Thomas McGrath

At two thousand feet the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand. Closer, in a monotone of peristalsis, Its fugue-like swells create and recreate One image in an idiot concentration. From horizon to horizon, this desert With the eye athirst for something stable When off to southeast-ward— It was a plane all right, or had been, A shipside fighter, her pontoons floated her. Smashed like a match-case, no one could be sure If it were ours or had been one of theirs. That’s all there was. A thousand miles anywhere There was only the north ocean, the poleward pallor, Like a desolation of spirit, lonelier than god. What did it mean? They thought of night fleets In the ghostly boreal dark or maybe Toy cardboard silhouettes in the bleak limbo of noon: The salvos wink in bloom at twenty miles, The pause, the roar like a night freight And the near misses building their faery forests. Where were these giants? The sea offered A single clue, a symbol; no explanation. Northward the fog banks thickened and on all horizons As if jealous of giving up secured positions The night stirred angrily like an old suspicion.

Baton Rouge, 1940 These are savannas bluer than your dreams Where other loves are fashioned to older music, And the romantic in his light boat Puts out among flamingos and water moccasins Looking for the river that went by last year. Even the angels wear confederate uniforms; And when the magnolia blooms and the honeysuckle, Golden lovers, brighter than the moon, Read Catullus in the flaring light Of the burning Negro in the open eye of midnight. And the Traveller, moving in the hot swamps, Where every human sympathy sends up the temperature, Comes of a sudden on the hidden glacier, Whose motives are blonder than Hitler’s choir boys. Here is the ambiguous tenderness of ’gators Trumpeting their loves along a hundred miles Of rivers writhing under trees like myths— And human existence pursues the last, The simple and desperate life of the senses. Since love survives only as ironic legend— Response to situations no longer present— Men lacking dignity are seized by pride, Which is the easy upper-class infection. The masters are at home in this merciless climate But deep in the caves of their minds some animal memory Warns of the fate of the mammoth at the end of the ice-age; As sleeping children a toy, they hug the last, fatal error, But their eyes are awake and their dreams shake as with palsy. Over Birmingham where the blast furnace flowers And beyond the piney woods in cotton country, Continually puzzling the pale aristocrats, The sun burns equally white man and black. The labor which they do makes more and more Their brotherhood condition for their whole existence; They mint their own light, and their fusing fires Will melt at last these centuries of ice. This is a nightmare nimble in the Big House, Where sleepers are wakeful, cuddling their terror, In the empty acres of their rich beds, dreaming Of bones in museums, where the black boys yawn.

For Marian Before you, I was living on an island And all around the seas of that lonely coast Cast up their imitation jewels, cast Their fables and enigmas, questioning, sly. I never solved them, or ever even heard, Being perfect in innocence: unconscious of self; Such ignorance of history was all my wealth— A geographer sleeping in the shadow of virgins. But though my maps were made of private countries I was a foreigner in all of them after you had come, For when you spoke, it was with a human tongue And never understood by my land-locked gentry. Then did the sun shake down a million bells And birds bloom on bough in wildest song! Phlegmatic hills went shivering with flame; The chestnut trees were manic at their deepest boles! It is little strange that nature was riven in her frame At this second creation, known to every lover— How we are shaped and shape ourselves in the desires of the other Within the tolerance of human change. Out of the spring’s innocence this revolution, Created on a kiss, announced the second season, The summer of private history, of growth, through whose sweet sessions The trees lift toward the sun, each leaf a revelation. Our bodies, coupled in the moonlight’s album, Proclaimed our love against the outlaw times Whose signature was written in the burning towns. Your face against the night was my medallion. Your coming forth aroused unlikely trumpets In the once-tame heart. They heralded your worth Who are my lodestar, my bright and ultimate North, Marrying all points of my personal compass. This is the love that now invents my fear Which nuzzles me like a puppy each violent day. It is poor comfort that the mind comes, saying: What is one slim girl to the peoples’ wars? Still, my dice are loaded: having had such luck, Having your love, my life would still be whole Though I should die tomorrow. I have lived it all. —And love is never love, that cannot give love up.

I see him moving, in his legendary fleece, Between the superhighway and an Algonquin stone axe; Between the wild tribes, in their lost heat, And the dark blizzard of my Grandfather’s coat; Cold with the outdoor cold caught in the curls, Smelling of the world before the poll tax. And between the new macadam and the Scalp Act They got him by the short hair; had him clipped Who once was wild—and all five senses wild— Printing the wild with his hoof’s inflated script Before the times was money in the bank, Before it was a crime to be so mild. But history is a fact, and moves on feet Sharper than his, toward wallows deeper than. And the myth that covered all his moving parts, Grandfather’s time had turned into a coat; And what kept warm then, in the true world’s cold Is old and cold in a world his death began.

The birds have flown their summer skies to the south, And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion, Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves. A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea, A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping An aging whiskey of distances and departures. Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land. My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave. I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe, Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.

for Don and Henrie Gordon Forty-odd years ago— Headlines in the snow— The jobless scrawled a text for mutineers; Then history seemed sane, Though Franco sailed for Spain And Hitler swore to live a thousand years. Now Progress, his machine, Makes water out of wine; With loaves and paper stuffs the multitude; For power he milks the sun To see the cities flame And drives the Goddess from the sacred wood. Yet anniversaries Should have our praise, as trees Salute the queenly coming of the Spring. All sacred marriages Keep evergreen in this: Coupling with Time, they bind him in a ring. Though time turns, history moves As if to prove our loves, Having no pattern but the one we give. While countries bleed and burn Not any shall sleep warm Unless, good friends, you teach us how to live. Some nine and forty years, A pulse-beat of the stars, Astounds the May Fly’s million generations. Your middle style of Time Is suited most to man. This whispering wrist sustains the dream of nations.

In the chill rains of the early winter I hear something— A puling anger, a cold wind stiffened by flying bone— Out of the north ... and remember, then, what’s up there: That ghost-bank: home: Amchitka: boot hill .... They must be very tired, those ghosts; no flesh sustains them And the bones rust in the rain. Reluctant to go into the earth The skulls gleam: wet; the dog-tag forgets the name; The statistics (wherein they were young) like their crosses, are weathering out, They must be very tired. But I see them riding home, Nightly: crying weak lust and rage: to stand in the dark, Forlorn in known rooms, unheard near familiar beds: Where lie the aging women: who were so lovely: once.