A strange public generosity prevails.
Only too well he knows the tiny moment when
everything is possible, when pride is loved, beauty held
in common, like having an exquisite sister,
and a man gives away his death like a piece of advice.
Our Kerensky has waited for these moments
over a table in a rented room
when poems grew like butterflies on the garbage of his life.
How many times? The sad answer is: they can be counted.
Possible and brief: this is his vision of Revolution.
Who will parade the shell today? Who will kill in the name
of the husk? Who will write a Law to raise the corpse
which cries now only for weeds and excrement?
See him walk the streets, the last guard, the only idler
on the square. He must keep the wreck of the Revolution
the debris of public beauty
from the pure smiling eyes of the trained visionaries
who need our daily lives perfect.
The soft snow begins to honour him with epaulets, and to provoke the animal past of his fur hat. He wears a death, but he allows the snow, like an ultimate answer, to forgive him, just for this jewelled moment of his coronation. The carved gargoyles of the City Hall receive the snow as bibs beneath their drooling lips. How they resemble the men of profane vision, the same greed, the same intensity as they who whip their minds to recall an ancient lucky orgasm, yes, yes, he knows that deadly concentration, they are the founders, they are the bankers – of History! He rests in his walk as they consume of the generous night everything that he does not need.
ANOTHER NIGHT WITH TELESCOPE
Come back to me
Thin Byzantine face
preside over this new fast
I am broken with easy grace
Let me be neither
father nor child
but one who spins
on an eternal unimportant loom
patterns of wars and grass
which do not last the night
I know the stars
are wild as dust
and wait for no man’s discipline
but as they wheel
from sky to sky they rake
our lives with pins of light