Collected Earlier Poems (5 page)

I saw it on their belts. A young one, dead,

Left there on purpose to get us used to the sight

When we first moved in. Helmet spilled off, head

Blond and boyish and bloody. I was scared that night.

And the sign was there,

The sign of the child, the grave, worship and loss,

Gunpowder heavy as pollen in winter air,

An Iron Cross.

It is twenty years now, Father. I have come home.

But in the camps, one can look through a huge square

Window, like an aquarium, upon a room

The size of my livingroom filled with human hair.

Others have shoes, or valises

Made mostly of cardboard, which once contained

Pills, fresh diapers. This is one of the places

Never explained.

Out of one trainload, about five hundred in all,

Twenty the next morning were hopelessly insane.

And some there be that have no memorial
,

That are perished as though they had never been
.

Made into soap.

Who now remembers “The Singing Horses of Buchenwald”?

“Above all, the saving of lives,” whispered the Pope.

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde
,

But for years the screaming continued, night and day,

And the little children were suffered to come along, too.

At night, Father, in the dark, when I pray,

I am there, I am there. I am pushed through

With the others to the strange room

Without windows; whitewashed walls, cement floor.

Millions, Father, millions have come to this pass,

Which a great church has voted to “deplore.”

Are the vents in the ceiling, Father, to let the spirit depart?

We are crowded in here naked, female and male.

An old man is saying a prayer. And now we start

To panic, to claw at each other, to wail

As the rubber-edged door closes on chance and choice.

He is saying a prayer for all whom this room shall kill.

“
I cried unto the Lord God with my voice
,

And He has heard me out His holy hill
.”

Small paw tracks in the snow, eloquent of a passage

Neither seen nor heard. Over the timbered hill,

Turning at the fence, and under the crisp light of winter,

In blue shadows, trailing toward the town.

Beginning at the outposts, the foxtrot of death,

Silent and visible, slipped westward from the holy original east.

Even in “our sea” on a misty Easter

Ships were discovered adrift, heavy with pepper and tea,

The whole crew dead.

                         Was it a judgment?

Among the heathen, the king of Tharsis, seeing

Such sudden slaughter of his people, began a journey to Avignon

With a great multitude of his nobles, to propose to the pope

That he become a Christian and be baptized,

Thinking that he might assuage the anger of God

Upon his people for their wicked unbelief.

But when he had journeyed twenty days,

He heard the pestilence had struck among the Christians

As among other peoples. So, turning in his tracks,

He travelled no farther, but hastened to return home.

The Christians, pursuing these people from behind,

Slew about seven thousand of them.

At the horse-trough, at dusk,

In the morning among the fishbaskets,

The soft print of the dancing-master’s foot.

In Marseilles, one hundred and fifty Friars Minor.

In the region of Provence, three hundred and fifty-eight

Of the Friars Preachers died in Lent.

If it was a judgment, it struck home in the houses of penitence,

The meek and the faithful were in no wise spared.

Prayer and smoke were thought a protection.

Braziers smoldered all day on the papal floors.

During this same year, there was a great mortality

Of sheep everywhere in the kingdom;

In one place and in one pasture, more than five thousand sheep

Died and became so putrified

That neither beast nor bird wanted to touch them.

And the price of everything was cheap,

Because of the fear of death.

How could it be a judgment,

The children in convulsions, the sweating and stink,

And not enough living to bury the dead?

The shepherd had abandoned his sheep.

And presently it was found to be

Not a judgment.

The old town council had first to be deposed

And a new one elected, whose views agreed

With the will of the people. And a platform erected,

Not very high, perhaps only two inches above the tallest headstone,

But easy to view. And underneath it, concealed,

The excess lumber and nails, some logs, old brooms and straw,

Piled on the ancient graves. The preparations were hasty

But thorough, they were thorough.

A visitor to that town today is directed to

The Minster. The Facade, by Erwin von Steinbach,

Is justly the most admired part of the edifice

And presents a singularly happy union

Of the style of Northern France

With the perpendicular tendency

Peculiar to German cathedrals.

No signs of the platform are left, which in any case

Was outside the town walls.

But on that day, Saturday, February 14th,

The Sabbath, and dedicated to St. Valentine,

Everyone who was not too sick was down

To watch the ceremony. The clergy,

The new town council, the students

Of the university which later gave Goethe

His degree of Doctor of Laws.

For the evidence now was in: in Berne, under torture,

Two Jews had confessed to poisoning the wells.

Wherefore throughout Europe were these platforms erected,

Even as here in the city of Strasbourg,

And the Jews assembled upon them,

Children and all, and tied together with rope.

    It is barren hereabout

               And the wind is cold,

And the sound of prayer, clamor of curse and shout

               Is blown past the sheepfold

                         Out of hearing.

    The river worms through the snow plain

               In kindless darks.

And man is born to sorrow and to pain

               As surely as the sparks

                         Fly upward.

    Father, among these many souls

               Is there not one

Whom thou shalt pluck for love out of the coals?

               Look, look, they have begun

                         To douse the rags.

    
O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue

               To crie to thee,

And then not heare it crying! Who is strong

               When the flame eats his knee?

                         O hear my prayer,

    And let my cry come unto thee.

               Hide not thy face.

Let there some child among us worthy be

               Here to receive thy grace

                         And sheltering.

    It is barren hereabout

               And the wind is cold,

And the crack of fire, melting of prayer and shout

               Is blown past the sheepfold

                         Out of hearing.

The contemplation of horror is not edifying,

Neither does it strengthen the soul.

And the gentle serenity in the paintings of martyrs,

St. Lucy, bearing her eyes on a plate,

St. Cecilia, whose pipes were the pipes of plumbing

And whose music was live steam,

The gridiron tilting lightly against the sleeve of St. Lawrence,

These, and others, bewilder and shame us.

Not all among us are of their kind.

Fear of our own imperfections,

Fear learned and inherited,

Fear shapes itself in dreams

Not more fantastic than the brute fact.

It is the first Saturday in Carnival.

There, in the Corso, homesick Du Bellay.

Yesterday it was acrobats, and a play

About Venetian magnificos, and in the interval

Bull-baiting, palm-reading, juggling, but today

The race. Observe how sad he appears to be:

Thinking perhaps of Anjou, the climbing grace

Of smoke from a neighbor’s chimney, of a place

Slate-roofed and kindly. The vast majesty

Of Rome is lost on him. But not the embrace

Of the lovers. See, see young harlequins bent

On stealing kisses from their columbines.

Here are the
dolces
, here the inebriate wines

Before the seemly austerities of Lent.

The couples form tight-packed, irregular lines

On each side of the mile-long, gorgeous course.

The men have whips and sticks with bunting tied

About them. Anointed Folly and his bride

Ordain Misrule. Camel and Barbary horse

Shall feel the general mirth upon their hide.

First down the gantlet, twenty chosen asses,

Grey, Midas-eared, mild beasts receive the jeers

And clouts of the young crowd. Consort of brasses

Salutes the victor at the far end. Glasses

Are filled again, the men caress their dears,

The children shout. But who are these that stand

And shuffle shyly at the starting line?

Twenty young men, naked, except the band

Around their loins, wait for the horn’s command.

Christ’s Vicar chose them, and imposed his fine.

Du Bellay, poet, take no thought of them;

And yet they too are exiles, and have said

Through many generations, long since dead,

“
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem
,…”

Still, others have been scourged and buffeted

And worse. Think rather, if you must,

Of Piranesian, elegaic woes,

Rome’s grand declensions, that all-but-speaking dust.

Or think of the young gallants and their lust.

Or wait for the next heat, the buffaloes.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence,

Nor, given the way things go,

Even of low cunning.

Yet I have seen the wicked in great power,

And spreading himself like a green bay tree.

And the good as if they had never been;

Their voices are blown away on the winter wind.

And again we wander the wilderness

For our transgressions

Which are confessed in the daily papers.

Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us

A very small remnant,

We should have been as Sodom,

We should have been like unto Gomorrah.

And to what purpose, as the darkness closes about

And the child screams in the jellied fire,

Had best be our present concern,

Here, in this wilderness of comfort

In which we dwell.

                         Shall we now consider

The suspicious postures of our virtue,

The deformed consequences of our love,

The painful issues of our mildest acts?

Shall we ask,

Where is there one

Mad, poor and betrayed enough to find

Forgiveness for us, saying,

“None does offend,

None, I say,

None”?

Listen, listen.

But the voices are blown away.

And yet, this light,
The work of thy fingers,…

The soul is thine, and the body is thy creation:

O have compassion on thy handiwork.

The soul is thine, and the body is thine:

O deed with us according to thy name.

We come before thee relying on thy name;

O deal with us according to thy name;

For the sake of the glory of thy name;

As the gracious and merciful God is thy name.

O Lord, for thy name’s sake we plead,

Forgive us our sins, though they be very great.

               It is winter as I write.

For miles the holy treasuries of snow

                         Sag the still world with white,

And all soft shapes are washed from top to toe

                         In pigeon-colored light.

               Tree, bush and weed maintain

Their humbled, lovely postures all day through.

                         And darkly in the brain

The famous ancient questions gather: Who

                         Fathered the fathering rain

               
That falleth in the wilderness

Where no man is, wherein there is no man;

                         To satisfy the cress,

Knotweed and moonwort? And shall scan

                         Our old unlawfulness?

               Who shall profess to understand

The diligence and purpose of the rose?

                         Yet deep as to some gland,

A promised odor, even among these snows,

                         Steals in like contraband.

                         Father, I also pray

For those among us whom we know not, those

                         Dearest to thy grace,

The saved and saving remnant, the promised third,

                         Who in a later day

When we again are compassed about with foes,

Shall be for us a nail in thy holy place

There to abide according to thy word.