from Of Being Numerous

9 ‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’ I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry To dream of that beach For the sake of an instant in the eyes, The absolute singular The unearthly bonds Of the singular Which is the bright light of shipwreck 25 Strange that the youngest people I know Live in the oldest buildings Scattered about the city In the dark rooms Of the past—and the immigrants, The black Rectangular buildings Of the immigrants. They are the children of the middle class. ‘The pure products of America—’ Investing The ancient buildings Jostle each other In the half-forgotten, that ponderous business. This Chinese Wall. 26 They carry nativeness To a conclusion In suicide. We want to defend Limitation And do not know how. Stupid to say merely That poets should not lead their lives Among poets, They have lost the metaphysical sense Of the future, they feel themselves The end of a chain Of lives, single lives And we know that lives Are single And cannot defend The metaphysic On which rest The boundaries Of our distances. We want to say ‘Common sense’ And cannot. We stand on That denial Of death that paved the cities, Paved the cities Generation For generation and the pavement Is filthy as the corridors Of the police. How shall one know a generation, a new generation? Not by the dew on them! Where the earth is most torn And the wounds untended and the voices confused, There is the head of the moving column Who if they cannot find Their generation Wither in the infirmaries And the supply depots, supplying Irrelevant objects. Street lamps shine on the parked cars Steadily in the clear night It is true the great mineral silence Vibrates, hums, a process Completing itself In which the windshield wipers Of the cars are visible. The power of the mind, the Power and weight Of the mind which Is not enough, it is nothing And does nothing Against the natural world, Behemoth, white whale, beast They will say and less than beast, The fatal rock Which is the world— O if the streets Seem bright enough, Fold within fold Of residence ... Or see thru water Clearly the pebbles Of the beach Thru the water, flowing From the ripple, clear As ever they have been 29 My daughter, my daughter, what can I say Of living? I cannot judge it. We seem caught In reality together my lovely Daughter, I have a daughter But no child And it was not precisely Happiness we promised Ourselves; We say happiness, happiness and are not Satisfied. Tho the house on the low land Of the city Catches the dawn light I can tell myself, and I tell myself Only what we all believe True And in the sudden vacuum Of time ... ... is it not In fear the roots grip Downward And beget The baffling hierarchies Of father and child As of leaves on their high Thin twigs to shield us From time, from open Time