506 History and politics poems

All cities are open in the hot season. Northward or southward the summer gives out Few telephone numbers but no one in our house sleeps. Southward that river carries its flood The dying winter, the spring’s nostalgia: Wisconsin’s dead grass beached at Baton Rouge. Carries the vegetable loves of the young blonde Going for water by the dikes of Winnetka or Louisville, Carries its obscure music and its strange humour, Its own disturbing life, its peculiar ideas of movement. Two thousand miles, moving from the secret north It crowds the country apart: at last reaching The lynch-dreaming, the demon-haunted, the murderous virgin South Makes its own bargains and says change in its own fashion. And where the Gulf choirs out its blue hosannas Carries the drowned men’s bones and its buried life: It is an enormous bell, rung through the country’s midnight. * * * Beyond the corrosive ironies of prairies, Midnight savannas, open vowels of the flat country, The moonstruck waters of the Kansas bays Where the Dakotas bell and nuzzle at the north coast, The nay-saying desolation where the mind is lost In the mean acres and the wind comes down for a thousand miles Smelling of the stars’ high pastures, and speaking a strange language— There is the direct action of mountains, a revolution, A revelation in stone, the solid decrees of past history, A soviet of language not yet cooled nor understood clearly: The voices from underground, the granite vocables. There shall that voice crying for justice be heard, But the local colorist, broken on cliffs of laughter, At the late dew point of pity collect only the irony of serene stars. * * * Here all questions are mooted. All battles joined. No one in our house sleeps. And the Idealist hunting in the high latitudes of unreason, By mummy rivers, on the open minds of curst lakes Mirrors his permanent address; yet suffers from visions Of spring break-up, the open river of history. On this the Dreamer sweats in his sound-proof tower: All towns are taken in the hot season. How shall that Sentimentalist love the Mississippi? His love is a trick of mirrors, his spit’s abstraction, Whose blood and guts are filing system for A single index of the head or heart’s statistics. Living in one time, he shall have no history. How shall he love change who lives in a static world? His love is lost tomorrow between Memphis and the narrows of Vicksburg. But kissed unconscious between Medicine Bow and Tombstone He shall love at the precipice brink who would love these mountains. Whom this land loves shall be a holy wanderer, The eyes burned slick with distances between Kennebunkport and Denver, minted of transcience. For him shall that river run in circles and The Tetons seismically skipping to their ancient compelling music Send embassies of young sierras to nibble from his hand. His leaves familiar with the constant wind, Give, then, the soils and waters to command. Latitudinal desires scatter his seed, And in political climates sprout new freedom. But curst is the water-wingless foreigner from Boston, Stumping the country as others no better have done, Frightened of earthquake, aware of the rising waters, Calling out “O Love, Love,” but finding none.

With lines unseen the land was broken. When surveyors came, we knew what the prophet had said was true, this land with unseen lines would be taken. So, you who live there now, don't forget to love it, thank it the place that was once our forest, our ponds, our mosses, the swamplands with birds and more lowly creatures. As for us, we walked into the military strength of hunger and war for that land we still dream. As the ferry crossed the distance, or as the walkers left behind their loved ones, think how we took with us our cats and kittens, the puppies we loved. We were innocent of what we faced, along the trail. We took clothing, dishes, thinking there would be something to start a new life, believing justice lived in the world, and the horses, so many, one by one stolen, taken by the many thieves So have compassion for that land at least. Every step we took was one away from the songs, old dances, memories, some of us dark and not speaking English, some of us white, or married to the dark, or children of translators the half-white, all of us watched by America, all of us longing for trees for shade, homing, rooting, even more for food along the hunger way. You would think those of us born later would fight for justice, for peace, for the new land, its trees being taken. You would think the struggle would be over between the two worlds in this place that is now our knowledge, our new belonging, our being, and we'd never again care for the notion of maps or American wars, or the god of their sky, thinking of those things we were forced to leave behind, living country, stolen home, the world measured inch by inch, mile by mile, hectares, all measurements, even the trail of our tears. With all the new fierce light, heat, drought the missing water, you'd think in another red century, the old wisdom might exist if we considered enough that even before the new beliefs we were once whole, but now our bodies and minds remain the measured geography.

Never reaching the promised land in Canada, HIN-MAH-TOO-YAH-LAT-KET: “Thunder-rolling-in-the-mountins,” the fugitive chief sits in a corner of the prison car headed for Oklahoma, chained to his warriors, a featherless hawk in exile. He sees out the window geese rise from the storm’s center and knows more men died by snow blizzard than by cavalry shot. Still his father’s shield of Wallowa Valley deer and elk flashes in his eyes and coyote runs the circles and a cricket swallows the dark. How many songs this elder sang to break the cycle of cold weather and disease his people coughed and breathed in this land of drifting ice. Now sleepless as the door-guard, the train rattles like dirt in his teeth, straw in his eyes. Holding rage in the palm of his fist, his people’s future spirals to red-forest dust, leaves his bones on the track, his soul in the whistle.

I My wife is ill! And I sit waiting for a quorum II Fast ride his horse collapsed Now he saddled walked Borrowed a farmer’s unbroken colt To Richmond Richmond How stop— Arnold’s redcoats there III Elk Hill destroyed— Cornwallis carried off 30 slaves Jefferson: Were it to give them freedom he’d have done right IV Latin and Greek my tools to understand humanity I rode horse away from a monarch to an enchanting philosophy V The South of France Roman temple “simple and sublime” Maria Cosway harpist on his mind white column and arch VI To daughter Patsy: Read— read Livy No person full of work was ever hysterical Know music, history dancing (I calculate 14 to 1 in marriage she will draw a blockhead) Science also Patsy VII Agreed with Adams: send spermaceti oil to Portugal for their church candles (light enough to banish mysteries?: three are one and one is three and yet the one not three and the three not one) and send salt fish U.S. salt fish preferred above all other VIII Jefferson of Patrick Henry backwoods fiddler statesman: “He spoke as Homer wrote” Henry eyed our minister at Paris— the Bill of Rights hassle— “he remembers . . . in splendor and dissipation he thinks yet of bills of rights” IX True, French frills and lace for Jefferson, sword and belt but follow the Court to Fontainebleau he could not— house rent would have left him nothing to eat . . . He bowed to everyone he met and talked with arms folded He could be trimmed by a two-month migraine and yet stand up X Dear Polly: I said No—no frost in Virginia—the strawberries were safe I’d have heard—I’m in that kind of correspondence with a young daughter— if they were not Now I must retract I shrink from it XI Political honors “splendid torments” “If one could establish an absolute power of silence over oneself” When I set out for Monticello (my grandchildren will they know me?) How are my young chestnut trees— XII Hamilton and the bankers would make my country Carthage I am abandoning the rich— their dinner parties— I shall eat my simlins with the class of science or not at all Next year the last of labors among conflicting parties Then my family we shall sow our cabbages together XIII Delicious flower of the acacia or rather Mimosa Nilotica from Mr. Lomax XIV Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed to father and sister in Paris by way of London—Abigail embraced her—Adams said “in all my life I never saw more charming child” Death of Polly, 25, Monticello XV My harpsichord my alabaster vase and bridle bit bound for Alexandria Virginia The good sea weather of retirement The drift and suck and die-down of life but there is land XVI These were my passions: Monticello and the villa-temples I passed on to carpenters bricklayers what I knew and to an Italian sculptor how to turn a volute on a pillar You may approach the campus rotunda from lower to upper terrace Cicero had levels XVII John Adams’ eyes dimming Tom Jefferson’s rheumatism cantering XVIII Ah soon must Monticello be lost to debts and Jefferson himself to death XIX Mind leaving, let body leave Let dome live, spherical dome and colonnade Martha (Patsy) stay “The Committee of Safety must be warned” Stay youth—Anne and Ellen all my books, the bantams and the seeds of the senega root

It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands,— Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong, As of a world left empty of its throng, And the void weighs on us; and then we wake, And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along Twixt villages, and think how we shall take Our own calm journey on for human sake.

Ce qui est beau à Leningrad, c’est Saint Petersbourg. What fellow traveller returned from the U.S.S.R., Burdened with souvenirs in the form of second thoughts, said That, rephrasing the Slavic platitude as a reactionary epigram? Thence One must count oneself privileged to have escaped empty-handed, Frisked in exit by the incompetent customs of the country Who got everything backwards, inspecting my papers with a glass: Bourgeois formalism apart, my handwriting looks like a decadent cipher. “Chto eto?” The pocket epic or this wordy verse?“Poezia.” Insisting it scans as prose they confiscate War and Peace: The classic comeback: loved her, hated him, your eponymous warhead In gremium qui saepe se reicit aeterno devictus vulnere amoris: Even apologists for free love must confess this pair legally Wed, a union no sentimental do-gooder likes to solemnize. V., I’m afraid the authorities took away your name Which they found in my notebook. Asked who you were, I said, “Someone I met in a restaurant.” Not so: You were a pick-up of sorts on Nevsky Prospekt Where as I puzzled over a plan filched from Intourist That first evening you appeared eager to be of help. In exchange for a few verbatim tips on English idiom (“Tell me, please, is it better, ‘Here you are!’ or ‘There it is!’ ”) you afforded me a smattering of Russian— Dom, dub, tsat, eima dvorets, knigi, mir, ya ne ponemayu, House—oak—garden—winter-palace—books—world—I don’t understand— And your jealous services as a guide to the environs When you were “free from class”. Unlike the other touts, Official and unofficial, who besieged the foreigners’ hotel, you never Asked for cigarettes or dollars nor offered girls or watches, But wanted books and talk. Whether you were an agent I am not absolute. If so, it doesn’t figure. Who sold me “art treasures” to take out, a nickel Samovar and the biscuit bust of Pushkin, price two rubles, From that popular Thrift Shop where one bought antiques, the Only place in Leningrad to find silverware, glass, or china, As department stores seemed to stock nothing but plastic gimcracks? Enough economics—unless I just mention in passing the maids At the hotel, patriots whom I detected to be helping Themselves to my dwindling whisky. When I locked it up One morning, on my return I found the bed unmade. Still there are things I want to ask you, V. Are you in prison or power? Were you really interrogated As you foretold if you were seen with me? Paranoid Melodrama I supposed, yet daily life in never-never land. You warned me one was followed, watched, suspected, bugged, betrayed As a matter of course, and there were certain places We mustn’t be seen together in public, like divorcées. Out of bounds to you the doldrums of the Europa. Every day you used to suggest some novel rendezvous Where until you materialized no one was in evidence. Dialectics make impossible bedfellows. Are you today the interrogator You once were, inexhaustible in futile questions of American usage? Following a call at the single synagogue, where we tapped The anti-semitic party line, you invited me back for A supper of black bread, sausage, and sweet white wine. No English on the stair or in the common hallway You cautioned, but your student’s room itself was an asylum, With an encyclopaedia, your father’s paintings, a dusty grand piano (“I was used to play.”), and the telephone. “Talk now!” The couple embracing in the entrance, were they also spies? What circuitous routes we pursued in our innocent sight-seeing, How vast the meander of the stone Hermitage which holds A pictorial history of pillaged Europe, where the fat, satisfied Intelligent bust of the Holstein Messalina smirks from its pedestal, As at Tsarskoe Selo, which the present regime calls Pushkin. There, amid monumental, autumnal ruin, in a neo-gothic folly, Lunching on lard, I learned the Russian word for cosy, Oiutny: neither Pavlovsk, that meticulously restored memorial to filial resentment Nor Peterhof’s post-war proletarian Renaissance trick pavilions quite qualify. I go on like a guidebook, there being none such. Nowhere could we find a Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary Or maps less rudimentary than those of a vanished century. Lies appropriately describe this sequestrated Czarist capital founded on water, Edifice of pure will and an idea, double-glazed window Closed on the West. The past lingers along the Neva Like a revisionist prince: pink, green, ochre, robin’s-egg-blue Italianate confectionery on a Scythian scale. You wanted to know Why all foreigners are so fascinated by palaces and churches Used as cinemas and baths? Our taste is counter-revolutionary. Just fancy playing Soviet monopoly or enduring social-realist monotony! And having nothing to read but Lenin and Jack London Unless in samizdat! I am unable to appreciate a solitary Line of Russian verse in translation, from Bogan to Brodski. Although, like Leningrad at the same time fantastic and prosaic, Your novels form a sort of exotic province of English, I don’t know why, inimitable Pushkin is a noted bore. But who came here to talk about literature? The night Before leaving I invited you to squander my last vouchers Somewhere they, and we, would be accepted at face value: After two helpings of chicken you ordered another, of veal. Russkaya dusha! What if we were brothers? Haven’t men More in common than their wants, such as language, a Skeleton key rattled in so many locks? With all utopias, The farther from perfection the better; this future that works Looks so old-fashioned and unkind. Although the masses may Be content, unhappy, or indifferent, excellence is an individual gesture. Malice, too, is personal. The destroyer Aurora opposite Intourist’s incongruous Glass prison, her heroes liquidated, will she ever lift anchor For the free world? Here, perhaps better dead than read, Instead of the Concise Oxford Dictionary you wanted, this letter.

They remember the dead who died in the resistance. It is in sweet tones that they speak of them. They shake their heads, still, after the dinner Walking back to the car, while an evening snow That has started windlessly, white from pearl-gray, Falls into streets that are already slushy. They shake their heads, as we do when there is something Too strange to believe, Or as a beast does, stunned by a blow. “To die in the resistance,”   they say, “is to fail To turn into slush, to escape this ugliness. It is at once to leap, a creamy swan, Upward.”   Three voices: oboe, piano, cello. The high one wishes to be pleasing, the middle To be practical, the deep to persevere. A movie theater lobby in front of them Throws its light on the sidewalk, like a woman Swiftly emptying a bucket of water: The flakes are falling in its yellow light. Then they pass a café, its light red neon, Then a closed pharmacy. —They pull sharp air Into their lungs, a pain that is a pleasure. “Try to live as if there were no God,” They don’t say, but they mean. A recollection of purity, a clean Handkerchief each man feels in his own pocket, Perturbs them, slows their pace down. Now they have seen A yellow stain on a pile of old snow Between two parked cars, where a man has peed: The resistance. The falling flakes, falling On the men’s hats. And now The snow grows heavier, falls on their stooping shoulders.

Through these pale cold days What dark faces burn Out of three thousand years, And their wild eyes yearn, While underneath their brows Like waifs their spirits grope For the pools of Hebron again— For Lebanon's summer slope. They leave these blond still days In dust behind their tread They see with living eyes How long they have been dead.

I advise rest; the farmhouse we dug you up in has been modernized, and the people who hung you as their ikon against the long passage wall are underground — Incubus and excellent woman, we inherit the bone acre of your cages and laws. This dull green land suckled at your blood’s frigor Anglicanus, crowning with a housewife’s tally the void of Empire, does not remember you — and certain bloody bandaged ghosts rising from holes of Armageddon at Gallipoli or Sling Camp, would like to fire a shot through the gilt frame. I advise rest, Madam; and yet the tomb holds much that we must travel barely without. Your print — ‘from an original pencil drawing by the Marchioness ‘of Granby, March, eighteen nine- ty seven…’ Little mouth, strong nose and hooded eye — they speak of half-truths my type have slung out of the window, and lack and feel the lack too late. Queen, you stand most for the time of early light, clay roads, great trees unfelled, and the smoke from huts where girls in sack dresses stole butter . . . The small rain spits today. You smile in your grave.

Know, that I would accounted be True brother of a company That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong, Ballad and story, rann and song; Nor be I any less of them, Because the red-rose-bordered hem Of her, whose history began Before God made the angelic clan, Trails all about the written page. When Time began to rant and rage The measure of her flying feet Made Ireland's heart begin to beat; And Time bade all his candles flare To light a measure here and there; And may the thoughts of Ireland brood Upon a measured quietude. Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, Because, to him who ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of things discovered in the deep, Where only body's laid asleep. For the elemental creatures go About my table to and fro, That hurry from unmeasured mind To rant and rage in flood and wind; Yet he who treads in measured ways May surely barter gaze for gaze. Man ever journeys on with them After the red-rose-bordered hem. Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon, A Druid land, a Druid tune! While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew. From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye; And we, our singing and our love, What measurer Time has lit above, And all benighted things that go About my table to and fro, Are passing on to where may be, In truth's consuming ecstasy, No place for love and dream at all; For God goes by with white footfall. I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.