A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar

I The light foot hears you and the brightness begins god-step at the margins of thought, quick adulterous tread at the heart. Who is it that goes there? Where I see your quick face notes of an old music pace the air, torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre. In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche have a hurt voluptuous grace bruised by redemption. The copper light falling upon the brown boy’s slight body is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing up from blind innocence, ensnared by dimness into the deprivations of desiring sight. But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft, diffuse with rapture absorb the flame. Their bodies yield out of strength. Waves of visual pleasure wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience. A bronze of yearning, a rose that burns the tips of their bodies, lips, ends of fingers, nipples. He is not wingd. His thighs are flesh, are clouds lit by the sun in its going down, hot luminescence at the loins of the visible. But they are not in a landscape. They exist in an obscurity. The wind spreading the sail serves them. The two jealous sisters eager for her ruin serve them. That she is ignorant, ignorant of what Love will be, serves them. The dark serves them. The oil scalding his shoulder serves them, serves their story. Fate, spinning, knots the threads for Love. Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt . . . serve them. II This is magic. It is passionate dispersion. What if they grow old? The gods would not allow it. Psyche is preserved. In time we see a tragedy, a loss of beauty the glittering youth of the god retains—but from this threshold it is age that is beautiful. It is toward the old poets we go, to their faltering, their unaltering wrongness that has style, their variable truth, the old faces, words shed like tears from a plenitude of powers time stores. A stroke.   These little strokes.   A chill. The old man, feeble, does not recoil. Recall. A phase so minute, only a part of the word in- jerrd. The Thundermakers descend, damerging a nuv. A nerb. The present dented of the U nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod? Cloud. Invades the brain. What if lilacs last in this dooryard bloomd? Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower— where among these did the power reside that moves the heart? What flower of the nation bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture? Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities. For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing? Noble men in the quiet of morning hear Indians singing the continent’s violent requiem. Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt, idiots fumbling at the bride’s door, hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war. Where among these did the spirit reside that restores the land to productive order? McKinley, Cleveland, Harrison, Arthur, Garfield, Hayes, Grant, Johnson, dwell in the roots of the heart’s rancor. How sad “amid lanes and through old woods” echoes Whitman’s love for Lincoln! There is no continuity then. Only a few posts of the good remain. I too that am a nation sustain the damage where smokes of continual ravage obscure the flame. It is across great scars of wrong I reach toward the song of kindred men and strike again the naked string old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake! that cried: “The theme is creative and has vista.” “He is the president of regulation.” I see always the under side turning, fumes that injure the tender landscape. From which up break lilac blossoms of courage in daily act striving to meet a natural measure. III (for Charles Olson) Psyche’s tasks—the sorting of seeds wheat      barley      oats      poppy      coriander anise      beans      lentils      peas      —every grain in its right place before nightfall; gathering the gold wool from the cannibal sheep (for the soul must weep and come near upon death); harrowing Hell for a casket Proserpina keeps that must not be opend . . . containing beauty? no!      Melancholy coild like a serpent that is deadly sleep we are not permitted to succumb to. These are the old tasks. You’ve heard them before. They must be impossible. Psyche must despair, be brought to her insect instructor; must obey the counsels of the green reed; saved from suicide by a tower speaking, must follow to the letter freakish instructions. In the story the ants help. The old man at Pisa mixd in whose mind (to draw the sorts) are all seeds as a lone ant from a broken ant-hill had part restored by an insect, was upheld by a lizard (to draw the sorts) the wind is part of the process defines a nation of the wind— father of many notions, Who? let the light into the dark? began the many movements of the passion? West from east   men push. The islands are blessd (cursed)   that swim below the sun, man upon whom the sun has gone down! There is the hero who struggles east widdershins to free the dawn   and must woo Night’s daughter, sorcery, black passionate rage, covetous queens, so that the fleecy sun go   back from Troy, Colchis, India . . . all the blazing armies spent, he must struggle alone toward the pyres of Day. The light that is Love rushes on toward passion. It verges upon dark. Roses and blood flood the clouds. Solitary first riders advance into legend. This land, where I stand, was all legend in my grandfathers’ time: cattle raiders, animal tribes, priests, gold. It was the West. Its vistas painters saw in diffuse light, in melancholy, in abysses left by glaciers as if they had been the sun primordial carving empty enormities out of the rock. Snakes lurkd guarding secrets.         Those first ones survived solitude. Scientia holding the lamp, driven by doubt; Eros naked in foreknowledge smiling in his sleep;    and the light spilld, burning his shoulder—the outrage that conquers legend— passion, dismay, longing, search flooding up where the Beloved is lost. Psyche travels life after life, my life, station after station, to be tried without break, without news, knowing only—but what did she know? The oracle at Miletus had spoken truth surely: that he was Serpent-Desire that flies thru the air, a monster-husband. But she saw him fair whom Apollo’s mouthpiece said spread pain beyond cure    to those wounded by his arrows. Rilke torn by a rose thorn blackend toward Eros.          Cupidinous Death! that will not take no for an answer. IV Oh yes!      Bless the footfall where step by step      the boundary walker (in Maverick Road      the snow thud by thud      from the roof circling the house—another tread) that foot      informd by the weight of all things that can be elusive no more than a nearness to the mind of a single image Oh yes!      this most dear the catalyst force that renders clear the days of a life from the surrounding medium! Yes, beautiful rare wilderness! wildness that verifies strength of my tame mind, clearing held against indians, health that prepared to meet death, the stubborn hymns going up into the ramifications of the hostile air that, decaptive, gives way. Who is there?   O, light the light! The Indians give way, the clearing falls. Great Death gives way   and unprepares us. Lust gives way.    The Moon gives way. Night gives way.   Minutely,   the Day gains. She saw the body of her beloved dismemberd in waking . . . or was it in sight?Finders Keepers we sang when we were children      or were taught to sing before our histories began      and we began who were beloved      our animal life toward the Beloved,      sworn to be Keepers. On the hill before the wind came the grass moved toward the one sea, blade after blade dancing in waves. There the children turn the ring to the left. There the children turn the ring to the right. Dancing . . . Dancing . . . And the lonely psyche goes up thru the boy to the king that in the caves of history dreams. Round and round the children turn. London Bridge that is a kingdom falls. We have come so far that all the old stories whisper once more. Mount Segur, Mount Victoire, Mount Tamalpais . . . rise to adore the mystery of Love! (An ode? Pindar’s art, the editors tell us, was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor. But if he was archaic, not classic, a survival of obsolete mode, there may have been old voices in the survival that directed the heart. So, a line from a hymn came in a novel I was reading to help me. Psyche, poised to leap—and Pindar too, the editors write, goes too far, topples over—listend to a tower that said,Listen to Me! The oracle had said,Despair! The Gods themselves abhor his power. And then the virgin flower of the dark falls back flesh of our flesh from which everywhere . . . the information flows that is yearning. A line of Pindar moves from the area of my lamp toward morning. In the dawn that is nowhere I have seen the willful children clockwise and counter-clockwise turning.