God blinked and Lo! the Nebulae!
Ben blinked; electric founts poured from his hands;
Within a century his sparks had lit the lands
And filled the towns with noon at night.
Such was God’s vision.
Such was Ben’s sight.
And after long years, some eighty-odd or more
Of intemperate days, good afternoons, storms, calms,
Bad fights, then making peace,
Vast multiples of weather,
God yawned, Ben gummed his eyes,
But still arguing… went off to bed together
SOME LIVE LIKE LAZARUS
Some live like Lazarus
In a tomb of life and come forth curious late
To twilight hospital and mortuary room.
From one womb to another
Is but a falling step;
Yet Innocence unbandaged
Blinks at Truth in terror
And would blind itself again!
But better the lame drags forth at last
From morning sickness waxed to twilight sleeps
Thine own self litter forth in autumn’s self-consume
Than linger in one room.
Let summer wander idiot in these eyes
Which stricken wide one wild sweet moment upon day
Fix, transfix, and die,
Than, warned by widows, stifled in a cage
All stillborn stay.
From first cry to last breath
If all one knows is death upon a frost-rimed path
To yet more ice,
Let one warm breath suffice
For July dawns of hail
And August snows when stormbound senses fail.
Best Lazarus born of witch-hag, shocked, miscarrying
Than, senses shorn, gone ill with thought
Of marrying ear to music,
Eye to luscious color,
Nose to time and tide’s caprice,
Hand to squalor.
Tongue to late sour wine must answer sweet.
Mere roadway dust-track now name street.
Best Lazarus born a dwarf dismembered
Than cat-sick hairball choked in half-out,
Hid moth-hair, chaff-seed, cold steam of un-lust
Unthrust, by hungry Death himself quite ill-remembered,
Never birthed at all.
Better cold skies seen bitter to the North
Than blind unseeing sac-bile gone to ghost.
If Rio is lost, love the Antarctic Coast.
O ancient Lazarus!!
Come ye forth.
THESE UNSPARKED FLINTS,
THESE UNCUT GRAVESTONE BRIDES
The ladies in the libraries
Do not go home at night;
Stand watch, be sure, just wait
Outside the mellow place at nine
Crouched down in bush and elderberry vine,
Look in through windows tall
Where virgin brides go quiet as the dust
By shelves where titles ranked, gold-bright as foxes’ eyes,
Glint sparks of lust.
Among the million dead and million more to perish
These unsparked flints, these uncut gravestone brides
Do nourish silence, and their tread
Is stuff of moss and downfell rust.
They do not touch the floor, incircling the dark,
To one-by-one pull strings to snatch the light,
Extinguish and move on to next and snatch again,
Keys at their waists ajingle in a gentle rain,
Like skaters in a summer dream,
Their spectacles agleam beneath the greenglass shades.
The smell of hyacinth pervades where they have been
And goes before as harbinger of youngness kept
Clasp-corseted in Iron Maiden flesh.
Where air was warm and bounteous on the sill,
In passing, such as these give vapors and the chill
To airs that touch and move aside.
They hide themselves a moment in the stacks
To shove long needles murderous in their hair
And find themselves in mirrors, unaware;
Both seer and seen the Queen of Iceland’s crop,
A blind stare, a strange drift of unshaped snow.
Then, at the door they go, give last looks round the shop
Where Time is vended in the books,
Where skin prolapses from the dinosaur,
Then wheel again to knife the air, go out and down the street
To places no one knows.
They do not go.
Their coats all buttoned tight,
Their spectacles fresh-washed, they spin to call:
“Is anybody there?”
In hopes that some deep terrifying voice of man
Might some night soon reply, “Ah, yes.”
Their ringless fingers tremble on their dress.
They hold their breath, their souls, they wait.
Then reach up for the last light-string and yank.
The night drops down.
But in the instant of eclipse
They snap-close-clench themselves like
Ancient paper flowers of Japan.
A wind from basements dank and attics desert-dry
Breathes up, breathes down the air,
These scentless flowers shower everywhere!
And where before the brittle women stood,
Some vagrant tattered crepes now tap the floor.
As for the rest, the lustful books on shelves gape wide
And into these the funeral-flower souls now rattle,
Tickle, rustle, hide, and, hiding, rest;
Each to its age, each to its own and proper nest.
This maid to Greece and Rape of the Sabines,
That one to Child’s Crusade
Where knights shuck off their stuffs
To bed the sixteenth summer maid;
The third and last cold statue turned to farewell summer’s dust
Flies up the Transylvania height
And welcomes lust by showing it her neck
And trading randy bite for bite.
All, all turned to bookmarks!
Slipped in dreadful books
Where loving makes a din
Ten times as loud as loving in the world beyond the shelves.
Tucked in warm dark the bookmark maidens
Feel themselves crushed and beauteously mangled,
Scream and gibber all the night,
Only swooning down to dreaming sleep at dawn,
Smiles creped about their mouths.
Squashed flat ‘twixt Robin and his nimble nibbling men,
And Arthur who, if thanked,
Will pull Excalibur from them at breakfast-time,
And so be King, his weapon free of stone
That held it fast, all hungry for a fight.
Such screams! Such gladsome mourns of happiness!
List, listen! by the library.
But, soft… the books, gummed shut, do muffle it.
The maids all night each night are maids no more.
Come back at noon.
And see the ancient cronies three, aswoon,
All somewhat tipsy-drunk and tenterhooked with memory
Propped up at desks as if the sun were still the moon.
Give nod,
Give book,
Go off, but never ask, for you will never know
Where, where o where at night
These long lost cold-chipped marble ladies go.
Ask silence,
Linger on awhile
But all you’ll have for answer
Is a sad remembrance smile
They’ll quickly cover with a Kleenex, wipe away.
So, old again and lonely and unsquashed
And ringless, pale, and breathing only ice,
They face the heatless noon,
The sunless hours of day,
Reckon your question,
Recommend files,
And give virginal advice.
AND THIS DID DANTE DO
The truth is this:
That long ago in times
Before the birth of Light,
Old Dante Alighieri prowled this way
On continent unknown to mad Columbus;
Made landfall here by sneaking, sly Machine,
Invention of his candle-flickered soul
Which, wafted upon storms,
Brought him in harmful mission down.
So, landed upon wilderness of dust
Where buffaloes stamped forth
A panic of immense heartbeat,
Dante scanned round and stamped his foot,
And hoofed the trembling flints l
And named a Ring of Hell.
With parchment clenched in tremorous fist,
He inked out battlements of grime
And arcs of grinding coggeries which, struck,
Snowed down a dreadful cereal of rust
Long years before such iron soots were dreamt
Or made, or flown,
Long long before such avenues of steel in sky were sought.
So, in a guise like Piranesi lost amidst-among
His terrible proud Prisons,
The Poet sketched a vaster, higher, darker Pent-up Place
A living demon-clouded sulphur-spread of Deep.
From tenement to tenement of clapboard dinge
He rinsed a sky with coal-sack burning,
Hung clouds with charcoal flags
Of nightgowns flapping like strange bats
Shocked down from melancholy steam-purged locomotive caves.
Then through it all put scream of metal flesh,
Great dinosaur machines charged forth by night,
All stomaching of insucked souls Pent up in windowed cells.
Delivered into concrete river-shallow streets,
Men fled themselves from spindrift shade
Of blown black chimney sifts and blinds of smoking ghosts.
And on the brows of all pale citizens therein
Stamped looks of purest terror,
Club-foot panic and despair,
A rank, a raveling dismay that spread in floods
To drain off in a lake long since gone sour
With discharged outpouring of slime.
So drawn, so put to parchment, so laid down
In raw detail, this Ring of Hell (No mind what Number!)
Was Dante’s greatest Inventory counting-up
Of Souls in dread Purgation.
He stood a moment longer in the dust.
He let the frightened drumpound heart of buffalo tread
Please to excite his blood.
Then, desecration-proud, happy at the great Black Toy
He’d printed, builded, wound, and set to run
In fouled self-circlings,
Old Dante hoisted up his heels,
Left low the continental lake shore cloven, stamped,
And hied him home to Florence and his bed,
And laid him down still dreaming with a smile,
And in his sleep spoke centuries before its birth
The Name of this Abyss, the Pit, the Ring of Hell
He had machinery-made:
CHICAGO!
Then slept,
And forgot his child.
YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN
They say you cannot, no, in any way
Go home again.
Yet home I came,
And picked an hour when the train
Slid in upon the golden track of twilight to the town.
I rode in bronze and saw the panoply of ore
Laid out on every leaf and every roofing cope
And balustrade;
The train rode high on trestle as it braked on toward its stop
And I gazed out upon that special dusking sea
Which washes for scant minutes on the world
At rise and set of sun.
Stepped down, I moved upon the yellow planks
Torn up from all the halls of ancient myths. The station sign was gold.
The trees, my god, the trees wore epaulettes!
The ivy on the old school wall was dazzling braid.
And in the shade the eye of cat sent forth
A minted signaling which could be spent!
The walks I trod were saffron from an Indian sand;
The lawns were amber carpetings
Where warrior ants climbed stricken with such luscious tints
As made them seem the richest armory in time.
Mere bees upon the air were tapestries.
And down the slanted beams of now-lost afternoon
And soon-come night
A spider made his way
On harps of honey-colored twine
Which struck might cry with pure delight.
All, all was light!
The very air swam syrupy with tunes of wind
And rattlings of coins which tufted every branch.
The leaves beneath each tree were jackpot avalanche.
A dog trot-rambled by
His fur made up of stuffs from out Fort Knox,
His eyes cuff-links he sported without pride,
Accepted, knew, forgot, and took in stride.
The house where I was born,
My grandma’s house,
Most terrible, most beautiful of all!
As I came by
Aflame it was, all fire in the windows
From the plunging sun;
Each glass a meld of brazen metals
From old shields on which a thousand dead
Were proudly borne toward sunset cairns.
As if raised high upon the instant of my coming
The windows dazzled, clamoring the lawns,
Then rushed to set more torches
On the blazing rose-filled porches,
And attics danced with firefly dust
As cupolas took light like lust
And virgin chandeliers were crazed
And cracked with flame.
I stood amazed,
I trod the flaxen grass;
Never such welcome!
In all my days of going forth and coming back,
Never such wealth.
The sunset knew my lack
And sparked a million bons to show the way,
All celebrant, a burning down of happiness
Before my river-running, gladsome-fractured eyes.
All of its banks it opened,
All of its wealth it spent
In one last great pervading spree.
I sensed but one cool shade of Death behind a single tree
Waiting for the silent river of light to ebb
So it might seize not only cash but me.
But now it was an hour all sweetly met;
I did come home and chose by clumsy miracle
A time which made the world stand still
Mute-struck to bronze.
A statue, then, I fed myself the splendid prides of air
And heard the birds that sang with jeweled throats:
You’ll live forever. This, your summer, gone eternal,
Will stay fair.
I stayed.
The sun went out.
The sky shut down its light.
Gone wise, a few days later, rising up near dawn
I made my way through streets of night
To train and left the way I came—
As sun fired gold to mint the town;
Still the same king I was upon arriving
All royal gowned I left in a lie of light.
The last I saw of it
The town was, avenue and shop, bright swathed
In goldleaf touching and renewed.
A tree all dripped with Spanish royal doubloons
Shook with premonitions as I passed
And mouthed farewells.
In Chicago
Some hours later,
The railway station men’s room
Smelled like the lion house
At the zoo
In Dublin.
When I was very old.
AND DARK OUR CELEBRATION WAS
And dark our celebration was,
For Death was sweet to us;
By that I mean it filled our sacks so full
We leaned atilt round moonlit corners of the town
And sprinted on to doorways where we buzzed and rang
And lit the pumpkin windows and held forth our hands
To take the treasures of the time,
Then ran again, my lovely thistle girls and I
Gone old within a night yet young with them.
How grand such Eves, how good such girls
That they slowed pace for ancient boys like me.
Who could not give it up, stay home, put by that holiday.
I had to go, to lurch, to tap, to laugh, to walk at last
All happy-tired home in cold wind blowing
With the full-lit moon to wife and hearth and aunts
Come by to wait for us: the crazy man and his wild pride
Of maiden beasts.
Long years ahead, dear girls, on nights like those,
Do please drop by at dusk, come sit upon my stone
And speak glad words
To spirit gone but wishing to be still
With you when you go forth with your own children
Thus to filch and prize and laugh at every door.
No more. I stay.
But save for me a single sweet, some Milky Way to munch
Or bring a pumpkin cut and lit and place it so to warm my feet.
Then on the path run, go! knowing that I’m not dead,
For you are my head, my heart, my limbs, my blood set free;
You are the me that is warm,
I am the me that is cold,
You are the me that is young,
I old.
But what of that?!
Death’s mean at all his Tricks, God, yes,
But you the Treats
Who run to beg my life and yours
In all the Future’s wild, delirious, dark
But warm and living streets.
MRS. HARRIET MADDEN ATWOOD,
WHO PLAYED THE PIANO FOR THOMAS A. EDISON
FOR THE WORLD’S FIRST PHONOGRAPH RECORD,
IS DEAD AT 105
And did you know that still she was alive?
Somewhere, old Harriet Madden Atwood, there’s a name!
And freshly gone now at, listen to the sum:
One hundred years plus five!