish for life,
Whence you project your naked fantasies.
World-Telegram
Man with a tail heads eastward for the Fair.
Can open a pack of cigarettes with it.
Was weaving baskets happily, it seems,
When found, the almost Missing Link, and brought
From Ceylon in the interests of science.
The correspondent doesn’t know how old.
Two columns left, a mother saw her child
Crushed with its father by a ten-ton truck
Against a loading platform, while her son,
Small, frightened, in a Sea Scout uniform,
Watched from the Langley. All needed treatment.
Berlin and Rome are having difficulty
With a new military pact. Some think
Russia is not too friendly towards London.
The British note is called inadequate.
An Indian girl in Lima, not yet six,
Has been delivered by Caesarian.
A boy. They let the correspondent in:
Shy, uncommunicative, still quite pale,
A holy picture by her, a blue ribbon.
Right of the centre, and three columns wide,
A rather blurred but rather ominous
Machine-gun being set up by militia
This morning in Harlan County, Kentucky.
Apparently some miners died last night.
‘Personal brawls’ is the employers’ phrase.
All this on the front page. Inside, penguins.
The approaching television of baseball.
The King approaching Quebec. Cotton down.
Skirts up. Four persons shot. Advertisements.
Twenty-six policemen are decorated.
Mother’s Day repercussions. A film star
Hopes marriage will preserve him from his fans.
News of one day, one afternoon, one time.
If it were possible to take these things
Quite seriously, I believe they might
Curry disorder in the strongest brain,
Immobilize the most resilient will,
Stop trains, break up the city’s food supply,
And perfectly demoralize the nation.
11 May 1939
Conversation
Whether the moorings are invisible
Or slipt, we said we could not tell,
But argument held one thing sure
Which none of us that night could well endure:
The ship is locked with fog, no man aboard
Can make out what he’s moving toward,
There’s little food, few love, less sleep,
The sea is dark and we are told it’s deep.
Where is an officer who knows this coast?
Downward, one summon. Who knows how,
With what fidelity, his voice heard now
Could shout directions from the ocean’s floor?
Traditional characters no more
Their learnéd simple parts rehearse
But bed them softly down from the time’s curse.
A snapt short log pitched out upon the hearth,
The flaming harbinger come forth
Of holocausts that night and day
Flake from the mind its skinny sovereignty.
We watched the embers cool, embers that brought
To one man there the failing thought
Of cities stripped of knowledge, men,
Our continent a wilderness again.
These are conclusions of the night, we said;
And drank; and were not satisfied.
The fire died down, smoke in the air
Assumed the alarming postures of our fear,—
The overhead horror, in the padded room
The man who will not tell his name,
The guns and subtle friends who face
Into this delicate and dangerous place.
1938
Ancestor
The old men wept when the Old Man in blue
Bulked in the doorway of the train, Time spun
And in that instant’s revolution Time
(Who cannot love old men) dealt carelessly
Passions and shames upon his hardihood,
Seeing the wet eyes of his former staff:
. . Crossing from Tennessee, the river at flood,
White River Valley, his original regiment,
The glowflies winking in the gully’s dusk,
Three horses shot from under him at Shiloh
Fell, the first ball took Hindman’s horse as well
And then the two legs from an orderly
Rain on the lost field, mire and violence,
Corruption; Klan-talk, half-forgotten tongue
Rubbed up for By-Laws and its Constitution,
The Roman syllables
he an exile fled,
Both his plantations, great-grandmother’s too
Gone, fled south and south into Honduras
Where great-grandmother was never reconciled
To monkeys or the thought of monkeys
once
Tricked into taking bites of one, she kept
Eight months her bed
fire on the colony,
Lifting of charges, and a late return,
The stranger in his land, and silence, silence . .
(Only the great grey riddled cloak spoke out
And sometimes a sudden breath or look spoke out)
Reflecting blue saw in the tears of men,
The tyrant shade, shade of the last of change,
And coughed once, twice, massive and motionless;
Now Federal, now Sheriff, near four-score,
Controlled with difficulty his old eyes
As he stepped down, for the first time, in blue.
World’s Fair
The crowd moves forward on the midway, back
And forward, men and women from every State
Insisti
ng on their motion like a clock.
I stand by the roller-coaster, and wait.
An hour I have waited, fireworks on the lake
Tell me it’s late, and yet it is not that
Which rattles at the bottom of my mind,
Slight, like a faint sound sleepy on the wind
To the traveller when he has lost his track.
Suddenly in torn images I trace
The inexhaustible ability of a man
Loved once, long lost, still to prevent my peace,
Still to suggest my dreams and starve horizon.
Childhood speaks to me in an austere face.
The Chast Mayd only to the thriving Swan
Looks back and back with lecherous intent,
Being the one nail known, an excrement;
Middleton’s grave in a forgotten place.
That recognition fades now, and I stand
Exhausted, angry, beside the wooden rail
Where tireless couples mount still, hand in hand,
For the complex drug of catapult and fall
To blot out the life they cannot understand
And never will forgive. The wind is stale,
The crowd thins, and my friend has not yet come.
It is long past midnight, time to track for home
And my work and the instructor down my mind.
Travelling South
A red moon hung above the pines that night
Travelling, as we travelled, south. First one,
Crept and trivided the cold brooding light
Like blood. The captive hum under the hood
Pacing, the pebbles plunging, throbbing mind
Raced through the night, afraid of what we’d find
For brother at the end, sightless or dead.
The same womb bore us. What is the time of man?
At what time does he rise and go to bed?
When shall a young man bend his hopeful head
Upon the block, under a red red moon,
And lose that dear head? I was dull with fear,
The car devoured the darkness, the moon hung,
Blood over the pines, and the cold wind sang
Welcome, welcome the executioner.
O then the lighted house, the nurse, at last
Painfully but his real face, his hand
Moving, his voice to melt the frozen wind;
Trouble but trouble that would soon be past;
Injury, but salvation. The headsman stood
Once at the block, looked on the young man stark,
And let that young man rise. In the flowing dark
The pines consumed the moon and the moon of blood.
At Chinese Checkers
I
Again—but other faces bend with mine
Upon the board—I settle to this game
And drive my marbles leaping or in line
Towards the goal, the triangular blue aim
Of all my red ones, as it was before.
Sitting with strangers by a Northern lake
I watch the opening and the shutting door,
The paradigms of marble shift and break.
II
The table moves before my restless eyes,
Part of an oak, an occupation once,
This town humming with men and lumber, cries,
Will, passionate activity that since
Dwindled, died when the woods cut without plan
Were thirty years ago exhausted. Now
The jackpine where the locomotive ran
Springs up wild; the docks are rotten with snow.
III
Last night for the first time I saw the Lights,
The folding of the Lights like upright cloud
Swinging as, in a childhood summer, kites
Swung, and the boys who owned the kites were proud.
What pride was active in that gorgeous sky?
What dreadful leniency compelled the men
Southward, the crumpled men? Questions went by,
Swung in the dark back and were gone again.
IV
Far on the dunes the wind is rising, sand
Drifts with it, drops; under the rounding moon
Deer, hesitating from the wood, will stand
Until their promise is a lonely dune
And they come forward, masters for the time
Of all that mountainous dead world, cold light.
The glittering rocks are naked as a tomb
Where the sea was; alteration is the night.
V
Insistent voices recall me to the play.
I triple over blue and yellow, sit
Erect and smile; but what it is they say
My ears will not accept, I mangle it,
I see their faces change, I hear the wind
Begin to whistle under the shut door,
The door shudders, I cannot hold my mind,
Backward, east, south it goes in the wind’s roar.
VI
I am again in the low and country room
Where all that is was heart-wrung, had by hard
Continual labour. We are at the game:
Excited childish cries over the board,
The old man grumbling in the darkness there
Beside the stove, Baynard is still, intent,
And to my left his sister has her chair,
Her great eyes to the flashing marbles bent.
VII
The shy head and the delicate throat conceal
A voice that even undisciplined can stir
The country blood over a Southern hill.
Will Ingreet’s voice bring her renown, bring her
That spontaneous acclaim an artist needs
Unless he works in the solitary dark?
What prophecy, what hope can older heads
Proclaim, beyond the exhaustion of the work?
VIII
How shall we counsel the unhappy young
Or young excited in their thoughtlessness
By game or deviltry or popular song?
Too many, blazing like disease, confess
In their extinction the consuming fear
No man has quite escaped: the good, the wise,
The masters of their generation, share
This pressure of inaction on their eyes.
IX
I move the white, jumping the red and green,
Blue if I can, to finish where the blue
Marbles before they issued forth began,
And fill the circles, as I ought to do.
Can I before the children win that place?
Their energies are here at work, not mine:
The beautiful absorption on Sue’s face
My crowded travelling face cannot design.
X
The fox-like child I was or assume I was
I lose, the abstract remember only; all
The lightness and the passion for running lose
Together with all my terror, the blind call
At midnight for the mother. How shall we know
The noon we are to be in night we are?
The altering winds are dark and the winds blow
Agitation and rest, unclear, unclear.
XI
Deep in the unfriendly city Delmore lies
And cannot sleep, and cannot bring his mind
And cannot bring those marvellous faculties
To bear upon the day sunk down behind,
The unsteady night, or the time to come.
Slack the large frame, he sprawls upon his bed
Useless, the eloquent mouth relaxed and dumb,
Trouble and mist in the apathetic head.
XII
What prophecies, what travel? Strangers call
Across the miles of table, and I return,
Bewildered, see burnt faces rise and fall
In the recapitulation
of their urn.
I speak; all of us laugh; the game goes on.
The Northern wind is moaning still outside.
The sense of change, suns gone up and come down,
Whirls in my tired head, and it will abide.
XIII
Against my will once in another game
I spat a piece of tooth out—this was love
Or the innocence of love, long past its time
Virgin with trust, which time makes nothing of.
The wind is loud. I wonder, Will it grow,
That trust, again? Can it again be strong?
What rehabilitations can the heart know
When the heart is split, when the faithful heart is wrong?
XIV
Venus on the half-shell was found a dish
To madden a fanatic: from the nave
Rolled obloquy and lust. Sea without fish,
Flat sea, and Simonetta had a grave
Deeper than the dark cliff of any tooth,
Deeper than memory. Obstinate, malicious,
The man across the table shouts an oath,
The sea recedes, strangers possess the house.
XV
Marbles are not the marbles that they were,
The accurate bright knuckle-breakers boys
In alleys, where there is no one to care,
Use, in the schoolyard use at noon, and poise
As Pheidias his incomparable gold.
The gold is lost. But issued from the tomb,
Delmore’s magical tongue. What the sea told
Will keep these violent strangers from our room.
XVI
The marbles of the blood drive to their place,
Foam in the heart’s level. The heart will mend,
Body will break and mend, the foam replace
For even the unconsolable his taken friend.
Wind is the emblem of the marbles’ rest,
The sorrowful, the courageous marble’s hurt
And strange recovery. Stubborn in the breast
The break and ache, the plunging powerful heart.
1939
The Animal Trainer (1)
I told him: The time has come, I must be gone.
It is time to leave the circus and circus days,
The admissions, the menagerie, the drums,
Excitements of disappointment and praise.
In a suburb of the spirit I shall seize
The steady and exalted light of the sun,
And live there, out of the tension that decays,
Until I become a man alone of noon.
Heart said: Can you do without your animals?
The looking, licking, smelling animals?
The friendly fumbling beast? The listening one?