Death delicate as moss and leaf mold
Borne in a box.
Within the box was running and laughter and dark hair,
Within the box was the eye of the antelope
And the breath of the moon,
Within the box a fevered but cooling apricot, a pear,
Within the box all life that was or ever comes to be,
Within the box some picnic tinsel, silver amulet, mountain shade.
They moved on with their murmuring guitar,
I saw the great fern shadows of the iron gate blow shut.
How strange—I smiled—that I should think them picnicking,
How strange to think they carried wine above their heads;
For, in reality,
Those souls were eating long before the noon
And long after the midnight,
They ate forever and never stopped their eating.
Even as I, hurrying in an icy wind,
Sculled down the quiet avalanche of cobbled street and hill
Eating of the clear air, and drinking of the mellow wind,
And eating of the blue sky
And taking the golden dust with my mouth
And feeding the yellow sun to my soul.
I passed a coffin shop where hammers
Were ticking like clocks.
I woke in the night so hungry that I wept.
ALL FLESH IS ONE;
WHAT MATTER SCORES?
The thing is this:
We love to see them on the green and growing field;
There passions yield to weather and a special time;
There all suspends itself in air,
The missile on its way forever to a goal.
There boys somehow grown up to men are boys again;
We wrestle in their tumble and their ecstasy,
And there we dare to touch and somehow hold,
Congratulate, or say: Ah, well, next time. Get on!
Our voices lift; the birds all terrified
At sudden pulse of sound, this great and unseen fount,
Scare like tossed leaves, fly in strewn papers
Up the wind to flagpole tops:
We Celebrate Ourselves!
We play at life, we dog the vital tracks
Of those who run before and we, all laughing, make the trek
Across the field, along the lines,
Falling to fuse, rising amused by now-fair, now-foul
Temper-tantrums, sprint-leaps, handsprings, recoils,
And brief respites when bodies pile ten high.
All flesh is one, what matter scores;
Or color of the suit
Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold?
All is one bold achievement,
All is a fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day
When juices run in antelopes along our blood,
And green our flag, forever green,
Deep colored of the grass, this dye proclaims
Eternities of youngness to the skies
Whose tough winds play our hair and re-arrange our stars
So mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
We do confound ourselves.
All this being so, we do make up a Game
And pitch a ball and run to grapple with our Fates
On common cattle-fields, cow-pasturings,
Where goals are seen and destinies beheld,
And scores summed up so that we truly know a score!
All else is nil; the universal sums
Lie far beyond our reach,
In this wild romp we teach our lambs and colts
Ascensions, swift declines, revolts, wild victories,
Sad retreats, all compassed in the round
Of one October afternoon.
Then winds, incensed and sweet with dust of leaves
Which, mummified, attest the passing of the weather,
Hour, day, and Old Year’s tide,
Are fastened, gripped and held all still
For just one moment with the caught ball in our hands.
We stand so, frozen on the sill of life
And, young or old, ignore the coming on of night.
All, all, is flight!
All loss and ept recovery.
We search the flawless air
And make discovery of projectile tossed
The center of our being.
This is the only way of seeing;
To run half-blind, half in the sad, mad world,
Half out of mind—
The goal-line beckons,
And with each yard we pass,
We reckon that we win, by God, we win!
Surely to run, to run and measure this,
This gain of tender grass
Is not a sin to be denied?
All life we’ve tried and often found contempt for us!
So on we hied to lesser gods
Who treat us less as clods and more like men
Who would be kings a little while.
Thus we made up this mile to run
Beneath a late-on-in-the-afternoon-time sun.
We chalked aside the world’s derisions
With our gamebook’s rulings and decisions.
So divisions of our own good manufacture
Staked the green a hundred yards, no more, no less.
The Universe said “No”?
We answered, running, “Yes!”
Yes to Ourselves!
Since naught did cipher us
With scoreboards empty,
Strewn with goose-egg zeros
Self-made heroes, then we kicked that minus,
Wrote in plus!
The gods, magnanimous,
Allowed our score
And noted, passing,
What was less is now, incredibly, more!
Man, then, is the thing
Which teaches zeros how to cling together and add up
The cup stood empty?
Well, now, look!
A brimming cup.
No scores are known?
Then look down-field,
There in the twilight sky the numbers run and blink
And total up the years;
Our sons this day are grown.
Why worry if the board is cleared an hour from now
And empty lies the stadium wherein died roars
Instead of men,
And goalposts fell in lieu of battlements?
See where the battle turf is splayed
Where panicked herds of warrior sped by,
Half buffalo and half ballet.
Their hoof marks fill with rain
As thunders close and shut the end of day.
The papers blow.
Old men, half-young again, across the pavements go
To cars that in imagination
Might this hour leave for Mars.
But, sons beside them silent, put in gear,
And drive off toward the close of one more year,
Both thinking this:
The game is done.
The game begins.
The game is lost.
But here come other wins.
The band tromps out to clear the field with brass,
The great heart of the drum systolic beats
In promise of yet greater feats and trumps;
Still promising, the band departs
To leave the final beating of this time
To older hearts who in the stands cold rinsed with autumn day
Wish, want, desire for their sons From here on down, eternal replay on replay.
This thought, them thinking it,
Man and boy, old Dad, raw Son
For one rare moment caused by cornering too fast,
Their shoulders lean and touch.
A red light stops them. Quiet and serene they sit.
But now the moment is past.
Gone is the day.
And so the old man says at last:
“The light is green, boy. Co. The light is green.”
They ran together all the afternoon;
Now, with no more words, they drive away.
THE MACHINES, BEYOND SHYLOCK
The Machines, beyond Shylock,
When cut bleed not,
When hit bruise not,
When scared shy not,
Lose nothing and so nothing gain;
They are but a dumb show:
Put Idiot in
And the moron light you’ll know.
Stuff right, get right,
Stuff rot, get rot,
For no more power lies here
Than man himself has got.
Man his energy conserves?
Machineries wait.
Man misses the early train?
Then Thought itself is late.
Sum totalings of men lie here
And not the sum of all machines,
This is man’s weather, his winter,
His wedding forth of time and place and will,
His downfall snow,
The tidings of his soul.
This paper avalanche sounds off his slope
And drowns the precipice of Time with white.
This tossed confetti celebrates his nightmare
Or his joy.
The night begins and goes and ends with him.
No machinery opens forth the champagne jars of life.
No piston churns the laundered beds to summon light.
Remember this:
Machines are dead, and dead must ever lie,
If man so much as shuts up half one eye.
THE BEAST UPON THE WIRE
Suppose and then suppose and then suppose
That wires on the far-slung telephone black poles
Supped up the billion flooded words they heard
Each night all night and saved the sense
And meaning of it all.
Then, jigsaw in the night, put all together,
And in philosophic phrase
Tried words like moron child,
Numb-shocked electric idiot, mindless babe
Alone upon its spider-threaded harpstrung poles,
Incredulous of syllables that shimmer dazzle down
Along swift thunder-lightning streams
In sizzlings and fermentings of power.
Thus mindless beast, all treasuring of vowels
And consonants,
Saves up a miracle of bad advice
And lets it filter, seep, experiment,
One hissing stutter heartbeat whisper at a time
So one night soon someone in dark America
Hears sharp bell ring, lifts phone
And hears a voice like Holy Ghost gone far in nebulae—
That Beast upon the wire,
That pantomimes with lipless, tongueless mouth
The epithets and slaverings of a billion unseen lovers
Across continental madnesses of line in midnight sky,
And with savorings and sibilance says:
Hell… and then O.
And then Hell-O.
To such Creation—
Such dumb brute wise Electric Beast,
What is your wise reply?
CHRIST, OLD STUDENT IN A NEW SCHOOL
O come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
And say out prayers that most need saying
For needful sinners who’ve forgotten praying;
And in every alcove and niche you spy
The living dead who envy the long since gone
Who never wished to die.
Then, see the altar! There the nailed-tight crucifix
Where Man in place of Christ gives up the ghost,
And priests with empty goblets offer Us
As Host to Jesus Who, knelt at the rail,
Wonders at the sight
Of Himself kidnapped off cross and Man nailed there
In spite of all his cries and wails and grievements.
Why, why, he shouts, these nails?
Why all this blood and sacrifice?
Because, comes from the belfries, where
The mice are scuttering the bells and mincing rope
And calling down frail Alleluias
To raise Man’s hopes, said hopes being blown away
On incensed winds while Christ waits there
So long prayed to, He has Himself forgot the Prayer.
Until at last He looks along a glance of sun
And asks His Father to undo this dreadful work
This antic agony of fun.
No more! He echoes, too. No more!
And from the cross a murdered army cries: No more!
And from above a voice fused half of iron
Half of irony gives Man a dreadful choice.
The role is his, it says,
Man makes and loads his own strange dice,
They sum at his behest,
He dooms himself.
He is his own sad jest.
Let go? Let be?
Why do you ask this gift from Me?
When, trussed and bound and nailed,
You sacrifice your life, your liberty,
You hang yourself upon the tenterhook.
Pull free!
Then suddenly, upon that cross immense,
As Christ Himself gives stare
Three billion men in one blink wide their eyes, aware!
Look left! Look right!
At hands, as if they’d never seen a hand before,
Or spike struck into palm
Or blood ad rip from spike,
No! never seen the like!
The wind that blew the benedictory doors
And whispered in the cove and dovecot sky
Now this way soughed and that way said:
Your hand, your flesh, your spike,
Your will to give and take,
Accept the blow, lift hammer high
And give
