Brian Culhane

Paulatim lachrymas rerum experentia tersit. Petrarch Father’s books lying on the living-room floor Must be divided into threes: art history, Classical letters and, left from my days here, Unsteady stacks of quasi-educational lore That show yellowing Geographic scientists Perennially lost in rain forest mists. An instant choice will cull some from the rest So they may become mine—a banausic test. Prewar light glimmers in the apartment: A shadowplay that summons an adolescence Of slammed doors and risible nothings Hurled at retreating parental backs —The most telling blows always sotto voce— As I stormed and wept and read in silence. Now, standing again in silence, I stare At a word trove given two sons to share. Some are dated in the first blank page:1 January 1938

In the garrulous present Threadbare nouns find What raiment’s left From forefathers Who perhaps struck poses But wrote of frenzy Out of deepest urgency Hammering voices In no dumbfounded age. Theirs the grace Of unfaltering Fealty to the word. Yet then I picture Pound Prematurely stilled By his own tongue —Tempus tacendi. Did he ever revisit The barbed floodlit quad Where bareheaded he’d Stood in all weather Mouthing surreal Greek, Fashioning a rhythm Out of life’s ruin, That life he would unspeak Half a lifetime later Arriving on the tarmac Of Eisenhower Italy, Breath caught in the throat? I heft his burdened book Only to let it drop —A stoneweight dropping down Well’s jaggy darkness That anyhow comes back In stonecold dialect: Pisa! A pure echo Purged of memory. On my lap his poems’ Esoteric call Has no words at all Or just those selfsame ones Quarried from a rock —Red and ocher bison Emblaze the solitude Of an old draughtsman Who long hours daubs In Altamira’s shade: Let those I love try to forgive What I have made.

In memory of Nancy Tow Spiegel Before he put his important question to an oracle, Croesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers, Sending runners half around the world, to Delphi, Dodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon, So as to determine the accuracy of their words; His challenge: not to say anything of his future But rather what he was doing in his capital, Sardis (Eating an unlikely meal of lamb and tortoise, Exactly one hundred days after messengers had set out). This posed a challenge, then, of far space not of time: Of seeing past dunes and rock fortresses; of flying, Freighted, above caravans and seas; of sightedness, As it were, in the present construed as a darkened room. Croesus of Lydia sought by this means to gauge The unplumbed limits of what each oracle knew, Hesitant to entrust his fate to any unable to divine Lamb and tortoise stewing in a bronze pot. When only the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi correctly Answered from her cleft, her tripod just the lens For seeing into the royal ego, she put his mind to rest, But not before speaking in her smoke-stung voice: I count the grains of sand on the beach and the sea’s depth; I know the speech of the dumb and I hear those without voice.

Hold, memory, a vision out of Greece: The west wind breathes a ripening breath As each pear, pendant and golden, brushes Another, where four tilled acres glisten Winter and summer: fig, olive, currant, And the heavy succulent pomegranate —Sunstruck for the plucker’s hand. All this a stranger sees, palm on lintel, Sees the stately women of the royal rooms Murmuring over linen, looms humming; Sees boys, on pedestals, shine torches Which fire the eyes of Alkinöos’s hounds. So much of heroism wondrously found (Like a glinting pebble in a child’s hand, Borne upward to imagination’s shallows), As I’d gaze at snow blanketing West End, Hearing the story my father burnished Over a month of nights, so that the voyage Of the telling faded into the hours lived Beside that voice—whiskey rough—again Taking up the exile’s lament:hekatomb, Distaff, honeyed wine . . .

Mount Olympus held nothing for them. No occasion of theirs could provoke Magniloquent debate. Nor act require That attic of gods to come swooping Onto the field, swaying the battle. Only the great booming of the ferry As it shouldered alongside the pier; Only the waitress counting their Saucers: it was this April morning That swung them by their heels. What was missing was the impersonal, The fated, a visionary marble address, The goddess skimming over blue water To whisper good news, or some stud, Swan, or bull brimming with light. Not a wingéd foot. Only Love, Recently decamped, hovered above The table, ready to be splendid. But their ten years’ war had ended.

For hours now the Last Supper has been over, And the beating almost over, and morning’s cry Yet to be heard by the workmen in the courtyard Warming themselves by the hasty fire, and Peter, Near the agony in the garden, feeling something Terrible happening, blinking back stale sleep, Peter turns his face from strangers’ stares. “This man also was with Jesus.” The others Slowly turning toward him with cold interest, And his own voice, thick-tongued: “I do not know him.” That the cock crows not then but at the third No Must tell us much about the nature of faith, How it leans on separations, how it robes simple Gestures—a hand waving from an open window— With deferral, as if real knowledge only comes after, As though Peter could only see what he’d done Upon going from the high priest’s courtyard And, all alone, weeping bitterly in the dawn. That much we can understand, but why then Does Chekhov revisit this known, hard ground With a half-frozen student who, on his way back From a failed hunt, thinks how this same chill Easter wind must have blown in Rurik’s age And scourged the hungry poor in the years Of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible? Wind, raw wind, hunger, icy needles of rain . . . The same as then—until, coming on two widows, A huge, shapeless old woman in a man’s overcoat And her putty-faced daughter washing a kettle, The student asks if he might share their fire, Saying, as he does, that St. Peter had on such A night warmed himself before a fire, on such A cold, extraordinarily long and terrible night. Murmuring welcomes, they bring him inside, And soon he finds himself describing in detail That part of the gospel which is Peter’s betrayal: “. . . thus I imagine it: the garden deathly still And very dark, and in the silence came Sounds of muffled sobbing—” Here his account Breaks off when the absently-smiling Vasilissa Suddenly weeps, burying her eyes in her apron; Whereupon her daughter, herself bowed down By sickness and filth, blushes and turns away. The student, for all his theology, is speechless. There’s nothing for it now but to step out With empty game-bag and find his moonlit Way back home across the ancient marsh. Only then does he see in the waterlogged Meadow, well beyond the river’s sedges, Something remarkable: a high-walled garden Looming green against a background of sand. Nineteen hundred years crossed in heartbeats! In that kindled instant all the world’s travails Drop from his shoulders. Just twenty-two, He has found the very quick of faith. Gone are hunger, sleet and useless words. Gone! Ah, we leave him there at century’s end, Before he has returned to his village —And all that returning would surely mean— In this, the briefest of the master’s stories.