William Meredith

Do not embrace your mind’s new negro friend Or embarrass the blackballed jew with memberships: There must be years of atonement first, and even then You may still be the blundering raconteur With the wrong story, and they may still be free. If you are with them, if even mind is friend, There will be plenty to do: give the liars lessons Who have heard no rumors of truth for a long time But have whatever they hear on good authority, Whether it concerns Chinese women or the arts. Expose the patrons, some of whose best friends Are brothers, and who are never now anonymous: What kind of credit do they expect for that, Ask them, or better, ask their protested brothers, The grateful tenants who can’t get their curtsies right. Finally the injured, who think they have no friend, Who have been convinced by the repeated names That they are jews or negroes or some dark thing: They must be courted with the lover’s touch And as guiltily as if yourself had turned them inward. If you complete this program, you will have friends From all the rich races of your human blood: Meantime, engage in the often friendless struggle. A long war, a pygmy war in ways, But island by island we must go across.

I. Of Choice Despair is big with friends I love, Hydrogen and burning jews. I give them all the grief I have But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose, Don’t make me say against my glands Or how the world has treated me. Though gay and modest give offense And people grieve pretentiously, More than I hoped to do, I do And more than I deserve I get; What little I attend, I know And it argues order more than not. My desperate friends, I want to tell Them, you take too delicate offense At the stench of time and man’s own smell, It is only the smell of consequence. II. Of Love People love each other and the light Of love gilds but doesn’t alter, People don’t change one another, can scarcely By taking will and thought add a little Now and then to their own statures Which, praise them, they do, So that here we are in all our sizes Flooded in the impartial daylight sometimes, Spotted sometimes in a light we make ourselves, Human, the beams of attention Of social animals at their work Which is loving; and sometimes all dark. The only correction is By you of you, by me of me. People are worth looking at in this light And if you listen what they are saying is, Love me sun out there whoever you are, Chasing me from bed in the morning, Spooking me all day with shadow, Surprising me whenever you fall; Make me conspicuous as I go here, Spotted by however many beams, Now light, finally dark. I fear There is meant to be a lot of darkness,

Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit. —Pascal, Pensées sur la religion The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here? —Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House Spared by a car or airplane crash or cured of malignancy, people look around with new eyes at a newly praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these. For I’ve been brought back again from the fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie down for long naps. And I’ve also been pardoned miraculously for years by the lava of chance which runs down the world’s gullies, silting us back. Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet happened away. But it’s not this random life only, throwing its sensual astonishments upside down on the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs, not just me being here again, old needer, looking for someone to need, but you, up from the clay yourself, as luck would have it, and inching over the same little segment of earth- ball, in the same little eon, to meet in a room, alive in our skins, and the whole galaxy gaping there and the centuries whining like gnats— you, to teach me to see it, to see it with you, and to offer somebody uncomprehending, impudent thanks.