other’s ghosts,
One sailing lawns, the other ocean storms,
Strike up a conversation out of single simple words,
Alarms repeated and re-echoed, and so make up a life
From halves which separated long before the oceans rolled
Still sought each other, but in different towns.
Un-met and doomed they went their ways
To never greet or make mere summer comment
On her attic mothball or his sea-dog days.
Death would not stop for her,
Yet White graves yawned for him,
Each loved one half of that which, grim, enticed and beckoned,
Yet neither reckoned it as half a life for each;
With sudden reach they might have found
Each other and in meld and fuse and fusion
Then beheld between the two, two halves of loving Life,
And so made one!
Two halves of sun
To burn away two halves of misery and night,
Two souls with sight instead of tapping
Long after midnight souls skinned blind with frost,
Lost minds turned round-about to flesh,
Instead of lonely flesh, for lack of company,
Alone with mind.
But, then, imagine, whatdoes happen when some ghost
Of quiet passes and in passing nudges silence?
Does his silence know her vibrant quiet there
All drifting on the walk with leaves and dust?
It must. Or so the old religions say.
Thus forests know themselves and know the fall
Of their own timbers dropping in the unseen,
And so non-existent, wood;
Such things should hear themselves
And feel, record, and ridge them in their souls—
And yet…?
I really wonder if some night by chance
Old Herman and that lost and somehow always old dear Emily
Out late and walked five hundred miles in dreams
Might not have made some lone collision
At a crossroads where the moon was lamp
And trees were winter sentry to their soft encounter there.
One pale gaze finds the other,
One blind hand stutters forth to reach and touch the air,
His wry hand comes the other way,
So frail the night wind trembles it,
Both shake as candles shake their fires
When old time turns ashuttle in its sleep.
The houses keep their shutters down.
The moon expires. The sidewalk ghosts remain
And, touching palms, at last walk almost but not quite
Arm in arm, soul hungering soul, away, away
Toward loss of midnight, toward gain of fog and mist
And day.
So walk they round the buried town all night.
Seeing their spectral shadows in the cold shop window glass,
Bleak mariner and odd mothball closet attic maiden lass.
No word they speak, nor whisper, nor does breath
Escape their nostrils, but they share
A strange new sense of being, everywhere they wander, go.
No thought, no word is said of dining,
Yet in the middle of a midnight pond of grass they do
Toss down their souls
And bring some wild thing up that writhes and gasps
And dances in their arms and is all shining.
Then on through night the love-drunk strangers browse
And in conniption clovers do their fevers douse.
Thus round the courthouse square
Where Civil cannons boom beneath their breath
And on to country lanes where ancient death
Keeps syllables on stones, those unseen words
That only sound from graveyard birds.
And stop at some sweet dark orchard yard
Where, panics stifled, ancient Melville skins on up
With gouty reach
To bring and offer, peel and eat
Some last lone sexual-pectin-covered farewell summer peach.
So nibbling in silence, mouths covered with gums,
Hands counting and touching and softly adding odd sums
Of affections —hips on occasion nudged in soft collisions,
They go cupping and hugging and surprised by derisions
And calamities of love, which in marrow and blood
Fix secret alarms set to waken wild needs.
And behind on the pavement leave trackings
Of seeds from apple and pear and apricot and cherry,
Wherever a farm offered food, their merry cries rose
As Emily chose and advised and sent old Ahab ashore
To come forth with his hands full of loot;
The smell from his nostrils and mouth
A whole summer of fruit.
Then at the far end of the town
They turn them round and make ready to depart forever,
She on meadow concretes where no grass
Obtrudes, seethes through,
And he upon an ocean sea of rye and late-mown hay
That takes him rudderless to break of day;
He walks out in the tides, the grass foams round his feet,
She with her skirts now glides and calmly cleans
The leaves straight down the middle of this cold town’s street.
Both turn but do not wave, look with their eyes,
A look of love, a look of mad surmise?
They cannot tell, they mirror each the other’s
Lonely statue, one in fallow moonlake meadow lost,
One like female dog who trots the night
A thing of frost and mildewed echoes
Where her feet set up a ricochet of battles
Fought for no gain from both sides of the street.
She dwindles, goes, is gone.
He slowly sinks from sight in weed and briar
And toadstool silages and dew.
All silence is.
All emptiness.
And now:
The dawn.
O GIVE A FIG FOR NEWTON,
PRAISE FOR HIM!
Mad Isaac, snoozed beneath a tree,
Was shaken by surprise;
A sneeze of happenstance and fruit
Knocked wide his eyes and sprang his wild thoughts free
To watch the Force Invisible pluck apples down.
From there, informed, he jogged about the town
And told what he was bold to tell:
Apples fall gladly, held in the spell of Force,
With neither hesitation nor remorse.
The Truth is this: They Fall.
Friends listened, looked, and they themselves saw All.
Glad Isaac, back beneath his tree
Pressing old truths to new cider myth or scientific sauce,
Hauled off and kicked to help the Yield, the Unseen Source.
That last kick shook a billion seeds to fall;
Thus Gravity, invisible till now, was found, revealed.
Within the hour, ten thousand nimble scientists
Dodged out to scowl beneath strange trees,
Through orchard field they loped to sprawl,
Waiting for ripe fruit or o’er-ripe Theory to fall.
Apple or Isaac?
Which did it matter?
But in their secret, unscientific hearts—
Preferably the latter.
I WAS THE LAST, THE VERY LAST
I was the last,
The very last;
You understand?
No one else in all the land saw him as then I saw.
They opened up the tomb a final time
When I was nine
And held me there and said:
Look on him dead, boy, look, oh, look you well,
So some day later on you then can tell,
Describe, remember how it was.
That’s Lincoln there,
His face, his withered jackstraw bones;
Within this case from which we lift the lid
Is that beloved man.
You be the final one,
You young and fresh
To see and memorize his ghosted flesh.
So, look, ah sweet Christ, look,
And print the backwall of your gaze
With photographs to be immersed in fluid memory,
Developed in your ancient days.
I was the last!
The very last to see him!
There in Springfield’s keep
One summer day
They tacked and hammered, grunted, groaned
To summon Lincoln from his sleep.
So many robbers had come round
To sack his soul;
Many an odd and evil mole had burrowed hard
To ransom forth his brow and beard and hand,
And kidnap him who died so long before.
So now upon this final day
Before they locked and poured the concrete round
And kept him really buried deep
In his home farm and land
A crowd had gathered to unpry his secret box of bones
And look a lingering while on greatness gone to farewell summer,
April’s promise lost in snow.
All came, all gazed, to see, to know.
I was the last to go.
They held me high, a boy, they turned my head.
I saw the man strewn lonely in his crypt.
That’s him, they whispered, he who was shot,
Old Gettysburg man, and Grant’s night-camp,
Dawn damps at Shiloh,
Gentle playmate of Tad;
Look, boy, look! Slept away! Kept in sod.
Jesus gentle his bones.
Gone to God. Gone to God.
Lincoln; what of him?
What in all of this was his cold part?
I thought I heard his icy heart start up
As if my small fists, pounding it, had knocked an echo in the tomb!
I thought I saw an old sad smile
Re-etch itself around his mouth,
A vagrant wisp, a tired nod,
Acknowledgment that funeral trains and trips
Were still ahead,
And crowds by sidings in the noon-but-now-late day.
But over all, I thought I heard him say
Less than a dozen words, no more.
Clear whispered, only I, leaned forward, heard.
The words thus softly breathed upon my cheek
Were, late remembered, funny, sad, or country-plain absurd.
He spoke! I cried.
He’s dead, the folks behind me tenderly explained,
He died some forty years ago.
Oh, no! Oh, no! He said! Not dead! Not dead!
What?! cried the stunned people round-about.
But I saw doubt in them and kept his words for me
And just myself.
I took them off and filed them on a country shelf
And only on occasion in late years
Took memory forth and heard again
The old man’s sad odd prayer and rambling refrain.
I looked a last time on his bones and parchment skin,
They nailed the box flat shut
And fixed one hundred tons of marble on his place.
We walked away.
Midnight stood amidst our unreal day.
What said? what said?! were whispers all about,
People clutching my elbows, touching my head,
But I wanted to grieve alone and know what he said
And understand; I brushed them aside and ran.
And now, very old, some sixty years on,
I sit up half the night and light a candle and look toward the tomb
And remember the words that Lincoln whispered in that dusty room:
I’m tired.
I’m tired of the infernal buttoning and unbuttoning
And the buttoning again.
That’s what he said.
An old farmer gone to law,
Just simply fed and done with getting out of bed
And washing up to start the day,
Or washing up and going to sleep.
He had had it with buttoning and unbuttoning,
He was ready for clay.
What did Lincoln say?
That was it.
To a boy in a marble tomb who was the last to see
The look and shape and size of eternity
And the man kept there.
No vast grandiloquence, no sweeping phrase,
No fourscore and seven years ago to warm my own late days
But just his old bones tired
And unslept by night prowling the White House rooms,
Searching for dawn;
An old man put out by dressing and undressing,
Done with the whole nuisance,
More than ready to be gone.
So one night not so long ago I walked through midnight Springfield
Thus to Lincoln’s tomb,
And scanned the marbled syllables and great stone words,
And took a crayon from my coat and in a scribbled trace,
Upon the wall above his place,
Where none but I might