Thomas McGrath

It is autumn but early. No crow cries from the dry woods. The house droops like an eyelid over the leprous hill. In the bald barnyard one horse, a collection of angles Cuts at the flies with a spectral tail. A blind man’s Sentence, the road goes on. Lifts as the slope lifts it. Comes now one who has been conquered By all he sees. And asks what—would have what— Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero? More than the hands on the lines and the back aching, The daily wrestle with the angel in the south forty, More than this forever lonely round Round hunger and impotence, the prickly pair: Banker or broker can have dreamed no fate More bankrupt than this godlike heresy Which asks of love more leave than extended credit, Needs comradeship more than a psalm or surely these Worn acres even if over them Those trained to it see signs of they say God.

All cities are open in the hot season. Northward or southward the summer gives out Few telephone numbers but no one in our house sleeps. Southward that river carries its flood The dying winter, the spring’s nostalgia: Wisconsin’s dead grass beached at Baton Rouge. Carries the vegetable loves of the young blonde Going for water by the dikes of Winnetka or Louisville, Carries its obscure music and its strange humour, Its own disturbing life, its peculiar ideas of movement. Two thousand miles, moving from the secret north It crowds the country apart: at last reaching The lynch-dreaming, the demon-haunted, the murderous virgin South Makes its own bargains and says change in its own fashion. And where the Gulf choirs out its blue hosannas Carries the drowned men’s bones and its buried life: It is an enormous bell, rung through the country’s midnight. * * * Beyond the corrosive ironies of prairies, Midnight savannas, open vowels of the flat country, The moonstruck waters of the Kansas bays Where the Dakotas bell and nuzzle at the north coast, The nay-saying desolation where the mind is lost In the mean acres and the wind comes down for a thousand miles Smelling of the stars’ high pastures, and speaking a strange language— There is the direct action of mountains, a revolution, A revelation in stone, the solid decrees of past history, A soviet of language not yet cooled nor understood clearly: The voices from underground, the granite vocables. There shall that voice crying for justice be heard, But the local colorist, broken on cliffs of laughter, At the late dew point of pity collect only the irony of serene stars. * * * Here all questions are mooted. All battles joined. No one in our house sleeps. And the Idealist hunting in the high latitudes of unreason, By mummy rivers, on the open minds of curst lakes Mirrors his permanent address; yet suffers from visions Of spring break-up, the open river of history. On this the Dreamer sweats in his sound-proof tower: All towns are taken in the hot season. How shall that Sentimentalist love the Mississippi? His love is a trick of mirrors, his spit’s abstraction, Whose blood and guts are filing system for A single index of the head or heart’s statistics. Living in one time, he shall have no history. How shall he love change who lives in a static world? His love is lost tomorrow between Memphis and the narrows of Vicksburg. But kissed unconscious between Medicine Bow and Tombstone He shall love at the precipice brink who would love these mountains. Whom this land loves shall be a holy wanderer, The eyes burned slick with distances between Kennebunkport and Denver, minted of transcience. For him shall that river run in circles and The Tetons seismically skipping to their ancient compelling music Send embassies of young sierras to nibble from his hand. His leaves familiar with the constant wind, Give, then, the soils and waters to command. Latitudinal desires scatter his seed, And in political climates sprout new freedom. But curst is the water-wingless foreigner from Boston, Stumping the country as others no better have done, Frightened of earthquake, aware of the rising waters, Calling out “O Love, Love,” but finding none.

All night long I hear the sleepers toss Between the darkened window and the wall. The madman’s whimper and the lover’s voice, The worker’s whisper and the sick child’s call— Knowing them all I’d walk a mile, maybe, hearing some cat Crying its guts out, to throttle it by hand, Such simple love I had. I wished I might— Or God might—answer each call in person and Each poor demand. Well, I’d have been better off sleeping myself. These fancies had some sentimental charm, But love without direction is a cheap blanket And even if it did no one any harm, No one is warm.

Where once I loved my flesh, That social fellow, Now I want security of bone And cherish the silence of my skeleton. Where once I walked the world Hunting the devil, Now I find the darkness and the void Within my side. First to be good, then to be happy I Worked and prayed. Before the midnight, like the foul fiend, I killed my dear friend. Hope unto hope, dream beyond monstrous dream I sought the world. Now, at the black pitch and midnight of despair, I find it was always here.

I don’t belong in this century—who does? In my time, summer came someplace in June— The cutbanks blazing with roses, the birds brazen, and the astonished Pastures frisking with young calves . . . That was in the country— I don’t mean another country, I mean in the country: And the country is lost. I don’t mean just lost to me, Nor in the way of metaphorical loss—it’s lost that way too— No; nor in no sort of special case: I mean Lost. Now, down below, in the fire and stench, the city Is building its shell: elaborate levels of emptiness Like some sea-animal building toward its extinction. And the citizens, unserious and full of virtue, Are hunting for bread, or money, or a prayer, And I behold them, and this season of man, without love. If it were not a joke, it would be proper to laugh. —Curious how that rat’s nest holds together— Distracting . . . Without it there might be, still, The gold wheel and the silver, the sun and the moon, The season’s ancient assurance under the unstable stars Our fiery companions . . . And trees, perhaps, and the sound Of the wild and living water hurrying out of the hills. Without these, I have you for my talisman: Sun, moon, the four seasons, The true voice of the mountains. Now be (The city revolving in its empty shell, The night moving in from the East) —Be thou these things.

1. God love you now, if no one else will ever, Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill In the fine and ruinous summer of a war You never wanted. All your false flags were Of bravery and ignorance, like grade school maps: Colors of countries you would never see— Until that weekend in eternity When, laughing, well armed, perfectly ready to kill The world and your brother, the safe commanders sent You into your future. Oh, dead on a hill, Dead in a paddy, leeched and tumbled to A tomb of footnotes. We mourn a changeling: you: Handselled to poverty and drummed to war By distinguished masters whom you never knew. 2. The bee that spins his metal from the sun, The shy mole drifting like a miner ghost Through midnight earth—all happy creatures run As strict as trains on rails the circuits of Blind instinct. Happy in your summer follies, You mined a culture that was mined for war: The state to mold you, church to bless, and always The elders to confirm you in your ignorance. No scholar put your thinking cap on nor Warned that in dead seas fishes died in schools Before inventing legs to walk the land. The rulers stuck a tennis racket in your hand, An Ark against the flood. In time of change Courage is not enough: the blind mole dies, And you on your hill, who did not know the rules. 3. Wet in the windy counties of the dawn The lone crow skirls his draggled passage home: And God (whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze, Like grace or confetti) blinks and he is gone, And you are gone. Your scarecrow valor grows And rusts like early lilac while the rose Blooms in Dakota and the stock exchange Flowers. Roses, rents, all things conspire To crown your death with wreaths of living fire. And the public mourners come: the politic tear Is cast in the Forum. But, in another year, We will mourn you, whose fossil courage fills The limestone histories: brave: ignorant: amazed: Dead in the rice paddies, dead on the nameless hills.

Miami Beach: wartime Imagine or remember how the road at last led us Over bridges like prepositions, linking a drawl of islands. The coast curved away like a question mark, listening slyly And shyly whispered the insomniac Atlantic. But we were uncertain of both question and answer, Stiff and confused and bemused in expendable khaki, Seeing with innocent eyes, the walls gleaming, And the alabaster city of a rich man’s dream. Borne by the offshore wind, an exciting rumor, The legend of tropic islands, caresses the coast like hysteria, Bringing a sound like bells rung under sea; And brings the infected banker and others whose tenure Is equally uncertain, equally certain: the simple And perfect faces of women—like the moon Whose radiance is disturbing and quite as impersonal: Not to be warmed by and never ample. They linger awhile in the dazzling sepulchral city, Delicately exploring their romantic diseases, The gangster, the capitalist and their proteg

November 1941 We sat in the park, but there was a war between us, A dead moon over us and all around us The shy and secret whisperings as of the tiny Woods animals which in the high forest gather Wind-fallen goods before the frost comes. We praised as lucky all whose sure existence (As of the careless moon, the dutiless squirrels) Is not responsible for human history— Feeling how our happiness, how hope must mount Machine guns which other men yet have the firing of, How liberty is seen in the form of a fighter plane Millions look up asking, Is it ours? Our despair was temporary but not less painful. Over us the moon was quiet about its business, Pouring its constant light upon the naked beaches. The squirrels built up their small defenses Obliged to the fulfillment of a natural process. Their leaf-lined cell, the brilliance of the moon, The winter cannot touch and no touch tarnish.

1. Betrayed by his five mechanic agents, falling Captive to consciousness, he summons light To all its duties, and assumes the world Like a common penance. Rust on the green tongue burns Like history’s corrosive on his living tree. But all the monsters of his sleep’s dark sea Are tame familiars in the morning sun. 2. He sees the nation browse across burnt miles Of toast, toward the time-clock. Deafened, hears A Gettysburg of breakfast food explode Against the surd tympanum of the air. The roads outside to No-and-Any Where Trigger all space-time to a zero Now. The punctual goddess blossoms on his brow— Pragmatic emblem of the daylit need. 3. Now with his thought the rank and maundy world (That lost between quanta and mechanic wave All pulp and passion sprawls around the globe). He stiffens, as a hand informs a glove, And drags each lank potential into form. Thus the hieratic arrow of his glance Creates St. Sebastian Avenue Street Place— All of sublunary circumstance Crowds on the casual platform of his gaze. 4. Like money sealed in a pneumatic tube He whirls beneath the city’s stony floor To where the cold coordinates of work Advance their cross-hairs on the target hour. There surplus value’s mathematic flower (All X squared Y squared like a tesseract Or ghostly dirigible) grows unseen Across the lean dimension of in fact. 5. Grows all unseen as Jason Quint pursues The windy hazard of the Absolute Through icy tundras, farther than the Horn, Vaster than Asia in their wuthering snows. The sweat of progress and humanity Colors no litmus in those latitudes; In a rustle of banknotes and casualty lists The Bomb is shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. 6. The quitting whistle lofts a flag of truce, And all hope’s flutes and harpsichords compound The lonely leisure. The Great Nocturnal Drift Sets to its Deep. He walks the park. Profound Unease returns to Quint. The sleepy lathes Of hummingbirds machine the emerald Of garden silence which his feet confuse. The statues hoist, on labyrinthine paths, The mineral grandeur of a public smile. 7. And the world goes blank, and heavy as a stone Rolls into night. It is the human hour. Imperfect. Lovers, food and politics Command the air, and Jason Quint alone, Clothed in abstraction, like a bush that burns In the blind frequencies where none may pass, Stalks through that only country of the poor— The lamplit hour the quitting whistle mourns. 8. Imperfect. The stability of dextrous stars Offers him comfort, but their light is cold. A storm of sentiment, sudden as a cloud Of migrant birds, sings in his head. Now stirs The terrible friend, companion of his dreams, With his emotional algebra of need and loss— The hateful witness to his mortal part And confirmation of his loneliness.

Sirs, when you are in your last extremity, When your admirals are drowning in the grass-green sea, When your generals are preparing the total catastrophe— I just want you to know how you can not count on me. I have ridden to hounds through my ancestral halls, I have picked the eternal crocus on the ultimate hill, I have fallen through the window of the highest room, But don’