Or gone acold in dreadful deep November nights.
Boys are always running somewhere.
Not to start is a sin.
Who’s to say they should not leap from bed,
Roar from house, chockful of hotcakes, rituals and rites,
Ever ready to begin?
Men are always running somewhere.
Ask them on the train, the jet, the rushing sidewalk, where?
They’ll shift their suitcase or their gum
Or their cigar,
To ponder, wonder, peer, then, shut up, wander off,
Thinking you even madder and somehow sadder
Than the boys who thought you mad and sad,
And thus immunized to joys.
Twelve years before,
If boys were all yearning,
Now, as men, they have been to where they wanted to run,
Reached the end of the line, had their tickets punched
And circle back again
With tossed confetti-stuffs on hatbrim and lapel
To prove their madcap learning,
To show wherever it was, was a party!
And what the hell.
But, brushing the unknown Mardi Gras from off their eyebrows,
Hefting their great-coats stuffed with memos,
Ask them now not where they’re going
But where’ve theyBeen?
They’ll cudgel up their brows and scowl
As if some survey-maker had just been delicately obscene,
Recheck their datebooks, shuffle
Maunder,
But not spell those Destinations Past…
They’ve Gone! So what’s to tell?
Going was all the custom.
Now the custom is: Having Been.
And you?
Standing there with your battered kite and no string?
It’s obvious you’ve never went or gone
Or made the scene or, trying, failed,
Or done a thing!
You go not barefoot,
Neither are you shod by Mercury, Apollo,
Or any other plain or fancy god.
Where were they going?
Where last seen?
The man and boy stand tall and small before you;
One gray, the other green,
And, damn it! cry:
They’ve been Far Traveling…
Boy running to meet the man,
Man running to meet the boy,
Collision-course; struck bruised,
All tender-fused, why, look!
They make a troop,
A regiment of two
Who ramble thus forever in their single, simple,
Rare rambunctious joy.
So, suddenly, we see
Where the one was wandering, what he wanted to be;
Where the other has been and, having been, will forever know.
Ask, yes, but answers are absurd.
Like dogs they’ll stand and cock their heads at you
And tell no word.
But looks can say:
“I ran to be the man.”
Or, “Once I was a boy in summer, rushing to be me.”
It is no sin to not know where you’ve come from,
Or where go. Why should they tell,
When at their secret hearts they spell
The finest truths, and, spelling, mow the lawns of summer,
Barking, snapping, circling, biting, yapping,
There they vault, sunsets
There they share dawns.
There, ambidextrous to delight, they flow.
And who’s to stop that joy which hides and seeks
Like child in man?
And who’s to warn and tell, prevent,
The man who calls out to the boy?
Here lie their tandem prints in blowing sands—
Quick! here they turn back!
To wipe out their prints with a smile, a shout,
With quick paws that are hands.
Boys are always running somewhere.
Where, where, where O where?
They know.
Men are always running running running somewhere.
O woman, woman of all the sad wise years,
Let them go.
O TO BE A BOY IN A BELFRY
O to be a boy in a belfry
Tilting summer noon in tumults,
On your back, the sun squeezed lemon in your eyes,
The blue heaven all bright fries,
Your feet raw naked to the light,
Strewn warm in bed of straw high up in tower
And this your hour to summon all to prayer.
An incense burns the wind,
The altars wait to tremble,
The ancient dust to tingle
As you kick heel and toe,
Strive up, fists under rump
To patter-slap, to shape, to drive the bell
And start its voice athunder
In your bones and swarming through the air
To shake blue snows of summer sky
Invisible and drifting on the glare.
The bell swings traveling; you kick it on;
Returned, you thrust it, hungry-mouthed and lolling
Forth again, now lashing iron tongue
To lick its clangorous rims,
To bang, to detonate in glorious pronunciamentos:
I’m here! ‘Tis me!
‘Tis me who hooves the cannon bell!
To wake the summer dead out of their drowse.
‘Tis me! A mouse
Of boy gone high in belfry dins!
Who with pure iron sound would douse your sins!
All, startled, listen, rouse,
And come, drift-dusted down the roads!
And bell-creased crimsoned heel,
Upon my back I bicycle the wind
To rotor-thump the bombshell clangs!
Its great mouth hungers me;
I feed it feet.
Sprawled laughing, bell-sound in my lungs,
Prone underneath,
The sun all gone to shards, asplinter in my lids,
My mouth blood-rust from giving shout
To answer iron shout of bell:
Here’s heaven! heaven! heaven!
Bang. Not hell. Not hell. Bang! Not hell!
Until the church below is full of summer breath
And priest then wanders forth to make discussion,
His nave much shaken to sense with wild concussion.
Now one must cease.
But sometimes in the uptilt, ever-frenzied dance, forgets;
So priest must send on mission yet another boy
To stop the bell
To still the belfry and the iron-spilled joy.
Now lie there yet awhile, fine lad, upon your back,
As bell tilts down to quiet, soft asimmer.
Long before loves and beds are known you have known this:
Bells are a loud communion,
Belfry-banging bells are bliss.
Glistered with holy sweat you lift your head
And send a bright salt golden rain down free from brow
With one shake, smiling.
It blesses the distant ground.
You touch the bell:
It trembles still with sound.
You touch the sky with glance:
It shivers bright with quakes you’ve given
It will, long gone days beyond, remember.
You laugh one last triumphant burst.
Great seas of prayer wait murmuring below
Carefully, holding to your soul
And sweet-bruised tender wits,
You descend the belfry stair,
Inexplicably wild with thirst.
IF I WERE EPITAPH
What would I say of me,
If I were Epitaph?
That there were silly bones in him?
The grim but made him l
augh?
The jolly made him serious?
The glum made him delirious?
That lawyers talked him sleepy,
And made him snooze at noon,
But bed was his by nine o’clock
So he could rise with moon?
And roll upon the meadows
While other people dreamed,
With windows up and chilly
He smiled and only steamed?
They sealed him in a coffin
But could not make him stay,
His laugh too large, his smile too wkie
No matter what the molder,
The maggot in his bin,
No measuring-worm could inch and cir—
Cumnavigate his grin?
If Universe should claim me
And keep me with a sleep
I’d open up my laughter
And drop the Abyss deep;
There we would lie all friendly,
The empty stars and I
And speak upon Creation
And with God occupy
The time that’s left for burning,
A billion years to sup,
Then open wide God’s laughter
And let Him eat me up.
IF ONLY WE HAD TALLER BEEN
The fence we walked between the years
Did balance us serene;
It was a place half in the sky where
In the green of leaf and promising of peach
We’d reach our hands to touch and almost touch that lie,
That blue that was not really blue.
If we could reach and touch, we said,
‘Twould teach us, somehow, never to be dead.
We ached, we almost touched that stuff;
Our reach was never quite enough.
So, Thomas, we are doomed to die.
O, Tom, as I have often said,
How sad we’re both so short in bed.
If only we had taller been,
And touched God’s cuff, His hem,
We would not have to sleep away and go with them
Who’ve gone before,
A billion give or take a million boys or more
Who, short as we, stood tall as they could stand
And hoped by stretching thus to keep their land,
Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul.
But they, like us, were standing in a hole.
O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measured out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam’s finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God’s great hand come down the other way
To measure Man and find him Good,
And Gift him with Forever’s Day?
I work for that.
Short man. Large dream. I send my rockets forth between my ears,
Hoping an inch of Will is worth a pound of years.
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall:
We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!
We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!