Edgar Bowers

Her unawed face, whose pose so long assumed Is touched with what reality we feel, Bends to itself and, to itself resumed, Restores a tender fiction to the real. And in her artful posture movement lies Whose timeless motion flesh must so conceal; Yet what her pose conceals we might surmise And might pretend to gather from her eyes The final motion flesh gives up to art. But slowly, if we watch her long enough, The nerves grow subtler, and she moves apart Into a space too dim with time and blood For our set eyes to follow true enough, Or nerves to guess about her, if they would.

All winter long you listened for the boom Of distant cannon wheeled into their place. Sometimes outside beneath a bombers’ moon You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace Their careful webs against the boding sky, While miles away on Munich’s vacant square The bombs lunged down with an unruly cry Whose blast you saw yet could but faintly hear. And might have turned your eyes upon the gleam Of a thousand years of snow, where near the clouds The Alps ride massive to their full extreme, And season after season glacier crowds The dark, persistent smudge of conifers. Or seen beyond the hedge and through the trees The shadowy forms of cattle on the furze, Their dim coats white with mist against the freeze. Or thought instead of other times than these, Of other countries and of other sights: Eternal Venice sinking by degrees Into the very water that she lights; Reflected in canals, the lucid dome Of Maria della Salute at your feet, Her triple spires disfigured by the foam. Remembered in Berlin the parks, the neat Footpaths and lawns, the clean spring foliage, Where just short weeks before, a bomb, unaimed, Released a frightened lion from its cage, Which in the mottled dark that trees enflamed Killed one who hurried homeward from the raid. And by yourself there standing in the chill You must, with so much known, have been afraid And chosen such a mind of constant will, Which, though all time corrode with constant hurt, Remains, until it occupies no space, That which it is; and passionless, inert, Becomes at last no meaning and no place.

I summon up Panofskv from his bed Among the famous dead To build a tomb which, since I am not read, Suffers the stone’s mortality instead; Which, by the common iconographies Of simple visual ease, Usurps the place of the complexities Of sound survivors once preferred to noise: Monkeys fixed on one bough, an almost holy Nightmarish sloth, a tree Of parrots in a pride of family, Immortal skunks, unaromatically; Some deaf bats in a cave, a porcupine Quill-less, a superfine Flightless eagle, and, after them, a line Of geese, unnavigating by design; Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks, A hundred porous arks Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks Ape mother mules or imitation sharks— And each of them half-venerated by A mob, impartially Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry Unable mouth, symmetrically awry. But how shall I, in my brief space, describe A tomb so vast, a tribe So desperately existent for a scribe Knowingly of the fashions’ diatribe, I who have sought time’s memory afoot, Grateful for every root Of trees that fill the garden with their fruit, Their fragrance and their shade? Even as I do it, I see myself unnoticed on the stair That, underneath a clear Welcome of bells, had promised me a fair Attentive hearing’s joy, sometime, somewhere.

With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones. The bees renew the blossoms they destroy, While in the burning air the pines rise still, Commemorating long forgotten biers. Their roots replace the semblance of these bones. The weight of cool, of imperceptible dust That came from nothing and to nothing came Is light within the earth and on the air. The change that so renews itself is just. The enormous, sundry platitude of death Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same. And splayed upon the ground and through the trees The mountains’ shadow fills and cools the air, Smoothing the shape of headstones to the earth. The rhododendrons suffer with the bees Whose struggles loose ripe petals to the earth, The heaviest burden it shall ever bear. Our hard earned knowledge fits us for such sleep. Although the spring must come, it passes too To form the burden suffered for what comes. Whatever we would give our souls to keep Is merely part of what we call the soul; What we of time would threaten to undo All time in its slow scrutiny has done. For on the grass that starts about the feet The body’s shadow turns, to shape in time, Soon grown preponderant with creeping shade, The final shadow that is turn of earth; And what seems won paid for as in defeat.

“Who is Apollo?” College student How shall a generation know its story If it will know no other? When, among The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever, Indignantly he drew upon the blackboard, For all to see, the Streptococcus chain. His mind was like Odysseus and Plato Exploring a new cosmos in the old As if he wrote a poem—his enemy Suffering, disease, and death, the battleground His introspection. “Science and peace,” he said, “Will win out over ignorance and war,” But then, the virus mutant in his vein, “Death to the Prussian!” and “revenge, revenge!” How shall my generation tell its story? Their fathers jobless, boys for the CCC And NYA , the future like a stairwell To floors without a window or a door, And then the army: bayonet drill and foxhole; Bombing to rubble cities with textbook names Later to bulldoze streets for; their green bodies Drowned in the greener surfs of rumored France. My childhood friend, George Humphreys, whom I still see Still ten years old, his uncombed hair and grin Moment by moment in the Hürtgen dark Until the one step full in the sniper’s sight, His pastor father emptied by the grief. Clark Harrison, at nineteen a survivor, Never to walk or have a child or be A senator or governor. Herr Wegner, Who led his little troop, their standards high And sabers drawn, against a panzer corps, Emerging from among the shades at Dachau Stacked like firewood for someone else to burn; And Gerd Radomski, listening to broadcasts Of names, a yearlong babel of the missing, To find his wife and children. Then they came home, Near middle age at twenty-two, to find A new reunion of the church and state, Cynical Constantines who need no name, Domestic tranquility beaten to a sword, Sons wasted by another lie in Asia, Or Strangeloves they had feared that August day; And they like runners, stung, behind a flag, Running within a circle, bereft of joy. Hearing of the disaster at Sedan And the retreat worse than the one from Moscow, Their son among the missing or the dead, Pasteur and his wife Mary hired a carriage And, traveling to the east where he might try His way to Paris, stopping to ask each youth And comfort every orphan of the state’s Irascibility, found him at last And, unsurprised, embraced and took him in. Two wars later, the Prussian, once again The son of Mars, in Paris, Joseph Meister— The first boy cured of rabies, now the keeper Of Pasteur’s mausoleum—when commanded To open it for them, though over seventy, Lest he betray the master, took his life. I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies, Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight, Teaching his daughter to use a microscope And musing through a wonder—sacred passion, Practice and metaphysic all the same. And, each year, honor three births: Valéry, Humbling his pride by trying to write well, Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention Repeatedly outside the reach of pride, And him whose mark I witness as a trust. Others he saves but could not save himself— Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates—the spirit Fastened by love upon the human cross.

Walking back to the office after lunch, I saw Hans. “Mister Isham, Mister Isham,” He called out in his hurry, “Herr Wegner needs you. A woman waiting for a border pass Took poison, she is dead, and the police Are there to take the body.” In the hall, The secretaries stood outside their doors Silently waiting with Wegner. “Sir,” he said, “It was her answer on the questionnaire, A clerk for the Gestapo. So it was.” Within the outer office, by the row Of wooden chairs, one lying on its side, On the discolored brown linoleum floor Under a GI blanket was the lost Unmoving shape; uncovered, from a fold, A dirty foot half out of a dirty shoe, Once white, heel bent, the sole worn through, the skin Bruised red and calloused, uncut toenails curved And veined like an old ivory. No one spoke. Police stood at attention by a stretcher. After an empty moment, suddenly Bent over as if taken by a cramp, I sobbed out loud and, on my uniform, Vomited up my lunch—over the tie, The polished buttons and insignia, The little strips of color and the green Eisenhower jacket with its Eagle patch, The taut pants in a crease, the glistening jump-boots— Vomiting and still sobbing, like a child Awakened in the night, and sick. Wegner and Hans Held me, murmuring, “Ach, dear sir, the war Is over and not over, such things happen.” While no one else moved, Frau Schmidt brought a towel To clean me off before Hans walked me back, My arm across his shoulders and I retelling The story of how, near Zell am See, we found, Hung from a tree in leaf, the final sack Of bones, in rotted Wehrmacht green. In the house An SS lord had furnished for his mistress— Deep sofas, Persian rugs, and velvet drapes— Frau König took my clothes. In my own room, Wearing the Gucci robe Bouchard had taken From a fine house before we got to Ulm, Instead of lying down to rest, I studied The book I read for German with Frau Schmidt, Goethe’s Italian Journey . Through the window, The Watchman’s upper slopes were shadows, green And purple with the afternoon, its snows Melting, its double peaks the victory sign.

Bavaria, 1946 The clairvoyante, a major general’s wife, The secretaries’ sibyl, read the letters They brought her from their GI soldier-lovers, Interpreting the script. I went along One afternoon with writing of my own. “This writing is by one you cannot trust,” She frowned, and all the secretaries smiled. But when she took my palm, she read the brown Fingers for too much smoking and the lines Of time and fate for a long and famous life. “Soon you will take a trip by land and sea.” Across the hall, her husband, half asleep And propped high on his pillows, when I bent To shake his hand, seeing my uniform, Called in a whisper as if he still dreamed, “I told him not to go to Russia!” Then, Remembering the woman at my jeep, Among the smoking tanks and half-tracks, crying, “My husband fell in Russia!” I thought I saw For him the summer uniforms in snow, Partisans, savage reprisals, day-long strafing, Long lines of prisoners never to return, Comrades armless, legless, and blind. But he, Clutching my sleeve to pull me closer, whispered, “It was the SS did it, not my men. The week before the armistice, they took Three just-conscripted boys who were afraid And hanged them, German children, the sky green Above the uniforms too big for them, As we saw when we found and cut them down. It was then that I despaired to live or die.” The secretaries waiting with their coats on, She thanked me for my visit, and, “Next week Bring cigarettes and coffee, please,” she said.

1 The autumn shade is thin. Grey leaves lie faint Where they will lie, and, where the thick green was, Light stands up, like a presence, to the sky. The trees seem merely shadows of its age. From off the hill, I hear the logging crew, The furious and indifferent saw, the slow Response of heavy pine; and I recall That goddesses have died when their trees died. Often in summer, drinking from the spring, I sensed in its cool breath and in its voice A living form, darker than any shade And without feature, passionate, yet chill With lust to fix in ice the buoyant rim— Ancient of days, the mother of us all. Now, toward his destined passion there, the strong, Vivid young man, reluctant, may return From suffering in his own experience To lie down in the darkness. In this time, I stay in doors. I do my work. I sleep. Each morning, when I wake, I assent to wake. The shadow of my fist moves on this page, Though, even now, in the wood, beneath a bank, Coiled in the leaves and cooling rocks, the snake Does as it must, and sinks into the cold. 2 Nights grow colder. The Hunter and the Bear Follow their tranquil course outside my window. I feel the gentian waiting in the wood, Blossoms waxy and blue, and blue-green stems Of the amaryllis waiting in the garden. I know, as though I waited what they wait, The cold that fastens ice about the root, A heavenly form, the same in all its changes, Inimitable, terrible, and still, And beautiful as frost. Fire warms my room. Its light declares my books and pictures. Gently, A dead soprano sings Mozart and Bach. I drink bourbon, then go to bed, and sleep In the Promethean heat of summer’s essence. 3 Awakened by some fear, I watch the sky. Compelled as though by purposes they know, The stars, in their blue distance, still affirm The bond of heaven and earth, the ancient way. This old assurance haunts small creatures, dazed In icy mud, though cold may freeze them there And leave them as they are all summer long. I cannot sleep. Passion and consequence, The brutal given, and all I have desired Evade me, and the lucid majesty That warmed the dull barbarian to life. So I lie here, left with self-consciousness, Enemy whom I love but whom his change And his forgetfulness again compel, Impassioned, toward my lost indifference, Faithful, but to an absence. Who shares my bed? Who lies beside me, certain of his waking, Led sleeping, by his own dream, to the day? 4 If I ask you, angel, will you come and lead This ache to speech, or carry me, like a child, To riot? Ever young, you come of age Remote, a pledge of distances, this pang I notice at dusk, watching you subside From tree-tops and from fields. Mysterious self, Image of the fabulous alien, Even in sleep you summon me, even there, When, under his native tree, Odysseus hears His own incredible past and future, whispered By wisdom, but by wisdom in disguise. 5 Thinking of a bravura deed, a place Sacred to a divinity, an old Verse that seems new, I postulate a man Mastered by his own image of himself. Who is it says, I am? Sensuous angel, Vessel of nerve and blood, the impoverished heir Of an awareness other than his own? Not these, but one to come? For there he is, In a steel helmet, raging, fearing his death, Carrying bread and water to a quiet, Placing ten sounds together in one sound: Confirming his election, or merely still, Sleeping, or in a colloquy with the sun. 6 Snow and then rain. The roads are wet. A car Slips and strains in the mire, and I remember Driving in France: weapons-carriers and jeeps; Our clothes and bodies stiffened by mud; our minds Diverted from fear. We labor. Overhead, A plane, Berlin or Frankfurt, now New York. The car pulls clear. My neighbor smiles. He is old. Was this our wisdom, simply, in a chance, In danger, to be mastered by a task, Like groping round a chair, through a door, to bed? 7 A dormant season, and, under the dripping tree, Not sovereign, ordering nothing, letting the past Do with me as it will, I savor place And weather, air and sun. Though Hercules Confronts his nature in his deed, repeats His purposes, and is his will, intact, Magnificent, and memorable, I try The simplest forms of our old poverty. I seek no end appointed in my absence Beyond the silence I already share. 8 I drive home with the books that I will read. The streets are harsh with traffic. Where I once Played as a boy amid old stands of pine, Row after row of houses. Lined by the new Debris of wealth and power, the broken road. Then miles of red clay bank and frugal ground. At last, in the minor hills, my father’s place, Where I can find my way as in a thought— Gardens, the trees we planted, all we share. A Cherokee trail runs north to summer hunting. I see it, when I look up from the page. 9 In nameless warmth, sun light in every corner, Bending my body over my glowing book, I share the room. Is it with a voice or touch Or look, as of an absence, learned by love, Now, merely mine? Annunciation, specter Of the worn out, lost, or broken, telling what future. What vivid loss to come, you change the room And him who reads here. Restless, he will stir, Look round, and see the room renewed and line, Color, and shape as, in desire, they are, Not shadows but substantial light, explicit, Bright as glass, inexhaustible, and true. 1O My shadow moves, until, at noon, I stand Within its seal, as in the finished past. But in the place where effect and cause are joined, In the warmth or cold of my remembering, Of love, of partial freedom, the time to be Trembles and glitters again in windy light. For nothing is disposed. The slow soft wind Tilting the blood-root keeps its gentle edge. The intimate cry, both sinister and tender, Once heard, is heard confined in its reserve. My image of myself, apart, informed By many deaths, resists me, and I stay Almost as I have been, intact, aware, Alive, though proud and cautious, even afraid.

Love is no more. It died as the mind dies: the pure desire Relinquishing the blissful form it wore, The ample joy and clarity expire. Regret is vain. Then do not grieve for what you would efface, The sudden failure of the past, the pain Of its unwilling change, and the disgrace. Leave innocence, And modify your nature by the grief Which poses to the will indifference That no desire is permanent in sense. Take leave of me. What recompense, or pity, or deceit Can cure, or what assumed serenity Conceal the mortal loss which we repeat? The mind will change, and change shall be relief.

I’ll go among the dead to see my friend. The place I leave is beautiful: the sea Repeats the winds’ far swell in its long sound, And, there beside it, houses solemnly Shine with the modest courage of the land, While swimmers try the verge of what they see. I cannot go, although I should pretend Some final self whose phantom eye could see Him who because he is not cannot change. And yet the thought of going makes the sea, The land, the swimmers, and myself seem strange, Almost as strange as they will someday be.