Look, boy, look! Slept away! Kept in sod.
Jesus gentle his bones.
Gone to God. Gone to God.
Lincoln; what of him?
What in all of this was his cold part?
I thought I heard his icy heart start up
As if my small fists, pounding it, had knocked an echo in the tomb!
I thought I saw an old sad smile
Re-etch itself around his mouth,
A vagrant wisp, a tired nod,
Acknowledgment that funeral trains and trips
Were still ahead,
And crowds by sidings in the noon-but-now-late day.
But over all, I thought I heard him say
Less than a dozen words, no more.
Clear whispered, only I, leaned forward, heard.
The words thus softly breathed upon my cheek
Were, late remembered, funny, sad, or country-plain absurd.
He spoke! I cried.
He’s dead, the folks behind me tenderly explained,
He died some forty years ago.
Oh, no! Oh, no! He said! Not dead! Not dead!
What?! cried the stunned people round-about.
But I saw doubt in them and kept his words for me
And just myself.
I took them off and filed them on a country shelf
And only on occasion in late years
Took memory forth and heard again
The old man’s sad odd prayer and rambling refrain.
I looked a last time on his bones and parchment skin,
They nailed the box flat shut
And fixed one hundred tons of marble on his place.
We walked away.
Midnight stood amidst our unreal day.
What said? what said?! were whispers all about,
People clutching my elbows, touching my head,
But I wanted to grieve alone and know what he said
And understand; I brushed them aside and ran.
And now, very old, some sixty years on,
I sit up half the night and light a candle and look toward the tomb
And remember the words that Lincoln whispered in that dusty room:
I’m tired.
I’m tired of the infernal buttoning and unbuttoning
And the buttoning again.
That’s what he said.
An old farmer gone to law,
Just simply fed and done with getting out of bed
And washing up to start the day,
Or washing up and going to sleep.
He had had it with buttoning and unbuttoning,
He was ready for clay.
What did Lincoln say?
That was it.
To a boy in a marble tomb who was the last to see
The look and shape and size of eternity
And the man kept there.
No vast grandiloquence, no sweeping phrase,
No fourscore and seven years ago to warm my own late days
But just his old bones tired
And unslept by night prowling the White House rooms,
Searching for dawn;
An old man put out by dressing and undressing,
Done with the whole nuisance,
More than ready to be gone.
So one night not so long ago I walked through midnight Springfield
Thus to Lincoln’s tomb,
And scanned the marbled syllables and great stone words,
And took a crayon from my coat and in a scribbled trace,
Upon the wall above his place,
Where none but I might see,
Wrote his last words to a boy held high to view his drowsy face,
The last lone words that Abe would ever say:
I’m tired.
Tired of buttoning and unbuttoning
And buttoning again.
I smiled.
Then, suddenly, suchmirth!
I heard his slept bones laugh,
And knock and shake warm harvest earth!
I turned.
I wept.
I walked away.
MAN IS THE ANIMAL THAT CRIES
Man is the animal that cries;
That sweet beast dumb in a wilderness of world
Yet knows to weep
And thus, astonished, finds those lost sea tides
In rivulets from out his eyes and on his cheeks
And thus to trembling hand.
But is it elsewhere so?
On far worlds do the inner-human outward-awful creatures go
With such mute shivers in their blood
That they must spring them forth,
Deliver them in shudders and wild cries?
Show weathers of the spirit and the soul?
Confounded by the Universe, do they despair
And wring their marrows and convulse those dread machines
Of air and bone which, caught up in their skin,
Would seem constructs of sin to us if we might see them?
So we to them might seem a nightmare moth or poisonous fly
Which hung upon an endless night in
May Upon a most odd world
Were better killed than left to fade away.
No matter.
Shapes are not the stuffs from which we humans run us up our dreams.
No, in our strange genetics lie
The circumstantial motes that hunger light
And not to die but live beyond the Night.
So all odd beasts on worlds which name themselves
Most rare, most bright—which means a fair humanity—
Share out their yellow suns and think on basking dusts
And immortality.
And if our shapes and sizes,
Eyes and ears and warbling mouths
Amuse or, gods! confuse us in their multiplicities,
Get down to blood which, summoned by the heat,
The sweet explosions of far suns,
Did call us forth, some to a nightmare south,
Some to a feared and awesome north.
Aroused from most dissimilar slimes and primal mud,
A fear of darkness pulses, looms, habituates our blood.
Forever separate from them by 90 billion hours, years,
Our need is theirs, theirs ours;
We trade a fine supply of tears.
And if the eye that sheds them, hand that finds them,
Is disproportionate,
Our wild fate is the same:
To know the winds of dawn and fear the ever coming-on
Of suns to dusk and worse than dusk… that Night
Which threatens all our candles where we hearth our hands
And cup our lives against a damping breeze.
All walking—wounded shapes, to one another spider-apes
Yet similar our fears.
And so, ah, look!
On old worlds light-years lost,
Un-met,
They weep! We weep! in funerals that sanctify and save,
Thus daring to rebirth ourselves
With simple gifts of tears.
N
O, Nemo, where’s your dream tonight?
I used to dream of you in any moment I found right
When I was ten;
Behind my lids I’d rush across the world
Then back again, knowing your death
But hoping to find
Somewhere the man whose ink of octopi
Flourished in nights and dawns across my mind.
I ached to make tomorrow dawn for you:
That somehow underneath a polar sea on some strange afternoon
I’d swim in diver’s suit and find
A great White Shape,
A long and dazzling iceberg fathoms deep
That shoaled much like a whale.
I’d crack its skin of ice! I’d break away the frost!
To find within that chrysalis
all safe and kept
A ship we thought was lost:
That lean submersible with fierce and awesome prow,
And on it one initial: N!
The billion waves that beat and tossed to rake this ship
Have not erased this sign.
Initial, craft, and what lies deep within the craft, are mine!
I break the frosted seal.
The airlock gapes.
I enter there.
I tread an ancient floor,
Wondering at N for Nil for Naught,
For Nothingness, or more?
In mazed apartments, past untouched foods
And unplayed organs now with stealth I go and find
A man laid out on laboratory table frosted white
And frozen so his lips, mouth, ears, eyes, soul are blind.
I touch the white-tomb shape: it melts.
The beard, the cheek, the brow, the mouth, the eye
Come forth and flush, grow warm; they move,
And such their fame, when asking I receive
From one cold gasp that awful name,
That name of beauty, that name of wrath and Time,
Nemo! breaks forth from ice-crusted tongue!
Nemo! makes frost and rime to fall and flake
In syllables magnificent for my sweet sake!
And (Renaissance from snow!) you rise to take me where
All wild lost-wandered silly travel-romanced boys must go.
Half blind you teach me how to see
And hear the grindings of your dread machinery;
They fill my soul. I burrow like a mole with you
Beneath Mysterious Islands where you keep
A hideaway or two or three.
All madness maddened, like old Ahab,
Tack and hammer we the bones and skin and heart
Of circumnavigating Whale namedNautilus
With which the two of us set sail,
Wild Nemo, and wild half-constructed boy,
The sea our bowl of soup, this iron whale our toy.
We trough the world around and, hand in hand,
Make Friday footprints on the sand of isles half coral
And half sifting hour-glass dust.
Your moral madness anchors us at yet much farther islands
On a hunch,
To run from cannibals who favor us for lunch
And running laugh, for all of this is larks!
We dive back in to breakfastings of sharks
And sink us deep and keep us snug and warm,
Thus hid and snug, we talk late in the night
And plan for what? For all that’s Good and Right?
Why, to Cure the World of War!
That was your boast.
Comparing madnesses, failed dreams, wild enterprise
The sinking of a White Whale
Or a warship by surprise,
Ahab’s dread Bible-planned and heedless
Self-destruction
Or your lost reconstruction of our world and sphere?
I think, old Nemo, I do love your madness most.
Your aims are closer to the Host
Whose Peace would walk upon your seas.
Half out of sun, half into night,
Your crooked shadow, leant toward goodness
Seems half right. I fill the other half with me.
O, gladly would I sail with Nemo
Against the lords and brutes who breed annihilation,
And live alone with you, our ship our nation.
The N upon your prow which Nothing signifies,
Your unshelled soul being raw, and empty now your cup,
I would, with the numerals of my twelve brave years
Fill up for you to drink, and again and again
With loud sweet cries
Fill up: Nemo! I say! And “You, R. B.!” your echoes sigh.
All dreams must end.
That dream is long since gone, I know,
So from this unkempt world we turn and go
ToNautilus, to deeps, to sleeping ice,
To dreaming snow.
There you to drowse and snooze a little hundred years or more
Until some other aging boy cracks wide the seatide door
And creeps to touch and whisper—waken you
To rise from out the sea
In hopeful times of Peace, eternally at ease,
O,can it be?
May it please God.
No, more, may it please Man.
It can be so if he but make the plan
And sign it NEMO, for it was Nemo’s scheme
To still the scarlet waters and fulfill Man’s dream.
But there, bound up in whiteness and soon lost
To sleep and time and winter’s mortal frost,
Your lips, dear Captain, twitch a final gasp,
I bend to catch your breath
And hear you still outwhispering all tides, all death,
And this your lasting cry:
“Dear boy, with such good reading, dreamer lads like you,
Why, bless me.NEMO! shout the name!
Willnever die!”
AIR TO LAVOISIER
Lavoisier, when just a boy,
Did suffer vital gas to joy;
He’d snuff a lung, he’d sniff a quaff,
Then let it forth, much changed, to laugh
Which, echoed on the sides of seers
Who had not laughed in sixty years,
Convulsed their bones, ground them to dust
In hyperventilated lust.
And then, when grown, he sniffed the air,
That vital flux which everywhere
We lean upon with heart and lung,
And readied up a tune which, sung,
Changed Science’s antique brass band.
Here’s Oxygen, he said,
And on the other hand, here’s Hydrogen;
They dance like gypsies down the strand
And in our blood these twin stuffs caper,
Half drunken gas, half flaming vapor.
So said Lavoisier’s report;
Then stopped, he took another snort,
Cried, “Gods, one cannot get enough
Of this invigorating stuff!”
This secret to our Race bequeathing,
All cheered. Forgot.
But went on breathing.
WOMEN KNOW THEMSELVES;
ALL MEN WONDER
Women know themselves;
All men wonder.
Women lie still with themselves;
Men and dogs wander.
Women appraise themselves;
Men mustfind.
Women have seeing eyes;
Men are blind.
Women stay, women are;
Men would be, all men go yonder.
Women walk quietly;
Most men blunder.
Women watch cool mirrors
And there find mortal dust;
Men crave fast creeks
That break the sun and light
And shimmer laughter and show no sight
Save residues of lust;
So it is women accept
While men reject
The night.
Women bed down with child against the cold;
Men drink to shake the winter lodged in summer bones
Grow bold with beer
And thus more certainly
Grow old.
When death sighs whitening the sill
Women give way, cry welcome, stand still;
But men run fast
Thus racing for the hill
Where all lie lonely under stones
Where harvesters lie harvested by grass.
In sum: it is man’s dear blind and blundered need
And begging after life
To break, to run, to leave;
And woman’s to walk all warm with seed
All lit by candle-children
To look in midnight mirror
s, finding truth,
And, happy in late years, recall,
And sometimes, grieve..
DEATH IN MEXICO
I thought it strange to see them on the path
That led them up in sun and lemon-shadow
Through winds that smelled of summer and of wine.
I thought that they were only passing
The delicate and fern-scrolled iron gates
The winter-white, the marble cemetery
Carrying their lunch in a little silver case.
Murmuring, all,
And chattering, and smiling;
One held a soft guitar and touched it with a whorled thumb;
And they were dark birds wheeling south at winter’s call
I saw them chewing tangerines and spitting seeds,
I saw them move, night among day-whitened stone.
And the food that they ate upon was Death,
And the sustenance they bore in a silver box
Was the fossil imprint of a child.
They carried her like jewels overhead;
The father balanced her, hand up, gently as a plume,
A crated feather, a valley flower, an April grass.
And no one wept.
But each was eating of the air and of the day,
As quick, as quickly as they could.
They ate the sky with eyes,
And the wind with teeth,
And the sun with their flesh;
And it was good to be alive,
If only to be walking here
With Death crowned upon their heads,
Death delicate as moss and leaf mold
Borne in a box.
Within the box was running and laughter and dark hair,
Within the box was the eye of the antelope
And the breath of the moon,
Within the box a fevered but cooling apricot, a pear,
Within the box all life that was or ever comes to be,
Within the box some picnic tinsel, silver amulet, mountain shade.
They moved on with their murmuring guitar,
I saw the great fern shadows of the iron gate blow shut.
How strange—I smiled—that I should think them picnicking,
How strange to think they carried wine above their heads;
For, in reality,
Those souls were eating long before the noon
And long after the midnight,
They ate forever and never stopped their eating.
Even as I, hurrying in an icy wind,
Sculled down the quiet avalanche of cobbled street and hill
Eating of the clear air, and drinking of the mellow wind,
And eating of the blue sky
And taking the golden dust with my mouth
And feeding the yellow sun to my soul.
I passed a coffin shop where hammers