A. F. Moritz

You couples lying where moon-scythes and day-scythes reaped you, browning fruit falls and sleeps in tangled nests, the wild grass, falls from your apple tree that still grows here: cry for your dead hero, his weak sword, his flight, that you were slaughtered and your bed poured whiteness, the issue of murdered marriage dawns. The streets crack, a house falls open to the air, sun and rain lie on the bed. And the river still runs in a child’s hands under the factory’s black hulk, four stacks that used to bloom with smoke over shining leaves, beneath thunderheads. Then the storm shatters and beats and after in woods a scented smoke of light, a dripping quiet, and the small gold snake sparkles at the pond’s edge. But who is he? What were the goods he made, what became of his loved wife, his children, and where has he gone, fearsome, powerless? The silver path of air from the river’s bend to its rippling away beneath the low concrete bridge is still pure. No one comes, and the child who watched by it has vanished. Or sometimes he appears for a day, a night, in the walls and windows reflected on the water, in goldfinches’ flight, cricket song, the heron’s great rise from the bank. Last a carp leaps, voices and a lantern slide down the secret stream in black and gold peace, past the child’s husk, the family never born.

A courtier speaks to Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, ca. 210 B.C. Highness, the former walls were helpless. They stood alone in the middle of small fields protecting nothing. A single peasant’s holding engulfed each one as it ran briefly, straight from noplace off to noplace, with ruinous steps of broken stone at both ends. Only head-high, without the towers, gates and towns of your great wall, they stuck where they were, never rising over hills or curving through valleys: nothing but shoddy masonry and a mystery: who built them, how long ago, what for? They seemed to have no role but balking the reaper and the ox; their bases made islands in the flashing scythe-strokes, where wild flowers and shrubs sprouted. So all the people praise you for burying such walls and their memory in your vast one, which joins them, stretching far beyond where they once crumbled to hold your Empire: a wall which therefore can never have an end but has to go on extending itself forever. How useful, how cogent your wall is: a pale for the civilized, a dike against the wild people outside, who trade their quiet human blood for the rage of gods, tearing men to pieces, throwing them, watching them fall. In burying those little walls, Lord, you have covered our shame at our ancestors, best forgotten, whose mighty works were so pointless, or so pitiably useless. Was all their effort so that daisies could grow in fissures? So that some human work would rise over the flats and weather till it seemed not human? Only so that something of ours could be like trees and rocks: docile-seeming, yet sullenly opposed to use, and when compelled, only half serving, reserving from the functions that we give them a secret and idle self. The peasants would make lean-tos for cattle against those walls: they served for this alone. Now scholars, Lord, are saying the gods are not bulls and cows. That in ancient times we herded these animals to keep from starving and going naked, and so came the old custom of thinking them gods—from dependence. In my youth, I know, the peasants said just the opposite. Worship came first. The awesome bull and cow were gathered to be adored more easily, till people noticed how they let themselves be driven and penned. Next came the first murders against these gods, and the careful observation that they stood to be killed. And so their cult became contempt of beings that would live with us and submit to our crimes and hunger, and we began to breed them. That is why, the farmer says, cattle are honoured, murdered, eaten, cherished with labour that makes him their slave, and that is why in summer he exults in blood, but shivers with fear, with exhausted terror and regret, and sinks into stunned revelry all winter, eating the salted meat, getting children, his house closed up with snow, himself awake as if he slept, living as if he had already died, and rich, happy as if he were a buried worm. Is God, then, Highness, the fat flaccidity of cattle? Myself, I don’t like to wonder anymore. I only hope lifelong service earns what I ask: the command of some far bastion on your wall where it curves out into the unsettled wastes beyond any field, and the barrenness inside is indistinguishable from that without. This is the reward and end of life I want: to be a point, though infinitely small and far from you, in that wide circle centred on your great self. I see myself arriving to take charge of my troops. I look down from the tower: bare plains, outcrops of ice and rock, vast restless stirrings of grey grasses and dark-veined overcast, the cold wind’s hissing. Year after year the same, waiting for an assault that never comes, straining to glimpse our naked enemies creeping blended with their stony soil: nothing but legend, it may be. Maybe a morning will rise when, waking, I find that I’ve forgotten which way is north, and can’t tell if I am turned outward to danger or inward, Highness, to you. The sun invisible, a murky light diffused throughout featureless cloud, and the wall so long no curve appears—it seems to stretch out straight endlessly east and west: what clue will there be which way to face my people for the attack? It will be crucial then to show no doubt. My orders, I vow, though ignorant, will be crisp.

Here comes the wise man in the story of sick times, telling you how to find the passage of satisfaction. He is many million years old and has been walking many thousand miles, more miles, more lengths of road than the shrunk-up earth of these days possesses, to find you. He has a veda from before creation to sing you and, lo and behold, it is about you, it means everything to you. Though they’ve made a rope out of rough, heavy smoke, like a whale-thick hawser for a steamer of dead star, and pulled it through you from throat to crotch, from ear to ear, and hag-tied your hands and feet with the ends, though each of them has your own face molten with leprosy, though your brain makes the sound of crowded trains colliding in Kashmir and a stadium that roars hosanna, it is still possible now, in the next moment, to know God. That is, not die in confusion. But maybe, then, this guru is too soon. Maybe he hasn’t come from far enough. Maybe he’s still much too young. Maybe he’s never asked himself clearly what happens when someone like you hears that a lightning-opened living fig tree or a mountain and a blue sky can be lived in and sets out on the long road never moving from his realm in pain.

For John Hollander Although it’s likely you’re on your own at this moment in this city of three million reading the poems of Traherne, and there was no one till you lit your lamp, the kingdom of childhood keeps being founded in his voice and his seeing, which are a sort of birth. A birth goes on in the dark of a poor family, or a mother alone. Then comes the small bright circle of the faces: lover pores over sleeping loved one, parent over child in their enclosure we name home, a hut in the plain so bare there’s not a tongue of grass to make the wind hiss. Unknown to the world a world exists: trees and streams, birds all the colors of the flowers. So Traherne pours over you his wild remembrance of the world to come. And would even in the silence of his book if it were lost and lay unopened two hundred years. Even if he had died before he sang the Eden in his look.

Uncle Johnny died after rigid years of cutting hair in his shop downtown. Toward the end he cut it badly, breathing a whisky scent into the tonic, talc and glossy male curls piling up on the tiled floor. He died shrivelled, a man who seldom spoke, still with that nickname, Johnny, last taciturn hint of a youth who may have been angry, a lover of women, filled and lightened by vast ocean, the sky over America. He spent his time at home, silent, or sometimes in bars, or on the corner by King’s Newsstand with others like himself on sun-baked cement, spitting single words, standing in dark slacks, short-sleeved shirts and suspenders. The tall and narrow-waisted new world had by that time completely rejected suspenders. And after the funeral Mary, his wife, was crying and said to me, "Why is it that the men always die sooner? Do they just give up?" We stood there in the church of our fathers, who explained their own deaths, all death, by an ancient crime. How foolish it would have been to tell you, Mary, something about dioxyribonucleic acid, adaptation of the sexes, effects of the hormones, or social factors, things you’d listen to blankly. Better to say that what we find in ourselves, whatever weakness, we ourselves have put there. Both of us knew enough about men’s weakness. Your question didn’t need an answer: I simply shrugged and silently, without real hope, asked to be absolved from the fault of men: Powers of earth, give me the male strength that we desire, kindly strength, which protects. Don’t make my wife a nurse, helplessly to watch me dying drunk and before her. And do not punish me for pride because I’ve asked to be so strong: to be the last.

Stiff, thick: the white hair of the broad-faced father, who leads his shambling son along cracked sidewalks, by dusty glass half hiding goods never sold. The son is the taller one but still a child: not aware of his clothes, of what expressions seize on his soft face. His gait lolls, loosely directed from some weak, distant center, scarcely devoted to any purpose but following along and looking. Thick lenses glint with watery blue: his small eyes, veiled and placid, as far off as the milky August sky. The father, all the time glancing at him and talking as man to man, seems to forget it would be better for this one to have been like all the rest. He has his son still with him, the others have grown up and gone away—but when he dies, then what will happen to the boy? Even this thought is absorbed now in their ordinary errand, men’s business: grateful going out through the day, talk with the owners, the salesmen, a mechanic in the scent of grease and sawdust of machined metal, the sifting through tools and parts that flow, spill, gleam like seeds, like sand—looking for what fits, finding what will work. Afterwards to stop for food, then walk back home down the clear streets, when starlings, hunting and restless before sleep, and children are the loudest things, with the dark foaming among maples, glinting, as it comes in.

Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe does the summer when I was seventeen come back to mind against my will, like a bird crossing my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation of the comic boundaries, defiances that never failed or brought disaster. Days on the backs and in the breath of horses, between rivers and pools that reflected the cicadas' whine, enervation and strength creeping in smooth waves over muscular water. All those things accepted, once, with unnoticing hunger, as an infant accepts the nipple, never come back to mind against the will. What comes unsummoned now, blotting out every other thought and image, is a part of the past not so deep or far away: the time of poverty, of struggle to find means not hateful—the muddy seedtime of early manhood. What returns are those moments in the diner night after night with each night's one cup of coffee, watching an old man, who always at the same hour came in and smiled, ordered his tea and opened his drawing pad. What did he fill it with? And where's he gone? Those days, that studious worker, hand moving and eyes eager in the sour light, that artist always in the same worn-out suit, are my nostalgia now. That old man comes back, the friend I saw each day and never spoke to, because I hoped soon to disappear from there, as I have disappeared, into the heaven of better days.

Each living thing is like a kingdom that rises not quite out of nothing: April stirrings of some boy and the May beauty of a generous princess. Then came children— who could calculate their splendor? And there were factories in valleys, mile after mile, dragons of purple smoke, blue flames at night, castles hidden in forests equally hidden where a shining company rode through flowers to pacify the dangerous land. Triangular sails, violet, saffron, and rose, glowed beyond coves under cliffs dangling silver torques of waterfall. Later the parents aged and grew more grateful, more full of a certainty that could not be glimpsed or dismayed, and then the children were gone to some other land as if to heaven, yet the mourning was not for death. Now by a quiet wall buckled cement gives a bright home to milkweeds like strange skeletons, pale green, intact and upright, and tall white grasses that never wave. The sole survivor— a duty was laid on him to tell the tale among new minds, other ways, and how do we imagine him, wherever he’s gone—all that remains, scholar of an unread book, beggar of an unfilled cup, an unknown variation, the thought of the kingdom in a lost man?

I wish we could control this revolting want of control: these people with their spongy eyes, their mouths of trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penises and bear traps for vulvas. One taste of sunlight and at once they can’t do without it. Water, the same, and food, and air, and a dozen other squalid habits. Some—like their copulation, a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck— are not physically compulsive but the partners can’t stop wanting them to be: so we desire to be raped by love, who would fill us, they say, with an oil from the lit braziers of stars. What if, doing it every day, we resemble pistons, and the slow poison cuts our lives off at 70: it’s the grim determination of our passion. And beyond this, even I— defended in childhood by my strong father the piano and my mother the virtuoso from knuckles among warehouses—even I am addicted to the mild light of words.