The Last Canto

In the garrulous present Threadbare nouns find What raiment’s left From forefathers Who perhaps struck poses But wrote of frenzy Out of deepest urgency Hammering voices In no dumbfounded age. Theirs the grace Of unfaltering Fealty to the word. Yet then I picture Pound Prematurely stilled By his own tongue —Tempus tacendi. Did he ever revisit The barbed floodlit quad Where bareheaded he’d Stood in all weather Mouthing surreal Greek, Fashioning a rhythm Out of life’s ruin, That life he would unspeak Half a lifetime later Arriving on the tarmac Of Eisenhower Italy, Breath caught in the throat? I heft his burdened book Only to let it drop —A stoneweight dropping down Well’s jaggy darkness That anyhow comes back In stonecold dialect: Pisa! A pure echo Purged of memory. On my lap his poems’ Esoteric call Has no words at all Or just those selfsame ones Quarried from a rock —Red and ocher bison Emblaze the solitude Of an old draughtsman Who long hours daubs In Altamira’s shade: Let those I love try to forgive What I have made.